I posted only the relevant portions of the article. Click on the above link for the rest.
Warning -- obscenities in the article. Reader discretion advised.
The whole thing was an obscenity. The people who authorized it (on both sides) should be suffering right along with the sheeple.
It is hard to fathom why we need to read the Rolling Stone to get these stories.
schu
“Warning — obscenities in the article. Reader discretion advised.”
Yeah, Taibbi has to relay the information in ‘Left-Speak’. If there’s not enough flowery expletives, the target demo will start thinking the article belongs in the Weekly Standard.
Unfortunately, the Kelo vs. New London decision by the Supreme Court also makes it much easier for corrupt local politicians and officials to rip off their constituents. All they have to do is decide it is in the city’s or county’s “best interest” to take private property from one individual, business or entity and sell it to another.
Wall Street lending on municipal bonds. Shocking.
Taibi, the communist, thinks money grows on trees.
And none of this is the fault of the Democrat and RINO politicians who piled up huge debts, issued more and more bonds, borrowed more and more money, and then found that they were, well, in debt?
I blame the politicians first, for insane borrowing, and the banksters second, for agreeing to lend to them.
sfl
For anyone who looks around at his county, city, or state, and asks “How did it get like this?”, this article explains a lot.
AND THE REAL LOOTING OF ALL AMERICANS HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR ALMOST 100 YEARS THANKS TO OUR GREEDY, CORRUPT, SELFISH AND INCOMPETENT FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, MAINLY OUR CONGRESS.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The initial bad guy was the judge and enviros who required an over-built sewage processing plant. With current impossible regulations, “zero tolerance” and “polluter pays, the enviros get cities and counties in a squeeze where they are forced to build a state of the art facility that they cannot possibly afford.
In our small rural county, we have an old unlined septage receiving pond. The regulations are so onerous that no municipality is able to enlarge its facilities to receive the stuff because the wrath of the water board would rain down upon it in expensive redesigns and upgrades. So the County is faced with building a $multi-million facility or telling half the county’s population to literally take a hike two hours trucking distance to the next county. Imagine the fuel and pollution costs of trucking sludge down the interstate.
Unfortunately, the county has already borrowed to the hilt to close nine landfills and build transfer stations to truck all the garbage out of the county to someone else’s lined landfill because the demands/fines of the water board made a local landfill impossible. The County is at a point where it defies state agency orders on the pond while it figures out a solution because it has no other realistic choice. It has already borrowed to the hilt on the landfills and there are no reasonable infrastructure financing programs available for a septage facility.
That is how cities and counties get into trouble.
The article puts part of the blame on “A mob of corrupt local officials” but fails to name names and point out party affiliation. What should the reader conclude from this?
Ping for later.
When is it ‘Cairo time’ on Wall st.?
QUILCENE — The Dabob Bay Natural Area near Hood Canal has been bolstered with the addition of 604 acres of forestland and 10 acres of shoreline, all placed into permanent conservation status. QUILCENE — The Dabob Bay Natural Area near Hood Canal has been bolstered with the addition of 604 acres of forestland and 10 acres of shoreline, all placed into permanent conservation status. Roughly half the land was taken out of Common School Trust status and placed into Natural Resources Conservation Area status. The state Board of Natural Resources compensated the school trust fund with $3 million, the value of the standing timber. That money came from a legislative appropriation and will be used for school construction. A legislative appropriation equivalent to the value of the underlying land — $581,000 — will be used to purchase replacement lands for the Common School Trust.
A thousand dollars an acre, what a deal. The school trust used to be land and the trees and crops on, it logged and sold to fund education. Now they take money from taxpayers, buy off the resource that was a steady source of income for the state schools, and put it permanently off of the tax rolls of the state. You and I both know, for anyone to acquire another 600 acres of land from a private party, will cost vastly more to replace this plot. Something like this happened in our city a few years ago. The city built a sewer treatment plant at an expanded cost from estimates. The neighborhood was affected because of there being no lid on the cooking tank. The smell was horrible, and affected a large swath of private homes. The city spent millions more putting a lid on the tanks, and the average sewer bill soared to over $50 a month, from $15, of course tied to water usage. The smell still was too much for people to tolerate, so the housing began to be rented out at discount rates. The neighborhood devolved into very low income, and drug housing. The govt then decided to buy out the homes, to create a "smell easement". After bulldozing the 54 homes affected, the city rezoned the land commercial, sold it to a car company for $2 Million dollars, well under its value as it is now being used.
The point being, govt used the system to both tax citizens to the breaking point, ruined taxpayers homes, then used the process again to make a profit for them. In the meantime, the unions, construction companies, the sewer district and a car lot both made out like bandits. I am quite sure elected officials did to.
Unrestrained govt, fleecing citizens from Alabama to Washington.
At first, the regulations were reasonable. Like anything else in government, though, they eventually became unreasonable. It has taken nearly 40 years for that to happen. But now, the runoff from RAINWATER has to be treated in some of the largest cities. It will spread to the smallest ones in a few years. After that happens, who knows what the EPA will require then. I am sure they will not stop.
I have thought about this many times trying to make sense of the relationship between the Feds and the States (and counties, and cities, for that matter). There is no doubt in my mind that what was being done before the late 1960’s was wrong. It was immoral. It is not right to contaminate the drinking water of everyone downstream of a place even though it is cheaper for them to dump crap in a nearby stream instead of treating. There was a need to have the Feds step in since local governments refused to do that. However, how do you stop the Feds once they get started down this path?