Forum Post: The real problem with America: insane over regulation!!
Posted 12 years ago on May 24, 2012, 7:19 p.m. EST by 22250flatshot
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The Empire State Building was built in 13 months. The Golden Gate bridge was built in 4 years. Hoover Dam took 4 years. The Sears Towers took 3 years. The Trans Continental railroad took 6 years.
The 2 World Trade Center towers took 4 years. We are now on Year 11 of rebuilding the Twin towers.
Here my twist on this - corporations have corrupted our government - they are running the show pretty much - so think about it - all those regulations the small guys hate so much are being implemented by mega-monopolies and mega corporations to slow you down, fix the market and kill all and any competition - fines are nothing to them they go on doing terrible things to workers, and to our environment. If you're wondering why you are so regulated you can't breathe - there you go. Cut monopolies and their hold on our government - watch your little business flourish and grow. Regulating you into oblivion is just part of the m.o. (not that occuppy wants you to pollute all over the country) - but you are aware of the things I'm talking about - unnecessary permits, all this fine, fine print that even lawyers can't keep up with it. A study of third world nations found the types of entanglements you are referring to to be the number one common denominator in all third world nations; Preventing entrepreneurship, fixing the markets, keeping you in your caste - cut Wallstreet's power and their hold on our government. Simple as that - I agree Wallstreet is regulating smaller business into oblivion and using the politicians to do it (both parties). That's why we're fighting. You can too.
I hope someone fracks under your house
I cant attest to the saafety of fracking. I havent read one peer reviewed, scientifically tested piece of research that indicates fracking is dangerous.
I do know the oil industry ceates very lucrative jobs for high school graduates. I have talked with oil field workers and most love their jobs. It has provided a standard of living they cant get doing ANYTHING else. I would tread very carefully before I destroyed high paying jobs whereby families have planned their entire lives around a decent steady paycheck.
I spend time with people when visit places. In louisiana and Wyoming, I talked with folks whose jobs are a function of the oil industry. They like having real income and full benefits. I was in Walnut, Iowa, virtually ground zero for wind energy and the response there was much more muted. Once a windmill is up, there isnt much to do and its doesnt create a lot of work.
I cant toss hard working families under the bus for some energy utopia just yet. You can, apparently very easily, and the speaks more to your motives than to hard working folks everywhere.
It's funny how presumed safe is taken to mean proved safe...once it was believed that small doses of mercury were good for a person's health, then it was learned that it's accumulative. Once it was believed that lead was a great metal for children's toys, until it was proven not to be...
The issue with fracking isn't that they are cracking rock, it's that they are pumping chemicals as well as water into the ground where the aquifers are. You know those things nature put into place to clean the water we use and toss back with all our dirt and disease, where we get our potable (drinking and cooking) water from.
It won't do anyone any good if there is no clean water, without water there is no life, none at all.
That's the problem with us today, we all do it. We worry about today and tomorrow with no thought to 10, 20 or 50 years down the line.
We don't NEED that gas, we don't NEED that oil, the lowest of oil in the world...
We have an abundance of 'natural gas', a little research will show you that 97% of so called natural gas is methane, we can make methane so easily, nearly for free...heck we DO make methane, all we have to do is tap it.
Jobs today, that's great, but water tomorrow would be even greater.
Ok, so you say we don't need gas and don't need oil. Give me your IPOD, computer, any plastic objects you own, your clothing, turn off your heat and electricity.
In return you will be confined to your dwelling only after all fixtures that required fossil fuel to make are removed.
There is a huge difference between need and want...you should check it out.
You are right and I don't disagree with you. The "want" is what got this country in the situation it's in today.
Yes it has...we tend to forget that in our day to day lives.
we could save a great deal by giving up commuting to work
Except for that whole earthquakey part, and supposedly potable water catching fire?
Oh, yeah and the part about them not wanting anyone to know just what's in the compound?
Can you point to a peer reviewed article that says fracking is dangerous? It sounds dangerous but so did silicone implants, and banning them was proved to be total junk science.
How about some simple truth?
http://grist.org/list/2011-07-28-after-hundreds-of-earthquakes-arkansas-shuts-down-fracking-dispo/
Any fraking along the New Madrid Fault system would be dangerous as it's a major, yet little understood fault system.
They thought the Cuyahoga was OK too, until it caught fire.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/18/us-earthquakes-fracking-gas
Then I find this. Like I said, there are so many differing opinions or realities. Clearly fracking would appear to a layman as myself to be a risk near major fault lines.IMO an unacceptable risk. How about other places? I cant throw the jobs under the bus, not right yet.
She's not in Arkansas and when the fraking stopped there, so did the quakes.
There have been other quakes in the US attributed to fraking as well, all have been relatively minor.............so far.
I'm just asking them to find safer, less questionable methods of extraction.
It's not like they're not rich enough to do that.
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what's a lucrative job ?
lucrative (adj.) Look up lucrative at Dictionary.com early 15c., from O.Fr. lucratif "profitable" and directly from L. lucrativus "gainful, profitable," from lucratus, pp. of lucrari "to gain," from lucrum "gain, profit" (see lucre). Related: Lucratively; lucrativeness.
other's are making money off it?
I don't need science! I have predetermined conclusions! Energy companies are bad, so everything they do is bad!
I cant attest to the safety of breathing in space.
I havent read one peer reviewed, scientifically tested piece of research that indicates breathing in space is dangerous. Science has shown that no one has ever asphyxiated in space.
Save America- Lets move all of the damn leeches getting money from the government into space. Oh - Let's start with the people who get more than $1,000,000.00
LOL - you could probably have a lot of blind marchers sign up for the trip with a recruitment speech like that.
Hey guys - it's safe!!!!!!!!!
This is why OWS is not gaining traction as it should. Its more religion than anything else.
I will play your game and hopefully shed light and not heat on how we should look at things. We know breathing in space is deadly because through true scientific research, we know we need to breath O2 inorder to live. We know space does not have O2, so we know we will die in a place where there is no O2.
We dont have that with fracking, not yet anyway. Can you see the difference? Maybe not.
There is a global rush to embrace a new technique to extract hydrocarbons from the Earth. From Germany to Poland and France, from China and above all in the USA where the technique of hydraulic fracturing of shale rocks is most developed, governments and major oil companies are producing huge volumes of shale gas.
A number of energy importing countries around the world are planning a major investment in extracting natural gas from their shale rock formations. The most ambitious plans are coming from China and from Poland in the EU. Germany is also heatedly debating the technique.
The US Government’s Department of Energy together with a Washington energy consultancy has just released a mammoth global report estimating resources of shale gas. Significantly, the report estimates that the largest untapped shale gas reserves worldwide lie in China. The study puts Poland and France at the top of the shale gas list in the EU. The rest of Europe they estimate has significant shale gas formations as well, though in smaller volumes where shale rock is present.
In the US, oil industry people have quickly forgotten the recent scare about oil and gas depletion, popularly known as the Peak Oil theory, in their new euphoria over huge new volumes of gas and also oil obtained by fracking of shale and coal beds. Now even the Obama Administration is talking about a renaissance in domestic oil production. The reason is the dramatic rise in domestic extraction of gas from hydraulic fracking of shale, using new fracking techniques first developed by Halliburton, expensive techniques made financially attractive with the advent of $100 a barrel oil and record high gas prices since 2008. Halliburton - hmmmm - where have I hear that name before ?
The Halliburton Loophole
Fracking techniques have been around since the end of World War II. Why then suddenly is the world going gaga over shale gas hydraulic fracking? the record high oil and gas prices of the recent few years have made inefficient processes such as extracting oil from Canada’s tar sands or the costly fracking profitable. The second reason is the advance of various horizontal underground drilling techniques that allow companies like Schlumberger to enter a large shale rock formation and inject substances to “free” the trapped gas.
But the real reason for the recent explosion of fracking in the country where it has most been applied, the United States, is the passage of legislation in 2005 by the US Congress that exempts the oil industry’s hydraulic fracking activity from regulatory supervision by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The oil and gas industry is the only industry in America that is allowed by EPA to inject known hazardous materials -- unchecked -- directly into or adjacent to underground drinking water supplies.
Let them drink wine!
The law is known as the “Halliburton Loophole.” That’s because it was introduced with lobbying pressure from the company that produces the lion’s share of chemical hydraulic fracking fluids—Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton. When he became Vice President under George W. Bush in early 2001, Bush immediately gave Cheney responsibility for a major Energy Task Force to make a comprehensive national energy strategy. Aside from looking at Iraq oil potentials as documents later revealed, Cheney’s task force used Cheney’s considerable political muscle and industry lobbying money to win exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act. During Cheney’s term as vice president he moved to make sure the Government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would give a green light to a major expansion of shale gas drilling in the US. In 2004 the EPA issued a study of the environmental effects of fracking. That study has been called "scientifically unsound" by EPA whistleblower Weston Wilson. In March of 2005, EPA Inspector General Nikki Tinsley found enough evidence of potential mishandling of the EPA hydraulic fracturing study to justify a review of Wilson's complaints. The Oil and Gas Accountability Project conducted a review of the EPA study which found that EPA removed information from earlier drafts that suggested unregulated fracturing poses a threat to human health, and that the Agency did not include information that suggests “fracturing fluids may pose a threat to drinking water long after drilling operations are completed.” These warnings all were simply ignored by the EPA and White House.
Attempts by citizen organizations and individual litigants to force oil services company disclosure of the composition of chemicals used in hydraulic fracking have met a stone wall of silence. The companies argue that the chemicals are proprietary secrets and that disclosing them would hurt their competitiveness. They also insist the process is “basically safe and that regulating it would deter domestic production.” 10 This legal sleight of hand lets the fracking lobby have their cake and eat it too. They claim it is safe, refuse to say what chemicals are used and insist it be free from the Environmental Protection Administration rules under the Safe Drinking Water Act. If they are right about how safe their chemical fracking fluids are why are they afraid of regulation like other chemical companies?
Poisoned water
In a typical shale gas fracturing operation, a company drills a hole several thousand meters below surface; then they drill a horizontal branch perhaps one kilometer in length. As one expert described the fracking, once the horizontal drilling into the shale formation is done, “you send down a kind of subterranean pipe bomb, a small package of ball-bearing-like shrapnel and light explosives. The package is detonated, and the shrapnel pierces the bore hole, opening up small perforations in the pipe. They then pump up to 7 million gallons of a substance known as slick water to fracture the shale and release the gas. It blasts through those perforations in the pipe into the shale at such force—more than nine thousand pounds of pressure per square inch—that it shatters the shale for a few yards on either side of the pipe, allowing the gas embedded in it to rise under its own pressure and escape.”
The shale rock in which the gas is trapped is so tight that it has to be broken in order for the gas to escape. Therein come the problems. A combination of sand and water laced with chemicals — including benzene — is pumped into the well bore at high pressure, shattering the rock and opening millions of tiny fissures, enabling the shale gas to seep into the pipeline.
Not only does it liberate gas or in the case of Bakken in North Dakota, oil. It also floods the shale formation with millions of gallons of toxic fluids. A study conducted by Theo Colburn, director of the Endocrine Disruption Exchange in Paonia, Colorado, identified 65 chemicals that are probable components of the fracking fluids used by shale gas drillers. These chemicals included benzene, glycol-ethers, toluene, 2-(2-methoxyethoxy) ethanol, and nonylphenols. All of those chemicals have been linked to health disorders when human exposure is too high.12
Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, D. C. Baum Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, who has researched fracture mechanics for more than 30 years, has said that drilling and hydraulic fracturing “can liberate biogenic natural gas into a fresh water aquifer.”13 In other words the chemicals and gas can pollute water aquifers.
A new study authorized by two New York State organizations, Catskill Mountainkeeper and the Park Foundation, of the effects of fracking in the Marcellus Shale in New York and Pennsylvania puts the lie to the gas industry claims fracking is harmless to ground water. The study, just published in the journal Ground Water, concludes, “More than 5,000 wells were drilled in the Marcellus between mid-2009 and mid-2010…Operators inject up to 4 million gallons of fluid, under more than 10,000 pounds of pressure, to drill and frack each well.” To date, little sampling has been done to analyze where fracking fluids go after being injected underground.
Contrary to the industry assertion that fracking takes place in rocks (shale) that are impermeable thereby preventing leaking of toxins into ground water, the scientists concluded, in a peer-reviewed article, that natural faults and fractures in the Marcellus, exacerbated by the effects of fracking itself, could allow chemicals to reach the surface in as little as "just a few years." Tom Myers, the study head who is an independent hydrologist whose clients include the US Government and environmental groups, states, "Simply put, [the rock layers] are not impermeable. The Marcellus shale is being fracked into a very high permeability. Fluids could move from most any injection process."
Inducing Earthquakes
Not only possible poisoning of the fresh water underground aquifers, hydraulic fracking is done with such force that it has been also known to cause earthquakes. In the UK, Cuadrilla was doing shale gas drilling in Lancashire. They suspended their shale gas test drilling in June 2011, following two earthquakes—one tremor of magnitude 2.3 hit the Fylde coast on 1 April, followed by a second of magnitude 1.4 on 27 May. 16 A UK Government study of the earthquakes, released this April concluded that the fracking drilling operations had caused the quakes.
The new technique of hydraulic fracking was first used successfully in the late 1990s in the Barnett Shale in Texas, and is now being used to liberate oil from beneath the Bakken Shale in North Dakota. But the largest shale gas fracking activity in the US has been a literal gas bonanza drilling boom in the Marcellus Shale that runs from West Virginia into upstate New York, estimated estimated to hold as much gas as the whole United States consumes in a century.
F. William Engdahl author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Poliltics
And the name of your book is ???
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I will grant you the chemicals in fracking should be public knowledge, absolutely. We need to know what is going into these formations.
Halliburton employs 70,000 people directly and another likely 100,000 secondarily. I simply do not believe you can get 70000 people to do evil. I do not see Halliburton as evil. At the present time we need oil
I simply do not believe you can get 70000 people to do evil.
Have you ever heard of the nazi army ?
This energy utopia is going to set those same people that you obviously care so much about, free. No one wants to put people out of work. But it is happening, it is precisely because of tech downsizing that people are losing jobs and as you would agree this is unavoidable, it is progress. But what happens to those same people when their job drys up, either for tech reasons or because there is no more oil and you know both are coming. So, simply put what is your plan for then? A paycheck will provide for their families for now, but good ideologies will provide for their families for generations.
And will their paycecks cover the cost of new lungs ? kivers ?
I honestly dont have a good solution to vanishing jobs. I remember going fishing up in Washington one year and the guide who took me used to work in the shake shingle industry. The industry died and he was left jobless. When we were fishing he spotted a female elk and came back and shot her to feed his family, completely poaching her out of season. I hate to count on future jobs when there are good jobs now. I hope wind and solar work great, I am not optimistic, but right now I know oil jobs help families.
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Eh, I'd argue that it is more constant lawsuits and that no one is really rushing to rebuild that the Freedom Tower is taking so long to be constructed. Most of the examples you gave were literally rushed to get the job done while also constructing something that wouldn't collapse in a strong wind.
just wow,. you are a tinny baby. so regulation is a problem? that is funny, The Clinton gutted the regulations in the financial industry, that went so well we are in an unprecedented boom time,. not.
You forgot to mention the under regulated Banking industry.Where do turds like you come from?
hey cjess.go what is up ? I saw Lara Littletree yesterday...and she was asking for you. She looked good.
Did she drop all that weight or do you like them very very BIG?
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I think you ought to have a few more salads for dinner... Instead of that stuff you're packing in.
I drink my dinner.
Well may be then you should switch to O'Drools. Your local hillbillies can turn you on to it.
Thank I prefer single malt of the Islay variety,Are you a tee totaler who likes plup girls?
what is a plup girl? i drink meister brau...the best.
fat without the Mmmmmmm!
Also, did we not just deregulate IPOs and a big swath of little investors just get Face Booked--Hustled.
Anyone that invests in the stock market, given the risks inherent in any IPO should be able to weather a dud like FB. Only a complete fool would risk core money on risky bets like FB. It is impossible to protect people from themselves, it truly is.
I think you totally missed the scandalous point. Morgan Stanley committed insider trading, at least that is what they called it before deregulation. You Know, after the Abacus debacle with Goldman Sacks, I guess there really should be no tears to shed for those little investors. What's is the ol' adage: First time shame on you; second time shame on me. Only a affluencey hype would deal with a crooked system after it has been proven to be unethical.
I know a bunch of folks who bought intoFB. they were looking for a quick killing. Avarice/Greed, plain and simple. I cant shed a tear for them.
I can shed tears for families thrown under the bus for future utopian ideals.
Wow, so you see a problem with the system but it is safer to do nothing and criticize those who wish for something different. Tisk, tisk, put a bullet in me if old age ever makes me so indifferent.
THAT is just because all are rich people don't invest in America. They are investing in emerging economies. And when they do have public/private investments, they over charge and go over the bade time.
"The real problem with America: insane over regulation!!" Cough cough
For the most part Regulation is fine, it's when it's NOT reinforced. Example: Madoff, toxic real estate sold off and gambled through Goldman Sachs. There were many red flags of a collapse. Derivative is NOT substitute for regulation nor should government bailout should be handle so lightly to participate in this toxic practice. You cannot keep spending or lend what you don't have without going in debt. That's basic economics. Taxs rates shouldn't be so disportionate. Example: Tax rates for Hedge funds shouldn't be lower than teachers when they profit in the billions.
Not enforcing regulation is what help caused this global depression. Unless you want to keep giving BP or Goldman Sachs tax breaks.
There Is One regulation that was removed entirely.. From the Banks.. and they have Hedged the Publics money to bankruptcy while enjoying the Spoils. Bonus's anyone? ....
the Other is a Rule in Regulations, which was the UpTic Rule in the Stock Market Exchanges which put the Kabosh on Collusion . The Banks and Henchfunds Begged to have it removed so their NEW Privately Owned Trading Program by .. (Drum Roll...)..Goldman Sachs, ..... Could be installed to the NYSE.
.... SEC got some erroneous reports ( Finra Supplied, and other Crooks).. that the Removal would be only 9% Problematic..
.. I Called the Inspector Generals office at the SEC.. when Watching this Krap on C=Span with Linda Thomsen telling the Congressional Oversight Committee this BS Report was Real.. They Turned me over to her under Supervisors office, Then.. H. David Kotz.. and He allowed me to explain on the phone., and Send him some FACTS saying it would Be as Much As 90% problematic.. and Guess What?
...The SEC had to Fire Thomsen.. for Fraud.. Yet they NEVER reinstalled the UpTic Rule.. (In place since th 1929 crash.. so it would never happen again..)
.. Thomsen..was the scape Goat for Wall Street Crooks.. And,..
..... To this Day, we are ALL Reeling from the kind of IN YOUR FACE Criminal Activity that no one seems to be addressing.... 'Cept me and about 30 others..
... And we Wont stop until it's CHANGED!
Bravo bravo - well said.
Prosecute the white collar criminals - do a Bernie Madoff to them - all of them.
End this culture of white collar crime and no responsibility or accountability.
When do the Adults take over this World.. ...I'm tired of all the children running Amok..
No kidding - it kind of reminds me of that song by Fastball - The Way.
They drank up their wine and they started talking - they left before the sun came up that day...................
Yep time to round up all of the adults and say get to work look at the mess you have made.
Progressives are all about regulation except of course when it comes to Abortion and voter fraud. Yep,that's when they go off the "Regulation Reservation" and scream bloody murder and go all activist on everybody. Killing babies and allowing everybody and anybody regardless of citizenship,being alive or qualified to vote is all they care about and vehemently protest any regulation of these two issues.