Insecticide, Texas Politics and plundering the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Friday 4:30 pm approx.-- Painting exterior of nice home in West Texas. Weather gray and overcast; wind moderate 15 from the north. Downwind was speed-painting trim to beat anticipated inclement conditions; suddenly I got a good breath of insecticide and an eyeful. Waited a few seconds to decide if I could continue painting, stopped and went inside house.

The 'Bugs are Us' guy in the bright yellow pickup truck with a bed full of equipment and pumps perhaps in pursuit of fire ants or termites had launched at aerial mist spray from the next yard upwind. An accident-all I heard was some disparaging language in the cell phone he was using walking about the yard.

It reminds me of the atrocious West Texas water supply, not to mention my days at army chemical school learning to identify hazardous military hyper-insecticides like GB and GA or VX. The water is amongst the worst tasting in America perhaps because of decades of Permian basin oil drilling and the polluting drilling fluids that have been pumped into the underground water reserves over the last century. Of course cotton crops from Amarillo to San Antonio haven't helped either. Each pair of jeans requires about 3/4's pound to produce some article mentioned maybe in pop mechs.

Chemicals have been a stumbling bloc for Texans, they produce and use a lot, believing it of immaculate conception and application that can do no harm to left wing eagles even with DDT. The founders of the nation may have been liberals, but Americans today think that means socialism and debauchery, and have forgotten what personal liberal ideas mean in the headlong rush to become conservative Tories and royalty or neo-Corporatists. Immigrants from authoritarian nations tend to be conservative too, and the liberal heritage has been eclipsed by a generation of the indolent and aggressively conservative.

Texan labor standards seem worse than that of many parts of the nation. At a Miracle Grow plant south of Abilene at graveyard shift when temporary and regular workers used compressed air to clean off the machinery, almost no one was wearing a protective filter mask or eye protection in the cloud of chemical dust that would grow the wrong cells in human beings. Texans have sought for a way to develop new sources of cheap labor after slavery and segregation dried up. Now to a certain extent it’s China, but like slavery the exploitation of others eventually results in the social demise of the perpetrators as the grapes of wrath are trod.

The pervasive use of chemicals and accompanying criminal dumping of toxic wastes may have been perpetrated in the state of Texas and offshore in the Gulf of Mexico for decades. The administration of course would like to follow the Soviet model of exploiting the high artic and accelerating global warming with rampant oil development on the Arctic Ocean littoral. They may soon use the higher oil profits they've managed that has put Exxon-Mobil back to numero uno in planetary businesses and mover Halliburton toward the black after taking over Brown and Root and it's litigious obligations as inspiration to assault the nation's final; large oil safety reserve in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve and drain it to make America forever reliant on trans-national oil sources until some liberals break free from the Global neo-Corporate Tories with an electrified interstate power grid and individually metered cars with electric engines. Each homeowner could have a home fuel cell and sell electricity to the grid in excess of his auto power consumption.

A transnational oil supremacy transaxle of evil that would sink the aircraft carrier America in 6000 feet of water in the Atlantic has no qualms about plundering ANWR for cheap profits, running up trillions and trillions of national debt, compelling interest payments on the debt to Global Corporations for decades or centuries and generally attacking American financial independence.

The issue of Global Warming and the percent of atmospheric carbon dioxide may seem trivial to the privileged, yet the world's oceans have already absorbed a third of the carrying capacity of CO2. Sending diesel engines to tramp the north slope of Alaska won't help the nation to prosper, nor will the administration's inability to concentrate on liberating the nation from over reliance on foreign leadership and production serve to create a healthy and secure nation in the future.