Something's Broken In The Promised Land

Brother Wayne Kramer explains what went wrong in the Promised Land. It's all about jobs, right? It's all about fiscal responsibility? Right? Look, if you've followed this blog and have any idea of who I am, you have to realize that I define myself as a Detroit, Michigander...no matter where I have been, no matter what I have ever done, the stain remains the same, and I am proud of it. Detroit has always been an industrial dumping ground. In the 1880s' it was the place where the buffalos were finally processed when they were exterminated.

Following the wholesale slaughter of buffalo on the Great Plains, settlers earned money by gathering the skeletons. “The bones are shipped East by the carloads,” reported the Dodge City Times. “where they are ground and used for fertilizing and manufactured into several useful articles.” This mound of buffalo bones at the Michigan Carlson Works in Detroit, c.1870, suggests the extent of the devastation.
It is almost a historical by note that the historical corporate geneology of the Michigan Carlson Works links it to the Oxbow Corporation which is owned by the third Koch Brother, William I. Koch. The Oxbow Corporation  is currently responsible for the newly rising mountain of potentially hazardous Petroleum waste now incrementally growing on the shores of the Detroit River. 

As reported in yesterdays, May 18, 2013 NY Times, a three story mountain of Petroleum coke has rapidly grown on the shore of the Detroit River since the Koch Brothers owned, Koch Carbon Corporation started importing and refining Alberta, Canadian Oil Sands since just this last November. I guess it's just a small and almost irrelevant foot note that this is almost the same location that the mountain of buffalo skulls was located in 1870, or for that matter, who even remembers the massive refinery fire that occurred on April 27, 2013, uhh, that would be just three weeks ago for all of you with limited attention spans, at the Koch Brothers owned Marathon Oil Refinery that is processing the Canadian tar sands only a few blocks away.

The logic being spewed to justify using Detroit as a toxic waste dump facility is that the Oxbow Corporation is going to export this stuff to China, India and Mexico to be used a a cheap energy source for low tech, polluting industrial energy for brick making among other things, because they just don't care about sissy environmental stuff like air quality. The promoters of this logic are touting the fact that Oil Sand Petroleum Coke can be used to be mixed with concrete and, get this, to be burned in American electrical generating plants. Somehow, magically, it is generating revenue and jobs for Michigan while the pile keeps growing and the run off pollutes the already compromised ecosystem of the Great Lakes. Well, I suppose if you look to the future, if there is one here, someone is going to have a job cleaning up this mess. The Marathon Oil Refinery explosion created a mini disaster that required  almost 1.2 square miles of down river Detroit to be evacuated. The all ready decimated emergency managed Fire Department had to cope with the emergency. I hope they are at least getting overtime here. The bottom line is the only ones making money here are the Koch Family Corporate Enterprises and they are getting a free ride courtesy of YOU!