empires have failed because they just financially exhaust them stops and i think we're headed toward that now and we're certainly spending way too much on defense given the fact that we have a yawning budget deficits and huge piling up national debt yet it keeps getting greenlighted and laws don't get enforced i want to thank you so much for giving us that perspective on this that with ivan eland senior fellow at the independent institute and that is going to do it for now for more on the stories we covered go to our t.v. dot com slash usa and we will be back for so much more news at i.p.m. . you didn't start all of a sudden. it's a long story of destroying the living and their habitats. there are constantly. something leaks down here when they get done with it it's just something if you took every fisherman out of the water and he tell you something about that water.

protecting the habitat to this roost means it's going to be nature's steps making waves are the consequences are you look around and see a little of the solar. obviously everybody humans think well lost income and speak road systems to great number that's true. and yet billions of dollars oil and gas state. real baby drill. from there to cut some so. my frustration with consider potential areas for development in south atlantic in the gulf of mexico live . wealthy british scientists i took some

time to cut. the to. market dynamics. find out what's really happening to the global economy with much stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to the report on r.g.p. . lenses . look.

thirty five years ago will not help to identify the toxic assets and suffocating marine life in the gulf of mexico the dead cell is all encompassing it's along the mississippi river it's in the gulf the dead zone has a huge impact along the coastal areas where you have the fisheries restricts the fleet we know that it's being caused by runoff in the midwest. the midwest has been growing more clark and walk on which was having a fertile housing a. full . every you know nine hundred thousand tons of agricultural

fertilizer. washes into the mississippi river from thirty one states outside louisiana. as the river moves through the e.c.m. it brings all those nutrients down with it because it's algae blooms which you suck the oxygen and cause what's called a dead stop and slow are no. makes sense from the mouth of the mississippi all the way into texas. no fish no crabs all the type of aquatic organisms that they normally catch so it's having an impact on how united states but it's only quote in fact in the economic base along the coastal areas. and.

occasionally feel the food and music right people one of the richest places in the world but now a natural resources are something that folks who have been in power have abused and neglected. two hundred petrochemical plants line eighty five miles of the mississippi river between baton rouge and new orleans. they produce over twenty five percent of the petrochemicals made in the united states. it's known as cancer alley.

the boy when i brought my son michael holmes from the hospital they tell me he might be blind deaf or brain damaged and certainly more yet more susceptible cerebral palsy and more susceptible to respiratory infections monia etc . and then i realized that the error was in non attainment here meaning that it was unhealthy to breathe seventeen times that year the year that brought him home i felt really like our basic civil rights are being violated that i wasn't certain when i opened up my window that i was getting clean air i wasn't certain that the earth was clean i wasn't certain that the water that i was drinking was all right and i was terrified for my children. going to go.

so i think there's nothing like a mother's instinct that's what's missing you something about that we already have too much or in our qualities back and then i realize the basic civic lesson that. i am that somebody. that's when i got involved i said i did this for six months and now is twenty something years ago. lane is a louisiana farm and action network and we've been working on public health and protecting natural resources for twenty three years. we're on our way to hack sun mobile to the largest petro chemical facility in united states. petro chemical companies in the easy. employ more than one hundred thousand people

. there's a lot of folks who are good neighbors but there is this percentage of folks that are really bad neighbors and it really ruins people's lives literally because they aren't obeying the law. a chemical worker told me when he would come home in his clothes with smell he tells children that was a small money. yes it is jobs but we care about the workers too you need to have a safe job. it is hard when people are worried you know where's my next paycheck and a come from my paycheck is coming from my company we are very attune and try to help people who want to do something but they can only do so much and that and there's no judgement there i mean this is just to be about helping people and not not harming anybody. this is going to harm my job it's going to harm my husband.

or you know will my people in the community look at me differently or they think i'm a crazy environmentalist for a while people may have a lot of attacks but you really know is they're not really talking about the substance of what you're saying they're just trying to take attention off of the facts of what's really happening here trying to stereotype you and there's no stereotypical environmentalist anymore used to be a yogurt backpack and crunchy kind of people which i love which is obviously in seattle not now it's everybody's moms and dads and grandmas and people become more aware about the environment. the more people that are lost in my life in this work the woman who started this work with me ramona was like my partner in this work she was another mother actually her husband was a worker at one of the chemical facilities she just wanted to live to be forty and she died at thirty nine of cancer. when someone asks me when they're dying that

i'm not forget the day they were here and they were important and so. but at least i can do is try to help. you have to bring yourself back to why are you doing this and for me it's helping people and believe in net service is the round i pay for the space i take out on earth i believe that i owe something back and if as long as i can talk and walk on i want to help i mean it's life is just about getting through life.

but. i'm not pessimistic because if i got pessimistic i would quit doing more i'm doing just give up and i don't think that we can do that and. these things are just happening here of moving somewhere else that's not how it works it's everywhere.

because of. this mentality of better living with chemistry that we have in some of them it's everywhere it's pervasive but ten thousand mile web of oil and gas pipelines crisscrosses louisiana's wetlands. today many of those pipelines and their infrastructures i don't and. my father was military. and when you grow up i think in a household and that environment you learn that you have a responsibility to do the right thing for other people not just you know their companies. they're not even people they're corporations they're legal entities and i don't think you can let somebody intimidate you.

much of the abandoned oil and gas infrastructure was initially built on land. but due to erosion storms or misguided attempts to control the mississippi river much of it is now surrounded by water. not only others can now like they did to access the on the first place to scrawny of the wetlands there are constantly or else feels something or leaks out here and when they get done with it it's just there and it's all on the bottom may have all the pipes on the bottom whatever they aren't using they throw overboard the only people that ever see that is a fisherman who work the bottom are shrimpers the skimmer boats because they run into it and skimming or in the nets or shreds their nets on.

every bit of the spaces that are in at water and it does have traditionally fish crab and fin fish and shrimp out here there's less of it for them to catch. the habitat destruction that is occurring if you took every fisherman out of the water and you don't do something about that water quality and the habitat protecting the habitat that the fisheries needs it's going to collapsed. i am the people who work live off of these natural resources it's for work but it's all also teach you connected is real family oriented you take the kids along when they're young when you're working you keep i'm with you on the boats and they go to the. marketing learn a trade and they can take care of the family your hand they need to move past. the now so it's real tight now. and on the money that they earn stays within the

community and the money goes to the docks in the boats for the notice for the nets and hope builders you know and it sustains the community as a whole. this is a national treasure and it really is people need to wake up in this country and realize what they're losing when they lose this asked or system here hopefully and. when we lose a sense to larry the gulf of mexico fisheries are going to collapse because. this is where those pieces were. when i started i had the optimism of the young and i thought that if you point out

a problem things will change well it doesn't work that way you've got to really work at it to make things change. million is oil and gas industry generates more than seventy billion dollars a year and employs three hundred twenty thousand people. if you look around resound and you say well i had all this oil and gas obviously everybody here must be well off and incomes must be high and the road system must be great none of that is true their road system schools are in trouble all the time there's no money for any public services the state's always in a fiscal problem. and yet billions of dollars of oil and gas were removed from the state and our per capita income is among the lowest in the country our poverty

rates highest next to mississippi thank god for mississippi so we don't have to be last in everything and so we don't have much to show for it except the waste that they left and to me that's the real crime here is that you had all this wonderful all these wonderful resources and the people got very little of it. every day six thousand workers shuttle by helicopter from soda to boil lakes in the gulf of mexico. they used to provide forty percent right tax base now they provide maybe fifteen ten or fifteen percent so it's much less so the benefits coming in and gone down over the year and the impacts are gone up so it's some point those lines cross in louisiana is a net loser because of having oil and gas development is so far by some jobs with

the oil industry is about three percent of our jobs just not to be a part of our job base and. there probably came a problem say in one thousand nine hundred thirty s. people began to notice that the waste from the oil industry which is wherever they drilled the well and wheezy and they've probably drilled a hundred thousand them they would also. just hold a gram and then these pits they would put these waste water zubair ice all these things they use in the oil and gas industry it's got hydrocarbons in it light oil it's got heavy metals we find arsenic around these wells a lot and it's got was called produced water comes up with the oil three four times the salinity of seawater dumped on the ground it kills everything it touches so it would kill off all these little valleys and creek beds and streams and so when they left the lease they would just push the little paid in a little dirt over but the land on his left with this massive waste which then

seeps down to the ground water and there's a hundred thousand of these out there and many of the still leaking landowners are just finally learning about them so it's another one of those legacies and. they knew that these pits were going to leak out scene reports from the thirty's it's a. if you put some water in these on line pitches going to leak down to ground water and they continue doing louisiana until the late eighty's. finally now they're supposed to line their goods but we will last state and nation to do it and it's really too late many cases. two decades ago paul helped to write some of the cns strongest environmental dogs. which coil and gas companies fiercely opposed.

corruption is probably the biggest problem money in politics corruption is people think of in terms also might get a payoff like that's part of it but it's goes much deeper than that once you begin to change the way an agency does its business once that happens then the whole agency begins to change and it no longer works for the people if it's what. political scientists call client capture agency becomes captured by the group it's supposed to be regulated and then the agency serves that group and it doesn't serve the public anymore the good people leave because they don't want to work in that kind of environment and you're left with a sort of dead in the water agency and we have a number of those no we as you know. even if you got the law in place industry has had a big say in writing the rules they want to take a first look at the regulations and then they would edit them and i was on from that program because the management program over that.

drill baby drill. right here. yes we must drill out sure well yes we need conservation alternative fuels nuclear and many other things we also need more domestic production you can come off the coast of louisiana see how we're doing with the most modern technology so today we're announcing the expansion of offshore oil and gas exploration my administration will consider potential areas for development in the mid and south atlantic and the gulf of mexico.

everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall in draw mostly thoughts of this will be very very modest with soaring fuel in message disruption in schools their lives and you know we there's no one who wants this thing as it moves and i think you know i love my life but. we used to identify louisiana pre-k. train and rita and post katrina and rita and now it's pretty spill and post gallup we feel like life has me now it has changed forever. it's just unbelievably bad when they wanted to start burning the heavy portion of it

we had to insist that it only be burned when the winds were moving offshore. it was making an aerosol of the hydrocarbons it was moving on shore way ahead of the spill and making people very very sick given headaches vomiting precious burning eyes and just disrupting life all along the coastal areas. this is the last thing we need we've got a hurricane season approaching this is the tommy year when you know we've got a lot of birds breeding out on the baryons and then the wait times the fish will all be another marine log be a study into into the by the news stories most marine oldham isms when they come into an oil slick the instincts don't tell them how to react because it's not a natural phenomenon and folding. is just going to lie about

these coastal communities as we know it because there will not be a mechanism for them to earn a living on the natural resources and what we see happening. we really believed that there were not failsafe measures in place on those rigs that ecological disaster of this size could happen. this is something totally different this is something that they can't control they don't know how to control and it is just heartbreaking in a fury that our legislators lacks the rules and allowed them to do this when they didn't have the technology to take care of it as something like this happens. what they've done here is wiped out these coastal communities put us all out of business and the rain is the charter captains the commercial fisherman nobody can do

anything nobody can go to work they're angry and they're scared. everybody is like shell shocked and nobody knows what to do. how do you recover everything that is lost. on the oil industry is completely drives to the state committees like natural resources in our legislature headed up by exxon executives and people. like that the oil industry ultimately choose the ruling elites who run the e.c.m. . it's one of the costs of oil that's never figured into the price of oil which is why gasoline is so cheap because we don't put all the call sandwiches bannock amounts and certainly the bad environmentally. d.p.'s that falls tolls fall and so should you because it's equipment that failed but we americans shit

a fair amount of the blame. most of us all in denial about the whole energy situation the reason they're out there getting the oil is we demand it and they can still make money on. b.p. oil on the river us is not going to go drill in one mile deep water if they all make money. but they can make money because all policy. they're gonna keep drilling and it's gonna happen again. industries like to change the federal agencies my tighten up some i mean to be fools not to but while industry is pretty powerful i'm sure they're up there lobbying in the halls of legislature in the halls of the agency every day every hour. we all give up very tenacious we love where we live and we think we live here it's our duty to protect

our environment protect our communities and so i'm just so sorry that i live to see this. this should be a giant wake up call for all of us were addicted to oil. i saw some money yesterday i go into a stall driving a big huge is to be kept in the big pot but just today they lift a car running small i went into the store there when the still probably fifteen to twenty minutes and the reason being says they call with syria wouldn't get. as long as we have that sort of attitude we've got to have to go offshore to foreign oil and we're going to have more of these sorts of accidents. one of our former governors phil louisiana oil has been sold to cheat to the rest of the nation his

idea was well we'll shut down the pipelines and his slogan was lick them freeze and the dog. and it's all something like that have to swear with the you is has to freeze in the dark i don't see a change in our energy policy and there will no real change in the desire to go deeper and deeper while.