Michigan gets another kick in the teeth

I figured that Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox would lose the lawsuit on trying to close the Chicago canals, especially when the Feds sided with Illinois. Let's face it, the President is from Illinois, he is connected to the Daley machine in Chicago, and they are very strong supporters of (doubtless meaning, get a lot of money from) the barge companies.

And let's also be honest, Cox brought the suit as a stunt to boost his chances in the Republican primary for Michigan Governor in August. "I saved the Great Lakes" is a pretty strong claim to election.

Even so, this is a bitter blow to Michigan. The Supreme Court says no to closing the canals. I haven't seen any so-called rationale, but I imagine it has something to do with disruption of commerce and lack of imminent harm.

The fish that the lawsuit was intended to block are Asian carp--silver and bighead varieties. They are voracious eaters who exclude native fish from the food supply. They reproduce rapidly and grow to be 100 lbs or more. They have no natural predators and at present no value as a commercial product. The silver ones don't like the sound of boat motors and jump out of the water at the passing of a boat. Many people have been injured by these flying fresh water rats-with-fins. If they get into the Great Lakes there will be no stopping them. Last week there were traces of a carp in the waterway 1 mile from Lake Michigan. I have to wonder what an imminent threat is if this is not one.

But heavens, closing the canals would be costly for Chicago, which derives revenue and commerce from the barge traffic. It would cost more money to send gravel and the like by rail rather than on the barges. We wouldn't want to disrupt the commercial ventures of important campaign contributors just for the sake of the world's largest bodies of fresh water, would we? No, no, commerce trumps all.

Michigan gets another kick in the teeth. No electric barrier on the locks is going to stop these things from swimming towards a new home, once population pressure builds high enough. Nature finds a way. These things will infest and ruin bodies of water that are natural wonders of the world. But, it's just Michigan. So long as Li'l Richie, Mayor of the President's hometown, keeps his contributors happy, little things like Great Lakes don't mean "squat".

Not that I believe that closing the canals would be a permanent solution; it wouldn't. Nature would find a way for the swimming cockroach to spread. When they were introduced into this country by foolish fish growers in the south, objections were met with the certain assurance that these things would never escape the ponds they were placed in as algae control. In 1993, along came a 500-year flood and the ponds were compromised. Since then, these pest fish have spread throughout the Mississippi basin. There are millions of them, they crowd out all other fish, and there is no practical use for them. And people call H1N1 a potential plague?

There are potential solutions for the carp problem, but they are long term and at least a year or more away from being practical. Let me know if you are interested and I will share information about one of them by a new post.

Meanwhile, what is the long-term solution for the feckless elevation of commerce and money over all else? Does the public good not outweigh the chance for individuals to make a profit? Or is individual profit the only form of "good" we are prepared to recognize?

That last paragraph gives the curious some hint as to what this Red Tory thinks.