Hoosiers and Lake Michigan

The first order of business, the News-Swami suggests, is to remember why there are large, ugly crud-belching industrial behemoths in Northwest Indiana at all.

‘Cause Chicago didn’t want them, that’s why. They could have been in our back yard. But, noooo. Chicago wanted lovely beaches and glistening towers to adorn its lakefront.

But we all still need to make cars and skyscrapers, and we need oil and gas to grease the engine of economy; so that stuff has to be made somewhere. Lots of the oozing stink can be placed in Waukegan. After all, what do they know?

And the rest?

Hey, let’s make Northern Indiana do it.

So, lo, it came to pass at the dawn of the 20th Century. Hoosiers thought Chicago was just doing them a favor.
True, the plants produce jobs and homes and successful lives in addition to millions of tons of toxic fluids and solids and gasses and some mixes that you can’t quite tell what state of fluidity it is. Many of the jobs have fled; the gunk remains.

Hoosiers didn’t figure out until much later that lots of the jobs would go away when India and China figured out how to make steel with slave labor, and Hoosiers would be left with extinguished pensions and lymphomas on the half shell.

Thrust into this mix is IDEM, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. IDEM’s history of carefully managing the environment is sort of mixed; Like Britney Spear’s history of sexual abstinence is mixed.

All Indiana enviro warriors (all four of them) know that IDEM would turn Indiana into the eastern entrance to the LaBraya Tar Pits if no one was watching.

So giving BP a pass made perfect sense. It would create 80 jobs. What’s a dead Lake Michigan compared to that? It's the bargain Indiana has always made.

And thence to the obvious next step. Mittal Steel wants to build a nearly 75-acre landfill for sludge from its mill on company property less than a mile from the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, as gorgeous and pristine a piece of land as God has left on this little planet.

The landfill would store up to 1.8 million tons of truly awful gutjuice from the steel mill's past operations. They let it lay around above ground on its property along Lake Michigan, along with 150,000 to 400,000 tons of sludge per year from current operations.

Mittal, an India-sired operation, bought up the remnants of Ispat Inland Steel in East Chicago and Bethlehem in Burns Harbor.

They are international owners who are soaking the last drop of profit and blood from Indiana.

But their world headquarters? They’ve moved to downtown Chicago. Where else?

And once again, the News-Swami has served the caused of knowledge.