Among the many ugly truths of COVID-19’s heartbreak and ruin, these are the ugliest:
- In Milwaukee, African Americans are 70% of COVID-19’s deaths, but only 26% of the population.
- In Louisiana, those numbers are 70% and 32%.
Among the many ugly truths of COVID-19’s heartbreak and ruin, these are the ugliest:
Late last month, Americans were panicked by COVID-19 claiming the lives of hundreds of people per day (it’s now more than 1,000 per day), and consumed by the fear of sickness, job loss, financial distress and the anxiety caused by our entire way of life being cast into uncertainty. President Trump seized on that very moment of intense national distraction to have his EPA decide to stop enforcing environmental laws altogether. This means that polluters will no longer face penalties for failing to monitor or report their pollution, or for spewing and dumping toxic chemicals into our air and water.
In the nearly 50 year history of the EPA, this is the first time that the agency has ever just flatly refused to do its job.
Trump’s EPA offered only phony reasons for this license to endanger American lives:
The Trump administration’s “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” rule will severely limit the scientific studies used by the federal government to create new regulations. Environmental attorney Shawn Collins says the rule requires data to be publicly available, including confidential medical records and sensitive personal information and will be a major impediment for clean air and water rules. Continue reading…
It started with a letter to Congress.
Seven past EPA chiefs, appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents, wrote to Congress in April. They were concerned about the direction of the current EPA and offered to help Congress use its oversight to put a halt to Trump’s misguided deregulatory push and the dismissal of science in favor of politics at the agency.
The seven EPA leaders signing the letter had served under Obama, Reagan, and both Bushes, so the current administration could not blame the letter on partisan politics.
President Trump’s decision to abandon America’s commitment to the Paris Climate Change Accord is just the latest horrible environmental decision that he has made. Here are just some of the others:
These decisions reveal a level of ignorance and cruelty that was unthinkable until Trump came along. Environmental protection is a moral issue, above all else. Because, while in a general sense all of us are the victims of pollution, and of the wars over a lack of water and food that rampaging climate change is already provoking, the truth is that those most acutely threatened are the poor, the politically powerless, and, especially, their children. They are the ones who get sick and die, or have shortened life spans, or must live (if they are so lucky to live at all) with starvation, debilitating cancers and chronic respiratory disease…..because decisions such as Trump’s announce that these human beings are not deserving of the same standard of environmental protection as everyone else.
Trump’s decisions are immoral. Because they are made by our elected leader–and because the rest of the world understandably believes that he speaks for Americans–these decisions declare that, as a country, America is abandoning those who suffer most from pollution, and are least able to defend themselves against it.
When Pope Francis met with President Trump at the Vatican this past week, Francis gave him a copy of his 2015 Encyclical, which passionately argued that the environment is God’s gift to mankind, to benefit all mankind, and therefore that the powerful must not exploit it for their selfish purposes.
Crafty guy, that Pope.
He no doubt is well aware that the President is the agent of the worst environmental exploiters and despoilers that the world has ever known-oil companies-and accordingly has his administration in overdrive to crush the environmental protections that have saved lives and health, especially those of poor minorities and children.
According to the non-profit Environmental Working Group, California’s public water systems in the San Joaquin Valley and urban areas like LA and San Bernardino and San Mateo counties are contaminated with a very dangerous, cancer-causing chemical known as 1,2,3 trichloropropane (“TCP”). Evidently, the TCP is a remnant of a chemical manufactured by Dow Chemical and Shell Oil.
The California State Water Board is proposing to limit the allowable concentration of TCP in drinking water to 5 parts per trillion. Fine. But who’s going to clean up the TCP? Are Dow and Shell responsible for the TCP in the water systems? The Water Board should also be looking into that. Because it’s not enough to just tell people how dangerous TCP is……the point is to get the TCP out of their water as soon as possible.
http://californiahealthline.org/multimedia/public-water-systems-polluted-with-123-tcp/
This month in Germany, the world’s biggest industrial nations are meeting to discuss what to do about increasingly threatening climate change. A good idea, right? Except it turns out that the meeting will be disgraced by the presence of some 270 business lobbyists, most of them there to protect trillions in worldwide oil industry profits. Their aim is to shut down any chance of real progress on climate change, which would require clamping down on oil production.
Sadly, the U.S. has been stripped of its moral authority on climate change, with the President now the world’s most famous climate change denier, and his cabinet stocked with oil industry hacks like Scott Pruitt (EPA chief) and Rex Tillerson (Secretary of State). Let’s not risk the rapid destruction of our health and planet by allowing oil lobbyists and fake science peddlers to control this debate.
Pro-business forces in Congress have proposed laws aimed at restricting, or even eliminating, the rights of injured Americans to join together in bringing their claims in the form of a single “class action” lawsuit. A class action is a kind of lawsuit in which those who have been injured by the same corporate conduct can bring their legal claims as part of a single case, rather than having to file dozens or hundreds or even thousands of essentially identical individual cases. Common examples of a class action include: