Archive for October, 2008

27
Oct

Lead Pollution Rules Spiked, Or Why Government Doesn’t Work

What Scares The Bush Administration Sh*tless

Scares The Bush Administration Shitless

The United States Environmental Protection agency’s proposal to tighten permissible lead pollution standards tenfold while also increasing the number of targeted lead air monitoring stations was slapped down by the Bush administration on Thursday. The executive-branch agency, created under Richard Nixon, is charged with guarding and improving the quality of the air that Americans breathe, but here we have pretty stark evidence that this isn’t its real mission.

The new rules were proposed, as they all are, by career bureaucrats within the agency, who probably saw a politically weakened Bush presidency in its final months as an opportunity to push through some in their minds overdue regulation. And it’s true that primary and secondary lead smelting has been getting away with murder, in some cases quite literally, when it comes to their trespassing on the properties of others with their pollution, including their bodies.

But look at how it works;

EPA documents show that until the afternoon of Oct. 15, a court-imposed deadline for issuing the revised standard, the EPA proposed to require a monitor for any facility that emitted half a ton of lead or more a year.

The e-mails indicate that the White House objected, and in the early evening of Oct. 15 the EPA set the level at 1 ton a year instead.

According to EPA documents, 346 sites have emissions of half a ton a year or more. Raising the threshold to a ton reduced the number of monitored sites by 211, or more than 60 percent.

In layman’s terms, under pressure from the lead industry, the Bush White House rejected the EPA suggestion for more site-specific monitoring of the amount of lead pollution spewed by lead smelters, recyclers, battery manufacturers, and steel mills.  In essence, the president rejected any reduction of lead pollution trespass at all, simply by preventing monitoring from being done where it would do the most good.

This particular strategy has a new twist, in that while the tighter pollution trespass standard would fall under the standard regulatory procedure, i.e., tighten a regulation so that small businesses are disadvantaged relative to bigger ones, the new monitoring provisions would have more closely targeted both large and small pollution trespassers, resulting in more monitoring stations being placed at their gates and fence lines, rather than in urban centers at some distance from the plants themselves.

But this shows the government’s hand – they have absolutely no interest in preventing pollution trespass at all. They simply wish to preserve their power to manipulate commercial activity for their own benefit, and that of their favored interests. And it’s a peculiarly bipartisan sort of  manipulation. How, for example, will the agency deal with the likely vast increases in lead smelting and recycling that Federal hybrid car mandates will occasion, for example?

The answer is to reconstitute pollution torts as property-rights violations. Once we stop “permitting” polluters to trespass on our bodies and properties and start prosecuting them, there will be no need for these pointless ‘gotcha’ games within the federal government.

15
Oct

Yet A Couple More Reasons To Love New Jersey

New Jersey Has The Lowest Gas Tax Around, Who'da Thunk It?

And It's FULL SERVICE!

I love New Jersey. Full-serve regular gas at a name brand station for 30 cents less per gallon than the national average. Almost makes all the refinery pollution worthwhile…

And another bonus – the Republicans in the state legislature are forcing Governor John Corzine’s hand on the economy by proposing to cut the sales tax in half through New Years. Not that it will ever pass, but it is forcing Corzine (D. Goldman Sachs) to do something to relieve the burden of the current financial meltdown on consumers and businesses.

How about this guys – let’s make the rate ZERO. Permanently.

(PHOTO: What I paid for gas today at a brand-name station)

02
Oct

The Bailout Is Pure Economic Socialism

Hank Paulson Is A Pu$$y

Hank Paulson Is A Pu$$y

Look – I took a BRUUUUTAL beating recently on some mining stocks. If you believe the powers that be, this bailout is the answer to my prayers, a ‘hail mary pass’ that will rescue the markets, refill our home equity and 401-Ks and IRAs, and everyone will live happily ever after.

Even if ANY of it were true, I STILL say DUMP IT. I am standing on principle, on what I know is right, and I’ll be goddamned if I’ll support something so pernicious and evil, even if it would benefit me in the short run.

Because I know what it means. Bailout means socializing losses and privatizing profits. It means massive new inflation, which means more poverty for millions of people around the world, while Wall Street fatcats and the Merchants of Death, who get to spend it first, reap tremendous profits. And, because the government has to spend the money into circulation, it means unprecedented amounts of military spending, and monstrous wars, wars without end.

And it’s empire that creates such horrible things as nuclear weapons and engineered plagues. The anthrax that was used in the only biological weapons attack ever recorded (except for the settlers giving the Indians Smallpox and Syphilis of course) came from the US government lab at Ft. Detrick, MD. The CDC actually sanctioned an Army scientist to reconstitute the 1918 pandemic flu, which killed more people in the aftermath of WWI than the frickin’ WAR did.

This is the kind of madness that is gripping our government. Will you trust your children’s futures to these people?

Even if my balance goes to zero, I defiantly stand and say to the economic fascists “NO BAILOUT – NO WAY!”