Saturday, September 9, 2017
Friday, September 8, 2017
The Nina Turner Show: On Solidarity with Linda Sarsour and Winnie Wong
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GLFoqGYFOo
Peter Daou's Hillary-Approved 'Verrit' Outlet is Already an Internet Meme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ6UDRkBmdg
Environmentalists' Surprising Ally to Save National Monuments: Hunters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMay5BVBPEE
Trump, Pruitt Slash EPA Staff to 30-Year Lows as Drinking Water, Climate Change Crises Mount
Wednesday, September 6, 2017
WASHINGTON – By October of
this year, the staff at the Environmental Protection Agency will be reduced to
levels not seen since the Reagan administration, 30 years ago, according to a
report by Brady Dennis with the Washington Post.
The dramatic reduction in
staff will almost certainly include career scientists and other staff who are
often called into local communities where an environmental disaster is
occurring, like Houston following Hurricane Harvey. These staffers also work on
less urgent, but serious problems like the widespread drinking water
contamination that impacts virtually every American.
The push to downsize EPA staff
comes as part of a larger effort to curtail the size and scope of an
agency that President Trump once promised to eliminate “in almost every
form.”
Last week, the Arkema chemical
plant explosion in Crosby, Texas, in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, shined
a light on not only the Trump administration’s lax oversight of the nation’s
chemical facilities, but his dramatic 31 percent proposed budget cut to the EPA
and what that would mean for chemical plant safety in the future.
A second hurricane, Irma, is
the largest ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean and is ripping through the
Caribbean on its way toward South Florida. Among the 97 percent of climate
scientists who agree humans are a driving contributor to the warming planet,
there is consensus that a result of warming oceans is much
larger, more intense hurricanes. Until the Trump administration came to
power, former President Obama’s EPA was taking significant steps to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions, which are the leading culprit of climate change.
“Only the Trump administration
would conclude that it’s a good idea to cripple the federal agency tasked with
combating the growing pollution threats to Americans’ drinking water, and the
clear and present dangers of climate change – like historic, back-to-back
hurricanes,” said EWG President Ken Cook. “These and other serious problems
demand more resources, not fewer. However, the EPA is no longer run by leaders
who put a premium on human health and environmental protection, and this
hollowing out of the agency’s staff is the clearest example of Trump and
Pruitt’s disdain for both.”
A report
released this week by EWG shows the drinking water of nearly 90 million
Americans is tainted with the cancer-causing chemical 1,4-dioxane. The EPA and
its career staff are charged with working with local authorities to help
mitigate drinking water contamination.
Fossil Fuel Lobbyist By Day, WaPo Columnist By Night
Ed
Rogers continues to embarrass the Washington Post
By
Adam
Johnson
http://fair.org/home/fossil-fuel-lobbyist-by-day-wapo-columnist-by-night/
Fossil fuel lobbyist Ed Rogers
What
is the point of Ed Rogers, the Washington Post’s most conflict-ridden, mediocre
columnist (FAIR.org, 4/23/15)?
He doesn’t add a lot to the discourse, his boilerplate Republican talking
points could be better written by any number of Heritage fellows, he shills for
Trump in the most boring ways possible, and—most glaringly of all—is an actual
paid lobbyist for an assortment of sleazy industry interests, via his lobbying
firm BGR
Group.
So
why does a major paper feel the need to continue to give him column inches?
Rogers has major conflicts of interest, as AlterNet
and Media
Matters have noted: Among many
other infractions, he neglected to mention his firm’s $500,000 fee from the
Saudi regime while boosting Trump’s PR trip there, and promoted the shiny new
weapon systems of his client Raytheon on the night Trump used them to bomb the
Syrian Air Force.
When
he does disclose conflicts, it renders the rest of his writing limp and
risible. Take his latest right-wing missive (9/5/17)
lamenting the “lurch to the left” of the Democratic Party, which offers up one
of the greatest self-owns in the history of the Post opinion section:
Economic
policies [of the Democrats in 2020] will consist of government giveaways and
anti-business crusades. Social causes will give no quarter to moderate
positions, and LGBT special interests, labor unions, global warming fanatics
and factions such as Black Lives Matter, along with other grievance industry
groups, will face no moderating counterforce. (Disclosure: My firm represents
interests in the fossil fuel industry.)
It’s
rare for a screed to undermine its own credibility in such a glaring and
amusing fashion—to rail against a made-up “grievance industry” only to follow
up by letting the reader know that the writer himself shills for a very real
and widely loathed fossil fuel industry. The rub is Rogers’ disclosure, such as
it was, was only fraction of what it ought to have been.
Almost
every “left” issue Rogers opposes conflicts with one of BRG’s corporate
or government clients. Let’s run them down:
“A
$15 minimum wage”: BRG clients include the Asia-Pacific Council of American
Chambers of Commerce, HNTB Holdings (construction), Caesars Entertainment and a
number of corporations reliant on low-wage work.
“Free
college tuition”: BRG client Flagstar Bank issues student loans.
“Single-payer
health-care system”: BRG clients include GlaxoSmithKline, Senior Care Pharmacy
Alliance, Lifecare Hospitals, Merck & Co, Eli Lilly, Neurocrine Biosciences
and a host of others profiting from for-profit healthcare.
“Labor
unions”: Toyota Motor Corp, Caesars and any corporate client whose profits are
threatened by a strong labor movement.
Clearly,
an aggressive left-wing agenda would be a major threat to the bottom line of
scores of Rogers’ clients. The fossil fuel industry apparently rises to a level
of manifest terribleness that made Washington Post editors feel they had to
demand a token disclosure. Those lobbying for low wages, massive student loan
debt and exploitative private healthcare evidently do not.
Having
a lobbyist moonlight as a columnist, of course, is inherently conflicting; the
major corporate, financial and fossil fuel interests Rogers represents will, by
definition, pollute his writings as surely as his clients do the Earth.
Perhaps
Post editors can stop and examine their priorities when one of their columnists
has to write, “Disclosure: My firm represents interests in the fossil fuel
industry,” in the same 48-hour period three massive hurricanes formed in the
Atlantic. The Post seems to be filling a niche that doesn’t need filling:
insider oil company pitchman with run-of-the-mill GOP positions.
Rogers’
piece bizarrely went on to claim the 2020 Democratic nominee will attempt to
“normalize” and “show common cause” with “the antifa”:
But
just as the right tries to normalize President Trump, the left will try to
normalize the antifa. As the rationalization gets underway, the presidential
candidates wanting to distinguish themselves in a crowded field will be tempted
to show common cause and try to harness the antifa fury. The pandering to come
will be nauseating, but nonetheless compelling to watch.
Even
aside from Rogers’ glaring conflicts, this section is worth highlighting
because it shows what an amazingly poor writer he is. It’s a series of lazy
ideological assumptions built on top of each other that thinks antifa is called
“the antifa” and Democrats seek to embrace radical anarchists, despite the top
Democrat in the country coming
out expressly against it. Indeed, if Rogers were a venal industry hack who
could also write well and make original points, his existence on Washington
Post’s payroll would be more understandable. But he’s not; he’s both corrupt
and a banal, unlettered writer, leading one to ask, again—what is the point of
Ed Rogers?
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