It was easy to focus this week on Walker and Trump's self-inflicted Russia-related wounds, but here's some of what their official corporate bellhops were doing to further trash the environment that you might have missed:
Law That Saved the Bald Eagle Could Be Vastly Reworked
The Trump Administration is Expected to Weaken Fuel Emission Standards Next Week
Interior Fast Track's drilling's Arctic impact: Report
And do not forget that Walker has done his share of damage to clean water, wildlife and clean air, too, noted here and here and here.
Law That Saved the Bald Eagle Could Be Vastly Reworked
The Trump Administration is Expected to Weaken Fuel Emission Standards Next Week
Interior Fast Track's drilling's Arctic impact: Report
And do not forget that Walker has done his share of damage to clean water, wildlife and clean air, too, noted here and here and here.
We're TOAST!
ReplyDeleteHere's the problem. Real wages have not gone up since the 1970s. Housing, transportation and energy costs have, relative to some other goods, skyrocketed. Increasingly more Americans cannot afford frivolous purchases - so where are there profit opportunities to exploit?
ReplyDeleteThe last untapped lucrative market in the US has been education. This is what drives voucher & charter schools as well as outright privatization. But there's another vast market waiting to be tapped.
Polution is a profitable 2-fer. First, companies externalize their productions costs by irresponsibly sticking the public with expenses that should, if we actually had Adam Smith's "free markets", be exclusively their cost of doing business.
Then the public money is used to clean up the dangerous pollution and environmental destruction almost entirely created by the private sector. These funds are a second profit center for multinational corporate interests.
Witness the BP Gulf disaster several years ago. The negative financial impact of killing workers and creating one of the most dangerous environmental disasters in world history were largely offset by selling another danverous chemical, Corexit, to disperse the oil (and in no meaningful way cleaning it up).
Disaster capitalism is increasingly seen as the path to economic growth. It is a near perfect sham, because only a few multinational corporations have the technology to deal with poison air, water, and soil. These pesky environmental laws make massive pollution illegal (profit motive #1) and without the dangerous pollution, public coffers cannot be raided to create profit motive #2 - cleanup of increasingly massive damage to our environment.
What this comment is really meant to demonstrate, however, is that most Americans have been propagandized to believe the lie that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. Strict enforcement of reasonable laws protecting life would reduce much of problem 1. If the public sector then took responsibility for clean-up without paying for privately-owned technology, charging back all costs to polluters, that would reduce the 2nd incentive.
Walker and GOP are just hoisting another scam on us when they claim there is no need to protect the public from environmental tal disasters.