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Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace:
The Most Important Financial Journalist of Her Generation
Dean Starkman
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The Supreme Court Resists Drug War Hysteria
Krystal Quinlan
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Summer Downsizing: 31 Ways to Jumpstart Your Local Economy
Sarah van Gelder
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10 Dangerous Household Products You Should Never Use Again
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Huron, California May not Exist in a Year
Viji Sundaram
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Michael Jackson's Death Was Tragic, But He Was Little More Than an Icon of Mediocrity
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
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Up: This Time, Pixar Has Gone Too Far
Eileen Jones
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Hunter Thompson Knew It Well: Robert McNamara's Vision for America Was Imperial and Elitist
Joe Costello
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My First Abortion Party
Byard Duncan
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Why the FBI Squelched an Investigation of a Post-9/11 Meeting Between White Supremacist and Islamic Extremists
Mark Levine
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Why the Left Looks Like a Big Hypocrite in the Sanford Affair
JoAnn Wypijewski
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Ending Indefinite Detention is AlterNet's Top Take Action Campaign of the Week
Byard Duncan
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Energy Industry Threatens Water Quality, Sways Congress With Misleading Data
Abrahm Lustgarten
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Robert McNamara Was Never Really in Touch with His Role in Causing Atrocity in Vietnam
Andrew Lam
In mid-May, the propaganda machine at the Bush administration's Environmental Protection Agency was like a diesel engine in overdrive, breaking with its nonpartisan past to help re-elect the president. After cutting deals with oil and diesel engine companies on new standards for diesel heavy equipment, the EPA was proclaiming, hyperbolically, that President Bush was taking bold steps that would usher in a veritable Age of Aquarius for clean air.
While spin-doctors were plying their craft, White House political surgeons were quietly carving up an EPA plan to clean up lethal emissions of electric power plants. By the time they were through, the plan resembled the hapless Trojans slashed apart by Brad Pitt's Achilles.
Progressive staffers at the EPA had been promoting a plan to create incentives for power companies to use energy more efficiently -- an idea that could reduce not only greenhouse gas emissions, but harmful pollutants as well. Behind closed doors, however, the White House axed the idea. What emerged was a plan that favored the oldest and dirtiest coal-fired electric plants.
Though the matter dealt with a seemingly esoteric and technical issue, the stakes were enormous. The White House gambit not only constituted a huge financial windfall for some of the biggest Bush campaign contributors, it also rewarded companies in a number of battleground states important in the November election, including Ohio, Michigan, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Iowa.
This sorry episode is just the latest in a series of heavy-handed White House moves to tamper with EPA activities in order to help politically wired supporters from the coal fields.
The President had barely taken his oath of office when the pro-coal promotional effort began. In early 2001, President Bush cut the legs out from under then-EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman and disavowed the Kyoto Climate Accord.
Whitman was still reeling from that blow when Vice President Cheney's energy plan -- carved out in secret with the help of coal and power industry lobbyists -- ordered the EPA to rethink its enforcement strategy for dealing with existing coal-burning power plants. Despite Whitman's warning that Bush might pay a "terrible political price" for such a blatant sellout, the result was a slowdown in enforcing the Clean Air Act and new industry-friendly rules that would permit the dirtiest coal plants to continue polluting.
More recently (after Whitman fled the agency, declaring, like departing CIA Director George Tenet, that she needed to "spend more time with my family"), the White House ordered the EPA to pretend that poisonous mercury is not a toxic pollutant -- even while the Food and Drug Administration was warning pregnant women of the risks associated with eating mercury-contaminated fish. A proposed EPA rule was politically doctored by the White House to include language supplied by lawyers from coal-fired power companies.
These ham-fisted White House maneuvers all have one thing in common: they all distort administration policies to favor big coal and coal-burning electric companies -- the source of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to the Republican Party and to the Bush-Cheney re-election effort in particular.
This most recent gambit involves a Bush administration proposal to reduce smog- and soot-forming emissions from power plants during the next two decades. As the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (a quasi-independent watchdog group set up under NAFTA) recently noted, power plants are the biggest source of toxic air contaminants in America. Those emissions -- chiefly from coal-burning plants -- have been linked to tens of thousands of premature deaths every year.
The Bush plan is a dud in many respects. It sets weak targets and would permit the biggest polluters to continue spewing poisons well into the next two decades. It would also illegally attempt to substitute this weaker approach for a tougher Clean Air Act requirement to clean up the haze that ruins the views at national parks.
Not surprisingly, the plan also favors the biggest polluters in a seemingly technical respect, and that was the subject of this latest bit of White House interference.
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Huron, California May not Exist in a Year Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace: The unemployment rate in Huron in recent months is “off the charts.” By Viji Sundaram, New America Media. July 9, 2009. |
Energy Industry Threatens Water Quality, Sways Congress With Misleading Data Water: The industry is misleading the public into a false choice between the economy and the environment. By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica. July 9, 2009. |
Summer Downsizing: 31 Ways to Jumpstart Your Local Economy Environment: Here's how to make more with less, put people before profits and cut down on waste. By Sarah van Gelder, YES! Magazine. July 9, 2009. |