With the presidential election year about to begin, the United States has already had to endure several rounds of political debates focused on candidates each trying to compete for popularity in the hopes that they might be about to oust the current President. This is a repeating 4-year process, and I see no reason to drag candidate or president names into the mix, as this string of events is nothing new.
What is different this cycle, however, is the sudden and illogical attack on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by almost every right-winged candidate trying to run. This sudden and focused attempt to undo the protective laws and regulations in place is nothing short of a direct attack on the American populous, and for some reason we as a people aren’t just letting it happen…we’re choosing to elect people to do this for us.
The EPA isn’t some tyrannical, job-killing business-hating entity. It’s an organization that employs some 17,300 people toward the very focused and direct task of protecting America’s homeland in the most physical sense. The reason there are still forests in the National Parks, the fact that people living in major cities don’t need to wear portable oxygen tanks, even the reason your house isn’t built on top of a toxic waste dump. Most of the staff consists of engineers and scientists, as a small number of IT/networking personnel, PR reps, financial specialists, legal representatives make up the remainder.
Of all people…Richard Nixon (a Republican) was actually the one to establish the EPA in the first place. Due to overwhelming concerns and criticism about pollution and environmental damage being caused by careless and haphazard handling from companies trying to save money, the EPA was given authority to write and enforce regulations (which must be ratified by congress). A notable example of such blistering human stupidity occurred from 1957 to 1977, near Niagara Falls, where a small community known as “Love Canal” had to deal with the ramifications of building an entire community on top of a toxic waste dump. It took years for the population to catch on before the EPA was even dispatched to investigate the event, which was later deemed one of the first “environmental disasters” caused by toxic spillage in history.
Miscarriages, birth defects, nervous disorders, developmental problems in young children, cancers, a whole slew of other horrifying health problems started arising in the area. Today, nearly 40 years after the entire community was evacuated, there is nothing remaining except partially-overgrown roads. Unfortunately, despite the EPA stepping in and containing the site and removing the people, due to the shifting ownership of the companies responsible for owning the land and the chemicals…no one was ever brought to trial or charged with any crime. So in essence, the entire ordeal occurred, 900 families endured 20 years of degenerative health problems and deformities, only to be kicked out of their homes, and no one punished at all…
Love canal isn’t the only event like this. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill that killed 11 people and devastated the Gulf of Mexico was caused by careless construction on the part of several companies. So many corners were cut, even some of the safety mechanisms designed to prevent such a disaster failed to operate because they hadn’t been inspected in years. Thanks largely in part to the response of the EPA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), cleanup crews were dispatched, containment procedures were eventually established and much of the Louisiana coastline was able to be protected from the brunt of the damage caused by the oil spreading around the gulf. The event was considered by White House energy adviser Carol Browner as “the worst environmental disaster the U.S. has ever faced,” which still has ongoing environmental ramifications. Unfortunately, there are dozens, even hundreds more examples of such environmental disasters being caused by companies not caring about other people, only the bottom line.
The EPA has passed protective legislation that has directly improved the lives of Americans everywhere. The Clean Air Act, the Water Quality Improvement Act, and the Resource Recovery Act are all regulations created the same year the EPA was formed. They place limitations and regulations on what companies can pump into the air so that people can safely breathe, they prevent companies from dumping chemicals into streams and rivers, polluting our drinking water, and they prevent toxic, deadly, and harmful pollutants from being stored carelessly or buried and forgotten.
Let’s pretend we lived in a world where the EPA didn’t exist. There are no regulations on air pollution or smog, so cars still use leaded gas, companies billow smoke and unknown carcinogens into the air, making it so hard to see and breathe that you can barely see across the street. There are no regulations on aquatic dumping, so fishing is a thing of the past, as most rivers are now stuffed completely full of garbage and caustic chemicals that anything going near a river usually doesn’t come back out alive. All water of any kind (even to shave, shower, wash your hands) is purchased out of a bottle for a premium, as clean water is a precious commodity. Since there are no laws preventing dumping or protecting the environment, you regularly walk out to your back yard where you have to cover your nose because your neighbor is burning away his garbage in a large bonfire next door. Anything he can’t burn, he pours down the sewer drain, off to somewhere nobody cares about, right?
It’s not difficult for me to create example of what would happen, because I have several countries that I can look to as examples of how this can occur. In China, where there are no air pollution regulations at all, their smog is such a problem and can grow so large in scale that entire weather-systems are formed out of the smog, not water clouds.
In India, where the culture has evolved around using the one same river for the country’s water source and sewer drain, many rivers have become so stuffed with garbage that it’s possible to walk across them without getting wet. In both of these countries, impoverished people survive by crawling through the trash, separating it, to sell or burn, or use themselves. Many communities now exist within dumpsites, where children grow up using their teeth to rip off electronic components off of old computers, in order to melt them down and sell the materials.
Images courtesy of Ritemail.Blogspot.com.
This is what America will become without the protection of the EPA. No, I’m not being inflammatory or alarmist. I can say this with absolute certainty because this is what America was becoming before the EPA was founded. I grew up in a mining community, where the effects of the Gold Rush are still visible in large fields of barren land, where the soil is so contaminated that not even plants have grown for almost 150 years. We were already headed this way, we just saw it coming and decided to take corrective action. Now, 40 years later, we decided latch onto the idea that destroying the environment and taking us all back to 1970 is the only way we can create jobs.
So as ridiculous as this is, why the sudden attack on the EPA? Well from what can be gleaned from the internet, the official “reason,” from the Republican Party is that America is “too difficult to do business within.” I’ve heard this expressed by different candidates in different ways. “Not competitive,” is a common phrase I’ve also read. Regardless of the reasoning, these excuses are really all just a way of politely saying to the American population, “if we can’t poison the air, water, and land at our discretion…then we just don’t feel like doing business here.”
Another lame excuse I’ve come across is that the EPA is a “job-killer.” For the sake of argument…let’s just abandon logic for the time being and just indulge the Republican Party on this. I feel like using some math to berate some folk…
Say we do as Ms. Bachman says, and “chain the doors and shut off the lights” to the EPA. How many jobs will that create? Well for starters, that just put 17,384 people out of work. So what’s our current total?
Step 1: -17,384 jobs
Ok, so now that that the pesky EPA’s out of the way, let’s start tallying up the wave of jobs pouring in! First up is the Keystone XL Oil Pipeline, a project focused on digging an enormous path, 1700 miles across the United States, connecting tar sands in Canada to Refineries in Texas. This project has been falsely drummed up to creating “up to a million” jobs, as seen below on this excerpt from The Colbert Report:
For those of you interested in learning more about Global warming, please visit 350.org
In reality, this project, once completed will likely not create any jobs at all, if any only a few hundred in order to maintain the pipeline. I have heard the argument raised that they will at least have to hire Americans in order to install the pipeline in the first place, but this is actually also incorrect. Take a look at Discovery Channel’s shows sometime: Modern Marvels, Big Builds, Extreme Engineering, How it’s Made, etc. I’m a huge tech-buff so I love watching and learning how everything is put together. One sure-fire commonality to EVERY major construction job I’ve seen on any of those shows is that the construction teams are always, always outsourced to the lowest bidding global contractor available. It’s not too far of a stretch of the imagination to see that the Keystone pipeline will likely be the same…outsourced to the cheapest foreign contractor available. Ok, so for argument’s sake, let’s say about 500 people are somehow permanently employed to maintain the pipeline, where are we now in terms of job-count?
Step 2: -16,884 jobs
Up next are the four rhetoric-driven suggestions from the Right that cropped up in the past, the first of which is union-busting. Unions are the organizations that formed to give American’s weekends and 8-hour work days. In an environment completely without labor unions, companies have no organized resistance against pulling unethical moves, such as abruptly lowering wages, or extending work hours. So, because labor unions are a good thing for the general populous, Republicans want to remove them based on the claim that they “kill jobs.” I’d like to counter this argument with a simple observation: I have never met a single union-worker in my life. They’re just not that common in California, as the labor market has been dominated by companies that refused to hire union labor for years. From my perspective, Republicans claiming they can’t do business because of unions holds as much logical weight as me claiming that I can’t pay taxes because unicorns are preventing me from getting around to it. This suggestion is just a front to make the lives of the average American worker more like that of 1910, when people were fired for being too sick or injured to work, and everyone was just as replaceable as equipment. Since this suggestion and the next three are actually not job-creating ideas, but smokescreens in order to hide more disparity-generating maneuvers from the Republicans, I’ll discuss each idea, but skip the job count for now.
The second suggestion focuses on free-trade agreements, which is a fancy way of saying, “make it cheaper to outsource labor.” Read up on the links I provide about how these free trade agreements work, but I’d like to focus on the fact that this suggestion is actually the smoking gun that proves Republicans are in things only for companies and themselves. If the intention of the other suggestions, to destroy unions, remove the minimum wage, and lowering taxes, was all designed to make it cheaper for businesses to operate in America by turning their workers into essentially slaves, then why turn around and simultaneously establish laws that make it easier to do business overseas?
I see this move as the exact same as selling weapons to both sides of a war. You can’t undercut the rights and privileges of American workers under the guise of “bringing back jobs,” only to then turn around and erect laws that make “bringing back jobs,” easier in China…that’s literally being a hypocrite, and unfortunately, the average American voter is too misinformed to even notice this, let alone do anything about it. Free-trade agreements should be instant campaign suicide for anyone even suggesting it, but because people are thinking that it will somehow “create jobs” they’re actually supporting this idea.
Lowering business taxes and cutting the minimum wage are the last two standard rhetoric-driven suggestions from the Republican candidates that also won’t work. Businesses in the United States have been scamming the tax system and abusing it for years, which is now the reason why we have such a revenue problem in the Government. Here is a link to an article explaining how 30 of America’s most profitable companies not only didn’t pay any taxes for the last three years, but were in fact paid by the government during this time.
And all this at the same time, we have candidates such as Ms. Bachman claiming that “forty-seven percent of all American’s don’t contribute anything in taxes.” This is because 47% of all Americans can barely afford to operate each year, as they are going without heat, food, health insurance, or in some cases even power, and yet these impoverished people “need to contribute” while companies like General Electric or Wells Fargo are paid billions of dollars each year, through federal subsidies. The reason people aren’t paying is because they can’t afford to. However, the reason companies aren’t paying is just pure, unfiltered greed, and nothing more.
And lastly, what has to be by far the most hilariously ridiculous thing I’ve heard proposed to create jobs: de-regulate the man-eating snake industry. Here is a link to the article where not only was the idea suggested and fought for by the Right, they even went so far as to drag a snake-breeder into the congressional floor and make the claim that proposing new regulations on selling Burmese Pythons would kill his job. As ludicrous as all this is, it’s just more evidence that people who are leading our government are clearly not working toward the best interests of the American population.
So where are we so far from all of these suggestions in terms of jobs? Well, assuming we give one job to the person that the Republicans dragged in to argue on their behalf…1 job. That’s it. So our overall count of “job creation” that we would accomplish in the U.S. if we just bent over and allowed the Republican party carte-blanche?
Final total: -16,883 jobs
Hard numbers right there folks…if we do what the candidates are suggesting, 17000 people WILL lose their jobs, and maybe 501 people MIGHT get a job. This math is very simple, but still is way beyond anything that I’ve been seeing coming out of either party during the year.
So, when we’re done shoveling through all the bull and we wind up at the dark, festering core of reason behind these attacks on the EPA, we are left with the conclusion that the EPA is being attacked because “it’s in the way,” of the Republican party. Since the employees of the EPA consist mostly of scientists, engineers, researchers, and people who are more passionate about the environment than anything else, they are a group that cannot be swayed or purchased by corporations. Since they are an agency that is independently run, congressional interference cannot prevent the EPA from doing its job. In fact, as it stands, the EPA is pretty much the last line of defense between the American people and an all out attack on our rights, liberties, and freedoms from corporate entities. Allow me to use more math…
Since everyone loves using the 9/11 event for their motivation speeches (even through it’s been over a decade now), I’ll use the same base point to begin my argument. The event was a direct attack on the American people. Nearly 3500 American civilians died in the event, which generated so much political rage, we jumped into two separate wars (Afghanistan, and Iraq). As a comparison point, Pearl Harbor, the event in 1941 that triggered America’s entry into WWII, had only 2402 casualties and 1247 injuries created.
Ok, so now that we have established that it takes about 3000 deaths for the United States to “roll out the big guns,” and put a boot to some people, let’s start tallying up the deaths caused by corporate activity.
Let’s start with cancer, as it’s typically linked to asbestos, or chemicals, or usually some other form of carelessness on the part of manufacturers everywhere. Just because I like a challenge, I’ll play nice and say…well, what if only one case in every 100 was ACTUALLY caused directly by a product…that’s scaling things way down from practical values. Well, turns out it’s not enough, because that’s still 5,628 deaths (as there were 562,000 cancer related deaths in the U.S.) in 2009, according to the CDC. So already, just looking at cancer rates and nothing else, America, by the same logic as Pearl Harbor and 9/11 should be looking around, angrily trying to beat down a population for these deaths, right? Nope.
What about heart disease? Every year, about half a million Americans keel over from heart disease alone. If only 1 out of every 100 of those cases was caused by excessive fats in junk-food, then that’s still more than 5000 people dying every year from fast-food companies.
The tobacco industry caused 221,000 cases of cancer in 2011 so far. There’s no 1 out of 100 here, that’s the actual raw value…221,000 people affected by these products. While that number is incredible, it’s important to understand that people buying tobacco products are making a choice (same goes for fast food). So what about people not actively choosing products?
According to this article, in 2002, the number of people dying from air-pollution in the United States exceeded the number of people who died in traffic accidents. From smog, and other fine-particles in the air, an estimated 70,000 people are killed in the U.S. every year due to poor quality of the air. Taking that number and keeping it the same since 9/11/2001…that accounts for over 700,000 people, or ¾ of a million deaths, just from the air-pollution in the country.
My ultimate point is this: if this was Germany, or China, or Australia, or some other country that was causing American deaths at this rate, we’d have leapt into a full-fledged war with that country a long time ago. Why then, as a people, are we so complacent about being treated just as badly by companies? We’re showing a hypocritical two-sided nature that basically states this:
If you are a foreign entity hell-bent on taking down America, it’s easier to kill its population by poisoning their water, destroying their air, and taking away every one of their rights via corporate lobbying from within than it is to attempt a frontal-assault.
From what I can tell…they’re winning.
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