Three former Environmental Protection Agency leaders sounded an alarm on Friday, saying rollbacks proposed by the EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, endanger the lives of millions of Americans and abandon the agency’s dual mission to protect the environment and human health.
Zeldin said on Wednesday he planned to roll back 31 key environmental rules on everything from clean air to clean water and climate change. The former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy called Zeldin’s announcement “the most disastrous day in EPA history.”
“What this administration is doing is endangering all of our lives – ours, our children, our grandchildren,” added Christine Todd Whitman, who led the EPA under George W Bush.
This techno-feudal war lord stuff going on at the EPA sounds more like a prequel to the Road Warrior franchise than anything else. Grump wants to be King of Gastown!
And, recall, the Associated Press is the long-standing news organization that is now banned from White House press conferences because they won't call the Gulf of Mexico what Grump is calling it now. So now the AP is part of the resistance. Bet me the Grump admin is strictly ordered to use Pocahontas when referring to Senator Warren. Like the first 2016-2020 edition, Grump is already inexplicably recruiting hard for the opposition and resistance.
I still maintain that at least half of all this, Grump winning the election, stems from Big Biz resistance to government efforts to address climate change (and the other half due probably to Lina Khan's antitrust and minimum wage pressures and IRS reforms). Or to put it another way: these are the relevant economic factors for the 8 out of 10 billionaires that supported Grump.
The problem is not just that markets have failed to confront climate change, a problem largely of their own making. But they have actively sabotaged and obstructed efforts by governments to protect the environment. Read Private Empire by Steve Coll for one big case example. Big Biz knows the coming energy transition means reducing the burning of fossil fuels, and in general will mean more regulations and taxes and government planning to incentivize the coming energy transition. This threatens their profit margins. And they also know their argument that environmental reforms and regulations are bad for the economy, a Chamber of Commerce staple for going on a half century, is losing its persuasive steam as it becomes increasingly clear that GNP growth in the neoliberal free market fundamentalist period of the last half century, 1980 to 2025, is nearly half what it was during the New Deal liberal period, 1935 to 1980.
The tragic part is billionaires would rather support a fascist authoritarian state, a dictatorship, than accept any increased financial responsibility for climate change or face antitrust or living wage union pressures. They see government, other than securing and protecting private property, as extraneous to profit seeking efficiencies of building a business and making a fortune; something to be evaded or minimized with austerity measures (cut gov spending, higher interest rates). Big Biz is essentially hostile to any democratic claims (taxes, regulations, living wages) on their business interests. I'm not saying it has to be this way, there are really existing social democracies (EU, Canada, Japan). But this has been more or less the posture of the merchant classes, capitalists, classical liberals, free marketeers, ordoliberals, neoliberals, and corporate rule, i.e., hostility towards democratic claims on private wealth, since the Bourgeoisie Revolution in England in the 17th century.
And also bonus for the Christian Nationalist cause the billionaire that steps up is a Neo-Nazi and an extreme bigot asshole. Making all of this rhyme ominously with the way business interests in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s turned to fascist authoritarian state rule rather than compromise with labor unions and communists.
And this failure of capital, business elites, the Mellons, the Hoovers, Laissez-faire, to compromise with labor, yes, to appease labor, Keynes believed, I might add, led to police-state crackdown regimes like fascism in Italy and Germany.
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