What Republicans Are Really Saying

Republicans hate regulation so they will do anything and everything to dismantle regulations.  According to the Republican philosophy, we don’t need to regulation green house gases.  And Pat Toomey, the “Wall Street Warrior”, while serving on the House Banking Committee, helped write a resolution which lead to the repeal of parts of the Glass-Steagall Act that protected American’s financial investments.

Toomey’s first order of business as a freshman congressman: getting some good committee work. His Wall Street credentials—as well as the Republican majority—helped him score a seat on the House Banking Committee, where he sits on the Capital Markets, Securities and Government Sponsored Enterprises subcommittee as well as the Domestic and International Monetary Policy subcommittee. Toomey has already helped draft House Resolution 10, a proposal to roll back some of the Glass-Steagall legislation of the 1930s. Not surprisingly, Toomey is virulently opposed to unnecessary regulation. “The trend in deregulation, beginning in the early 1980s, is one of the biggest reasons for the sustained economic expansion,” he says. “I would like to see us continue to deregulate on many fronts, including the financial services industry.”

And what of the much-ballyhooed hedge fund regulation talk emanating from Washington lately? “It’s not clear to me that the problem with Long-Term Capital Management requires new regulation,” he says. “I think we need to continue to work on understanding what really happened there and what the magnitude of the threat to the infrastructure of our financial services industry was. Frankly, I think that the outcome was appropriate. The equity investors lost everything—and under the circumstances that had to happen—but the bailout essentially worked. I would be very leery about, and I will resist, any effort to impose inappropriate regulations as a knee-jerk reaction to what was a big problem but was essentially solved.”

Read more about Toomey and his Wall Street connections here.

The bottom line is this:  Republicans are against regulations (Banks, Oil/Gas Industries).  However, when deregulation creates problems (Bank Failures, Oil/Gas accidents, pollution), then Republicans want the taxpayers to bailout the banks and pay for the environmental clean up.

Pat Toomey is just another Republican that supports deregulation and he would have voted “Yea”, in favor of the bank bailouts.  After all, Toomey would not have wanted to place any hardships on his friends in the banking industry or on Wall Street.

Arlen Specter’s View on Drinking Water

Judge for yourself.

Pennsylvania – And There Is More To Come

Our State Government wants to allow more of this contamination.

I’m just getting started.

Just a slap on the wrist

(This is a re-post from last August.)

For decades, Monsanto had been polluting a creek in the town of Anniston, Alabama.

“On the west side of Anniston, the poor side of Anniston, the people ate dirt. They called it “Alabama clay” and cooked it for extra flavor. They also grew berries in their gardens, raised hogs in their back yards, caught bass in the murky streams where their children swam and played and were baptized. They didn’t know their dirt and yards and bass and kids — along with the acrid air they breathed — were all contaminated with chemicals. They didn’t know they lived in one of the most polluted patches of America.”

“Today, parts of Anniston are so contaminated that residents have been told not to grow vegetables in the soil, kick up dirt, eat food, chew gum or smoke cigarettes while working in their yards. ‘Our children have to play in the streets, on the sidewalks, because they can’t play in the grass because it’s contaminated,’ says resident David Baker. ‘We have to wear masks if we cut our grass. Where else in the United States of America are people doing that?'”

“In my judgment, there’s no question this is the most contaminated site in the U.S.,” says Dr. David Carpenter, a professor of environmental health at the State University of New York in Albany. [10].

(source Wikipedia)

Besides dumping PCBs into the streams, Monsanto has also dumped mercury and lead down the Company’s sewer drains which eventually made its way to the sewage treatment plant.

In 2002, a jury found Monsanto guilty of polluting for decades in the Anniston area. This opened up the opportunity for further lawsuits.

Monsanto was found negligent because back in 1966, Monsanto managers discovered that fish turned belly within 10 seconds, spurting blood from their mouths and shedding their skin as if they were dropped in boiling water. Instead of reporting this information, Monsanto decided to keep it secret and the residents of Anniston continued to fish and swim in this toxic soup which was once a pristine stream. Monsanto hid decades of pollution.

As posted in Mindfully.org, (if you have the time, read the entire article)

They also know that for nearly 40 years, while producing the now-banned industrial coolants known as PCBs at a local factory, Monsanto Co. routinely discharged toxic waste into a west Anniston creek and dumped millions of pounds of PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills. And thousands of pages of Monsanto documents — many emblazoned with warnings such as “CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy” — show that for decades, the corporate giant concealed what it did and what it knew.

Monsanto has been dumping PCBs for over 40 years and creating “super fund” sites and we, the taxpayers, are stuck with the clean-up bill.

How long have we known about the toxicity of PCBs?

In early 1967, a group of Swedish scientists demonstrated publicly that PCBs were a threat to the global environment. The Swedes identified traces of PCBs throughout the food chain: in fish, birds, pine needles, even their children’s hair. They proved that PCBs are persistent — which, as one lawyer drawled in court last spring, “is nothing but a fancy word for ‘won’t go away.’ ” But Monsanto’s primary response was to prepare for a media war.

Monsanto has no scruples and continues to provide products that are risky to our health.

Additional reading:

http://www.greenleft.org.au/1997/292/15855

Is The Lame Duck Losing His Feathers?

Duck Feathers

Looks like some of the rule changes that the boy Bush is trying to rush through before the adults move into the White House won’t be happening. According to an article in the Washington Post, the EPA is backing away from proposals to alter air pollution rules. Whew! As if the boy Bush doesn’t realize that the most basic need for animal and human life is oxygen and that the only way we take oxygen in is through our lungs and pollution destroys the body’s ability to get to that oxygen. Then again, the boy Bush lacks curiosity and doesn’t think beyond his own nose.

The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday abandoned its push to revise two air-pollution rules in ways that environmentalists had long opposed, abruptly dropping measures that the Bush administration had spent years preparing.

One proposal would have made it easier to build a coal-fired power plant, refinery or factory near a national park. The other would have altered the rules that govern when power plants must install antipollution devices. Environmentalists said it would result in fewer such cleanups.

At least the Environmental Protection Agency is cooperating with the Obama transition team something that Bush promised to do but hasn’t done, yet. Perhaps Bush could learn something from these EPA officials and that would be how to reach beyond his own interests and start caring about other people. Let’s hope that other agencies follow the EPA’s lead and pull more feathers from the lame duck, Bush.

Dear Hillary – about those 18 million cracks…

Now before anyone starts attacking me (and you know who you are) for writing in support of Hillary Clinton, be sure to read Politics is Politics first. I was disappointed in Hillary Clinton’s attacks during the primary season. Since then, Hillary and I have “kissed and made up”, so to speak. What I did learn about Hillary is that she is very good at standing up for her principles and Americans. I liked and respected Hillary Clinton before the primaries and I still like and respect Hillary Clinton. If you want to attack me, please be sure to include a link to this site when you do it. Publicity will help spread the truth about Sarah Palin and John McCain.

Now that that is out of the way, I want to address the real issues. Last week, John McCain was pressured by his Republican handlers to choose an ultra conservative, right wing female to be his running mate. McCain’s first choice was Joe Lieberman and he also seriously considered Tom Ridge. But John McCain, no longer the maverick, folded his hand, adjusted his “Party” hat, and gave into the right wing, neocon Republicans that control him. All you moderate Republicans can forget about “the maverick” because “the maverick” threw away his deck of cards and packed up his guns and he won’t be back. It’s all right wing, Evangelicals all the way until election day and then if he wins, it will be more of Bush and Cheney years.

This is shocking…

http://www.thinksalmon.com/

In honor of Earth Day which was on April 23, I decided to create a thread about an environmental issue that is having a negative impact on the food chain. It is plastics.

Plastics may be the cause behind the decline in the number of Salmon returning from the oceans to spawn.

According to the AFC News Source, plastic is in the plankton, the very bottom of the food chain. It is estimated that there is six times more plastic debris in parts of the North Pacific Ocean than zooplankton.

According to the nonprofit Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, California, tens of thousands of mammals and birds swallow the plastic. The plastic is dumped from countries worldwide, lost by ships or washed out to sea from urban areas. Furthermore, plastic becomes a “toxic sponge,” soaking up pollutants in the water. Charles Moore, founder of Algalita Marine Research Foundation, says the ultimate concern is that humans could wind up consuming the plastic – and its absorbed pollutants – as it makes its way up the food chain.

Since plastic is not biodegradable, it doesn’t disappear. It just gets smaller. One pound of plastic will turn into 100,000 small pieces of plastic if left in the ocean.

While oil spills get more attention as an environmental threat, Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer says plastic is a far more serious danger to the ocean’s health. Oil is harmful but eventually biodegrades, while plastic remains forever, he says. Half of beach debris worldwide is plastic and its impact on the food chain is undetermined, Ebbesmeyer says. Not much is known about the effect of plastic consumption on marine life like jellyfish and fish. Plastic doesn’t biodegrade, it just gets broken into smaller pieces resembling zooplankton. The plastic is eaten by jellyfish, which are then eaten by fish. In addition to substituting for actual nutrients, plastic also chemically attracts hydrocarbon pollutants found in the ocean like PCBs and DDT. Moore says pollutants accumulate in plastic up to one million times more than in ocean water.

Don’t think that plastic bag that was left on the beach is harmless. It washes into the ocean where the ocean “uses what she can get”. The ocean will grind it up and feed it to it’s critters. If the critters make it to our tables, then we, too, consume these toxins known to us as plastic.

The most frightening part is that unlike oil which eventually breaks down, plastic is forever.

Read the complete article here. Contact information is included in the article.