skews13
Diamond Member
- Mar 18, 2017
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In the years immediately leading up to the 1970 creation of the EPA, pollution in America had gotten so bad it was impossible to ignore and was quickly becoming a political issue.
Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring in 1962, a book about how DDT was killing birds worldwide, that electrified Americans and launched the nation’s first real environmental movement. The following year, smog killed 400 New Yorkers, and Lake Erie had largely died because it was so polluted.
n 1969, a spark from a passing train lit the Cuyahoga river on fire, and that same year a massive oil spill off the California coast covered over 400 square miles of beach and coastline with oil, killing thousands of birds and other wildlife.
Car exhaust, scientists reported in 1969, was so severe it was causing birth defects and cancer. Major American cities like St. Louis smelled, as TIME magazine reported at the time, “like an old-fashioned drugstore on fire.”
Richard Nixon, a canny politician who’d always had a pretty good take on the pulse of America, stepped up in 1969, creating the Environmental Quality Council. That was well received but didn’t make a dent in the problem, so Nixon did what was probably the only good deed for America of his presidency and helped create the EPA in 1970.
The wealthy oligarchs of American industry — particularly fossil fuel and chemical industry oligarchs — hated the EPA from the get-go.
Environmental regulations cut into their profits, and they felt persecuted after generations of their predecessor fatcats had poured their poisons into our air and water without a peep from the government. It was almost as infuriating as having to pay a 74% income tax on everything they earned after their first $3 million (in today’s dollars).
In response to public opinion, the sentiments of the morbidly rich back then went along the lines of, “So what if kids got cancer? We didn’t live in the neighborhoods of our refineries and manufacturing facilities: screw them! They should be happy we keep them employed and shut up about all this hippy-dippy environment stuff!”
www.rawstory.com
The pollution billionaires should all be rounded up, and made to live right on top of a superfund site, until they die premature deaths from their products.
Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring in 1962, a book about how DDT was killing birds worldwide, that electrified Americans and launched the nation’s first real environmental movement. The following year, smog killed 400 New Yorkers, and Lake Erie had largely died because it was so polluted.
n 1969, a spark from a passing train lit the Cuyahoga river on fire, and that same year a massive oil spill off the California coast covered over 400 square miles of beach and coastline with oil, killing thousands of birds and other wildlife.
Car exhaust, scientists reported in 1969, was so severe it was causing birth defects and cancer. Major American cities like St. Louis smelled, as TIME magazine reported at the time, “like an old-fashioned drugstore on fire.”
Richard Nixon, a canny politician who’d always had a pretty good take on the pulse of America, stepped up in 1969, creating the Environmental Quality Council. That was well received but didn’t make a dent in the problem, so Nixon did what was probably the only good deed for America of his presidency and helped create the EPA in 1970.
The wealthy oligarchs of American industry — particularly fossil fuel and chemical industry oligarchs — hated the EPA from the get-go.
Environmental regulations cut into their profits, and they felt persecuted after generations of their predecessor fatcats had poured their poisons into our air and water without a peep from the government. It was almost as infuriating as having to pay a 74% income tax on everything they earned after their first $3 million (in today’s dollars).
In response to public opinion, the sentiments of the morbidly rich back then went along the lines of, “So what if kids got cancer? We didn’t live in the neighborhoods of our refineries and manufacturing facilities: screw them! They should be happy we keep them employed and shut up about all this hippy-dippy environment stuff!”
The white GOP base has been so abused over the last 40 years they’ve become easy marks
While many trace the beginning of the modern rightwing fascist-friendly MAGA-type movement to the 1954 Brown v Board decision and the way it put the John Birch Society on steroids, another interesting origin story for today’s GOP base is grounded in the creation of the Environmental Protection...
www.rawstory.com
The pollution billionaires should all be rounded up, and made to live right on top of a superfund site, until they die premature deaths from their products.
