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| Air pollution in America, 1973. US National Archives and Records Administration. Courtesy: Wikipedia. |
We live in unchartered territory. With global temperatures rising, July has been uniformly hot. Yesterday, 10 July 2018, the temperature was around 100 degrees Fahrenheit – in Claremont, California.
I started the day at seven in the morning: walking my dog, biking, and swimming. By then it was nine o’ clock. I felt good and had a great breakfast of organic cereals and fruit.
Bad poison habits out in the open
Yet, walking and biking also revealed the insidious hold of chemicals on the mind of Americans. About a hundred meters from where I live, a large house, just sold for more than a million dollars, was pumped full of poisons for the extermination of termites. A colorful thick plastic covered the entire house, giving the illusion to the neighbors things are under control and the poisons in the house are “safe.”
In addition to this dramatic evidence of a breakdown in public safety, I saw a homeowner and a company man spraying roundup herbicide in the gardens of two homes.
In the case of the homeowner spraying roundup, I talked to him. I said to him it was an error to use this toxic material that causes cancer. He thanked me for my “information.”
I have done this repeatedly – for years. Whenever I see a man with a small sprayer slowly and carefully targeting the poison on innocent grasses (weeds), I stop and politely direct his attention on the dangerous nature of the sprayed chemical. I don’t know the effects of my meager action. Yet I know the deadly practice continues, even flourishes behind the ignorance and smiles of the users.
TV propaganda
I thought about this fact nearly all my life. Lots of ancient philosophers spoke about education. Socrates kept nagging the Athenians about becoming virtuous. He infuriated them and they put him to death.
So, why has man great difficulties in becoming virtuous? In this case, learning that spraying poisons is bad for him and everybody else, including the creatures of the natural world.
Is it because in America the average citizen has been literally bombarded with advertisements washing clean the poison of pesticides and pest control, making the poison as innocent as salt or sugar? The same thing tobacco company money did with cigarettes. Which is to say this little neighborhood sprayer inoculates its owner against the chemicals in what he eats and, naturally, the vast amounts of chemicals all around him, what he considers the “environment.”
President Trump
At the same time, this person, utterly at home with TV-made harmless chemicals, has a president, Donald Trump, who has confirmed and legitimized his illiteracy and ignorance of chemicals and science.
Trump came out of business and personal inherited wealth. He has been making money from gulf courses and apartment towers. He promised the electorate to drain the Washington Swamp and revive prosperity by bringing manufacturing jobs back to America. However, he has fulfilled none of these worthwhile goals.
Instead, he went to bed with the corrupt Congressional Republicans and, together, passed a law that gives the very rich Americans and corporations the fantastic sum of a trillion-and-a-half dollars. This extravagance did not treacle down to many impoverished Americans who voted for Trump. Yet, thanks to the media that are making a kill from selling the weirdness and unpredictability of Trump, president Trump has become as much an addictionto Americans as drugs.
Equally toxic, Trump has become the deregulator-in-chief. With utter contempt for public health and the health of the natural world, he did away with a few legal provisions safeguarding water quality and the environment. It’s fine now for coal companies to dump their toxic wastes over creeks. It’s easier to wipe out wetlands. Furthermore, like a dinosaur, he sided entirely with the petroleum companies declaring there’s no global warming.
To realize these illegal and unethical policies, Trump shrewdly chose Scott Pruitt from Oklahoma to head the US Environmental Protection Agency.
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| Logo of the US EPA on the door of the Washington, DC, headquarters of the agency. March 16, 2017, the day Trump proposed cutting the EPA budget by 31 percent, the most effective way of silencing the agency. Photo: Courtesy Getty Images. |
Pruitt, like Trump, graduated from the school of propaganda and deception. For the sake of personal loyalty to the president and political ambition, he changed the government’s rules in favor of the crude antienvironmental agenda of Trump, especially weakening climate mitigating policies. In fact, he convinced Trump to pull America out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. With zealous deregulations put into government books by Pruitt, EPA and the industry nearly became indistinguishable.
However, during that violent process of working against human and environmental health, Pruitt stepped on so many toes and committed so many ethical lapses that he doomed himself. Trump fired him 5 July 2018.
Pruitt adorns himself and Trump with an imperial god
Pruitt left his office without anger. On the contrary, he wrote a letter to Trump like Trump was Jesus, thanking him profusely for the great honor of serving him as if that was the fulfillment of a divine commandment.
“I believe,” said Pruitt to Trump, “you are serving as President today because of God’s providence. I believe that same providence brought me into your service.”
This is outrageous language by a senior official – in a Republic. It is also extraordinary not because it has anything to do with truth but because it is a talk one would hear in empires and, especially, religious empires. So, Pruitt looked on Trump as the American emperor blessed by a god, probably Jesus.
Combining the denigration of public and environmental health with the blessings of Christianity is a first in America. Industrialists did not mince words about ecology or public health. They cared less for anything that prevented them from exploitation and profit. But, until Trump, Christianity did not advance the cause of polluters - at least openly. Now it does – with Trump.
The religious outburst of Pruitt is another way of seeing the war the ruling elite is fighting for enrichment. No morality here, just profit.
Andrew Wheeler – a silent Scott Pruitt
The removal of Pruitt does not signal change with Trump. On the contrary, Pruitt’s temporary successor, Andrew Wheeler, EPA acting administrator, may be more dangerous than Pruitt. He is a “consummate Washington insider.” He served Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma who has been a proud lobbyist for the petroleum industry and an enemy of the science of global warming.
Wheeler learned from Inhofe to hate the idea of climate change. He also honed his deregulatory passion at America’s largest coal company, Murray Energy Corporation. This kind of intimate knowledge of how Washington works is invaluable. With little doubt, Wheeler will advance Trump’s agenda considerably.
Stop the Republicans and Trump is controlling pollution
The tragedy is that Americans elected so many Republicans – and Trump. The oligarchy of money and power used the media to dumb down Americans, the better selling them one of the oligarchs, Trump.
Trashing the environment benefits primarily the ruling class. Business as usual triggers Trump’s agenda of extracting money-making resources.
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