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| Frankenstein monster. Frontispiece in the 1831 edition of Mary Shelley's 1816 novel, Frankenstein. Frontispiece by Theodore von Holst, 1810-1844. Courtesy Wikipedia. |
Future historians will have a say on the Donald Trump administration. Was it average or more hegemonic and plutocratic than its predecessors? Trump threatens adversaries with wars of “fire and fury.” He claims he is a billionaire. He hired billionaires for his cabinet.
The paradox of Trump
Future historians will probably question the foolishness of American democracy giving the president, all presidents, more power than any emperor ever had. This is as convincing an argument as one can make that the United States is an empire dressed in democratic clothes.
Democracy and empire don’t seem to bother Trump. He is the uncrowned emperor dreaming of a real crown. He is obsessed with expanding his popular base, doing things that, at least, give the impression to those of the lower classes who voted for him he is with them. Dismantling environmental regulations is such a glue. He can falsely claim dirty air and water create jobs and the people listening to such falsehoods will likely believe it.
Trump is a business man with no particular knowledge or interest in the environment. In fact, one wonders if he understands the meaning and importance of the natural world (environment).
He came to the presidency with the metaphysics of persons making money out of the exploitation of the natural world: loggers, commercial fishermen, giant agribusiness men, gold and silver miners, frackers for petroleum and natural gas, Exxon petroleum diggers. In other words, his models developed from the petrochemical industry and real estate business he inherited from his father.
So, it was inevitable, he would make himself a global spectacle of recklessness with his withdrawal of the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The man pretends global warming is a hoax.
Trump told Americans to burn petroleum, coal, and natural gas. There was no climate change; human activities cause higher temperatures is a nonsense, Trump said. Parallel to this outrageous lie, Trump issued several “executive orders” to neutralize environmental protection regulations and tie the hands of the US Environmental Agency in enforcing pollution laws.
All this is outrageous, inexcusable, and outright dangerous.
But is this shameful and frightening policy an innovation from Trump or does it fit a pattern in American politics? The majority Republicans in Congress welcomed Trump’s war on the environment. How is one to explain this stupidity from so many wealthy and educated politicians?
I worked for EPA for 25 years. My experience covers administrations from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush. My book, Poison Spring, tells it all in excruciating detail.
Smiling Jimmy Carter
The Democratic Jimmy Carter administration reaped the benefits of the environmental policies of the Republican Richard Nixon administration. Nixon, mired by the Vietnam War, was by far the best environmental president. He had the wisdom of creating EPA. He was also honest enough to acknowledge that Americans had to repair the damage they had inflicted on the natural world.
The acting of Ronald Reagan
The Republican Reagan administration reigned in the 1980s. It dismantled America’s fragile infrastructure of environmental protection. How Reagan officials did so much environmental damage so fast remains the model for all subsequent administrations, including the Trump administration.
The Reagan EPA in 1981 was barely ten years old. It tried to work in the minefield of the Reagan business men and women administering it. The result was chaos. EPA, obedient to the Reagan dictates of corporate interests, stumbled repeatedly. Like the Carter White House, the Reagan White House ordered EPA to let the chemical industry scotch free after a government inspector discovered, in 1976, a massive fraud in laboratory practices.
The gangster-industry complex
America’s largest chemical and pharmaceutical companies “tested” their products in a gigantic laboratory near Chicago. The remarkable feature of this lab was not its size or near monopoly powers in having tested about forty percent of all the chemicals in America, but its criminality. For a quarter of a century it faked its testing and made huge profits primarily because its clients, the chemical industry, secretly approved its fake testing business.
The lab, Industrial Bio-Test, consistently gave the companies a clean bill of health for their products. This meant those fake products received government approval for sale. The result of such national criminal conduct was that food, for example, was inoculated with farm poisons.
I don’t know what happened with the IBT drugs. But the IBT food had consequences haunting us to this day.
The gangster-like operation of IBT tied in a close brotherhood not a few of the titans of industrialized America. And once the crime became news in 1976, the government of Jimmy Carter joined the illegality by defending the indefensible: that chemicals approved by this gangster lab remain in the market. Both EPA and the Justice Department were well aware of the magnitude of the crime and its public health consequences. Most Americans would be eating food contaminated by poisons.
Second, refusing to pull the IBT tested poisons off the market gave the chemical industry ways of perpetuating the same violence for years to come. The pesticide companies must have told themselves they run the country. They got away with mass poisoning -- and had a secret license to continue with their medieval practices.
In other words, the government of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan refused to prosecute industry executives who, knowing of the fraud at IBT, kept sending their products to IBT for testing. The US EPA did not ban the chemicals with an IBT testing / license. It could not. The White House run the show. Not only that, but the White House ordered EPA to demolish its own ability to catch and punish lab and chemical industry crooks.
By the end of the Reagan administration in the late 1980s, there was very little if any science and, practically, no honesty left in the lab “testing” and “approval / registration” and use of pesticides.
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| Mixing pesticides before applying them to crops. Photographer unknown, Iowa, 1980s. |
Eating pesticides-drenched food is risky
Millions of Americans have been eating food tainted by hazardous toxins, especially farm sprays. These people, practically the entire population of America, have been metamorphosed into experimental animals. They, much more than lab rats, increasingly get sick or die from cancer and a multitude of neurological diseases. Conveniently enough, the ecologically illiterate medical establishment rarely makes the connection between the chronic exposure of Americans to deleterious farm sprays and disease and death.
EPA scientists are like the doctors of an emergency room. Certainly, they knew that the Reagan administration would not tolerate environmental and public health protection. They realized they had to be more than careful and circumspect with science. They had to be indifferent. Speaking the language of science was definitely risking their career. EPA scientists noticed senior officials often disregarded their reports.
The Reagan administration was leading the country to a dangerous territory. “Environmental protection” was becoming a lipstick: nice to talk and legislate, but keep it away from farming or other business.
The Delaney clause
The Democratic Clinton administration in the 1990s learned practically nothing from the abuses of the Reagan administration. It did not eliminate the corruption plaguing the chemical industry, its manufacture of totally unnecessary but extremely toxic pesticides threatening both the natural world and human health.
Despite the crimes of IBT, the Clinton administration allowed the chemical companies to go on “testing” their own products. Private laboratories, of course, continued with their IBT model. They “tested” or faked the testing of the toxic substances of the chemical industry.
The Clinton White House also allowed business as usual for agribusiness. Farmers cannibalized each other. Millions of rural Americans moved to the cities. Giant monopolies started harvesting their farms with armies of imported foreign workers. Large agribusiness companies took over rural America.
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| Indigenous Central American workers harvesting vegetables in the Coachella Valley, California. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos |
The Clinton administration, however, gave more funds to EPA and told us to do as good a job as we could. By we all knew, but kept it to ourselves, our beloved EPA had become a certified industry lapdog rather than a vigorous protector of public health and the environment.
Soon this reality broke through the bureaucratic walls of caution and silence. The irresponsible policies of the Clinton administration took flesh and bones in a minor and forgotten regulation no one had ever heard. The year was 1996. Congress then passed a law that abolished the Delaney Clause, the only provision that existed in the books, preventing carcinogens from entering processed food.
This protective law, the Delaney Clause, was protecting American food since 1958. It belonged to the Food Additives Amendment of 1958, which was part of the Food, Drugs, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. The Delaney Clause said any substance causing cancer to man or animals could not be used as “a food additive.”
The chemical lobbyists and their Clinton supporters were blurting they wanted equality – in the poisoning of our food. Yes, why should processed food be without carcinogens while fresh food was full of them? Imagine the logic. Instead of extending the protection of the Delaney Clause to fresh food, they wanted to bury it. They did.
I remember seeing bureaucrats from EPA, the Food and Drug Administration, the White House and Congress celebrating the removal from US law of the Delaney Clause. Just like in the blatant yet unpunished IBT crime, that exhibition of immorality had a profound effect on me.
I realized I was in the midst of dangerous people. If the poisoning of most of the population of the country did not bother them, what was left they could not do? I kept telling myself to be careful. I could see senior officials watching me. Whistle-blowing had to go underground.
The fireworks of George W. Bush
Things got even more hazardous with the coming to power of another Reagan-like president, George W. Bush. The twenty-first century was starting with a big bang, the bang of war from Bush. He chose violence to settle scores. He invaded Iraq in 2003, inflicting a devastating blow against Iraq and the Middle East. The American invasion of Iraq also triggered a series of Moslem civil wars that have been destroying Moslem countries and creating a global refugee tragedy.
At home, the Republican Bush administration welcomed the rebranding of the pesticide industry. Now pesticide merchants tried colonizing the language of ecology while remaining as ruthless as ever in their defense of their poisonous products. In 2001, they formed a group with the Orwellian name CropLife America.
Bush liked CropLife America. He directed EPA to leave pesticide companies alone. So, he handed the EPA to Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey. Whitman was a reliable Republican with a record of serving polluters.
With Whitman at the head of EPA, the state of American environmental protection dropped to levels I had not seen since the days of Reagan.
The Bush administration gave away millions of acres of public lands to oil and timber industries for drilling and logging. And just like under Trump in 2018, the Endangered Species Act under Bush in 2001-2008 almost became extinct. Thousands of snowmobiles invaded Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. Thousands of miles of streams and rivers in Appalachian mountains became dumping grounds for mining waste.
Not all EPA staff could stomach such revulsive policies. In early 2002, after twelve years of service, Eric Schaeffersent his letter of resignation to Whitman. He was the director of the EPA’s Office of Regulatory Enforcement. He quit because of the dirty politics being played between the White House, the Energy Department, and energy companies. “Congressmen have become de facto lobbyists for home state polluters,” Schaeffer said.
In addition, Schaeffer resented White House efforts to ignore global warming and to weaken the federal Clean Air Act. He complained to Whitman that nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide from coal power plants cause thousands of premature deaths, other debilitating maladies, and lasting damage to the environment.
The EPA could hardly be said to be “working in the public interest,” Schaeffer wrote.
Whitman ignored Schaffer’s letter. Global warming was beyond the pale. She was now busy implementing another insane proposal from Bush: shutting down EPA’s libraries, pillaging an extremely rich collection of scientific documents funded by EPA for several decades.
Without research libraries, EPA would be blind, incapable of knowing who did what when. These libraries were stocked with tens of thousands of scientific studies and government documents -- all relating to issues of public health and environmental protection.
EPA would also have to disband its laboratories. That way, corporations would be even freer to pollute.
Like the Clinton administration, the Democratic Obama administration, 2009-2016, learned nothing from its predecessors – with a slight exception: failed efforts banning chlorpyrifos.
This chemical is a neurotoxin that for more than half a century has been poisoning city and country. Under pressure from environmental organizations pointing out this toxin was affecting the brain and the nervous system of infants, the Obama administration proposed banning chlorpyrifos in 2015.
However, Obama acted too late. The Trump administration resurrected chlorpyrifos. So, what if a few more thousand children become mentally deficient, nay brain damaged, the Trump lobbyists said in the White House.
The deadly environmental Congressional consensus
The ground was set for another attack against the natural world and public health. The Democrats and Republicans in Congress, different sides of the same Wall Street capitalism, are often fighting each other on gender, race and class issues. They are in agreement, however, on minimal environmental protection.
Both Republican and Democrats in Congress favor the chemical and agribusiness industries. EPA and other government departments would have to live with such a consensus. Science and limited regulation are fine, as long as they don’t interfere with the profits of the industry. As for pesticides, Congressional politicians trusted the propaganda of CropLife America, saying they are safe.
It’s this obscene political environmental consensus that oiled the way to Trump. Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton provide the precedents of how to keep the country’s environmentalists impotent and polluting corporations happy. Obama, the almost do-nothing president, mirrors the willful apathy and ignorance of his predecessors.
None of this excuses Trump’s brainless and deleterious environmental policies.
America’s environmental black hole
The tragedy is that such contempt for the natural world and public health exists in a country that inherited Greek-Western civilization. That civilization filled the United States with hundreds of universities and libraries and hundreds of thousands of medical doctors and scientists. Science has been the signature of Western civilization.
But where has science been for several decades of chemical-pesticide warfare in the United States? What are universities and libraries and intellectuals and scientists and medical doctors doing? Do they have any ethical standards? Are they even sacrificing their children for corporate profit and pollution? Are they agents of civilization or soldiers of an empire of death?
They know or should have known that ceaseless dumping poisons (even in very small amounts) into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and food we eat is sheer madness and prescription for suicide. Is this what they want? Or are they under an illusion that daily tiny amounts of poisons are harmless? Have they talked to young mothers discovering farm sprays in their milk? Have they talked to young mothers with children with learning disabilities and autism?
Or do Americans expect an ecologist becoming president?
The failure of the EPA to be EPA mirrors just these anxieties. It’s not that EPA is bad. The problem of corruption is subtle. Blame the politicians in power. They are the lobbyists for the polluters.
Why should such a beautiful idea like that of the EPA turn sour so early? Only an oligarchy running an empire could be so callous about its own citizens -- and the world. Some experts say dismantle the empire.I add don’t forget to also dismantle the toxic institutions that paralyze EPA and threaten our health and the integrity of the natural world.
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