#deregulation

[my-midlife-crisis]

[dispatchesfromtheclasswar]

[saywhat-politics]

RFK, Jr., Once Poisoned by Mercury, Is Silent as EPA Weakens Rules against It

RFK, Jr. fought mercury pollution for years, but he is now in an administration that wants to make it easier for industries to dump it into the air and water

CLIMATEWIRE | The last time President Donald Trump tried to roll back a mercury regulation, he faced a high-profile opponent: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy railed against EPA at an August 2017 public hearing for going along with the Trump administration’s demands to repeal wastewater limits. He warned that allowing more power plant pollution to enter waterways would poison people through mercury-contaminated fish — a problem he experienced personally after a period of eating tuna.

"It is really troublesome for those of us who will suffer from your irresponsibility," Kennedy said at the time. "The law says the waterways of this country, the fisheries of this country, belong to the people."

Eight years later, Kennedy has been silent as the Trump administration is again rolling back those same mercury regulations, along with at least a dozen other pollution controls announced last week in what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has called the agency's "biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history."

[odinsblog]

An absolute tragedy happened to innocent people and young athletes, and this is how Trump meets the moment? JFC.

He is, in real time, working out a way to deflect attention away from his dangerous deregulation policies.

[whydidisavethistomyphone]

How it started:

How it’s going:

[onlytiktoks]

[corporationsarepeople]

Several groups representing “startup nations”—tech hubs exempt from the taxes and regulations that apply to the countries where they are located—are drafting Congressional legislation to create “freedom cities” in the US that would be similarly free from certain federal laws, WIRED has learned.

- - -

This is all kinds of fucked up. Secession didn’t work in the 1860s, so apparently our modern-day plantation owners are trying it again. “Freedom” to exploit.

[dosesofcommonsense]

Truth

It's what I liked about #Trump's first presidency of "for every regulation we must add, we'll remove at least 2 that we don't need" status. That freaked everyone out. Why? Deregulation of BIG government is a good thing.

[tomorrowusa]

Donald Trump has sent the federal government into a state of turmoil with his mass firings, flood of dubious executive orders, and appointments of alarmingly incompetent individuals. And when something goes wrong because of his own malfeasance, he resorts to flimsy scapegoating rather than accept responsibility.

A US Army helicopter collided with an airliner just a few days after a frequently drunk sex abuser picked by Trump became Defense Secretary.

At Daily Kos, Emily Singer writes about Pete Buttigieg's response to Trump's demented tirade about the crash.

Buttigieg then said Trump bears some of the blame for the crash, as he is in charge and has already taken actions to make the skies less safe. "President Trump now oversees the military and the [Federal Aviation Administration]," Buttigieg continued. "One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe. Time for the President to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again." At the time of the crash, there was no head of the FAA, as Trump's co-President Elon Musk had forced out the previous administrator because the FAA fined Musk's company SpaceX.

Yep, Elon Musk's billionaire ego may have contributed to the deaths of 67 people in this week's crash.

Trump also gutted an aviation safety committee days before the crash, getting rid of a three-decade-old safety committee that was created by Congress after the 1988 PanAm 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. Because the committee was created by an act of Congress, Trump couldn’t get rid of it, but he did fire all of its members, which will make the committee unable to do the work of looking into airline safety issues, the Associated Press reported. Kara Weipz, the president of Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, said a statement that Trump’s gutting of the safety commission, “will undermine aviation security in the United States and across the globe.”

Trump only cares about keeping oligarchs happy and himself out of prison. Public safety and health mean nothing to him.

Alexander Sammon at Slate writes...

t marks the first major crisis of the nascent Trump presidency, and one with particularly bad optics for the president. In his war with the administrative state and in his determination to gore federal spending, Trump had already fired the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard and gutted a key aviation safety advisory committee, all just 10 days before the crash. As the Daily Beast reported, Federal Aviation Administration head Michael Whitaker stepped down on Jan. 20, after Elon Musk, the spear tip of Trump’s “cost cutting” spree, demanded that he quit.

Firing public safety officials so Elon Musk can play James Bond villain is the mark of a malicious moron, not a leader.

Trump doesn't have a great history with airplanes. He once had an airline called Trump Shuttle. One serious accident can be found in news archives.

Trump Jet Crash-Lands; No Injuries

Trump Shuttle lasted only three years and never made a profit. It sits on the shelf of Trump business failures along with Trump Vitamins, Trump Steaks, and Trump University.

A broader matter is the existence of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA). It's directly on the other side of the Potomac River from Washington and suffers from congestion and understaffing. It probably shouldn't even be there but it's very convenient for politicians who prefer not to commute to the better equipped Dulles Airport.

USA Today says...

The airport is particularly popular among lawmakers because it's more convenient to their Capitol Hill offices than either Dulles International Airport (IAD) or Baltimore/Washington International Airport (BWI). [ ... ] "DCA is currently at capacity and at risk of being seriously overburdened should there be changes to the slot and perimeter rules," the Coalition to Protect America’s Regional Airports said in April. "Moreover, any changes to the slot and perimeter rules threaten to undermine the access of regional airports and their communities to the D.C. area, as well as increase delays, traffic, congestion, noise, and safety concerns." [ ... ] The airport's longest and main runway, Runway 1/19, is 6,869 feet long, which today is considered a relatively short runway for a major airport. Because the other two runways are much shorter, most airplanes use 1/19, making it the single-busiest runway in the country, according to airport officials. According to air traffic control data, Flight 5342 was on final approach for one of the shorter DCA runways, Runway 15/33. Due to safety and noise considerations, the FAA generally requires aircraft flying around the Washington, D.C., area to travel above the Potomac, which concentrates traffic in a narrow area. Aircraft are generally required to stay above or below certain altitudes in the area to reduce noise impacts on both residential and tourist areas, including the National Mall.

With fewer federal workers and reduced regulation which Trump and his filthy rich libertarian extremist broligarchs demand, expect more disasters.

[gnosticgnoob]

In 1776:

Thomas Jefferson was 33 years old (Primary author of the Declaration of Independence)

James Madison was 25 years old (Father of the Constitution, though more active post-1776)

Alexander Hamilton was 21 years old (Later key author of the Federalist Papers and first Secretary of the Treasury)

John Adams was 40 years old (Defended the Declaration, served on drafting committee)

Thomas Paine was 39 years old (Authored influential media at the start of the Revolution, inspiring colonial era patriots to declare independence)

------------------

Rosa Luxemburg was 35 when she wrote The Mass Strike

Che Guevara was 28 at the Granma Landing, and Fidel was 30

Bill Gates was 19 when he created Microsoft and 31 when it went Public

Martin Luther King Jr. was 26 when he led the Montgomery Bus Boycott and 39 when he was assassinated

Malcom X was 39 when he was assassinated

And you WILL show up to vote against fascism under new Democratic leadership. Or else go put on the red hat TODAY, cynical rightoid, and join the other bigots and misogynists and crooks, you are made of the same stuff deep down.

[utilitymonstermash]

Coogan casually mentions in his history of Visa video, that when Bank Americard first launched, banks couldn't do business across state lines. It seems like these rules were ended by the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994 signed by Bill Clinton.

Sometimes when discussing 20th century forms of American Elites vs 21st century forms, the notion seems to come up that 20th century elites seemed more anchored into local communities than their 21st century counter parts.

I wonder how much things like each state needing its own banking infrastructure contributed toward the cultivation of local elites. Alabama needed bankers. Alaska needed bankers. Arizona needed bankers. Arkansas needed bankers. And by bankers I don't just mean branch managers.

[saywhat-politics]

WASHINGTON (AP) — In what he called the “most consequential day of deregulation in American history,” the head of the Environmental Protection Agency announced a series of actions Wednesday to roll back landmark environmental regulations, including rules on pollution from coal-fired power plants, climate change and electric vehicles.

“We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age,’' EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in an essay in The Wall Street Journal.

In all, Zeldin said he is rolling back 31 environmental rules, including a scientific finding that has long been the central basis for U.S. action against climate change.

[odinsblog]

Agenda-setting theory suggests that the communications media, through their ability to identify and publicize issues, play a pivotal role in shaping the problems that attract attention from governments and international organizations, and direct public opinion towards specific issues. The theory suggests that the media can shape public opinion by determining what issues are given the most attention, and has been widely studied and applied to various forms of media. The way news stories and topics that impact public opinion are presented is influenced by the media. It is predicated on the idea that most individuals only have access to one source of information on most issues: the news media. Since they establish the agenda, they may affect how important some things are seen to be.

The agenda-setting by media is driven by the media's bias on things such as politics, economy and culture, etc. Audiences consider an issue to be more significant the more media attention it receives (issue saliency). For instance, even if readers don't have strong feelings about immigration, they will believe that it is a pressing problem at the time if there is consistent journalistic coverage of it over the period of a few months.

[thoughtlessarse]

The US could be plunged back into an era of toxic acid rain, an environmental problem thought to have been solved decades ago, due to the Donald Trump administration’s rollback of pollution protections, the scientist who discovered the existence of acid rain in North America has warned. A blitzkrieg launched by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on clean air and water regulations could revert the US to a time when cities were routinely shrouded in smog and even help usher back acid rain, according to Gene Likens, whose experiments helped identify acidic rainwater in the 1960s. While drastic improvements in America’s air quality have seemingly consigned acid rain to a problem belonging to a bygone era, Likens said if rules curbing toxic emissions from power plants, cars and trucks are aggressively scaled back, the specter of acid rain could again haunt the US. “I’m very worried that might happen, it’s certainly not impossible that it could happen,” Likens, 90, told the Guardian. Likens is still involved in a long-term monitoring project, stretching back to 1976, to sample rainwater for acidity but this program has just had its funding cut by the Trump administration. “I hope we don’t go back to the old days, so these rollbacks are very alarming,” Likens said. “I care about the health of my children and grandchildren, I want them to have clean air to breathe. I care about clean water and clean and healthy soil, I want them to have that too.” It was in 1963 when Likens, as a young scientist, sampled rainwater in the Hubbard Brook Experimental forest in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and found that it was 100 times more acidic than expected. “That was really an ‘a-ha!’ moment that led us to question what was happening,” he said. Years of subsequent study by Likens and other scientists ascertained that pollution wafting from coal-fired power plants in the American midwest was being transported by the wind, primarily to the eastern US and Canada. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides in the pollution reacted with water and oxygen to form sulfuric and nitric acids, combining with water to fall to the ground as acid rain. By 1980, the average rainfall in the US was 10 times more acidic than normal, with a devastating environmental impact. Lakes and streams became too acidic to support fish and amphibians, nutrients were stripped from soil and the rain damaged plants, trees and even buildings.

continue reading

[onlytiktoks]

[thashining]

Democrats are doing things, they just cant be the only ones.