Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson Steps Down
After four years of service as administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson is stepping down. Thus far, she has provided no reason for her decision to leave.
Let me go out on a limb and suggest one: she’s tired of the 24/7 hassle from the right wing, which has fought every single effort she’s taken to mitigate the vast ecological destruction we’re wreaking on our earth and skies, and the consequent damage to our health.
According to this piece at the Huffington Post:
The GOP chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Fred Upton, said last year that Jackson would need her own parking spot at the Capitol because he planned to bring her in so frequently for questioning. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney called for her firing, a stance that had little downside during the GOP primary.
Of course, these reactions were tame in comparison to those of most of the other Republican presidential candidates, who were loudly calling for the dismantling of the entire agency.
I’m completely sympathetic with someone who wants to see her life return to some level of normalcy after four years of fighting. Want better fuel mileage standards? Better be prepared to deal with an auto industry that likes things the way there are. Trying to do something to control toxic coal ash after a massive spill in Tennessee? Well, it’s more than four years after the spill, and the regulation has yet to be finalized. Most obviously, suppose you share the concerns of 97+% of climate scientists who tell us that our consumption of fossil fuels is in the process of causing catastrophic climate change; you better be prepared for the battle of your lifetime.
Ms. Jackson: Good effort, and congratulations on the accomplishments you were able to achieve.
You’re kidding, right? I would expect it to have more to do with bi-partisan corruption in D.C., which is truly sickening, literally. Some big messes are coming up for the EPA, for example, contaminants in water that EPA policies make worse. Spokane is a glaring example, hard fought, where Too-Bigs were allowed to take contracts with worse outcomes than local Right-Sized contractors could have done. Some Canadian infrastructure companies are worse than some of ours, but we have got some Big Bads that need to be corrected, and it is not going to be pretty. Obama has put chemical-company retreads in charge of everything food. Excuse me? You cannot pin Michael Taylor exclusively on the R’s. His most recent go-around is all Obama.
As a wise friend of mine observed, we have now in modern life two conflicting philosophies.
These are, on the one hand, that an individual should act with responsibility only to one’s own self-interest, and perhaps only secondarily to the interests of one’s young children and one’s spouse – and, on the other hand, that we each should behave with a combined obligation toward the health and welfare of our own selves, our family, our nation, our species, and all the life and resources on earth – that life and those resources upon which we will always depend for mutual survival and prosperity.
It should therefore come as no surprise that the most predatory individuals among us should do their utmost to discredit a government of the people, and render it powerless for those purposes for which it is intended – and to do so most especially by convincing an ignorant swath of the populace of a demonstrated falsehood: that every government venture is inherently inefficient and harmful to freedom. A related central strategy of this vulturine segment of humanity has been to cast as thievery all forms of taxation – that statutory obligation to contribute a share of wealth toward investment for public benefit.
The influential GOP activist and strategist Grover Norquist famously said, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” In another famously revealing moment, Karl Rove said, “As people do better, they start voting like Republicans…unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.” Indeed, a great deal of harm to our government has been done as it has been transformed from a creditor to a debtor under successive administrations from Reagan through the Bushes, pausing briefly under Clinton and continuing in fiscal desperation and fawning compromise under Obama.
It is quite true that the GOP leaders are not alone in their servitude under the weight of greed in this country, they are, however, significantly more proud of that fact than are the Democratic leadership. With CU v FEC, the GOP Five in our Supreme Court have recently assured the growing power of King Cash in our society (a decision the GOP leadership quite openly applauded, until they perceived how unpopular it was even with their own base).
The birthright of one individual ends where another’s birthright begins. It is the deliberated determination of world bodies – and of educated, rational and compassionate people – that we each have the human birthright to unfettered access to healthy air, water, land, food, shelter, clothing, and medical care. To the extent that this birthright of unfettered access is infringed by the hoarding and gouging of rapacious individuals, it is reasonable and proper that We the People have the right and the duty to firmly limit that hoarding and gouging.
It is useful to observe, among the political parties, which most reliably aligns itself with those privileged quarters exercising resistance against the recognition and defense of these birthrights.
The triumph of avarice in the modern age has many important consequences for humankind, and for the delicate biosphere from which we emerged and on which we will always depend.
Examples are useful…
American labor unions are now feeble at less than 7% of the private sector and less than 12% across all employment in the US. Environmental concerns have been increasingly sidelined in politics, as the profit motive more and more exerts its most short-sighted influences.
Only about 14% of our electricity is from renewables, and growth is slow and sporadic from about 9% in 2002. This is as compared to about 30% in 1949 – while total renewable output has more than tripled since then, it is overshadowed by the far larger growth in total output for fossil burning.
Our manufacturing base has been decimated, and now resides mostly in China (a nation whose government has organized a highly robust renewables program along with its rapidly increasing demand for fossil energy).
The most widely successful times in this country were the nineteen-fifties and sixties, when the top tax rate was 90% and more, with heavily government-subsidized college educations (particularly important for the masses of veterans returning from WWII), and a tax rate of 20% for the lower income brackets. The 90% top rate was continued under Truman, the two terms of Eisenhower (one of history’s very best Republicans), and the tragically abbreviated term of Kennedy.
The top rate was then lowered to about 70% in the mid-sixties under Johnson, and slashed to 50% in the eighties under Reagan. The top rates were slashed again under G.W. Bush.
This Johnson to Bush era was the period when wages in America flattened (and they have never recovered), and when we lost huge swaths of our domestic manufacturing base – mostly to China. Elements in our already substantially pocketed government saw to it that this worker austerity and factory departure were widely facilitated, and not significantly opposed.
Were American manufacturers fleeing that massive Johnson to Bush reduction in their taxes? …Of course not. Our captains of industry chose to pay people in foreign lands far less money for their labor, and they worked them in unsafe conditions for long hours and no benefits.
Incidentally, an honest rich man (they do exist) recently pointed out that, while the average CEO in the US makes over 450 times the average worker’s pay, they don’t buy 450 times the goods and services of the average worker.
In contrast, there are nations that have pursued wiser courses and see quite favorable outcomes.
Despite the global economic downturn, Germany still enjoys one of the world’s strongest economies and one of the most generally prosperous and healthy populations.
The ratio of average CEO pay to average worker pay there has been about 12 to 1. Their labor unions hold 50% of the seats on the boards of the country’s largest corporations, and the Green Party wields substantial political and social influence. The nation is on track to achieve 100% of its electricity production through renewable resources, and they have meanwhile not merely preserved but developed their flourishing and vibrant domestic manufacturing base.
Our problem in America isn’t partisanship – that’s merely a vicious symptom of the underlying disease.
The challenge is, first and foremost, the power of legitimized bribery – from campaign contributions to lobbying to revolving doors. Add that Gordian Knot upon a secondary and related issue: our tightly consolidated corporate media playing our social divides like the strings of a Stradivarius. No important issue will be effectively addressed until these two are laid to rest in permanent fashion.
Strikes me that the technique of threatening filibuster has become a metaphor for other activities. One used to have to read the phone book while standing and now its simply the threat of filibuster. As regards confirmation and oversight, we can now simply threaten to make someone’s life a living hell, and that usually does the trick. Quite frankly, there is no GSA scale high enough to compensate for putting up with our politicians.
Why Children are so important for Fighting Couple, because they (Innovations) are so cute.