Good Intentions and Abuse of Regulations

I see that Rudy Baum is back to his old program of supporting big government and excusing its abuses.

Rudy is the Editor in Chief of Chemical & Engineering News, the house organ of the American Chemical Society. Rudy uses C&E News as a forum to promote his Communistic/Socialistic ideology. He does this through his editorials and also presumably by applying pressure on his reporters, who write individual articles.

In the November 14 issue of C&E News, Rudy has an editorial, entitled "The Cost of Prevention". As is standard for Rudy, he usually uses a title intended to enlist sympathy of the readers, while the essence of the article is somewhat different. In this case, Rudy is defending the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

In the present editorial, Rudy starts his dissertation by expounding on the pleasures of his recent boat trip on the Chicago River. He says that at one time the Chicago River was the sewer of Chicago, but with the introduction of the Clean Water Act by Congress, and the appointment of the EPA for enforcement the river's environment changed. However in spite of Rudy's accolades, the EPA still calls it a sewer, unfit to swim in.

I doubt that many persons will dispute the value of the Clean Water Act, and likely most will support the action of the EPA in attempting cleanup of the Chicago River, but that is not the main point.

What we need to consider is the bad decisions and actions of the EPA, as well as the good. More importantly, we need to address the likely supposition that the EPA has changed its operational vision from improving the environment to becoming more of a political arm of the President in establishing a global redistribution of wealth, which leads to destruction of a previous strong US economy.

Related to this is my previous condemnation of US environmental organizations. My claim is that they have been taken over by Communists/Socialists, who also are major donors to the Obama reelection fund. This also fits in well with Obama's Communist/Socialist agenda and with Obama's control of EPA, as an arm of the same program.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently said there were no government regulations which had a negative effect on jobs. He seems to have neglected the fact that the federal government sharply restricted logging in a 2,000-acre radius around known spotted owl nests, required that at least 500 acres of the largest trees in that zone be left uncut, and prohibited logging within 70 acres of a nest. Before the restriction, annual production of lumber in the 1980s from the Sweet Home Ranger District in the Willamette National Forest was 86 million board feet of timber. By 1992, the height of the Northern Spotted Owl controversy, the district produced only 100,000 board feet. Men showed up for work at the mills and went home early--with pink slips. Timber dependent small family-owned businesses closed their doors. Men needing to support their families moved elsewhere to find family-wage jobs. The local timber industry no longer offered jobs to high school youth dropouts, nor provided work for those not versed in modern computer technology. Many former mill workers and loggers, when possible, retrained for other jobs. The other jobs all too often proved to be entry level, minimum wage jobs. Men could not support their families on such jobs. They lost their houses.

The Internet is full of such cases, but I'll mention only one more. That is the case of the snail darter, which is a small fish living in rivers. As an excuse for preserving the snail darter, the EPA was able to shut down a nuclear power plant, with the obvious loss of commercial power to support and enlarge our economy. This was consistent with the new environmental movement and Pres. Obama's agenda to redistribute global wealth.

The obvious problem, with the Clean Water Act and the use of the EPA to administer it, is the usual situation with government. Intentions are initially good and first actions are helpful, but then outside influences begin to change the program, in order to satisfy the avarice of individuals and political organizations, including other branches of government. There is an obvious answer to this. Congress needs to have some mechanism by which it continually follows operations resulting from previous Acts, and when necessary, make appropriate changes. It is now past time to do this with EPA, to remove its political action.