November 23, 2002
The Demise of the Simple Fact
Hi David,I'm writing to you just to vent a little. I can't just sit back and not express my outrage at the latest Bush Mob action. Too many good writers and columnists are asking "Where's the outrage" and I want to let them know that it is alive and well and kicking up a storm right here with me. And that if I feel it then millions must also be feeling it.
It's as if all of us are like the "deer caught in the headlights" with this administration! Not a day goes by that the Bush Mob doesn't try to sneak one in while we're not watching. I'm just grateful that newspapers like the New York Times are catching at least some of these outrages. This morning on the front page is an article titled EPA SAYS IT WILL CHANGE RULES GOVERNING INDUSTRIAL POLLUTION - MOVE DENOUNCED BY OFFICIALS IN NORTHEAST STATES.
To paraphrase Christie Whitman, the EPA administrator, the Bush Mob's idea is to make it easier for industry to modernize to cleaner standards. Sounds good, even hopeful right? Except that the argument that industry will do more about cleaning up their manufactured pollutants if they're asked to do so sweetly and if they're left to decide on a voluntary basis just doesn't sell. It just doesn't! You'd have to be a moron -- a certified idiot -- to believe that, which may be why Bush does it.
States all over the country are passing laws which make smoking in public places illegal because there have been studies finding factual evidence that second-hand smoke causes cancer in non-smokers. Yet the Bush Mob is categorically saying that it's OK for factories and industries to belch every kind of proven carcinogen into the air, rivers, streams, oceans and dump their toxic waste into landfills.
This is stupidity of the most craven kind. This is the kind of stupidity that precipitates major ecological calamities and creates far reaching and irreversible damage. This is the modern version of the scorched earth practice only on a bigger and more murderous scale. This is as bad as Saddam torching the oil fields as he retreated from Kuwait in 1991, or the oil tanker disasters of the Exxon Valdes and now off the coast of Spain.
These ecological assaults are dramatic examples of the earth becoming more and more polluted at the hands of humanity. They show us graphically and in a condensed and immediate way what is already happening on a slower and grander scale all over the world.
It urgently behooves us all to understand this now and to do everything in our power to stop the Bush Mob from decimating and gutting our home.
If industry is given the opportunity to "modernize" without worrying about having to clean up their polluting practices, how does that help anything? As usual with this Bush Mob, their approach to all problems is to ignore facts because facts only confuse their simple-minded spoils practices.
Thanks for reading this, Judith Foster