Truly, I can't wait. Especially in light of the way George W. Bush has disparaged science, screwed the public and worried mostly about helping big business. It all comes together in this post by Think Progress about Bush's Administrator for the EPA, Stephen Johnson: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson…
I was in a bad mood after I wrote a post summarizing a recent Harpers Magazine article demonstrating that the United States government is working hard to keep its citizens from knowing whether numerous commonly used chemicals are dangerous.
After all, our government is supposed to be there to protect us yet it appears that our government is, instead, kissing up to the chemical manufacturers, allowing them to dump highly questionable substances into the products American consumers purchase and use.
And now, I’m in a worse mood. I just finished reading an extraordinary article called “You Are What You Drink Out Of,” by Nadia Pflaum. This article appeared in a local alternative St. Louis newspaper called the Riverfront Times. Pflaum’s story is available online, and thank goodness, because this is extraordinary piece of writing and it serves as an illustration of just how corrupt the system has become. I’ll give just the basic outline here. You’ll want to go read the entire article, however, if you want to be prepared to pull out Exhibit A the next time you get into an argument with one of the many remaining Bush-loving purported free-marketers.
The story centers around Frederick vom Saal, a biology professor at the University of Missouri. He is one of the leading experts on bisphenol A, a chemical that is ubiquitous in the United States-more than six billion pounds are produced every year. The trouble is that bisphenol A contains a substance that acts as a synthetic hormone …
What? The White House is endangering us by withholding information?
This is getting to be a familiar story, right? Here’s the typical plot: There’s something going on that poses a serious risk to Americans, and the White House decides to protect big corporations rather than protect the people at risk.
This time, the protected industry consists of chemical manufacturers. The victims are American citizens, many of them recalcitrant admirers of the Bush Administration. Here’s an excerpt of the article by the Associated Press:
The Bush administration is undermining the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to determine health dangers of toxic chemicals by letting non-scientists have a bigger – often secret – role, congressional investigators say in a report obtained by The Associated Press.
The administration’s decision to give the Defense Department and other agencies an early role in the process adds to years of delay in acting on harmful chemicals and jeopardizes the program’s credibility, the Government Accountability Office concluded.
At issue is the EPA’s screening of chemicals used in everything from household products to rocket fuel to determine if they pose serious risk of cancer or other illnesses.
How many people are dying out there because they have been exposed to common chemicals of which most people don’t know of the dangers? How many of those people are children? Every time I hear of another person getting cancer (especially when I hear of a young child getting cancer), I wonder whether it’s because he or she has been exposed too …