Pete Buttigieg is a failure at the U.S. Department of Transportation - UPDATE: He's improved!!

[Professor Emeritus]

fukk out of here. This shyt is jammed up because republicans are playing politics.

I'm referring to the people actually involved, who in that excerpt gave three different ways that the EPA has let them down.

Honest question - before I highlighted the EPA, was this an important issue for you that you've researched intensively and determined for a fact that their complaints are incorrect? Di you know more about the house-to-house response than the people involved? Or are you just reflexively defensive of the current government?

If this is in response to the other breh’s comments on the EPA….even if the initial incident is due to poor governance and deregulation by republicans…..we’re 6 months into this, the response is garbage. Just like the response was/is garbage with Flint.

It’s like you’re absolving a doctor of not doing or poorly doing his job in fixing your stab wounds, because he aint the one that stabbed you in the first place. (Even tho he might’ve helped stabbed you in this context)

And it goes back much further than Flint.

I first got exposed to just how bad the EPA is from the Dupont case. Dupont was openly discharging extremely toxic chemicals straight into a man's farm. The details sound like a horror movie:

‘‘I’ve taken two dead deer and two dead cattle off this ripple,’’ Tennant says in voice-over. ‘‘The blood run out of their noses and out their mouths. ... They’re trying to cover this stuff up. But it’s not going to be covered up, because I’m going to bring it out in the open for people to see.’’

The video shows a large pipe running into the creek, discharging green water with bubbles on the surface. ‘‘This is what they expect a man’s cows to drink on his own property,’’ Wilbur says. ‘‘It’s about high time that someone in the state department of something-or-another got off their cans.’’

At one point, the video cuts to a skinny red cow standing in hay. Patches of its hair are missing, and its back is humped — a result, Wilbur speculates, of a kidney malfunction. Another blast of static is followed by a close-up of a dead black calf lying in the snow, its eye a brilliant, chemical blue. ‘‘One hundred fifty-three of these animals I’ve lost on this farm,’’ Wilbur says later in the video. ‘‘Every veterinarian that I’ve called in Parkersburg, they will not return my phone calls or they don’t want to get involved. Since they don’t want to get involved, I’ll have to dissect this thing myself. ... I’m going to start at this head.’’

The video cuts to a calf’s bisected head. Close-ups follow of the calf’s blackened teeth (‘‘They say that’s due to high concentrations of fluoride in the water that they drink’’), its liver, heart, stomachs, kidneys and gall bladder. Each organ is sliced open, and Wilbur points out unusual discolorations — some dark, some green — and textures. ‘‘I don’t even like the looks of them,’’ he says. ‘‘It don’t look like anything I’ve been into before.’’

Bilott watched the video and looked at photographs for several hours. He saw cows with stringy tails, malformed hooves, giant lesions protruding from their hides and red, receded eyes; cows suffering constant diarrhea, slobbering white slime the consistency of toothpaste, staggering bowlegged like drunks. Tennant always zoomed in on his cows’ eyes. ‘‘This cow’s done a lot of suffering,’’ he would say, as a blinking eye filled the screen.

‘‘This is bad,’’ Bilott said to himself. ‘‘There’s something really bad going on here.’’

Yet when the EPA was forced to get involved, all they did was help Dupont with the cover-up in the most comical, embarrassing fashion.

Bilott filed a federal suit against DuPont in the summer of 1999 in the Southern District of West Virginia. In response, DuPont’s in-house lawyer, Bernard Reilly, informed him that DuPont and the E.P.A. would commission a study of the property, conducted by three veterinarians chosen by DuPont and three chosen by the E.P.A. Their report did not find DuPont responsible for the cattle’s health problems. The culprit, instead, was poor husbandry: ‘‘poor nutrition, inadequate veterinary care and lack of fly control.’’ In other words, the Tennants didn’t know how to raise cattle; if the cows were dying, it was their own fault.

That's 1999, the Clinton EPA. How the fukk were they that ambivalent in response to such an obvious crisis? In the end, it turned out that PFOAs hasn't just been killing cattle, they'd been responsible for killing tens of thousands of people and sickening millions more.

The EPA (under Bush, ironically), finally responded after a massive pressure campaign from the lawyer in question. They were fined $16.5 million, or approximately 2% of one year of PFOA profits. No executive at Dupont faced criminal charges, despite them having known for decades that the substance was destructive to human health.

Why are certain people so blind to this constant history of pro-corporate bullshyt?

 

[WTFisWallace?]

The details sound like a horror movie:

I watched Dark Waters a couple of years ago…it’s about EPA/DuPont. Was the first time I heard of DuPont. Going into the movie, didn’t even realize it was based on a true story, legit thought it was a horror flick.

Somewhat related, Young Guru was speaking on how people/the public always speaks in terms of ‘they’, ‘the powers that be’, ‘the Illuminati’ when speaking of those who fukk them over, or are fukking up the environment…like it’s some boogeyman. He’s like no, we know their names…it’s the DuPonts, Murdoch’s, etc and we know who does their bidding.

Putting a name & face to it dampens the inevitability/boogey man factor.


Reading the details after watching the movie in how the government not only carried DuPont, but enabled them is infuriating. The people pushing the levers need to start facing physical consequences, cause clearly fines and such don’t phase them.

 

[mastermind]

I only posted in this thread because train derailments are a major problem, but it wasn’t really to blame Buttigieg but to point out that these people are still living with this even though the attention ain’t there. This has been a failure of the current administration, but also past administrations and continues to be so.

 

[mastermind]

Somewhat related, Young Guru was speaking on how people/the public always speaks in terms of ‘they’, ‘the powers that be’, ‘the Illuminati’ when speaking of those who fukk them over, or are fukking up the environment…like it’s some boogeyman. He’s like no, we know their names…it’s the DuPonts, Murdoch’s, etc and we know who does their bidding.

As I’ve gotten older, I have told people to stop chasing wild and imaginative conspiracies. The people in power and with names are doing things much worse than you could ever imagine and aren’t hiding it.

Calling it out and putting faces and names to it also lessens the fear we have of going against power.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Now, does the EPA's energy to prosecute criminal cases look different when they're helping a corporation, rather than going after them?

Did the EPA Prosecute and Jail a Mississippi Lab Owner Because of Her Activism?

Tennie White's work as an activist forced big corporations to clean up the messes they made in African-American communities. So the EPA put her in jail.

theintercept.com

ON A MUGGY Thursday morning in June, I drove through the gates of the Federal Correctional Institute in Tallahassee to meet a convicted criminal who, as far as I can tell, is the only person connected to two huge environmental contamination cases in Mississippi to ever serve prison time.

Yet, strangely, the convicted felon I was on my way to meet wasn’t a polluter. On the contrary, Tennie White, who was prosecuted by a joint team made up of attorneys from the Environmental Protection Agency and the environmental crimes division of the Justice Department, had spent her professional life exposing contamination. She was an environmental lab owner who was particularly vocal about protecting poor African-American communities. Before she was charged and prosecuted, White had spent much of her time volunteering for an organization she had co-founded to help these Mississippians contend with pollution.

Indeed, the crime White had been convicted of didn’t seem to have any environmental consequences at all.

Tennie White is a Black environmental activist who has been fighting the EPA to protect Black communities for decades. Tennie White did not find the EPA to be a helpful partner in this battle.

From reading through the state’s files, White knew that Mississippi had handled other cases of creosote contamination differently. For instance, in Wiggins, Mississippi, a town that was about two-thirds white, both the EPA and the state environmental agency had designated a similar situation an emergency and remediated the contamination in less than a year. The neighborhoods affected by creosote contamination in Hattiesburg and Columbus, by contrast, were mostly black, and the problems there had gone unaddressed for many years.

When the MDEQ failed to respond to her requests to test for creosote in Columbus, she went above their heads, contacting the federal authorities directly. In October 2009, she made an official complaint charging that the MDEQ and the EPA were guilty of environmental injustice. After investigating her complaint, the EPA’s office of the inspector general responded that the agency hadn’t found any evidence it had done anything wrong. In a letter, White replied “that OIG couldn’t find mud after a raging flood.”

She also wrote to the attorney general of Mississippi and suggested that the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality had failed to test the samples in Columbus because the affected locals were mostly poor and black. She sent copies of the letter to the FBI, the EPA, and the Justice Department.

Two months later, she wrote to Lisa Jackson, then the head of the EPA, suggesting that “the residents of Columbus appear to be participating in a Tuskegee Controlled Experiment to determine the health effects of Dioxins, Phthalate Esters and PAHs on African-Americans.” She posted pieces online accusing both the EPA and the MDEQ of environmental racism.

Incredibly, no one at the company that caused the pollution ever went to jail. No one at the EPA which slow-footed its response ever went to jail.

Instead, Tennie White had federal agents show up at her door within weeks of sending those letters. And they also knocked on a lot of other doors.

The EPA special agents who came to ask him about White in 2009 or 2010 did seem eager to dig up anything negative about White. The agents told him that White had implicated him in the fraud case and he responded that he didn’t believe them. The agents, Wilson said, then “changed tactics and just questioned me about the time I had worked with her.”

Wilson said that sometime in 2013, Special Agent Anderson flew from Florida to see him again and described their visit this way: “He asked a lot of questions that were more of a personal nature than professional and seemed to want personal information on Ms. White. When it got to the point that he asked if we ever had a sexual relationship, I invited him to leave my office and not to contact me again.”

“At that point they were grasping at straws. They were trying to decimate her personal life or character assassination,” said Wilson. “It became a quest to decimate this lady not only professionally but personally as well.” The agents also dug up White’s financial information, including the fact that she had defaulted on a bank loan she took out to pay for her lab, which the prosecution later presented in court.

I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the EPA for all communications relating to the investigation of Tennie White in April 2016. The agency is supposed to resolve such requests within 20 business days, but I did not receive all the documents I requested. After months of being sent from one division of the EPA to another, I reached Tom Seaton, a deputy director in the legal counsel division of the office of criminal enforcement, who admitted that my request had been “totally mishandled” and that I had “a right to be unhappy.” Seaton said he would try to send me the special agents’ emails that referred to the White case, but he never did.

Tennie White was charged with a completely unrelated crime - the failure to adequately perform three $150 water quality tests for her EQ side business. She cut corners to save money, but zero actual pollution was involved. And it was difficult to see why the EPA would have any jurisdiction at all.

White’s two court-appointed attorneys argued that there was no evidence BorgWarner’s output to the creek ever caused any harm — a contention that the government prosecutors never disputed. They pointed out that because the wastewater went into a creek that wasn’t a federal waterway, the whole matter was outside the EPA’s jurisdiction and that there was no contract between BorgWarner and Tennie. The defense attorneys also argued that, because Tennie was supposed to give the test results to a private company and not the EPA, their dispute wasn’t a federal matter. (The EPA itself had used this argument when responding to White’s complaint about their failure to look into the testing done in Columbus by Lois George; because George’s data hadn’t been submitted to the EPA, the agency claimed, it was outside its jurisdiction.)

Wilson described seeing rows of prosecutors. On one side, were “the DOJ lawyers from Washington. And then you had the EPA guys lined up next to them. They were an impressive sight. Then on the other side you have one court-appointed lawyer next to this poor little black woman,” Wilson said, adding. “She’d kill me if she heard me say that. To me, it looked like they just took a sledgehammer to a flea.”

“I’m amazed at the lawyers they sent from the Justice Department out of Washington, D.C., and all the trouble they went to to prosecute a small-time little black businesswoman in Jackson, Mississippi,” said Wilson. “You don’t bring that much firepower if you’re going to be stepping on ants. Somebody wanted Tennie put away.”

For failing to perform three $150 tests and lying about it, Tennie White was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison and three additional years of supervised release. A sentence virtually never touched by even the worst polluters the EPA prosecutes - most don't do a single day in jail at all.

Tennie White's persecution by the EPA started in mid-2009. The Obama EPA. Charges were filled against her in 2012, conviction and sentencing was 2013, the EPA's stonewalling of that journalist's investigation was 2016.

ALL of those were the Obama EPA. Putting a nearly 60yo Black woman in prison just because of her environmental activism, while the actual polluters stay free.



It's obvious to me that certain posters don't want to talk about the pro-corporate bias in government agencies, one that occurs even when Blue Team is in power. It's obvious they don't want to talk about how how two parties have done more to collaborate rather than fight when it comes to the major ways that corporations are destroying this county.

Looking forward to the inevitable "didn't read" or "doesn't matter" response.

 

[KFBF]

Now, does the EPA's energy to prosecute criminal cases look different when they're helping a corporation, rather than going after them?

Did the EPA Prosecute and Jail a Mississippi Lab Owner Because of Her Activism?

Tennie White's work as an activist forced big corporations to clean up the messes they made in African-American communities. So the EPA put her in jail.

theintercept.com

Tennie White is a Black environmental activist who has been fighting the EPA to protect Black communities for decades. Tennie White did not find the EPA to be a helpful partner in this battle.






Incredibly, no one at the company that caused the pollution ever went to jail. No one at the EPA which slow-footed its response ever went to jail.

Instead, Tennie White had federal agents show up at her door within weeks of sending those letters. And they also knocked on a lot of other doors.






Tennie White was charged with a completely unrelated crime - the failure to adequately perform three $150 water quality tests for her EQ side business. She cut corners to save money, but zero actual pollution was involved. And it was difficult to see why the EPA would have any jurisdiction at all.






For failing to perform three $150 tests and lying about it, Tennie White was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison and three additional years of supervised release. A sentence virtually never touched by even the worst polluters the EPA prosecutes - most don't do a single day in jail at all.

Tennie White's persecution by the EPA started in mid-2009. The Obama EPA. Charges were filled against her in 2012, conviction and sentencing was 2013, the EPA's stonewalling of that journalist's investigation was 2016.

ALL of those were the Obama EPA. Putting a nearly 60yo Black woman in prison just because of her environmental activism, while the actual polluters stay free.



It's obvious to me that certain posters don't want to talk about the pro-corporate bias in government agencies, one that occurs even when Blue Team is in power. It's obvious they don't want to talk about how how two parties have done more to collaborate rather than fight when it comes to the major ways that corporations are destroying this county.

Looking forward to the inevitable "didn't read" or "doesn't matter" response.

What they've done to White and Donzinger is unconscionable.

 

[Godless Socialist CEO]

fukk out of here. This shyt is jammed up because republicans are playing politics.

GOP discord threatens Senate response to railway disaster

Sen. J.D. Vance insists the support is there. His colleagues say the bill needs significant changes before it could get enough GOP backing.

www.politico.com

Elections have consequences.

To be fair, it's been exposed in the recent court proceedings that illegal Gerrymandering is the ONLY reason the GOP has the house right now. The American people didn't vote for this

 

[mastermind]

What they've done to White and Donzinger is unconscionable.

out in the open evil

 

[Professor Emeritus]

What they've done to White and Donzinger is unconscionable.

Don't forget Eric Lundgren. Man devoted his life to electronics recycling and got 15 months in federal prison for helping people access free restore disks easier. Once again, prosecuted by the Obama Administration.

The difference in energy when the government is prosecuting the opponents of corporations is wild.

 

[mastermind]

The difference in energy when the government is prosecuting the opponents of corporations is wild.

this country works to only serve the capital class.

 

[Godless Socialist CEO]

this country works to only serve the capital class.

It's always been that way too

 

[mastermind]

It's always been that way too

Indeed

The build up and fallout to the East Palestine derailment shows that.

The issue today is American people had about 50-60 years of wrestling back some power from the wealth. Over the last 40, it’s not just gone in reverse to the robber baron/gilded era period, but wealthy people are now seeking fame and glory too and doing even less for society. At least the robber barons would pay for public parks and the like, what is Marc Zuckerberg doing?

And they are literally poisoning air and water and our government fights those that expose it.

 

[Godless Socialist CEO]

Indeed

The build up and fallout to the East Palestine derailment shows that.

The issue today is American people had about 50-60 years of wrestling back some power from the wealth. Over the last 40, it’s not just gone in reverse to the robber baron/gilded era period, but wealthy people are now seeking fame and glory too and doing even less for society. At least the robber barons would pay for public parks and the like, what is Marc Zuckerberg doing?

And they are literally poisoning air and water and our government fights those that expose it.

Bro they tried to throw people into the woodchipper to keep capitalism going through COVID. Anyone who is still confused about who the government serves after COVID is just flat out fukking stupid

 

[Pressure]

If this is in response to the other breh’s comments on the EPA….even if the initial incident is due to poor governance and deregulation by republicans…..we’re 6 months into this, the response is garbage. Just like the response was/is garbage with Flint.


It’s like you’re absolving a doctor of not doing or poorly doing his job in fixing your stab wounds, because he aint the one that stabbed you in the first place. (Even tho he might’ve helped stabbed you in this context)

No, this is the typical bullshyt y’all do. Y’all quote someone saying they need help and the ignore the help they’re asking for to jump on your soapbox.

Crazy how y’all went from “ we need help” and “now isn’t the time to be political” and then immediately make a b line to being political.

Y’all don’t actually care about those people. And I wish y’all would stop pretending. Y’all are looking for a radical restructuring of public transportation and you think this is a potential catalyst.

Nothing you or the other want to be smart guy has said anything about , looks at topic, why the response that the people are looking for is on Pete.

 

[Pressure]

BTo be fair, it's been exposed in the recent court proceedings that illegal Gerrymandering is the ONLY reason the GOP has the house right now. The American people didn't vote for this

The people in east Palestine Ohio certainly voted for those people.