A Convenient Enemy

It's all very black and white: EPA bad, industrial America good. Economy vs. the environment. Capitalism vs. socialism. Or, maybe, in the mind of Joe Barton, the "legitimately wrong" vs. the illegitimately right.
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Republicans sure do love their wars, don't they? Seems like they just can't live without pointing the finger of blame at anyone but themselves for what ails us, whether it be compromised national security, a languishing economy or crumbling educational system. There's nothing like a convenient enemy to keep the messaging two-dimensional. Who needs complexity when you've got black and white to paint your simplistic political landscapes with?

Now that they've run out poor excuses (and money) to launch some extravagant foreign affair against the Bogeyman himself, as they did in Iraq, they've turned their attention to much less costly domestic campaigns of misdirected anger and misinformation. Now, the recently elected House Republican majority have formally announced their declaration of war on the Environmental Protection Agency.

Consider the recent ramblings of Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX): "Over the past four years, as Ranking Member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, I have led the charge against radical cap-and-trade legislation.. It's been an uphill battle, and I'm grateful that, thanks to your votes, the cavalry is riding to the rescue." This is the same man who recently apologized to BP after whining that he didn't want to live in a country where corporations are forced to answer when they do something "legitimately wrong."

Maybe he was right to apologize. During Barton's career, he's received almost $1.5 million in campaign financing from BP and the oil and gas industry. "Don't bite the hand that feeds you" is one of politics' golden rules.

Put aside the fact that we've got political leaders who think that there's such a thing as "legitimately wrong." It's at least clear where Joe Barton is going: the same place other Republican leaders are heading.

Take Rep. Dave Camp (R- Mich.), another outspoken EPA critic, who lies in bed with Dow Chemical alongside a 50-mile-long stretch of dioxin-contaminated watershed in his home state. A known human carcinogen, Dioxin passes into our bodies when we eat the fish from these waterways. Even with short-term exposures, it can cause skin lesions and alter liver function; the results of long-term exposure can be devastating.

Dow's been dumping dioxins into Camp's district for years, but waterways aren't the only thing they're poisoning; they're also dumping money into Camp's pocket, topping the list of his campaign contributors from 2009 to date. Smart investment: Camp recently condemned EPA's "radical" plans to further limit acceptable levels of dioxin exposure in residential communities, suggesting the economic impact of making our communities safe should trump human health.

Camp's Michigan ally, Rep. Fred Upton, vying to chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is threatening a level of investigation into EPA that would require Lisa Jackson to reserve a parking space outside the Committee office building. When considering proposed carbon regulation, Upton complained that "We ought to be encouraging our electricity producers rather than penalizing the users of electricity." Understandable, since the electric utility sector has been very encouraging to Upton; it's at the very top of his industrial campaign contributors for 2009-2010.

You might be surprised that Upton's concerns about penalizing users of electricity didn't stop him from introducing a Bill in 2008 that would have created a $1 billion annual fund to research carbon sequestration technologies. The good news is that the fund was to be paid into by utilities that use coal, natural gas, and oil. The bad news is that Upton called for these utilities to recover the money by passing costs onto consumers.

The list goes on: Barton, Camp, Upton, Issa, Shimkus, and others -- Republicans leading the charge in the ongoing war against the "radical" environmental interests of the enemy in the fight "to consistently appl[y] free market principles to legislative decisions," as Barton recently stated in a mass email. It's all very black and white: EPA bad, industrial America good. Economy vs. the environment. Capitalism vs. socialism. Or, maybe, in the mind of Joe Barton, the "legitimately wrong" vs. the illegitimately right.

The problem is that the Republican's stance on free market principles is nowhere near as consistent as their ongoing support for anti-free market corporate welfare schemes for the oil and gas industry. And that's where the Republican war against EPA's "anti-market" regulation of industry really begins to break down. It's disingenuous and hypocritical.

After all, it was Barton who, as Committee Chair pushed through the 2005 Energy Policy Act which contained billions of dollars in handouts for the oil and gas companies in the form of subsidies, tax and royalty relief. Barton even made sure Congress doled out an additional 50 million taxpayers' dollars annually for "research." How's that for "applying the free market principles to legislative decisions?"

When BP wants to drill on public lands for free, or not foot the bill for their own R&D, here comes Joe Barton and the rest of the oil and gas political gang with a bucket-load of corporate welfare. When Dow pumps cancer-causing dioxins into our waterways and refuses to clean up its corporate mess, Republican Reps like Camp ride to the rescue. Republicans are holding out the free market banner in their tightly clenched right hand, while they're giving industry a giant, grimy fistful of taxpayers' dollars and true production-cost avoidance with their left. It's no different than what we saw with the recent banking scandal -- capitalize profits, socialize costs and losses.

But I guess we shouldn't be too outraged with Barton's and Camp's actions, or with the Republican war on the environment and the health of our communities. After all, industry has gone out and paid for these people to fight their battles, and what good is a mercenary who questions his orders?

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