William Sanjour, friend and former colleague at the US Environmental Protection Agency, just told the world how the industry of waste disposal in the United States captured EPA and, almost immediately, became large and powerful. His story covers the decades from the late 1970s to the 1990s. He retired from EPA in 2001 after 30 years of work. This period neatly covers most of the years I worked at EPA.
Sanjour started in the waste management division of EPA as a branch chief. He remembers with bitterness Jimmy Carter’s foolish efforts to do the bidding of polluters under the ridiculous and laughable excuse of fighting inflation.
Sanjour told his boss watering down the waste disposal regulations, reducing them in scope, was “cruel, stupid and probably illegal.” He was certain president Carter used the authority of the waste management law to “sabotage regulations intended ‘to protect human health and the environment’ in order to fight inflation.”
But it was not Carter alone that messed up how the country tried to diminish the dangers of extremely toxic industrial wastes. The smaller part of the waste industry, companies that move wastes from factories to landfills, caused real harm. Carter’s deregulation boosted their profits and power. The largest of the waste carriers include SCA Services, Waste Management, Browning-Ferris Industries, and Rollins Environmental Services. They profit from wastes, the more wastes the more money they make.
These disposal companies lobbied EPA senior officials and Congress and succeeded in sapping the spirit of the law for reducing the annual amount of wastes in the country.
Commercial waste haulers handle vast amounts and a tremendous variety of hazardous wastes. No wonder they cannot handle them with safety. According to Sanjour, “commercial facilities have a dreadful reputation for breakdowns and blow ups.”
“Waste disposal became the growth industry of the 1980s and made lots of fortunes. Its practices were sloppy… there were credible reports of connections [of the waste industry] with organized crime. [Waste management] companies bullied, lied, and bribed their way into poor rural communities…. Their money [also] corrupted EPA. Top EPA executives… and civil servants were pigs to a trough, taking lucrative jobs in the waste industry,” Sanjour wrote.
This revealing story is not unique to the waste industry of America. It mirrors, in general, decades-old disease of corruption afflicting America and the industrialized world. This is a prosperous disease making corporations rich and powerful, spreading real disease to society and death to the natural world. In fact, this prosperous disease recognizes no border or limits.
The chemical and agribusiness industries, for example, captured their EPA pesticide regulators in charge of the largest office of EPA. The transition to false reality started with the pesticide law, an invention of polluters. It is full of loopholes and obscure rhetoric about efficacy, testing, and public health. A first reading suffices to hide this document as a relic of an age of oligarchy gone mad.
But this law and regulations have been greasing the skids of lobbyists, brained-washed or brain-damaged professors and industry-funded scientists certifying the “safety” of neurotoxins in the food, drinking water, and bodies of most of the people of the world. Regulators and industrialists ignore the havoc of these deleterious substances in nature. Their holy books convince them they are the “stewards” of nature. They can do to wildlife, rivers, forests and mountains whatever they please.
In such a climate of muddled thinking, unethical behavior and invisible power, scientists, who are not in the influence of the polluters, delude themselves thinking their knowledge makes a difference. They say to each other they are not political. They are just doing their job. But they see the “political appointees” ignore their memoranda. Polluters come and go to the enclaves of the regulators and scientists within the government. They are smiling at the theater of the absurd. It serves them.
Donald Trump inherited this madhouse, perfect for his friends in the polluting industries. But Trump elevated the endemic corruption of the country’s business class to a deleterious level. He forgot he is the president. He assumed the language and thinking of shamans.
His executive orders disrupt the public good, hurting primarily the middle class, the poor and the vulnerable natural world. Not only does he deny global warming, but also he is promoting energy from petroleum and coal, which intensify the violence of higher temperatures.
He appointed at EPA Scott Pruitt in order to give freedom to polluters. Pruitt is gutting the EPA and is retreating from enforcing the law. He endangers public health and the environment.
Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne Ehrlich, professors of biology at Stanford University, see Trump and his rogue cabinet officers as “thugs” “trying to undo decades of progress.” Meanwhile, the Republican Congress is stealing “large amounts of money from poor Americans to increase the wealth of our billionaires.”
The Ehrlichs are right. This “shocking political theater,” built on past corruption and exacerbated by Trump’s irresponsibility, is undermining everything. The professors give us about a decade to mend our ways before calamities like nuclear war, global warming, famine, toxification of the natural world and debt trigger a collapse of civilization.
Can we avoid this rush to oblivion?
The election of Doug Jones as a Democratic senator in Republican-controlled Alabama is a sign that humans have the potential for moving away from the precipice. If the Democrats learn the lesson from Alabama, they can win back the White House and Congress.
Then the real work begins: end past corruption and abuse of the environment, and rebuild EPA to really protect public health and the environment.
Cleaning our nest means no more petroleum, coal, natural gas, pesticides, sprays for logging, and polluting industries. Embrace solar power, organic family farming, public transport, global abolition of nukes, and a new democratic economy without billionaires owning most of the country’s wealth.
A tall order? Yes, but business as usual has no future. The capturing of the EPA by polluters simply explains why.