The Republicans created the EPA. The Republicans are bent on destroying the EPA. You have no idea how bitter I am about relaxing EPA rules, which have helped Americans with cleaner air and cleaner water. I wish more people would write their reps to tell them we are going in the wrong direction. Environmentalists knew this was going to happen with the GOP controlled senate and house. Its scary. Think of China, without their regulations. Is that really what we want? Quote: House Republicans and Senate Democrats have managed to agree to a budget. But the bill undermines some environmental policies while giving big banks and big political donors more freedom to run roughshod over the American public. The agreement was made possible because Republicans dropped their most unreasonable demands, such as preventing the EPA from finalizing its proposed power-plant regulations and blocking Obama’s new executive order on immigration. Leaving out such extreme and unrelated measures cost the budget bill a number of votes from right-wing Republicans. But the GOP and its corporate backers still got a lot of goodies. One of the biggest: The legislation would undo a key element of the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law that requires big banks to move risky derivatives trades into separate entities not backed by the FDIC. This sets a very bad precedent for next year, as it shows Republicans can undo regulations by attaching the measures to a must-pass spending bill, and the president won’t necessarily put up a fight. As former Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who wrote the financial-reform law that bears his name, complained in a statement, it’s “a non-germane amendment inserted with no hearings, no chance for further modification and no chance for debate into a mammoth bill in the last days of a lame-duck Congress.” Can you imagine if Congress stripped the EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases this way? Republicans can. They almost succeeded in including a provision to weaken the EPA’s authority to protect waterways this time. They are just waiting until they are in a more powerful position next year. But, in the meantime, they did damage to the environment in other ways. “The abundance of policy riders — backed by trucking, mining and securities interests — shows the GOP’s new clout.” The weakening of campaign-finance rules is dangerous for the environment as well as American democracy. “Who are the people within our society that can give these large contributions?” asks Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program. “What you’ve seen is, it’s CEOs of energy companies as well as CEOs of other companies that can give these contributions. You’re going to have the ability of the Kochs or [Robert] Murray from Murray Energy or others to unilaterally influence the financing of the convention and play a big role in it as a result.” The bill also contains direct assaults on environmental regulation. Those fall into two general categories: corporate giveaways and ideological gestures.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 19:56:37 +0000