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Hollywood 'Resistance' Must Abandon Trump's Tabloid Enablers |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=34577"><span class="small">Marlow Stern, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Monday, 25 June 2018 08:36 |
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Stern writes: "The AMI-owned National Enquirer collaborated with the Trump campaign during the election and covered for Weinstein and Cosby. They now control nearly every celebrity weekly."
An issue of the National Enquirer with President Trump on the cover, from last summer. (photo: Mary Altaffer/AP)
Hollywood 'Resistance' Must Abandon Trump's Tabloid Enablers
By Marlow Stern, The Daily Beast
25 June 18
The AMI-owned National Enquirer collaborated with the Trump campaign during the election and covered for Weinstein and Cosby. They now control nearly every celebrity weekly.
 his past week, The Washington Post exposed an unsettling—yet all too foreseeable—revelation: that during and after the 2016 presidential race, the National Enquirer provided drafts of its stories to the Trump camp for pre-publication approval.
And the arbiter of taste on behalf of “Mr. Trump” was none other than Michael Cohen, the president’s longtime attorney/fixer who orchestrated his six-figure hush payments to mistresses Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, and is said to be on the brink of cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller.
“Since Trump’s become president and even before, [AMI publisher David Pecker] openly just has been willing to turn the magazine and the cover over to the Trump machine,” an insider told the Post. “If it was a story specifically about Trump, then it was sent over to Michael, and as long as there were no objections from him, the story could be published.” (Pecker denies this.)
The Post investigation further revealed that the Enquirer would then receive requests for story changes from team Trump—from photos that made him look slimmer to tweaked headlines—and that Trump would even pitch story ideas to the Enquirer “on a regular basis” via Cohen or his former communications adviser Hope Hicks. Trump would also get to review stories about his opponent, Hillary Clinton, prior to publication, with sources claiming that he was particularly aroused by pieces (unsubstantiated, of course) concerning her declining health. If you recall, during the campaign the Enquirer ran bogus cover stories declaring that Hillary had “6 months to live” and was “going to jail,” as well as this splashy “exclusive” on Trump’s Republican rival: “TED CRUZ FATHER LINKED TO JFK ASSASSINATION!”
You might be asking, why should I give a damn about the National Enquirer? It’s a tacky, largely fact-free supermarket tabloid—celebrity gossip for the Infowars-adjacent. Well, on June 15, Enquirer publisher American Media Inc. (AMI) announced that it had purchased a number of celebrity magazines from the German publisher Bauer: In Touch, Life & Style and Closer. Having already acquired Us Weekly in 2017—and OK! and Star previously—it now controls every single celebrity weekly not named People (it tried to obtain People before Time Inc.’s sale to Meredith), granting it a near-monopoly on tabloid-magazine “news.” Pre-Bauer deal, AMI boasted that it had a combined total circulation of over 5.3 million, reaching 51 million people each month (and 61 million unique visitors monthly online).
That means David Pecker, a good pal of Trump’s who’s reportedly granted him story approval and allowed him to commission hit pieces on his rivals, is now presiding over this tabloid fleet, which can be weaponized against Trump’s foes—or, in the case of Us Weekly’s exclusive Ivanka Trump cover story in October, normalize and sanitize those in the Trump orbit.
These periodicals—in particular Us Weekly, OK! and In Touch—subsist on celebrity collaboration. They rely on insider tips from Hollywood publicists and managers, as well as puffy interviews and pictorials with image-conscious celebs, for much of their content. Many of those celebrities and hangers-on will then, in the very next breath, tweet their outrage at the Trump administration’s latest cruel policy or diplomatic snafu, from its unctuous summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to those horrifying child concentration camps at the U.S.-Mexico border. Given AMI’s status as an unofficial publicity arm of Trump’s, it’s all so wildly hypocritical.
Or maybe those same “woke” celebs who deliver various items to AMI will voice their disgust with Harvey Weinstein, a man accused of sexually assaulting many of the women in their very industry. In December, The New York Times ran a bombshell story about the lengths AMI went to to help protect Weinstein and discredit his accusers.
The Times reported that Dylan Howard, the editor of the Enquirer and chief content officer of AMI, regularly engaged in “catch and kill”—or “acquiring exclusive rights to damaging stories and not publishing them.” It’s a strategy he employed to protect Trump when the Enquirer paid Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal $150,000 during the 2016 presidential campaign for the rights to her story about an extramarital affair she says she and Trump had between 2006-07, shortly after the birth of his son Barron (the adult actress Stormy Daniels was paid off by Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, to cover up an alleged affair during the same time period). The story never ran, and she was effectively silenced.
With Weinstein, AMI not only “struck a business deal,” but attempted to pay for the silence of Ambra Battilana, an actress and model who’d accused the movie mogul of sexual assault in 2015; according to documents reviewed by the Times, however, she shot them down. Later, when the actresses Ashley Judd and Rose McGowan alluded to sexual misconduct perpetrated against them by Weinstein, The Weinstein Company told Howard to “pursue” damaging stories on the women. AMI subsequently sent a reporter at Coleman-Rayner, an AMI entertainment-news subsidiary, “to collect hostile commentary about Ms. McGowan,” reported the Times. The reporter contacted Elizabeth Avellan, the ex-wife of filmmaker Robert Rodriguez (Rodriguez left Avellan for McGowan) and, according to The New Yorker, pressed her for “unflattering statements about McGowan.” Avellan maintains that the reporter agreed their conversation was off the record, but he still is said to have recorded the call and given the audio to Howard.
“This is killer. Especially if my fingerprints r not on this,” Weinstein wrote to Howard, reported The New Yorker. Howard then replied, “They are not. And the conversation… is RECORDED.” (AMI acknowledged to the Times that they collected and provided information to Weinstein about his accusers.)
In fact, as the Times discovered: “[Weinstein] was so close to David J. Pecker, the chief executive of American Media Inc., which owns The Enquirer, that he was known in the tabloid industry as an untouchable ‘F.O.P.,’ or ‘friend of Pecker.’ That status was shared by a chosen few, including President Trump.”
On top of carrying water for the president they claim to despise and the monster accused of violating many of the women in their industry, AMI also performed a modified “catch and kill” to cover for serial rapist Bill Cosby.
As I reported in 2014, according to a 2006 complaint filed by Cosby victim Andrea Constand against the National Enquirer and Cosby’s high-powered attorney, Marty Singer, she alleges that Cosby granted an exclusive interview to the Enquirer in 2005 “knowing it would injure Plaintiff, and to deprive her of her good name, credit and reputation.” In the interview, Cosby said that Constand “asked Cosby for money” before going to the police in a “classic shakedown” attempt (there is no evidence of this occurring). In exchange for the interview, the Enquirer killed a story they were planning to run on Beth Ferrier, a woman who alleged she was drugged and raped by Cosby; Ferrier had conducted a tell-all interview with Enquirer reporter Robin Mizrahi, and passed a lie-detector test arranged by Mizrahi.
It will be interesting in the coming months and years to see which Hollywood stars who publicly profess ties to The Resistance continue to grant interviews or slip items to AMI’s stable of weeklies; to see if they’re willing to sacrifice their moral compasses in exchange for some nice PR. The ones that do should be branded Vichy celebrities, complicit in both the culture of silence surrounding sexual misconduct as well as the Trump administration’s reign of terror.
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Some Rare Good Climate News: The Fossil Fuel Industry Is Weaker Than Ever |
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Sunday, 24 June 2018 13:30 |
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McKibben writes: "If you're looking for good news on the climate front, don't look to the Antarctic. Last week's spate of studies documenting that its melt rates had tripled is precisely the kind of data that underscores the almost impossible urgency of the moment."
'The basic trajectory of the world away from coal and gas and oil is firmly underway.' (photo: Alamy)
Some Rare Good Climate News: The Fossil Fuel Industry Is Weaker Than Ever
By Bill McKibben, Grist
24 June 18
From Wall Street to the pope, many increasingly see fossil fuels as anything but a sure bet. That gives us reason to hope
 f you’re looking for good news on the climate front, don’t look to the Antarctic. Last week’s spate of studies documenting that its melt rates had tripled is precisely the kind of data that underscores the almost impossible urgency of the moment.
And don’t look to Washington DC, where the unlikely survival of the EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, continues to prove the political power of the fossil fuel industry. It’s as if he’s on a reality show where the premise is to see how much petty corruption one man can get away with.
But from somewhat less likely quarters, there’s been reason this month for hope – reason, at least, to think that the basic trajectory of the world away from coal and gas and oil is firmly under way.
At the Vatican, the pope faced down a conference full of oil industry executives – the basic argument that fossil fuel reserves must be kept underground has apparently percolated to the top of the world’s biggest organization.
And from Wall Street came welcome word that market perceptions haven’t really changed: even in the age of Trump, the fossil fuel industry has gone from the world’s surest bet to an increasingly challenged enterprise. Researchers at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis minced no words: “In the past several years, oil industry financial statements have revealed significant signs of strain: Profits have dropped, cash flow is down, balance sheets are deteriorating and capital spending is falling. The stock market has recognized the sector’s overall weakness, punishing oil and gas shares over the past five years even as the market as a whole has soared.”
The IEEFA report labeled the industry “weaker than it has been in decades” and laid out its basic frailties, the first of which is paradoxical. Fracking has produced a sudden surge of gas and oil into the market, lowering prices – which means many older investments (Canada’s tar sands, for instance) no longer make economic sense. Fossil fuel has been transformed into a pure commodity business, and since the margins on fracking are narrow at best, its financial performance has been woeful. The IEEFA describes investors as “shell-shocked” by poor returns.
The second weakness is more obvious: the sudden rise of a competitor that seems able to deliver the same product – energy – with cheaper, cleaner, better technologies. Tesla, sure – but Volkswagen, having come clean about the dirtiness of diesel, is going to spend $84bn on electric drivetrains. China seems bent on converting its entire bus fleet to electric power. Every week seems to bring a new record-low price for clean energy: the most recent being a Nevada solar plant clocking in at 2.3 cents per kilowatt hour, even with Trump’s tariffs on Chinese panels.
And the third problem for the fossil fuel industry? According to IEEFA, that would be the climate movement – a material financial risk to oil and gas companies. “In addition to traditional lobbying and direct-action campaigns, climate activists have joined with an increasingly diverse set of allies – particularly the indigenous-rights movement – to put financial pressure on oil and gas companies through divestment campaigns, corporate accountability efforts, and targeting of banks and financial institutions. These campaigns threaten not only to undercut financing for particular projects, but also to raise financing costs for oil and gas companies across the board.”
Hey, the movement against Kinder Morgan’s pipeline got so big, the Canadian government had to literally buy the thing in order to try and ram it through. Protesters will die, a former Bank of Canada governor predicted this week – though he added the country will have to muster the “fortitude” to kill them and get the pipeline built.
For activists, the best part of the IEEFA report is a series of recommendations for precisely how to hurt the industry the most, from creating delays that “turn a marginal project into a cancelled one” to “strategic litigation” to “changing the narrative”.
The report’s authors write: “The financial world is just beginning to understand the fundamental weakness of the fossil fuel sector, and barely acknowledges the global climate movement’s growing power and reach. This has created a powerful opportunity to develop and foster a new storyline on Wall Street: that the oil and gas industry is an unstable financial partner just as it faces its greatest test.”
That’s work we’re capable of. If a few years of campaigning is enough to convince the pope we need to keep fossil fuels in the ground, a few more quarters might finally persuade the suits that there’s more money to be made elsewhere. But speed is clearly of the essence. If massive losses of money loom over Wall Street, massive losses of polar ice loom over us all.
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Gorsuch Says He'll Repeal and Replace the Fourth Amendment With Something Terrific |
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Sunday, 24 June 2018 13:20 |
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Millhiser writes: "Gorsuch's dissenting opinion in Carpenter v. United States is an odd piece of writing. It reads less like a judicial opinion and more like the sort of essay that an overworked law professor might toss off after they suddenly realize that they have a symposium paper due at the end of the week."
Donald Trump and Neil Gorsuch. (photo: Getty Images)
Gorsuch Says He'll Repeal and Replace the Fourth Amendment With Something Terrific
By Ian Millhiser, ThinkProgress
24 June 18
This is not how judges are supposed to behave.
 s a presidential candidate, Donald Trump offered a vague promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with “something terrific.” On Friday, Neil Gorsuch, who occupies the seat on the Supreme Court that Senate Republicans held open until Trump could fill it, brought a similar amount of thoughtfulness and coherence to the question of when police should be allowed to conduct a search without a warrant.
Gorsuch’s dissenting opinion in Carpenter v. United States is an odd piece of writing. It reads less like a judicial opinion and more like the sort of essay that an overworked law professor might toss off after they suddenly realize that they have a symposium paper due at the end of the week. After lecturing his colleagues for 20 pages about how he has uncovered a way of interpreting the Fourth Amendment that is more “tied to the law” than the last half-century of Supreme Court opinions on this subject, Gorsuch outright refuses to apply this mysterious new interpretation to the case at hand.
Carpenter asked whether law enforcement can, without first getting a warrant, use cell phone records to pinpoint where a particular suspect traveled over a course of weeks, months, or potentially even years. A majority of the Court — Chief Justice John Roberts plus the four liberal justices — held that the answer to this question is “no.”
Until its final pages, Gorsuch’s dissent reads as if he agrees with the majority’s conclusion — it’s only at the very end that Gorsuch reveals he is casting a vote in favor of the government because the lawyers on the other side failed to anticipate the specific way that Gorsuch wants to repeal and replace a half-century of established law.
Reasonable expectations
To understand Gorsuch’s odd Carpenter dissent, it’s helpful to understand a brief history of how the Supreme Court’s understanding of the Fourth Amendment developed in light of new technology. The Fourth Amendment protects the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” and it requires police to obtain a warrant before conducting certain searches.
The Court first confronted electronic eavesdropping by law enforcement in its 1928 decision in Olmstead v. United States. According to Olmstead, police did not need to obtain a warrant to wiretap a phone call because such a wiretap did not involve an “actual physical invasion” of a person’s property. This decision, which largely left individuals without any Fourth Amendment rights whenever they picked up the telephone, remained good law until the 1960s.
The Olmstead regime came to a close, however, with the Court’s 1967 decision in Katz v. United States, which held that police typically must first obtain a warrant before they listen in on a phone call. In an influential concurring opinion whose reasoning was embraced by a majority of the Court the next year, Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote that an individual’s Fourth Amendment right to be protected from warrantless searches it triggered when they have a “reasonable expectation of privacy.”
At the time, this “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard was considered a tremendous victory for civil libertarians. It gave the Supreme Court a framework it could use to apply the Fourth Amendment to electronic communications that police could easily intercept without physically intruding on someone’s home.
Less than one year after Katz, however, the voters elected Richard Nixon president — and President Nixon, who campaigned on a “law and order” platform, appointed four new justices in his first term in office.
Though the Court’s new majority retained the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test, they interpreted it to give police broad authority to obtain information about criminal suspects. Thus, in Smith v. Maryland, one of the most significant Fourth Amendment cases of the post-Nixon era, the Court held that police could obtain every single phone number dialed by a criminal suspect without obtaining a warrant.
“A person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties,” Smith held. And each of us voluntarily reveals which number we are dialing to the phone company every time we call someone.
Thus, whatever promise the “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard might have had when it was first handed down, it proved to be quite vague and easily manipulated by justices sympathetic to police.
Something terrific
Gorsuch spends the bulk of his Carpenter opinion railing against pretty much everything that has happened in the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment cases since Katz, and this part of his opinion gives civil libertarians a great deal to cheer. Among other things, Gorsuch lists some of the truly absurd results the Court reached using the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test.
Take Florida v. Riley, which says that a police helicopter hovering 400 feet above a person’s property invades no reasonable expectation of privacy. Try that one out on your neighbors. Or California v. Greenwood, which holds that a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in the garbage he puts out for collection.
Indeed, if someone only reads the first 12 pages of Gorsuch’s dissent, they would come away with the impression that the deeply conservative judge is eager to rein in police and undo much of the post-Nixon Court’s efforts to empower law enforcement. But then the opinion takes a weird turn.
“From the founding until the 1960s, the right to assert a Fourth Amendment claim didn’t depend on your ability to appeal to a judge’s personal sensibilities about the ‘reasonableness’ of your expectations or privacy,” Gorsuch writes with his trademark arrogance, “it was tied to the law.” The judge then suggests scrapping Katz‘s entire framework in favor of what Gorsuch labels the “traditional approach” to the Fourth Amendment.
This “traditional approach” asks “if a house, paper or effect was yours under law.” So if police want to search something that belongs to you, Gorsuch’s standard suggests that they need to obtain a warrant. If they want to search something that does not belong to you, they likely do not need a warrant.
In fairness to Gorsuch, the judge spends a good deal of time explaining how this “is it yours?” standard could extend, in some cases, to electronic records. If you “toss your keys to a valet at a restaurant,” for example, the valet still has a legal obligation to respect the car as your property. Similarly, Gorsuch suggests, Google would have a similar obligation to treat your emails as your own property.
But it is unclear how, if at all, Gorsuch’s “is it yours?” test should apply to a case like Carpenter. Recall that Carpenter involved whether police can access cell phone records that allow the cell phone company to track its customer’s locations. Our cell phones constantly ping nearby cell towers and similar sites, revealing much about our location in the process.
Cell phone companies keep records of this geolocation data, often for as long as five years. As Chief Justice Roberts explains in his majority opinion, they use this data to find “weak spots in their network,” to apply “roaming” charges, and to “sell aggregated location records to data brokers, without individual identifying information of the sort at issue here.”
But who owns this data? One possible argument is that I own my own cell phone. Any data it provides to the cell phone company is data that my device shared with them. And thus, like the emails I send through gmail, my cell phone’s geolocation data belongs to me and the government needs a warrant to touch it.
But wait! Doesn’t the cell phone company own its own network? The geolocation data exists, not because my device is broadcasting my location directly, but because my device communicates with a cell tower owned by the cell phone company — and the cell phone company knows where I am largely because it knows which of the many nodes on its network my cell phone has pinged. Under this theory, the data belongs to the cell phone company — it is not mine — and so the government could obtain it without a warrant.
The point isn’t that either of these theories are correct. Rather, the point is that Gorsuch’s theory doesn’t offer any more clarity than the imperfect “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard. Indeed, if anything, it offers far less certainty. Whatever else can be said about reasonable expectations of privacy, there are literally thousands of court opinions examining this standard. Those decisions will offer a great deal more legal guidance than the half-baked idea proposed by Gorsuch.
His Carpenter opinion is vintage Gorsuch. He even acknowledges the fact that his vague new standard offers little clarity — while simultaneously implying that he knows more than all of his colleagues put together. “I do not begin to claim all the answers today,” the judge writes, “but (unlike with Katz) at least I have a pretty good idea what the questions are.”
Well, maybe. But Gorsuch has, at other times, warned against throwing out legal rules simply because a few judges think that they have a better idea.
“Chesterton reminds us not to clear away a fence just because we cannot see its point,” Gorsuch wrote in his dissenting opinion in Artis v. District of Columbia, for “even if a fence doesn’t seem to have a reason, sometimes all that means is we need to look more carefully for the reason it was built in the first place.”
The reason for the “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard Gorsuch disdains is that the real “traditional approach” — the approach used by Olmstead — placed no limits whatsoever on police searches of telephone conversations. Today, it would give cops almost unlimited discretion to track our internet usage.
Gorsuch may no longer see the point of the “fence” that Katz erected around police, but he is still itching to tear it down. And he’s offered only the vaguest legal standard to replace it — a standard that no other member of the Court endorses.
Worse, Gorsuch concludes his opinion by suggesting that the best arguments for protecting the cell phone records at issue in Carpenter is an argument grounded in “positive law” — that is, an argument that such records are protected by state or federal law and not the Constitution itself.
When you strip away all the rhetoric, in other words, the world Neil Gorsuch wants looks a whole lot like Olmstead. State legislatures or Congress can give you privacy rights, but they can also take them away. And the Fourth Amendment will provide little backstop in a case like Carpenter.
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2 Years After Reform Act, Pruitt's EPA Has Failed to Protect Us From Toxic Chemicals |
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Sunday, 24 June 2018 13:11 |
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Benesh writes: "The updated TSCA is supposed to regulate thousands of chemicals used industrially and also in an array of consumer products like paint, cleaning products, mattresses, clothes, insulation and more. But under Administrator Scott Pruitt's leadership, the Environmental Protection Agency has taken every opportunity to undermine, not enhance, chemical safety."
Scott Pruitt. (photo: AP)
2 Years After Reform Act, Pruitt's EPA Has Failed to Protect Us From Toxic Chemicals
By Melanie Benesh, Environmental Working Group
24 June 18
 n June 22, 2016, President Obama signed into law a significant overhaul of the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, the nation’s primary chemical safety law. It was the first update to the law, which was widely considered to be the least effective environmental law on the books, in 40 years.
The updated TSCA is supposed to regulate thousands of chemicals used industrially and also in an array of consumer products like paint, cleaning products, mattresses, clothes, insulation and more.
But under Administrator Scott Pruitt’s leadership, the Environmental Protection Agency has taken every opportunity to undermine, not enhance, chemical safety. Two years later, here are 10 ways Pruitt’s EPA has failed to protect Americans under the new law:
1. Rubber-stamping new chemicals
The update to TSCA required the EPA to make affirmative safety decisions about new chemicals for the first time. At first, the EPA appeared to be taking this responsibility seriously by rigorously reviewing new chemicals before they could come onto the market. However, in August 2017, the Pruitt EPA fundamentally changed the way it was reviewing these new chemicals and eliminated a backlog of 600 new chemicals overnight. Since June 2016, the EPA has reviewed more than 2,000 new chemicals, more than half of which have been approved to come onto the market. In January, the Natural Resources Defense Council sued the EPA over its actions on new chemicals.
2. Delaying a ban on a toxic paint-stripping chemical that has caused four deaths in one year
Methylene chloride is a highly toxic chemical used in paint strippers that until recently most consumers could buy at their local hardware stores. In the waning days of the Obama administration, the EPA proposed banning it. However, the EPA signaled in December that the ban would be delayed indefinitely. At least four people have died using paint strippers containing the chemical since the ban was proposed, and more than 50 people have died from it since 1980. Although the EPA recently reversed course and announced it would be taking action on methylene chloride after meeting with victims’ families, many important details remain unknown. In the absence of EPA action, several retailers – including Lowes, Sherwin Williams and Home Depot – have taken steps to remove methylene chloride paint strippers from their shelves.
The fate of N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone, another toxic paint-stripping chemical the EPA previously considered banning, remains uncertain.
3. Abandoning proposed bans on uses of TCE, the chemical from “A Civil Action”
Trichloroethylene, or TCE, is a known carcinogen made infamous in the book and movie “A Civil Action.” It has caused various cancers in former residents of the Camp Lejeune military base in North Carolina, and it contaminates military bases throughout the U.S. TCE is also linked to birth defects, hormone disruption, Parkinson’s disease, and damage to the immune system and kidneys. The EPA proposed banning some uses of TCE in aerosol degreasing, spot cleaning and vapor degreasing, in December 2016 and January 2017. But earlier this month, the Pruitt EPA signaled that it would delay or even scrap these proposed bans. The EPA also laid the groundwork to ignore a key study linking TCE to birth defects.
4. Gutting proposed “framework rules”
The updated TSCA requires the EPA to develop two so-called “framework rules” governing how the EPA chooses chemicals to assess and how it conducts those assessments. The EPA issued two proposed framework rules that were robust and health protective in the final days of the Obama administration. However, in July 2017, the Pruitt EPA gutted those proposed rules before finalizing them to be in line with the chemical industry’s priorities. More than a dozen environmental and public health groups have sued the EPA in response.
5. Cooking the books on risk assessments by excluding key exposures
The updated TSCA requires the EPA to, for the first time, systematically and comprehensively assess chemicals already on the market by looking at all uses and exposures to a chemical. However, when the EPA released key scoping documents for its assessments of the first 10 chemicals last year, it excluded critical sources of exposures – like asbestos in old building materials, and 1,4-dioxane in personal care and cleaning products. In so-called “problem formulations” released earlier this month, the EPA narrowed these assessments even further and excluded major routes of chemical exposure like air pollution, waste disposal and even drinking water. An analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund found that the EPA will ignore more than 68 million pounds of seven out of the 10 chemicals released into air, water and land every year.
6. Stacking leadership positions with industry-friendly nominees and appointees
The EPA has also looked to industry advocates to fill leadership positions in the offices responsible for implementing the new law. Nancy Beck, who holds a leadership position in the EPA’s chemical safety office, came to the agency directly from the American Chemistry Council, where she lobbied for weaker chemical safety regulations. Michael Dourson was nominated for the top post in the EPA’s chemical safety office after a long career of doing junk science for the chemical industry. He withdrew his nomination after significant public backlash.
7. Protecting “secret chemicals”
The updated TSCA limits the amount of information the EPA can keep secret about chemical information submitted to the agency, including safety studies. However, an analysis earlier this year found that the EPA is routinely ignoring this change in the law, and is failing to release health and safety studies provided with new chemical filings. In recent guidance, the EPA also failed to acknowledge its obligation to give certain government and medical professionals access to chemical information the agency possesses.
8. Cutting critical agency resources
The new law imposes many new requirements on the agency. To meet these new obligations, the agency needs adequate resources. Nonetheless, the fee rule proposed by Pruitt’s EPA dramatically underestimates costs and lets the industry get away without paying its fair share. Additionally, the president’s budget, released in February, proposed significant cuts to the EPA – including deep cuts to programs that remediate lead in homes and research hormone-disrupting chemicals. Additionally, the EPA has put significant pressure on employees to leave the agency with early buyouts, putting the agency at its lowest staffing levels since 1988.
9. Undermining EPA science
At the end of April, the EPA proposed radically changing the kinds of science the agency can rely on to guide decision-making. This so-called “secret science” rule would prevent the agency from relying on studies based on confidential medical data – even if those studies are thoroughly peer-reviewed. The proposed rule would also restrict some studies that haven’t been published. Even Nancy Beck acknowledged that these draconian measures would make it more difficult to make decisions under TSCA. In emails released to the Union of Concerned Scientists, she warned the proposed rule would “jeopardize our entire pesticide registration/re-registration review process and likely all TSCA risk evaluations.”
10. Failing to adequately consider vulnerable populations
The updated TSCA requires the EPA to explicitly consider and mitigate risks to vulnerable populations like children, pregnant women, workers and the elderly. But by excluding key sources of exposure from its chemical safety evaluations, the EPA fails to protect these susceptible populations. For example, children drink more water per pound of bodyweight than adults. By excluding drinking water from its chemical risk evaluations, the EPA is failing to account for particular risks to children. By excluding waste disposal and air pollution from its evaluations, the EPA is failing to consider special risks for fenceline communities, where there may be higher concentrations of chemicals in the air or soil.
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resident Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner says he has a new peace plan for Palestine and Israel.
