Let's Clear The Air

So Christie Todd Whitman, enemy of the environment and gutless EPA stooge who kow towed to Bushco at every conceivable opportunity, is back in the news again because a judge quite rightly refused to grant her immunity from a class action lawsuit by New York residents in Brooklyn and Manhattan over Whitman’s claim that it was all right to return to their neighborhoods after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center even though “toxic dust was polluting their neighborhoods,” according to the news story.

As Lou Dubose and Molly Ivins documented in “Bushwhacked,” this is par for the rotten course, so to speak, when it comes to Whitman’s tenure as head of the EPA…

(The book) also details the battle Deb Sanchez and her neighbors in South Denver fought with the Environmental Protection Agency over contaminated soil left in their neighborhood at the Shattuck Superfund site.

The soil was laced with radium and other contaminants, the byproduct of decades of manufacturing. Residents near the site were told by the EPA that the soil was indeed a danger and would be dug up and hauled to a licensed dump.

But the EPA, without notifying the neighbors, decided to mix the soil with concrete and fly ash and build a 6-acre monolith 10 feet high.

Sanchez and the others battled the EPA for 10 years in a seemingly vain effort to have the monolith removed. Only when EPA Ombudsman Bob Martin stepped in did Sanchez and the others start to see results. With Martin, who as ombudsman regularly sided with residents in fights against the EPA, they forced the EPA to break up the monolith and haul it away (a process that is going on).

They would have been lost without Martin, who had long been a thorn in the side of EPA administrators appointed by the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton.

Shattuck proved to be Martin's last victory. Although a Government Accounting Office report recommended more independence for the ombudsman, Bush appointee Christie Todd Whitman moved oversight of Martin's office into the EPA, gutted his budget and handcuffed his only investigator.

When Martin was out of town, Whitman took more than 100 boxes of case files out of his offices, removed the computers and phones and changed the locks. Martin resigned in protest.

In George Bush's America, according to Ivins and Dubose, people like Deb Sanchez don't have a voice at the EPA.

There’s more on Whitman here.

I realize you can’t do jail time for stupidity or environmental malfeasance, but if that were possible, then we should be readying a cell for her right now. She will have the thanks of an entirely new generation of children, senior citizens and others affected by asthmatic disorders and other respiratory difficulties.