Lame Duck and a Lead Balloon

For fuck’s sake:

The Bush administration is considering doing away with health standards that cut lead from gasoline, widely regarded as one of the nation's biggest clean-air accomplishments.

Battery makers, lead smelters, refiners all have lobbied the administration to do away with the Clean Air Act limits.

Sure they have. And if babies and old people and other people particularly vulnerable to lead had the same lobbying power, maybe we’d give a shit about what they thought, too! Honestly, is there no limit to the amount of corporate cock this administration will suck?! Don't answer; that's rhetorical.

(Fun Fact: A coroner for the county in which I live, which contains several influential steel mills along Lake Michigan, says the air here is so polluted, he can’t tell whether the dead were smokers or non-smokers, because all of our lungs are equally black.)

A preliminary staff review released by the Environmental Protection Agency this week acknowledged the possibility of dropping the health standards for lead air pollution. The agency says revoking those standards might be justified "given the significantly changed circumstances since lead was listed in 1976" as an air pollutant.

The EPA says concentrations of lead in the air have dropped more than 90 percent in the past 2 1/2 decades.

Awesome. The standards are working…so let’s get rid of them. Evidently, the only reason we implemented those standards was to get the lead concentrations down to a level where Big Bidnez can start polluting again without killing off most of their human resource.

I’m no anti-capitalist, but I’m sick to death of hearing about what’s good for business and what’s good for the market and what’s good for corporations and what’s good for profits and how genuflectingly grateful American workers are supposed to be just for being part of the Super Mega Molto Awesome American Economy, even as every last scrap of benefit once conferred by being a part of the American workforce is taken away from them—and the quality of their air, water, and land is sacrificed, shortening their lives and giving them less time to enjoy any pittance of reward they earned themselves in a lifetime of slavery to a behemoth enterprise that cannot care for them or even learn their names.

FUCK!

(H/T Oddjob.)