Congressional fights over 62,000+ unregulated chemicals can be complicated by TPP, TTIP, & remand to each state. House Committee Markup today & Wednesday -- Hope you'll read on!
There are TPA, TPP, TTIP, and now comes the fight to protect the U.S. from over 62,000 unregulated chemicals (CDC-Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, ATSDR Toxic Substances Portal) of which less than 1% have been tested for safety. Whether you are more interested in a personal value of individual and public health or you are more interested in a social value of environmental protection simple because of the distributive justice and political process it empowers, either way you have or will come to be vitally interested, personally active, in this fight. Worse yet, EWG says 80,000+ chemicals are now used in consumer products about which federal government and consumers know little to nothing. I’m an experienced chemist and chemistry teacher who believes Environmental Working Group (EWG) and so many others who work tirelessly to protect the thin covering of planet Earth that contains and sustains life. We have no idea how 62,000 -80,000 chemicals in our daily lives interact with each other, no idea of their effect on vulnerable communities (kids, elderly, currently ill) of either individual persons or groups of persons who have not yet matured or have any kind of illness, whether physical illness, mental illness or both. Action item: Earth Justice has an online petition to your Senators telling them to Stop A Dangerous Chemical Law.
Civil rights enforcement demands environmental protection. Residents of poor communities and communities of color in the United States bear a "disproportionate" burden of toxic contamination, through the generation and release of hazardous chemicals in their neighborhoods, via the location of waste management facilities, and through inadequate healthcare screening and treatment. CDC old estimates are that just from foodborne diseases each year, roughly 1 in 6 persons (16.67%) in the U.S. (or 48 million people) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die. Multiple sources of data are used to make attribution estimates, including data from outbreak investigations, infections not associated with outbreaks, and food. Current U.S. population amounts to 321 million: using the CDC estimate that 16.67% get sick from foodborne Illness in the U.S., the actual annual number sick from food alone is 53.49 million. How 62,000 -80,000 chemicals in our daily lives interact with just that huge population is anybody’s guess let alone the remaining hundreds of millions who are not yet sick or injured but will become so, as we all do. Meanwhile the current federal legislature along with legislatures and Governors of many states are hell-bent to deny funding to science education and unbiased science research. The current need for a premier toxic substances control act with top-flight enforcement of it has never been a higher need. The U.S. loves to make law but it does not care much about enforcing law if that enforcement truly regulates, educates, rehabilitates and/or punishes financially well to do persons and corporations. It is in our own selfish interests to learn about and to influence the course of current federal modernization of the now antiquated Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 (TSCA).
The Udall-Vitter-Inhofe vs. Boxer-Markey fight over the best legislation to modernize the obsolete and largely unenforced TSCA is joined by Representative John Shimkus [IL-15], Ken Cook (President and Co-founder, Environmental Working Group, EWG), the chemical industry that has, over the past three years spent $190 million on lobbying as efforts intensified in Congress to update TSCA, a host of Attorneys General from many different states to name just a few in the fight. Our Presidential candidate Senator Bernard “Bernie” Sanders has been involved in this fight for many years and currently sits in the Senatorial Committee of Jurisdiction, Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW).
The environmental wing of the environmental movement wants S. 725, Alan Reinstein and Trevor Schaefer Toxic Chemical Protection Act, from Senators Boxer, Sanders, Blumenthal, Gillibrand, Markey, and Mikulski as you can see from the fact that it languishes in committee, no hearings, etc. The political wing of the financial-investment-real estate (FIRE) movement wants Udall-Vitter-Inhofe S. 697 Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act as you can see by inspecting its sponsorship coalition (shown below), just plain old pure and simple politicians.
EWG headlines Udall-Vitter S. 697 this way: Chemical Industry Bill Protects Polluters, Profits – Not Kids’ Health Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW) had a legislative hearing, March 18, 2015 (watch here Sen. Sanders’s 5 minute statement & questions at 1:53:15). In that hearing Ken Cook said:
Congress hasn’t sent a major, comprehensive environmental protection law to the president’s desk for signature since 1996 – nineteen years ago this summer when Congress made landmark reforms to the safe drinking water and pesticide laws. Dozens of bedrock environmental laws were enacted in the preceding 30 years as science revealed more and more ways in which human activity was harming nature and people alike. The development of those laws was driven by scientific advances, overwhelming public support and environmental advocates and organizations determined to clean up America’s air and water and safeguard human health from toxic pollution. It’s a good thing for all of us that those laws were enacted when they were. Every one of them began as a “pie in the sky” response to a grave environmental problem – polluted air, rivers, tap water and land. And not a single one of those bedrock laws could be enacted by Congress today.
Erin Brockovich (
Last Call at the Oasis, a Documentary About Water Supplies) is a Consumer Advocate who endorses
Boxer-Markey as do current New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman,
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, Mass. Asst. Atty. Gen. Andrew Goldberg Environmental Protection Division and a host of other experts. Opposing, fighting against S. 697 (Udall-Vitter-
Inhofe) are
ATTORNEYS GENERAL OF NEW YORK, IOWA, MAINE, MARYLAND, OREGON and WASHINGTON, especially opposing the provisions in S. 697 that would greatly expand the limits on state action under state law to provide protections against dangerous chemicals. Attorneys General of California and Massachusetts have sent separate letters to their Senators in which they express their similar opposition to the preemption provisions of S. 697. Atty. Gen. Schneiderman leads a
13-State coalition Opposing a proposed “Chemicals in Commerce Act,” U.S. House bill that “Strips States Of Right To Protect Citizens Against Toxic Chemicals” proposed by Rep. John Shimkus. Attorneys General from California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington came out against the Shimkus proposal immediately after Shimkus released a draft of the proposed bill.
We need a strong bill requiring chemical companies to prove their products are safe before any use or a re-purposing of them whether as additives to stuff we touch and smell all day—food packaging, car seats, carpets, etc. Re-purposing them to a use for which they were not previously tested is to dodge federal regulation by “grandfathering” and the like. Expect the clowns who defeated passionate, honest, transparency in their brazen so-called "leadership" to actualize cloture with a cataclysmal decision to plunge the Senate into a caliginous atmosphere of underhandedness, concealment, covertness, stealth, and subterfuge as they led the charge into the Cloture Vote on S.AMDT.1221 to stand up for the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a major trade group representing giants like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Proctor & Gamble. ACC has 153 members & associate members. (Here are some associate members: Accenture, Bain & Company, Inc., Beveridge & Diamond PC, Holland & Knight LLP, KPMG, Marsh Inc., MTG Ltd., PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), REACH24H Consulting Group, Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, Sidley Austin LLP, Steptoe & Johnson LLP ~~~ do these associate members have care for the environment and protection from toxic substances as at least one of their top priorities?).
Partners of ACC include Koch, ALEC of which ACC is a "private sector" member, and therefore The Kochtopus (see interactive map, and further Dissection). The long-game is to wreck what tiny federal influence there ever was in 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, kick all regulation to the now feckless, hamstrung, ineffectual, inefficacious, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), while also getting U.S. Congress to gut the power of states to regulate toxic chemicals. (10-11-1976 Public law 94-469 seemed robust when it originated in Senate sponsored by John Tunney with Vance Hartke, Warren Magnuson, James Pearson, Phillip “Phil” Hart, Frank Moss, Ted Stevens, Adlai Stevenson III, Lowell Weicker Jr, John Durkin but it never met the best case scenarios presented by its advocates, so typical of the interplay between the Myth of Progress, the Myth of Control and the Myth of Material Satisfaction to which Kossak Phoebe Loosinhouse added the Myth of Centrism “as the guiding principle of American politics” in a comment here.
See: the big flaws in the 04-14-2015 [DISCUSSION DRAFT bill] 114TH Congress 1st Session H. R. — To modernize the Toxic Substances Control Act, and for other purposes — in the House of Representatives as released by John Shimkus [IL-15], Committee on Energy and Commerce Chair of Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy. The Shimkus bill was introduced in the House 1 week ago with 3 Cosponsors as H.R.2576 TSCA Modernization Act of 2015 introduced 5/26/2015 (actual Text of Legislation and here) and was immediately referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce (see: subcmte. on Environment and the Economy). H.R.2576 markup happening Tuesday, June 2, at 5:00 p.m. in room 2123 of the Rayburn House Office Building to consider legislation that aims to reform chemical management and modernize and reform a key federal agency. Members will convene for opening statements only on Tuesday (now adjourned but VIDEO HERE) and reconvene to consider the legislation Wednesday, June 3, at 10:00 a.m. H.R. 2576, the TSCA Modernization Act, authored by Environment and the Economy Subcommittee Chairman John Shimkus (R-IL), Subcommittee Ranking Member Paul Tonko (D-NY), full Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), and Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ).
Action item: contact your Representative and the Subcommittee telling them to conform H.R.2576 to S. 725 the Boxer-Markey bill (Alan Reinstein and Trevor Schaefer Toxic Chemical Protection Act).
S. 697 Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act
Sponsor: Sen Udall, Tom [NM] (introduced 3/10/2015) Cosponsors (39) see list below
Related Bills: S. 725 Latest Major Action: 4/28/2015 Senate committee/subcommittee actions. Status: Committee on Environment and Public Works. Ordered to be reported with an amendment in the nature of a substitute favorably.
Senators Cosponsoring S. 697:
Barrasso, John [WY] Blunt, Roy [MO] Booker, Cory A. [NJ] Boozman, John [AR]
Brown, Sherrod [OH] Capito, Shelley Moore [WV] Carper, Thomas R. [DE] Casey, Robert P., Jr. [PA] Cassidy, Bill [LA] Coats, Daniel [IN] Coons, Christopher A. [DE] Cornyn, John [TX] Cotton, Tom [AR] Crapo, Mike [ID] Donnelly, Joe [IN] Heinrich, Martin [NM] Heitkamp, Heidi [ND] Hoeven, John [ND] Inhofe, James M. [OK] Isakson, Johnny [GA] Kaine, Tim [VA] Klobuchar, Amy [MN] Manchin, Joe, III [WV] McCaskill, Claire [MO] Merkley, Jeff [OR] Murkowski, Lisa [AK] Murphy, Christopher S. [CT] Perdue, David [GA] Peters, Gary C. [MI] Portman, Rob [OH] Rounds, Mike [SD] Rubio, Marco [FL] Scott, Tim [SC] Shaheen, Jeanne [NH] Stabenow, Debbie [MI] Thune, John [SD] Vitter, David [LA] Warner, Mark R. [VA] Whitehouse, Sheldon [RI]
3/10/2015: Read twice and referred to the Committee on Environment and Public Works.
3/18/2015: Cmte. on Environment & Public Works. Hearings held (Statements & Video).
4/28/2015: Committee on Environment and Public Works. Ordered to be reported with an amendment in the nature of a substitute favorably.
S. 725 Alan Reinstein and Trevor Schaefer Toxic Chemical Protection Act
Sponsor: Sen Boxer, Barbara [CA] (introduced 3/12/2015) Cosponsors (5) Sanders, Bernard [VT], Blumenthal, Richard [CT], Gillibrand, Kirsten E. [NY], Markey, Edward J. [MA], Mikulski, Barbara A. [MD]
Related Bills: S. 697 Latest Major Action: 3/12/2015 Referred to Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. now Stalled in Committee.
.
.
Paraphrasing the “Finest Hour” speech by Winston Churchill on June 18, 1940:
We have to break corporate oligarchy or lose the planet. If we can stand up to big money, all lands-seas-and-skies may be free, fit to contain and sustain life in all the world, so to move into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science and lack of its regulation.
While we are here, let’s agree to give a gift of
Onions to these TPA Fast Track S.AMDT1221 cloture gremlins who also rammed through cloture motion for H.R.3114:
President Barack Obama Senators Mitch McConnell John Cornyn,
Orrin G. Hatch Daniel Coats John Boozman
Thom Tillis Mike Rounds Pat Roberts
Richard Burr John Barrasso Mike Crapo
Jeff Flake Tom Cotton Shelley Moore Capito
David Perdue Chuck Grassley, Dan Sullivan
Orchids to those who voted Nay on The Motion to Invoke Cloture on H.R. 1314 when it passed Senate 61-38 on May 22. The 38 Nays included Republicans Collins, Lee, Paul, Sessions and Shelby. Democrat Cardin [MD] voted no.
Ultimate Orchids to those who voted Nay on H.R.1314 passed Senate 62-37-1 May 22 with same few Republicans holding firmly to the NAY position. Democrat Cardin [MD] voted Yes for TPA-Fast Track.
What does TTP and TTIP say that has consequences on the ability of federal, state and local regulation &/or control of 62,000+ unregulated chemicals? Only Obama knows and he ain't sayin'..... Maybe Tom Cotton knows and is mailing a letter...etc.
.