Photo by thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0
Federal Christmas presents are being lavished on toxic polluters, arms merchants, billionaires, and their Congressional lap dogs, while, as Zappa said, the meek shall inherit nothing.
As if pollution and graft made the country great, the Trump administration, with help from Democrats, has been on a regulation-cancelling rampage, repealing rules on environmental protection, health care, financial services, and even internet accessibility. As of Dec. 15, Mr. Trump’s government-by-corporations had revoked 67 rules, withdrawn 635 planned regulations, declared 244 laws “inactive,” and “delayed” 700 others.
In Minnesota, US Rep. Rick Nolan, D-Crosby, managed to giftwrap for a foreign mining company the cancellation of an environmental study of mining in the watershed of the famed Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The US Forest Service had been examining the environmental risks of several large mining proposals near the BWCA.
The giant Antofagasta Corporation from Chile wants to dig a massive underground copper mine southeast of Ely near the Kawishiwi River which flows directly into and through the protected boundary waters. If the study had a chance of finding little risk of permanent mine pollution, Nolan and the billionaire Chileans would have allowed it to proceed. But copper mines always wreck surface and groundwater, so mine proponents zeroed out the study, and, voila, its absence makes the plan look as clean as…