By Joshua Daniel Hershfield, 9/8/06
The Bush Administration has
declared itself above the law. The
Secretary of Labor’s Administrative Review Board, citing the Attorney General,
has ruled that federal employees may no longer pursue whistleblower claims
under the Clean Water Act.
Normally,
federal workers may report water pollution enforcement breakdowns, clean-up
failures, and the like without being discriminated against or losing their
jobs. Now, no such protection
exists. Any federal employee who reports
on failures or neglect of the Clean Water Act may be fired. This lack of employee protection enables the
federal government to more freely exploit the environment. According to Public Employees for Environmental
Protection (PEER) the ruling reverses nearly two decades of precedent. The Bush Team is justifying this encroachment
on rights and protections by invoking the ancient doctrine of sovereign
immunity that is based on the old English legal maxim that “the King can do no
wrong.”
Approximately 170,000 federal
employees working within environmental agencies have just lost their right to
safely report when something is going wrong.
Simultaneously, the US
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has declared that federal employees will
no longer receive legal protection for trying to enforce or implement the
anti-pollution provisions within such laws as the Clean Air Act and the Safe
Drinking Water Act.
The Bush Administration has made
their opinions on the environment and our health painfully obvious. Their interests are not in providing clean
water to drink. They do not care if we
have clean air to breathe. They are
concerned with oil profiteering, and environmental protections only interfere
with their quest for economic and political power. Under the Bush Administration the environment
and our bodies are expendable, “collateral damage,” in the war for profit and
control. We can be poisoned and they
will not be held accountable.
This is not acceptable. Already cancer rates are soaring and have been
directly linked to polluted water and air.
Already five million people around the world are dying every year from
polluted water. Already one million
people around the world are dying every day from polluted air. This attack by the Bush Administration on
environmental laws is an attack on our bodies and lives.
The list of assaults on our
environment is growing. Shall we
continue to tolerate such injustices while our water becomes more polluted,
while our air is further toxified, while our bodies grow sicker? Or shall we come together and drive out this
regime that is threatening our planet and lives?
(Info on pollution related
deaths from “Earth Odyssey” by Keith Hertsgaard.)