Monday, August 02, 2004

THE "SUPERFUND" FRAUD

"Almost one in 10 of the nation's 1,230 Superfund toxic waste sites have not yet been cleaned up enough to guarantee that people and drinking water supplies won't become contaminated," reported the Associated Press this week. "Environmentalists said Tuesday those figures show the Bush administration is failing to protect public health, and Congress and the White House should reinstate a special tax to help fund the Superfund program," the AP continued.

But this election-year attack on President Bush by environmental extremists rings hollow - something that becomes clear once the dirty secrets of the Superfund program are revealed. Superfund is the federal program providing for the cleanup of so-called "toxic waste sites." The law was hastily passed after the 1980 elections by a lame-duck Congress and signed into law by a lame-duck President Carter. And all that lame-ness became part-and-parcel of the Superfund program.

Cleanups of Superfund sites were commenced regardless of actual risks to local residents and environment, and regardless of cost.... Sites originally selected to be cleaned up, the so-called National Priorities List, were not selected on the basis of threat to the local community or environment, but on the basis of spreading the wealth. The National Priorities List was established so that every state could have a Superfund site - no doubt because the cleanup program was more about local jobs than environmental protection....

And so we come to the most important but least known of Superfund's "dirty" secrets - there has never been a single shred of evidence and not a single documented case of anyone ever becoming ill, getting cancer, or dying because of contaminants at a Superfund site. That is based on my personal review of, and subsequent testimony to Congress in 1995 about, the records of over 1,300 Superfund site histories prepared by the EPA. I have not seen any evidence or heard of any credible claim since that time that would change that fact....

Even at the headline-grabbing Love Canal site or the Woburn, Mass., site featured in the John Travolta-movie "A Civil Action," multiple studies have subsequently been unable to link the sites with any actual health effects in local populations.

Another dirty secret of the Superfund program is that, while there is no evidence that anyone has been harmed by the contamination at Superfund sites, perhaps thousands of workers and others have been killed or injured as a result of construction and traffic accidents related to cleanups".

More here.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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