Arsenic, lead, air pollution: This can’t be what voters wanted | The Times-Picayune
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt says the Trump administration will abandon the Obama-era clean power plan aimed at reducing global warming. (Adam Beam)
If you voted for Donald Trump and the Republicans now running Congress, I have a few questions for you. Did you intend your vote to approve:
More arsenic in your drinking water — enough to pose a serious risk of brain damage to your children?
Allowing your house, your lawn and your water to be polluted with more lead – long recognized as one of the world’s most dangerous neurotoxins and linked to fetal damage, neurological disorders, low school performance and early deaths.
Allowing companies to pump more pollution into your air — enough to put your children into a lottery for 1,500 to 3,600 more premature deaths; 90,000 more asthma attacks; 1,700 heart attacks and 300,000 missed school and work days.
To appoint executives from polluting companies to top spots at agencies in charge of stopping those companies from polluting?
Support measures that will increase the frequency and severity of rain storms pushing your insurance rates higher and dropping your property values?
To push programs that, according to Louisiana’s own coastal agency, will almost guarantee many of our coastal communities will have to move within 40 years?
By now you’re saying “Marshall, you’ve got it all wrong!” We voted for Trump and those other GOPers because they spoke to our deepest frustrations. They validated our feelings that immigrants and people of color are being given unfair advantages; that liberals and educated elites look down their noses at us and ridicule our lifestyles; that we are tired being called a racist or a Nazi for voicing our concerns; that cities – filled with minorities and immigrants – are getting more attention and help than our suburbs; that political correctness is aimed at us but not at minorities or the elites — who, by the way, can insult anyone they want, as long as their targets are white, male and from the South. Bubba Bashing was still OK.
And, of course, we just hated Hillary Clinton.
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