Once again, the regime of malignant moron Donald "Rump" Trump, stands up for the health and safety of the American people:
President Donald Trump's Environmental Protection Agency—already accused of being "pesticide cheerleader"—threw its weight behind chemical company Bayer AG on Friday when the agency asked a federal appeals court to reverse a lower court's ruling in favor of a man who said the company's Roundup weedkiller was responsible for his cancer.
The case centers on Edwin Hardeman of California, who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2015 after using the glyphosate-based pesticide, made by Monsanto, for years on his property. Bayer acquired Monsanto last year.
A federal jury in July ordered the company to pay Hardeman roughly $25 million in damages, a lower amount than the $80 million a federal judge had ordered months earlier.
The EPA maintains—to the outrage of environmental and public health groups—that glyphosate is not a carcinogen. The federal decision notwithstanding, California in 2017 agreed with the World Health Organization's 2015 classification of glyphosate as a "probable carcinogen." Trump's EPA has pushed back on the state's finding and said that product labels informing users of that cancer risk would [be] "misbranding" and announced in August of this year that the agency would not approve of labels carrying that warning.We've all seen that Trump's regime is a rat's nest of industry insiders, lobbyists and extremists like Trump consigliere William "Low" Barr and the EPA's Administrator Andrew Wheeler, himself a former coal industry lobbyist. In case you need to get a quick picture of Wheeler, here's what the Natural Resources Defense Council had to say about him:
Despite his claims to uphold the EPA’s mission, Wheeler has acted in line with his predecessor’s anti-environment agenda. Since his taking over, the agency has moved to weaken federal fuel-efficiency standards, air pollution safeguards, and the Clean Water Rule, which impacts the drinking water supply for millions of Americans. “He’s worked to worsen the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the heat we feel,” Cohen says, “flouting the mission of the EPA at every opportunity.”Even with Wheeler and Barr on their side, Bayer still faces legal challenges; as the Common Dreams article points out, there are currently some 43,000 claims related to Bayer's use of glyphosate in federal courts. However, now that the formerly liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is hearing the appeal, is close to having a Republican majority for the first time in memory (thanks, Moscow Mitch McConnell!), the final disposition of this particular case is hard to predict.
Regardless, it turns out "elections have consequences" can have pretty nasty consequences for a lot of innocent people, and that when the Trump regime talks about "environmental protection," they're only talking about protecting the usual suspects -- the environment's polluters, despoilers, and poisoners.
BONUS: The Washington Post looks at the full scale of Trump's anti- environment attacks, which the malicious moron thinks is a winning political pitch.
(Image: via NRDC)
