EPA Official Ousted For Offending Dow Chemical

At the request of Dow Chemical, the Bush administration forced out one of its own hand-picked EPA regulators on May 1st because she naively attempted to do her job by enforcing the law against Dow. EPA officials told Mary Gade, the federal agency's top Midwest regulator to step down from her post or be fired by June 1. Bush appointed Gade in 2006, but Gade ran afoul of the White House when she pressured Dow Chemical to clean up dioxin pollution extending 50 miles downstream from the company's Michigan headquarters. Dow asked EPA headquarters to intervene. In response EPA chief Stephen Johnson's top deputies repeatedly grilled Gade about the case. When she refused to lay off Dow, they stripped her of her authority and told her to quit or be fired. "There is no question this is about Dow," Gade said. "I stand behind what I did and what my staff did. I'm proud of what we did."

Gade was formerly a loyal George W. Bush supporter and adviser. In 2000, she praised then-governor and candidate Bush for his "fresh approach" and "strong leadership." But her loyalty couldn't shield her from an administration bent on insulating its chemical industry cronies from public health laws.

Bush's Misleading Claims About the Arctic Refuge Denied by Federal Officials

By Mike Papantonio

Last year, 13 people were killed in Minneapolis when a bridge collapsed because our government couldn’t spend the money on critical repairs. Two years before, New Orleans was destroyed and 1,500 people were killed because there was so little money to go around to fix the levees.

The system of maintaining America’s infrastructure in the last eight years has been referred to as “patch and pray.” The no-regulation, no-tax approach to government was unleashed on all of us in 2000. It was as if a giant clown car pulled up to a curb somewhere in our nation’s capital and unloaded a gaggle of politicos who had no real understanding about why tax revenues matter. They called themselves fiscal conservatives.

America’s infrastructure is crumbling because no-tax demagogues have some Americans believing that they can have quality bridges, roads, police and fire departments, schools, libraries and national parks without ever making a sacrifice. The math is not complicated. We can’t maintain bridges and roads while we have a debt of $9 trillion.

When we’re spending $12 billion a month on a desert war that 60 percent of Americans want behind us, it’s pretty tough to build new airports, or replace decrepit, leaking pipes that deliver our nation’s drinking water.