| By Charles Bedell, Esq. LHI Trustee
1998 When you read about the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensationand Liability Act ( CERCLA ) and its "Superfund", you usually learn how the EPA is pursuing the legal descendants of an evil company or two who did something like railroad ties around the turn of the century and left a mess behind when they went out of business in 1944. Although it is an ex post facto law and objectionable in many of its provisions, CERCLA is widely known as a law which holds all polluters feet to the fire to get the funds necessary to clean up sites which threaten public health or theenvironment. All parties are supposed to pay their fair share based on the amount and nature of the material they disposed of at the site. But, is that really what happens, or does the EPA have internal policies which let it pick and choose among "potentially responsible parties" in a way which avoids adverse impacts on its political friends or classes of parties whom it doesn't want to offend?
In fact the EPA has a policy which it uses to discriminate among the potentially responsible parties at a Superfund site. This policy was only finalized in February and is designed to allow the EPA to cut special deals with municipal governments which have liability under CERCLA for the way they operated city dumps or for wastes they illegally disposed of. City governments are offered cut rate, "opt out" settlements which bear norelationship to their level of responsibility at the site in question. These settlement amounts bear no relationship to the true costs of cleaning up the city's waste site. Who will pay those costs? That's right, the evil businessmen ( businesspersons doesn't sound as evil as a word with "-men" as a suffix ).
Why do I think this is another facet of the "Evil Empire"? Is it because it represents a mechanism by which the EPA can, in one fell swoop, further demonize members of the capitalist, business community? Do they like the fact that by letting the cities get cut rate settlements they make businesses pay more than their share? Is it because it allows the EPA favor cities ( which have become serfs of the Federal Government, dependent on the money provided by Washington )? The answer is "yes" in all these cases, but those benefits to big government pale in comparison to the real core reason why the EPA hatched this new, discriminatory policy.
The most important objective of this new EPA policy is to allow them to avoid forcing the public to directly bear any substantial share of the impacts of the enforcement of this basically unfair law. If a city is held liable for its fair share of the cleanup costs at a Superfund site, it might have to raise taxes! The Environmental-Educational-Legal establishment (remember the "military- industrial complex? ) wants to preserve the innocence of the public so that they will continue to tell public opinionpollsters that environmental laws, regulations and controls should be increased. You've seen those polls in which people say they are willing to pay anything to protect the environment. Well, our friends in the Environmental Educational-Legal Establishment ( EELE ) are in fact really slippery and they don't believe their own publicity statements. They know that if the public starts feeling direct hits on their pocketbooks in the form of higher taxes which are clearly linked to the EPA's enforcement of environmental laws, the EPA will lose the public opinion club it holds over politician's heads. When a business has to pay for cleaning up these Superfund sites, they may pass on the costs through increased prices. However, market forcesor the activities of so-called consumer advocacy groups may preclude this. If there are any price increases they may be small per unit and are likely to be spread out to affect consumers all over, rather than only those near the Superfund site. In this way the public never realizes that they really are paying for the cleanups.Although it is clearly necessary for the government to have the power to act to force the cleanup of sites where dangerous wastes threaten public health and the environment, the EPA and the liberal EELE will go to great lengths to use the laws as a tool to divide society into hostile, controllable camps. They want to maintain the populist myth that our society is divided into two classes, the "evilexploiters" / businessmen and the downtrodden masses. They view the great American public as inferiors who are in need of protection and benevolent leadership which can only be provided by the EPA and the EELE. Their credo is that the representatives of
big government are the common man's only protection". That attitude would not have have been out of place in the Court of Louis the Fourteenth, but it makes this American citizen mad!
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