, “a pretty, twenty-seven-year-old woman with jetblack hair who proved remarkably adept at dealing with experienced politicians and at keeping the matter in the news.”
In the years since, though, “Superfund” has become a misnomer. The fund grew to nearly $4 billion by the time the “polluter pay” taxes expired in 1995. Gibbs lobbied anyone she could to extend the tax, but the Republican Congress wasn’t interested. The huge pot of cleanup money dwindled and emptied in 2003. As president, Obama vowed to reintroduce the taxes, but bills to reup the fees never left committee.
“All she cared about was climate, everything else went to hell in a handbasket, whether it was water or environmental justice,” Gibbs says, adding, “Gina, that bitch!”Gibbs watched as the agency’s record under Trump and Pruitt began to read like something out of.
Top: Remains of an abandoned residence set ablaze, photographed on August 10, 2020 in Minden, WV. Just a week prior, the house was photographed standing abandoned but intact. As illness forces residents away from Minden, a rash of arson fires have emerged to permanently remove structures that effectively render the land worthless. | M. Scott Mahaskey / POLITICO
Each quarter Gibbs gathers a dozen or so local activists and residents like Worley-Jenkins and Chapman, flies them out to Washington, and marches them up to the third floor of the EPA’s imposing Federal Triangle building. At the meetings, which Covid has now made virtual, residents who have often endured decades of being ignored by Washington discuss the fine-tooth details of their hometown cleanups with administrator Wheeler and a bevy of other political appointees.
On Superfund, says Larry Davis, who fights for the East Chicago USS Steel site, “some political appointees seemed to be pushing the envelope.” Kim Kasten, a Columbia University professor who works with a local non-profit at the Acton, MA site, feels optimistic. “We’re definitely seeing some motion,” she says. Linda Robles, who lives near the polluted Tucson Airport site, agrees: “They are doing good things. I have no complaints.
Sherie Huggins, 32, teaches her daughter Paris Powell, 6, to ride without training wheels in Birmingham, AL, on January 7, 2018. In the background a stack from ERP Coke juts above the landscape. Huggins said"it smells sometimes." | Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images
realDonaldTrump is a leader who cares. He may be abrasive and have the huggability of an irritated hedgehog, but he truly cares. History, and even posterity, will be kinder to him for standing up for America's founding values and foundational strengths than those who didn't.
I love sixty miles from Hanford, arguably one of the worst managed Superfund cleanup sites in the nation. POTUS hasn’t done bunk out here. Leaking buried train cars filled w/radioactive spent fuel rods? No probs.
It’s really hard to ignore all the deregulations they’ve done and think there isn’t an angle. I’m guessing, as the article states, this is done in areas they’re hoping to develop. Maybe the Trump Organization plans on buying the land cheap and developing it. Wouldn’t surprise me.
Buried at the bottom of the story and missing from the headline: 'Trump’s Superfund focus has benefited white people more than people of color'
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