1/3 of all GoFundMe campaigns are for medical bills. From its inception through Jan. 2019 GoFundMehad raised $650 million for those campaigns.
Meanwhile, we have three Zumwalt class destroyer warships (with purchase prices that could have paid for those GoFundMe campaigns 18-36 times over depending on how you count) which are dormant because the Navy can’t settle on which guns to equip them with because the ammunition considered is too expensive to fire (LRLAP at $800k per round, Excalibur at $113k per round, or railgun rounds at $25k each) and isn’t sure any will work since the three ships were delivered and commissioned in a substantially incomplete state.
June 22, 1969: The Cuyahoga River catches fire in Cleveland
The Time article linked above is a good reminder: The EPA didn't come from a vacuum or from the moon.
For those who seek to neuter the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and similar regulatory structures and let the invisible hand of capitalism guide our course it would pay to acknowledge the genesis of this agency.
In 1969 the Cuyahoga river lit on fire - AGAIN. The Cleveland fire chief described it as a, "run of the mill fire," since it had already ignited the slick of industrial runoff that covered it for the 40 odd years preceding at least a dozen other times. In fact, the Time Magazine image that garnered such attention when accompanying the story of the '69 blaze was actually an image from '52.
And the Cuyahoga, while emblematic enough to garner support for the concept of environmental protection agencies (both state and federal) was hardly alone in its pollution. Unregulated dumping existed in most waterways near cities.
Deregulation sounds great when you feel wrapped up in red tape but you may sing a different tune when your neighborhood industrialists are only compelled by their altruism, their PR image and their bottom line.
When they are large enough entities with deep enough pockets or there are multiple entities to diffuse the blame - who goes to bat for the average American who lives next to a river so polluted it lights on fire? What if the source of pollution comes from one state but the average folk live in another?
