academics entirely at the university administration’s mercy

ROAR Magazine

the neoliberal knowledge economy, most academics find themselves under immense pressure to meet standardized performance criteria, focusing much of their energy on the marketability of their work. These intellectual workers don’t clock out after an 8-hour day, and many are in fact running on a 24/7 schedule. For them, there is no end to the workday and no more life outside of work.

Join this Global Moonshot

#onebillionhappy – Join this Global Moonshot = create a billion happy people!

This mission is my attempt to fulfill the task assigned to me by my happiness idol, my wonderful son, Ali. My hope is that by sharing his message -his peaceful way of living- I may be able to honor his memory and continue his legacy. I tried to imagine the positive impact spreading this message could create, and I realized that maybe it is not for nothing that I have a high-profile job with global reach. So I took on an ambitious mission: To help one billion people become happier, a movement that I ask you to join so that together we can create a small-scale global pandemic of Ali-style joy.

Your “Healthy” Diet Could Be Quietly Killing Your Brain | Psychology Today

Your “Healthy” Diet Could Be Quietly Killing Your Brain | Psychology Today

Source:

"The brain thrives on a fat-rich, low-carbohydrate diet, which unfortunately is relatively uncommon in human populations today," he says. Carbohydrates typically thought of as healthy, even brown rice, 100% whole grain bread, or quinoa—mainstays of many of the most health-conscious kitchens—cause disorders like dementia, ADHD, chronic headaches, and Alzheimer’s, over a lifetime of consumption. By removing these carbohydrates from the diet—harbingers of inflammation, the true source of problems that plague our brains and hearts—and increasing the amount of fat and cholesterol we consume, we can not only protect our most valuable organ, but also potentially, undo years of damage. Cholesterol, for example, long vilified by the media and medical community, actually promotes neurogenesis (the birth of new brain cells) and communication between neurons, to the degree that studies have shown that higher levels of serum cholesterol correlates to more robust cognitive prowess.

The book is also not without serious consideration for cardiovascular system, citing study after study to reaffirm that it’s not fat and cholesterol, but carbohydrates and certain fats—and not the fats that you would think—that are the true enemies of heart and vascular health. Guidelines to eating for above-average health and longevity are not without nuance, but Grain Brain lays out an easy-to-understand roadmap packed with the latest science in a colloquial writing style, never once doubting the ability of its audience to keep up.

As the only doctor in the country who is both a board-certified neurologist and Fellow of The American Board of Nutrition, he deftly covers a topic rarely discussed: How what we eat affects the health of our brain. And considering that deaths from Alzheimer's increased 68 percent between 2000 and 2010, the timing of Grain Brain couldn’t be better.

After reading it, I couldn't wait to sit down with him for a Q&A. (My questions are in bold.)

You’ve stated that carbs of any kind, from natural sugars in fruit to the complex carbs in quinoa and a whole wheat bagel, are detrimental to the brain, to the point that the most serious degenerative brain disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease, are now being referred to as “Type 3 diabetes”. What’s the science behind this?

Carbohydrate consumption leads to blood sugar elevation obviously in the short term, but also, in the long term as well. Persistently challenging the pancreas to secrete insulin to deal with dietary carbohydrate ultimately leads to insulin resistance, a condition directly associated with increased risk for dementia. What’s worse, insulin resistance is the forerunner of type 2 diabetes, a condition associated with a doubling of Alzheimer’s risk. In a recent report in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.(link is external), Mayo Clinic researchers showed that individuals favoring carbohydrates in their diets had a remarkable 89% increased risk for developing dementia as contrasted to those whose diets contained the most fat. Having the highest levels of fat consumption was actually found to be associated with an incredible 44% reduction in risk for developing dementia.

10 Easy Things You Can Do To Improve Your Health Immediately

10 easy things you can do to improve your health immediately

1. Eliminate refined sugar from your diet
Table sugar, brown sugar, high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, and most of the other common sweeteners are poison to your body. Artificial sweeteners are toxic chemicals and should be avoided at all cost. Given a choice, choose white sugar over nutrasweet any day but know that both are terrible for your health.

2. Cut out or at least cut down on all other processed and refined foods
If you’re one of those people who has nothing but microwave dinners in your fridge and snack bars, cereal, and chips in your pantry, you’re not eating healthy. Even if all of those products wear the organic label, processed, refined, and pre-packaged foods should not be your main staples. There are some great meal replacement bars and shakes out there that are very nutritious but they need to be secondary to the mainstay of a healthy diet: raw fresh produce.

3. Get sunlight
Sunlight is natural and we need it. All of life needs sun in one way or another. If you are healthy and do not have toxins oozing out of your pores, then you shouldn’t have to worry about skin cancer. Use common sense. The more fair skinned you are, the less sun you need. Build your tolerance slowly and get a tan.

4. Take the right multivitamin/mineral supplement
If you bought your multivitamin/mineral supplement at gnc or a drug store, you’re probably wasting your money. Any Big Pharma is a Big Mistake, only get multivitamin-mineral supplements from a saft organic provider.

5. Make sure your diet is alkaline
If you follow the previous suggestions, your diet will be alkaline. Cancer, viruses, bacteria, and virtually every other illness or disease from lupus to diabetes thrives on, even generally requires, an acidic environment. Dr. Shillington recommends body balance to help you regain the proper alkaline ph in your body. Body balance is available at his website www.organicsolutionsstore.com.

6. Make sure you get enough omega 3’s
Dr. Kelly recommends cod liver oil by nordic naturals. “this will give you a healthy dose of omega 3s.” He says, “i don’t recommend a 3-6-9 blend because the body can convert omega 3s into 6s and 9s if needed. But it can’t convert anything else into 3s. And you need the 3s to heal. You need the omega 3s to take away inflammation. Studies show that most people will die from inflammation and inflammation related health problems.” Dr. Kelly’s contact information is available on his website www.drtimkelly.net.

7. Hot cold hydrotherapy
Hot and cold hydrotherapy dramatically moves blood and can lower your stress levels for optimum health. Many health practitioners will tell you there is no better way to treat disease than hot and cold hydrotherapy. Take a Hot Shower, and drop it cold before getting out.

8. Workout the right way
Yoga is a great way to get a good, low-impact workout, to tone muscle, and to build stamina. Do something at least a few times a week that will make you break a sweat and breathe heavily. Your body detoxifies through its skin and lungs more than though defecation and urination. Sweating and breathing heavily has many health benefits.

9. Stop suppressing your symptoms
When you take drugs for colds, headaches, and other minor (and major) health ailments you are not making yourself well. You are generally suppressing the symptoms. A lifetime of suppressing symptoms like headaches, sore throats, and coughs will have detrimental affects on your health. When you don’t feel good, your body is trying to tell you something while it tries to fix the problem. Don’t ignore it.

10. Have the right mindset
Dr. Shillington says, “all disease is curable! But not all patients are! There are those who are determined to be victims and who are actually trying to succumb!”

Tax plans and science

Tax plans and science: Some argue that tax cuts will pay for themselves—that is, stimulation of the economy will generate so much additional revenue that increased tax receipts will make up for the loss of revenue associated with decreases in the tax rates. However, analyses from economists from a wide range of perspectives refute this notion. Stimulation of the economy associated with tax cuts will diminish the impact of such cuts, but not nearly enough to pay for lost revenue associated with the rate changes. Ignoring evidence that is widely agreed upon by a field of qualified economists while presenting tax changes that seem to be based on wishful thinking is a bad foundation for policy changes. Evidence and transparency must be brought to bear on the decision-making processes that shape a nation's economic health as the proposed provisions will undermine U.S. science and technology and will substantially influence the lives of many people, alter the ability of the government to support programs including those related to science, and affect generations to come.

However, what continues is provisions emerged from a remarkably opaque process with little or no discussion of their policy objectives or analysis of data that would inform these important decisions.

Avoid all Toxic, Processed, Refined, and Harmful Foods

The research findings and experience of top nutritionists, physicians and dentists have led to the discovery that devitalized foods are a major cause of poor health, illness, cancer and premature death. The enormous increase in the last 70 years of degenerative diseases such as heart disease, arthritis and dental decay substantiate this belief. Scientific research has shown that most of these afflictions can be prevented and that others, once established, can be arrested or even reversed through nutritional methods.

THUS AVOID ALL:

• Refined sugar, artificial sweeteners (toxic aspartame) or their products such as jams, jellies, preserves, marmalades, yogurts, ice cream, sherbets, Jello, cake, candy, cookies, all chewing gum, colas & diet drinks, pies, pastries, and all sugared fruit juices and fruits canned in sugar syrup.
• White flour products such as white bread, wheat-white bread, enriched flours, rye bread that has white flour in it, dumplings, biscuits, buns, gravy, pasta, pancakes, waffles, soda crackers, pizza, ravioli, pies, pastries, cakes, cookies, prepared and commercial puddings and ready-mix bakery products. Most made with dangerous (oxy-cholesterol) powdered milk and powdered eggs. (Health Stores have huge variety of 100% whole grain organic products, delicious breads, crackers, pastas, desserts, etc.)
• Salted foods, such as corn chips, potato chips, pretzels, crackers and nuts.
• Refined white rices and pearled barley.
• Fast fried foods.
• Indian ghee.
• Refined, sugared (also, aspartame), dry processed cereals – cornflakes etc.
• Foods that contain olestra, palm and cottonseed oil. These additives are not fit for human consumption and should be totally avoided.
• Peanuts and peanut butter that contain hydrogenated, hardened oils and any peanut mold and all molds that can cause allergies.
• Margarine – combines heart-deadly trans-fatty acids and saturated fats.
• Saturated fats and hydrogenated oils – enemies that clog the arteries.
• Coffee, decaffeinated coffee, caffeinated tea and all alcoholic beverages. Also all caffeinated and sugared water-juices, all cola and soft drinks.
• Fresh pork and products. Fried, fatty greasy meats. Irradiated GMO foods.
• Smoked meats, such as ham, bacon, sausage and smoked fish.
• Luncheon meats, hot dogs, salami, bologna, corned beef, pastrami and packaged meats containing dangerous sodium nitrate or nitrite.
• Dried fruits containing sulphur dioxide – a toxic preservative.
• Don’t eat chickens or turkeys that have been injected with hormones or fed with commercial poultry feed containing any drugs or toxins.
• Canned soups - read labels for sugar, salt, starch, flour and preservatives.
• Foods containing benzoate of soda, salt, sugar, cream of tartar and any additives, drugs, preservatives; irradiated and genetically engineered foods.
• Day-old cooked vegetables, potatoes and pre-mixed, wilted lifeless salads.
• All commercial vinegars: pasteurized, filtered, distilled, white, malt and synthetic vinegars are the dead vinegars! (Use only Bragg Organic Raw Vinegar)

EPA’s RCRA hazardous waste program was captured by industry

How the Once Tiny Waste Management Industry Captured EPA and Became VERY BIG



the president used that authority to sabotage regulations intended “to protect human health and the environment” in order to fight inflation. Clearly this action was an abuse of power and probably illegal. But this kind of abuse of presidential authority is so commonplace and widespread that it hardly gets noticed.

Whereas personnel in the Washington, DC program offices tend to associate with the industries they regulate, personnel in the regional offices tend to associate with the state governments and the business interests within their region. (In my experience, not too many EPA personnel associate with the people the agency is charged with protecting.)

In the case of the RCRA hazardous waste laws there are two categories of industries regulated, the industries that generate the wastes and the industries that dispose of them. Before the passage of the RCRA in 1976, and for a few years afterward, the philosophy of the Hazardous Waste Management Division, headed by John Lehman, was to write regulations in a way that encouraged industries, especially big industries, to handle their own wastes and not just turn them to someone else to dispose of them. At the time one would see factory designs by engineers showing the layout and flow of various parts of the plant with an arrow coming out labeled “To Waste.” One of our objects was to eliminate that arrow and make waste disposal part of the plant design. This concept was in keeping with the intent and spirit of the RCRA law to reduce the amount hazardous waste generated. The concept was generally accepted (if not completely understood) by our upper management.

There are several reasons why one would prefer hazardous wastes to be handled at the sites where they are produced, if practical, rather than by commercial waste haulers.

• Since a factory will produce only a limited number of different kinds of hazardous wastes, plant engineers can optimally design safe disposal techniques. On the other hand, commercial hazardous waste disposal facilities handle such a wide variety and ever changing kinds of wastes it is impossible to design an optimal facility to treat all the wastes. Indeed, commercial facilities have a dreadful reputation for breakdowns and blow ups.

• Commercial hazardous waste treatment and disposal facilities are run by private companies to make money. Their income is derived from the wastes they bring in. Their costs are derived from the treatment of those wastes. Any successful business works to maximize income and minimize costs. Therefore it is in their interest to prevent any reduction in the amount of hazardous wastes generated and to cut corners on the cost of treating those wastes. On the other hand, if factories treat their own wastes, on site, their incentive is to reduce the amount generated. Waste handling is not treated as a profit center, i.e. it is not run to make money for the company.

This policy (among many other things) was abandoned in the tumult that followed Thomas Jorling’s orders to redirect the drafting of hazardous waste regulations in order to carry out the President’s wishes.

The tumult arose because many Hazardous Waste Management Division staffers were upset by Jorling’s actions and a few of us went public with our concerns. After the resulting press coverage and Congressional oversight hearings, our activities were closely monitored by upper management. Jorling’s chief of staff, Gary Dietrich, replaced the director of the Office of Solid Waste Management, John Lehman’s immediate superior. Lehman kept his job for a while but he was no longer making the policy decisions, Dietrich was. I was transferred to a meaningless position.

The hazardous waste management industry, particularly Waste Management Inc. (WMI), took advantage of this opportunity to lobby even more strongly, especially with Gary Dietrich.

The waste management industry had been busy buying up landfills in anticipation of a windfall in new business and was not entirely happy with the direction the hazardous waste regulations had been going. They wanted strong regulations requiring generators of hazardous waste to use their services but weak regulations on how they could dispose of the wastes. The regulations, when eventually written, in July 1982, accommodated them. (Gary Dietrich left EPA in 1982 for a lucrative position as an expert consultant on hazardous waste.)

Before 1978 it had been EPA policy to discourage landfilling hazardous waste, but with the implementation of RCRA came the explosive growth of the landfill operators, with Waste Management Inc. (WMI) in the forefront.

Wayne Huizenga, WMI’s founder, was driving a garbage truck in Florida when he bought his own, in 1962. In 1968 He formed WMI. By 1969 his single truck had become a fleet. The company’s growth was marked with allegations of ties with organized crime; bribery; unfair competition practices; illegal political contributions; and disregard for the environment. Huizenga’s net worth in 2017 was estimated at $2.6 billion.

RCRA gives the Administrator of EPA no authority or responsibility for creating, promoting, or siting, hazardous waste disposal facilities. Under the law, the Administrator’s responsibility is limited to drafting and enforcing regulations for such facilities so as to “protect human health and the environment.” This limitation probably stemmed from the experience with the Atomic Energy Commission, which was abolished in 1974, but whose authority to both promote and regulate the nuclear power industry created an obvious conflict of interest.

Nevertheless, by 1980, as EPA executives started flocking to lucrative jobs in the hazardous waste disposal industry, EPA actively promoted hazardous waste landfills with ineffective controls and no insurance. It also did little to support alternatives to landfills. In fact, the EPA Administrator did not just promote facilities but, as it will be shown later, he actually required specific facilities to be built.

Under Gary Dietrich’s supervision, EPA finally published woefully weak regulations for the treatment, storage, and disposal of hazardous waste on May 19, 1980, which also established the basic “cradle to grave” approach to hazardous waste management that exists today. On one hand EPA was promulgating regulations requiring industries with hazardous wastes to register and fill out manifests and use only licensed waste haulers to dispose of their hazardous waste. On the other hand there were very few safe places to dispose of them. Into this vacuum poured the waste management industry. Firms like WMI scrambled to buy up old sites and create new ones. As Michael Brown put it:

“Like an imported animal species let loose on virgin soil, the waste brokers have proliferated throughout the nation, settling into a lagoon complex in one place, a landfill in another, and focusing their attention on highly industrialized states—California, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Texas. Several of them—SCA Services, waste Management, Browning-Ferris Industries, Rollins Environmental Services—have reached the proportions of conglomerates, gobbling up independent landfill operations and spreading themselves on vast sites.”

Waste disposal became the growth industry of the 1980s and made lots of fortunes. Its practices were sloppy, their sites were often no better than the ones portrayed in The Killing Ground, and there were credible reports of connections with organized crime. Companies bullied, lied, and bribed their way into poor rural communities who were bamboozled by them[i]. Their money corrupted EPA. Top EPA executives, including five Chief Administrators , numerous Deputy and Assistant Administrators (political appointees) and civil servants were pigs to a trough, taking lucrative jobs in the waste industry.

In order to illustrate the regulatory capture of EPA’s hazardous waste program consider the chart below. On the left side are listed several policies pertaining to hazardous waste management. The first column asks whether the policy was in the public interest. The second column asks whether the policy benefited the landfill operators and the third column asks whether EPA supported the policy.

Table

Hazardous waste management policy	Was policy in the public interest?	Did policy benefit landfill operators?	Did EPA support policy 1979- 1986?
Cradle-to-grave management	yes	yes	yes
Discourage to use of landfills and encourage technological alternatives	yes	no	no
Educate the public on known risks of landfills and other hazardous waste facilities	yes	no	no
Strict oversight on monitoring and reporting	yes	no	no
Punishment for violations great enough to deter violations	yes	no	no
Require insurance and financial responsibility great enough to cover future problems	yes	no	no
Encourage industry to manage its own waste on site	yes	no	no
Encourage waste reduction	yes	no	no
Encourage recycling	yes	no	no

It is seen that except in the first case, the policy interests of the landfill operators were not in the public’s interest yet EPA always supported the landfill operator’s interest. And from what I hear, they still do.

Public opposition to EPA and the waste industry

The only force opposing the waste industry juggernaut and EPA was the NIMBYs. In this context the NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) were local grass root organizations opposed to existing or prospective commercial hazardous waste facilities, usually landfills, in their area. They were frightened at the prospect of an industrial hazardous waste dump the size of several football fields in their “backyards”. They felt they were being given a snow job by the landfill operators, the politicians, the EPA, and local businessmen, who, in many instances, had a financial stake.

Several organizations gave the NIMBYs technical and moral support, support in how to organize and fight. Organizations such as Greenpeace, the North Carolina Waste Awareness and Reduction Network, The Southern Organizing Committee for Racial and Economic Justice, and the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste (CCHW). The latter was founded by Lois Gibbs, the brilliant organizer from the Love Canal toxic waste dump site in upstate New York, who, after victory, moved to the Washington area to create CCHW in 1981. She travels around the country teaching NIMBYs how to organize and fight and she recruited me as an unpaid technical advisor. The NIMBY movement was very successful in thwarting and frustrating the efforts of the hazardous waste management industry and EPA. .

On July 26, 1982, also under Gary Dietrich’s supervision, EPA finally issued landfill standards required by RCRA in 1976. During that period scientific and technical evidence accumulated to show that beyond any reasonable doubt that there is no such thing as a secure hazardous waste landfill and that no one knew how to build one. The preamble to the regulations acknowledged as much. Nevertheless, EPA published regulations which would continue a practice which EPA knew would not work and which will ultimately cost the nation dearly both in terms of health and money.

A hazardous waste landfill is an underground dump which contains thousands of tons of poisonous industrial wastes, most of which remain poisonous forever, and which will dissolve in the rainwater which inevitably passes through it. Throughout the years many technologies have been tried to keep the wastes contained and none have succeeded. On the other hand, EPA has demonstrated many alternative technologies capable of safely recycling, destroying or detoxifying these wastes. Technologies which are readily available but underutilized.

Dumping is popular because it is cheap. It is cheap because unlike the competing alternatives, the real cost of dumping is not borne by the producer of the waste or by the disposer but by the people whose health and property values are destroyed when the wastes migrate onto their property and by the taxpayers who pay to clean it up, such as happened at Love Canal. It was in order to pander to this demand for cheap disposal that the politicians running EPA kept trying to find ways to continue the dumping of hazardous waste in landfills, despite the compelling evidence that it doesn’t work.

The July 26 regulations admit that landfills will leak and cannot be relied on to protect human health and the environment, as required by law. But Dietrich’s solution was that, rather than phasing them out, EPA would provide emergency relief and remedial action when a landfill fails. This is analogous to the Federal Aviation Administration issuing an airworthiness certificate to an airplane it knows to be unsafe but promising additional fire trucks and more hospital beds.

Passed as a response to public anxiety, The Superfund Law (the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA)) was, by 1984, in full force. The act created a fund, paid for by the chemical industry, to clean up past, and often abandoned, hazardous waste dump sites.

Within EPA the Superfund program was managed by the same office that managed RCRA. In other words, the Superfund program, started out captured by the waste management industry and turned out to be still another windfall for it. Pressured by the waste management industry to spend Superfund money as fast as it could, EPA was paying millions to move pollution from one leaking dump site to another. Thousands of tons of dangerous Superfund clean-up wastes were moved to sites that were themselves leaking hazardous waste into the environment. It was inevitable that some sites to which Superfund wastes have been taken would also become Superfund sites.

One case was the Stringfellow dump site near Riverside, California, which had been designated a Superfund site. A firm called BKK was hired by the Superfund program to haul millions of gallons of hazardous waste from the Stringfellow site to BKK’s own landfill in West Covina, California. However, the BKK facility was also reported to be leaking. Moreover, BKK was one of the parties named as responsible for dumping hazardous wastes into the Stringfellow site in the first place. Thus, BKK was paid to dump hazardous wastes in Stringfellow, where it leaked into the environment, and then paid again to haul the wastes from Stringfellow to the BKK facility where it was leaking again. Later the BKK facility also became a Superfund site.

Aided by such shenanigans, Superfund funds soon ran out and had to be replenished. The legal concept of “joint and several liability” was applied (though later reversed by the Supreme Court) to help pay for cleanup. This meant that any one of the many polluters of a dump site could be held responsible for the entire cleanup costs. (Whoever paid could then sue the other polluters for their share of the costs.) This caused a major change in the behavior of the giant corporations, who generated a great deal of the hazardous waste, since the costs of cleaning up these old sites was significant. The concept of big industry handling its own wastes, while at first promoted and later rejected by EPA, was now taking hold, to the consternation of the waste management industry.

Even more bad news for the waste management industry and its EPA allies came in the form of the Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments of 1984 (HSWA). Drafted in response to EPA’s poor performance, HSWA directed EPA to phase out land disposal of hazardous wastes, expanded the public’s ability to sue EPA, and dictated that should EPA miss regulatory deadlines, statutory “hammers” would fall putting into effect strict legislated rules.

New developments in hazardous waste

The waste management industry tried to cope with these new Congressional constraints by promoting a new breed of “scientific” waste management facilities. But the NIMBYs were not fooled.

In 1985, a company called GSX applied for a permit to build a commercial liquid hazardous waste treatment plant in Scotland County, North Carolina, which had a largely poor population of blacks and Native Americans. This was the beginning of a new wave of hazardous waste facilities. Wastewater from the plant would be discharged into the Lumber River, upstream of the drinking water intake of the town of Lumberton. It turned out to be a long, involved case with many unexpected twists, too long to be included here, but there are two especially relevant features of this story.

The first concerns the EPA Administrator under the first President Bush. William Reilly was a professional environmentalist and president of the World Wildlife Fund at the time of his appointment. One of Reilly’s first acts, in April 1989, without any explanation or public discussion, was to reopen the proceedings to withdraw North Carolina’s authority to manage the RCRA hazardous waste program.

North Carolina had written a law in 1987, which prevented construction of the GSX facility, in order to protect public health and the environment. Then GSX and its allies petitioned EPA to withdraw the authority of the State of North Carolina to administer the federal hazardous waste program because, they claimed, the state law unreasonably imposed a law more stringent than the federal law. The regional EPA administrator, Jack Ravan, who later left EPA to become President of Rollins Environmental Services, the country’s second largest hazardous-waste company, supported and promoted GSX. EPA had never faced this kind of dilemma so the administrator, Lee Thomas, commissioned a study (which cost $1.2 million). It was completed in December 1988, when, shortly before leaving office, Thomas issued a policy memo, based on the study, which, among other things, conceded North Carolina’s right to act as it had. One would think that that was the end but it was only the end of round one.

The environmental community was confused, even outraged at Reilly’s decision to reopen the proceedings that his predecessor had closed. The Winston-Salem Journal wrote:

“The criticism of Reilly yesterday came from five of Reilly’s former colleagues — the presidents or executive directors of the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, the Audubon Society, the Environmental Policy Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Reilly had been the president of the Conservation Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund until February, when he became the first professional environmentalist to head the EPA.

Reilly said yesterday in Washington that he was surprised that Jay D. Hair, the president of the National Wildlife Federation, was among his critics.

“Jay Hair hosted the breakfast at which I was lobbied to do the very thing that we are doing,” Reilly said. He said that one of the people who spoke to Reilly at that breakfast was Dean Buntrock, the chairman of Waste Management Inc. of Oak Brook, Ill., the nation’s largest hazardous-waste management company.”

Buntrock was accompanied by two previous EPA executives who by then worked for Waste Management Inc.

So the motivation for Administrator Reilly’s strange behavior was doing some powerful friends a favor. An unnamed EPA official was once quoted as saying “Reilly’s always looked up to rich people, and he’s infatuated by money and prestige. He’s Jay Gatsby.” (from Bill Gifford, “The Life of Reilly,” (February 27, 1990), the Village Voice, New York, NY)

The other relevant feature were the hearings, called by Reilly, to disenfranchise North Carolina’s hazardous waste program, which took place before EPA Administrative Law Judge Spencer T. Nissen.

I sat in on one session of the proceedings. It was a sad spectacle. The lawyer from the EPA Office of General Counsel was accompanied only by lawyers for the waste management industry. Indeed, the industry lawyers answered most of the questions Judge Nissen addressed to EPA. Sitting on the other side, opposed to the industry and EPA, were not only the attorneys for North Carolina, but also two representatives of national environmental organizations, and a representative of a grass-roots citizens group. It was obvious to any observer that EPA was being led in these proceedings by the hazardous waste management industry.

On April 11, 1990, Judge Nissen dropped his bomb. He found for North Carolina and against EPA. His 122-page decision was a sweeping rejection of almost every EPA/hazardous waste management industry position. Some of his specific findings were:

• EPA gave to itself authority to essentially preempt state laws which are more stringent than EPA’s and which interfere with the expansion of the commercial hazardous waste management industry. Judge Nissen suggested that EPA was overreaching by ignoring the clear Congressional message of the Bumpers Amendment that allows states to adopt more stringent hazardous waste laws than the federal program, especially in regard to siting of facilities.

• EPA claimed that the proposed GSX facility, which it was promoting, was environmentally adequate and, therefore, the North Carolina law requiring more stringent environmental standards added nothing to the protection of human health and the environment. Judge Nissen disagreed and found ample justification for North Carolina’s more stringent standards. In order for EPA to reach the conclusion that the North Carolina law was unnecessary it had to ignore the advice of its own experts that the GSX site was, in fact, a threat to the drinking water supply of Lumberton, NC.

• EPA violated its own prohibitions against the use of dilution as a waste treatment technique. EPA had almost no standards for siting hazardous waste facilities but nevertheless tried to prevent North Carolina from establishing standards of its own. EPA claimed that North Carolina’s standard was “arbitrary”, but the finding was that EPA’s own standards were just as “arbitrary”.
• EPA claimed that the real intent of North Carolina’s statute was to block the construction of any commercial hazardous waste facility and that the state’s assertion of an environmental protection motive was a sham. The judge found was that EPA has no business looking beyond the stated purpose of the law, which was to protect the environment.
• Judge Nissen debunked the EPA/hazardous waste industry’s claim that commercial hazardous waste facilities were no different than non-commercial ones and should be treated no differently. Judge Nissen’s finding was that commercial hazardous waste facilities can be far more dangerous than non-commercial facilities and a more stringent standard for them is justified.

In conclusion, stopping GSX was important. It was not the end of the hazardous waste industry’s dominance of EPA’s hazardous waste management program but it put a brake on the expansion of the industry. By running EPA and cowing state governments, the industry was planning on having dozens of sites like GSX all over the country. After the defeat of GSX the industry’s ambitions were more modest and the battle for each site harder fought.

In April 1990 Browning-Ferris Industries, headed by former EPA Administrator Ruckelshaus, discontinued all hazardous waste business. Expansion of the commercial hazardous waste industry would have retarded the impetus of industry to design and operate its factories so as to eliminate or safely treat or dispose its waste on site and reduce or recycle wastes. That was the goal of EPA before it got taken over by the hazardous waste industry. That this goal has been somewhat achieved was due to Superfund, HSWA and Judge Nissen; not EPA. Unfortunately though the defeat of GSX did not change EPA.

William Reilly, Gary Dietrich, Thomas Jorling, Jack Ravan, and many others have violated many specific EPA ethics provisions. These rules state that: “Employees may not use their official positions for private gain or act in such a manner that creates the reasonable appearance of doing so. “Employees therefore must not …. take any action, whether specifically prohibited or not, which would result in or create the reasonable appearance of: (1) Using public office for private gain; (2) Giving preferential treatment to any organization or person; ….. (4) Losing independence or impartiality of action; (5) Making a Government decision outside official channels; or (6) adversely affecting public confidence in the integrity of the Government or EPA.”

Every one of these rules were violated in the cases discussed here but I know of no EPA executives who were punished for it. Indeed they have all prospered. On the other hand, EPA employees had their careers ruined for pointing out such violations.

Authors note: I consider this a prequel to an earlier paper I wrote for Independent Science News titled “Designed to Fail: Why Regulatory Agencies Don’t Work.” This paper tells the story of one instance of regulatory capture while Designed to Fail suggests ways to prevent regulatory capture.

* William Sanjour retired from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2001 after 30 years, most of it spent in regulations. He has written and published articles about why regulatory agencies don’t work and what can be done about it. He has have been invited to testify at numerous Congressional hearings and at state legislatures and citizens groups around the country as well.  He presently sits on the Board of Directors of the National Whistleblowers Center. This article and others can be found on the Web at http://sanjour.info.