3M
pfc teflon forever
MERRI OK
KUSHNER?
JOHN GRAHAM
==
see GOV bak 420
see felony disenfranchise
promoted primary 3/19 look at tags, mercer , koch, horowitz ; beat gillam in blue wave for GOV
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2018 3M
political-chemicals-cleanup-3m-1012445
By Annie Snider11/23/2018
Chemical industry giant 3M is waging an aggressive campaign to stave off new regulations and potentially billions of dollars in damages stemming from a contamination crisis that has fouled tens of millions of Americans’ drinking water.
The Minnesota-based company is putting its lobbying muscle to work in Washington and courting the support of state attorneys general as it faces potentially massive financial liability for toxic pollution linked to two of its nonstick and water repellent chemicals, which have turned up in the water supplies of more than 1,500 U.S. communities.
A key component of 3M’s campaign to fend off government action is a new industry advocacy group that began weighing into the debate this summer, arguing that the chemicals don’t pose a health threat — a conclusion that numerous government agencies and independent studies have disputed. The industry group’s efforts to raise doubts about the science have caused alarm among public health watchdogs who call them reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s old playbook.
3M’s combative posture contrasts with a more conciliatory approach taken by other giant companies that have been implicated in the pollution crisis, as well as the industry’s primary lobbying group, the American Chemistry Council. Those organizations have supported federal efforts to evaluate and regulate the chemicals, banking on the Trump administration to deliver industry-friendly rules.
But as the chemicals’ original and biggest manufacturer, 3M faces a different scale of risk.
A glimpse at the scope of its potential liability emerged in February, when 3M reached an $850 million settlement with Minnesota for damage the company’s chemicals caused to the state’s drinking water. New York state soon filed its own lawsuit, and outgoing Republican Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder asked his state’s attorney general to pursue litigation as well. Meanwhile, dozens of other personal injury, class-action and property damage lawsuits are piling up against the company across the country. Altogether, industry experts say the company’s liability could reach the tens of billions of dollars.
Joshua Aguilar, an equity analyst with Morningstar, said analysts view the Minnesota settlement as a one-off event, at least for now, but that the litigation from other states and class-action suits could threaten the company’s value.
“If you have different jurisdictions where this becomes serious, you have to settle one, you have to settle another, it becomes a contagion effect,” he said.
The chemicals, known as PFOA and PFOS, have been used for five decades in products ranging from firefighting foam to Teflon to 3M’s signature Scotchgard. They take years to break down in the environment, giving them the nickname “forever chemicals.” They also accumulate in human bodies, where they have been linked to kidney and testicular cancer, immune disorders and other ailments — and have been found in more than 99 percent of Americans’ blood.
Communities from New York to Michigan to Colorado have been in an uproar as more contaminations have come to light. Earlier this year, POLITICO reported that the Trump administration sought to block a federal study finding they pose a danger at lower levels than the EPA previously deemed safe — a conclusion one White House said warned could be “a public relations nightmare.” That study, published by an agency of the CDC, finally came out this summer.
3M did not respond to multiple questions from POLITICO about its political activity and lobbying around the chemicals, which are part of a broader category of substances known as PFAS. But it acknowledged its membership in the new advocacy group, the Responsible Science Policy Coalition, as well as being a member of other business-oriented organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable and the American Chemistry Council.
“3M is a technology and manufacturing company committed to scientific research and environmental stewardship,” company spokesperson Fanna Haile-Selassie said in a statement. She noted that the company, which lobbies on a wide variety of topics from taxes to health care, “voluntarily discloses its political activities and the public policy reasons behind them.”
An industry source with knowledge of the Responsible Science Policy Coalition said 3M is its main backer.
3M’s political action committee poured money into state-level campaigns this year including to attorney general candidates in Michigan, Ohio, California and Alabama — all states with major PFAS contaminations. The company also made its first contributions since at least 2013, totaling more than $36,000, to the Republican Attorneys General Association and its Democratic counterpart. Those groups, in turn, donate millions to their parties’ candidates for state attorney general without disclosing which contributions were directed by which corporate donors.
Some attorneys general have proven receptive to the company’s message.
In Alabama, where the chemicals made by 3M’s manufacturing plant in Decatur have contaminated the Tennessee River, a drinking water source for 4.7 million people, the freshly reelected attorney general has refused to join a drinking water utility’s lawsuit against the company. GOP Attorney General Steve Marshall received $2,000 from 3M’s political action campaign, and RAGA gave $735,000 during his bruising primary — a contribution that both Republicans and Democrats in the state argue violates Alabama’s ban on contributions between political action committees. Records do not indicate whether 3M directed any of its RAGA donations to him.
The northern Alabama water utility that supplies some of the state’s poorest communities with water drawn from just downstream of the 3M plant has sued the company over the contamination. The water utility’s manager formally requested Marshall’s help in the litigation an Oct. 12 letter, and said that Marshall’s predecessor, former Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange, had been collaborating with the water utility on the issue before Strange was appointed to the state’s open U.S. Senate seat in February 2017. But Marshall told a Huntsville television station last month that he is trying to determine whether his office has a role in the contamination case, WHNT-TV reported.
“I’m not the environmental watchdog,” he told the station. “My job is to make sure that we enforce the laws and do things that are appropriate for the people of this state.”
Marshall’s office declined to respond to POLITICO’s queries about the campaign contributions or his stance on the lawsuit.
State attorneys general were also the audience for the first public appearance of the Responsible Science Policy Coalition.
The coalition’s lobbyist warned against acting too fast to regulate the chemicals when he spoke on a panel at the Conference of Western Attorneys General in New Mexico in July.
“So much of what you see in emerging chemicals is people jump forward because of public pressure and things like that, make decisions, but then as more science emerges, we realize, ‘Oh, maybe that wasn’t the right decision,’ and it’s very hard to pull things back once you’ve done them,” lobbyist Jonathan Gledhill told the attorneys general, according to 
posted online by the conference.
Representatives of the coalition have also met with several congressional offices and EPA political appointees in recent months, arguing that “the weight of current scientific evidence does not show that PFOS or PFOA cause adverse health effects in humans at current levels of exposure.” That conclusion flies in the face of findings by leading independent scientific researchers, EPA and the CDC.
The lobby group contends it is simply interested in assuring a sound process.
“The Coalition supports EPA’s ongoing efforts to evaluate and develop appropriate regulations and guidance for PFAS and to collaborate on testing, remediation and research that will help assist federal agencies, states and communities to more comprehensively evaluate PFAS occurrences,” coalition attorney James Votaw said in a statement to POLITICO.
But Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the strategy a classic industry approach to delaying and undermining regulations.
“The goal is to stave off regulation by questioning the science,” Halpern said. He likened the new industry group to a similarly named organization, the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, that the tobacco industry used in the early 1990s to attack EPA’s findings on secondhand smoke.
Briefing materials from the Responsible Science Policy Coalition obtained by POLITICO feature charts comparing the average concentration of the chemicals in Americans’ blood with the levels at which the chemicals have been found to harm animals in industry-backed studies. The implication is that humans’ exposure is far below the level that causes harm.
But David Savitz, an epidemiologist at Brown University’s School of Public Health, called the approach “disingenuous.” He said scientists recognize that humans’ bodies aren’t the same as those of lab animals, and they adjust the comparisons to account for those differences.
Moreover, he said, looking at the average person’s exposure is misleading because people living near contaminated hotspots, like manufacturing sites or military bases, have far higher risks.
Indeed, 3M’s own internal documents, which were handed to the Minnesota attorney general’s office as part of the lawsuit that settled in February, show that the company has known since the 1970s that the chemicals were toxic, according to reporting by The Intercept.
The coalition’s efforts to question the chemicals’ harm have set off alarm bells on Capitol Hill, where Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, pressed Trump administration officials during a recent hearing to dispute the group’s arguments that the chemicals aren’t linked to illnesses.
“What this country needs is responsible regulation to protect the public’s health and the environment, not more efforts to delay solutions and downplay risks,” Carper said in a statement to POLITICO.
3M’s campaign against government regulation has even caused concern from others within industry. DuPont, which faces major liabilities for PFOA, and the industry’s biggest lobbying group, the American Chemistry Council, have backed EPA’s efforts to evaluate and regulate the chemicals, banking on the Trump administration to write the most industry-friendly regulations that they can hope for.
“You are never going to have a more favorable administration than this administration to set standards,” a person in the industry said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal industry discussions. “It doesn’t get any better than this.”
Former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt committed to taking the first step toward potentially regulating PFOA and PFOS in drinking water and setting cleanup standards. His successor, acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler, has reiterated that pledge.
Asked about agency officials’ meetings with 3M and the new coalition, EPA spokeswoman Molly Block said they have met with a “variety” of individuals and officials about the chemicals. She said the agency will issue a plan that outlines short- and long-term steps for dealing with the chemicals.
Still, a version of the strategy 3M is deploying at the national level has already borne fruit in the company’s home state of Minnesota. There, years before this February’s hefty legal settlement, 3M persuaded lawmakers and regulators to pull back from formally declaring the chemicals hazardous — a designation that could have brought even wider-reaching legal consequences.
But now the company is facing a new challenge, from a novel legal technique aimed at short-circuiting 3M’s efforts to question the science.
As part of a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of residents near DuPont’s Teflon manufacturing plant in Parkersburg, W.Va., a decade and a half ago, DuPont agreed to do medical monitoring and to convene an independent science panel to evaluate PFOA’s health effects. Those studies produced the lion’s share of evidence about the chemical’s effects on human health. And crucially, the settlement required that the company not only fund the independent research but be bound by its findings.
This February, that science led to a settlement between DuPont and residents affected by its plant’s water contamination, with the company agreeing to pay $670 million to 3,550 residents.
The Cincinnati attorney behind that suit has since filed a new lawsuit, on behalf of an Ohio firefighter, that seeks to create another independent science panel that would look at PFOA, PFOS and other chemicals in the class, whose findings would bind 3M, DuPont, Chemours and other major manufacturers of the chemicals.
“There is tremendous fear, anxiety, and uncertainty across the country as to the serious public health threat posed by PFAS contamination,” the attorney, Robert Bilott, said in a news release announcing the lawsuit in October. “This lawsuit could provide a mechanism for addressing and resolving those concerns through a truly comprehensive and independent, science-based process paid for by those that actually created the problem — and not by the American taxpayers.”
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Even after years of reporting on forever chemicals, ProPublica reporter Sharon Lerner had questions that nagged at her. She knew that a handful of 3M scientists and lawyers had learned in the 1970s that one of the company’s fluorochemicals, PFOS, had seeped into the blood of people around the country and that company experiments around that time had shown that PFOS was toxic. But 3M kept making the compound until 2000. What did it mean, Lerner wondered, for a sprawling multinational company to know that its products were dangerous even as it kept making them? Who at the company knew? And how much, exactly, did they know? And how had 3M kept its dark secret for decades? For years, no one from inside the company had spoken publicly. Then last year, a former 3M chemist reached out to Lerner.
“Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe” offers the inside story of how the company allowed PFOS to seep into all of us while sitting on research that showed the chemical is toxic.
Through Lerner’s reporting, we learned that in the late 1990s, when 3M chemist Kris Hansen showed her colleagues that its chemicals had been detected in the blood of people across the country, her bosses questioned her findings, halted her work and reassigned her to other projects. They told her the chemical wasn’t harmful — even though 3M’s own experiments in the 1970s had shown it was toxic. The known dangers of PFOS had remained hidden from the public and from many at the company for years.
When Hansen learned, decades later, how much the company had known and how little it had told her, she felt enraged at 3M and at herself. For years, she had repeated the company’s claim that PFOS was not harmful. “I’m not proud of that,” she told Lerner. With ProPublica’s help, she’s making these secrets, and the process through which they were kept, public.
Even after learning that the compound was toxic and accumulating in people’s bodies, 3M continued to produce tens of millions of pounds of PFOS and other chemicals that break down into it. In 2022, in the face of mounting lawsuits over PFAS, 3M said that it would stop making the broader group of forever chemicals known as PFAS and “work to discontinue the use of PFAS across its product portfolio” by the end of 2025. (PFOS is a PFAS compound.) When ProPublica sent the company detailed questions about Hansen’s account, a spokesperson responded without answering most of them or mentioning Hansen by name. In a written statement, a 3M spokesperson said that the company “is proactively managing PFAS” and that its approach to the chemicals has evolved along with “the science and technology of PFAS, societal and regulatory expectations, and our expectations of ourselves.” The company and its scientists have not admitted wrongdoing or faced criminal liability for producing forever chemicals or for concealing their harms.
When Hansen was ready to tell her story, she reached out to Lerner, specifically, because of the reporter’s body of work. Lerner had spent nearly a decade extensively detailing how manufacturers of forever chemicals like 3M covered up the dangers.
Thanks to Lerner’s commitment, and Hansen’s willingness to speak, we now know more about corporate cultures of silence, systematic compartmentalization of research and suppression of dangerous and expensive truths. Trusted nonprofit investigative newsrooms like ProPublica’s, with relentless reporters who stick with a story for decades, play a critical role in bringing long-held toxic secrets to light.
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https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/epa-white-house-pfas-pfoa-pfos/
the CHEMICALS ARE linked to cancer, reproductive and developmental harm, liver problems, and immune dysfunction. They stay in the body for years — and persist in the environment indefinitely. And they’ve contaminated thousands of sites around the country, including hundreds where the military used firefighting foam laced with the chemicals. Yet somehow the industrial compounds PFOS and PFOA —part of a family of chemicals called PFAS — are not hazardous, according to the Trump administration.
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency promised to designate the two chemicals as hazardous substances more than two years ago. And staff completed its work on the policy change in September of last year, according to agency insiders. But the proposed change to the law, which would help hold polluters liable for billions of dollars of costs of cleaning up the toxic chemicals, has stalled at the White House.
At a summit on the PFAS chemicals held on May 22,2018, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt
that the agency would designate PFOS and PFOA as “hazardous substances.” While seemingly a mere technical tweak, the change in the official categorization of the chemicals, which were used for nonstick coatings and in firefighting foam and have contaminated industrial areas and military sites, would help “to get accountability,” as Pruitt noted at the time.
“This administration hasn’t taken a single action to reduce the ongoing emissions of PFAS, to clean up legacy PFAS pollution or any take any meaningful action to require water utilities to take PFAS out of the drinking water,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group. “The PFAS Action Plan was just a plan to plan.”Pruitt also said that the EPA would develop toxicity values for two other PFAS chemicals, GenX and PFBS, which were introduced as sustainable substitutes for PFOA and PFOS, respectively, but have since also been found to have contaminated water around the country and present many of the same healthdangers as the chemicals they replaced. The development of the GenX and PFBS values, a critical step toward regulating the chemicals, was already underway and “should be done by December of this year,” Pruitt said back in 2018.
While Pruitt resigned amid a swirl of ethical scandals three months after speaking at the summit, both commitments made it into the PFAS Action Plan, which the agency issued in February 2019 under the leadership of Pruitt’s successor, Andrew Wheeler. At the time of the plan’s release, the agency said that “EPA has already begun the regulatory development process for listing PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances.” Wheeler described the 72-page document as “the most comprehensive cross-agency plan it has ever undertaken to address a chemical,” according to a CNNreport, which explained that action items were “expected to take months to implement."
yet almost two years later, the Trump administration has not finalized the hazardous substances designation for PFOA and PFOS, released the toxicity standards for the two chemicals, or taken several other steps promised in what it continues to tout as an aggressive plan to address PFAS pollution.
Asked about the delayed action on PFAS, a spokesperson for the EPA referred me to statements EPA administrator Wheeler made in a speech he delivered at the American Enterprise Institute last week. “The PFAS family of chemicals have been around since at least the 1950s and no administration ever took them on,” Wheeler said to the audience at the right-wing think tank. “In 2019 EPA took the historic step of creating a PFAS Action Plan that uses all our program offices to deal with this emerging chemical of concern.”
While several policy promises remain unfulfilled, some of the work necessary to make those changes was completed long ago, according former EPA staff members.
Jim Woolford, who was director of the EPA’s superfund program from 2006 until retiring in April, said that he and his colleagues began work on the rule that would have designated PFOS and PFOA as hazardous substances in the late spring of 2019. “I can’t tell you how many hours my staff put into that,” said Woolford, who described several months of late nights during which his team pulled together scientific research that provided the justification for the hazard designation and coordinated with other offices within the EPA. After several rounds of edits, his team handed in their final draft of the proposed regulation in September 2019.
“Then it just sat there,” said Woolford.
Aggressive Delays
While the Trump EPA has openly expressed its derision for climate protections, the agency has fashioned itself as aggressively leading the fight for PFAS-polluted communities across the country. Yet even as the Trump administration is racing to finish some of its work in other areas, it is slow-walking promised changes to clean up PFAS contamination, according to environmental advocates.
The designation of PFAS as hazardous substances is a central focus of their criticism because it would be hugely consequential for polluted communities that have been unable to get polluters to pay to clean up the chemicals left behind from firefighting foam and industrial processes. If a chemical is deemed hazardous, its discovery automatically triggers an investigation and possible cleanup. Despite the fact that PFAS have been shown to persist indefinitely in nature and to cause multiple diseases, including cancer, PFAS still lack the designation, which gives agencies discretion over whether or not to clean them up. Critically, the hazardous substance designation would permit polluted communities to sue for cleanup costs.
In Oscoda, Michigan, near the Wurtsmith Air Force Base, PFOS-laden foam floats on lakes, and the fish are too contaminated to eat. Yet the Air Force has argued that, because the chemical isn’t officially a hazardous substance, “the federal government is immune” from a state law that would have required them to clean up the highly polluted base to the state’s legal standard.
“DOD will just not comply with it,” said Anthony Spaniola, an attorney and activist with Need Our Water in Oscoda. While Spaniola waits for the EPA to make good on its pledge to designate PFOA and PFOS as hazardous, he has been trying to devise other strategies to compel the military to clean up the pollution. “But even when the Air Force treats you like dirt, suing them is really difficult,” he said. “And every time we think we find a new legal avenue, it always leads back to the hazardous substances designation. We just can’t get past it.”
Read Our Complete CoverageBad Chemistry
The military has pointed to the fact that PFAS aren’t yet officially hazardous in justifying their decisions not to clean up the chemicals in other recent cases. In New Mexico, the Air Force challenged a state permit that defined PFAS as hazardous substances last year. And the Air Force defended its decision not to clean up PFAS pollution that was beyond the boundaries of three bases in Georgia because the chemicals aren’t regulated.
Asked about the pollution in Michigan, New Mexico, and Georgia, Air Force spokesperson Mark Kinkade emailed a statement that said, in part, “The Air Force is part of the communities where we serve, and we share community concerns about this issue. The Air Force has aggressively tackled PFOS/PFOA contamination of drinking water, and will continue to take action to protect drinking water.”
While the statement acknowledged that the Air Force has already begun to address the releases of PFOS and PFOA “attributable to Air Force mission related activities,” it pointed out, “We are not yet in the part of the process when determinations are made concerning risk and the need for and standards to be used for cleanup. Consequently no decisions concerning cleanup have yet been made. We recognize people have many concerns about potential contamination, and we will continue to partner in good faith with local communities, state regulatory authorities, federal interagency partners, and Congress to address unacceptable risks posed by PFOS/PFOA.”
Kinkade’s statement also noted that “the Air Force looks to the Department of Defense to determine if the standards are to be used as potential cleanup levels.”
A statement from the Department of Defense in response to questions for this story said, “DoD has taken action to quickly address PFOS and PFOA in drinking water from DoD activities. No one is drinking water above the Environmental Protection Agency’s lifetime health advisory level where DoD is the purveyor of the water. DOD continues to work closely with the EPA and other partners to gain a better understanding of PFAS, including support for EPA establishing objective, science-based regulatory standards under the federal clean up law.”
Part of a filtration system designed to filter out PFAS from the drinking water supply in Horsham, Pa., on Aug. 22, 2019.
Photo: Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The Navy has taken a similar tack in Horsham, Pennsylvania,where it halted the removal of contaminated soil from the former Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Willow Grove in June 2019. “There is no requirement to take the soil out,” Gregory Preston, director of the Navy’s Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission’s Program Management Office East, said by way of explaining the decision. “There are no limits, there are no regulations.”
Two suits filed by families living near the same base in Pennsylvania whose water was contaminated by PFAS-containing firefighting foam were dismissed in January because the chemicals aren’t officially considered hazardous. The Navy pays when PFOA and PFOS are present in drinking water at levels above 70 parts per trillion — a nonbinding health advisory level the EPA set in 2016. But even though many experts feel that level is not low enough to protect health, the Navy and other branches of the military won’t pay for providing clean water when there is contamination that doesn’t meet that threshold. Some districts that do remove lower levels of the chemicals are often left shouldering the burden of those costs.
“In this community alone, the townships went out of pocket $15 million,” said Mark Cuker, an attorney who represented one of the families who sued the military over the contamination near the Pennsylvania base.
Dozens of private well owners also had contamination that fell below the federal cutoff. “If it were a hazardous substance, they could have forced the Navy to provide bottled water, pay for a filtration system on their well, or connect them to public water,” said Cuker. Instead, part of the cost of addressing the water contamination was covered by a $10 million grant from the state — a solution Cuker said let the Navy off the hook.
“Why are the Pennsylvania taxpayers having to subsidize the cleanup of pollution that the Navy put into our community?” he asked.
A spokesperson for the Navy referred The Intercept to the Department of Defense response.
Tens of Billions at Stake
The thousands of sites polluted by military and industrial activity will cost tens of billions of dollars to clean up, according to experts. And the massive liability at stake both for the military and the chemical manufacturers is likely at the root of the failure to designate PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances, said the Environmental Working Group’s Faber.
“No one believes PFAS pollution is something that should remain in our soil and water,” said Faber. “The only dispute is over who should pay for it. Should it be the companies that knowingly and secretly contaminated our water and soil for decades? Or should it solely be the taxpayers?”
Meanwhile, residents of contaminated communities across the country have expressed feeling powerless over polluters, and the companies that stand to lose if the change is finalized have the administration’s ear, according to Faber. “I’m confident that many of the industries who helped create the PFAS contamination crisis are also big donors to the campaign to reelect Donald Trump,” he said.
Although corporations are barred from contributing to federal candidates’ campaigns, the idea of holding companies liable for pollution is clearly of great interest to many large and influential corporations.3M, DuPont, Chemours, and Daikin Industries were among the chemical manufacturers that lobbied on the PFAS Action Act, which was introduced in the House in 2019 and passed in January 2020. The bill calls for making PFOS and PFOA hazardous substances along with other steps to regulate the chemicals.
While there are questions about whether chemical manufacturers may dodge liability for PFAS pollution by using an exemption to the Superfund law for manufacturers of useful products, other companies are likely to find themselves on the hook for cleanup costs if PFOA and PFOS are deemed hazardous. Oil companies, which have used firefighting foam to put out fires at refineries and rigs, may also face costly suits. Royal Dutch Shell, Phillips 66, BP, Exxon Mobil, and the American Petroleum Institute were among dozens of companies and trade associations that lobbied on the bill.
The EPA hasn’t officially backed away from its plan for the hazardous designation, but in January, the White House weighed in against the PFAS Action Act, saying that it “would create considerable litigation risk, set problematic and unreasonable rulemaking timelines and precedents, and impose substantial, unwarranted costs on Federal, State, and local agencies and other key stakeholders in both the public and private sectors.”
Some of the resistance in taking steps to regulate PFAS comes from the Department of Defense, according to Betsy Southerland, who worked at the EPA for 30 years and most recently served as director of science and technology in the Office of Water. Southerland resigned in protest of industry influence over the agency in 2017. The Defense Department reacted badly to the EPA’s release of a drinking water health advisory for PFOA and PFOS in 2016, according to Southerland, who oversaw the work on the health advisory. “DOD knew they had all this contamination, so they were furious,” she said.
According to Southerland, those tensions influenced guidance for the cleanup of groundwater near contaminated sites, which the EPA committed to at the 2018 summit. Such guidance typically includes three numbers — two lower values to guide monitoring and standard cleanup as well as a third higher emergency threshold, which allows the EPA to immediately step in to protect people from dangerous drinking water. But the groundwater guidance the EPA released at the end of 2019 didn’t include the crucial number that would allow the agency to take emergency action.
“When I saw that,” Southerland said, “I thought: DOD won.”
Regulatory Foot-Dragging
While it has issued a provisional toxicity value for PFBS to be used at Superfund sites, the EPA has yet to finalize the assessments of PFBS and GenX, which it released in draft form and shared with the White House Office of Management and Budget in November 2018. The delay sets back the process of setting binding limits on the chemicals under the Safe Drinking Water and Clean Water Act, which are built on these toxicity values.
Emily Donovan, who lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, where drinking water is polluted with GenX, has been eagerly anticipating those numbers for years. While she has been waiting, scientists have identified four other PFAS compounds from the same local plant that have been found both in the local drinking water and in the blood of people who drink that water. While the EPA hasn’t finalized the GenX value, it has yet to even announce plans to assess the toxicity of these newer compounds, which has infuriated Donovan. “We are continually seeing our neighbors get sick and the EPA can’t even figure out if the four new compounds in our blood in North Carolina are harmful,” said Donovan, who dismissed the commitments made in the EPA’s action plan as “propaganda.”
Part of the two-year delay in finalizing the GenX and PFBS standards can be explained by additional scientific requirements the Trump administration has imposed on them, said Southerland.
Even though the draft values had undergone extensive peer review before they were issued in November 2018, the Trump administration sent them “back to the National Toxicology Program to make sure the studies were appropriate,” Southerland said. “They’re looking for opportunities where they can challenge the scientific underpinnings.”
The treatment of the draft assessments was in keeping with the Trump administration’s foot-dragging approach to the chemicals, according to Southerland. “It’s just been a struggle to get anything done on PFAS because [the Office of Management and Budget] always tries to see if there’s a way to challenge the science,” she said.
Asked about the delays, a spokesperson for OMB emailed the following statement: “Your question demonstrates your lack of understanding of the interagency review process. OMB facilitates interagency review. Nothing is being ‘held up’ and the Administration is executing on its PFAS plans across many more agencies than just EPA. Your view is also likely too narrow.”
The glacial pace at which the EPA is evaluating the toxicity of just these two chemicals bodes poorly for its ability to evaluate the more than 600 other PFAS compounds that are in active use, Southerland said. “At that rate, it’ll take us generations to do them all,” she said. “If that’s the aggressive PFAS action plan that Wheeler touts all the time, then, wow. That’s very disappointing.”
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no lnx an 420
Trump continues to base policy on what he hears on Fox News
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / The Washington Monthly April 4, 2020
On Thursday night, Donald Trump finally invoked the Defense Production Act. He made the announcement on Twitter, of course.
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We hit 3M hard today after seeing what they were doing with their Masks. “P Act” all the way. Big surprise to many in government as to what they were doing – will have a big price to pay!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 3, 2020
According to a report from Kevin Breuninger, the president issued an order on Thursday night directing Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to “use any and all authority available under the Act to acquire, from any appropriate subsidiary or affiliate of 3M Company, the number of N-95 respirators that the Administrator determines to be appropriate.”
Here is the response from 3M’s CEO.
“The narrative that we aren’t doing everything we can as a company is just not true,” 3M CEO Mike Roman says, after President Trump criticized the manufacturing giant and invoked the DPA to force 3M to step up production of respirator masks. https://t.co/Lfa4xPqVwo pic.twitter.com/3cxA2FUDiu
— CNBC (@CNBC) April 3, 2020
In commenting on this, Kevin Drum identified the problem with Trump’s selective use of this authority.
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The White House didn’t explain this, and it’s a little unnerving to see Trump using the DPA in such a gleefully punitive way. It’s supposed to be a technocratic tool for coordinating production, not a way for a president to score political points on Twitter.
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All of this raises the question of what 3M did that earned the ire of the president.As it turns out, this segment of Tucker Carlson’s show aired on Fox News not long before Trump fired off his tweet.
Tucker Carlson & @JaredEMoskowitz Calling Out @3M Selling Masks to Foreign Governments Instead of to Americans
Jared: “I can’t & other emergency management directors can’t get this life-saving PPE because a company decided to make a Globalist decision and not put America First.” pic.twitter.com/wPoFQnm6ej
— The Columbia Bugle ???? (@ColumbiaBugle) April 3, 2020
Carlson’s guest, Jared Moskowitz, works for Republican Governor Ron DeSantis as his director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management. He railed about not being able to get face masks from 3M.
It is difficult to sort out the truth from the lies in that segment. Some of the issues Moskowitz is pointing to surfaced after we learned that the federal government, probably under the direction of Jared Kushner, has turned the supply chain for these critical supplies over to the private sector. Josh Marshall documented the issues that raises.
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First is that there’s no clear mechanism to allocate these supplies on the basis of need based on a coherent national plan or framework. Secondly, it opens the door to massive profiteering. Even if companies aren’t technically gouging, that’s what bidding is. And you really can’t call this a legitimate private sector market if every state is having to bid with private companies to secure medical supplies during a historic national health emergency. The private sector rationale is also undermined if the US military has taken over a significant part of the fulfillment process.
The man who turned around the Bush administration’s botched response to Katrina, Lt. General Russel Honore, explained why that is a recipe for disaster.
After hearing the White House say critical supplies are going to commercial distributors who are then selling them to the states which are begging for help, I called @ltgrusselhonore who commanded federal troops after Hurricane Katrina to get his reaction. Watch this: pic.twitter.com/x7u3qoQ0v6
— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) April 3, 2020
Regardless of any complicity on the part of 3M, none of the issues Moskowitz complained about would be happening if this administration was taking charge of the supply chain rather than turning it over to the private sector. Those are the facts.
But beyond all of that, what we see is that once again the President of the United States took retributive action based on a segment he watched on Fox News. If you think his son-in-law, who has now been put in charge of managing this effort, will do any better, take a look at this.
Well, this is concerning.
Kushner says Trump finally acted on addressing supplies shortages after hearing about them “just this morning” from “friends of his in New York.”
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Not the governor. Not the hospitals. Friends.
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This is how Trump runs your country. pic.twitter.com/vlwDR86WWs
— DNC War Room (@DNCWarRoom) April 2, 2020
What we have is a president who, during a national emergency, is directing policy based on what he hears on Fox News and from his “friends.” Of course, that’s what he’s always done. In the past, it was bad news. But it is now unconscionable.
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COVID IS A STRESS TEST WE FAIL:
aha soc safe net is a buffer, adds resilience, includes unemployment insurance that keeps workers alive when they get fired (slowly in case of "creative destruction" mkt shifts, or more sudden recession / pandemic); so it enables capitalism, basically a subsidy to corps?!
eg
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/this-is-horrible-florida-republicans-furious-after-unemployment-system-they-mangled-puts-trumps-re-election-in-jeopardy/
no lnx
‘This is horrible’: Florida Republicans furious after unemployment system they mangled puts Trump’s re-election in jeopardy
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covid fail, spring brk beaches open; bet they wish they had Gillum now
https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/conservative-pundit-blasts-floridas-gop-governor-for-risking-the-lives-of-millions/
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Bad Chemistry3M Knew About PFAS Food Contamination in 2001
Sharon Lerner
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Drinking Water Crisis Update: Supplies in 43 States Found Contaminated With Harmful PFAS Chemicals
1 hour ago
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intercept
New Jersey Is Making Companies Pay for Toxic Contamination — Shining a New Light on a Little-Known Offender
Sharon Lerner — 4:30 a.m.
In the absence of federal regulations, New Jersey is the first state to set safety levels for PFAS contamination and make companies pay for clean up.
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Corporate Centrality
"Centrality" is a concept with two components, a large number of interlocks, plus the degree to which those interlocks are with other companies with a large number of interlocks. These two components are brought together through programs based on matrix algebra (Bonacich, 1972) and Boolean algebra (Bonacich & Domhoff, 1981). (The matrix algebra algorithm, along with many other network measures, is available on UCINET, which can be found at www.analytictech.com.) In the past, banks were invariably the most central organizations in the corporate network, but not any more. In a study of centrality using interlocking directorates among 100 corporations and 109 nonprofits, Citigroup and J. P. Morgan Chase, both headquartered in New York, were among the 10 most central organizations, but they were joined by Sara Lee in Chicago and 3M in St. Paul, which by coincidence were the 104th and 105th largest corporations on the Fortune 500 list a few years ago (Moore, Sobieraj, Whitt, Mayorova, & Beaulieu, 2002, Table 3). According to TheCorporateLibrary.com, in 2004 Sara Lee had ten directors who linked to 31 other companies, which in turn linked to 267 companies, and 3M had 11 directors who linked to 31 other companies, which in turn linked to 297 more companies. In looking at the Sara Lee and 3M networks, keep an eye out for any companies they might share in common.
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robt r
The Increasing Irrelevance of Corporate Nationality
“You shouldn’t get to call yourself an American company only when you want a handout from the American taxpayers,” President Obama saidThursday.
He was referring to American corporations now busily acquiring foreign companies in order to become non-American, thereby reducing their U.S. tax bill.
But the President might as well have been talking about all large American multinationals.
Only about a fifth of IBM’s worldwide employees are American, for example, and only 40 percent of GE’s. Most of Caterpillar’s recent hires and investments have been made outside the US.
In fact, since 2000, almost every big American multinational corporation has created more jobs outside the United States than inside. If you add in their foreign sub-contractors, the foreign total is even higher.
At the same time, though, many foreign-based companies have been creating jobs in the United States. They now employ around 6 millionAmericans, and account for almost 20 percent of U.S. exports. Even a household brand like Anheuser-Busch, the nation’s best-selling beer maker, employing thousands of Americans, is foreign (part of Belgian-based beer giant InBev).
Meanwhile, foreign investors are buying an increasing number of shares in American corporations, and American investors are buying up foreign stocks.
Who’s us? Who’s them?
Increasingly, corporate nationality is whatever a corporation decides it is.
So instead of worrying about who’s American and who’s not, here’s a better idea: Create incentives for any global company to do what we’d like it to do in the United States.
For example, “American” corporations get generous tax credits and subsidies for research and development, courtesy of American taxpayers.
But in reducing these corporations’ costs of R&D in the United States, those tax credits and subsidies can end up providing extra money for them to do more R&D abroad.
3M is building research centers overseas at a faster clip than it’s expanding them in America. Its CEO explained this was “in preparation for a world where the West is no longer the dominant manufacturing power.”
3M is hardly alone. Since the early 2000s, most of the growth in the number of R&D workers employed by U.S.-based multinational companies have been in their foreign operations, according to the National Science Board, the policy-making arm of the National Science Foundation.
It would make more sense to limit R&D tax credits and subsidies to additional R&D done in the U.S. over and above current levels – and give them to any global corporation increasing its R&D in America, regardless of the company’s nationality.
Or consider Ex-Im Bank subsidies – a topic of hot debate in Washington these days. These subsidies are intended to boost exports of American corporations from the United States.
Tea Party Republicans call them “corporate welfare,” and Chamber-of-Commerce Republicans call them sensible investments. But regardless, they’re going to “American” multinationals that are making things all over the world.
That means any subsidy that boosts their export earnings in the United States indirectly subsidizes their investments abroad – including, very possibly, their exports from foreign nations.
GE, a major Ex-Im Bank beneficiary, has been teaming up with China to produce a new jetliner there that will compete with Boeing for global business. (Boeing, not incidentally, is another Ex-Im beneficiary). In fact, GE is giving its Chinese partner the same leading-edge avionics technologies operating Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner.
Caterpillar, another Ex-Im Bank beneficiary, is providing engine funnels and hydraulics to Chinese firms that eventually will be exporting large moving equipment from China. Presumably they’ll be competing in global markets with Caterpillar itself.
Rather than subsidize “American” exporters, it makes more sense to subsidize any global company – to the extent it’s adding to its exports from the United States.
Which brings us back to American companies that are morphing into foreign companies in order to lower their U.S. tax bill.
“I don’t care if it’s legal,” said the President. “It’s wrong.”
It’s just as wrong for American corporations to hide their profits abroad – which many are doing simply by setting up foreign subsidiaries in low-tax jurisdictions, and then making it seem as if the foreign subsidiary is earning the money.
Caterpillar, for example, saved $2.4 billion between 2000 and 2012 by funneling its global parts business through a Swiss subsidiary (a ruse so audacious that one of its tax consultantswarned Caterpillar executives to “get ready to do some dancing” when called before Congress to justify it).
And what about American corporations that avoid U.S. taxes by never bringing home what they legitimately earn abroad – a sum now estimated to be in the order of $1.6 trillion?
Rather than focus on the newly-fashionable tax-avoidance strategy of changing corporate nationality, it makes more sense to tax any global corporation on all income earned in the United States (with high penalties for shifting that income abroad), and no longer tax “American” corporations on revenues earned outside America. Most other nations already follow this principle.
In other words, let’s stop worrying about whether big global corporations are “American.” We can’t win that game. Focus instead on what we want global corporations of whatever nationality to do in America, and on how we can get them to do it.
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