[HN Gopher] The Pesticide Industry's Toxic Lobby
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       The Pesticide Industry's Toxic Lobby
        
       Author : PaulHoule
       Score  : 55 points
       Date   : 2024-08-07 14:58 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (jacobin.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (jacobin.com)
        
       | hulitu wrote:
       | > The Pesticide Industry's Toxic Lobby
       | 
       | Every lobby is toxic.
        
         | tpmoney wrote:
         | Even the ALCU? The NAACP? The AFL-CIO? The NRA? The Innocence
         | Project? I suspect like most things in life, the situation is
         | far more complex than can be captured in a simple 4 word rote
         | expression.
        
       | alejohausner wrote:
       | This article points to another written by Sharon Lerner at the
       | intercept[1], which shows that, since the EPA was founded in
       | 1974, ALL of the directors of its Office of Chemical Safety and
       | Pollution Prevention went on to work for the pesticide industry.
       | 
       | All of them! The agency has worked to rubber stamp the pesticide
       | industry's proposals from the day it was founded.
       | 
       | What a rotten country we live in.
       | 
       | 1. https://theintercept.com/2021/06/30/epa-pesticides-
       | exposure-...
        
       | alejohausner wrote:
       | Unfortunately, golergka's now-dead comment here has some
       | excellent replies, which are buried! Why does HN do that?
        
         | PaulHoule wrote:
         | I try not to second guess the moderation. I think at the
         | individual post level it is often wrong but on average it is
         | good.
         | 
         | My feeling was that I was not so happy with the discussion this
         | post spawned, but I thought it got better over time.
         | 
         | An odd thing about it is that posts about "identity politics"
         | are frequently identified as pernicious and get flagged very
         | quickly on HN. "Politics" today seems to be a matter of
         | choosing issues to fit your tribe as opposed to choosing a
         | tribe that fits your issues
         | 
         | https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/05/23/views-of-the...
         | 
         | There's another axis one could draw between, say, Marx and
         | Milton Freedman which was an important political axis in the
         | West until the fall of the Soviet Union but until 2016 or so
         | there was a consensus that Milton Freedman had won. You got two
         | of the biggest welfare expansions in Bush's Medicare Part D and
         | Obama's Affordable Care Act but both of those were
         | fundamentally privatized and, I think, took a bit of legitimacy
         | out of the system because they created profit for special
         | interests. Clinton very much continued with the direction
         | Reagan set out in.
         | 
         | Since 2016 partisans of both political parties are freaked out
         | about the rise of China, our seeming inability to do anything
         | about it (where are photogs going to get drones in the US if
         | relations sour with China?), extreme monopolization, etc. Both
         | parties are moving to a more interventionist stance so again on
         | "who controls the means of production?" you aren't really
         | getting a choice.
         | 
         | The two most important splits in Trotskyism post 1970 I think
         | were (1) the issues that caused the SWP to drop out of the 4th
         | international in the 1980s which the consequence that there is
         | no US affiliate of the 4th international and (2) identity
         | politics vs class politics. Jacobin has a definite opinion on
         | that last one.
        
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       (page generated 2024-08-07 23:02 UTC)