Bailout Fallout, the New (Green) Deal and Scaring Parents with Toxic Arguments
The House and Senate agree on a $700 billion financial bailout bill.
Environmentalists try to leverage the mortgage and Wall Street financial crisis to argue for new “green” policies.
Journalists Philip and Alice Shabecoff write a book linking industrial toxins to an alleged rise in childhood disease and death.
More headlines: listen to the LibertyWeek podcast.
1. CONGRESS
The House and Senate agree on a $700 billion financial bailout bill.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Center for Entrepreneurship Director John Berlau on the disappointing result:
“[Last Friday] — five days after a courageous independent vote against Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s $700 billion bailout for Wall Street — the U.S. House of Representatives disappointingly approved the same basic measure. Many of the bill’s other “sweeteners”, such as earmarks and a regressive increase in deposit insurance for upper income bank customers –will also cost taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars.
All this week I and my colleagues have pointed out ways this bailout could, in addition to being costly, be counterproductive for the economy. Wall Street may have been feeling this ‘buyers’ remorse’ today as the Dow Jones Industrial Average pared back earlier gains to end the day down by 150 points.”
2. ENVIRONMENT
Environmentalists try to leverage the mortgage and Wall Street financial crisis to argue for new “green” policies.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Adjunct Analyst Steven Milloy wonders whether the bailout will be the beginning of the New (Green) Deal:
“Environmental activists are trying to figure out ways to advance their global-warming-regulation agenda by exploiting the current financial crisis…The good news [for them is that] someone with a very Green agenda will be in charge. As reported by Carbon Control News, ‘Environmentalists and some Democrats are seizing upon the financial sector crisis to call for major federal investments in energy efficiency and improvements in the electricity grid as a way to address climate change and spur a lagging economy.’ Michael Moynihan, former Clinton administration economic adviser and director of the Green Project for the New Democrat Network, has called for a national infrastructure bank to fund clean energy projects. Following up on this idea, two house Democrats introduced a bill last week to establish ‘Clean Energy Investment Bank.’ Although Moynihan claims this would be an improvement over the current earmark system, the bank seems to be little more than a permanent Green earmark.
3. HEALTH
Journalists Philip and Alice Shabecoff write a book linking industrial toxins to an alleged rise in childhood disease and death.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Iain Murray on the Shabecoffs’ toxic arguments:
“There’s a cartoon that ran in the New Yorker a couple of years ago. Two cavemen are sitting cross-legged, looking puzzled. One of them is saying, ‘Something’s just not right – our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past thirty.’ It is possible that one of those cavemen represents the ancestor of Philip Shabecoff, the former New York Times environment correspondent and co-author with his wife Alice of “Poisoned Profits: The Toxic Assault on Our Children,” which advances a positively Neanderthal view of the role of chemicals in modern life. To read the Shabecoffs’ book, you’d think we would be the ones dropping dead at thirty – or thirteen, such is the Shabecoff’s concentration on the dangers we are supposedly exposing our children to.”
Listen to LibertyWeek, the CEI weekly podcast, here.