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Tuesday, September 20, 2011

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is a jackass!

Courtesy of Sarah Hodgdon  Sierra Club, Conservation Director 
I don't say this lightly: if House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) gets his way this fall by passing his TRAIN Act, there could be up to 657,000 more asthma attacks next year.1 Majority Leader Cantor and his GOP allies are blinded by corporate polluter funders who have made destroying basic, life-saving protections their number one priority. 
Eric Cantor has raised $214,250 from dirty energy companies in the 2009-2010 fundraising cycle alone -- Dominion, a coal company, and Koch Industries, the oil brothers who have funded the political mess in Wisconsin, were the highest contributers.2
These dirty companies put destroying our clean air at the top of their to-do list -- not the health of our families. Send a message to your representatives letting them know that they represent us, not corporate polluters.
According to a Cantor memo that has recently been revealed, he and his colleagues will target 12 clean air common sense safeguards through the TRAIN Act and other methods.3  
Based on that memo, this what Cantor's plan to assault our air and water might look like in the first month of Congress's fall session :
Step 1: Gut health standards for smog, soot, and toxic air pollution from power plants.
Price Tag: 25,300 lives lost a year. 
Step 2:  Dismantle health standards for mercury and other toxic air pollution from incinerators and industrial boilers
Price Tag: 22,750 more premature deaths a year.
Step 3: Disable health standards for smog, soot, mercury, and toxic air pollution from cement plants
Price Tag: 2,500 premature deaths and 100,000 missed work days.
Our lungs depend on it.
Sarah Hodgdon Signature
Sarah Hodgdon
Sierra Club, Conservation Director 
[1]"Public Health Protections Save Lives, Create Jobs," http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/09/blocking_safeguards.html Center for American Progress, September 2011.


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