Stepp, a regional administrator for the EPA, is part of an investigation by the agency’s inspector general into how Minnesota awarded a permit in December to PolyMet Mining Co. which wants to build a $1 billion copper-nickel mine on 19,000 acres near Hoyt Lakes, Minn., near the North Shore of Lake Superior.
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The water permit has become a test case for Trump’s effort to weaken environmental oversight by having the EPA mostly defer to state regulators.
Stepp’s chief of staff, Kurt Thiede, who previously worked for her in Wisconsin, was asked in the Minnesota review to stall submitting written comments from the EPA on the proposed mine until after the period for submitting public comments had ended. That move in effect made those comments secret until environmental groups sued.
Glencore PLC, one of the world’s largest publicly traded companies with annual revenues of more than $200 billion, took majority ownership of PolyMet in June. The U.S. Justice Department has subpoenaed Glencore in an investigation into foreign corruption and money laundering, asking for documents for business in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Venezuela and Nigeria.
In Wisconsin, Stepp and Thiede helped Foxconn, the giant Taiwan manufacturer best known for assembling iPhones, be exempted from any major environmental review. Foxconn and the state claimed the deal would bring up to 13,000 jobs to Wisconsin, but now it looks like just 1,500 people could be hired to start.
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A profound, historical difference separates the protests across America the past six days from past eruptions of anger over police violence against black men and women. It’s a difference that that isn’t showing up in news reports, televised or print, even though it’s quite apparent
The differences are where these demonstrations are taking place and who is protesting. Historically we’ve seen white people burn down black neighborhoods or black Americans demonstrate in their own neighborhoods, as with the 1965 Watts riot in Los Angeles and most of the 1992 riots after the acquittal of white Los Angeles Police officers in the Rodney King beating.
In the weeks ahead America’s daily mail delivery may come to a complete halt because the U.S. Postal Service is running out of cash—though Donald Trump may take last-minute action so he can proclaim himself the hero who saved the post office.
But the real story here is one of Congressional neglect, Republican animosity and the craziest pension plan funding scheme ever devised by human beings. Throw in an illegal strike by fed up postal workers a half-century ago, laws tightly restricting what the United States Postal Service may do and the rise of private carriers like FedEx and UPS that deliver only to profitable locations, and you have a manufactured disaster just waiting to be exploited for political gain.
As more than 100,000 people have died of Covid-19 in the United States, and 40 million will have lost their jobs, there is another looming crisis that may eclipse these losses: a national mental health trauma.
The necessity for implementing social distancing, in large part because of the failure to test, trace, and isolate contacts properly in the early stages, a pandemic that has gotten out of hand is not just causing an economic recession but a “social recession.” We hear of domestic violence and problems of depression and anxiety every day, while isolation and sheltering in place become risk factors for substance abuse, suicide, and even homicide.
