Music

Greetings!

This is podcast number 52 of Blast the Right.

I'm Jack Clark from therationalradical.com.

Today, we're going to discuss a sneak attack by the right wing against the ability of the 50 states to protect their citizens against environmental and other health dangers.

Let's get right into it.

Right wingers are traditionally strong proponents of the states' rights doctrine, which holds that the federal government should play a limited role and defer to the states whenever it can.

Sometimes the states' rights doctrine has been employed for truly nefarious purposes, for example during the civil rights era of the 50s and 60s.

Right wingers who were proponents of racial segregation and Jim Crow laws engaged non-stop-in as the Wikipedia puts it, quote, denouncing federal interference in these state-level policies, close quote.

Civil rights advocates correctly saw the right wing states' rights argument as a smokescreen to allow continued racial discrimination and oppression.

But that was then right wingers have no principles, and when it suits their needs, they will readily abandon such supposedly sacred ideological tenets as states' rights.

And that's just what they have been doing.

You probably remember a prime example of their abandoning the states' rights doctrine in the 2000 presidential election.

Right wingers sought and received an order from the conservative members of the federal Supreme Court to stop the state of Florida's vote recount.

The heck with states' rights, the ability of a state to determine how to count its own votes, if it means Bush could lose.

Ever since January 2001, right wingers have continued to jettison the state's rights doctrine when it suits their needs.

As you might expect, again for nefarious purposes, to guarantee higher industry profits at the expense of increased human misery, suffering, pain, and death.

How? Right wingers in Congress have conducted a massive assault on the right of the states to pass legislation to protect their citizens in the environmental and public health arenas.

The states would want to pass their own legislation when they feel that federal statutes don't adequately protect their citizens, which of course they won't when right wingers are writing those statutes.

So the GOP-controlled Congress has been trying to prevent the 50 states from passing any such legislation that goes beyond federal standards.

This right wing campaign is happening largely under the radar, even though the effect of this campaign could be deadly for countless Americans.

My sources for this segment are, a New York Times op-ed by University of Michigan Law School Professor Nina Mendelssohn, an article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Zachary Coil, a column by Bob Herbert, and a New York Times op-ed by Senator Jim Jeffords and Calvert Group Social Investment Strategist Julie Fox Gorte.

...