St. Louis Is Burning

[CrispyQ]

2. Are human beings ever going to demand the corporate behemoths be reined in?

They are a tool for the elite to act without accountability or responsibility.

The EPA officially lists four potentially responsible parties for the West Lake Superfund site. One is the U.S. Department of Energy. A second is Cotter Corporation, a company whose contractors secretly dumped nuclear waste at West Lake in the Seventies, as uncovered soon after by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The others are Bridgeton Landfill LLC and Rock Road Industries LLC – both subsidiaries of Republic Services, which currently runs the landfill. Under Superfund law, these four parties must ultimately foot the bill for any remedial actions ordered by the EPA; at the same time, it is these same four parties that contract and pay for all EPA studies leading up to a decision. This might seem like a conflict of interest, but Gravatt insists it's all on the up and up: "We tell them what to do." It must be a coincidence, then, that the EPA's capping plan cost the potentially responsible parties only $41 million, compared to up to $415 million required to actually excavate the waste.

We are destroying our ecosystem for the profit of a few.