Map
showing details of Foxconn's locations
(the
two southernmost of which are within
the
Des Plaines River watershed)
Northern
location (13315 Globe Drive, Mt. Pleasant, WI; outside of the Des
Plaines River
watershed)
http://www.google.com/maps/place/Foxconn+ETC/@42.727865,-87.9254122,11z/data=!4m8!1m2!2m1!1sfoxconn+wisconsin!3m4!1s0x0:0x43a62bdb5eda9a71!8m2!3d42.720313!4d-87.9501057
Central
location (8418 Durand Avenue, Sturtevant, WI; inside the Des Plaines
River
watershed)
http://www.google.com/maps/place/FoxConn/@42.727865,-87.9254122,11z/data=!4m8!1m2!2m1!1sfoxconn+wisconsin!3m4!1s0x0:0x9f4211b63f924442!8m2!3d42.6900065!4d-87.9334116
Southern
location (in Mt. Pleasant; inside the Des Plaines River
watershed)
http://www.google.com/maps/place/FOXCONN+WISCONSIN/@42.727865,-87.9254122,11z/data=!4m8!1m2!2m1!1sfoxconn+wisconsin!3m4!1s0x0:0xfc6fb83bdc1d8f12!8m2!3d42.6765041!4d-87.9397631
dcreport.org/2018/08/14/foxconn-gets-a-pollution-pass-for-its-wisconsin-factory/?fbclid=IwAR0IOX0MPHJh1R-pOmP19w5X3HDSAElU7PKRywCu0mdg_i_LHEiO8L2l3yQ
http://madison.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/illinois-plans-to-challenge-epa-ruling-on-foxconn/article_1fbed7dc-1cc5-57cc-a40f-2c1b5c18b13f.html
http://journaltimes.com/news/local/illinois-to-challenge-foxconn-ruling-schimel-calls-potential-suit-meritless/article_7b22adf2-e853-59f9-be1e-e460629986b6.html
http://apnews.com/8ac3c33e68274190a84b6154097c53e7/Illinois-officials-concerned-over-Foxconn-plant-impact
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-met-foxconn-indiana-smog-trump-epa-20190516-story.html
http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2018/05/07/illinois-attorney-general-files-suit-against-epa-ozone-rules-cites-impact-foxconn/586479002/
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-epa-lawsuit/illinois-to-sue-epa-for-exempting-foxconn-plant-from-pollution-controls-idUSKBN1I52NB?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews
4.
Explanation of Proposals #6, #7, #8, and #9
What
follows below are the details and purpose of proposals #6, #7, #8,
and #9 (spread awareness of Georgism and bioregionalism to focus
taxation and border issues on land, de-politicize environmental and
health issues, reduce demand for medical devices through reforms to
taxation and patents, and decentralize environmental issues).
I
defend and explain why I believe that these reforms are needed;
and why I believe that my approaches towards understanding these
issues will be necessary and helpful to improving environmental and
health policies going forward.
Georgism
and Bioregionalism (Proposal #6)
As part
of my issues-based, education-based campaign for the U.S. House of
Representatives, I will teach voters about Georgism and
bioregionalism, in order to increase the degree of public focus on
environmental matters. I will also support measures to reform taxes
and pricing, which will lead to increased affordability and
availability of medical devices, and in turn, to decreased demand for
dangerous low-cost sterilizing chemicals such as EtO.
Changing
the way we think about the issues of taxation and borders, and
re-focusing those issues on the environment, will cause people in
Lake County and elsewhere, to talk about the environment more. This
will, in turn, increase the attention which is paid to E.T.O. and
other airborne pollutants, carcinogens, and mutagens.
I
would draw more attention to environmental issues:
First,
by urging more towns and villages in Lake County (especially those
which now host Medline and Sterigenics) to vie for designation as one
of the many “Tree City USA”s around the country.
Second,
I would increase public awareness of the heavily land-focused
economic system of Georgism, and the associated topics of:
1)
Henry George and Georgism;
2)
Land Value Taxation / the “Single Tax”;
3)
the broader topic of environmental taxation;
4)
Community Land Trusts (and water and air trusts); and
5)
Bioregionalism (the ideology of the Cascadia independence movement).
The
only way to get clean air, water, and land, is to impose punitive
fees, or “environmental taxation”, upon air pollution, water
pollution, land degradation, and natural resource extraction.
Teaching
voters about Henry George and his proposals, will help governments
around the country make taxation more efficient, by ceasing to
parasitically tax income, sales, and consumption (taxing away what we
trade and produce), and instead taxing forms of economic activity
which are actually harmful to
somebody or to the environment, and thus deserve to
be taxed at high rates that will make what they are doing
unprofitable.
The
association of business, capital, and production, with monopoly,
destruction, waste, and environmental degradation, causes significant
antagonism between sectors of the economy. Taxing people and
companies based on how much they waste, destroy, degrade the
environment, or damage the value of the land they own – instead of
how much they produce - will help decrease the conflict between
workers and bosses, and between renters and landlords, by decreasing
the costs borne by renters and property managers. Pollution, and
keeping rent instead of spending it to improve your tenant's
dwelling, will be treated as externalities;
acts of externalizing problems onto third parties (that is, onto
people who don't consent or aren't aware of it).
Treating
pollution as an externality, will help communicate that pollution
others' land, air, and water is a property
rights violation.
Taking this stance will help legitimize the need to compensate
pollution in the eyes of people whose primary political concerns
revolve around issues like property rights and the need to award
damages for intentionally committing personal injuries against
others.
These
proposals will lead to more untaxed safe production, higher taxes on
unsafe production, and easier access to work opportunities and
opportunities to start a business for all Americans. They will also
likely lead to an increased legitimization of environmental concerns
in Libertarian, Republican, and constitutional conservative circles
(especially if the Lockean proviso on homesteading is promoted as a
part of teaching how Georgism and libertarianism are compatible).
Georgists
want to tax land, not labor or capital; they want to tax the
non-improvement of land, and the disuse and abuse of
land, not improvements upon land.
Land
hoarders, speculators, slumlords, and the owners of the largest
amounts of wasted or unused land, would see the highest taxes in a
Georgist system. Families who own large plots of land, and state and
federal Bureau of Land Management and Department of Natural Resources
-type agencies - as well as the National Park Service - would also
pay high taxes.
The
point of these taxes would be to make it too expensive to own land
privately, or publicly; such that the largest public landowners would
have incentive to convert public lands into common-pool resources,
and that the largest private landowners would have incentive to sell
their lands off (to common and collective management organizations)
for more affordable prices. These lands would be preserved and
developed, in a sustainable manner, according to the wishes of the
people in each bioregion or watershed.
Taxing
non-improvements instead of improvements (such as developing your
land, cleaning it up, building a house on it, starting a business on
it, earning income on it, etc.)
would help reduce the demand for the taxation of income and sales,
which are unnecessary.
Getting
rid of these unnecessary forms of taxation will help reduce the
prices of goods, which will help consumers in terms of affordability.
Taxes
and Medical Device Patents (Proposal #8)
One
example of a type of good whose price would decrease, as a result of
eliminating unnecessary taxes, is medical devices; the type of
medical devices which are sterilized by E.T.O.. I support eliminating
the federal medical device sales tax, but I would understand keeping
taxes on profits
from the
sales of medical devices, at least until the length (“lifespan”)
of medical device patents is reduced significantly.
I
would implement my E.M.P.A.T.H.I.C. plan as an early step towards
decreasing demand for low-cost sterilizing chemicals.
E.M.P.A.T.H.I.C. stands for “Eliminating Medical Patents to Achieve
Technology for Human Immortality Cheaply”. I support decreasing the
lifespans of medical patents, in order to increase the lifespans of
human beings. Allowing pharmaceutical patents to expire sooner rather
than later, will allow less expensive generic versions to come onto
the market sooner. Similarly, allowing medical device patents
to expire sooner, will help reduce the costs and waiting time for
imitators. Three-dimensional printing stands to revolutionize
medicine. As long as the materials used are safe, “medical device
piracy” should not be treated as a serious concern.
I
believe that patents are temporary monopolies, and that the only
reason it is necessary for the government to tax profits, is because
the government's creation of that temporary monopoly privilege
(through assigning the patent) is what makes companies feel entitled
to charge such high prices for medical devices (and pharmaceuticals)
in the first place. These businesses are just trying to gouge as much
as they can before they are taxed; they probably feel that the high
taxes make the high profits justified. But don't the
high profits make
the high taxes justified
too? We can fix this by making it clear to medical companies, what
the government and the I.R.S. expect from them. Taxing profits but
not sales (in regards to both medical devices, and consumer goods in
general), will make it clear that producers are not the
enemy of the people; monopolies are.
Once
the charging of outrageous profits by medical device companies can be
reigned in through patent reform and taxation reform, the high costs
and consumer prices of needed medical devices will stabilize, and
slowly begin to decline. This will lead to more affordable medical
devices, which will help both medical patients, and hospitals, in
terms of affordability.
I
believe that increasing the affordability of medical devices, will
lead to reduced demand for low-cost sterilizing chemicals such as
E.T.O.. That's because funds which would have been spent paying taxes
on the sales and manufacture of medical devices, will be freed-up. As
long as C.E.O.s and investors can be prevented from pocketing too
much of those funds, they will be available to be spent on
higher-cost sterilizing chemicals which are more expensive because
they are less deadly.
Companies
would have no reason not to re-allocate funds in such a way. However,
if Stop E.T.O. Lake County believes that it would be prudent to pass
a law requiring medical
device producers to use safer but higher-cost chemicals as
a condition of receiving
the sales tax breaks which I have described, then I would understand
that concern.
My
only caveat is
that such a policy should take place at the state level, and that it
should be implemented concurrently with, and as part of, a planned,
smooth, orderly transition of the power to regulate environmental
issues, back
to the communities from the federal government.
Since
health and environmental issues are not explicitly mentioned in the
Enumerated Powers of the Constitution (Article I, Section 8), but the
power to regulate patents is mentioned, the
E.P.A. is on shaky constitutional foundation. But reforming medical
patents, and switching to a more efficient taxation system, are much
easier to justify as legitimate, constitutional goals, and they could
solve the problem just as easily as creating a new federal program
could, but without the additional cost.
Decentralizing
Environmental Issues (Proposal #9)
The
Clean Air Act (a phrase which may refer to the act passed in 1963,
and/or the act passed in 1970) prohibits states from passing air
pollution standards lower than
the national standard, but allows states
to pass standards higher than
the national standard.
However,
before a state can pass higher standards, it must apply for and
obtain a waiver, wait for a period of public hearing, and for written
comments to be made, and reviewed by the E.P.A.. Then, an E.P.A.
administrator determines whether the state deserves the waiver.
During
the late days of the George W. Bush Administration, the State of
California was required to obtain a waiver, to exempt it from the
Clean Air Act's standards on greenhouse gas emissions from new motor
vehicles. California wanted to raise
its standards above the national standards,
and the Clean Air Act forestalled that process. That is
unacceptable.
Learn
more about that story at the following link:
http://www.epa.gov/regulations-emissions-vehicles-and-engines/california-greenhouse-gas-waiver-request
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2013-title42/html/USCODE-2013-title42-chap85-subchapII-partA-sec7543.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_of_1963
As
long as people are compensated for takings of their sub-standard
vehicles which would have resulted from the enforcement of
California's standard (as in a "Cash for Clunkers" -type
program), states and communities should never be prohibited, nor
delayed, from having higher standards than the national standard.
Decentralizing
(#9) and De-Policitizing (#7) Environmental Issues, and Implementing
Bioregionalism in the Great Lakes Region (#6)
As
long as the E.P.A. is under threat of being gutted, and bought out or
sold to corporate or pro-pollution interests, we must guard against
the risks of that sabotage, by finding local solutions to
environmental devastation in our own communities.
One
way to do that is to call for the creation of “Community Air
Trusts”, to augment the Community Land Trust (C.L.T.) and Community
Water Trust movement. We should the economic future of each
community, to the ability of that community to plan for sustainable
development and production that does not harm the environment.
This
likely means forming non-governmental, or QUAsi-NonGOvernmental
(Q.U.A.N.G.O.) organizations - preferably run on cooperative,
non-profit, or not-for-profit bases – that represent most or all of
the groups in the community which are concerned with pollution. The
more non-governmental the agency can be, the better; this will help
de-politicize the issues of health and environment.
The
less the environment, and our health, are seen as political issues -
and the more they are seen as scientific issues that are too
important to vote on - the better.
I
recommend the creation of non-governmental Community Air Trusts (and
C.L.T.s, etc.)
as part of a mission to de-politicize environmental issues.
I
believe that scientific issues such as health, environment, justice,
elections, budgets, and other issues, could potentially be
de-politicized, in the same manner in which the government of the
United Kingdom has done, in its creation of "non-ministerial
government departments".
In
my opinion, non-governmental regulation of the environment should be
achieved through a mix of, or any one of, the following: 1) joint
regulation by consumers and workers (i.e., the
members of the community and the employees of C.L.T.s, etc.);
2) boards of environmental scientists determining policy instead of
voters; and/or 3) "bill of rights for the environment"
-type legislation, which would recognize the rights of humans,
animals, and other living things, not to be exploited.
Learn
more about Q.U.A.N.G.O.s and non-ministerial government departments
at the following links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quango
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ministerial_government_department
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-organized_non-governmental_organization
This
group of groups (i.e., syndicate)
would ideally be untaxed. This is for two reasons: 1) because it
would be non-profit, and would thus produce nothing which could be
taxed; and 2) because this group would be the one doing the
taxing. C.L.T.s (etc.) would
not pay taxes; instead, they would pay dividends to the people (but
only in communities that choose to run C.L.T.s in this manner).
C.L.T.s could thus help create a basic income.
These
“Community Air Trust” groups would get together to share
information, and make outlines of legislative policy and activism
protocols which will allow for preventive and punitive measures to be
taken against air polluters in the most efficient and cost-effective
manner. This will require public education about Georgist views
on tax revenue sourcing policy, because the measures which will be
considered, will likely include taxation and fines.
Activities
which community land, air, and water trusts, should undertake,
include (but are not limited to): 1) education on Land Value
Taxation, bioregionalism, and recent issues in environmental policy
and local pollution; 2) organizing the community to engage in mass
cleanup efforts, and mass tree-planting, efforts, and other efforts
to offset carbon emissions; 3) streamlining the gathering of
legal resources to assist people interested in filing lawsuits
against polluters); and 4) organizing efforts to solicit
contributions to be spent relieving the medical needs of people
harmed by pollution.
Learn
more about community land trusts, including one in Lake County, by
visiting the following links:
http://www.cpahousing.org/home-buying/community-land-trust-inclusionary-housing-programs/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_land_trust#:~:text=A%20community%20land%20trust%20(CLT,on%20behalf%20of%20a%20community.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/affordable-housing-always/397637/
Education
about bioregionalism will also be essential in these groups, because
the boundaries of communities and counties overlap in a manner which
often has almost nothing to do with the pre-existing geographical and
topographical features of the surrounding environment. By taking
advantage of the free gift which nature has given us, in the form of
mountain ranges, we can make use of these natural borders. This will
help drastically reduce the costs of maintaining, patrolling, and
defending walls and fences; no enemy in his right mind would come
over a mountain range.
Most
importantly for environmentalists, bioregionalism will help reduce
conflict over water, because all the water in each individual river
system will be located in a single political jurisdiction. This will
eliminate the occurrence of problems such as the situation involving
Foxconn Technology Group.
Foxconn
is a Taiwanese company with locations in southern Wisconsin. Those
three locations process cell phone components, causing pollution
which affects the air quality of people in the area, as well as the
water supply of people living to the south. The two southernmost
locations of the three, are located in Mt. Pleasant and Sturtevant,
Wisconsin, at the extreme northern edge of the Des Plaines River
watershed. Most of that watershed is, and the downstream areas of the
Des Plaines River are, located in Illinois.
When
all water pollution can be traced upstream, without crossing any
political borders, then there will be no chance of the federal
government claiming the right to intervene in conflicts over water,
or disputes over water quality, based on interstate commerce clause
grounds. Keeping all water pollution in a single jurisdiction, will
help ensure that the environment - an issue which I believe deserves
to be treated as an innately local issue, politically speaking -
will stay a
local issue.
[Note:
It's possible to justify national or federal regulation
of air pollution,
based on the fact that pollution that goes into the air, can easily
move across mountain ranges. However, the validity of that argument
does not invalidate the case for bioregionalism, being that air
pollution gets into the water and affects the water cycle, and that
the spread of air pollution is still somewhat slowed by mountain
ranges.]
I
believe that these measures will help create a "common-pool
resource" mindset of land, water, and air quality management,
for the people of each bioregion and watershed (for example, the Des
Plaines River watershed, and the larger Great Lakes and St. Lawrence
River system watershed which borders on the Des Plaines watershed). I
believe that these measures will also prevent the E.P.A. from
unnecessarily intruding in local environmental issues in a way that
lowers standards for communities wishing to increase their quality of
living.
5.
Conclusion
I
believe that - by “hedging our bets” and creating local
alternatives to the E.P.A. (to guard against sabotage and failure),
and de-politicizing environment and other scientific issues - we can
reduce conflict over the environment.
I
hope that my proposals will be helpful in reducing not only partisan
political conflicts, but also conflicts between central and local
levels of government, as well as conflict over natural resources such
as good quality land, water, and air.
Ensuring
equal opportunity to access natural resources, and make use of them
for survival, is crucial to reducing the risk that climate change,
and the scarcity of resources which climate change intensifies, will
lead to more violent conflict over those resources, and to more acts
of "eco-terrorism" (which are increasingly being viewed as
necessary to take decisive action in the face of the various threats
to the health of the planet and the ability of human beings to
survive in harmony with it).
6.
Resources
Please
visit the following links to learn more about Henry George and his
ideas on land, economics, taxation, and wealth disparity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9WAMpM6e9Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUXyfVDyXlQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpqtfMraJvU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8l8w7hG8ho
Visit
these links to learn about the Georgist organization Common Ground:
http://commonground-usa.net/
http://commongroundorwa.org/related-organizations/
Visit
the following links to learn more about economist Scott Baker's views
on Georgism, including why he thinks Land Value Taxation could
drastically increase the amount of wealth taxable by the government:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3EmrqPfsJQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qphu3buTpmg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukXLpkn_UFY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zifxuH2NiKc
Written
on September 14th and 17th, 2020
Published
Incomplete on September 17th, 2020
Edited
and Expanded on September 18th and 30th, 2020
Title
Has Changed Since Original Publication
