In what certainly feels like fallout from the Supreme Courts disastrous ruling against affirmative action, a Louisiana federal judge has used the "considering race is itself racism" argument to permanently block EPA intervention in the state against corporate polluters whose activities disproportionately affect marginalized, primarily non-white communities.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/louisiana-ruling-epa-civil-rights
Federal Judge Gives Louisiana Polluters a 'Free Pass' to Harm Communities of Color
"Louisiana has given industrial polluters open license to poison Black and brown communities for generations, only to now have one court give it a permanent free pass to abandon its responsibilities," Patrice Simms, a vice president at Earthjustice, said in a statement.
The ruling forbids the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Justice from enforcing "disparate-impact requirements" under Title VI the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the state of Louisiana. The ruling affects permitting for industrial projects and could, according to Earthjustice, even be applied to "basic services such as sewage, drinking water, and health services."
Although this article is painfully brief, the background you need to know here is that for decades governments all across the country have been turning a blind eye to corporate and industrial pollution in marginalized, non-white communities; actions facilitated by the U.S. government's own racist history of "redlining" in housing policy. Although we've known about the problem for decades, the EPA under the Biden administration only recently began acting to combat this environmental racism, by applying the "disparate impact standard" of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which greenlighting contaminating facilities in non-white communities violates; violations that again, we know have been going on for decades and decades now.
Well, the crackers running states like Louisiana didn't like that very much, and sued to block the EPA from bringing these types of cases, arguing that factoring in the race of the people living in communities affected by this pollution, is itself a form of racism. Which pretty much only makes sense if you accept ahistorical arguments pushed forward by white supremacists (and thus many Republicans) in our society. Realizing that this suit and others like it would eventually reach a Supreme Court prepared to turn those power-blind, ahistorical arguments into legally-binding precedent, the EPA dropped its actions against Louisiana, in effect to keep the door open a crack to combat environmental racism in the future, perhaps under a Supreme Court less high on reverse racism propaganda and fuckery.
Whelp, that wasn't good enough for U.S. District Court Judge James Cain, who allowed Louisiana's suit to go through anyway, and has now issued a permanent ruling that effectively blocks the EPA and the DoJ from enforcing Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act throughout the entire state entirely - not just in the Cancer Alley investigation, but apparently for any reason at all. Although Cain didn't say so, I think any reasonable observer can conclude that along with their dismantling of Dobbs, and piece by piece destruction of the Voting Rights Act, the fascist federal judiciary is also very interested in dismantling and disempowering the Civil Rights Act as part of its quest to codify a permanent white supremacist society in America; and rulings just like Cain's are how they're going to try to achieve that objective.
#Justice #Pollution #CancerAlley #Louisiana #EvironmentalRacism #EPA #JamesCain #1964CivilRightsAct #WhiteSupremacy
