Elizabeth Warren’s Cruel Plan For “Environmental Justice” Francis Menton
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-10-10-elizabeth-warrens-cruel-plan-for-environmental-justice
Elizabeth Warren wants to be known as the Democratic presidential candidate who has a “Plan” for everything. I count some 50 of these Plans here on her website. They cover everything from “health care is a basic human right,” to “a new farm economy,” to “fighting for an accessible and inclusive America,” to “addressing our maternal mortality epidemic,” to “how we can break up big tech,” to “universal child care,” and on and on and on — and obviously, I was just getting started. Every one of these things is some form of centrally-directed, bureaucrat-run, taxpayer-funded boondoggle of massive government expansion.
Well, now we can make that 51 Plans, because yesterday Warren came out with the latest and greatest of them all, titled “FIGHTING FOR JUSTICE AS WE COMBAT THE CLIMATE CRISIS.”
I know what you are thinking: How could she possibly have missed that one in the first 50? I can’t answer that, but you really need to look at this one if you want to get an appreciation of the levels of utopia that an uber-progressive like Warren thinks can be quickly achieved by government fiat backed by infinite amounts of government money and equally infinite numbers of bureaucrats. And while we’re at it, let’s make it explicit that anyone who opposes any part of this is an evil racist:
From predominantly black neighborhoods in Detroit to Navajo communities in the southwest to Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, industrial pollution has been concentrated in low-income communities for decades – communities that the federal government has tacitly written off as so-called “sacrifice zones.” But it’s not just about poverty, it’s also about race. . . . We didn’t get here by accident. Our crisis of environmental injustice is the result of decades of discrimination and environmental racism compounding in communities that have been overlooked for too long. It is the result of multiple choices that put corporate profits before people, while our government looked the other way.
Yes, we have a “crisis of environmental justice,” caused by racist people like you putting “profits before people” while the government “look[s] the other way.”
Fortunately, Elizabeth has all the answers. Among them here are the usual “expand[ing] health care” with a “Medicare for all” system, but that’s just the start. Then there’s “prioritiz[ing] communities that have experienced historic disinvestment, across their range of needs: affordable housing, better infrastructure, good schools, access to health care, and good jobs.” Or how about “deploying trillions of dollars to transform the way we source and use energy.” (“Trillions” seems so puny nowadays. Shouldn’t we be moving up to quadrillions?) Or “creat[ing] millions of good-paying American jobs in clean and renewable energy, infrastructure, and manufacturing; to unleash the best of American innovation and creativity; to rebuild our unions and create real progress and justice for workers; and to directly confront the racial and economic inequality embedded in our fossil fuel economy.” Again, this is just a little sample.
I have a different word to describe Warren’s Plan for Climate Justice. There’s nothing uplifting about my word. The word is “cruel.” Warren’s Plan is truly cruel to the poor and to the people in “frontline and fence line communities” (as Warren calls them). It is cruel because it points only toward greater dependency, which will mean worse health, and toward higher energy costs, which will mean further impoverishment.
Now I can’t speak to Detroit or Louisiana or “Navajo communities in the southwest,” because I’m not there. But on the question of trying to help the poor with more and yet more government programs and handouts, I would like to offer up a few observations from here in New York City. In New York City, we have a number of very wealthy areas, and many middle class areas, and then we have a number of relatively poor areas. Most residents of the relatively poor areas are people of color.
I would give the following four neighborhoods as the four poorest in New York City: Melrose/Mott Haven in the Bronx; Harlem in Manhattan; and in Brooklyn, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Ocean Hill/Brownsville. Here are some observations I have about these neighborhoods:
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There is very little in the way of a significant polluting industrial facility in any of them. Indeed, there is almost no manufacturing left at all in New York City today. These four poorest neighborhoods get the same city water supply as everyone else. As to the air, I have walked extensively in all of these neighborhoods, and if there is anything materially different about their air from that anywhere else in the city, I can’t notice it. (Admittedly, I did not bring sophisticated air monitoring devices along on any of my treks.) As to power plants, New York City gets most of its power from rural upstate, but within the City the largest fossil fuel power plant complex is not in any of the poor areas but rather in middle class Astoria, Queens; and the second largest is on the East River in Manhattan, upwind from hipster Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
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New York City famously provides the most extensive and expensive social services to the poor and underserved of any place in the country. There is no possible way of characterizing New York City’s treatment of its poor residents as “looking the other way” or placing them in “sacrifice zones.” In fact, as to New York City, such claims are completely preposterous, not to mention insulting. New York City tops up and supplements all federal welfare programs; it has far and away the most extensive public and subsidized housing programs in the country; it has a Medicaid program that adds every possible bell and whistle that the feds allow; it spends close to triple the average national cost to educate a public school student; and so forth.
And yet. And yet. In 2017 New York City published extensive health statistics broken down by neighborhood, complete with comparators as against the City-wide data. Let’s look at data for the four poorest neighborhoods that I have identified. Here is the report for Central Harlem; here’s the one for Mott Haven/Melrose in the Bronx; here’s the one for Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn; and here’s the one for Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn. In a post back in 2017 when these reports first came out, I provided the following summary:
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U.S. life expectancy in 2016 was 78.8 years. But in Harlem it was 75.1 years; in Mott Haven/Melrose 76.1 years; in Bed-Stuy 75.1 years. And in the ultimate public housing, Medicaid, and food stamp dependency utopia of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, life expectancy was just 74.1 years, almost five full years less than the national norm.
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Obesity and diabetes rates are far higher in these neighborhoods than elsewhere in New York City. In the four cited neighborhoods, obesity rates range from 28% of the population in Central Harlem to 33% in Bed-Stuy, against a city norm of 24%. Diabetes rates are 50% above the city-wide norm of 10% of the population in all of Mott Haven/Melrose, Bed-Stuy, and Brownsville, and 30% above in Harlem.
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These neighborhoods far exceed city norms for drug and alcohol-related hospitalizations. Brownsville is again the “leader,” with 2,285 alcohol-related hospitalizations per 100,000 population in 2015, and 2,682 drug-related hospitalizations per 100,000, as against city-wide norms of 1019 and 907 per 100,000 respectively. The best of the four is Bed-Stuy, with “only” 1713 alcohol-related hospitalizations per 100,000, and 1830 drug-related.
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Medicaid beneficiaries supposedly have infinite free pre-natal care and obstetrical services. Yet somehow, infant mortality is far higher in all of these neighborhoods than city-wide norms. The city-wide norm for infant mortality per 1000 births is 4.7. But the rate is 8.1 in Central Harlem, 8.0 in Brownsville, and 6.6 in Mott Haven/Melrose. Only Bed-Stuy, at 5.0 is near the city norm.
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In the category of “premature mortality,” where the city-wide rate is 198.4 per 100,000, Brownsville leads the city with a rate of 367.1. Bed-Stuy ranks third at 309.2, and Mott Haven/Melrose fourth at 305.7. Central Harlem is closest to the city norm — not very close — at 293.1.
What is going on here? It is glaringly obvious that there is a clear association between widespread dependency on government programs for the poor, including access to the open-ended Medicaid program, and worse health outcomes for such people. There is an obvious and easily demonstrated association between high dependency on government programs in general, and on Medicaid in particular, and much higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse, higher death rates and shorter life spans.
Add to this, of course, that Warren’s plans to eliminate fossil fuels and replace them with intermittent renewables are likely to increase the cost of electricity by at least a factor of five, and maybe ten. The burden of that will inevitably fall hardest on the poor.
In short, there is only one word to describe the likely effect on the poor of Warren’s Plan for “Environmental Justice”: cruel.
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