Like locusts swarming a wheat field, corporate lobbyists are all over our nation’s capital this spring, trying to get special favors, handouts, and insider deals from the White House huckster-in-chief.

It’s a corrupt-money sleazefest with lobbyists blatantly offering high-dollar political donations in exchange for presidential and congressional favoritism. Hundreds of these corporate requests are so selfish and unfair that it’s been hard to single out any one as exceptionally sleazy. Until now.

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Meet the “Coalition of Recyclers of Residual Organics.” Well, recycle and coalition sound sorta positive, right? But what are “residual organics?” Uh… poop. Specifically, sewage sludge, including human waste. Piped from our homes, it goes through sewer systems to utility plants, which treat it and filter out the water, leaving a thick sludge of “biosolids.”

And what does “recycling” mean? Corporate giants like Synagro (which is owned by Wall Street financier Goldman Sachs) buy it and simply rebrand the stuff as “fertilizer.” They reap huge profits selling the sludge to unsuspecting farmers and ranchers, not mentioning that it can contain deadly levels of “forever chemicals.” Millions of acres across America have already been contaminated – along with water sources, livestock, and families.

So now, lobbyists for sludge peddlers are demanding that Trump’s government intervene. Not to help victimized families, but literally to take away the legal right of those families to sue the corporate profiteers that poisoned them.

Unsurprisingly, Republican lawmakers are siding with the poisoners. Meanwhile, Synagro continues to sell sludge as fertilizer, and Trump officials are even pushing EPA to stop designating “forever chemicals” as hazardous.

Has everyone gone crazy!? No. To find sanity in this mess, go to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility: peer.org

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