There’s greed… and then there’s the nauseating greed of profiteering corporations that make a killing – literally – by knowingly contaminating people’s water, air, land, and families.

Such rank, moral corruption is hard to fathom... but it’s not hard to find. For one breathtaking example, consider Freeport-McMoRan.

This global mining behemoth is one of America’s most aggressive spoliers of land, air, water, and health – including from its sprawling copper smelter near Phoenix, Arizona. This operation is a major spreader of lead pollution, a neurotoxin that’s particularly harmful to children, causing pain, seizures, and learning disabilities.

But wait, where’s our Environmental Protection Agency? Good question. In fact, until last year, EPA was requiring Freeport to install technology to cut those poisonous emissions. The giant squealed like a stuck pig, though, crying that the $60 million cost for the lifesaving equipment was too “burdensome” – even though that wouldn’t even be a drop in Freeport’s $2-billion-a-year bucket of profits.

Sure enough, in October, Trump’s new EPA honcho rushed to provide pollution protection. Not for the children, but for the polluter! Indeed, Trump’s corporate-coddling agency “super-streamlined” the regulatory process by essentially eliminating it – no public hearing required, no presentation of facts, to chance for victims to object. All Freeport had to do was send an email requesting regulatory relief, and – BAM! – Trump promptly exempted its Arizona smelter from having to clean up its act.

Not only is this “free pass to pollute” a blunt proclamation of corporate rule, it also expresses Trump’s deep contempt for working-class people. Imagine if that smelter was in Florida, poisoning the elites in his Mar-a-Lago resort. Then, he’d jump on it like a gator on a poodle.

Do something!

The Environmental Defense Fund was one of the primary organizations working on the Freeport-McMoRan issue; they've launched a Trump EPA Pollution Pass map that shows you all the places that have applied for presidental exemptions from pollution laws. Support their work by getting involved at edf.org.

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