NJ Conservationists Embrace The Policies Of Trump’s Project 2025
Big Pharma Praised For Voluntary industry Standards In Lieu Of Strict Regulation
NJ Spotlight Reporting Normalizes Radical Trump Policies
NJ Spotlight ran another story today on the horseshoe crab, see:
I’ve previously criticized their excessive coverage of this horseshoe crab – red knot dynamic, while ignoring virtually all other ecosystem collapse issues (other than reporting the “good news” on bald eagle recovery).
But this time, Spotlight casually reports on and praises what are actually radical anti-environmental policies that exactly mirror Trump’s Project 2025 radical right wing corporate anti-regulatory policies. Ironically, these policies are widely being denounced by media, democrats, and environmental groups.
In the opening paragraphs of the story, NJ Spotlight praises and normalizes the following Project 2025 radical policies:
- support for corporations setting private voluntary industry standards
- reliance on markets and supply and demand to manage public natural resources
- conservation groups have abandoned calls for regulatory standards to protect important ecosystems and species
Here it is (emphases mine):
Protection of Delaware Bay’s horseshoe crabs took a step forward when a standards-setting group for the pharmaceutical industry moved away from its longtime endorsement of horseshoe crab blood in drug-testing.
The standards body approved the use of two synthetic chemicals for detecting toxins in medical products rather than a substance based on horseshoe crab blood, which is commonly used now.
Pharmaceutical companies are not required to switch to the new standards, but conservationists hope demand for horseshoe crabs will drop as a result of the change, improving survival prospects for the crabs and imperiled species that depend on them, notably the red knot shorebird.
Did you get that? Let’s break it down:
1. A Big Pharma controlled private industry standards setting group adopted voluntary standards that directly impact an important public natural resource management issue (endangered red knot).
2. Those Big Pharma standards are praised as “a step forward” in “protecting” horseshoe crabs (and thus red knot).
3. The private Big Pharma corporate standards are voluntary. The public had no involvement in the development and adoption of those private standards.
4. Conservationist are “hoping” that market demand will improve survival of the red knot.
5. Omitted from the passage is the fact that conservation groups are not making demands for strict regulation to protect horseshoe crabs and red knot from commercial exploitation by Big Pharma and extinction.
Each of these radical policies being praised by conservationists and NJ Spotlight virtually mimic identical radical policies in Project 2025, for example, see:
Here is my note to NJ Spotlight reporter Jon Hurdle and his editors:
Jon – Do realize that the sentence below from your story today is an incredibly revealing statement and an indictment of the conservationists? Allowing Big Pharma (privatization) to set standards and then relying on market demand to determine the management of a species, while not even calling for regulation is shameful:
“Pharmaceutical companies are not required to switch to the new standards, but conservationists hope demand for horseshoe crabs will drop as a result of the change, improving survival prospects for the crabs and imperiled species that depend on them, notably the red knot shorebird.”
Do NJ Spotlight and PBS realize that they are reporting on policies that exactly comply with the radical anti-regulatory and pro-market policies of Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025?
Have you even read Project 2025? Because it calls for market solutions, privatization, and deregulation – which are exactly the policies controlling horseshoe crab.
Wolfe