Mother Nature is taking revenge for moves by oil industry to destroy our environment

Cartoons lampooning President Trump's half-hearted efforts on behalf of victims of Hurricane Harvey in Texas from Jimmy Margulies, above, and Monte Wolverton, below. Margulies, the former editorial cartoonist at The Record of Woodland Park, has Trump referring to his election as "history making," and conceding "the storm was pretty strong, too."

Here, cartoonist Wolverton shows Trump dismantling Obama-era flood protection regulations just weeks before Harvey hit Texas in a bid to get infrastructure projects approved more quickly.

TRUMP'S BUDGET SLASHES

COASTAL PROTECTIONS

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

By VICTOR E. SASSON

EDITOR

Houston and New Orleans are major centers of the oil, gas and chemical industries, and both have been hit with superstorms that exposed massive failures by government officials to protect their citizens.

In fact, Mother Nature seems to be taking revenge for all of the environmental damage caused by those industries in their reckless pursuit of hundreds of billions of dollars in profit.

Refineries and chemical plants aggravate climate change, and cause widespread air and water pollution.

Meanwhile, auto emissions are linked to 53,000 premature deaths every year in the United States.

Equally as troubling is that most of the victims I've seen interviewed in Texas shelters were black and Hispanic.

On visits to Texas and Louisiana, President Trump's words of comfort ring hollow: 

He is loosening environmental regulations instead of enforcing them and cutting budgets, ensuring a repeat of the devastation all over the country.

Coastal flooding

In New Jersey, shore towns are struggling "to find ways to prepare for an increase in flooding and severe storm events," according to the American Littoral Society, a coastal-conservation nonprofit.

Many coastal communities have turned to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for expertise, coordination and funding to make the coast "safer and more resilient," said Helen Henderson, the society's Mid-Atlantic Ocean Planning manager.

But President Trump's spending plan would cripple NOAA and eliminate thousands of jobs by cutting funding by nearly $1 billion.

That's in addition to proposed cuts to the Department of the Interior, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce (where NOAA operates).

"Those cutbacks could be disastrous for the U.S. coast, both environmentally and economically," Henderson says.

Cartoonist Dave Granlund on the dark side of the recovery from Hurricane Harvey.

This cartoon from Steve Greenberg speaks for itself.

The Record

Hurricane Harvey was on the front page of my local daily newspaper, The Record of Woodland Park, for seven days, but the cleanup was demoted to 3A today.

On Aug. 26, a Saturday, readers were greeted with a banner headline on the front page below a story about NJ Transit, the state's beleaguered mass-transit agency:

"HARVEY SLAMS TEXAS"

That day's paper also ran a story on A-3 reporting two former associates of Governor Christie filed appeals of their November convictions and subsequent prison sentences for plotting the 2012 lane closures on the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee.

The "Harvey slams Texas" phrase appeared two days later in a sub-headline on Page 1.

EDWIN JOSEPH REITER

Ed Reiter

For decades, Ed Reiter was one of the faceless workers on The Record's copy desk in Hackensack (where the paper was headquartered before moving to Woodland Park in 2009).

That's where copy editors worked late into the night fact-checking news stories and columns; correcting spelling and grammatical errors, and trying to improve syntax and eliminate wordiness.

Reiter died on Aug. 24 in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. He was 79. His wife, Patricia, said the cause was multiple organ failure.

Coin writing

Between 1998 and 2002, he won four First Place awards from the New Jersey Press Association for Best Headline Writing, "reflecting his penchant for wordplay and puns," as one obituary put it.

Reiter left The Record in 2008, and at the time of his death was senior editor of COINage magazine.  

He also wrote a numismatics column for nearly a decade (1979-89) for The New York Times.

The Borg family and Gannett Co., the new owners, have virtually eliminated copy editors and the work they did at The Record, resulting in the low-quality print edition you've been reading for far too many years.