Leadership Quote by Fred Thompson

“Nobody wants to open a business near a Superfund site and risk being sued” is political common sense packaged as inevitability. Fred Thompson isn’t arguing chemistry; he’s arguing psychology. The line works because it frames environmental contamination less as a public-health emergency and more as a liability cloud that scares off the people a town is supposed to court: employers, developers, the tax base. In one sentence, he turns cleanup policy into an investment climate problem.

The specific intent is to make Superfund feel like a double penalty. First, the land is damaged. Second, the government’s designation and the legal regime around it function like a scarlet letter that depresses nearby commerce. Thompson’s subtext is pro-growth and implicitly skeptical of regulation-by-litigation: lawsuits are the villain, not the original polluters or the slow grind of remediation.

Context matters because “Superfund” carries Reagan-era baggage: a program born from industrial disasters, then criticized for being bureaucratic, slow, and expensive, with costs and legal risk spreading well beyond the responsible parties. Thompson’s phrasing (“Nobody wants”) is the oldest trick in politics, a pseudo-populist shrug that discourages counterargument by pretending the conclusion is just human nature. It also smuggles in a hierarchy of harms: the economic chill gets top billing, while the communities already living with contamination are implied rather than named.

The rhetorical power is its clean villainy. Not “toxins,” not “cancer clusters,” not “corporate dumping,” but the fear of being sued. It’s a pro-business argument that treats the courthouse, not the waste, as the real hazard.