Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s crackdown on the H. Kramer copper smelting company is a welcome contribution to the assault on Pilsen’s polluters.

After years of activists trying in vain to get something done in the community, politicians finally seem to think it’s a good idea to take care of this issue. Granted, it took an election-eve furor about lead poisoning to do it, but these things are finally happening.

It’ll still take an effort from all corners of the government to get this done. It seems H. Kramer and other polluting industries need to be pushed, shoved, berated and threatened in order to get anything done.

With the city and state focusing on H. Kramer, we’d like to see the federal government step in, too. The U.S. EPA needs to make sure their rules are being followed, and they might have the biggest guns of all in this fight.

It’s still pretty frustrating, though, that so little attention is being paid by the government to Midwest Generation’s Fisk and Crawford’s coal-fired power plants. They, too emit lead among their other pollutants — even if it’s not as much as H. Kramer. The other stuff they spew out is just plain awful for humans to breathe.

Frankly, we maintain the only reason these plants haven’t been shut down is because of the neighborhoods they’re in. Just look back at the hullabaloo that ensued when South Loop residents were scammed into thinking a power plant was coming to their neighborhood. It was a deceitful move by power plant protestors, but it sure did prove a point.

Remember, South and West Loop residents, these plants are still close enough to your neighborhoods to affect you, too. University Village and Little Italy residents — you’re really close to the action here.

It’s a disgrace that these plants haven’t gotten more attention lately. Let’s see the Clean Power Ordinance move forward and at the very least, crack down on these blights.