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May 16, 2009

Obama Picks a Clarence Thomas for the EPA

By Rob Kall

another betrayal by Obama, in the form a of a minority appointee-- female, latina, but look at hear history. Do we have a Clarence Thomas for the environment? Obama came talking about change but the change we've seen is HIM looking more like the do-nothings in congress on both sides of the aisle... except what they do for corporations and lobbyists.

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When George Bush the dubya semen supplier (senior) chose Clarence Thomas for the supreme court, he hid the most conservative judge on the court under the cover of blackness. Now, Obama is hiring a female latina who just happens to be a lawyer for the nation's largest toxic polluters to take responsibility for enforcing our nation's evironmental laws. WTF?
 
Ya think there's a problem here?
 
Think progress reports that President Obama

"announced his intent to nominate" Ignacia S. Moreno to be Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division in the Department of Justice. Moreno, general counsel for that department during the Clinton administration, is now the corporate environmental counsel for General Electric, "America's #1 Superfund Polluter":

Number five in the Fortune 500 with revenues of $89.3 billion and earnings of $8.2 billion in 1997, General Electric has been a leader in the effort to roll back the Superfund law and stave off any requirements for full cleanup and restoration of sites they helped create.

This February, General Electric lost an eight-year battle to "prove that parts of the Superfund law are unconstitutional." One of the 600-person DOJ environmental division's "primary responsibilities is to enforce federal civil and criminal environmental laws such as" the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Superfund.

Before General Electric, Moreno worked as a corporate attorney at Spriggs and Hollingsworth. Moreno's name is found in the Westlaw database as an attorney defending General Motors in another Superfund case, the GM Powertrain facility in Bedford, Indiana:

Historical uses and management of PCB containing hydraulic oils and PCB impacted materials has contaminated on-site areas as well as the sediment and floodplain soil within Bailey's Branch and the Pleasant Run Creek watershed.

But wait. There's more. This nominee,  the NY Times reports, "worked for DOJ during the Clinton administration, serving as special assistant and principal counsel to the assistant attorney general for the environment division. According to Thinkprogress,
During the Clinton administration, Moreno was involved in another controversial case, unsuccessfully defending the Secretary of Commerce's decision to weaken the dolphin-safe tuna standard. In Brower v. Daley, Earth Island Institute, The Humane Society of the United States, and other individuals and organizations brought suit against the United States government for actions that were "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and contrary to law," winning their case in 2000.
We have to wonder how Obama is rationalizing this one, or, who has helped Obama to rationalize this. There is some defense of his decision, with one former Bush EPA director, Eric Schaeffer, director of the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project, who quit because Bush's direction was going to anti-environment, who suggests that a corporate attorney will know how to play the game.
But this nascent appointee fought against dolphin-free tuna laws. That was under Clinton. The smell of Clinton always seems to show up with Obama's worse appointees. Or maybe it's Rahm. Same thing. I really thought that with Obama's election we'd seen the beginning of the end of the DLC. Boy, was I wrong.  The only way Obama's going to start heading in the right direction is if he purges ALL of his Clinton appointees, and that's not likely to happen very soon.
 
Meanwhile, it does give one pause for concern about the SCOTUS appointment he will make soon.  Maybe he's been reading too much of that that Team of Rivals Lincoln presidency stuff. Maybe it's time he remembers who elected him-- people who cared about the war, the environment, illegal spying, torture, corruption, health care for all-- because he seems to have forgotten every single one of them.  He came talking about change but the change we've seen is HIM looking more like the do-nothings in congress on both sides of the aisle... except what they do for corporations and lobbyists.


Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.


Check out his platform at RobKall.com


He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity


He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com


more detailed bio:


Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.


Rob Kall Wikipedia Page


Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel


Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel


Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.


Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.


To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.


For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.


Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..


To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.


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His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.


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