Biden DOJ sets up a new ‘Office of Environmental Justice’ — headed by another fanatic By Monica Showalter
As if we didn’t need yet another government agency in this age of behemoth federal spending, the Biden administration has saddled the U.S. with a new one, the Office of Environmental Justice. The $1.4 million monstrosity will be buried within the U.S. Department of Justice under the authority of U.S. associate attorney general, Vanita Gupta, who set up the new bureaucracy-enforcer arm. It will be headed by one Cynthia M. Ferguson, whose title is acting director. And you can bet it’s going to be a problem.
According to the Washington Examiner:
The Justice Department is launching a new Office of Environmental Justice, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Thursday, which will seek to redress health risks from climate change faced by minorities and low-income people in the United States.
“Although violations of our environmental laws can happen anywhere, communities of color, indigenous communities, and low-income communities often bear the brunt of the harm caused by environmental crime, pollution, and climate change,” Garland said at a news conference on Thursday.
“For far too long, these communities have faced barriers to accessing the justice they deserve,” Garland said, adding that the Justice Department “will prioritize the cases that will have the greatest impact on the communities most overburdened by environmental harm.”
Which sounds like a shakedown operation. We already know that activist groups have conspired with the Environmental Protection Agency for millions in payouts as well as the ‘right’ to write regulations themselves in exchange for not protesting the agency. We saw the details of that scandal in the late Obama years, after President Trump’s officials came to power and put a stop to it. Remember this?
In fulfilling his promise to end the practice of regulation through litigation that has harmed the American public, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt issued an agency-wide directive Oct. 16 designed to end “sue and settle” practices within the agency.
Sue and settle refers to the practice of special interest groups filing suit against federal agencies with the two parties coming to an agreement outside of the normal rule-making process. These settlement agreements are negotiated behind closed doors with no participation from the public or affected parties.
…and…
For example, between 2009 and 2012, EPA chose not to defend itself in over 60 lawsuits from special interest advocacy groups. These cases resulted in settlement agreements and EPA publishing more than 100 new regulations — including the recent Clean Power Plan.
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“The days of regulation through litigation are over,” Pruitt said in a press release. “We will no longer go behind closed doors and use consent decrees and settlement agreements to resolve lawsuits filed against the agency by special interest groups where doing so would circumvent the regulatory process set forth by Congress. Additionally, gone are the days of routinely paying tens of thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees to these groups with which we swiftly settle.”
This new agency may well be a similar shakedown operation where job-creators in minority neighborhoods will be targeted for massive fines over “environmental violations” like someone picking up an eagle feather or filling in a fetid rain pool as a wetlands violation), after activists with private grievances target them, bankrupting the companies and leaving the remaining poor neighborhoods in the wake investment-free wastelands. Imagine all the Black Lives Matter activists who will step forward with grievances, looking for a Malibu mansion of their own. Residents of the stripped neighborhoods, of course, would become fully dependent on government handouts as a result, which is probably the idea.
The set-up of this phony-problem agency follows from the Biden administration’s bid to set up a speech regulator at the Department of Homeland Security, in its Disinformation Governance Board, which has ballooned into a disaster for them, according to Politico:
It started the way all Washington’s spiciest scandals start — with a departmental working group.
Over just a few days last week, the creation of a new board in the Department of Homeland Security generated an outcry on the right, from genteel retiring lawmakers to the loudest hosts on Fox News. It found its way to congressional Republicans’ oversight to-do lists. The secretary of Homeland Security was forced to address the allegations on multiple Sunday shows. And the board’s new executive director went very, very viral.
The latter was the freakish Nina Jankowicz, who spewed out a TikTok video of herself singing as Mary Poppins singing her own version of “Supercalifragiliciousexpialadocius” to denounce Republicans who question the validity of the 2020 election and various COVID arguments, which she distorted.
Jankowicz also was a big fan of the Steele dossier on the side, and declared parents’ groups objecting at school board meetings to the teaching of critical race theory nothing but “for profit” operations.
Speaking of disinformation…
Now we have the Office of Environmental Justice, which is likely to have the same kind of overweening government agenda, nominally claimed as this:
The Strategy is grounded in four core principles, which direct Department attorneys to: (1) prioritize cases that will reduce public health and environmental harms to overburdened and underserved communities; (2) make strategic use of all available tools to address environmental justice concerns; (3) meaningfully engage with impacted communities; and (4) be transparent about environmental justice efforts, as well as the results of those efforts.
As we work to advance environmental justice, the Justice Department through the Office of Environmental Justice will look to strengthen our partnerships with community advocates and other stakeholders. We look forward to your input and engagement, to make this Strategy a living document that guides DOJ’s enforcement efforts.
This time, the Bidenites were careful about whom they chose to head the operation. Acting director Ferguson, unlike Jankowicz, seems to be a nonentity, and may have a very scrubbed Google history. She doesn’t even have an official government photo out there.
Her boss, though, the person who set the office up, according to DOJ, and undoubtedly, the one who will likely really run it, is Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, who is more the Jankowicz type.
Like Jankowicz, she’s a big fan of more censorship on Facebook. She’s big on defunding the police, leaving minority neighborhoods without protection while rich enclaves would be free to stick to their paid security. This, despite some later denials of the facts. She also wanted to deny any police presence to the schools, which of course, has led to scenes like these in minority-dominant schools. She’s denounced any refusal to let men into women’s bathrooms as un-American. She’s demanded that the FBI enforce hate-crime quotas on local police departments — if there aren’t enough hate-crime charges made, she’s coming after them. She’s thrown out junk lawsuits against the State of Georgia to stop its popular newly passed electoral integrity laws, claiming racism. She’s lawsuited the state of Texas as an NGO lawyer to stop its bid to end sanctuary states, and denounced any bid to deport an illegal alien for committing crimes against Americans. She declared the 2020 Republican National Convention “three days of racism, xenophobia, and outrageous lies” on Twitter, and at an earlier interval demanded that a Republican judicial nominee who made mean tweets in college be disqualified from a top court, and got what she wanted. However, she insisted on a different treatment for herself after being caught doing the same thing.
She’s quite the character.
And more to the point, she’s made it a habit to pay off Black Lives Matter activists, even after they burned down parts of the capital. With Vanita around, who says crime doesn’t pay?
So now we have Gupta’s little pawn running this Office of Environmental Justice as a tenuous “acting” director who can be booted at any time, with Gupta the overseer. It seems the Black Lives Matter activists just can’t be paid off enough. You can bet this office will become a nexus for corruption, money-flinging, and scandal.
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