A while ago, Al Armendariz (an Obama recruit / appointee), a high level EPA district administrator for the oil areas of the South and Southwest regions got caught in a 2010 video admitting that his style of environmental overwatch was akin to the Roman soldiers (video after the jump) (emphasis mine):
“But as I said, oil and gas is an enforcement priority, it’s one of seven, so we are going to spend a fair amount of time looking at oil and gas production. And I gave, I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting but I’ll go ahead and tell you what I said. It was kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years. And so you make examples out of people who are in this case not compliant with the law. Find people who are not compliant with the law, and you hit them as hard as you can and you make examples out of them, and there is a deterrent effect there. And, companies that are smart see that, they don’t want to play that game, and they decide at that point that it’s time to clean up. And, that won’t happen unless you have somebody out there making examples of people. So you go out, you look at an industry, you find people violating the law, you go aggressively after them. And we do have some pretty effective enforcement tools. Compliance can get very high, very, very quickly. That’s what these companies respond to is both their public image but also financial pressure. So you put some financial pressure on a company, you get other people in that industry to clean up very quickly. So, that’s our general philosophy.”
Of course, the whitewash machinery went to to work right away to disavow his actions and words and to make him out to be an outlier and not typical of the outlook of the EPA itself.
Yeah, like anybody believed that – and with this news as to where he landed after he resigned (just before he was to go before a Congressional hearing), does anyone believe that the Obama Administration WASN’T out to get the oil companies (disbelieve me? See after the jump for a reminder)? The Hill reports:
A former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official who resigned earlier this year for comparing his work to crucifixion has found new employment with a leading green group.
The Sierra Club on Friday announced that Al Armendariz would be joining the group’s “Beyond Coal” campaign next month as a senior representative:
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