Article: Obama Picks a Clarence Thomas for the EPA

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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, Â 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.Â 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.Â 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.Â 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.