EPA: Gone Rogue and Dangerous

January 3, 2013   ·   By Rick Manning   ·   0 Comments

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa P. Jackson

The Environmental Protection Agency has been rocked by two major scandals in the past weeks culminating with Administrator Lisa Jackson’s resignation this past week.

The agency charged with responsibility for overseeing the nation’s environmental laws has become one of the most controversial federal government agencies during Obama’s first term through their dramatic expansion of powers over the nation’s economy.
But now, revelations that Jackson had a secret, private e-mail account that she used to usurp the laws relating to official communications have been trumped by the most stunning charge of all — that the EPA has been engaged in human testing of toxic levels of environmental pollutants.
The Washington Times reports that a lawsuit brought against the EPA by the American Tradition Institute will be heard on January 3, 2013 in federal court. The EPA’s response to the allegations of illegal human testing is not a denial that the testing is occurring but rather a statement that they are not prohibited by law from doing it.
The stunning arrogance of a federal agency in modern times subjecting the elderly, children and the sick to concentrated doses far beyond what is legal of carcinogens and other environmental hazards is reminiscent of Nazi “scientist” Josef Mengele’s experimentation on twins.
In recent American history, we remember the horrors of discovering that the U.S. Public Health Service used poor blacks contacted through the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama as guinea pigs in watching the progression of syphilis that went without treatment. All the while, the “subjects” were led to believe that they were receiving treatment. The public revulsion that greeted discovery of the program in 1972 led to its being disbanded and the passage of the Office for Human Research Protections and other federal laws requiring Institutional Review Boards for the protection of human subjects.
It is shocking that today, in 2013, an American court will be hearing a case about an agency that is engaging in systematic human experimentation under the guise of pursuing the “greater good.”
Of all the actions undertaken and administered by the EPA, this stunning discovery that U.S. tax dollars have been spent for more than a decade on making some people sick by pumping them full of concentrated pollution in order to further environmental policy ends should unify every American to demand accountability from those in the Administration who oversaw these studies.
While the federal court hears the case, Congress should act immediately to not only defund these EPA “studies” but also to ferret out any instances of similar abuses in other agencies. In addition, a special prosecutor should be immediately appointed by the Attorney General to investigate these obvious human rights violations, and to bring those responsible — including Administrator Jackson — to justice.
The very fact that Obama’s EPA can arrogantly argues that no law empowers any judge to stop it from conducting scientific experiments on seniors, children and the sick should sicken all but the most callous among us.
Whether you support the EPA’s environmental agenda or you believe that they have engaged in an historic regulatory overreach, each of us should find the Agency’s human experimentation abhorrent.
The only question is whether Congress will have the guts to stand up to the EPA hold this rogue agency to account, or will human experimentation just be ignored to the shame of everyone