EPA Sue and Settle Scheme - How do we Claw Back our Tax dollars stolen by EPA fraud?

Is this something you made up on your own, or did you read it in a right wing anti-environmental blog? And if this scheme were working, it isn’t your tax dollars.

@zenvelo Is Forbes.com “a right wing anti-environmental blog”? If so I did. Even if it came off the “right wing anti-environmental blog” aka Forbes.com it still seems true to me. Do you have some reason to believe it isn’t true?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/02/17/epas-secret-and-costly-sue-and-settle-collusion-with-environmental-organizations/

Forbes is a pretty right wing anti-environmental magazine. They openly have criticized the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act as being anti-business for many years. I am perfectly fine with what the EPA has been doing for many years.

@zenvelo Is the Clean Air Act pro-business? As far as I am concerned it is one of the reasons everything you buy at Wal*Mart comes from China instead of being made by Americans. The air isn’t any cleaner for it. In fact, the air is DIRTIER for every unit of production we push off to China.

The NY Times also covered it. It really sounds like a sweetheart deal. Very difficult to catch or police. The EPA has been involved in a lot of shady stuff so I don’t find this to be much of a stretch. It may not be quite as blatant as some would have us believe but there may be some incentive to settle lawsuits that actually accomplish some of the goals or desires of the EPA with little fanfare.

Maybe they are involved in collusion or maybe they just settle when it’s a friendly plaintiff. It’s hard to tell. Such are the problems when bureaucrats are dealing with other peoples money.

Hopefully the technique is not as skeezy as this article makes it out to be, but honestly, I’d rather my tax dollars go to environmental organizations than the mega-defense industry, the insurance racket, big oil subsidies, and drug company pay-offs.

Which groups do you consider “wacko”?

@syz What “drug company pay-offs” are you talking about? I just want to be sure you aren’t talking about the profits which incentivise them to develop the drugs in the first place. If I die of illness it will be because the medical procedure to cure or treat it hadn’t yet been invented.

This kind.

@syz ” including promoting prescription drugs for uses not approved by the FDA ” – this is known as off-label use and it only exists because of flaws in the FDA. The problem is that people are sick (even die) every day because the drugs they need cannot make it through the BROKEN GOVERNMENT approval process. It is known these drugs can help people even though not approved for the use so of course people are going to tell others. The real problem is the approval process not a drug rep who tells someone a drugs can help them even though not approved.

@syz

“Forbes is a pretty right wing anti-environmental magazine” – so if the posts above are true, you can’t believe that story.

@everyone I was really hoping to hear some ways to reclaim these dollars. If the dollars are spent these environmental groups can have their future donations levied, etc.

Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. The only way to make it happen is for someone to sue those plaintiffs and prove it was fraudulently awarded. The tax payers are represented by the Attorney General. Unfortunately he reports to the same guy that the EPA reports to. If that guy didn’t like what was happening he would replace the head of the EPA and that’s not happening. So who do you think would represent the people in this matter?

The guy who wrote those articles is a professor at the University of Houston, and he’s pretty much a right wing space nut. He doesn’t understand debt or the economy, and is guilty of making up numbers (which he calls hypothetical) in order to illustrate his points. Yeah, sure, the world would be going to hell in a handbasket if he numbers were real. But he made them up just to make it look like the world is doing badly.

His article about sue and settle also makes it clear that he is just a front propagandist for some far right wing nut congress critters and their secret funders. He infuses the article with innuendo and misrepresentations all over the place. He has done no real investigation. He is just casting aspersions. No one has actually talked to any of the EPA folks or the environmental organizations (which are mainstream, middle of the road organizations) to find out what is going on. They don’t want to find out. They just want to sit back and toss bombs, like most radical conservatives.

There is no real information here to go on. No case. Just crazies blowing smoke. As you were.

@wundayatta

Wow, talk about casting aspersions. You seem to be throwing a lot of bombs yourself. The private e-mail accounts seem awfully suspicious to me. It’s not like she was using a private her private email account, it was under a complete different alias.If you can’t get the information from the Freedom of Information Act, your left with estimating. Why exactly won’t the most transparent government ever created, comply with the FOIA? doesn’t that worry you?

It would seem that there are enough questions here to make me wonder, what the hell is going on. You may be fine with this but it smacks of corruption. And not just a little but massive. A little investigation of these charges would seem appropriate.