By USDR
Well, if anyone has beef with the new regulations coming out of the Environmental Protection Agency, this latest development won’t give you peace of mind. A deposition released by the House Oversight Committee shows an ex-EPA official testifying under oath in December of last year that the agency intended to “modify the DNA of the capitalist system.”
Now, it should be noted that the official is John Beale, who pled guilty last September to defrauding the government of nearly $900,000 in pay and bonuses. He also masqueraded as a CIA agent.
The part about changing the capitalistic dynamic in the U.S. is mentioned on page 19 of the deposition. Here, he describes a meeting on April 29, 2010 with then-assistant administrator Gina McCarthy of the Office of Air and Radiation – who now heads the EPA.
Beale recounted a discussion he had with McCarthy regarding a project:
“I’d been working in the environmental business for a long time, and although generally the western world has made good progress, and the United States has been particularly successful about improving the environment in terms of things like water quality and air quality, we’re reaching the limits of traditional regulatory process to do that, largely because the fundamental dynamic of the capitalistic system is for businesses and individuals to try to externalize all costs. That’s the way the system and individuals can maximize profits and minimize costs.
“In addition to that, pollution is being transported globally around the planet, and we’re reaching the limits of what we can do technologically to protect our citizens without having more impact on other countries. In other words, we need to get reductions from some of these other countries. That’s the type of project I wanted to work on. That’s what we talked about.”
When asked if he worked on the project, Beale said, “I certainly did.”
When asked if “any work product ever get produced as a result of that work,” Beale said:
“It depends on how one defines work project. There were several phases of this project as we had outlined it. There’s an enormous body of literature on the subject. Sometimes, it’s referred to [as] sustainability literature, sometimes it’s referred to green economics. And so, phase 1 of the project was for me to become very familiar and transversant [sic] with that literature. Phase 2 would have been out and interviewing academic experts, business experts, people in other countries that are doing things. And, then, phase 3 would have been coming up with specific proposals that could be – could have been proposed either legislatively or things which could have been done administratively to kind of modify the DNA of the capitalist system, which is not new.”
“It’s happened tens of times through the history of the capitalist system being there. It’s not a God-given system that was created once and never changes. It changes all the time,” he said.
Now, that’s quite a claim, sir.
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