April 7th 2009
The EPA’s Most Wanted
C
lick here to view the Environmental Protection Agency’s rogues gallery of fugitives from environmental justice. Quite a seedy bunch they are, like:
Allessandra Giordano, right, who with poppa Carlos fled the country (hopefully in a bright red Ferrari) for importing cars what did not meet EPA’s air quality regulations.
Or
Wendell Baptiste, left, who I chose primarily because of the fascinating red tint on his mug shot. Do you suppose he got that way by peddling plutonium on dark corners? No, Baptiste is a wanted EPA fugitive because he went on the lam after illegally discharging a hazardous substance into waters of the United States.
That’s the most common crime of these losers – dumping oil, sewage or contaminated cargos off their third-world freighters and into our international waters. That they’ve all fled seems to indicate that EPA Prison is not the most secure detention facility around.
EPA doesn’t want to judge the severity of these crimes. There is no #1 worst felon among this felonious bunch – at least not one EPA cares to identify. But the one who gets that dubious distinction is obvious. It’s not Denis Feron, who fled to Belgium after the hidden pipe dumping gunk from his factory into a creek was discovered, although that’s a pretty heinous act. Belgium apparently is tolerant of polluters. And it’s not Albania Deleon, who had a pretty brisk little business going, in which she didn’t properly train asbestos removers, then licensed them and hired them out for a pretty penny. She’s disappeared like asbestos vapors in the wind.
Nope, the award for the #1 EPA fugitive from environmental justice goes hands down to this guy, Mauro Valenzuela. Nice looking fella, eh? Hint of a smile, whimsical tilt to the head. Don’t you believe it. Here’s his write-up:
# Valenzuela was charged in the Southern District of Florida on a multiple count indictment.
# Alleged violations include:
* Illegal transportation of hazardous materials aboard a commercial aircraft
* Making false statements
* Conspiracy# Valenzuela was a mechanic for SabreTech. He certified that all cabin oxygen generators had been properly removed and replaced on a ValuJet plane. Valenzuela caused these generators to be delivered and loaded on VALUJET flight 592 without proper markings, capping, packaging and other safety measures. The flight crashed into the Everglades shortly after take-off from Miami International Airport killing all 110 passengers and crew onboard.
# Valenzuela fled the country soon after his arraignment. Whereabouts unknown.
Now you’d think they might include murder in there, too, since the oxygen generators caused the fire that caused the horrific, nose-in crash, but that’s someone else’s bailiwick. To EPA Valenzuela is just a lying, conspiring transporter of improperly marked, capped and packaged oxygen generators.
I think there’s a lesson in there about the workings of the mind of the federal bureaucrat … you know, the ones that now run Wall Street and Detroit, and are coming soon to a business near you.
hat-tip to “Alphonse,” who is not too keen on bureaucrats trying to assess evil:
You bring up an inconvenient truth about ranking degree of evil. The criterion should be human life, reduced to cost per life directly or indirectly taken. Most agencies will not touch this. NRC (AEC) tried with one of its early reports, but there was a controversy because it appeared that some lives were deemed to be more valuable than others. [Can't have that, can we?]
The Netherlands used human life valuation for its levee reconstruction: “The optimal failure probability shows a downward trend with increasing number of victims. With this addition, however, the problem of the value of a human life has been introduced. Numerous approximations for this are to be found in the literature. In the present study, it is proposed that the value of human life be equated to the cash value of the net national product per inhabitant of the Netherlands. The opinion is that in assessing acceptable levels of risk, it is advisable to take the possible loss of lives into account in economic terms.” [See, the government really does see you as just an economic entity.]
Someone apparently forgot to teach this to the RNC Welcoming Committee, an anarchist group poised to disrupt this week’s GOP convention. Police raids at several of the groups’ domiciles resulted in the confiscation of:
