The Green Police

[BridgeTheGap]

America’s most wanted list has gone green. Last year, the once docile Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “formed its own teams of inspectors, chemists, and street cops, and trained them in law enforcement,” writes Amy Roe in Bear Deluxe Magazine (Winter 2010–2011).

Some 200 gun-wielding special agents pursue business owners and con artists on the lam from charges such as tossing concrete and metal scrap into the ocean and selling bogus auto emissions tests to unsuspecting consumers. The eco-crime-fighting agents “possess full Title 18 law enforcement authority—the same as the FBI,” explains Roe. The feds won’t go after a home owner who trashcans his lawnmower oil, but they will pursue a chemical company owner like Larkin Baggett who funnels Chemical Consultants Inc.’s hazardous chemical waste into the sewer—and then compounds his crimes by assaulting law enforcement officers. A former EPA fugitive, Baggett is now serving a 20-year prison sentence.

Read more: http://www.utne.com/Environment/Green-Police-EPA-Eco-Crime-Fighting-Agents.aspx#ixzz1XStPw0W1

[Eric J in MN]

1. Does every federal agency have its own cops now? NT

NT

[txlibdem]

2. 200 agents? Make it 20,000 and we just might take this country back from the polluters

Bring our troops home, train them in bank fraud, EPA enforcement, and CEO incarceration (you can't get to be a CEO without lying, stealing, cheating, double-crossing, fraud or murder anyway) all CEO's are criminals. Criminals belong behind bars, not sipping ice tea at the ones in Maui.