UPDATE: I got a direct email from the EPA with a statement. See below.
From Investors Business Daily:
Clandestine Government: During his first full day in the White House, Barack Obama promised he’d brought with him “a new era of open government.” Yet again, we have a promise that hasn’t been kept.
Among the administration’s many violations of public trust to recently become public is the Environmental Protection Agency’s apparent attempt to keep some of its correspondence hidden from the light of day through the use of aliases.
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, for instance, has reportedly used the name “Richard Windsor” to cover her tracks in private emails.
Federal law prohibits the government from using private emails for official communications unless they are appropriately stored and can be tracked. Because things look suspicious at the EPA, the House Science Committee is investigating the possibility that the agency has conducted business it doesn’t want the public to see.
On Friday, the committee delivered letters to the EPA and “various agency inspectors general” seeking to find out if “senior personnel have been conducting official business through secretive means such as aliases and private email accounts.”
The letters, sent by committee Republican members, express concern that “senior Obama Administration appointees” might be violating the Federal Records Act, Freedom of Information Act, the Presidential Records Act, and “other statutes designed to facilitate transparency and oversight.”
Read More At IBD: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/111912-634046-epa-lisa-jackson-emailing-as-richard-windsor.htm#ixzz2ClZF2f8J
UPDATE: This email was sent directly to me this morning, comments follow.
============================================================
From: Johnson.Alisha@xxxxxx.epa.gov
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2012 9:16 AM
To: awatts@xxxxxx.xxx
Subject: EPA Statement
Want to make sure you have EPA’s statement on your story this a.m. This is attributable to EPA, the Agency.
For more than a decade, EPA Administrators have been assigned two official, government-issued email accounts: a public account and an internal account. The email address for the public account is posted on EPA’s website and is used by hundreds of thousands of Americans to send messages to the Administrator. The internal account is an everyday, working email account of the Administrator to communicate with staff and other government officials.
Given the large volume of emails sent to the public account –more than 1.5 million in fiscal year 2012, for instance – the internal email account is necessary for effective management and communication between the Administrator and agency colleagues.
In the case of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, both the public and internal accounts are reviewed for responsive records, and responsive records from both accounts are provided to FOIA requesters.
=============================================================
That may be so, but it doesn’t explain these things.
1. Why is the account named “Richard Windsor” instead of something like headadmin.internal@internalmail.epa.gov
2. Why there’s no “Richard Windsor” listed at EPA
3. The reticence at making emails public, as required by law.
The EPA has failed to convince.
See this new post where Horner responds here:
Gail Combs says:
November 20, 2012 at 2:11 pm
“The last question of course is why ‘Global Governance’? The answer is the transnational corporations want it. Borders, tariffs and local laws, officials and politicians are a royal pain in the rear. They cost time and money. You have to bribe not one set of officials and politicians but a set for each country. There is always a chance a greedy politician will ‘nationalize’ your business holdings. So something like the EU makes a lot of sense IF you can get American citizens to go along with it.”
Interesting idea, but there are strong pressures in the other direction. Big companies may have more problems with international trade and business issues than smaller ones, but they also have more resources to deal with them. In the end, the advantage now probably belongs to the bigger entities. More “global governance” would give them more competition from smaller, more agile companies. And a more unified, worldwide governing entitiy would be able to regulate these companies worldwide. The paperwork might be easier, but they’d no longer be able to pick their venues, such as placing factories in places with less restrictive environmental laws, to avoid the really difficult regulations.
…and with the wildest of stories and anecdotes from the most dubious of sources which read like The Enquirer.
One might be asked to see your ‘Bircher’ (not birth-er) credentials to make all those pronouncements, but seeings as how they are (or were) available in cracker-jack boxes or The New American (and now can be printed off one’s own 3-color printer) I can safely assume you are ‘self-credentialed’.
Just remember one thing: “Con-spir-acy theories are the favored tools of the weak minded.” meaning if you can’t explain the actual political and financial workings of the world you ‘make it up’ and spin a tale as wildly conceivable as possible that fit your self-published ‘facts’ for the purposes of well, shaping the world in your self-conceived image; one classically called ‘populism’, seen as ‘rule by the proletariat’ in their struggle over the bourgeois (and I thought we had overcome that in America, but here it is again being run up the flag pole …)
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