Obama Doing Everything He Can to Destroy American Business

Obama's gone full bore since the inauguration to either sink what industry we have left or take it over. Today, he sealed the deal and allowed his Environmental Protection Agency to start regulating a gas that is a requirement for life on the planet:

Officials gather in Copenhagen this week for an international climate summit, but business leaders are focusing even more on Washington, where the Obama administration is expected as early as Monday to formally declare carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant.

An "endangerment" finding by the Environmental Protection Agency could pave the way for the government to require businesses that emit carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases to make costly changes in machinery to reduce emissions -- even if Congress doesn't pass pending climate-change legislation. EPA action to regulate emissions could affect the U.S. economy more directly, and more quickly, than any global deal inked in the Danish capital, where no binding agreement is expected.

Many business groups are opposed to EPA efforts to curb a gas as ubiquitous as carbon dioxide.

An EPA endangerment finding "could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project," U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue said in a statement. "The devil will be in the details, and we look forward to working with the government to ensure we don't stifle our economic recovery," he said, noting that the group supports federal legislation.

Mark my words that the US Chamber of Commerce is about to have an even worse jihad leveled against it. Several high profile corporations have already bailed under the heat The One has placed on them but they ain't seen a damn thing yet; but I digress.

So Lisa Jackson wasn't happy just driving business out of the state of New Jersey. No, she wants to destroy industry in the US as well and give India and China a leg up. Ask anyone who tries to conduct business in the the Garden state how oppressive the environmental regulations are.

Background: I'm in the environmental business and have worked in the two toughest states environmental regulation-wise--California and New Jersey. I watched as industry gave the Golden State the finger because of insane environmental policies and went south to Mexico or east to Nevada or Arizona. I believe in sane environmental policies--policies that actually protect people and the environment. Examples would include Superfund cleanup and elimination of actual air pollutants that could cause harm like lead and benzene. Lisa Jackson was a horrid leader on remediation and allowed hazardous sites to remain un-remediated and kids to live near them while cozying up to the companies that impacted the sites.

Jackson was slammed by that noted conservative site The Huffington Post for her shady record on cleaning up Superfund sites. She was like everyone else in the Obama administration: close to those they are supposed to regulate. Geithner, Bernanke, Jackson...Get the point? Now she passes legislation that furthers an unproven scientific finding. By the way, she's still not pushed to clean up Superfund sites that are leaching heavy metals, organic toxins and dioxins into the water and land now that she's on the federal level. I'm a conservative and would re-institute Superfund immediately if I had the chance.

Think I'm joking? How can one explain this? How about a site that was allowed to be capped and made into a golf course (where a PGA event was played] next to a sports field and a luxury condo development). Capping is essentially putting a plastic cover over acres of contamination:

A 2004 investigation by the Newark Star-Ledger found that Honeywell Inc., PPG Industries and Maxus Energy Corporation, the companies responsible for the chromium pollution, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbying and millions of dollars on their own scientific studies to convince the state of New Jersey that its chromium standard was too stringent.

According to the investigation, when the lobbying effort began, New Jersey considered chromium levels in soil at 10 parts per million to be safe; by the end of the companies' lobbying campaign the chromium standard was raised to 6,100 parts per million: one of the loosest standards in the country, allowing the companies to save millions on cleanup costs.

But jeez, carbon dioxide? This is a policy that gives Obama temporary street cred in Copenhagen but sentences his nation to a decade (hopefully) of effectively conducting commerce with a ball and chain around their checkbook. All for a supposed problem that is far from proven.

We are witnessing a major turning point in the economic outlook of the nation. Anyone who is out of work or loses their jobs because of this can feel free to take it out on their elected representative even though Obama subverted the Constitution and did this through the EPA simply to save them from actually having to vote as the Founding Fathers intended.