EPA Official on How To Deal With Non-Compliant Companies: ‘Hit Them as Hard as You Can’ & ‘Make Examples Out of Them’

If you wanted America to fail — you’d put a brownshirt like the EPA’s  Al Armendariz in a position of power and influence in your administration:

The Blaze reports:

Chances are you’ve never heard of him. We suspect most Americans haven’t. However, with the recent unearthing of the video below, that could change very soon.

Thanks to a little digging by the staff of Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), attention has been brought to a 2010 video that seems to confirm what many conservative have long suspected: that the EPA is at war with the oil and gas industries.

“[O]il and gas is an enforcement priority, it’s one of seven, so we are going to spend a fair amount of time looking at oil and gas production,” Armendariz says in the video.

The top-ranking EPA official goes on to explain his philosophy of policy enforcement [emphases added]:

I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff…the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.

And so you make examples out of people who are in this case not compliant with the law. Find people who are not compliant with the law, and you hit them as hard as you can and you make examples out of them, and there is a deterrent effect there.

And, companies that are smart see that, they don’t want to play that game, and they decide at that point that it’s time to clean up.

Where does the President even find dirtbags like this? The EPA is being run like an organized crime syndicate punishing energy producers while the President shrugs his shoulders and blames the rise in energy prices on oil speculators.

…in regards to the rest of his remarks, and given some of the recent litigation brought against oil, gas, and coal producers by the EPA, Mr. Armendariz’s speech seems to confirm the aforementioned idea that the EPA is at war with these industries.

This is how the left rolls. “Punish your enemies”, as the President once said.

You can see it in how the organized left is going after companies that associate with the the free market conservative group,   American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), about which, Michelle Malkin has the latest.

MORE:

Via The Daily Caller:

Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe took to the Senate floor Wednesday to announce an investigation into the Environmental Protection Agency’s “crucify them” enforcement strategy to keep oil and gas producers in line.

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Inhofe sent a 16 question letter to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson Wednesday quizzing the agency on its handling of the aforementioned Parker County, Texas case — in which the EPA issued an emergency order against the Range Resources drilling company for methane contamination in water wells only to quietly reverse their decision 15 months later.

“EPA needs to be held accountable,” Inhofe said on the floor. “The American people deserve to know exactly why EPA pushed ahead with such intensity to capture alarmist headlines, and then, when their investigations didn’t pan out the way they had hoped, they were forced to reverse their claims.”

According to Inhofe, it is imperative that the EPA answers for their apparent hostility to oil, gas and coal producers.

“[T]wo things are clearly incontrovertible,” he concluded. “1) the Obama Administration has done everything it possibly can to destroy domestic production of oil, gas and coal. And 2) the Obama Administration now is successfully carrying out its admitted plan to ‘boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe’ and make energy prices ‘necessarily skyrocket.’ Fortunately for the American people, they have yet to fully achieve their goal and we have got to stop them.”

SEE ALSO:

No Runny Eggs: Crush your enemies, EPA edition where Conan the Barbarian weighs in.

Doug Ross: Question: what does the Obama EPA’s stated policy of “crucifying” oil companies do to gas prices?

See graph for answer.

RELATED:

EPA Bullying via Resourceful Earth: EPA Announces Plan to Use Clean Water Act to Preemptively Strike Down Pebble Mine Project Permits:

Last month the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suffered what should have been an embarrassing defeat when the Supreme Court ruled that Mike and Chantell Sackett could bring suit against the EPA. That Supreme Court decision was the culmination of a costly 3-year battle between the Sackett’s and the powerful Obama Environmental Protection Agency which used the Clean Water Act in an attempt to prevent the couple from building their home on their property in Idaho.

It seems that the Sackett ruling might not have been such an embarrassment to the mega-bureaucratic government agency because just last week the EPA announced plans to use the Clean Water Act to preemptively prevent the Pebble Mine Project from being built in Alaska. This battle has also been going on for about three years.

It seems that many of the well-heeled in Alaska and Oregon don’t want the Pebble Mine Project built close to an area they consider their personal playground, Bristol Bay, Alaska. And so, under the guise of environmentalism, the powerful few help finance astroturf campaigns and environmental activists in an attempt to ‘Keystone’ the Pebble Mine Project without concern for the Native populations of the area and the much needed jobs and the hundreds of millions of dollars that will be infused into the depressed economy both directly and indirectly.

These NIMBY activists (Not in My Back Yard) have shut down projects across the country. The most famous recent case is the Keystone Pipeline. Now, through the EPA’s announcement last week, it seems the next Obama Administration ‘Keystoning’ will be focused on the Pebble Mine Project.