From Carol Browner’s Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Browner

“During Browner’s tenure, there were many reports from African American employees of racism directed at them from a network of “good old boys” who dominated the agency’s middle management layers.[16] The most known of these involved policy specialist Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, who in 1997 filed suit against the agency; in 2000 the EPA was found guilty of discrimination against her and she was awarded $300,000.[16][17] Coleman-Adebayo said that Browner allowed the problems to persist rather than trying to clean them up: “She wasn’t at all sympathetic to complaints about civil rights abuses. We were treated like Negroes, to use a polite term. We were put in our place.”[16] In an October 2000 Congressional hearing on the matter,[18] Browner appeared near tears as she said minorities had tripled in the agency’s senior ranks during her time as administrator, but she was unable to explain why the culprits in Coleman-Adebayo’s case had not been dismissed and in some cases had been promoted.[16] A month earlier, Browner had asked for the Office of the Inspector General to linvestigate a statement by an African American environmental specialist that she had been ordered to clean a toilet in 1993 in advance of Browner’s arrival at an EPA event.[19] This followed a rally in which dozens of EPA employees protested what they saw as rampant bias at the agency.[19] Congressional dissatisfaction with the EPA situation and its treatment of Coleman-Adebayo led to passage of the No-FEAR Act in 2002, which discourages federal managers and supervisors from engaging in unlawful discrimination and retaliation.[17]”

I’ll be amazed if Obama turns out to be anything more than a talking head himself. He’ll spend the next 2 and a half years talking about bold new policies without actually doing much, then he’ll spend the next year and a half running for re election saying stuff like “the time for talk is over”

Running for office is what he does and bold policy implementation would only put re election at risk. No – he won’t do that. What he will do is talk tough and do very little and then run again on his words rather than actions.

Unless I’m just wrong about this guy of course. But so far – all he’s ever really done was run for President and get ready to run for President. So I’m not expecting big things.

In some deep sense, President-Elect Obama his new Administration are carrying the very future of children everywhere on his shoulders.

If only we could undo the earliest years of Century XXI so that they were not filled with a colossal fool’s errand, catastrophic financial failures and ecological nightmares: an unnecessary and unjustifiable war; a collapsing economy; a human-induced, recklessly degraded environment and relentlessly dissipated planetary home.

The challenges before the human community now appear to be daunting, that is easy enough to see; nevertheless, I believe our children will behold a good-enough future. Between now and the time our children lead the world come the necessary changes, I suppose.

Godspeed.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176

It’s a testimony to how effective the industry propaganda has been that when people start dealing with evidence they’re labelled as activists, liberal or progressives. Hopefully we can recover some of the lost ground.

Dill Weed