Obama Administration Suppress News that It Killed 7000 Jobs in Coal Industry

Obama Administration Suppress News that It Killed 7000 Jobs in Coal Industry

Obama administration officials may have pressured government contractors to change job loss estimates associated with coal regulations, audio recordings reveal.

The tapes show that unnamed officials with the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM) asked government contractors to change their calculations of job losses associated with the Stream Protection Rule.

A preliminary draft of an environmental impact statement estimated that up to 7,000 coalminers could lose their jobs under the administration’s “preferred” regulation. After a leaked copy of the report went public, officials asked the contractors to compare job estimates to a model in which another regulation was enforced, rather than the real world numbers.

“It’s not the real world, this is rulemaking,” an OSM official tells a skeptical contractor on the recording....

...The agency fired the contractors studying the rule less than one month later.

The House Natural Resources Committee obtained the tapes from an unidentified third party after OSM provided heavily redacted transcripts—the exchange above, for example, was blacked out—and withheld the audio recordings...

This story brings to light some troubling aspects of our government that need to be addressed.

First, government agencies should not be producing 'heavily redacted transcripts' and blacking out and withholding audio recordings. The first person that should be fired in every agency in our government (except when reasonable) is the person who's job description is 'hide information from the taxpaying public.' This is corruption, and I am sure it occurred during the Bush administration, but we see here for a fact that it is occurring during the Obama administration and not being addressed in any meaningful way. One wonders if this is a usual and regular practice of our government now- the hiding of information, the releasing of edited information, the suppression of records, etc.

Second, at first glance it appears that the agency fired the contractors studying the rules because they were asking too many important and relevant questions and probably were on to the fact that the Obama-run agency was trying to hide the truth, bury important facts, and kill thousands of jobs. I'm not lawyer, but I believe that there should be protection of contractors who point out when the government is acting wrongly, and it appears that in this case laws might have been broken.

Third, this administration seems to have as a re-occurring theme that of suppression of information, manipulation of data, and the deliberate and purposeful spreading of lies. Bush's administration was accused of these many times, but rarely was there any real evidence of it- but here we have yet another piece of evidence that people higher up in agencies are being instructed to actively conduct themselves in a corrupt and unethical manner.

Last, it is clear why the Obama administration was attempting to suppress this information- while our economy was in trouble and we needed all options on the table to fight off a recession and ward off an economic collapse, the Obama administration was busy pushing for regulations that they knew for a fact would kill thousands of good jobs, and attempted to suppress that information. Rather than creating jobs and improving the economy, stories like this demonstrate clearly that the Obama administration is killing jobs and strangling the economic recovery in our nation.

Neither Joe Pizarchik (head of OSM) and Ken Salazar (head of Department of Interior) have backgrounds that suggest that they'd on their own push for regulations that they know are going to kill thousands of jobs and then attempt to cover it up- no, this effort smells strongly like it came direct from President Obama himself.

unless otherwise indicated this content is copyright protected 2012 by SEA CHANGE, llc.