Obama's Terror War Misses Domestic Targets

By Linn Washington, Jr.

In the wake of the Obama Administration’s ballyhooed elimination of Osama bin Laden, thousands of government workers across the United States wonder when their president will provide them the ‘comfort of closure’ through his attacking a terrorism they confront daily.

This terrorism ravishing government employees working in entities from mega-federal agencies to small municipalities fits the classic dictionary definition of terrorism: using force or threats to demoralize, intimidate and subjugate.

This terrorism is a tyranny predating the birth of al Qaeda: institutional racism and its related deprivations like vicious retaliation against anyone objecting to unlawful institutional inequities.

Interestingly, a raging battlefield in the institutional racism wars is the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Civil Rights, where numerous organizations have blasted that office’s director for his failures to enforce civil rights.

Additionally, that director, Rafael DeLeon, allegedly engages in improper behavior inclusive of sexist and racist remarks according to critics, including the National Whistleblowers Center and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), asserts DeLeon himself is the subject of numerous discrimination complaints.

The Washington Post’s influential Federal Diary columnist Joe Davidson published an article in late April stating that “if” the EPA’s Civil Rights Office “were a chunk of ground, it would be declared a disaster area.”

Davidson’s column cited a scathing report on the EPA’s Civil Rights Office released in March by the Deloitte Consulting firm.

That report criticized the office’s “record of poor performance,” raking it for “losing sight of its mission and priorities” by focusing on “minor responsibilities” instead of on “critical discrimination cases affecting employees and disadvantaged communities.”

PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, in a press release, stated, “Conditions of fairness inside EPA, especially for whistleblowers, have gotten worse, not better during the past two years…How can EPA speak with any credibility on topics such as environmental justice when it cannot address gross injustice inside its own hallways?”

This row inside the EPA is embarrassing to the Obama Administration, because it raises disturbing questions about that administration’s real commitment to workplaces free of discrimination and to protecting whistle-blowers who expose misconduct...

For the rest of this article by LINN WASHINGTON, JR. in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent online alternative newspaper, please go to: ThisCantBeHappening!