Cheap Seats 2025 By Rich Trzupek

The Reverse of the Medal - 02/05

By Rich Trzupek
  It was bound to happen sooner or later. I am grateful that it happened later. I recently found out that the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s criminal investigations division has been looking into the professional activities of one Richard Joseph Trzupek aka: your humble correspondent.
  It is, on an infinitely smaller scale, an extension of the kind of lawfare that the deep state has so desperately utilized in the vain attempt to discredit the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington D.C.
  The term “deep state” is not always understood. The deep state does not consist of a cabal of evil, treacherous political operatives determined to subvert their perceived enemies and advance their agenda. The deep state rather consists of a collection of the most mindless sort of the mindless bureaucratic caste. Their focus is not about accomplishing a particular goal. It’s about preserving their perceived authority and, as importantly, their ability to exercise that authority.
  Given that preamble, let’s look at my current criminal investigation. I can’t describe the issues using specific names or events, but you’ll get the general flavor.
  The spurious concept of “environmental justice” was a huge focus of Joe Biden’s EPA. The core concept of the theory is that evil corporations build awful, heavy industry facilities in or near to poor, minority communities because those communities don’t have the resources to fight back.
  In reality, poor – often minority – neighborhoods tend to form in or around heavy industrial sites because property values, and thus home prices, are much less in those places. In just about every case the original inhabitants of today’s environmental justice areas worked their way into the middle class thanks to the wages that industrial jobs provided. They then moved out to nicer neighborhoods. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.
  Yours truly got caught up in a BS environmental justice case when USEPA learned that neighbors were complaining about odors that seemed to emanate from a nearby food products plant located within an EJ zone. However, the complaints originated from a high-end residential development the city in question had foolishly approved even though it was directly across the street from a long-established industrial park. None of the poor/minority residents of the neighborhood were bothered. Only the rich folk were offended.
  USEPA issued an extensive, complicated order to the plant to test for a huge suite of air pollutants. At my company that kind of work usually lands on my desk as the guy who handles extensive, complicated and therefore unusual testing programs. Privately, I felt that there was no way the agency could justify the sheer expense of the test program they were asking for, given the fact that the plant was a very minor contributor to air pollution in the area. Nonetheless, I designed a test program that provided USEPA all the data they asked for, using well established testing methodology.
  Unfortunately, the USEPA “engineer” (seriously doubt this person knows dink about the most basic engineering) wasn’t happy with the results of the test program. The results were too low according to this particular “engineer.” The test results must be wrong and those results might very well have been fabricated by the “anti-EPA” jerk running the test program, whom would be me.
  So USEPA decided to spend God-only-knows how much time and treasure to investigate the activities of an obscure source testing professional helping an equally obscure food products plant more accurately determine how much air pollutants it contributes to the air-shed.
  Am I personally worried about my future? No. This is about harassment, not the pursuit of justice. I’ve little doubt that will become increasingly obvious as this nonsense of a case moves forward. My hope is that the current administration will start to make this kind of silly, wasteful, unproductive deep-state activism disappear, or at least much less prevalent. Here’s hoping.
  Email: richtrzupek@gmail.com