More Inconvenient Truths: Title VI Suits
Unfortunately, our prediction that last December’s Poultry hit piece by McClatchy’s Charlotte and Raleigh papers wasn’t the end, but just the beginning was true.
Last Friday, an obscure law school in Vermont, which is training environmental justice lawyers, along with the NC Riverkeepers, Friends of the Earth, and two environmental justice advocates from Robeson County, filed what is wonkishly known as a Title VI complaint with the US Environmental Protection Agency. A Title VI complaint “allows persons to file administrative complaints with the federal departments and agencies that provide financial assistance alleging discrimination based on race, color, or national origin by recipients of federal funds.”
The complaint relies heavily upon the “award-winning” newspaper series that Google and 1 Earth Fund bought and paid for through undisclosed grant requests outlining their project. Unfortunately, NC Farm Families still has no response to their request for a copy of these closely held grant requests. Could it be that they outlined their “findings” in the grant requests? If so, this would put the final nail in the coffin for an independent investigative series of articles.
The point of the “propaganda dressed up like journalism” Big Poultry product is to generate unique complaints to push the legal boundaries. This complaint is simply the next step in environmentalist war against North Carolina’s booming Poultry business.
The real concern is that instead of fighting this frivolous complaint, the NC Department of Environmental Quality will decide to take the nonsense seriously. Instead of rejecting the false claims and innuendo, the department will settle with the activist plaintiffs.
This tactic is called “sue and settle,” and it is used by activists to enact policies that would not pass the legislature. That is the real concern here.
A whole non-profit industry exists to keep finding “problems” to solve. Rarely do they reach their goal and close down. Instead, once they build a support infrastructure and enjoy recognition and power – they look for the next problem to solve (or create). In business and government, we call it mission creep.
Suing regulatory agencies through the administrative and court systems is the current frontier for extreme activists to accomplish what they cannot achieve through our legislative and congressional processes.
We must be vigilant. We must find the resources to push back, expose and stop these extreme agendas.
As a result of the McClatchy poultry hit pieces, the NC Ag Partnership commissioned the comprehensive unbiased polling of the 23 largest poultry farming counties in our state’s history. We intended to find out what residents in those counties thought of poultry farming and the businesses that support them.
Please register for our webinar scheduled for Monday, May 22, at 11 o’clock. We will cover our surprising findings.
Help us stay in the fight. Help us shine the light on the murky interests that are accelerating their attacks on North Carolina’s Agriculture by clicking here: https://ncagpartnership.com
We appreciate your past support.