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Christie Blames Environmental Protections For Wall Street’s Bubble Driven Economic Recession

Christie’s “State’s Rights” Neshoba County Speech

Gov. Christie - Green Backdrop A Prop & Visual Ploy to Mask environmental attack (Terhune Orchards, 8/17/11)

Maybe now the media won’t have to hedge or qualify “claims” by environmentalists or “harsh critics” that the Governor is hell bent on rolling back environmental and public health protections in order to promote economic development.

Governor Christie just bragged about it – so now they can use his own words.

How’s this for a headline? (see Press of Atlantic City story)

Gov. Christie pitches his re-election to real estate developers

The Governor delivered his red meat attack before a crowd of commercial real estate developers in Edison, a sprawled out toxic post industrial wasteland that serves as a poster child for why NJ needs stronger land use and environmental regulations.

The Governor is so out of touch that he could not remotely perceive the warped irony of his choice of audience or location as the forum to deliver an attack on environmental and public health protections.

The chutzpa recalls Ronald Reagan kicking off his 1980 Presidential campaign with a “State’s Rights” speech in the racist deep south, Neshoba County Mississippi, just a few miles from the notorious 1964 murders of civil rights workers.

Message received Ronald Reagan – Message received Chris Christie. 

The essence of a Demagogue is to appeal to ignorance and resentment and – with a grain of truth – to present the Big Lie with a straight face.

The Governor succeeded spectacularly:

He was on stage less than two minutes before disparaging the record of his predecessor, Gov. Jon S. Corzine, and Corzine’s DEP chief, Lisa Jackson, who went on to lead the federal Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama.

“We had a situation where things in our state had ground to a halt, and in fact in many ways were moving backward,” Christie said. “We had a regulatory system which was running amok. A DEP which was the most business-unfriendly environmental protection department in America. Of course, the person who ran that department then went to make the EPA the most business-unfriendly organization in America.”

By “ground to a halt”, we presume the Gov. was referring to the economic recession.

Virtually all credible economists attribute the recession to the collapse of Wall Street and the bursting of the greed and fraud driven real estate bubble.

Not one single credible independent economists attributes the economic recession to environmental and public health protections.

In fact, a rich body of literature demonstrates that environmental and public health protection regulations have huge net economic benefits that dwarf their costs to industry, and that they stimulate innovation and create net jobs.

So, there is NO DOUBT that the Gov. was blatenly lying when he blamed environmental regulations and DEP for the economic recession.

Will PolitiFact and media call him out for that Big Lie?