I’ll admit I get a little sentimental sometimes, but damned if I wasn’t awestruck by all of the amazing people I met and re-met yesterday while here in DC for Power Shift. From Rainforest Action Network founder Randy Hayes to Indian Youth Climate Action Network super-star Caroline Howe, and numerous leaders and leaders-to-be in from the campus clean energy movement like Lindsey Berger from Missouri State and Markese Bryant at Morehouse College, I got to shake the hands of so many changemakers I just about wanted to cry on my metro ride home.
That doesn’t even get into the speakers. Majora Carter of Sustainable South Bronx was there, and Van Jones of Green For All was amazing as always, brining home the message that the clean energy revolution doesn’t mean much if we don’t deal with all our other social ills, and that we can have clean coal as soon as we have unicorns pulling our cars. (I heard a few young women say they kind of liked the unicorn idea..) Gillian Caldwell of 1Sky brought her two biggest inspirations for climate activism on state – her six year old daughter and four year old son. (I’m a sap, I definitely cracked a tear for this one and thought about my daughter who turns three next week.)
Two Obama administration officials spoke to 10,000 young people and said unequivocally that our generation elected this president. That’s right, this is our administration. EPA administrator Lisa Jackson told us that “science is back” at the EPA and that the “EPA is back on the job” after eight years of Bush. Ken Salazar, secretary of the interior, promised the department would no longer be the department of fossil fuel extraction. Billy Parish reminded us that the number one challenge in passing strong legislation this year is making the economic case, which is strong – clean energy investment creates three times the jobs dollar for dollar that dirty energy does.
And in case there was any doubt, former mayor of Salt Lake City Rocky Anderson came right out and said it – every politician that isn’t doing everything they can to transition us off of coal is the enemy, and mustn’t ever be re-elected again. I took away a lot of inspiration last night, and the first full of the conference is just beginning.
I think we just might shift the power this year.
Irrespective of Browner’s inside knowledge of the President’s policies, it is clear that Carol Browner is still directly in the chain of command between the White House and the Environmental Protection Agency she left in disgrace. Browner’s presence can only send a chilling message throughout the Agency that the master is back in command. Carol Browner’s history of discrimination and retaliation at EPA is well documented.
In 2000, a jury found that the EPA, under then-administrator Carol Browner, was guilty of race, sex, and color-based discrimination, and that Ms. Browner tolerated a hostile work environment. During subsequent oversight hearings of the Congressional Science Committee, the Chairman instructed Browner to clean up the working conditions at EPA so the next administrator wouldn’t get handed “a garbage can.”
Despite promising to do so under oath, Ms. Browner never accepted the jury’s findings as EPA Administrator. She never disciplined any of the senior managers under her supervision at EPA who were implicated in Coleman-Adebayo v. Carol Browner. She never stopped the appeal process in the case. It was her successor, Christine Todd Whitman, in her 1st act as EPA Administrator, who announced that the verdict in Coleman-Adebayo would not be appealed, and that the Agency would accept the jury’s findings.
Congress was so outraged by the conditions within EPA, that it passed unanimously in both houses the NoFEAR Act (Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation) 2001 and mandated that all Federal new hires be instructed in Coleman-Adebayo v Browner within 90 days, and that all Federal workers receive the instruction every 2 years.
Apparently, being found guilty of discrimination by a jury of her peers, having Congress enact legislation to outlaw her administrative behavior, and mandate that all Federal workers be instructed in Coleman-Adebayo v Browner was not enough to derail Ms. Browner’s career, or to prevent the retaliation against Dr. Coleman-Adebayo from the EPA that continues to this day.
These are not “allegations,” they are matters of public record.
The core of the case in Coleman-Adebayo v Carol Browner was Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. President Obama is a civil rights attorney. The question of justice in this matter has not been adequately addressed, with Ms. Browner’s ascension back into the heights of power, while Dr. Coleman-Adebayo, who stood up for civil rights for all Federal employees was thrown under the bus where Rosa Parks, a generation before her, took her stand.
The media need to start asking the President, Ms. Browner, and new EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, what the public is to make of this regrettable case of a courageous whistleblower, Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, being vilified, while her tormentors, Carol M. Browner — and the staff Browner left behind at EPA — are still retaliating, still discriminating against whistleblowers (who may be able to prevent poisonous peanuts from killing people), and still thriving within the EPA.
Carol Browner did more for women and minorities than any Administrator either before or after her. Her only mistake was to get cross-wise with Dr. Coleman-Adebayo who, to use the type of hyperbole Dr. Coleman-Adebayo herself has used so successfully, perpetuated what I believe is an enormous fraud on the American public.
There is only one thing that separates Dr. Coleman-Adebayo from the thousands of other people with grievances against the federal government, some of them undoubtedly justified, others undoubtedly not. And that is the jury verdict of $600,000.
Okay, let’s look at that jury verdict. A jury of 12 people heard evidence over a couple of days and concluded, based on that evidence, that EPA had discriminated against Dr. Coleman-Adebayo on the basis of race and gender. The jury found against Dr. Coleman-Adebayo on her claim of disability discrimination.
The standard of proof at a civil trial is preponderance of evidence. That means that the jury had to decide that more likely than not, the federal government had discriminated against Dr. Coleman-Adebayo. Twelve people, three or four days of testimony constrained by evidentiary rules, and then the conclusion that, yeah, there was a 51% chance of discrimination. That’s all Dr. Coleman-Adebayo has to hang her hat on. She has lost every single other trial since then.
What else do we know about the verdict? First, we know that the judge did not think much of it. The judge did not vacate the verdict as “shocking the conscience of the court,” which is, because it is such a high standard, a rare occurrence. But the judge did halve the verdict amount to $300,000. That gives you some indication of what that jurist, who had heard the same evidence as the jurors, thought of the verdict.
What else? Dr. Coleman-Adebayo’s star witness at the trial, Jon Grand, flew in from Chicago on the last day of trial to testify. In an interview with Jon Grand which Dr. Coleman-Adebabayo has posted on the internet, Dr. Coleman-Adebayo herself says that the trial was touch-and-go up until that point and she may well have lost had it not been for Jon Grand’s testimony. In the interview, Grand and Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo talk about how the government brought criminal charges against Grand for fraud in retaliation for his testimony at the trial. Grand says that he pled guilty to the charges of defrauding the government because of an “administrative oversight.” Grand graciously declined to identify by name the secretary who made the error.
To me, this summarizes everything that is wrong with the Dr. Coleman-Adebayo case. First, it was this version of the story that was dutifully reported by Daryl Fears of the Washington Post and then re-reported again and again by other newspapers. I understand deadlines, but newspaper reporters should still maintain some reportorial integrity through simple fact-checking. Second, as a check of the public record would have revealed, Jon Grand did not plead guilty to a simple case of fraud. He was convicted of defrauding the government of almost a year’s worth of salary — in this case, well over $100,000. He didn’t notice that this extra money was appearing in his paycheck? This poor secretary, blamed for it all, was supposed to be monitoring his paystubs and bank account? Fraud is a “crimen falsi” and, as such, is admissible at trial to impeach the testimony of a witness. Do you think the jury might have ruled differently had they known these facts about Dr. Coleman Adebayo’s star witness?
Finally, this story tells you how Dr. Coleman-Adebayo deals with these things. As the psychiatrist testified about her at trial, she is a narcissist. Everything is about her. As another commenter on another site has stated, it is like Jan Brady of the Brady Bunch: “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!” The government didn’t prosecute Jon Grand because he was guilty of major fraud. (People can be convicted of a felony for defrauding the government of 20 times less that amount.) The government prosecuted Jon Grand because he has testified for her. The whole government — to say nothing of the court system and every manager she has ever worked for — is apparently in on this grand conspiracy against her.
Dr. Coleman-Adebayo’s website claims that Grand was “set up” in retaliation for his testimony. So it’s even worse than just prosecuting him because of the testimony. This suggests the government actually played a hand in causing the fraud — entrapment, I guess. I see. The government decided to pay Grand double-salary for a year with the hope that he wouldn’t alert anyone. The government was then fortunate when Grand didn’t report the error because, well, he apparently didn’t notice.
One final point with respect to the verdict. Taking the verdict very seriously, then EPA Administrator Carol Browner commissioned an independent investigation by the law firm of Covington & Burling into the Office of International Activities (OIA), which had been the target of Dr. Coleman-Adebayo’s lawsuit. Unlike the 12 members of the jury, who heard testimony from select people over a three or four day period, Covington & Burling interviewed every manager at OIA and virtually every member of the OIA staff. The firm also interviewed former EPA employees that had a beef against the office, including the two EPA employees who testified for Dr. Coleman-Adebayo at trial. While I won’t repeat the main conclusions of the investigation (you can find them elsewhere on the web), Covington & Burling concluded after this year-long investigation that OIA was better in terms of diversity and promoting the interests of women and minorities than most organizations, public or private, with which it was familiar.
Dr. Coleman-Adebayo has sued virtually every single manager she has ever worked for EPA since she began work there in the early 1990s. Either there are only bigoted managers at EPA (a fact that I and many others can easily refute) or Dr. Coleman-Adebayo is the unluckiest woman in the world. She began by suing 6 out of 7 managers at the Office of International Activities, who, incidentally, included women and people of color. When she was transferred out of that office to the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxic Substances, she then had two managers, the first a white female and the second a senior and very-well respected African American male. Reportedly, the male hired Dr. Coleman-Adebayo because he believed her story and wanted to give her the opportunity to use her many talents in a discrimination-free work environment. That was his mistake because He and the female were Dr. Coleman-Adebayo’s next victims. Presumably, it would be difficult for Dr. Coleman-Adebayo to claim race and gender discrimination at this point. Now it was retaliation.
Consider Dr. Coleman-Adebayo’s latest target, a Latino male. Also very well-respected within EPA, this male had once worked in the Office of Civil Rights at EPA. Presumably, he knew something about discrimination. In fact, he himself has been widely applauded for his work on behalf of women and minorities at the Agency. In fact, Dr. Coleman-Adebayo herself once invited this male to make the keynote address she organized at EPA in the early 1990s in celebration of famous women. I remember this for two reasons. First, I remember it for the moving talk this male delivered about his mother. Second, I remember it for Dr. Coleman-Adebayo’s glowing introduction for this male and his accomplishments on behalf of civil rights. Apparently this male has also joined the conspiracy.
Every suit filed since the jury verdict — also part of the public record — has alleged retaliation. Specifically, the suits have alleged that the only reason EPA denied Dr. Coleman-Adebayo’s requests for work at home to accommodate her medical conditions was because the Agency was retaliating against her. Let’s look at this more closely. The federal government’s rules on working at home to accommodate some type of medical condition or disability are very progressive. But there are minimum requirements. One requirement is that you need to bring in proof from your doctor. Any federal manager who approved an accommodation without this proof would be fired, and for good reason.
Dr. Coleman-Adebayo suffers from, as I understand it, multiple sclerosis, hypertension, glaucoma and optic neuritis. I’m not a doctor but I know that there are various degrees of each of these conditions. I, for example, suffer from glaucoma that I treat once a day with eyedrops. Dr. Coleman-Adebayo did produce medical documentation from her doctors saying that, yes, these conditions would be better off if she worked in a stress-environment. However, because her doctors concluded that her conditions were easily treatable with medication, they could not say that she necessarily needed to work at home. This is the basis for her retaliation claims.
You can call me a bigot. You can call me anything you want. But when you do, please go beyond the name-calling. Tell me where I am wrong, what I have said that is not supported by the public record. Do you know Dr. Coleman-Adebayo? Have you ever worked with her? People love to adopt the cause of this professional victim. But they don’t know her. They don’t know what it is like to work with her.
Those of us who worked with Dr. Coleman-Adebayo at EPA were always fond of her. She is a warm and generous person, and she has a good sense of humor. But she was often tone-deaf in her dealings with other people, and we used to kid her that she always saw everything in racial terms. And I mean everything. As a commenter on another site has put it, if you disagreed with her on something as insignificant as what time to hold a meeting and you were white, you would soon hear stories about how you were a racist. And if you disagreed with her on the time of a meeting and you were black, you would soon hear stories about how you were an Uncle Tom. This is, sadly, so true.
How does she get away with it? First of all, she is enabled by members of the press, who, given deadlines, are too ready to pull language directly from her press releases without simple fact-checking and who can make their names and their careers by breaking big stories. She is enabled by her lawyers, who can establish reputations by representing such a high-profile client. She is enabled by people like Jon Grand and Congressman Sensenbrenner who have their own reasons to trash the EPA. She is enabled by people like President Bush who couldn’t resist a good photo opportunity with this civil rights crusader. She is enabled by all of her well-meaning supporters who so earnestly believe that, as soon as we have identified the sources of discrimination, we have taken the first step toward addressing them. And she is enabled by all the people, like me, who know Dr. Coleman-Adebayo and the facts of these cases, who, for fear of getting involved or putting our name out there or being called a bigot and a conspiracist, have remained silent. Well, for me, that ends today.
Marsha: I’m sorry your career didn’t turn out quite the way you wanted it too. It must make you feel good to have an explanation for every setback you experienced during your many years at EPA and it must make you feel good to think that the things that are happening to you are of historical dimensions along the lines of Rosa Parks. You obviously like the press attention, and I’m sure you are wondering who will play you in the Danny Glover movie.
But enough already. Your actions have harmed many innocent people, imperfect people just like yourself who were just trying to do their jobs. They may not have always agreed with you, but they are not racists and sexists and bigots. The record will show, for example, that Carol Browner has done more for women and minorities at EPA than any EPA Administrator before or since. And you have seriously damaged the national reputation of a federal agency that I love and that has been very good to me. I can’t tell you how many qualified women and minorities have told me they would never consider working for the agency because of what EPA did to you. That is bad for them. That is bad for EPA. And that is bad for all of us because we need good people at the EPA.
And not everything is about you. The government didn’t prosecute Jon Grand for testifying at your trial. It prosecuted him because he was a criminal, guilty of defrauding the government of tens of thousands of dollars. Every single day a government somewhere in the United States is prosecuting somebody for stealing 20 times less than the amount Jon Grand stole. But the government was to give Grand a pass because he had testified at your trial?
While I’m at it, let’s get some other things straight. Nobody ever called you “uppity.” I know it. You know it. In a weak, unguarded moment, you yourself admitted this to someone you thought was your friend.
As for the “honorary white man” thing, yes, that was unfortunate. But it has been repeated again and again, always out of context. I wasn’t at the meeting when it was said, but I know the situation. I know how it could have happened. You were famous in the office for seeing everything in racial terms. It was in fact you who introduced race into this particular situation. As I understand it, you came into a meeting already underway and you remarked about how there were only white men in the meeting. The man who reportedly said this was merely trying to defuse what was suddenly an awkward situation. I know this man. He is a good man, and he is not a racist. He was also poking fun at you a little bit when he said, okay, Marsha, I’ll make you an honorary white man if that’s what it takes. He was, in effect, gently chiding you that you were being ridiculous. Obviously you didn’t need to be a white man to attend that meeting. Again, I wasn’t there. But I know all of the people involved, including you. I’ve talked with other people who were there. How else to interpret his remarks? It’s a great soundbite, one I’ve heard again and again. But it really doesn’t say a thing.
And the ambulance. An ambulance arrives at EPA when you were forced to return. You do have a flair for the dramatic, don’t you? But anybody can call an ambulance. What did the doctors say when you arrived at the hospital? Finally, there is the whistleblower thing and South Africa. Gosh, now that’s dramatic. The stuff of Erin Brockovitch, right?
But it’s not true. You weren’t taken off the work because of the vanadium mine. You were taken off the work because the South Africans just couldn’t work with you.
But let me address this part first. Even had the vanadium mine thing been true, it is hardly appropriate for our government to be dictating to this fledging democracy what they should be doing. Anybody who has ever worked in a regulatory agency knows that you will often get many complaints from community groups about particular problems. Some of these complaints are valid. Some of these are not. But it is up to that government to determine how to handle the complaints. How arrogant for this American to be telling them whether or not there was validity to the claims?
But that’s just a smokescreen anyway, just an excuse to get you onto NPR. The real reason EPA took you off the work was because our South African partners (partners, not subordinates) complained that they just couldn’t work with you. You were opinionated, stubborn, and abrasive. You didn’t return phone calls. You were ineffective at doing your job because you didn’t really have a clue about EPA or EPA’s programs.
Yes, EPA replaced you with a white male. But there was a reason for this. The male did not have an advanced degree in African studies, but he did know EPA inside and out. He had a proven track record of managing EPA’s cooperative programs with developing countries. You with your degree in African studies might have made a better dinner companion for the South Africans. But they didn’t need a dinner companion. They needed someone who knew EPA and who could navigate the vast agency on their behalf.
Finally, there is the medical documentation — or lack thereof. I’m sincerely sorry you are ill, and I hope you will get better. But if it really is as serious as you claim, you should have had no trouble producing the required documentation. Without that, someone could be forgiven for believing that you are just someone who would rather sit at home updating your website and planning your next NPR appearance while collecting well over $100,000 a year in taxpayer money.
So many words, Tina, but alas, so little truth in your diatribe.
Let me only say that your assertion that “the judge did not think much of it. The judge did not vacate the verdict as “shocking the conscience of the court,” which is, because it is such a high standard, a rare occurrence. But the judge did halve the verdict amount to $300,000. That gives you some indication of what that jurist, who had heard the same evidence as the jurors, thought of the verdict.”
$300,000 was the maximum allowable award under the statute. So to use your logic, the judge must have been most impressed.
That you so misrepresent the “halving” of the award exposes your shabbiness. Shame, shame, shame.