GM cleanup of the Bedford Superfund site.

President Barack Obama has nominated a lawyer for the nation’s largest toxic polluters to run the enforcement of the nation’s environmental laws. On Tuesday, Obama “announced his intent to nominate” Ignacia S. Moreno to be Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division in the Department of Justice. Moreno, general counsel for that department during the Clinton administration, is now the corporate environmental counsel for General Electric, “America’s #1 Superfund Polluter“:

Number five in the Fortune 500 with revenues of $89.3 billion and earnings of $8.2 billion in 1997, General Electric has been a leader in the effort to roll back the Superfund law and stave off any requirements for full cleanup and restoration of sites they helped create.

This February, General Electric lost an eight-year battle to “prove that parts of the Superfund law are unconstitutional.” One of the 600-person DOJ environmental division’s “primary responsibilities is to enforce federal civil and criminal environmental laws such as” the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Superfund.

Before General Electric, Moreno worked as a corporate attorney at Spriggs and Hollingsworth. Moreno’s name is found in the Westlaw database as an attorney defending General Motors in another Superfund case, the GM Powertrain facility in Bedford, Indiana:

Historical uses and management of PCB containing hydraulic oils and PCB impacted materials has contaminated on-site areas as well as the sediment and floodplain soil within Bailey’s Branch and the Pleasant Run Creek watershed.

Although General Motors entered into an agreement in 2001 with the EPA to clean up the site, a number of local residents whose land has been contaminated by polychorinated biphenyls (PCBs) have sued for damages in Allgood v. GM (now Barlow v. GM), in a contentious and caustic dispute over cleanup, monitoring, and lost property values.

During the Clinton administration, Moreno was involved in another controversial case, unsuccessfully defending the Secretary of Commerce’s decision to weaken the dolphin-safe tuna standard. In Brower v. Daley, Earth Island Institute, The Humane Society of the United States, and other individuals and organizations brought suit against the United States government for actions that were “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and contrary to law,” winning their case in 2000.

Today, USA Today noted one more problematic result of the housing crisis — the federal government is sitting on a lot of homes that nobody really wants to buy:

The combination of a deep recession and a foundering housing market has left the government with more than 50,000 houses on its hands — enough homes to fill a city the size of Riverside, Calif., or Miami. Now federal records show it’s struggling to unload the houses and facing billions of dollars in losses…In many ways, the government’s situation parallels what thousands of other homeowners are confronting: The houses it owns are harder to sell, they typically sit empty longer, and in many cases, their values cratered as the real estate market collapsed.

The government is desperately trying to offload these homes, so much so that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) lost “39 cents on the dollar for every home it resold last year,” and is set to lose even more this year. This is a pretty big problem that is only going to get worse as the foreclosure rate keeps increasing.

But selling the homes one at a time to individual buyers is not the only way to get them off the government’s hands. One other option is to bundle properties that are in the same general geographic area and sell them to investors to maintain as rentals. This could be a great way to bring much needed rental housing into distressed housing markets. CAP’s Andrew Jakabovics and Ellen Seidman from the New America Foundation go through the possible models to base such a program off of here.

A second option is to strengthen efforts to help communities purchase and rehabilitate foreclosed, vacant properties. These properties could then be sold to low- or moderate-income borrowers, with the understanding that any future profits on the sale of the home will be shared jointly by the homeowner and the public. As David Abromowitz put it:

Beyond the present benefits of economic stimulus, the current sharp home-price plunge is also a unique, once-in-a-generation window to establish a stable stock of long-term, affordable, shared equity housing. Allowing good affordable housing stewards to buy homes in these neighborhoods is responsible policy. The public gets a return on its investment now, and also long beyond the first homeowner is helped.

In any case, it makes no sense for the government to sit on these homes, particularly when you factor in the costs of upkeep. It’s far preferable that the homes get put to some sort of productive use.

Via Joe Weisenthal, we have Mark Patterson — an investor who “took advantage of the TARP’s matching funds” to purchase a Michigan bank — claiming that the taxpayer funded bank rescue is a “sham,” and that taxpayers will not see much of a benefit from their investment:

“The taxpayers ought to know that we are in effect receiving a subsidy. They put in 40pc of the money but get little of the equity upside,” said Mark Patterson, chairman of MatlinPatterson Advisers…Mr Patterson said it would be better for the US to bite the bullet as Britain has done, accepting that crippled lenders must be nationalised. “At least the British are not hiding the bail-out,” he said.

We’ve expressed concern before that, under the Geithner plan, taxpayers shoulder an disproportional amount of the risk while not seeing enough of the upside. And indeed, according to a “convoluted deal” agreed to earlier this year, MatlinPatterson has come to own 80 percent of the shares in Flagstar Bancorp of Michigan, while the US government “has ended up with under 10 percent.”