December 14, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


BUSH DESTRUCTIVE TO THE END

George W. Bush is rushing through a series of so-called "midnight regulations" that will have severe negative impact on the environment and civil liberties. He can get away with this because of a loophole in the law that allows him to bypass Congress. It reminds me a little of a defeated military foe that burns the bridges and poisons the grain. Bush isn't satisfied with the damage he's already done to the United States and the world. This article by Paul Harris is at www.guardian.co.uk:

The Bush moves have outraged many watchdog groups. 'The regulations we have seen so far have been pretty bad,' said Matt Madia, a regulatory policy analyst at OMB Watch. 'The effects of all this are going to be severe.'

Bush can pass the rules because of a loophole in US law allowing him to put last-minute regulations into the Code of Federal Regulations, rules that have the same force as law. He can carry out many of his political aims without needing to force new laws through Congress. Outgoing presidents often use the loophole in their last weeks in office, but Bush has done this far more than Bill Clinton or his father, George Bush sr. He is on track to issue more 'midnight regulations' than any other previous president.

Many of these are radical and appear to pay off big business allies of the Republican party. One rule will make it easier for coal companies to dump debris from strip mining into valleys and streams. The process is part of an environmentally damaging technique known as 'mountain-top removal mining'. It involves literally removing the top of a mountain to excavate a coal seam and pouring the debris into a valley, which is then filled up with rock. The new rule will make that dumping easier.

Another midnight regulation will allow power companies to build coal-fired power stations nearer to national parks. Yet another regulation will allow coal-fired stations to increase their emissions without installing new anti-pollution equipment.

THE UGLY HISTORY OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

Let me be frank. I detest the Republican party. In its whole history, except for a very brief interlude with Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican party had tried to make serfs out of working men and women. They've tried to destroy unions, opposed any kind of fair wage compensation, used hatred of gays and minorities to win elections, created phony scares of Communism and terrorism, and consistently wrecked the economy. This commentary by J. Miller Rampant is at http://jamillerrampant.blogspot.com:

When the Republican Party handed itself heart and soul to Big Business in the 1890s, it was the start of an epic battle to defend power and privilege in the United States at all costs. Briefly, under Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican Party was captured by the progressive wing, and TR had little sympathy for the "malefactors of great wealth" as he called them. But by the 1920s the fanatically pro-business, anti-worker orientation of the Republican Party was set. I have wracked my brain and I cannot think of ANY time the Republicans EVER acted in the interests of ordinary working men and women. They and their allies fought savagely against unions, never hesitating to use violence and state power to destroy them. (There is a myth that violence in labor disputes is only union-generated; check out Henry Ford's war against the unions to see a powerful refutation of this, or the war of the coal mine owners against the unions in West Virginia and Kentucky.)

This pro-business, anti-worker faction of the Republican Party hated FDR as if he were Satan incarnate. It is this faction of the Republican Party that fought against child labor laws, the right of workers to organize, minimum wage laws, worker safety protections, and every other proposal that was designed to grant working men and women the rights and dignity they deserved. The modern descendants of these violently anti-worker conservatives control part of the Republican Party today. They are the ones who voted against financial aid to the Big Three automakers so they could kill off the United Auto Workers, their sworn enemies since the 1930s. We should not be surprised.