What Does "Dubya" Know about those who are trying to Sell our Safety, Sell Public Assets, and Subvert the Judicial System?

"There ought to be limits
to freedom..."

— George W. Bush,
commenting on the website
www.gwbush.com

"If you don't think it's a gamble to put a man in the White House who believes we should have guns in church, who thinks the Taliban is a rock band, who was such a failure as a businessman that his company was nicknamed "El-Busto," who wants to turn our Social Security system into a Wall Street boiler room, who can't name a single thing he disagrees with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson on, who smeared a bona fide hero named John McCain, and whose principle policy proposal is to give America's surplus to the idle rich in the form of a $1.3 trillion tax cut, you're either nuts or a Republican."
... Equal Time co-host Paul Begala, shooting the bull.

Selling Our Safety

A report by Public Citizen and Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways (CRASH), shows that between 1993 and 1998 the trucking industry bribed Congress with almost $29 million in political contributions and lobby expenses. As Joan Claybrook, President of Public Citizen said, "There are so many deaths and injuries because the trucking industry has used its influence to secure legislative exemptions from existing safety requirements".

Fatalities from large truck crashes increased by 10 percent from 1995 to 1997. Last year alone 5,300 people were killed in heavy truck crashes. An average of more than 100 per week. Another 141,000 were injured.

The study found that the largest single recipient of trucking industry money was Pennsylvania Republican Bud Shuster, chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, who received $145,400 from the trucking industry over the last six years. Members of his committee each received on average, $21,783 from trucking industry PACs during the six years studied. 73 percent more that the average $12,586 received by all other House members.

For their money, the trucking industry bought legislative exemptions from existing safety requirements, block legislation to improve truck safety, prevent any increase in fuel taxes, and to stop proper Congressional oversight of the Office of Motor Carriers (OMC), the report explained.

The OMC bases important safety standards on flawed research that it pays the trucking industry to conduct. The report highlights the OMC has significantly reduced the number of safety inspections, compliance reviews and fines imposed, as the number of deaths and injuries have increased along with the truck miles traveled.

The OMC is not the only agency created to protect citizens from business that would needlessly kill Americans in the name of profitability, Republicans are attacking.  The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), are all under conservative attack.

Its not just our environment and safety the Republicans in have sold out, here are a few more interesting facts about the prostitutes in the House and Senate.  

Selling Our Assets

Each year, U.S. taxpayers subsidize U.S. business with more than $150 billion. Examples such as Hershey International and McDonalds receive some $69 million each year in public funds for advertising campaigns and other promotions of their products as American agricultural exports.

"Commodity" timber sales section of the U.S Forest Service sell our trees to private timber companies for $5 dollars per tree, well below market value. The federal timber sales program actually loses money because the amount paid to the government by the private companies does not even cover the administration cost of preparing the sales. Add the cost of building 440,000 miles of roads built through National Forest Service lands (95% of the new roads built in public forests are logging roads, only 5% were for recreation and public use), and taxpayers pay $142.2 million annually.

The old boys in the mining industry take advantage of an 1872 law that allows mining corporations to pay no royalties on the billions of dollars worth of minerals they extract from public lands. Lands worth billions they buy at the 1872 price of $5 per acre. Annually, a $200 million cost to taxpayers. Adding insult to injury, taxpayers pay for clean up of the destruction left by private mining on federal lands, estimated cost $32 billion to $72 billion. Legislative efforts to address this burden on taxpayers have all been blocked in the Republican lead Congress.

The Department of Interior's Mineral Management Service estimates that the oil companies underpay by an estimated $66 million annually for oil extracted from public lands by undervaluing the oil from the actual market price.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture provides financial assistance to the tobacco growers through its price support program and with crop insurance. In 1998 the government gave $67 million for crop insurance.

When Republicans do vote on legislation to help our citizens they always insist on special clauses and amendments for the businesses that support them. Trent Lott, for example, insisting on a provision to the balanced budget act that allows cigarette makers to reduce their future liability in smoking-related lawsuits. Even allowing the Tobacco industry representatives to write and submit the document. According to a article in USA Today, Congress's chief tax writer told them, "Tobacco industry representatives wrote the provision of the budget law that allows cigarette makers to reduce their future liability in smoking-related lawsuits". Staff director of the Joint Committee on Taxation told them, "The industry wrote it and submitted it, and we just used their language". "...The proposal became law after House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott insisted on its inclusion in the balanced budget act". USA Today 8/29/97

This was not a unique event. According to an article in the New York Times (3/22/95), when talking about the Clean Water Act, "The bill's sponsors and a committee of lobbyists worked side by side on the bill, inserting one provision after another to satisfy industry groups like the Chemical Manufactures Association [and] companies like International Paper."

Campaign finance reform would address this scourge in politics. The McCain-Feingold bill in the Senate, and Shays-Meehan reform bill in the House, or versions of them, seek to put a cap on spending in congressional races in exchange for significant public resources (including free and reduced-priced TV), a ban on soft money (those unlimited and unregulated contributions from wealthy individuals, corporations and unions), reductions in the influence of special interest PACs, curbs on electioneering disguised as issue advocacy, and improved disclosure of campaign contributions.

Republican John Doolittle, when referring to the Democratic campaign finance reform discharge petition, which has 194 Democratic signatures and could force a vote on campaign finance reform said, "People who sign the discharge petition...are really committing treason against the party. That is how strongly I feel about that. That's a dangerous position to take and we need to end that talk." (ROLL CALL 5-13-99)

Selling Judicial Integrity

Judge Sentelle's scent of corruption has marked other Republican scandals. After they were caught searching Bill Clinton's passport he gave the job of investigating the Bush administration to the resolute Republican Joseph diGenove, who, surprise, found no wrongdoing.

When the Supreme Court gargoyle, Chief Justice William Renquist replaced Republican George Mackinnin who ran the three-judge panel which picked special prosecutors, in favor of hyper-conservative Judge Sentelle, the coup d'etat of the new liberal presidency had begun. Sentelle, now in position, fired the first Whitewater investigator Republican Robert Fiske, who would not play dirty enough. Then he hired the dependable hatchet man Ken Starr, who had long ago sold his integrity to big business. Renquist, Sentelle, and Starr, all alumni of the Scaife funded Federalist Society cabal, had manipulated themselves in place to launch the shameful assault on the American electoral system, in the first, second, and third positions.

Sentelle then gave Ken Starr unparalleled freedom to pursue any petty infraction with the utmost pomp, authority and, of course, press. Starr leaked every lascivious detail they could scrape up or make up. The Chief Justice, playing grotesque ringmaster of his own cirque d'etat spectacle, sadly, willing to sacrifice his judicial integrity for such an ignominious cause, Renquist degenerated into a pathetic caricature of imperial decadence straight out of Gibbon's,"Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."

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