The Rich Have Reason to Rejoice (Page 3)

§ Moved to renew thirty-six oil company leases of land off Santa Barbara, Ventura and San Luis Obispo counties for possible future development, arguing that the California Coastal Commission had no authority to restrict oil drilling in coastal waters. Bush's move was blocked by a three-judge panel, which ruled in early December that the state has the authority to review potential effects of oil drilling along its coast--a ruling the Bush Administration is likely to appeal.

§ Rolled back safeguards, opposed by the American Forest and Paper Association, that protect fish and wildlife from logging in 155 national forests with 192 million acres of public land in forty-four states. It removed a Clinton-era regulation requiring comprehensive environmental impact statements whenever the Forest Service revises its forest management plans. The Bush plan, instead, will give each forest manager discretion in deciding whether and how to assess environmental impacts; a move that the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife said would allow "reckless logging by timber-industry profiteers and the destruction of habitat for many species of wildlife."

§ Reversed a Clinton Administration rule banning snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.

§ Approved the drilling of two new natural gas wells in Texas's Padre Island National Park adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico--which lies along the nation's longest stretch of undeveloped beach and which is home to eleven endangered species--by BNP Petroleum, a private firm based in Corpus Christi. This is one part of the Bush Administration's plan to promote drilling at more than fifty new sites on federal land in the lower forty-eight states as well as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Opined the New York Times: "Such is this Administration's appetite for extractable resources that no area seems safe."

§ Approved construction by Calpine, a private utility company that contributed to the Bush campaign, of a forty-eight-megawatt geothermal power plant in the Modoc National Forest in California that had been blocked by the Clinton Administration because of concerns by environmental groups and by Indian tribes that consider part of the area sacred. In approving the project, the Bush Administration rejected a recommendation by the Advisory Council on Historical Preservation, a federal agency.

§ Replaced three ruling-class members of his economic team (SEC chairman Harvey Pitt, a lawyer for the major accounting firms; Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, former CEO of Alcoa; and chief economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, former Federal Reserve Board governor) with three other ruling-class members (John Snow, chief executive of CSX Corporation and former head of the powerful Business Roundtable, to the Treasury post; investment banker William Donaldson to the SEC job; and Stephen Friedman, former chairman of investment banking firm Goldman Sachs and current director of unionbuster Wal-Mart, as chief economic adviser).

§ Picked war criminal and liar Henry Kissinger to chair a task force investigating the 9/11 events without requiring him to disclose his consulting firm's business clients, which include some of the most powerful multinational corporations (reportedly among them Exxon Mobil, ARCO and American Express), which, as the New York Times noted, "depend on maintaining cordial ties with foreign governments and Washington officials"--an obvious conflict of interest. (Under public pressure to choose between making money and public service, Kissinger quickly resigned from the task force.)

§ Went to court to stop Congressional watchdogs (along with the Sierra Club) from forcing Vice President Dick Cheney--former CEO of the scandal-plagued energy services company Halliburton--to turn over documents detailing meetings between oil and gas industry lobbyists and executives (including representatives of Enron) and Cheney's energy policy task force, which called for expanded oil and gas drilling on public lands and an easing of regulations on the building of nuclear power plants. Helping craft the Bush legal strategy was White House counsel Alberto Gonzales (a possible Bush nominee for the Supreme Court), who, when he served as a justice on the Texas Supreme Court, received more than $100,000 in political contributions from the energy industry (including Enron and Enron's law firm, where he once worked).

Having Bush in the White House and Republicans in control of both houses of Congress makes it difficult to open the paper every morning. But rather than contribute to a sense of resignation and despair, the outrages of the Bush Administration should, like Thomas Paine's list of grievances against our eighteenth-century colonial masters, rouse us to revolt. Pass this list to your friends, activists and colleagues and let's get started.

Peter Dreier invites readers' comments, via e-mail.

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