How
Many Chickens Do We Have Left?
Looking
at the number of appointees and nominees under the Bush administration,
one wonders if there is ANYONE left guarding the national chicken
coops from the foxes. If you thought the Reagan Administration was
characterized by corruption and greed (or maybe you've forgotten
what happened when Reagan "deregulated" the S& L's
and let them police themselves), you ain't seen nothin' yet! Your
grandchildren will still be paying for that one.
Bush nominees
usually have one thing in common: they seem to be put there to destroy
whatever it is they are supposed to be protecting in the public
interest.
We have media
networks parroting the Bush line à la Joseph Goebbels. Just
watch the aptly-named "Fox News" Network. Even the once-objective
Corporation for Public Broadcasting is now under the control of
Republican partisan, Ken Tomlinson.
Can you even
imagine the chutzpah it took to nominate Jerry Hacker, (an extreme
right-wing Christian who calls AIDS the "Gay Plague")
to the Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV and AIDS?
Guess who appointed
W.David Hager (who believes that prayer can cure women's illnesses)
to the Federal Drug Administration's committee that deals with birth
control measures?
And there is
our Attorney General Gonzales, our top cop, with his pro-torture
positions in defiance of International Law.
Why was Gale
Norton (who came to the job from an anti-environmental law firm)
appointed Secretary of the Interior? The shrieks of our chickens
mingle with those of the spotted owl and the polar bear.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth
(who says that women are no longer affected by discrimination in
the workplace, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary) got
an appointment to the Council of Economic Advisors.
Nominating
an anti-UN guy like John Bolton as Ambassador to the U.N. was a
stroke of evil genius!
Tommy Thompson,
a welfare foe, gets to be chair of our welfare department (Health
and Human Services).
Another great
Bush choice was multimillionaire Sam Bodman to serve as Secretary
of Energy. This is a guy who for a dozen years ran a Texas-based
chemical company that spent years on the top five lists of the country's
worst polluters.
Then there
is Leon Holmes, a Bush nominee to the U.S, District Court in Arkansas
who favors a Constitutional Amendment banning abortion, even in
the case of rape.
Our Vice President,
Dick Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton got a $40 million dollar
retirement package from that company which incidentally got billions
of dollars in no-bid contracts in Iraq. Halliburton has already
been involved in scandals involving kickbacks, overcharging for
fuel and food for our military.
Condoleeza
Rice, our oil-industry Secretary of State is out there in the world
trying to convince other countries that we are in Iraq, not for
the oil, but to bring them freedom and democracy. Surely they will
listen to her! Right.
And would he
appoint a guy from the logging industry and who is all for more
cutting in the national forests to oversee our national forests?
Yep, he would and he did. Undersecretary Mark Rey.
I could go
on for a week...
The next appointments
coming up are really scary. Supreme Court justices O'Connor and
Rehnquist are going to need replacements. The Court is already controlled
by the Right Wing and with two more doctrinaire far-right Justices
(do you expect Bush to start appointing moderates, given his record?)
you can kiss the Court goodbye for the next 35 years.
Perhaps the
most frightening of Bush's choices for important jobs has to do
with the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) , which has already
left the door halfway open to the foxes due to lax SEC enforcement
in the case of corporate criminals like Enron, Adelphi, and World
Com that stole their employees jobs and retirement. The stock market
is a scary place, and the Great Depression of the 30's was largely
caused by an unregulated investment market that got out of hand.
The SEC was created to be a watchdog agency in 1934 and protect
investors. Even considering someone like Congressman Chris Cox for
Chairman of the SEC by the Senate Banking Committee (Chaired by
a Republican) is ludicrous. Cox has stood up for legislation that
would have made it almost impossible for investors who had been
defrauded by outfits like Enron to get their money back is sacrilege.
He has taken huge campaign contributions ($2 million bucks since
1989) from the very corporate criminals he would be responsible
for regulating!
How many chicken
coops full of your chickens, my friends, are still guarded in your
interest? The Bush Administration seems to prefers a foxes to watchdogs.
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