Damage to Our Nation: Foxes Guarding the Hen House

One of the functions of Government (perhaps ultimately the ONLY function of Government) is to protect its citizenry. Most, if not all, of the functions of Government boil down to that. With some functions, this is obvious (police forces, FBI, CIA, armed forces, fire departments), with others it may be a little less so.

• Governmental regulation and standardization of education is at least intended to protect citizens against the perils of an uneducated population, and to give individual citizens access to the same benefits which might otherwise be afforded only to the rich. This is necessary to prevent an entrenched class system, in which being born into a rich family is a better determinant of future prosperity than intelligence or hard work.
• Food and Drug oversight is intended to protect the populace from being sold harmful and damaging food products, non-effective drugs when others might be more effective and drugs with permanent and major side effects. Say what you will about the FDA, we’ve come a long way from the days when any joker could bottle any liquid and hawk their snake oil on a street corner, while those duped into buying it found themselves injured by it, or getting worse because it didn’t live up to the promised benefits. Claims by some that the free market economy would force safe drugs are clearly debunked by the modern “food supplement” industry, selling a wide variety of herbs, amino acids and chemical compounds which rarely pass scientific muster when put to a real test, and which have on more than one occasion turned out to be directly harmful to the user. We need the protection of an FDA-like group, because it is human nature to want hope, and so human nature to be easily deceived by false promises.
• Welfare, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and other social programs are intended to protect society from poverty. That they are poorly run, prone to abuse, and not particularly effective doesn’t change the fact that the intent is to protect society.

And so with protection of its citizens the top function of government, oversight of those who might be in a position to harm citizens through irresponsible behavior is key. It’s what the FDA is all about. It’s what the Judicial system is all about.

And it’s what the SEC and the EPA are all about. Fundamentally, it’s about putting in a layer of protection, forcing companies to clean up their own messes. You don’t put a teenager in charge of policing that he keeps his own room clean. You don’t put a toddler in charge of making sure she doesn’t eat too many cookies. You don’t put a fox in charge of safeguarding the hens. And yet the current Administration has time and again put those against whom Government is supposed to be safeguarding us (or at least their representatives) in charge of those very safeguards.

The latest example is Chris Cox’s nomination to the SEC. Cox played a major role in passing legislation which limited investors’ rights to sue companies for securities fraud. This legislation protected companies like Enron from lawsuits by those who were defrauded. In 1995, Cox’s efforts helped lead to the passage of “the Private Securities Legislation Reform Act” which provided extensive protections to executives, accountants and lawyers who made misleading statements about their companies. According to one “talking points” website, the securities and accounting industries form a majority of the political contributions made to Cox. So President Bush has seen fit to nominate this person to lead the governmental agency whose primary mandate is to prevent securities fraud and oversee the securities and accounting industries.

Would that this were the only case of putting the inmates in charge of the asylum, but no, this is but the tip of this particular iceberg.

Philip Cooney worked as an attorney for the American Petroleum Institute. For those who left their score cards at home, these are people who would be hit hard by proof of global warming, because their products are believed to be a major cause of it. Big Oil has been as slow to acknowledge any potential harm to the environment by their product as Big Tobacco was to acknowledge that theirs caused cancer and might be mildly addictive. Mr. Cooney was an outspoken critic of global warming theory, and yet President Bush named him Chief of Staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, in which position Cooney (a lawyer by trade and not a scientist) altered numerous scientific reports to downplay or eliminate any proof of global warming. All this time, President Bush’s mantra seems to be “the jury is still out on global warming”, but as long as he had Mr. Cooney running interference for him, that jury was never going to return to the courtroom. And further evidence that Mr. Cooney was doing the work of those whom his charge should have been overseeing, when these allegations came to light and Mr. Cooney was forced to leave his position at the White House, he was immediately given a cushy job with Exxon Mobil.

For 20 years or so, Mark Rey worked with various timber industry groups as a lobbyist. He became the Under Secretary for Natural Resources and the Environment, under which title he heads the U.S. Forest Service.

Stephen Griles was Deputy Director of Surface Mining under Ronald Reagan during which time he greatly reduced strip mining regulation and pushed to overturn restrictions on Pacific Coast offshore drilling. He then went on to form his own lobbying company, with a list of clients largely derived from the mining industry. And so in 2001, he was nominated and then confirmed as second in command at the Department of the Interior, the governmental agency in charge of overseeing and regulating use of public lands.

Jeffrey Holmstead, a former utility corporation lobbyist now runs the EPA’s air division.

Linda Fisher, Holmstead's co-worker at his lobbying firm (who represented Monsanto, a pesticide maker), was given a series of jobs in the EPA including "Deputy Administrator of the EPA", "Assistant Administrator - Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances", "Assistant Administrator - Office of Policy, Planning and Evaluation" and "Chief of Staff to the EPA Administrator". After leaving, she got a job with DuPont.

Thomas Sansonetti, a former lobbyist for the coal industry is now assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the Department of Justice.

The list goes on.

Time and again, this President has put people who are supposed to be overseen in positions of power within the departments which are supposed to oversee them, thus asking the prisoners to watch the gate of the prison, lest any of them escape.

This is not the way a government protects its people. This is the way a government helps its friends to skirt rules intended to protect its people, and just one of the ways in which I think President Bush is damaging to our country.

Copyright (c) June 16, 2005 by Liam Johnson. http://www.liamjohnson.net