Bush Fouls Out

Not satisfied to have the highest disapproval ratings of any president in modern times (71%), Bush now wants to foul-out in a toxic wave of last-minute “Midnight Regulations” that increase pollution and degrade the environment. Bush is sticking to his role as cringing bootlicker to the businesses that contaminate and despoil America.

Bush’s Chief of Staff, Joshua Bolten, notified federal agencies to have new rules in his office for vetting no later than November 1, 2008, so that they could be in effect by January 20, 2009—Inauguration Day. The intention was that all of Bush’s gang of environmental vandals, like Stephen L. Johnson of the EPA, would be able to enact regulations weakening existing environmental and other safeguards before Bush left office. Such regulations would be hard to overturn, and the incoming President would be somewhat hamstrung in efforts to reverse them.

One proposed rule would make it much harder for the government to regulate toxic substances and hazardous chemicals to which workers are exposed on the job. The rule says that in assessing the risk from a particular substance, federal agencies must take the extra steps of gathering and analyzing “industry-by-industry evidence” of employees’ exposure to it during their working lives. They must then publish “advance notice of proposed rule-making,” soliciting public comment on scientific information and data to be used in drafting a new rule. These steps are not now required. The proposal would delay needed protections for workers.

Among other rules being presented is a regulation that would allow mining companies to dump rock and dirt from mountaintop-removal sites closer to rivers and streams. Another rule would alter implementation of the Endangered Species Act by letting federal land-use managers approve projects like highways, mining, or logging without consulting federal habitat managers and biological health experts responsible for species protection.

One new regulation would ease current restrictions that make it difficult for power plants to operate near national parks and wilderness areas. Another new rule would circumvent the Clean Water Act by allowing factory farms to let their runoff pollute waterways without a permit.

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management has issued a new rule that attempts to eliminate Congress’s authority to prevent mining on public land. Presently Congress has the authority to stop mineral development where it would harm the environment on public land. The new rule leaves-out all reference to congressional authority. Bush has already opened millions of acres of public land in Utah for oil and gas drilling.

Another new rule would change the Environmental Protection Agency’s new source Review Program which requires new or renovated facilities to install better pollution-control technology. A further rule would transfer responsibility for examining the environmental impacts of federal ocean-management decisions from federal employees to advisory groups that represent the fishing industry. The rule would also make it tougher for the public to participate in the environmental assessment process as is now required by the National Environmental Policy Act.

A new president can unilaterally reverse executive orders issued by his predecessor, but it is much more difficult for a new president to revoke or alter final regulations put in place by a predecessor. Courts have ruled that a new administration must solicit public comment and supply a “reasoned analysis” for such changes.

President-elect Obama will have one advantage that could help to erase all of these despicable new regulations. He will have a substantial Democratic majority in Congress. Such regulations can be reversed under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) of 1996. The CRA gives Congress fast-track authority to hold filibuster-free votes on regulations if they were enacted within 60 legislative days after Congress has adjourned. Given Congress’s frequent adjournments this year, the law may allow the new Congress to vote on regulations enacted by the Bush Administration as far back as June of this year.

There are many other rules in the works by the Bush gang intended to dirty the environment, stick it to women and the poor, and thwart the will of the electorate. Let’s hope the next Congress will promptly vote to stick these foul Midnight Regulations in the trash basket.

RAM, the Uninsured, and the Underinsured

Approximately six months ago “Sixty-Minutes” reran a program about an organization called Remote Area Medical (RAM). RAM is a non-profit, volunteer relief corps dedicated to providing free health care, dental care, eye care, and other assistance to people in remote areas of the United States and the world. It is staffed by volunteer doctors, nurses, pilots, veterinarians and support workers. It originally concentrated on areas like South America but has been more active in the United States lately because of the overwhelming need here for free medical services.

The program described the opening of a free clinic for only one weekend in a Southern town and showed the large number of people who came from hundreds of miles around to be seen by the doctors. Many people who had arrived seven hours before the clinic was scheduled to open at 6:00 a.m. slept in their cars. They were given numbers, and when the doors opened, they entered one-by-one. One woman who had had cancer surgery, but could not afford to go for a follow-up, learned that her pap smear was negative but that there were other signs that the cancer may have returned.

I was moved by the story of another woman who was virtually blind and needed new glasses. She was almost too late to get in, but was finally seen by an eye doctor. She said that she had health insurance but that it did not cover eye examinations and glasses. She wept as she described her difficulties seeing and said that she was ashamed to ask relatives and friends for help. She wondered how America, the wealthiest nation in the world, could fail to take care of its own. RAM examined her eyes and gave her new glasses.

The most gut-wrenching part of the program was when the RAM clinic had to close after the weekend was over. The clinic treated over 1000 people, but more than 400 people had to be turned away. I cannot describe the looks on the faces of those people. They would not experience the caring and expert treatment of those noble people who volunteered to be there.

Those people who were treated or turned away were not the most impoverished people in America. There is Medicaid for the very poor. These were the “working poor,” part of the 47 million uninsured and 25 million underinsured people in America. Most of them have jobs and work hard for a living. Many of the underinsured have some insurance, but it does not cover routine medical care.

A study by the Commonwealth Fund found that the number of underinsured Americans has risen 60 percent since 2003. For adults with incomes above 200 percent of the federal poverty level (about $40,000 per year for a family), the underinsured rates have nearly tripled since 2003. Because of the skyrocketing costs of medical care, these people can no longer afford necessary treatment.

We think that we are a good people. We think that Americans are the most generous people in the world. We point to organizations like RAM that travel around the world helping poor people. But we are deceiving ourselves. Sure there are exceptions; the people who volunteer for RAM are heroes. But in a larger sense we are numb to the suffering of millions of our fellow Americans. While European nations provide free medical care for all of their people, we leave over 72 million people without necessary health insurance coverage. RAM and groups like it can treat only a tiny fraction of the people who need care.

Even though universal health insurance under a single-payer system would provide all Americans with medical, dental, eye care, and psychological treatment at a cost substantially lower than what we now pay for private insurance, we don’t care. We have been brainwashed by conservatives in the Bush Administration and in Congress who claim it would be “socialized medicine.”

Such thinking is shoddy and immoral. We have had Medicare for decades and it has not led us into socialism. On the contrary, the medical profession has thrived in under Medicare. Now it is time for Americans to start caring about one-another and provide Medicare for all of our people.

The Stench of Corruption

Corruption is not the greatest crime. It is not murder or genocide. It is not oppression or tyranny. They say that Adolf Eichmann could not be bribed. His evil was not that of venality. His evil was that he obeyed orders even when those orders were bestial. The philosopher Hannah Arendt has pointed out that corruption is an understandable human flaw, while the evil of genocide is beyond understanding. It is banal. But corruption can undermine the fundamentals of civilization. It can seep into the hearts of men and rot their sense of decency.

When you read the transcript of the telephone conversations by Governor Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, you can smell the stench of moral decay. Here was a man elected to an office of public trust, plotting ways to get a quid pro quo out of the appointment of a senator to replace Barack Obama. Democracy is an imperfect method of government. Sometimes the voters elect monsters.

It should have been expected that the Republican leaders, bitter and humiliated by an election that rejected them and their ideas, would revel in this exposure of a crooked Democratic politician. Several of them have tried to tie President-elect Obama to the scandal. It makes me think of Satan in Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” Satan is thrown out of heaven, hurled “headlong flaming from the ethereal sky with hideous ruin and combustion down to bottomless perdition.” Lying in the foul pit of Hell, Satan looks around at his fallen host of evil demons and tries to arouse them, saying: “What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable will, and study of revenge, immortal hate, and courage never to submit or yield.” It could be John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, or Mike Duncan of the RNC.

It is obvious from the Blagojevich tapes that Obama had nothing to do with the Governor’s sinister schemes. I believe that Barack Obama is a thoroughly honest and decent man. I have spent my life in courtrooms listening to witnesses lie, and I think I am a pretty good judge of whether someone is telling the truth. Barack Obama is a man of integrity. His detractors are lesser men who need something to raise their petty spirits after their ignoble fall from grace.

The reasons given by politicians for seeking office are mostly baloney. People do not usually run for office in order to help their fellow men. People run for office in order to achieve personal aggrandizement. It is a normal human ambition. But sometimes politicians seek to be elected in order to aggrandize their bank accounts. Money is Power. Power is a narcotic.

Money is the golden idol we worship six days a week. The U.S. Supreme Court adopted the language of the great theologian, Paul Tillich, when it defined “religion” as “your ultimate concern….what you take seriously without reservation.” If that is religion, than money is our god. The critical fact about money is that it not only buys the necessities and luxuries of life, it confers status. Among the wealthy, money becomes the symbol of respectability and the foundation of earthly merit. Among the middle class, money is a means of elevating one’s stature in the eyes of one’s friends and neighbors. Among the poor, money is the lifeblood of survival and the means of escape.

Money exerts such stunning power over our lives that most friendships are too weak to withstand its interference. Families are torn apart over financial disputes, and children wait like vultures for loved ones to die so that they can inherit the estates. It should come as no surprise that our public and private dealings are permeated with large and small corruptions based on money.

We should treat public corruption as treason against the government and the people. The penalties should reflect the seriousness of the offense. Prison terms should be very long and act as a deterrent. The fines should make corruption a fearsomely hazardous financial risk. Conviction should mean seizure of the offender’s entire net worth.

Much of what we do in life is based on faith. If we live in a world where every act of trust is suspect, we are doomed to perpetual paranoia and despair.

The Legacy of George W. Bush

President Bush is likely to go down in history as one of America’s worst presidents. The main basis for such a judgment will probably be his miscalculations about the Iraq war and stubborn persistence in pursuing it. There are, however, other factors that will weigh against Bush. One will be Bush’s indifference to the growing recession that has engulfed the nation. On December 2, 2008, the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed that the country has been in a recession since December 2007. It seems that everybody knew about it except Bush and his befuddled Administration.

In 2006, when Bush was bragging about the “booming economy,” I wrote a commentary in which I said: “If you live in the Miami Valley of Ohio and you have watched the collapse of the Delphi Corporation, the hobbling of General Motors, the rise in gas prices, the cuts in jobs, the cuts in wages, the abolition of pensions, the removal of or reduction in health insurance coverage, the increase in adjustable mortgage rates, and the increase in mortgage foreclosures, you probably don’t feel that the ‘booming economy’ is happening here. That is because the booming economy is an illusion.” Because of Bush’s opacity to the gathering clouds of recession, he and his administration failed to take action that might have eased or averted the calamity we now face.

Throughout 2007 and 2008 Bush continued to claim that the fundamentals of our economy were strong. As late as September 2008, Bush declared that the U.S. economy was healthy enough to withstand “the adjustments that are taking place” in the financial markets. Also in September 2008, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said: “I will tell you that our—from what I understand from the experts, that our economy has the strength to be able to deal with these shocks.”

It has always been a cardinal principle of the right-wing conservatives surrounding Bush that we should leave the markets alone to work-out their problems and that federal intervention in the economy is wrong. The result of that benighted concept is that Bush let things go until they were completely out of hand.

In 2005, faced with signs that the housing market was in serious trouble, bank regulators proposed new guidelines for banks writing risky mortgage loans. Regulators advised banks that no-down-payment, interest only, and low monthly payment or “option ARM” mortgages were often inappropriate for buyers with bad credit. The proposed regulations would have required banks to increase efforts to verify that buyers actually could afford the houses being bought. Banks that bundled the mortgages for investment were told to be sure investors knew exactly what there were buying.

Banking executives opposed any change in the rules. The managing director for public affairs of Countrywide Financial Corp., the nation’s largest mortgage lender, claimed that the proposals “appear excessive and will inhibit future innovation in the marketplace.” Subsequently, the Bush Administration buckled to pressure from some of the same banks that are now being bailed-out, and backed-off proposed crackdowns on dangerous loans to unqualified home buyers. Paris Welch, a California mortgage lender, wrote bank regulators: “Expect fallout, expect foreclosures, expect horror stories.”

ABC News said: “The administration’s blind eye to the impending crisis is emblematic of a philosophy that trusted market forces and discounted the need for government intervention in the economy. Its belief ironically has ushered in the most massive government intervention since the 1930s.” Today, those “sub-prime” mortgages constitute an indigestible lump in the stomachs of the leading banks now calling for multi-billion-dollar bailouts.

The philosophy that we should let free market forces correct the imbalances in our economy caused by greed and mismanagement, and that government intervention is contrary to the best interests of the nation, is simply dead wrong. The market does not always create wealth, jobs, and growth. Sometimes, the market creates chaos. In order to have a vibrant economy it is necessary to have strong governmental regulation and oversight to prevent the kind of disaster we are now facing.

Bush, who inherited a healthy economy with a budget surplus, is leaving it in shambles. That is his legacy.

Why We Must Save the Big Three

There was a segment on national television recently about the demise of the GM assembly plant in Moraine Ohio. All I could think of was, “What are those people going to do?” It must be an empty, sickening feeling to know that the job you have performed for many years is disappearing and that you live in an area where there are very few jobs to replace it. Unemployment insurance lasts just so long. After that, what? Will you be able to travel to another city to get work?

The anguish and pain now being felt by the people of Dayton and Moraine could be spread around America and we could face a period similar to the 1930s when a large portion of the country was out of work. The reason Franklin Delano Roosevelt said: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” was because he knew that along with the severe economic depression there was a powerful psychological depression in the minds of American workers. People out of work feel helpless.

There is much talk today about how, instead of being bailed out by the government, the auto makers should go into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Chapter 11 provides for continuation of the company under a plan of reorganization. The idea is that under reorganization, the big three would be able to cut waste, improve management, renegotiate labor contracts, obtain financing, and do other things to make the companies leaner, sleeker, and more competitive. If that were all that was involved, it might be a good idea. There are, however, many problems with a Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

In the first place, a Chapter 11 bankruptcy would most likely lead to liquidation under Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy code. The creditors of a bankrupt company have the power to force the company into liquidation when the reorganization of the company does not attract sufficient capital to make the company an ongoing proposition. Liquidation means that the companies would go completely out of business and their assets would be sold or taken-over by their creditors. All employees would lose their jobs and get no termination pay. All benefits would be lost.

If General Motors, Ford, or Chrysler were to file for Chapter 11 protection it would scare off thousands of potential car buyers, worsening the company’s finances. One recent survey showed that eighty percent of consumers would not even consider buying a car or truck and taking out an auto loan with a company that might not be around down the road.

With the tremendous loss of revenue that would result from lack of sales, the company would be unable to cover its high fixed costs. This would lead to a lack of confidence in the capital markets and the company would be unable to obtain the loans necessary to prop it up during the rebuilding. Moreover, Chapter 11 bankruptcy would prompt many of the best and brightest to leave the company.

A bankruptcy by even one of the Big Three would probably set in motion a cascade of smaller bankruptcies by suppliers and other dependent businesses which would create a giant ripple effect greatly impacting the entire economy of the United States. Cities in the Midwest would become desolate areas of rampant unemployment dwarfing what we are experiencing today. This is why it is necessary to give special treatment to these companies that affect such a major portion of the economy.

Now the government has an opportunity to save the Big Three automakers and in the process, increase jobs and improve the quality of American automobile making. We should look upon the money given to the car companies as a stimulus package like the one being proposed to rebuild our infrastructure. In addition to obvious improvements in management and concessions by labor, it should be a strict condition of any loans that a large part of the money be used to retool the manufacturing plants of the industry so that the Big Three can start building the kind of smaller, alternate energy, hybrid, high efficiency, high quality vehicles like the Chevy Volt. Retooling the plants would require the addition of thousands of new jobs. On this basis the Big Three could start over.