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TechnoratiPresident for 60 More Days, Bush Tearing Apart Protection for America's Wilderness
Oil shale mining in Rocky Mountains gets go-ahead • 'Midnight regulations' to dismantle safeguards
George Bush is working at a breakneck pace to dismantle at least 10 major environmental safeguards protecting America's wildlife, national parks and rivers before he leaves office in January.
![[US President George W. Bush speaks in Washington, DC. Bush might hold a final press conference before leaving the White House on January 20, but then again he might not, his spokeswoman said Tuesday. (AFP/Mandel Ngan)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/bush1120.jpg "bush1120.jpg")
With barely
60 days to go until Bush hands over to Barack Obama, his White House is
working methodically to weaken or reverse an array of regulations that
protect America's wilderness from logging or mining operations, and
compel factory farms to clean up dangerous waste.
In the latest such move this week, Bush opened up some 800,000 hectares (2m acres) of land in Rocky Mountain states for the development of oil shale, one of the dirtiest fuels on the planet. The law goes into effect on January 17, three days before Obama takes office.
The timing is crucial. Most regulations take effect 60 days after publication, and Bush wants the new rules in place before he leaves the White House on January 20. That will make it more difficult for Obama to undo them.
"There are probably going to be scores of rules that are issued between now and January 20," said John Walke, a senior attorney at the National Resources Defence Council. "And there are at least a dozen very controversial rules that will weaken public health and environment protection that have no business being adopted and would not be acceptable to the incoming Obama administration, based on stances he has taken as a senator and during the campaign."
The flurry of new rules - known as midnight regulations - is part of a broader campaign by the Bush administration to leave a lasting imprint on environmental policy. Some of the actions have provoked widespread protests such as the Bureau of Land Management's plans to auction off 20,000 hectares of oil and gas parcels within sight of Utah's Delicate Arch natural bridge.
The Bush administration is also accused of engaging in a parallel go-slow on court-ordered actions on the environment. "There are the midnight regulations that they are trying to force out before they leave office, and then there are the other things they are trying not to do before they go. A lot of the climate stuff falls into the category of things they would rather not do," said a career official at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Other presidents have worked up to the final moments of their presidency to impose their legacy on history. But Bush has been particularly organised in his campaign to roll back years of protections - not only on the environment, but workplace safety and employee rights.
"This is Bush trying to leave a legacy that supports his ideology," said Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, an independent Washington thinktank that monitors the White House office of management and budget. "This was very strategic and it was in line of the ideology of the Bush administration which has been to put in place a free market and conservative agenda."
The campaign got under way in May when the White House chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, wrote to government agencies asking them to forward proposals for rule changes. Bolten had initially set a November 1 deadline on rule-making. The White House denies that the flurry of rule changes is politically motivated. "What the chief of staff wanted to avoid was this very charge that we would be trying to, in the dark of night in the last days of the administration, be rushing regulations into place ahead of the incoming, next administration," Tony Fratto, the White House spokesman, told reporters.
But OMB Watch notes that the office of management and budget website shows 83 rules reviewed from September 1 to October 31 this year - about double its workload in 2007, 2006 and 2005.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration cut short the timeframe for public comment. In one instance, officials claimed to have reviewed 300,000 comments about changes to wildlife protection within the space of a week.
The new regulations include a provision that would free industrial-scale pig and cattle farms from complying with the Clean Water Act so long as they declare they are not dumping animal waste in lakes and rivers. The rule was finalised on October 31. Mountain-top mining operations will also be exempt from the Clean Water Act, allowing them to dump debris in rivers and lakes. The rule is still under review at the OMB. Coal-fired power plants will no longer be required to install pollution controls or clean up soot and smog pollution.
Yet another of the new rules, which has generated publicity, would allow the Pentagon and other government agencies to embark on new projects without first undertaking studies on the potential dangers to wildlife.
Announcements of further rule changes are expected in the next few days including one that would weaken regulation of perchlorate, a toxin in rocket fuel that can affect brain development in children, in drinking water.
The Bush strategy has prompted a fightback from environmentalists, the Democratic-controlled Congress, and members of the Obama transition team.
John Podesta, who is overseeing the transition, has said that Obama will review the last-minute actions, and will seek to repeal those that are "not in the interests of the country".
Pollute, baby, pollute
The last-minute rules passed during the "midnight hours" of the George Bush presidency differ from his predecessors because they are basically a project of deregulation - not regulation. Among the most far-reaching:
- Industrial-size pig, cow and chicken farms can disregard the Clean Water Act and air pollution controls.
- The interior department can approve development such as mining or logging without consulting wildlife managers about their impact.
- Restrictions will be eased so power plants can operate near national parks and wilderness areas.
- Pollution controls on new power plants will be downgraded.
- Mountain-top mine operators could dump waste into rivers and streams.
- 2m acres of land in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado opened to development of oil shales, the dirtiest fuel on Earth.
30 Comments so far
Show AllI have seen Bush make that face after every press conference. After mangling the English Language to announce his latest plan to murder, steal, enslave, pollute, and imprison, he walks off the stage with that look that says "NAILED IT!"
I still don't get it. WHO is letting these "midnight regulations" pass?
This is like coming home and finding out your house has burned down. Yes, one could look at it like it is the end of the world, but in fact it is just the opposite. A few weeks after someone loses their home it kicks in their desires and it provokes a whole new direction.
In a way this is the end, the end of religious and government institutional control that has been taking place for the last 2000 years.
What needs to be done now is to educate people about how the earth and universe really works. There is no need for people to just "believe it" science has proved it, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc.
This is the beginning of a new spiritual evolution. Teach on!
In all actuality Bush has no power.......we do! It is time to start learning how to use it.
Can you say oligarchy?
Can you say "Domination?"
All this pollution is a clear and present threat to everyone's health.
The Corporations and their Government Lackies are the guilty tyrants.
Americans have an avowed Declaration to take arms against Tyrany.
There is no need to take up arms to succeed, in fact that is exactly what they want American's to do!
You may have a point, MA_Matriarch. However, as times get worse, as environmental disasters worsen and get closer, as the sheer brutality of the corporate army tightens around our necks, we will be forced to defend ourselves one way or another.
The time is coming when we will have to decide how to fight back. Railing against a broken system (as so many progressives do) that ignores us, doesn't help us. We must take action.
"All Nature's difference keeps all Nature's peace." Alexander Pope
Bush's legacy: Scorched Earth Policy = Burn Baby Burn
Cee Miracles: A beautifully composed post. Thank you.
David G: Bush and Cheney's goons don't number 300-they are in the hundreds of thousands.Between Blackwater and other mercenary groups and all the law enforcement agencies,they have expanded thier repressive capacity quite well.
Resisters with more than 6 active brain cells understand they are risking not only arrest but torture then death.
I'm an old man in poor health and will admit to cowardice in not facing a fruitless situation until presented with plans holding out some chance of success.
You don't think the persistent smirking and sneering from the Bushies was because they were losing do you? [They forfeited their souls long ago.]
Thank you, klever.
"I'm an old man in poor health and will admit to cowardice in not facing a fruitless situation until presented with plans holding out some chance of success."
The tangle of problems economically is no accident. And that's pages.
The environmental massacre GWBush seems once again to delight in letting loose ... BECAUSE HE IS EMPEROR [albeit with no clothes to most of us now] and BECAUSE HE CAN!
But the import of the issue, which I did not initially intend to add to my comment, suddenly came into focus with the the 60-day reference. And suddenly I realized "The Palestinian Solution" had a time frame.
You are right. We are dealing with people whose souls seem to have fled from their dark, lead hearts years ago.
But despite them, I feel impelled now to do everything I know how to do to try to stop this. No guarantees.
I cannot just say, gee, too bad, or as some say to me, it's their [Palestinians] karma. There's nothing you can do anyway.
Maybe not, but I heard the NEVER AGAIN's too often growing up and saw all the films ... The Diary of Anne Frank included as a young adult and a mother already, and there is no way that I can sit still with a clear conscious as 1.5 million people are starved, abused and corraled like cattle, ready for slaughter ... in this case death by starvation, thirst, disease ... by those who are equivalent to ... and this is not glib or easy ... to Goerring, Goebels, Hess, Eichman, et al., and Fuhrer Adolph Schickelgruber.
If one is truly and fully human and in touch with all one's senses and sensibilities, it is impossible to deliberately plan and execute such a travesty. Having studied the subject extensively now, I can only conclude that the current crop of officials responsible for these policies are psychopathic personalities and thus sub-human or humanoid. They have no conscience to bother them. That has become more and more obvious. Therefore, they are like the others mentioned above.
We all have to ask ourselves as Obama asked, "Are we our brothers' and sisters' keepers or not?" Can we as humans tolerate or allow again the deliberate extermination of a people? And God and we know ... many of us anyway ... about the millions and millions of Biafrans, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Timorese, Guatamalans, Salvadoreans, Nicaraguans, Chileans, Haitians, Rwandian Tutsis, Sri Lankans, Burmese, native South Africans, Somalians, Congolese, Colombians, Iraqis, and many more just since the 1960's who were killed off with the military hardware supplied by major world powers whose manufacturers and governments themselves made fortunes from the killing fields. "War is [indeed] a racket," General Smedley Butler said.
But the hypocrisy of this ... "The Palestinian Problem" ... from those whose fairly recent ancestry was marked with the bright yellow stars that defined their deceased kindred as The Jewish Problem and their soon-to-be deaths as The Solution ... I cannot abide it and pretend I don't know and it doesn't matter. If this Israeli government policy is followed and completed in the next 60 days, under the foggy covers of dire economic problems around the globe and the full screens of massive news coverage and analysis of the decisions of a lame-duck and fledging U.S. Administrations, and the Palestinians die off one by one behind their cement walls and chain-link fences, IT MATTERS.
What happens to 1.5 million Palestinians in the winter of 2008-2009, while all the world powers and its peoples are silent ... MATTERS. We will find out who we are, for certain. We will find out the character of a new administration and the leaders of it. We will find out if we are the human beings so many of us claim to be, with our religions and our vaunted national heritage which we have heard so much about again in the last two years of electioneering, and during which so many of us madly waved our flags or carried our protest signs. We will find out about our humanity and all that supposedly goes with that, and whether or not we are really caricatures of human beings whose caring is limited only to the area defined by the fences around our dwellings and the fences criss-crossing our minds and hearts, and the thicket of fences in the Capitol District of Washington, D.C., that are called politics as usual. IT MATTERS.
peace. /cm
They don't have a clue about their soul for if they did they wouldn't be doing what they are doing.
W = Worst Ever.
May this jerk be forever reviled. Apparently he still doesn't want forever to be all that long a time.
Don't worry guys and gals, all the manufacturing will eventually be sent away anyway. Besides, it will create jobs and increase the GDP once Obama hires us to clean up the toxic sludge.
The legislators, who will return to the new congress and had been complacent during these environmental sellouts, should be chatisized and denied re-election. Members of the departing administration and congress, who assume lucritive positions with the industries they supported, will be violating the law--and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent.
This can happen if the populace is sufficiently persistent. Remember the 9/11 inquiries that Bush so vehemently opposed. They would never have happened had it not been for the persistent efforts of the victim's relatives, albeit their success was limited by non-cooperation from the Bush team.
Why would it take a new president longer to undo them when like the current one he should be able to just write a signing statement reinstating environmental regulations that if anyone breaks they are terry ist.
Appalachia can't stand anymore of Presidebt Bush's progress and prosperity, he and his buddies like THE COAL INDUSTRY has turned Wise County, Virginia into a toxic third world waste dump ! END MOUNTAIN TOP REMOVAL !
http://www.wisecountyissues.com
http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/timmullins
This just in...
USDA labels farmed fish ‘organic’, candy corn a ‘vegetable’, and Bush an ‘environmentalist’
http://climateprogress.org/2008/11/20/usda-labels-farmed-fish-organic-candy-corn-a-vegetable-and-bush-...
Also, ketchup is a vegetable.
Bush certainly knows how to rub the noses of his citizens in the toxic mud, doesn't he? Of course he's been doing it for eight years with little protest!
And 300 million people know what he's doing but, other than complain, they do nothing. The inability of Americans to act to save themselves or their country is amazing. Are they all drugged? Are they all cowards? Are they all ignorant?
George and his henchmen number 300. You're 300 million! Depose the dictator NOW before he does anymore damage!
www.dangeroucreation.com
All of these actions are insane. But the one about water pollution especially struck me: Industrial animals farms only have to self-declare that they're not dumping waste into waterways (????)
Bush and his necons worship the gospel of 'self-interest?'
But how can allowing this kind of threat to the water which they drink, too, be in the self-interest of even the greediest neocon?
This is one of many good examples of how unbounded greed becomes a form of self destroying moral insanity: Neocons so mad with the love of money, they're willing to poison even themselves, even their progeny, even their fellow frothing dollar suckers.
The overriding question:
What kind of society produces such morally sick people in such abundance...?
And then elects them to rule the country...?
And then let's them destroy the country without protest?
Proud of it, and the people in government who supported him(republicans and democrats and the media) have no shame.
Obama has a better chance of getting a bullet than Bush did.
Although you have to wonder if the anger against him will spill over once he is gone and come back to haunt him if he shows his face in public.
People have short memories though.
All the stuff with Wall Street happened before but its as if history is erased.
Well, surely being categorized publically as the worst U.S. president that ever there was and being soundly rejected to carry the Republican message during the election campaign side by side with the various Republican candidates and not being asked to be present at the Republican National Convention, along with the overwhelming victory for the Democrats and new President-elect, with votes both for change and against the Bush and Republican policies that are bearing such bitter fruits, ... surely that must sting the singular ego of this shallow man who has so many of the nasty traits of the psychopathic humanoid.
It doesn't surprise me that all this flurrying and scurrying to make it easier for corporations to continue and to increase their life-destroying policies, including the Wall Street boys and The FED, aside from new profits to be made, these actions by this man, partnered in this by his unscrupulous and sinister vice-president, is a smug punishment of the public and the people of the world, and the unbalanced Mother Earth, by victimizing them as the last frogs. Stuff a bunch of fire crackers in their gullets, light 'em up, and throw them into the soup and watch them all writhe as everything explodes. Revenge is sweet.
God bless him ... because history will not.
... and I must add here too that 60 days with a Congress gone home, and a still-dangerous pResident and vice pResident and a wait for that new man who has declared, "There can only be one president at a time," the Zionist government of Israel is also taking this opportunity, under a cooperative media black-out, to prevent 1.5 million, walled-in Palestinians to have access to food, medicine and medical services, electricity, clean water, sewage disposal and fuel for cooking and heating, ... and the UN and other agencies are unable deliver more food and supplies.
This lethal siege on Palestinian began two weeks ago when Israel blockaded the coastal areas of the Gaza Strip, and the UN could not deliver food supplies. How convenient with all the hoopla of victory celebrations after the U.S. election and the U.S. and global economies spectacularly tanking, evidently this heinous action by the government of Israel is not worth talking about.
Who will speak for these people being slowly genocided like it is the Warsaw Ghetto all over again? Who will speak for the the mothers and the fathers and the children and the grandparents and the brothers and the sisters ...?
Not George W. Bush, not any member of his Administration, not President-elect Obama who has sworn his allegiance to Israel and has at his side, Chief of Staff and Zionist Rahm Emanuel.
Sixty days is a long time. Who will speak for these people? Who will act on their behalf? ... Many Israeli Jews and Jewish organizations inside Israel are trying to help as, I would imagine are other Jewish organizations here and around the world who take seriously their own scriptures about humaneness and compassion and justice.
Who will speak for these people? ... My Congress people on recess until the Inauguration? Religious leaders here and around the world? The President-elect, his wife ... as private citizens? Film stars, celebrities who supported Barack Obama?
Move-on? The Pope? Former President Jimmy Carter who was villified for writing a book about the situation and simply telling the truth? Al Gore? Leaders of other countries waiting for the Inauguration? Islamic leaders? ... or if they do speak, with a media blackout, who can hear them? Secretary- General ki-Moon of the UN has tried, but no one, it seems, is paying attention to him.
Who will speak ... raise hell ... among the powerful in this deadly, between-presidents dead time of stealthy, planned killing ... extermination ... of a people? ... What else could it be called?
This Common Dreams site has spoken simply by posting the news reports of the situation, and the fact of the media blackout and that the UN is unable to deliver enough food. Likely some other sites have too. But listening to the newscasts ... the BBC, NPR, talk-radio, I hear nothing about this. And the Google Search site shows nothing, but a couple of current Aljazeera Reports and one from France.
If this situation continues with no relief, and no voices from the Democratic Party are raised, and Israel shortly will be re-embraced as a long, lost innocent cousin, then the new administration will begin with blood dripping from its hands and all of us will be tainted with it.
I am a child of the times of the extermination of people behind the walls and the barbed wire. No one in powerful positions would speak for those people then. Everyone claimed some kind of innocence of not knowing. ... Who will speak for these people?
To the infant baby in the news article picture on this site, it's naked little body struggling to breathe in a hospital with one small generator left for electricity, my stomach hurts for you. I've tried calling, but nobody's home.
SHHHH ... HUSH LITTLE BABY, DON'T YOU CRY. PAPA'S GONNA GET YOU SOME PIE IN THE SKY.
/cm
My heart is also broken. Here is a link to a list of press, press that is stonewalling or distorting this story. Please contact them. I have been....
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=111
Joe
Bush, like John Donne's flea, does all the harm he can.
Disaster capitalism hits home. Could Friedman enjoy this from hell?
We may not be able to get to Bush and the rest of the upper echelon criminals, but we can get to the people who come to our communities to implement these policies. They all wear targets on their backs.
George W Bush legacy -- the worst president in history.
And PROUD of it!
'have a nice doomsday' by nicholas guyatt (ebury press)..............
why millions of americans are looking forward to the end of the world.
There are internet actions - coalitions for environmental policy that include most of the major organizations -
this one include Union of Concerned Scirntists,WWF etc.
http://ga3.org/campaign/rebuild_america/3bnb5nbrq7k3i3j7
more productive than spending energy on the outgoing admin.