2-23-05, 3:03 pm
President Bush pre-set the tone for his supposed mandate with his selection of Porter Goss to the non-cabinet position of CIA Director. Goss has politicized the CIA, purging anyone not of Bush’s like-mindedness. With his recent cabinet moves, Bush the corporate wannabe has surrounded himself with sycophants. An alcoholic by nature, Bush has found a choir of enablers to live his lies for him.
The sins of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld include constantly lying about Iraq WMDs and advocating the use of torture. He sent under-equipped soldiers into battle, and rubber stamps their death letters. He wants to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on unneeded nuclear weapons and militarize outer space. Most ridiculous remains his 9/11 fantasy of personally inspecting the Pentagon 'plane' wreckage minutes after the attack, putting him wandering outside the Pentagon in 1100-degree heat. Anthony Lewis called Rumsfeld’s 'the most dramatically incompetent performance by a public official in recent American history.' Rumsfeld’s job: imperialism.
The sins of Secretary of State nominee Condoleezza Rice parallel Rumsfeld’s, especially her Iraq WMD and 'mushroom cloud' propaganda, and her mendacious 9/11 Commission testimony. Troubling remains her violation of the Hatch Act which prohibits federal employees from political campaigning – Rice stumped for Bush in seven states – leaving Zbigniew Brzezinski to call it 'excessive politicization of an office [National Security Adviser] which is unusually sensitive.' Rice will likely politicize the State Department, and conduct a Goss-like purge. Her job: gunboat diplomacy, especially with issues regarding Caspian Basin oil and the Trans-Afghan Pipeline.
Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton returns to rape America’s environment. She has overseen over 200 major rollbacks of environmental laws – all which benefit corporations – causing the National Academy of Sciences to state the rollbacks will cause at least 30,000 Americans to die prematurely each year. Underway include attacks on the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and a plan to privatize 70 percent of National Park Service environmental-science jobs to corporate consultants. This would give America third-world environmental protection. Norton has stated, 'We might even go so far as to recognize a homesteading right to pollute.'
In the first Attorney General nomination of international importance, Bush tapped long-time minion Alberto Gonzales. His anti-Constitutional legal memos laid the groundwork for (1) torture at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib (2) holding prisoners indefinitely without due process, including Americans inside the US (3) 'extraordinary rendition' – transporting detainees to be tortured in countries lax on human rights. Gonzales has called the Geneva Convention 'quaint' and 'obsolete,' and thinks Bush above the law. If Gonzales is confirmed, Osama bin Laden’s suspicions about Americans will be proved correct.
Like Rice, Treasury Secretary John Snow violated the Hatch Act by campaigning for Bush. A world-class tax evader at CSX – who paid Snow $3.3 million to take a government position for access to corporate welfare – Snow now supervises America’s corporate taxes. He has helped turn a $5.6 trillion budget surplus into a $2.9 trillion budget deficit. He promised the creation of 300,000 jobs per month, delivered few, then said outsourcing jobs is good for the American economy. Now he gets to privatize Social Security. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao returns to assault working America. Chao opposes affirmative action, federal standards on ergonomics, and any increase in minimum wage. She ended the Equal Pay Initiative, and has refused assistance to bilked pensioners. Despite the Republican family values mantra, Chao repealed the rule giving employees paid leave for birth/adoption of a child. She not only attacked paid overtime, but also compiled a manual for employers on ways to best underpay employees.
Michael Leavitt switches from head of the Environmental Protection Agency to Secretary of Health and Human Services. At the EPA he opposed the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and promoted what he called 'enlibra' principles, which forfeit federal environmental protection, leaving oversight to corporate polluters. Leavitt will likely repeat at Health and Human Services what he did as governor of Utah – attack Medicaid – leaving higher co-pays and HMO-style refusal of services.
In his perhaps most destructive selection, Bush nominated long-time toady Margaret Spellings to Secretary of Education, despite her frequently being overwhelmed as head of the Domestic Policy Council. Spellings co-authored No Child Left Behind, the deliberate attempt to bankrupt school districts and states to create a call for public education’s privatization. Her nomination, based on loyalty over competency, illustrates what Ron Suskind has called 'anti-meritocracy.'
Norman Mineta retired from a long stint in Congress for a political promotion, vice president of Lockheed Martin, who now receive a lion’s share of government contracts with Mineta as Secretary of Transportation. Mineta has also strangled Amtrak in the hopes of its privatization, despite the fact England’s railway privatization has been a $20 billion disaster.
Secretary of Agriculture nominee and Nebraska governor Mike Johanns opposes USDA policies for mad cow disease screening. He remains an advocate for free-trade initiatives, although outsourcing of food production has slashed America’s traditional advantage in agricultural trade by 61.6 percent. Johanns championed the 2002 farm bill, which directs billions of dollars in corporate welfare to agribusiness conglomerates at the expense of taxpayers and family farms.
Secretary nominees Samuel Bodman (Energy), Carlos Gutierrez (Commerce), Jim Nicholson (Veterans), and returnee Alphonzo Jackson (HUD) are too boring to discuss at length. Their jobs: Bodman – secure drilling in Alaska arctic reserves; Gutierrez (known for his role in downsizing at Kellogg’s) – corporatism over capitalism; Nicholson – expect God to help veterans; Jackson – do as little as possible. Do not be fooled by the cabinet’s politically correct make-up; it only mirrors the Kennebunkport domestic staff.
After the Director of Homeland Security nomination disaster that was Rudolph Giuliani’s pimp Bernard Kerik, Bush finally selected Mike Chertoff, who once raised an untold amount of money for Bush as the vice-chair of Bush’s 2000 New Jersey campaign. Chertoff co-wrote the civil liberties-destroying Patriot Act, which continued the punishment of the American people that began with 9/11. He also wrote the Feeney Amendment that created a blacklist of liberal federal judges, and a brief in Chavez v. Martinez which argued that people possess no Constitutional right to be free of coercive police interrogation.
