Dear Republicans,
We know how proud you are of your party. We’ve heard the narrative often enough, from pundits big and pundits small, about how Republicans stand for smaller government, less interference in our lives, lower taxes, and — oh yes — a strong, national defense. Maybe you even believe the narrative. I know my parents do, my brothers do and my sister does. So, just to be fair, I thought I’d show you a short list of TEN other things your party stands for (arranged in no particular order), which you might not of heard about:
1. Pesticide testing on orphans and mentally handicapped children
Despite receiving over 50,000 letters from citizens, Congress, and EPA’s own scientists opposing the proposed rule, the EPA has published a new federal regulation that will continue to allow observational studies of chemical and pesticide exposure on human subjects. On August 2, 2005, Congress had mandated the EPA create a rule that permanently bans chemical testing on pregnant women and children, without exception. But the EPA’s newly proposed rule, is ridden with exceptions where observational chemical studies may be performed on children in certain situations like the following:
1. Children who “cannot be reasonably consulted,” such as those that are mentally handicapped or orphaned newborns, may be studied. With permission from the institution or guardian in charge of the individual, the child may be studied.
2. Parental consent forms are not necessary for studies with children who have been neglected or abused.
3. Chemical studies on any children outside of the U.S. are acceptable.
Numbers 2-10, after the break . . .
2.Cutting back on health benefits for Veterans and their families
Bush’s plan would eventually cause some 600,000 retirees to be dropped from the military’s healthcare program. Bush’s budget also makes across-the-board premium increases to TRICARE retirees under the age of 65. Veterans will see an increase of 41% for single or family coverage within two years; senior enlisted and officer retirees will see increases of up to 204%. By 2009, healthcare premiums for our veterans will TRIPLE. (See PDF of TRICARE fee increases here).
3.Lax enforcement of Mine Safety laws
Phil Smith, the communications director for the United Mine Workers of America, said that while citations have been issued, the fines assessed for safety violations are too small to force large corporations to make improvements. “The problem with the current laws is enforcement.” According to an AFL-CIO analysis, the Bush administration cut 170 positions from federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and has not proposed a single new mine-safety standard or rule during its tenure.
And there’s a reason for that. The Washington Post reported that West Virginia coal firms raised $275,000 for Bush.
Last September, Bush rewarded the coal industry by placing coal industry veteran Richard Stickler in charge of MSHA. Stickler spent about 30 years as a coal company manager with Beth Energy. Mines managed by Stickler were marked by worker injury rates that were double the national average, according to government data cited by the United Mine Workers union.
4.Leaking Classified Information when it suits their political purposes
Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been “authorized” by Cheney and other White House “superiors” in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.
5.Suppressing the Free Speech of Government Scientists Who disagree with them about Global Warming
The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth “a different planet.” The administration’s policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.
After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be “dire consequences” if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.
6.Spying on Quakers and other Opponents of the Iraq War
A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn’t know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.
A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.
“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project.
[NOTE: Another story on spying on antiwar groups, this time by the NSA, is here.]
7.Supporting Federal Contractors who use Slaves
Gulf Coast Slaves
By Roberto Lovato
Salon.comHalliburton and its subcontractors hired hundreds of undocumented Latino workers to clean up after Katrina – only to mistreat them and throw them out without pay.
Martinez, 16, speaks no English; his mother tongue is Zapotec. He had left the cornfields of Oaxaca, Mexico, four weeks earlier for the promise that he would make $8 an hour, plus room and board, while working for a subcontractor of KBR, a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton that was awarded a major contract by the Bush administration for disaster relief work. […]
He says that Tovar “kicked us off the base,” forcing him and other cleanup workers – many of them Mexican and undocumented – to sleep on the streets of New Orleans. According to Martinez, they were not paid for three weeks of work. […]
Wherever the buck may stop along the chain of subcontractors, Martinez is stuck at the short end of it – and his situation is typical among many workers hired by subcontractors of KBR (formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root) to clean and rebuild Belle Chasse and other Gulf Coast military bases. Immigrants rights groups and activists like Bill Chandler, president of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, estimate that hundreds of undocumented workers are on the Gulf Coast military bases, a claim that the military and Halliburton/KBR deny – even after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency turned up undocumented workers in a raid of the Belle Chasse facility last month.
Here’s another story about Republican support for Corporations that employ slaves:
Three years after a 2002 Presidential Directive demanding an end to trafficking in humans for forced labor and prostitution by U.S. contractors, the Pentagon is still yet to actually bar the practice, The Chicago Tribune reports. […]
According to the Tribune, the concerns of five lobbying groups – including representatives of Halliburton subsidiary KBR and DynCorp – are stalling Pentagon action. These companies are specifically targeting provisions requiring companies to monitor their overseas contractors for violations. Both KBR and DynCorp have been linked to human trafficking cases in the past.
8.Lying to New Yorkers and 9/11 Cleanup Crews that the air around the two towers was safe to breathe
A judge attacked former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman for reassuring Manhattan residents soon after the 2001 terrorist attacks that the environment was safe to return to homes and offices while toxic dust was polluting the neighborhood.
“No reasonable person would have thought that telling thousands of people that it was safe to return to lower Manhattan, while knowing that such return could pose long-term health risks and other dire consequences, was conduct sanctioned by our laws,” U.S. District Judge Deborah A. Batts wrote, calling Whitman’s actions “conscience-shocking.”
9. Protecting Drug Companies from liability (even if they have to cheat to do it)
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert engineered a backroom legislative maneuver to protect pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits, say witnesses to the pre-Christmas power play.
The language was tucked into a Defense Department appropriations bill at the last minute without the approval of members of a House-Senate conference committee, say several witnesses, including a top Republican staff member.
10. Screwing the Middle Class (citing this story in the Financial Times)
[I]t was not a rise of profits or other non-labour income that squeezed the middle-ranking US citizen but an increase in the share of the top 10 per cent of wage and salary earners who have captured almost half the total income gains in the past four decades. Within that, there has been a vast increase of the share of the top 1 per cent, who gained more than all of the bottom 50 per cent.
>>Snip<<
The question is: who has benefited from the trend annual increase of around 2 per cent in US output per hour? Prof Gordon shows that there has been little long-term change in labour’s share in US income in the past half century.
What, then, was the source of the increased skewness of the income distribution? Prof Gordon is rightly suspicious of the conventional explanation that it has been mostly due to the pressure of skill-based technical change on the least skilled workers – the ratio of median earnings to those in the bottom 10th has hardly changed.
He concludes that it was not a rise of profits or other non-labour income that squeezed the middle-ranking US citizen but an increase in the share of the top 10 per cent of wage and salary earners who have captured almost half the total income gains in the past four decades. Within that, there has been a vast increase of the share of the top 1 per cent, who gained more than all of the bottom 50 per cent.
Hey Republicans, this was just a small sample of what Republican rule entails. I sure hope you got what you expected from your party. If you’re the CEO of a major corporation or someone who earns over $300,000 a year, maybe you did. The rest of you . . . ?
