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’Tis the shopping season, and many bedraggled
consumers are going store to store seeking gifts for loved ones. But the
most determined shoppers of all this season are corporate lobbyists,
scurrying from agency to agency in Washington in search of special favors
for themselves. They’re interested not in giving but in getting.
Indeed, they’ve already given. They put tens of
millions of dollars into the campaign coffers of President George W. Bush
and the GOP, and they’ve enjoyed big-time payback for seven years.
But time is running out — Republicans lost control of Congress, and
Bush is soon to go, so corporate lobbyists are now on a frantic last-minute
shopping spree, grabbing all they can while they can.
Their shopping list is filled with requests for
rigged regulatory rules. Coal barons, for example, are pleading for
permission to dump tons of rubble and waste into the valleys and streams of
Appalachia. This “spoil,” as they call it, is the byproduct of
mining shortcut called mountaintop removal. To get at the coal, they blow
up the top third of these beautiful mountains. Rather than hauling off
their rubble, they want final OK simply to shove it down the mountainside,
burying the streams, animals, and everything else below. On other fronts, such chicken potentates as Perdue
want an exemption from public-health laws that ban massive releases of
ammonia from their factory farms, electric-power plants want to increase
their toxic emissions without the “burden” of installing
pollution controls, and big-business lobbyists are demanding new rules to
keep workers from using the family-leave laws that allow unpaid time off to
care for newborns or deal with family illness. These truly are gifts that would keep on giving
— giving profit to the few and pain to the many.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator,
columnist, and author.
This article appears in Dec 13-19, 2007.
