the cumulative effect

Let’s talk about the Republican “retreat and pillage” strategy

As if it weren’t bad enough that the massive $700 billion bailout has been shown to be a giveaway to the financial institutions that caused this crisis by their greedy, reckless investing, we now learn that oversight for where taxpayers’ dollars are going is virtually nonexistent. Not only is the current administration lining their pockets while ensuring the soon-to-be Obama administration has no capitol to implement the sweeping reforms needed to pull this country out of its neocon death spiral, but they are attempting to gut environmental and workplace regulations while giving one last push to an exceedingly unpopular anti-choice ideology.

OMB Watch, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that reports on the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in order to, “lift the veil of secrecy shrouding the OMB,” issued a report last week on a number of regulations the Bush administration hopes to finalize before its time in power expires.

Some regulations that the current administration is trying to ram through:

· Make it easier for power plants to avoid installing pollution controls
· Allow trucking companies to force their drivers to work 11-hour shifts
· Ease restrictions on mountaintop mining companies allowing them to dump their waste into rivers and streams
· Make it more difficult for employees to claim unpaid leave for family and medical emergencies (part of the request of the National Association of Manufacturers, a lobbying group)
· As part of the above rule change, employers would be allowed to speak directly to an employee's health care provider
· Exempt factory farms from reporting air emissions from animal waste (here’s to you, poultry, pork, and turkey farm lobbies!)
· Allow factory farms to self-police their runoff into bodies of water (circumvents the Clean Water Act)
· Subject fewer facilities to the EPA's New Source Review program, which requires new facilities or renovating facilities to install better pollution control technology
· Transfer the responsibility for examining the environmental impacts of federal ocean management decisions from federal employees to advisory groups that represent regional fishing interests
· Require health care providers receiving federal funds to allow their employees to opt out of providing health care services they find morally objectionable (or risk losing federal funding)
· Ease current restrictions that make it difficult for power plants to operate near national parks and wilderness areas
· End the 25-year-old ban on carrying loaded weapons in national parks
· Broaden the scope of activities state and local law enforcement agencies could monitor to include organizations as well as individuals, along with non-criminal activities that are deemed "suspicious."

Let’s hope the Obama administration moves quickly and decisively to undo the damage done in the last eight years and that to come in the next eight weeks.