[Mb-civic] Bush to gut Environmental Laws (+ election suspicions?)

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

This is what Americans voted for (or maybe not if you are convinced 
by the 2nd article below!)....although clearly they didn't mean to!  
We (humans living as Americans) will.must do what we can to 
interfere (we owe it to the world and the future to do our best!)

Published on Sunday, December 5, 2004 by the lndependent/UK  

Bush Sets Out Plan to Dismantle 30 Years of 
Environmental Laws  
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1205-02.htm
by Geoffrey Lean in Washington 
  
George Bush's new administration, and its supporters controlling 
Congress, are setting out to dismantle three decades of US 
environmental protection.

We will now see an assault on the law which will set the US in the 
direction of becoming a Third World country in terms of 
environmental protection.
 
Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust 
In little over a month since his re-election, they have announced that 
they will comprehensively rewrite three of the country's most 
important environmental laws, open up vast new areas for oil and 
gas drilling, and reshape the official Environmental Protection 
Agency (EPA).

They say that the election gave them a mandate for the measures - 
which, ironically, will overturn a legislative system originally 
established by the Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald 
Ford - even though Mr Bush went out of his way to avoid 
emphasizing his environmental plans during his campaign.

"The election was a validation of the philosophy and the agenda," 
said Mike Leavitt, the Bush-appointed head of the EPA. He points 
out that over a third of the agency's staff will become eligible for 
retirement over the President's four-year term, enabling him to fill it 
with people lenient to polluters.

The administration's first priority is the controversial plan to open up 
the Arctic Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling. Two years ago the Senate 
defeated plans to exploit the refuge - home to caribou, polar bears , 
musk oxen and millions of migratory birds - by 52 votes to 48.

But with the election of four Republican senators in favor of the 
drilling, and the disappearance of one who opposed it, the 
administration now has the votes for victory.

It plans to follow with an energy bill - also defeated in the last 
Congress - which would investigate vast new tracts for exploitation 
for oil and gas. It will also encourage the building of nuclear power 
stations, halted since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident.

Far more radical measures are also under way. Joe Barton, the 
Texas Republican chairman of the House Energy and Commerce 
Committee, who is to help push through the energy bill, has also 
announced a comprehensive review of the Clean Air Act, one of the 
world's most successful environmental laws.

Environmentalists predict the emasculation of the Act, which has cut 
air pollution across the country by more than half over the last 30 
years. Not to be outdone, the Republican chairman of the House 
Resources Committee, Richard Pombo, has announced a review of 
the Endangered Species Act, for the protection of wildlife. The law 
has been the main obstacle to the felling of much of the US's 
remaining endangered rain forest. And in a third assault, 
Congressional leaders have also announced an attack on the 
National Environmental Policy Act, which requires details of the 
environmental effects of major developments before they proceed.

Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, said last 
week that the previous Bush administration had largely contented 
itself with weakening environmental legislation, but the new one 
intended to go much further. He added: "We will now see an assault 
on the law which will set the US in the direction of becoming a Third 
World country in terms of environmental protection."

The environmentalists point out that almost every local referendum 
on environmental issues carried out on election day achieved a 
green majority.

They recall the fate of the assault on environmental law - headed by 
the former Congressional Speaker, Newt Gingrich, in the mid 1990s 
- which caused such opposition that Congress enacted tough new 
green legislation. 

© Copyright 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

###
 

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1209-27.htm
  
  Published on Thursday, December 9, 2004 by the San Francisco 
Chronicle  
Election Fraud or Just Suspicions?  
by Theodore D. Graves 
  
If the United States were a Third World country, our Nov. 2 election 
would not pass certification by international monitors. As former 
President Carter has explained on National Public Radio, we lack a 
central, nonpartisan election commission to guarantee fair and 
equal treatment of all voters nationwide, our candidates do not 
receive free and equal access to the media to deliver their 
message, voting procedures are not uniform throughout the county, 
and there is not a "paper trail" available in all cases to guarantee an 
honest recount where called for. 

To insure against fraud in the counting and reporting of election 
results, international monitors depend on the same kind of election-
day exit polls as were conducted in the United States. Unlike earlier 
polls that attempt to predict a future election outcome, which are 
therefore subject to all manner of potential errors, exit polls estimate 
the characteristics of a population which has already voted. It is as if 
you had a huge jar of M&Ms and you took out several handfuls at 
random, counted the proportion of each color in your sample, and 
knowing the total number of M&Ms in the jar, used these results to 
estimate how many were red, brown, green or yellow in the jar as a 
whole. If your sample was reasonably large and randomly drawn 
from the jar, it would estimate these totals with a high degree of 
accuracy. 

In our own recent presidential election, exit polls were conducted 
nationwide for the media by two of the world's most respected 
professional exit-polling firms: Edison Media Research and Mitofsky 
International. Pollsters were sent to carefully selected, 
representative polling locations throughout each state. They then 
interviewed about every fifth voter emerging from the polling place 
during random periods throughout the day. Total samples from each 
state were large -- about 2,000 or more voters -- and the error of 
estimate was small -- plus or minus less than half of 1 percent in 99 
cases out of 100. 

By agreement among the networks, the results of these exit polls 
were not reported to the public on election day, so as not to 
influence the ongoing voting process or lead to embarrassing 
"premature" calling of outcomes by the networks, as happened for 
Florida in 2000. But they were shared with -- and believed by -- 
campaign officials and by the candidates themselves, and they were 
widely reported over the Internet. As we now know, on the basis of 
these exit polls, Kerry was expected to win. 

Then the "actual" tallies began to pour in. 

This was the "November surprise." In state after state, Kerry saw his 
expected lead shrink or vanish. And when he lost Ohio -- which exit 
polls estimated he would win by 4.5 percent -- he "lost" the election. 
According to Steven Freeman, who teaches research methods at 
the University of Pennsylvania, for 10 exit polls among the 11 
battleground states he analyzed to be this far off as a result of 
random error, particularly when all discrepancies favored Bush, is 
essentially impossible. 

As officials testified this week at a forum called by Rep. John 
Conyers Jr., D-Mich., and for an investigation by Congress' General 
Accounting Office, electronic voting theft is incredibly easy. There 
have also been widespread reports of election irregularities -- more 
than 38,000 nationwide at last count, according to Verified Voting 
Foundation's election-incident reporting system. Most of those 
irregularities appear to favor Republicans. 

If this were an election taking place in a Third World dictatorship, or 
a former part of the Soviet Union (Georgia and Ukraine, for recent 
examples) people would be in the streets screaming "fraud" and 
demanding the president's resignation. 

Democratic pundits have been wringing their hands, trying to figure 
out the best tactics for future victory. The answer is simple: Make 
sure every eligible voter gets a chance to vote, and that every vote 
gets recorded, counted and accurately reported -- and that a secure 
paper trail exists to ensure the validity of any required recount. 

Suspicions of election fraud undermine the very foundation of our 
democracy and need to be addressed. 

Theodore D. Graves (tgraves at monitor.net) a retired professor of 
anthropology and social psychology, has taught research methods 
at the University of Colorado, UCLA and the University of Auckland 
in New Zealand. 

© 2004 The San Francisco Chronicle

###
 
 
 
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Action is the antidote to despair.  ----Joan Baez
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