MB Civic

(Note from Mha Atma:  This month’s Earth Action Network letter packet had a letter to Congress on the “Sunset Commission” — if you are not an EAN member and would like a copy to personalize and send to your congressperson let me know.) (Also don’t miss the last of 3 items in this email on “Who Killed the Electric Car?”) (and thanks to Ed Pearl for these)

White House, GOP Leaders Plan All-Out Assault on Federal Protections
BushGreenwatch.org

Friday 23 June 2006

Apparently rushing to lock in a long-sought goal before the fall elections, GOP congressional leaders may bring to a vote within weeks a proposal that could literally wipe out any federal program that protects public health or the environment – or for that matter civil rights, poverty programs, auto safety, education, affordable housing, Head Start, workplace safety or any other activity targeted by anti-regulatory forces.

With strong support from the Bush White House and the Republican Study Committee, the proposal would create a “sunset commission” – an unelected body with the power to recommend whether a program lives or dies, and then move its recommendations through Congress on a fast-track basis with limited debate and no amendments.

Three leading proposals have been introduced and are being winnowed into a final version. They would give the White House some – or total – authority to nominate members to the commission. House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) has confirmed that his office is coordinating development of a final version for prompt floor action.

Sunset commissions have been proposed, and defeated, before. But public interest veterans say the current situation is unlike any in the past, because the House Republican Study Committee, which includes some of the most anti-regulatory members of Congress, has secured guaranteed floor consideration of a sunset bill.

If such a bill should become law, the sunset commission could be packed with industry lobbyists and representatives from industry-funded think tanks, and could conduct its business in secrecy. Two of the sunset proposals under consideration would mandate that programs die after they are reviewed, unless Congress takes action to save them.

Several environmental programs have been targeted during past sunset attempts. Experts predict those would be among the first a sunset commission would review. Among them: the Energy Star Program; federal support for mass transit; the State Energy Program, which supports numerous state and local energy renewable efficiency programs; the Clean School Bus Program; the Land and Water Conservation Fund; federal grants for Wastewater infrastructure; a national children’s health study that examines factors leading to such problems as premature birth, autism, obesity, asthma, and exposures to pesticides, mercury and other toxic chemicals.

A coalition of public interest groups is fighting to block enactment of a sunset commission. Information is available through the Sunset Commission Action Center   at OMB Watch.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/opinion/28Wed1.html?th&emc=th

Patriotism and the Press
NY Times Lead Editorial: June 28, 2006

Over the last year, The New York Times has twice published reports about
secret antiterrorism programs being run by the Bush administration. Both
times, critics have claimed that the paper was being unpatriotic or even
aiding the terrorists. Some have even suggested that it should be indicted
under the Espionage Act. There have been a handful of times in American
history when the government has indeed tried to prosecute journalists for
publishing things it preferred to keep quiet. None of them turned out well
– from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the time when the government tried to
enjoin The Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon
Papers.

As most of our readers know, there is a large wall between the news and
opinion operations of this paper, and we were not part of the news side’s
debates about whether to publish the latest story under contention – a
report about how the government tracks international financial transfers
through a banking consortium known as Swift in an effort to pinpoint
terrorists. Bill Keller, the executive editor, spoke for the newsroom very
clearly. Our own judgments about the uproar that has ensued would be no
different if the other papers that published the story, including The Los
Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, had acted alone.

The Swift story bears no resemblance to security breaches, like disclosure
of troop locations, that would clearly compromise the immediate safety of
specific individuals. Terrorist groups would have had to be fairly
credulous not to suspect that they would be subject to scrutiny if they
moved money around through international wire transfers. In fact, a United
Nations group set up to monitor Al Qaeda and the Taliban after Sept. 11
recommended in 2002 that other countries should follow the United States’
lead in monitoring suspicious transactions handled by Swift. The report is
public and available on the United Nations Web site.

But any argument by the government that a story is too dangerous to
publish has to be taken seriously. There have been times in this paper’s
history when editors have decided not to print something they knew. In
some cases, like the Kennedy administration’s plans for the disastrous Bay
of Pigs invasion, it seems in hindsight that the editors were
over-cautious. (Certainly President Kennedy thought so.) Most recently,
The Times held its reporting about the government’s secret antiterror
wiretapping program for more than a year while it weighed administration
objections.

Our news colleagues work under the assumption that they should let the
people know anything important that the reporters learn, unless there is
some grave and overriding reason for withholding the information. They try
hard not to base those decisions on political calculations, like whether a
story would help or hurt the administration. It is certainly unlikely that
anyone who wanted to hurt the Bush administration politically would try to
do so by writing about the government’s extensive efforts to make it
difficult for terrorists to wire large sums of money.

From our side of the news-opinion wall, the Swift story looks like part of
an alarming pattern. Ever since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has
taken the necessity of heightened vigilance against terrorism and turned
it into a rationale for an extraordinarily powerful executive branch,
exempt from the normal checks and balances of our system of government. It
has created powerful new tools of surveillance and refused, almost as a
matter of principle, to use normal procedures that would acknowledge that
either Congress or the courts have an oversight role.

The Swift program, like the wiretapping program, has been under way for
years with no restrictions except those that the executive branch chooses
to impose on itself – or, in the case of Swift, that the banks themselves
are able to demand. This seems to us very much the sort of thing the other
branches of government, and the public, should be nervously aware of. We
would have been very happy if Congressman Peter King, the Long Island
Republican who has been so vocal in citing the Espionage Act, had been as
aggressive in encouraging his colleagues to do the oversight job they were
elected to do.

The United States will soon be marking the fifth anniversary of the war on
terror. The country is in this for the long haul, and the fight has to be
coupled with a commitment to individual liberties that define America’s
side in the battle. A half-century ago, the country endured a long period
of amorphous, global vigilance against an enemy who was suspected of
boring from within, and history suggests that under those conditions, it
is easy to err on the side of security and secrecy. The free press has a
central place in the Constitution because it can provide information the
public needs to make things right again. Even if it runs the risk of being
labeled unpatriotic in the process.

***

“Who Killed the Electric Car?”
HYPERLINK “http://www.pluginamerica.com/”www.pluginamerica.com

Opens Wednesday, June 28th
in Hollywood, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Encino, Irvine & Ontario
(see below)

The Documentary film, “Who Killed the Electric Car?”, opens Wednesday,
June 28th in NY and Los Angeles. The film will open across the country
throughout the summer. We urge all of you who want to avoid using oil for
transportation to see this film. The carmakers and oil companies are very
concerned about the effect this film will have and are pulling out the
stops to discredit its message. We are fortunate to have this film to
counter their lies, but it only works if people see it.

Those of us who were lucky enough to experience production EVs know the
truth. This is the single best technology to move a significant percentage
of our transportation energy to a non-petroleum, all domestic energy,
electricity. Many of us with EVs have found that by using roof top solar,
we are able to completely divorce ourselves from the oil indistry as well
as drive pollution-free “well to wheels”.

Consumers are being cheated by the carmakers. We are not being given the
choice to drive clean. We have to demand this choice!

For more info, please see: HYPERLINK
“http://www.pluginamerica.com”www.pluginamerica.com or call:

Paul Scott
Plug In America
HYPERLINK “mailto:paul@pluginamerica.com”paul@pluginamerica.com
310-399-5997

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“Our German forbearers in the 1930s sat around, blamed their rulers, said ‘maybe everything’s going to be alright.’ That is something we cannot do. I do not want my grandchildren asking me years from now, ‘why didn’t you do something to stop all this?” –Ray McGovern,  former CIA analyst of 27 years, referring to the actions and crimes of the Bush Administration