Herbert Hoover Would Be Proud

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Mon, 22 May 2006 18:59:35 -0700

[Zepps_News] #Herbert Hoover would be proud

 

 

 

Herbert Hoover Would Be Proud

 

Karl Pope, The Huffington Post, May 22, 2006

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-pope/herbert-hoover-would-be-p_b_21473.html

 

Last week, the House Republican caucus demonstrated that, as Samuel

Johnson remarked, " When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight,

it concentrates his mind wonderfully. " Republicans mindful of coming

elections abandoned the Administration and their leadership in droves to

vote against: federal subsidies to log the Tongass National Forest,

allowing the drinking water for 110 million Americans to be put at risk,

and drilling the outer continental shelf off our coasts.

Meanwhile, the White House and the reactionary Congressional leadership

increasingly sound like Herbert Hoover, with promises that " prosperity

is just around the corner. "

 

The latest example: Council on Environmental Quality Chairman James L.

Connaughton has launched a campaign for what he has turgidly dubbed a

" transformative cooperative conservation strategy. " What this really

means is privatizing public resources and selling off or giving away

public lands and waters. Connaughton defends this strategy by saying

that " Fiscal realities do require that the federal government's

environmental partner organizations work towards selfsustainability.

Welfare conservation is not sustainable. The government won't fund any

program forever. " The Defense Department should, I suppose, be very,

very worried.

 

Connaughton offers a vision in which the federal government would retain

" ecologically significant lands, " and return " land with high economic

value " to the private sector. He does not address the likelihood that

ecologically significant lands -- say those capable of sustaining

ancient forests and wildlife -- might also have significant allure to

companies in the private sector that would love to clear-cut them --

especially if the government actually pays them to do so, as this

Administration advocates.

 

Now how is all this playing around the country? Well, at Oregon State

University, where Connaughton's kind of " transformative cooperative "

strategy was reflected in the partnership between the timber industry

and the Dean of the Forestry School, Hal Salwasser, an academic

committee appointed by Salwasser himself to investigate concluded: " The

inability of the leadership to recognize the academic freedom issues

involved in their participation in the letter to Science calling for

delay of the Donato et al. paper, and their coaching of groups

interested in attacking the Donato et al. paper, stand out as

significant failures of leadership and narrowness of purpose. "

 

They added that it was an open question whether Salwasser could " lead

the College through the changes needed to thrive in the future. "

 

Salwasser's biggest failure, according to his panel, was violating the

University's independence by putting its voice in service of the

Walden-Baird logging bill, which passed the House last week. And are

Salwasser, Baird, and Walden representing their state? Well here's what

the Eugene Register-Guard had to say about that: The bill " has a

deceptively appealing title: the Forest Emergency Recovery and Research

Act. This legislation is not about optimizing forest recovery or relying

on the best scientific evidence available. It's about shortcutting

critical environmental protections in order to fast-track salvage

logging, regardless of the potentially damaging consequences. "

 

--

" Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking

about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order.

Nothing has

changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists,

we're

talking about getting a court order before we do so "

-George W. Bush, April 20, 2004

 

Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!

Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.

 

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