Twilight of Secular Democracy in America?
[Charles] Tiefer's Veering Right: A Portrait of Bush's First Term, Focusing on Ashcroft
Tiefer's first chapter is devoted to former Attorney General John Ashcroft's role during Bush's first term as the main spokesperson for the religious right. And the second chapter chronicles the war on civil liberties led by Ashcroft.
These chapters are adeptly written, but much of the material may be familiar to readers - especially readers of this site.
More important to the understanding of current events is Tiefer's chronicling of how Senate and House rule changes, combined with Karl Rove's Machiavellian tactics and strong-arming by congressional leaders Tom DeLay and Bill Frist, have all but removed Democratic party (and even centrist Republican) participation in the legislative agenda. He notes how in the rare instance when moderates of either party were able to prevail in the first Bush term, it was often due to the rules as they then existed- including the now-endangered rule permitting filibusters.
Still, there was payback: When Vietnam War veteran and multiple-amputee Max Cleland (D-Ga.) voted to end the Republican-led filibuster stalling the passage of the first homeland security bill authored by Senator Lieberman, Karl Rove masterminded Cleland's electoral defeat.
Tiefer deftly details the role of big business in the Bush Administration - including how administrative agencies have become the pawns of Bush's corporate donors.
For example, former Interior Secretary Gail Norton and Former EPA head Christie Todd Whiteman oversaw massive revisions of regulations that benefit big business and threaten the environment.
Tiefer follows the money trail. In his view, no domestic policy agenda has ever been so strongly driven by the demands of corporate donors. As payback to donors, logging and snowmobiling in national parks are now allowed and public health is sacrificed to less stringent rules for the air we breathe and the water we drink.
Tiefer traces Bush's obsession with "revamping" social security to a courting of the financial industry. Wall Street, he points out, has much to gain from Bush's plan. Pushing for "private accounts" when even many of his own party question whether they are a safe and effective way to alter Social Security may be designed more to fill campaign war chests with financial industry dollars than to institute real reform.
Traditionally, big business has given more to the party in power, but has hedged its bets by giving some to the minority party. Not anymore. Tiefer argues that Bush programs are so pro-business (and anti-everyone-else) that Republicans are now, in essence, cornering the market on contributions from corporations and those who head them.
Donors' influence, Tiefer notes, isn't limited to domestic concerns: Tiefer explains how Vice President Cheney took control of money to "rebuild" Iraq in a way that virtually removed oversight of any spending.
He also describes how no-bid contracts to Halliburton and its affiliates, Bechtel, and other big players in the Bush money machine, cost the taxpayer millions. And he chronicles how Cheney and Rumsfeld saw to it that procurement regulations were rewritten to exempt businesses from accountability.
Tiefer argues that the Bush Administration is marked by lack of accountability to the taxpayer, often achieved by amending or evading laws and regulations designed to shine light on government procurement. Indeed, he makes a persuasive case that the taxpayer-funded Coalition Provisional Authority, now disbanded but then run by Paul Bremer, was purposely created as a virtual law-free entity to do the will of the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department.
Tiefer persuasively connects this lack of accountability with the Bush administration's worship of secrecy.
(excerpt)
Veering Right: How the Bush Administration Subverts the Law for Conservative Causes
by Charles Tiefer
Elaine Cassell
Counterpunch
May21.2005
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