RobsHouse.net

What you are about to read may make you cry. It may leave you feeling sick. Hopefully, it will also make you mad as hell, because it should. My friend Rimone pointed out this article from Rolling Stone on her blog, and it is something that every thinking and voting American should read. It is long, and it pulls no punches. You should continue to the very end, though, as some of the most incriminating and disgusting facts are to be found there. For example:

While peddling influence to energy tycoons, the White House quietly dropped criminal and civil charges against Koch Industries, America’s largest privately held oil company. Koch faced a ninety-seven-count federal felony indictment and $357 million in fines for knowingly releasing ninety metric tons of carcinogenic benzene and concealing the releases from federal regulators. Koch executives contributed $800,000 to Bush’s presidential campaign and to other top Republicans.

Here are some other random excerpts. Even though they are all horrific, they don’t even begin to hint at the final list of atrocities exposed by the article.

The White House then forced the Justice Department to drop the prosecution. Justice lawyers were “astounded” that the administration would interfere in a law-enforcement matter that was “supposed to be out of bounds from politics.” The EPA’s chief enforcement officer, Eric Schaeffer, resigned. “With the Bush administration, whether or not environmental laws are enforced depends on who you know,” Schaeffer told me. “If you’ve got a good lobbyist, you can just buy your way out of trouble.”

“we will fix the federal rules very soon on water and soil placement.” That was fancy language for pushing whole mountaintops into valleys, a practice worth billions to the industry. As a Reagan official, Griles helped devise the practice, which a federal court declared illegal in 2002, after 1,200 miles of streambeds had been filled and 380,000 acres of Appalachian forestlands had been rendered barren moonscapes.

The energy-task-force plan is a $20 billion subsidy to the oil, coal and nuclear industries, which are already swimming in record revenues. In May 2003, as the House passed the plan and as the rest of the nation stagnated in a recession abetted by high oil prices, Exxon announced that its profits had tripled from the previous quarter’s record earnings.

National treasures such as the California and Florida coasts, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the areas around Yellowstone Park will be opened for plunder for the trivial amounts of fossil fuels that they contain.

On August 27th, 2002 — while most of America was heading off for a Labor Day weekend — the administration announced that it would redefine carbon dioxide, the primary cause of global warming, so that it would no longer be considered a pollutant and would therefore not be subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.

And perhaps, most importantly, the realization that none of this is new - it is a pattern that has been seen before:

Corporate capitalists do not want free markets, they want dependable profits, and their surest route is to crush competition by controlling government. The rise of fascism across Europe in the 1930s offers many informative lessons on how corporate power can undermine a democracy. In Spain, Germany and Italy, industrialists allied themselves with right-wing leaders who used the provocation of terrorist attacks, continual wars, and invocations of patriotism and homeland security to tame the press, muzzle criticism by opponents and turn government over to corporate control. Those governments tapped industrial executives to run ministries and poured government money into corporate coffers with lucrative contracts to prosecute wars and build infrastructure. They encouraged friendly corporations to swallow media outlets, and they enriched the wealthiest classes, privatized the commons and pared down constitutional rights, creating short-term prosperity through pollution-based profits and constant wars. Benito Mussolini’s inside view of this process led him to complain that “fascism should really be called ‘corporatism.’ “