E-Mail This Article to a Friend How big media shortchange the public (continued)

5) The wholesale giveaway of our natural resources

Adam Werbach, executive director of the Common Assets Defense Fund and a former Sierra Club president, reviewed the Bush administration’s environmental-policy record and came to a disturbing conclusion: Bush’s record is not only bad — it’s "akin to an affirmative action program for corporate polluters," he wrote in In These Times.

Vice-President Cheney’s infamous, secretive, industry-laden energy task force produced what can be boiled down to two main recommendations — "lower the environmental bar and pay corporations to jump over it," Werbach wrote.

For example, Congress has promised $3 billion in tax cuts to mining corporations to help them access natural gas embedded in underground coal deposits in Georgia’s Powder River Basin. The Bureau of Land Management has calculated that miners will waste a full 700 million gallons of publicly owned water a year in the process — thereby sucking the region’s underground aquifers dry and decimating local farms and wildlife.

The Bush administration’s Healthy Forests Initiative essentially entails granting logging companies access to old-growth trees — and then subsidizing them for brush clearing. And even the giant sequoias that former president Bill Clinton sought to protect by creating a 327,000 national monument in the Southern Sierra Nevada just four years ago risk being logged at a rate of 10 million board-feet of lumber per year — a rate higher than that allowed on surrounding national forest lands — in the name of "forest management."

All in all, the Bush administration has launched the greatest giveaway of public natural resources in more than a century. Yet few in the mainstream media have bothered to analyze these plans and put the lie to the administration’s rhetorical manipulation.

6) The sale of electoral politics

The Help America Vote Act required that states submit their blueprints for switching over to electronic voting systems by last January 1, and implement those plans in time for the 2006 elections. Some regions are already using the new machines. But those who’ve bothered to look into the new systems are sending up serious warning flares. Critics say that if Americans don’t want a repeat of the 2000 election’s Florida fiasco — on a much grander scale — the administration’s plans must be halted in their tracks.

A switch to electronic voting might seem innocent enough at first — until you look at who’s implementing it, and how. Indeed, the transfer represents the privatization of the voting process in the hands of a select few fervent GOP supporters who’ve insisted on keeping their operating systems and codes a trade secret — meaning that they enjoy absolute control over the entire voting process, including ballot counting and oversight. There is no paper trail.

One prime example is Diebold, Inc., one of the nation’s top e-voting-machine manufacturers, whose equipment played a major role in the Florida debacle. Diebold already operates more than 40,000 machines in 37 states across the country. Many of these are in Georgia, which last November became the first state to conduct an election entirely with touch-screen machines. Oddly enough, incumbent Democratic governor Roy Barnes lost to Republican candidate Sonny Perdue, 46 percent to 51 percent — "a swing from as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls," wrote Andrew Gumbel in the Independent. In the same election, incumbent Democratic senator Max Cleland likewise lost to his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, thanks to "a last-minute swing of nine to 12 points." And in and around Atlanta, 77 memory cards went missing or were otherwise temporarily unaccounted for before the votes they’d registered could be counted.

Similar upsets occurred "in Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois, and New Hampshire — all in races that had been flagged as key partisan battlegrounds, and all won by the Republican Party," Gumbel continued.

"It makes it really hard to show their product has been tampered with if it’s a felony to inspect it," Rebecca Mercuri, a voting-systems specialist and research fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, told the Independent.

The other top two e-voting-machine manufacturers, Sequoia and Election Systems and Software (ES&S), are equally suspect. Several of their executives have troubling track records of corruption and conflict of interest. All three companies are prominent Republican Party donors.

7) Conservative organization drives judicial appointments

Ever since the Reagan administration, neoconservatives have pursued an aggressive campaign to stack the federal courts with right-wing judges. Their main vehicle: the Federalist Society of Law and Public Policy, an organization founded in 1982 by a small group of radically conservative law students at the University of Chicago.

The effort has been a resounding success. With the help of Republicans in Congress, 85 extra federal judgeships were created under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush; Bill Clinton got nine. Now, seven out of 12 circuit appellate courts are anti-abortion. Seven of the nine Supreme Court justices are Republican appointees — and it’s been 11 years since a post has opened up, meaning another right-winger or two could be appointed sometime soon. During the senior Bush’s tenure, one White House insider boasted that no one who wasn’t a Federalist ever received a judicial appointment from the president.

One of George W.’s earliest moves in office was to consolidate the Federalist Society’s power even further: he "simply eliminated the longstanding role in the evaluation of prospective judges by the resolutely centrist American Bar Association, whose ratings had long kept extremists and incompetents off the bench," wrote Martin Garbus in the American Prospect. "Today the Federalists have more influence in judicial selection than the ABA ever had."

The society now counts Republican senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, and prominent members of the conservative American Enterprise Institute among its leadership. Attorney General John Ashcroft, Interior secretary Gale Norton, Solicitor General Theodore Olson, and White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez — charged with approving all judicial nominations before passing them on to Congress — are all members.

As one might expect, the Federalist Society has consistently supported property rights over rights of the individual, business deregulation, creationist teachings, and much of the rest of the right-wing agenda. But one of the principal victims has been the democratic process itself: remember, it was the Supreme Court that stopped a hand count of 175,000 uncounted (largely Democratic) ballots in Florida, which could have cost Bush the 2000 presidential election. Conservative jurists have interfered with redistricting efforts to reverse the deliberate segregation of black and Latino voters, and have erected barriers to the participation of third-party candidates in the electoral process.

Unless liberals miraculously spawn a radical turnaround in how federal judges — who enjoy lifetime terms — are appointed, one of George W.’s most enduring legacies may very well be a hard-right judiciary that lasts for decades to come.