A Dirty Dozen

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Jim Hightower's newest book, Let's Stop Beating Around The Bush, is scheduled for release next month. Until then, Utne will be running a series of excerpts from the title.

Wheeze! Hack! Gasp! Gag! Bleeeeecch!

If America's air, water, global warming, and other enviro policies seem to you like they're coming right out of a corporate smokestack, that's because they are.

Bush has not merely put our government in service to polluters and plunderers, he has put it directly into their hands. It's not just a matter of the corporate-hugging, cabinet-level sparklies at the top of Washington's environmental pyramid -- Gale Norton (Interior), Mike Leavitt (EPA), Spencer Abraham (Energy), Ann Veneman (Ag). Rather, the daily dirty work is being done by dozens of industry no-names, trusted lobbyists, and ideological hacks whom Bush has installed in key positions deep inside the innards of the pyramid, where they quietly but zealously are re-engineering the flow of national policy from pure public protection to poisonous private profits.

It's these sub-cabinet policy operatives that actually run government. Meet a Dirty Dozen of them:

1. JAMES CONNAUGHTON, chairman of the president's council on environmental quality. A former lobbyist for utilities, mining, chemical, and other industrial polluters, Connaughton, represented the likes of General Electric and ARCO in their effort to escape responsibility for cleaning up toxic Superfund sites. Now he heads up pollution-policy development for the administration and coordinates its implementation. He has led the charge to weaken the standards of getting arsenic out of our drinking water, and he has steadily advised Bush to ignore, divert, stall, dismiss, and otherwise block out all calls for action against the industrial causes of global warming.

2. JOHN D. GRAHAM, administrator of regulatory affairs in the White House budget office. Graham is the de facto boss of all regulatory programs for the entire government -- any change in enviro rules must pass through his strangling hands. An avowed enemy of pollution regulations, he previously headed a quasi-academic front group that consistently issued reports claiming that environmental protections are too costly for industry -- not a surprising stance since he and his "risk-assessment" center were financed by more than 100 corporate entities, including the American Petroleum Institute, Dow, Dupont, Exxon, Monsanto, and 3M.

3. J. STEVEN GRILES, deputy secretary of the Interior Department. A disciple of the infamous James Watt, for whom he worked in the Reagan years, Griles went on to be a lobbyist for the National Mining Association, Edison Electric, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, and other energy giants. Appointed the overseer of America's 500 million acres of public lands, Griles was hailed by the NMA as "an ally of the industry," and the mining association welcomed him as "a breath of fresh air" -- for polluters, of course, not for us air breathers! Even though he is a public official now, he still draws $284,000 a year from his former lobbying firm, which represents corporations he supposedly regulates. Also, he has continued to meet behind closed doors with his former (and perhaps future) industry clients. The inspector general is investigating him for the blatant conflicts of interest posed by these meetings, which he had pledged to avoid in a "recusal agreement" he signed to get his government job.

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