Multinational Monitor |
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MAY 2001 FEATURES: Rollback: The Corporate Regulatory Feeding Frenzy Bush's Corporate Cabinet The Repetitive Motion Un-Rule Arsenic and Old Regs The Roadless Tramelled Bankrupt Policies Bush’s Hot Air Mining Their Own Business Defending Contractor Irresponsibility A Regulatory Accident in the Making Cheney and Halliburton: Go Where the Oil Is INTERVIEW: The Politics and Law of Worker Rights DEPARTMENTS: Editorial The Front |
The Bush Years BeginThe Repetitive Motion Un-RuleAfter a decade of repetitive political jostling, in January U.S. workers finally won workplace protections to prevent crippling ergonomic injuries. Weeks later, they saw these protections yanked away by President George Bush in one of the new administration’s first substantive pieces of legislation. MORE>> Arsenic and Old Regs"Let them drink arsenic!" That, complain environmentalists, was the message sent by the Bush administration in March, when U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Christine Whitman announced withdrawal of a new regulation for arsenic in drinking water, pending a review of scientific and cost issues. MORE>> The Roadless TramelledCaught up in the Bush administration’s across-the-board delay of pending regulations was a rule to ban roadbuilding in 58.5 million acres of roadless national forest land — an area larger than all U.S. national parks combined — including 9.3 million acres in Alaska. Forest activists say the stakes in the Bush review of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule could not be higher. “In the war over federal land management between the timber industry and environmentalists, there are no greater spoils than the last remaining roadless areas,” says Mike Roselle, director of Greenpeace USA’s forest campaign. MORE>> Bankrupt PoliciesWhat happens when you pit the nation’s financial industry and wheelbarrows full of campaign funds against debt-burdened low, moderate and middle-income citizens backed only by a handful of consumer and poverty groups operating without even a small sack of campaign goodies to spread around Capitol Hill? Answer: A legislative massacre. And massacre might be too mild a word to apply to what has happened to consumer bankruptcy protections in the U.S. Congress this year. MORE>> Bush’s Hot AirPresident Bush’s reversal of a campaign promise to reduce global warming pollution –– carbon dioxide –– from power plants has contributed to a change of political climate in the United States, where the public is increasingly convinced that Bush favors corporate energy interests over the environment and public health. MORE>> Mining Their Own Businessby Charlie Cray In late March, Gale Norton’s Interior Department moved to gut updated mining regulations that went into effect at the end of the Clinton administration. The surface mining regulations govern mining on land managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). They first went into effect in 1981, before widespread use of modern technologies made it profitable to extract tiny bits of metals such as gold from huge amounts of rock by using cyanide leaching and other toxic processes. MORE>> Defending Contractor Irresponsibilityby Robert Weissman The federal government’s short dalliance with a corporate responsibility screen for contractors appears to have ended. In April, the Bush administration issued notice that it intended to rescind the contractor responsibility rule issued at the end of the Clinton administration. The Clinton rule would have authorized government procurement officers to deny contracts to corporate bidders who had a demonstrated record of irresponsibility. The rule specified that procurement officers should look especially for repeat violations of laws and regulations related to taxation, environmental and consumer protection, antitrust and labor and employment laws [See “Controlling Corporate Scofflaws or Blacklisting?” Multinational Monitor, July/August 1999]. MORE>>
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