The article recounts numerous abuses of scientific and impartial investigation wreaked by the Bush administration. Ignoring studies, lying about (sorry, "forgetting" and "mistaking") what studies say, turning studies over to (for instance) the company that is doing the activity needing study (a maker of a pesticide banned in Europe for its adverse environment effects now gets to do its own investigations on itself), and many more abuses.
The article also mentions quite a few scientists who have resigned due to the administration's habit of riding roughshod over facts and scientific conclusions.
In this aspect is the untrustworthy nature of the administration most pronounced.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Impeach him. Get him out of office. I mean it, it's one thing after another. If Clinton had done any of these things back in 99 or something the Republicans would have had a tantrum. (Not that I was a big Clinton fan...)
Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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How dare you have the guts to attack our president!!!! Keep this up and he will have you silenced or deported (remember, he does have his patriot act to threaten his political enemies).
In fact, if Kerry wins the election, it would not surprise me if Bush has him arrested under the partiot act for insulting the office of the president and puts him away (without any rights) for as long as it takes him to get his supreme court to declare him president for life.
Okay, maybe that is ridiculous, but so is our "fearless leader.")
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I hate to say it--I'm certainly not a fan of this kind of manipulation--but my reality checker says that if the economy gets much worse no one will care about ecological health anymore. They'll be more concerned with having enough money to stay alive.
And say what you will about the greed of these companies--they provide jobs in huge numbers. Break them, and those jobs will dry up, and the economy will drop into the abyss. Then we really will be screwed.
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We're already screwed... Policies like Bush's only WIDEN the gap between the rich and the poor. Take that large tax cut for example. Isn't that supposed to be an insentive to help corporations create more jobs? Suppose they don't? Suppose they just pocket the money and hire overseas workers so that most Americans can only get jobs in the service sector not even having enough money to buy the corporation's products. There is a middle ground. Companies can make their money, supply workers with benefits and be environmentally responsible. Sure it takes more effort, sure it means that a few CEOs salaries will drop. Who cares? If they keep this up they'll be too busy worrying about polluted water and people being unable to afford their products.
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Sure, Syn, but how do you get them to take that middle ground? No CEO is going to voluntarily cut into his share of the profits, and higher taxes will just make him cut jobs to keep them. Make it illegal to fire people and small businesses will hurt ten times as much from not being able to fire the lazy and incompetent. The only possible option is to give them their tax cuts and hope that they do the right thing with it--it's a forlorn hope, but it's all there is.
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It's not a forlorn hope. Investors are by definition using money to create jobs (real investors, not speculators). The fact that the investors already have their money in companies shows they're predisposed to investing.
If you destroy incentives for people to risk capital by taxing the gains excessively, they'll soon stop risking it. There's a reason so many small businesses start each year in America as opposed to Europe.
quote:We're already screwed... Policies like Bush's only WIDEN the gap between the rich and the poor.
Is this a "bad" thing, this gap? I'm not well-versed in economics but it would seem that "what's good for the goose/gander (to be PC) is good for the gooselets/lings"? In a free market, so long as OUR Richie Rich's are getting richer and not the baddies' Rich's, don't we all stand to gain collectively as a society?
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Not really... Uncontrolled capitalism is probably as bad as uncontrolled communism. Corporations depend on the people. We manufacture their products and we buy them. If workers are not taken care of, they do a shoddier job. If workers don't make enough money how can they buy the cars, refridgerators, 50 dollar shirts if they are barely ecking out a living? If they can barely pay for essentials, how can they afford luxuries or designer jeans? Perhaps I'm being illogical or something, I don't know. But the gap between rich and poor becoming wider is NOT a good thing. It could lead to more crime...
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Syn, I think the tack that most conservatives will take is to agree with you--ie, when the rich see their profits drop due to lack of sales, then they will pay their employees more so that they will have a market. In which case, where is the problem?
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quote:But the gap between rich and poor becoming wider is NOT a good thing. It could lead to more crime...
I still don't follow. I think putting more resources in the hands of a society's leaders (making a a rough equivalence between political and economic influence, here) is not only prudent, but probably necessary when that society is facing an enemy.
and, really, how does crime come into play? it hardly affects the elite side of the monetary gap.
Does anyone have some sort of defense or rebuttal, or way of explaining how this is at all acceptable?
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Fugu, my first reaction was, "How does this guy know Bush even knows about what this organization is doing?" Officials have been known to go behind the president's back. But with the number of different organizations doing this, I can't see that Bush could miss all of it and be competent.
Really, the only defenses I see are "None of this is technically illegal," of which I'm not sure, and what I said earlier: "It's better than losing a zillion jobs when they go out of business."
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*understands this is derailing...but can't...stop...
quote: and, really, how does crime come into play? it hardly affects the elite side of the monetary gap.
White Collar crime...the kind of crime that directly impacts "the elite side of the monetary gap" is costing BILLIONS a year. I found one stat that said in the 70's, it was about $5 billion a year (no small amount). By 1990, it was $100 billion a year. I can only assume it is humongous now.
As for keeping on thread, is anyone really surprised that the Bush Administration "runs roughshod" over any advice given to them? They ignored threat reports prior to 9/11, the ignored the view of our allies on how to handle the war on terrorism (in short: why Iraq?) and have ignored better ideas on education reform (and not just because teacher's unions griped, either...entire school districts are shivering under the new rules). So to say that Bush picks and chooses what he wants to listen to is no surprise and quite in character.
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It also fits in with Bush's predeliction of removing or rendering toothless all forms of regulation. Restrictions are made voluntary, fines are never assessed. And unless a few good ones slipped in, every single appointment he's ever made to a regulatory board, either as president or as governor, was an industry lobbyist or lawyer who previously fought against just such regulation.
I don't want to see companies strangled by overly restrictive regulation, but I don't want to see the return of the robber barons either. Isn't there a middle ground?
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quote: White Collar crime...the kind of crime that directly impacts "the elite side of the monetary gap" is costing BILLIONS a year. I found one stat that said in the 70's, it was about $5 billion a year (no small amount). By 1990, it was $100 billion a year. I can only assume it is humongous now.
Yeah, I still don't understand how this is a "bad" thing. How does the humongosity and the perpetuation by "white collar" criminals effect a negative impact on the elite side of the money-gap?
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Dubya's rejection of JASON early in his term gave clear indication that his Administration would ignore science to the greatest extent possible.
quote: Yeah, I still don't understand how this is a "bad" thing. How does the humongosity and the perpetuation by "white collar" criminals effect a negative impact on the elite side of the money-gap?
Good point. I assume that people are doing harder time for carrying little more than a dime bag of some illegal narcotic than the dude who embezzeled $50,000,000 of an organization's assets. Just my thought. But also, I think White Collar crime is the best example of "trickle down economics." If someone steals from a company to the tune of $100 million, who will pay for this? Customers because rates will go up or workers because the money has to come from SOMEWHERE. The pain will no doubt trickle down to us, the end users or workers. This is why I am not too sad with cutting some taxes to BUSINESSES (not to rich individuals, though...cutting their taxes was silly). You raise a corporation's tax by 2.5%, the cost of their product goes up at least 2.5%...meaning, we pay for their tax increases, not the investors and certainly not the CEO's and other big-wigs in the organization.
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Bush has also hammered away at NASA. Even though he came out strongly earlier this year saying "$12 billion spent to get us to Mars!" it wasn't like he was adding that money to the pot...he was simply gutting money from other NASA programs to get there. I have a friend who works at NASA who saw this really cut into his project's bucket (and yet, he is still a Bush fan...hmmm....). Anyway, his project (around flywheel storage systems...for satellites and Space Station) was slashed to 10% of its original budget. He had a team of people working on a very useful (up there and down here) application and it is now down to a bare few folks. If programs directly effecting the Space Station are being cut, where is this money going? NASA is really on thin footing. My friend thought Bush, a big defense man, would save NASA but it seems the opposite is true.
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Actually, fil, tax increases don't work out quite like that. more usually a tax increase is split between product price increases and pay/benefit decreases, exact ratios depending on the slope and curvature of various relationship paths. Its all about relative efficiencies.
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Right. Taxing something doesn't change the demand curve. On non-essentials, the breakpoint between buying something and not based on price can be abrupt. Witness gas - if gas prices cause someone to start using public transportation to get to work, that person's gas consumption will plummet. It won't be a slight decline for that person. On essentials (food, etc.), price increases cause substitution to less profitable goods or a reduction in consumption.
Cutting wages quickly to respond to tax increases is very hard in some industries, whether because of unions or low labor supply. In those cases, reductions are more likely to come in the form of layoffs or in reduction on soft benefits such as informal breaks, free sodas, whatever isn't specified in a contract.
Some are absorbed by the investors themselves. If the tax is uniform across investment opportunities (it never is, but let's assume), then the tax itself won't make one investment opportunity more fiscally attractive. However, the behavior changes caused by the tax will definitely cause reallocation of capital.
The same applies in reverse to cuts, of course. A tax cut doesn't pass all the savings to consumers or workers, either.
quote:Not really... Uncontrolled capitalism is probably as bad as uncontrolled communism.
This may be a little of a late comment, but there's this really funny novel about a uncontroled capitalist-- "capitalizt"-- world called Jennifer Government (don't ask) by Max Barry. It's completly satire, but he gets his point across-- a world where the government is run by private enterprise is almost as bad as one with no private enterprise at all.
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