SCUMWATCH:
Brian Beutler | January 12, 2011 | [print_link]
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Left: Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA)
Late last year, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to the country’s major trade associations and private corporations asking them which regulations they want to see weakened or eliminated.
In response, the GOP-friendly National Association of Manufacturers has asked him to probe forthcoming regulations aimed at enhancing worker health, improving toxin standards, mitigating climate pollution and preventing another crisis on Wall Street.
In a letter dated January 7, NAM demands “immediate action and attention is needed on the following areas of regulatory policy this Administration is in the midst of proposing or implementing. If they are not substantially changed from their present form, they could cost millions of jobs and weaken an economy in a still fragile recovery.”
Some of the regulations — particularly of greenhouse gas emissions — come as no surprise. Others will raise eyebrows.
For instance: “The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed a rule that would establish more stringent emissions standards on industrial and commercial boilers and process heaters (i.e. Boiler MACT). This broad-reaching proposal could cost manufacturers over $20 billion in compliance costs and place hundreds of thousands of jobs in jeopardy.”
Here’s how the EPA puts it. “These rules would significantly cut emissions of pollutants that are of particular concern for children. Mercury and lead can cause adverse affects on children’s developing brains — including effects on IQ, learning, and memory. The rules would also reduce emissions of other pollutants including cadmium, dioxin, furans, formaldehyde and hydrochloric acid. These pollutants can cause cancer or other adverse health effects in adults and children.”
NAM also takes aim at an OSHA injury and illness protection plan that would require employers to find and fix hazards in their workplace. This, NAM says, “would have sweeping ramifications on all aspects of both workplace safety enforcement and the promulgation of new regulations.”
You can read the entire letter here. Given NAM’s influence in the GOP, it likely provides a glimpse at the sorts of regulations Republicans will challenge.
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BONUS FEATURE
Issa’s Glaring Omission: War Spending
Will the House’s new watchdog sniff out waste in the defense budget?
By Andy Kroll | Wed Jan. 5, 2011 4:58 AM PST
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) [1], the incoming chairman of the powerful House oversight committee, has vowed to sniff out the “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the federal government, even if it means holding [2] seven committee hearings a week. On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Issa pledged to identify as much as $200 billion in wasteful spending at the federal level, and an early target list [3] for Congress’ top watchdog includes WikiLeaks, housing giant Fannie Mae, and Food and Drug Administration recalls. However, a top Democrat on the oversight committee, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio.), is calling out Issa on a glaring omission in the chairman’s attack plan: the US’s bloated defense budget.
In a letter sent Tuesday [4], Kucinich challenged Issa on why he hadn’t pledged to rid the Department of Defense’s $663 billion budget of wasteful spending. Kucinich cited a 2001 Government Accountability Office report, mentioned by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, that found US officials had lost track of $2.3 trillion of DOD spending. Kucinich goes on:
“We have seen dozens of reports of corruption, lost money, and unaccountable transactions in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have seen report of billions of taxpayers dollars in shrink-wrapped packages sent to Iraq for unsupervised distribution. We have seen millions of dollars flow into Afghanistan, and we have seen millions of dollars flow out again into the hands of the family of President Hamid Karzai for purposes such as building luxury villas in Dubai.”
He concludes, “To meet your stated purpose of protecting American taxpayers from waste, fraud, and abuse, it is essential that you examine the Department of Defense and money wasted during unnecessary wars.”
Source URL: http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/01/kucinich-issa-waste-oversight
Links:
[1] http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/09/darrell-issa-enter-stage-right
[2] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20022217-503544.html
[3] http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/46952.html
[4] http://kucinich.house.gov/UploadedFiles/letter_to_Issa_regarding_potential_waste_at_DOD.pdf
COMMENTS
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fargo1169 HOURS AGO
Watch Issa slavishly do what they want and the Democrats to cave right along with him.
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How did this guy get elected and why is the media ignoring this?
http://mediamatters.org/resear…
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Shorter version: Keep allowing us to poison and abuse people for profit.
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Hang it around his effing neck – start telling everyone in America right now that the man who brought us CAR ALARMS now wants to add more mercury, dioxin and HCL acid tot he environment
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What is the common thread in all of this?
Profits. (not the religious kind either).
Cold, hard cash in the bank accounts of the owners of the various industies that will make even more money if they don’t have to be regulated and can dump the toxins waste into the environment. And not have to have any worker protection on the job site.
I am sure they will next ask their shills in the GOP in Washington to-
Lower the minimum wage (Wow! If we don’t have to pay the workers look how many jobs we will create!),
Get rid of overtime (Why should workers get paid more to work more?),
Release them from any other benefits on the job, (Hey, there is no constitutional right to health care!),
Get rid of child labor laws, (Chinese kids work, so why are we coddling ours?)
Make belonging to a union a federal crime, (Damn unions are to blame for EVERYTHING!)
Completely abolish the EPA and OSHA, (It is a big liberal LIE that mercury is bad for you)
Lower the corporate tax rate to zero, (Hey, if we don’t have to pay taxes, we might hire more people. Maybe.)
Make us immune to liability laws, (We really thought that product was SAFE. We are SORRY, isn’t that enough?)
Get rid of equal employment laws, (Black don’t WANT to work, they LOVE welfare)
Any reader here who votes gop listen to me good;
When you or someone in your family comes down with some kind of strange cancer or illness, I don’t want to hear SHIT out of you about “Why wasn’t the government doing something.”
You voted for people like this moron Issa so he and his ilk can gut any type of worker/environmental protections so his pasty faced, fat fatcats in corporate american can become even fatter.
They whittle your job pay and benefits away or send your job overseas.
They risk you and your children’s health by dumping their industrial byproducts in the environment.
They lie, cheat an steal not to pay ANY taxes, because only the little people pay taxes.
They go to their fancy country clubs and laugh at you for being so stupid to vote for them when everything they do is to harm you and your family.
But soldier on good GOP grunt!
Keep voting for them so they can increase their net wealth while partying on your back and credit card.
Maybe they will let you have a few scraps off their table if you are a good boy.
Next time you see that picture of the Earth from the Apollo missions, look at it closely.
THAT is the only place in the known universe that can sustain life as we know it.
And the more you vote gop, the faster it will be rendered unihabitable.
But I guess it comforts you at night that you have your guns, your little book of spells, and that two guys you don’t know in some far away city can’t get married.
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The Supreme Court has ruled that a corporation is a person. But a corporation has one purpose and that is to make a profit. A corporation today if a person, is the least patriot person in the nation. Aided by the GOP, a corporation does NOT want to refrain from pollution, provide worker safety, pay taxes or feel any obligation to serve the public good. When it falters, it expects the government to bail it out and it appeals all fines and judgments which usually amount to what a traffic fine would be to a person. Compare that behavior to an actual person if they knowling poisoned the water supply, the air or the ground, if they knowingly created a dangerous work environment resulting in injury or death, if they worked back room deals to avoid taxation. In most cases if a person behaved like a corporation they would be prosecuted and possibly fined taking a far greater percentage of their wealth than corporate fines or jailed. Yet, what happens to a corporation-virtually NOTHING. Now, they have Mr. Issa and the House of Representatives trying to further absolve them of the responsibility of being a decent person. When we look at Mines in West Virginia, AIG, Bank of America, BP and others, let’s think of them as a PERSON and then decide what their responsibility should be and if they are patriots on the side of this country or traitors to it, and we should be asking the Congress whether they are corporate patriots or American patriots?.
