Here we go again! I woke up this morning, as I have many mornings since Florida 2000, to read of another instance in which the Bush administration is seeking to transfer opportunities and assurances for our pursuit of happiness to corporate interests.
This time, our would-be dictator has deemed that a $250,000 cap on jury awards for pain and suffering in medical malpractice claims would be good for America. What a crock! Good for Corporate America, maybe. Mr. Bush bellows that unnecessary costs "don't start in the waiting room or operating room, but in the courtroom." What a shameless and obvious sound bite – not to mention a diversion from the truth. The fact of the matter is, most of the unnecessary costs of which the president speaks originate in the boardrooms of malpractice law firms. Typical attorney fees in such malpractice claims can range from a third to half of the award amount. If the fees were capped rather than the awards, the incentive for frivolous suits would be removed, and the rights of the patient would remain intact.
It is confounding as to why this president continues to receive the approval ratings he has. Nearly everything he has done has been for the benefit of corporations and to the detriment of the average Joe, or to Joe's descendants.
Shortly after taking office, he repealed the OSHA initiative set in place during the prior administration to ensure ergonomic workspaces for employees, thus reducing the number of incidents and claims for workplace injury. The reason given – it was too difficult to accomplish. What a cop out!
Later, he authorized the legitimate transfer among health care organizations (doctors, hospitals, clinics, health-insurance companies) of your personal and medical information without your knowledge or consent.
He continues to rape the environment, allowing unabated logging in national forests of prime commercial lumber, which also happens to be the best protection against forest fire damage due to the fire-resistant nature of those same trees – whereas the new brush overgrowth that would rise in place of the removed giant trees would go up in a whoosh.
He has effectively returned environmental policies back to the level in place in 1973. Do you remember the commercial with the American Indian viewing the pollution with a tear in his eye? Well, cry now, America. This desecrated land is your land. If the administration gets its way, ANWAR could easily look like the mess in Prince William Sound (the Exxon Valdez) or possibly the coasts of Spain and France (the Prestige – carrying over twice the amount of oil spilt by the Valdez.)
More ravaging of the environment by this administration is evident, as pollution controls have been pulled back for upgrading power plants. I'm not sure I follow the logic. I can understand a grandfathering scenario for older plants, but telling plants that newer equipment doesn't have to meet better efficiency and pollution standards seems a bit off. It's no wonder… Christine Todd Whitman is the wimp in place as the head of EPA. She is the former governor of New Jersey. Have you ever driven through Jersey? Yuk! What a stench! She and Mr. Bush would allow the rest of our beautiful country to be turned into a toilet if left to corporate interests.
Then there is our cowardly VP, hiding from one undisclosed location to another, and in doing so, meeting in secret with energy industry corporate big wigs, doing the public's business in private, and then telling us to trust him. Dick Cheney hawks war, and has a lot to gain if we take over the oilfields in Iraq, as I'm sure Halliburton would get more than its fair share of government contracts involved in the aftermath. During the 5 years Cheney led Halliburton from 1995-2000, their government contracts nearly doubled in size to a whopping $2.3 billion.
As the CEO of Halliburton, Cheney claimed that he supported the U.S. sanctions on Iraq, but the Financial Times of London reported that through foreign subsidiaries and affiliates, Halliburton became the biggest oil contractor for Iraq, selling more than $73 million in goods and services to Saddam Hussein's regime.
I won't even go into the demise of our civil liberties at the hands of a one-time people's advocate, John Ashcroft, who now plunders the Bill of Rights at every turn. The newest acronym, NSSC kind of rolls of the tongue, doesn't it? It stands for The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. This smokescreen will allow the feds to observe our every move on the Internet. Given that appliances are now being fitted with chips that communicate over the Internet for the purpose of home efficiency automation, it is conceivable that the government will have on record each and every time you open your refrigerator door. It and the Patriot Act have, in a heartbeat, decimated rights of Americans that took years to get into place.
I'm not sure if the American citizenry is apathetically asleep at the wheel, or whether they have their head buried in the sand, shivering in fear of Osama, and hearing only the drumbeat, IRAQ…IRAQ…IRAQ.
WAKE UP!!!