A few weeks ago I wrote about the Bush administration's efforts to pass new rules on its way out the door that would serve as gifts to American industry. These rules govern public health and safety, the kind of rules which truly affect all of us, as opposed to high profile matters like the death penalty, which have strong moral implications but which also affect relatively few people (unless you kill someone in a state that recognizes the death penalty).

There is a secret government which affects all of us. This secret government may very well determine who lives and who dies, and who stays healthy and who suffers for years to come. This is not the secret government of conspiracy theorists, but the real branch of government known as the administrative state. In many ways, the administrative agencies which regulate American industry affect our lives more closely than any other branch of government. And we know very little about it, not because it operates in secret, but because no one knows to pay attention.

Here's the story, on the front page of the New York Times over the weekend. It was news in the Times, but it will be pushed aside very quickly. It's not sexy enough.

The Labor Department is racing to complete a new rule, strenuously opposed by President-elect Barack Obama, that would make it much harder for the government to regulate toxic substances and hazardous chemicals to which workers are exposed on the job.

The rule, which has strong support from business groups, says that in assessing the risk from a particular substance, federal agencies should gather and analyze “industry-by-industry evidence” of employees’ exposure to it during their working lives. The proposal would, in many cases, add a step to the lengthy process of developing standards to protect workers’ health.

Public health officials and labor unions said the rule would delay needed protections for workers, resulting in additional deaths and illnesses.

. . .

The Labor Department proposal is one of about 20 highly contentious rules the Bush administration is planning to issue in its final weeks. The rules deal with issues as diverse as abortion, auto safety and the environment.

One rule would make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas. Another would reduce the role of federal wildlife scientists in deciding whether dams, highways and other projects pose a threat to endangered species.

. . .

A new president can unilaterally reverse executive orders issued by his predecessors, as Mr. Bush and President Bill Clinton did in selected cases. But it is much more difficult for a new president to revoke or alter final regulations put in place by a predecessor. A new administration must solicit public comment and supply “a reasoned analysis” for such changes, as if it were issuing a new rule, the Supreme Court has said.

Here's how it all works. The Congress passes laws, and the President signs those bills into law. We all learned this in school. But who enforces the laws? The President does. But not him personally. The administration enforces the laws. The President is too busy giving speeches and focusing on two or three policy matters at a time. That's where the federal agencies come into play. They enforce the laws. There are many such agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education. The laws they have to implement are often vague and open-ended, and the agencies therefore issue rules that allow the agency employees (bureaucrats) to actually do their work in enforcing the laws.

With me so far? The agencies issue rules that are supposed to be consistent with the laws they have to enforce. But the Supreme Court has given these agencies substantial leeway in drafting rules so long as they are not totally inconsistent with the plain language of the laws. This is because we assume that the people drafting the rules and regulations are experts and they know what they are doing.

None of this is done in secret. The agencies propose new rules by publishing them in something called the Federal Register, a booklet that the government issues regularly. Few of us care about the Federal Register, but lobbyists care. This includes the business lobby, the environmental lobby and other interest groups. They look forward to the next Federal Register the same way that everyone else looks forward to the morning paper. Once a proposed regulation is listed in the Federal Register, the government accepts public comment on the rule, but again, it's the lobbyists who provide that comment.

The agencies are not required to actually listen to the public comments. But in theory they could, and that is why the comments are solicited. Then the government can say that it took into consideration the views of the Sierra Club when it proceeds to build a power plan near a river with endangered species. After the public comment period closes, the agency can adopt the proposed rule and it goes into the Code of Federal Regulations. At that point, the regulations have the force of law.

In early 2007, the New York Times reported that, for the first time, a Presidential administration would have political appointees supervise the regulatory process in the federal agencies. This should have been big news. Politics should not have any place in neutral rule-making on health and safety issues. But the story came and went.

What this all means is that while we scream and yell about social issues like abortion and the Pledge of Allegience, regulations are being issued which govern clean air, clean water and workplace safety. The Bush administration knows that once regulations are enacted, they are difficult to overturn, because the next administration has to undergo a lengthy process to that end. It's a hell of a way to enact your policies, but it's Christmas shopping season and everyone's excited about the incoming Obama administration so, really, who gives a damn if the new regulations make it more difficult to ensure workplace safety?

One of the things I learned in college while taking a course about Latin American revolutions is that desperate people do things that no one else would otherwise do, such as take up arms and storm the halls of power. The other thing that I learned was that journalists have to be objective in reporting the news. So what does a desperate journalist do? He throws a shoe at the President of the United States.

For my money, the You Tube video of the year is the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush who came to Iraq one last time to proclaim that freedom is on the march. Iraq is anything but a success story. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died in "Operation Iraqi Freedom," and that country has been decimated after 5+ years of unjustified war. In Iraq, throwing a shoe is a sign of craven disrespect. The angry journalist not only threw one shoe: he threw both shoes. And his throwing arm is outstanding. Had President Bush not ducked, it would have been a direct hit.

Shoe throwing is not a pastime in the United States, probably because once you throw your shoe, you can't get it back, and you need your shoes to walk around in. The best place to throw your shoes is indoors, where the shoe can be retrieved. So far as I can tell, no one has made the connection between the Iraq shoe-thrower and any shoe-throwers in the United States, but there is in fact a real connection.

In 2004, filmmaker Michael Moore tried to derail Bush's re-election campaign with Fahrenheit 911, a provocative movie about Bush's lies and prevarications in Iraq and Afghanistan. The movie was all right, though it could have been updated every week. I am not sure if the movie covered waterboarding and other forms of torture, but it sure made Bush out to be an incompetent dolt. The final scene showed Bush mangling the cliche, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Bush said, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice . . . uh, You can't get fooled agan." Bush couldn't even get his cliches right.

When the media covered the movie as a political event, it noted that moviegoers shouted at the screen. Where I saw the movie, at the Rosendale Theatre in upstate New York, we all walked out of the movie house as if we had just gone to a funeral. We quietly filed out of the building and went to our cars and drove home with somber facial expressions. No one said a word.

But at one movie house, I recall reading, an older moviegoer did as the Iraqi journalist did. After Bush mangled the cliche, he took off his shoe and threw it at the movie screen. And according to Michael Moore himself, "A man in San Francisco took his shoe off and threw it at the screen when Bush appeared at the end. "This was more common than I thought, though, because a Google search references shoe-throwing as an aside, as if it were happening all over the place:

It’s been suggested that F 9/11 is a triumph of form over content-but that’s being generous. In MM’s film, mood and emotion trump both form and content. Its flourishes of detail conspire to build fervour and indignation. It’s an indelicate film-brash, wide-hipped and blustering. Like Moore. That’s why people throw shoes at the screen, weep aloud, can’t lift themselves from their seats when the credits roll. Viewed from whatever side of the fence, F 9/11 denies audiences the luxury of indifference.

No one thinks that he's the terrorist. The terrorist is always someone else. That's what happening these days, with Dick Cheney giving his farewell tour on the television news shows. He is brazenly defending the actions of the Bush administration, specifically, its policies on war and torture. He's lucky no one is going to serve him with a criminal warrant on the day he leaves office.

We don't associate terrorism with American policy. For that reason, terrorism is the most loaded word in the English language. They do it, not us. But that's silly. If human nature is what it is, and if terrorism is defined as politically-motivated violence, then terrorism is rampant all around the world, and there are terrorists among us. Like in Washington, which consistently maintains a violent foreign policy in violation of international law.

Portrait of a terrorist

Dick Cheney has been a bad guy for many years. I make it a point to read every good non-fiction book that comes out, particularly books on recent American history. As you read about American history from the Nixon administration to the present, there is one name that pops up regularly: Dick Cheney. He worked for the Nixon regime, a criminal enterprise by any definition. He hung around when Gerald Ford became president upon Nixon's resignation in 1974. Cheney never liked how the presidency lost presige and power as a result of post-Watergate reforms, and when he became a Congressman in the 1980's he defended President Reagan's illegal foreign policy when it erupted in scandal, the Iran-contra affair. After Reagan was caught trading weapons to Iranian terrorists in order to release American hostages and using the profits to finance the terrorist contras in Nicaragua in violation of American law, Cheney defended the practice and said that Congress had taken on too much authority in regulating foreign affairs. Cheney then became George H.W. Bush's Secretary of Defense, presiding over the invasion of Panama and the first Gulf War, military actions which killed thousands and proceeded on the basis of very flimsy justifications.

When Cheney became vice president in the Bush administration, astute political observers knew that he would be calling the shots, since George W. Bush had no experience on the national stage and knew nothing about foreign affairs. It was Cheney who forcefully pushed for war in Iraq and promoted the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture against prisoners captured in the war on terror.

There is no way to comment on Cheney's recent comments defending the use of torture. His words say it all. Here is a summary from ThinkProgress.org:

In an interview earlier this week, Vice President Cheney admitted to personally approving the torture of high-profile detainees. In a new interview with the Washington Times, Cheney stridently defended the Bush administration’s torture policies, saying, “I feel very good about what we did. I think it was the right thing to do.” He added emphatically that he would “do exactly the same thing again.”

Most audaciously, Cheney specifically defended the morality of torture, suggesting that it would have been immoral for the United States to not torture:

“In my mind, the foremost obligation we had from a moral or an ethical standpoint was to the oath of office we took when we were sworn in, on January 20 of 2001, to protect and defend against all enemies foreign and domestic. And that’s what we’ve done,” he said. […]

“I think it would have been unethical or immoral for us not to do everything we could in order to protect the nation against further attacks like what happened on 9/11,” Mr. Cheney said.

Cheney insisted that the torture policies he helped craft were “directly responsible for the fact that we’ve been able to avoid or defeat further attacks against the homeland for 7 1/2 years.”

Torture has endangered, not protected, American lives. Military experts say that the U.S.’s torture policies have been the single greatest recruiting tool for al Qaeda. A former interrogator who worked in Iraq stated unequivocally, “The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001.”

Rather than keeping us safe, former FBI special agent Jack Cloonan warned that Cheney’s torture policies will lead directly to another domestic terrorist attack:

Based on my experience in talking to Al Qaida members, I am persuaded that revenge in the form of a catastrophic attack on the homeland is coming; that a new generation of jihadist martyrs, motivated in part by the images from Abu Ghraib, is, as we speak, planning to kill Americans; and that nothing gleaned from the use of coercive interrogation techniques will be of any significant use in forestalling this calamitous eventuality.

The piece at Think Progress has links the original sources and articles to back up the commentary. More here. Many of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were found guilty of nothing and therefore sent back to their native lands with a new hatred for the United States. Torture probably reveals very little in the way of usable intelligence because people will say anything to stop the agony. Then investigators have to double-check what the prisoners say under duress and these leads often produce nothing useful while wasting the valuable time of American intelligence officials.

Historians will look back at the Bush administration with horror and scorn at an infantile president and his malicious vice president. Historians will correct the current lie now being pushed by Bush and his defenders: that the U.S. did not suffer any terrorist attacks during the Bush administration. September 11 happened on Bush's watch, and there are websites galore which document how the administration was grossly negligent in dealing with red alert threats. Just Google "August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing" to see what I mean. Invading a sovereign nation without any justification, killing thousands in the process, won't go over too well with future historians, especially as they and their kids will have to keep paying the bill, totalling hundreds of hundreds of billions of dollars.

There will be many celebrations when Bush leaves the White House on January 20, 2009. I will be among the celebrators. But don't forget the terrorist who will be taking out the garbage with Bush. May Dick Cheney live out the rest of his life coming to terms with the terror and violence that happened on his watch. May his sleepness nights and night-frights dwarf those of the victims of his heinous war policies.