Outgoing Admin High-Jinks

Bill Clinton going wiggy w/ pardons before leaving office? Remember the stink? (Also try to remember the bogus alllegations that Clinton staffers had removed the "W"s from White House keyboards. Thanks to Bush's general incompetence, there are now somewhat more important things over which to agonize.)

And here are two more, not incompetence related, but Bush doing the job he was appointed to do. That is, hand over as much of the country & its money to his pals/buddies/cronies/Republican campaign contributors.

[T]he changes appear to be a last-ditch push by appointees of President Bush to dilute securities rules passed after the collapse of Enron and other large companies — measures that were meant to forestall accounting gimmicks and corrupt practices that led to those corporate failures.

[...]

James D. Cox, a securities law expert at Duke Law School who returned this week from teaching corporate law in Europe, said the shift to international rules amounted to “outsourcing safety standards.”

“We would not for a moment tolerate having American auto safety standards set by China or India,” he said. “Why should we do it for financial safety standards? There has to be some accountability.”

Oh, this guy has a lot of confidence. On what basis does he state we wouldn't tolerate Indo-Chinese safety standards? Remember dead & sick dogs & cats last yr.? Anti-freeze in toothpaste? Tech help from someone in Delhi? (Disclaimer: The only time Just Another Blog™ has had contact w/ the other side of the world for tech assistance, the woman who helped us helped us, got our high-speed web connection working, & was a pleasure to speak w/.)

Meanwhile, in Big Sky Country, secret deals are being negotiated.

MISSOULA, Mont. -- The Bush administration is preparing to ease the way for the nation's largest private landowner to convert hundreds of thousands of acres of mountain forestland to residential subdivisions.

The deal was struck behind closed doors between Mark E. Rey, the former timber lobbyist who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, and Plum Creek Timber Co., a former logging company turned real estate investment trust that is building homes. Plum Creek owns more than 8 million acres nationwide, including 1.2 million acres in the mountains of western Montana, where local officials were stunned and outraged at the deal.

"We have 40 years of Forest Service history that has been reversed in the last three months," said Pat O'Herren, an official in Missoula County, which is threatening to sue the Forest Service for forgoing environmental assessments and other procedures that would have given the public a voice in the matter.

The deal, which Rey said he expects to formalize next month, threatens to dramatically accelerate trends already transforming the region. Plum Creek's shift from logging to real estate reflects a broader shift in the Western economy, from one long grounded in the industrial-scale extraction of natural resources to one based on accommodating the new residents who have made the region the fastest-growing in the nation.

Very nice. Very nice indeed. Let's see how nice.

Environmentalists, to their surprise, found that timber and mining were
easier on the countryside.

"Now that Plum Creek is getting out of the timber business, we're kind of missing the loggers," said Ray Rasker, executive director of Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit that studies land management in the West. "A clear-cut will grow back, but a subdivision of trophy homes, that's going to be that way forever.

"It's kind of the ugly face of the new economy."

Here's an even uglier face:

Most are the second, third or even fourth homes of wealthy newcomers who have transformed the local economy -- 40 percent of income in Missoula County is now "unearned," from, say, dividends -- and typically visit only in the summer. In Antler Ridge, across Highway 93, Web cameras installed over bird nests and a bear den beam photos to a hedge fund partner who visits his 200 acres just a few times a year.

"He was actually in France when the bear left the den," said "remote wildlife viewing" contractor Ryan Alter, on his way to install a camera at an owl's nest. "So I sent him pictures on his BlackBerry."

"I wanted to own land out there because I was always very interested in the concept of restoration, conservation," Paul Gurinas, the hedge fund partner, said by phone from Chicago. "The fact that it's almost become kind of a housing subdivision, that isn't what I was looking for. I guess I wish I had bought the whole thing up, and then I wouldn't have to worry about it."

What fucking next? No reward for any sort of "work," only for having enough money w/ which to invest. And the decadence of this fuck having "nature" beamed to him over the intertubes. Now he's sorry he didn't buy "the whole thing."

There's your future, America, decadent assholes w/ three or four houses, while thousands of Americans are w/o housing at all, paying you squat wages to take pictures of the very nature they're destroying. It's back to feudalism. They don't want to shred the Constitution, they want to go all the way back & destroy the Magna Carta.

A voice in the wilderness cries: "Where's your outrage? Why aren't you grabbing those guns the Supreme Court lets you have & using them? Are you really going to let this lame duck administration finish taking the vast majority of Americans to the proverbial cleaners w/o a fight?"