NP The Corporate Conservative Administration

[Doug Millison]

More echoes of Pynchon's politics...

The Corporate Conservative Administration
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Compassionate conservativism?

Try corporate conservativism. It's corporate conservatism that is going to
be the defining feature of the Bush White House.

Pushing beyond the corporate corrupting frontiers blazed by the Clinton
administration, the Bush team is making clear that it intends to deliver on
its campaign promises to strengthen Big Business's grip over government
policy-making.

The Bush cabinet is drawing on corporate executives as much or more than any
previous administration. Andrew Card, set to be Bush's chief of staff, moves
to the White House from a posting as General Motors vice president. Previous
to that position, he ran the auto industry's lobby shop. Bush has tapped
Paul O'Neill, chair of Alcoa, to head his Treasury Department. Bush crony
Don Evans, the Commerce Secretary-designee, is CEO of Tom Brown, Inc., an
oil company. Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush nominee to head the Pentagon, is
former CEO of G.D. Searle and of General Instrument, and has held a variety
of other top corporate posts. Bush's nominee for Veterans Affairs Secretary,
Anthony Principi, is president of a wireless telecommunications company.
National Security Adviser-designate Condoleeza Rice is a member of the board
of directors of Chevron (which has christened an oil tanker, the Condoleeza
Rice) and Charles Schwab, and is a member of J.P. Morgan's International
Advisory Council.

Of course, both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (CEO of Haliburton, the oil
services firm) themselves both come from the oil industry.

Bush's transition team is dominated by high donors and corporate interests.
Of the 474 individuals on the transition team, 261 made political
contributions during the last election cycle, the Center for Responsive
Politics reports -- and 95 percent of the $5.3 million they contributed went
to Republican candidates or the Republican Party.

Even more telling is the overwhelming corporate background of the transition
team members.

The transition team for the Department of Energy, for example, is almost
exclusively made up of people affiliated with or working for the extractive
energy industry. Companies and outfits represented include: Phillips
Petroleum, Enron, Kennecott, Southern California Edison, the National Mining
Association and the Nuclear Energy Institute.

For the Department of Health and Human Services transition, the drug,
biotech, insurance and hospital industries are set to have their way. The
transition team includes representatives from Merck, the American Hospital
Association, Mutual of Omaha, BIO (the biotech trade group), Ernst and Young
and the National Association of Health Underwriters.

On the Department of Labor transition team, you find two members of the
Teamsters, and no other labor-affiliated representatives. Instead, the
transition team comes from Union Pacific, the National Restaurant
Association, the American Trucking Association, the National Mining
Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Society of Human Resource
Managers.

It's unlikely that the transition team members -- at least as a body -- had
much influence over Bush's cabinet appointments, but they may well have
significant sway in the hiring of second- and third-tier officials. These
are the people who get their hands dirty on policy details, and can deliver
the goodies to the corporate paymasters.

More ceremonial posts are being parceled out with a machine-like efficiency
to high donors and top fundraisers.

Inaugural Committee Co-Chairs Bill and Kathy DeWitt and Mercer and Gabrielle
Reynolds come from the Cincinnati-based investment firm Reynolds, DeWitt and
Company. Bill DeWitt and Gabrielle Reynolds were co-chairs of the Ohio
Bush-Cheney Finance Committee. Other members of the inaugural committee
sport similar resumes.

Following in the Clinton-Gore footsteps, Bush-Cheney are soliciting private
funds for the inauguration. While Clinton-Gore at least restricted the
donations to $100 or less, however, Bush-Cheney are banking on major donors.
More than 50 individuals have each contributed $100,000 or more to the
inauguration committee.

Bush's economic summit, held earlier this month in Austin, was actually a
get-together with business leaders. The Austin meeting featured 36 top
corporate executives, including such major Republican donors as Kenneth Lay
of Enron, John T. Chambers of Cisco and Michael Dell of Dell Computer.

As you would imagine, this turn of events has corporate American dancing in
the streets. "They are happy, certainly," Jim Albertine, president of the
American League of Lobbyists, told the Boston Globe, speaking of his
association's members. "There is a strong belief that a lot of things will
be reopened."

  Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt
for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage
Press, 1999).

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

_Focus on the Corporation is a weekly column written by Russell Mokhiber and
Robert Weissman. Please feel free to forward the column to friends or
repost the column on other lists. If you would like to post the column on  a
web site or publish it in print format, we ask that you first contact us
(russell at essential.org or rob at essential.org).
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