Industry Lobbyists Now Oversee Their Industry

The Denver Post this Sunday ran a great expose on the scores of lobbyists and industry spokespeople President Bush has appointed to now oversee the industries they once worked for.

Though the story was stellar, the Post forgot to mention the fact that President Bush himself was an executive in the oil industry his Energy Bill would reward, and that he was an original investor in a drug card company that his Medicare bill now rewards. It also forgot to note that Vice Preisdent Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, the company bilking U.S. taxpayers on no-bid contracts in Iraq. Here are a few others troubling ones the Post did not touch on:

BEEF LOBBYISTS OVERSEE MAD COW POLICY AT USDA:

Why is the Bush Administration doing everything it can to fight American ranchers who want every cow tested for Mad Cow? Knight-Ridder reported "the Bush Administration's Department of Agriculture is staffed with former executives of the meat industry, now in charge of regulating their former employers." USDA "Chief of staff Dale Moore, senior adviser Elizabeth Johnson, and Chuck Lambert, deputy undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, all came from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. Deputy Undersecretary James Butler joined USDA after serving as partner in Butler & Son Charolais Ranch, a Texas cattle company, while Deputy Secretary James Moseley was managing partner of Infinity Pork L.L.C., an Indiana hog farm. Donna Reifschneider, the agency's administrator of inspection is the former president of the National Pork Producers Council." Former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman "said regulators with industry backgrounds are unlikely to fight for much-needed enhancements to the USDA enforcement powers" – and more susceptible to lax oversight. For instance, at the same time USDA employed an assistant secretary and chief information officer who used to work for ConAgra and its subsidiary, USDA acknowledged it had allowed ConAgra "to continue operating when inspectors knew of 34 E. coli samples in the Greeley, Colo., plant." That led to 47 people being sickened and one dying from E. coli poisoning.

LABOR DEPARTMENT SPOKESMAN FOR OVERTIME CUTS WAS INDUSTRY SPOKESMAN PUSHING FOR OVERTIME ROLLBACK:

Earlier this year, the Bush Labor Department began giving Big Businesses official, government-sanction "tips on how to avoid paying overtime" to workers under the Administration's new overtime rules (which would cut off 8 million workers from overtime protections). One suggestion was to "cut workers' hourly wages and add the overtime to equal the original salary." The official spokesman for the Labor Department's overtime campaign is none other than Ed Frank, who was formerly the spokesman for the so-called "National Federation of Independent Business" - the main special interest group pushing for the Bush overtime rollbacks.