corrente

Lambert notes here how the US Forest Service has been politicized. A group called the NPS Retirees.org, formerly about as political as a head of lettuce, has for some time been trying to call attention to the same thing happening in the National Park Service.

Remember how they hid the contract that sent private mercenaries in as torturers at Abu Ghraib by having it "managed" by the NPS? That's almost a trivial irrelevance to the havoc they're wreaking at one of the oldest, most-respected operations the Federal government has ever run.

The NPS Retirees manifesto is long and I almost despaired of choosing among the multitude of examples of awfulness. The "privatization" of jobs issue by itself is appalling. But this one I think serves a double purpose. See if this sequence of statements reminds you of anything....

Equivocation and disingenuousness by Interior and NPS officials on the “maintenance backlog” has been especially egregious. Consider this series of public promises:

--Gale Norton said in a press release on April 9, 2001: “The FY2002 budget makes good on the President’s pledge to eliminate the maintenance backlog over five years [emphasis added].”

--Then, in the “FY2004 Interior Budget in Brief, p. BH-66,” she said, “In order to support the President’s commitment to manage the maintenance backlog...”

--Then, in a DOI press release on February 3, 2003, she said, “The President’s 2004 budget request proposes...to fulfill the President’s pledge of addressing the maintenance backlog in the parks [emphasis added].”

--Finally, from a press conference on July 8, 2004, as reported by the Associated Press: “Eliminating a maintenance backlog in the national parks, as President Bush promised in his 2000 campaign, is impossible, Interior Secretary Gale Norton said Thursday.”

Hmm..."Osama dead or alive!" "Osama's not that important!" Osama bin Forgotten...yeah, I thought you'd note the similarity.

Scariest of all is this. Seems like there isn't just one Office of Special Plans:

Sources inside the NPS indicate that the political appointees within the DOI and the Bureaus in Washington DC have established their own “chain of command” and meeting protocols. These meetings occur frequently and totally exclude career employees from the Bureaus. Often decisions are made that favor the political interests of those involved and not in the best interests of the missions of the Bureaus. Generally there are no records of the meetings or decisions, and decisions and actions are carried by “word of mouth.”

One recent “order from on high” required daily reports from the NPS political leadership about what actions were being taken to benefit the re-election of President Bush.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. There's a common factor that ties it all together. Wouldn't you know that the guy who's seen it most clearly, and talked about it most bravely, is getting set to "retire"?

On June 3, 2004, Bill Moyers delivered the keynote address at the Inequality Matters Forum held at New York University. In part, he said:

“I don’t have to tell you that a profound transformation is occurring in America: the balance between wealth and commonwealth is being upended. By design. Deliberately. We have been subjected to what the Commonwealth Foundation calls a ‘fanatical drive to dismantle political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power.’

From land, water, and other natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and to politics itself, a broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift toward private and corporate control. And with little public debate. Indeed, what passes for ‘public debate’ in this country has become a cynical charade behind which the real business goes on—the not-so-scrupulous business of getting and keeping power in order to divide up the spoils.”

UPDATE The notion that the wingers have set up their own, parallel administrative structures fascinates me. We now have two examples: the National Park Service, and the National Forest Service. It sounds a lot like the old USSR, with the Party and the State. Given the Trotsky-ite heritage of many of the neo-cons, this is not surprising; back in the day, "The Trots" were notorious for using this tactic to split organizations they wanted to control or destroy.

Setting up Partei organizations in parallel to the legitimate state was also, of course, a tactic used by the Nazis in '30s Germany, as a letter to the Times (not, oddly, available on line) pointed out this week. Frank Rich writes that without—I wonder why—being hyped by the SCML at all, Roth's new Plot Against America, whose cover art depicts "a one-cent stamp of the 1930's crisply postmarked with a swastika" is now in the top 25 at Amazon. Maybe people are starting to realize what's happening to them... Read "They thought they were free", and then sing along with Frank Zappa: "It can't happen here...."—Lambert