Cronyism: The Bigger Picture

I took the Moveon.org "How Are We Doing" Survey today, which ended with the open-ended question, "is there anything else you'd like to share with us?" This is my reply to that question.

I don't know if we have to go rabid over every single so-so appointment Bush makes. What we need is to go after and educate people about the Big Picture. In the case of the Bush Administration, the Big Picture is what is finally being recognized as cronyism. But it goes well beyond rewarding Yes-men and Yes-women with good jobs that they're not qualified to do, the way Time magazine recently portrayed it, albeit as a cover story. Jim Hightower (Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush, Thieves in High Places) and Greg Palast (The Best Democracy Money Can Buy) have nailed it more precisely. The really key jobs are going to exactly the people who want to do the opposite of what the jobs are for, often for their own or for their own cronies' profit, like giving control of the EPA to anti-environmental corporate lobbyists, with Bush Pioneer fund raisers benefitting in particular. So the country is being sold out; the environment that sustains us and the lives of our young men and women who, bravely if perhaps foolishly, become soldiers, are being traded for profits in the forms of avoiding regulation, allowances for pollution, and war profiteering. The government is being run essentially by a criminal network, a gang if you will, of "business" people who are willing to quite literally destroy everything we hold dear to make a quick buck! To build a movement, people need to see the fundamentals of what's going on, and this extreme of Faustian bargaining is what's dominating the current Administration's policies. Some appointments and policy maneuvers are more crucial and emblematic of the phenomenon than others, and those are the ones we really need to focus on.

Let me add what has become somewhat of a common place disclaimer, but one which bears repeating. Bush and Co. did not invent cronyism. They have just taken it to new extremes, and these extremes threaten untold lives, and almost everyone's way of life. At best, as I've mentioned before, maybe they know not what they do; but make no mistake, they're doing it.