John D.Graham

Here's a fellow who might already have touched you personally, though he wouldn't have left any fingerprints. John heads a nerdy operation called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Let's see, the acronym of that'd be OIRAWHOMB, which can be rearranged as an anagram to spell BIG KIBOSH. That's what Graham is—the guy in charge of put­ting the kibosh on regulations designed to protect our health from things like asbestos poisoning, toxic emissions, and whatnot. 

Gosh, why would he do that? Because he wakes up every morning and takes a couple of lids of LSD, which has turned him into a danger­ous, hallucinogenic freak. (Just kidding! Call off the lawyers! I was only seeing if you were paying attention!) Actually, the LSD explanation is not one dot weirder than the reality, which is that Graham is besotted with an antigovernment, antipublic ideology and has found a way to convert his political extremism into a profitable career fronting for corporations that sicken and kill us with their products and carefree sloppiness.

What hole did Graham crawl out of? A place called the Harvard Cen­ter for Risk Analysis, which he directed, doing reports on the health risk of everything from secondhand smoke to the dioxins that spew from chemical plants. Well, that sounds pretty academicky, like he's a legiti­mate independent research scientist. He's not a scientist at all, just an­other doctrinaire policy geek. As for his independence, Graham's center is funded by more than one hundred corporations, including these specimens: Aetna, Alcoa, Amoco, ARCO, Bethlehem Steel, Boise Cas­cade, BP, Chevron, Ciba-Geigy, CITGO, Coca-Cola, Dow, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, Exxon, Ford, GE, GM, Georgia-Pacific, Goodyear, International Paper, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft, Merck, Mobil, Mon­santo, Nippon, Novartis, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Pharmacia Upjohn, Procter & Gamble, Schering-Plough, Shell, Texaco, 3M, Union Carbide, and Westinghouse.

The companies contribute generously because Graham delivers re­ports that almost always support them, usually without bothering to mention that they funded his "research." For example, when the EPA fi­nally reported that dioxin is an extraordinarily potent chemical that can cause everything from cancer to birth defects, Graham rushed out as an "expert" to criticize the EPA and pooh-pooh the risk, declaring to the media: "It's a shame when a mother worries about toxic chemicals, and yet her kids are running around unvaccinated and without bicycle helmets."

No mention to the media that his center is funded by forty-eight dif­ferent corporations that pollute our environment with dioxin.

This is Bush's choice to be the czar who oversees the entire regulatory process of the government's executive departments. No important health, safety, environmental, or other rule to protect you and me from corporate excess can be issued by the EPA or other executive agency without getting stamped by John's signet ring. Yet, his appointment to head OIRA caused little media stir, and you probably know nothing about it. But the corporate executives and lobbyists knew about it, and their beaming smiles would have lit up the sky on the darkest night of an Arctic winter.

Among those beaming the brightest would have been the honchos of W.R. Grace & Co., the chemical and asbestos giant. They had a problem. Millions of American homes, schools, and businesses—perhaps yours— are insulated with a product named Zonolite, made from a substance containing an extremely lethal asbestos fiber that came from W.R. Grace's mine in Libby, Montana. Hundreds of the Libby miners and their families have died from asbestosis, hundreds more are diagnosed with it, and thousands are sickened by it.

This is nasty stuff—breathing even a little can cause major health problems. The Zonolite insulation poses no problem if it's not dis­turbed. That's the good news. Bad news is that it takes very little to dis­turb it. Bumping the walls as you sweep your floor or doing work in the attic can shake loose a mess of fibers. It's such a problem that Bush's EPA administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, who's not exactly a tiger on corporate wrongdoing, was so alarmed that she was prepared in April of '02 to issue a national health warning about Zonolite.

Do you recall getting any warning? You didn't, because just days before Whitman was to go to the media, John Graham and his OIRAWHOMB put the kibosh on her warning. It seems that Graham's obligation is not to us pollutees, who might want to know about Zono-lite's danger to our families, but to the bottom line of the polluter, W.R. Grace.

Under what authority had Graham single-handedly quashed such an important effort by a cabinet officer to protect the public health? No re­sponse from OIRAWHOMB. Had he been contacted by Grace officials? Silence. An agency spokeswoman told an inquiring reporter: "We don't discuss predecisional deliberations."

There you have it—your tax dollars at work, Bush style. 

THREE MORE EXAMPLES

Donaldson, chosen to head the SEC, which is supposed to be our watchdog against fraud by Wall Street firms.  He was CEO of one of the biggest of the Wall Street  firms, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette—which presently happens to be un­der SEC investigation for fraud.

Friedman, chosen to be Bush's top economic advisor. He was cochairman of the huge investment house of Goldman Sachs, where he was a leader in the merge-and-purge boom of the '80s and '90s, which cost hundreds of thousands of workers their jobs, lessened competition, raised prices for consumers, and hurt shareholders.

Snow, chosen to be our country's top economic official as treasury secretary. He was CEO of the nation's largest rail­road company, CSX Corporation, where he presided over a 53 percent dive in the company's stock price while raising his own pay by 69 percent, at the same time he was slashing the health care and life insurance benefits for CSX retirees.

Hightower, pgs 15-16.