Inside the secretive plan to gut the Endangered Species Act

[IChing]

Source: salon

March 27, 2007 |

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is maneuvering to fundamentally weaken the Endangered Species Act, its strategy laid out in an internal 117-page draft proposal obtained by Salon. The proposed changes limit the number of species that can be protected and curtail the acres of wildlife habitat to be preserved. It shifts authority to enforce the act from the federal government to the states, and it dilutes legal barriers that protect habitat from sprawl, logging or mining.

"The proposed changes fundamentally gut the intent of the Endangered Species Act," says Jan Hasselman, a Seattle attorney with Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, who helped Salon interpret the proposal. "This is a no-holds-barred end run around one of America's most popular environmental protections. If these regulations stand up, the act will no longer provide a safety net for animals and plants on the brink of extinction."

In recent months, the Fish and Wildlife Service has gone to extraordinary efforts to keep drafts of regulatory changes from the public. All copies of the working document were given a number corresponding to a person, so that leaked copies could be traced to that individual. An e-mail sent in March from an assistant regional director at the Fish and Wildlife Service to agency staff, asking for comments on and corrections to the first draft, underscored the concern with secrecy: "Please Keep close hold for now. Dale does not want this stuff leaking out to stir up discontent based on speculation."

Many Fish and Wildlife Service employees believe the draft is not based on "defensible science," says a federal employee who asked to remain anonymous. Yet "there is genuine fear of retaliation for communicating that to the media. People are afraid for their jobs."

>>>snip

Read more: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/27/endangered_species/

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No surprise here:
This nation has a cancer that is spreading

If we've learned anything about cancer, it is that it must be confronted and dealt with. You can't deny its existence, or wish it away, or play nice with it and hope it will ease up on you. Cancers are cells gone wild with their power. When such a malignancy shows up in a human body, you cut it out, and then drive a symbolic stake through its heart through chemo and radiation.

When a malignant tumor shows up in the polity, you follow the same protocol. When the costs of denial become too great, when so much damage and death and destruction is done in your name, then the cancer finally has to be faced and dealt with. Society must mobilize itself for radical surgery, and then through symbolic chemo/radiation -- reforms, re-asserting the primacy of the rule of law and Constitutional protections, re-establishing the checks-and-balances established by our Founding Fathers -- try to ensure that one-party rule, authoritarian leadership, police-state measures, "pre-emptive" wars, torture as state policy, incipient native fascism, etc., do not have an easy chance to re-assert themselves again.

[Miss Chybil]

1. This administration is systematically removing all that makes this country great

in order to turn us into a third world pool of labor lorded over by the likes of Dick Cheney.

[annabanana]

2. It pisses me off that they work so hard to keep the public's business

away from the public's eyes..

[vickitulsa]

3. Yes, me too! Yet the very nature of their dark acts require secrecy

as "cover" and they succeed only so long as they can KEEP their secrets from us.

Just before Hitler catapulted himself to ultimate power in Nazi Germany, he kept extremely secret his key move to eradicate the SA and assassinate its powerful leader, a military general. If they hadn't been so successful at keeping this plan secret until it was implemented suddenly all in one night, virtually, it is likely that Hitler and his thugs never would have succeeded in gaining the full power they craved.

Ditto with this maladministration. Nothing thrills me so much as seeing a great many of their vile secret plots exposed by Americans who loathe seeing their country defiled and its citizens and natural resources exploited and reduced to servitude to a powerful state.

A return to a sort of feudal state is their goal, with the masses kept down by their own ignorance and a willingness to trust, and to FEAR "outside forces" that would supposedly harm them.

But when common folk begin to realize that it's their own "leaders" that are generating all the fear and gaining a power beyond any they were intended by our Constitution to have, progress may be made in gutting their plans!

I refuse to quell the hope I feel that a lot of sheeple are getting angrier by the week. They may not be well informed, but it doesn't take a genius to see the harm these criminal bastards have brought down on them.

"Out" their secrets, and half the work of ending their reign of terror is done!

What's that 12-Step mantra? "You're only as sick as your secrets!"

Yeah, Dick and Dubya, and all your enablers and assistants! ... How does it feel to be "exposed," hmmm?

[harpboy_ak]

4. They've been trying this with the Clean Water Act, too

Like Coeur's attempt to get a permit to fill a lake near Berner's Bay, just north of Juneau.

Oh, excuse me, they're not filling a lake, they're going to dam it up and use it for "temporary" tailings storage, creating a square mile toxic waste lake draining into as yet still intact ecosystem that produces thousands of salmon, millions of herring, and is habitat for bears, seals, sea lions, whales...

The Mow-The-Forest Service and the Army Corpse of Engineers and Coeur Alaska just lost this one at the 9th Circuit.

See http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/031807/loc_20070318016.shtml

Because it would set a precedent gutting the Clean Water Act, and because of the new Bush Justices now part of Bush's Supreme KKKourt, I expect Coeur and its friends in the mining industry to try to get the Supremes to rule on this. After all, they won't be able to destroy Bristol Bay's salmon runs with the Pebble mine if they can't create toxic lakes in the middle of pristine salmon producing wilderness.

[IChing]

5. kick after it removed from

LBN

[harpboy_ak]

6. but ***why*** was it moved?

It was correctly a LBN thread. Once threads start there, they should stay there. LBN is the DU forum I read regularly.