Salon paints a good (or bad) picture here.
While the press salivated about Mary Cheney's new infant, they ignored this fun information;
As the Washington Monthly reveals in its current issue, Perry has
spent the past few years at DHS obstructing federal and state
regulation of the nation's chemical industry, which still remains
vulnerable to a devastating terrorist attack -- and which has paid
millions of dollars to Latham & Watkins, the Washington law firm
where he has been a partner and lobbyist, earning as much as $700,000
a year. (Having just resigned from Homeland Security last month,
Perry could soon return to Latham, thus completing his third circuit
through the revolving door.)
Perry's crowning achievement in the months before he quit the federal
government is a set of laws and regulations that permit chemical
manufacturers to decide whether and how to improve the notoriously
lax security at their plants. Last fall, with Perry overseeing the
legislative process, Congress passed a feeble bill that was supposed
to force reform before a disaster occurs. The hardworking Perry made
sure that the bill was rendered even more toothless when he and his
staff set up the regulations to enforce it. Those rules include a
special provision designed to frustrate vulnerable states such as New
Jersey from passing stronger regulations, which will be preempted by
the weak federal law.
In an interview with the Washington Monthly, Sen. Frank Lautenberg,
D-N.J., furiously excoriated the Bush administration for coddling its
corporate friends. "In order to please their cronies in the chemical
industry, the Bush administration is willing to put the health and
safety of millions of people at risk," he said of Perry's handiwork.
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