Slashdot Mirror
US Government Restricting Research Libraries
An anonymous reader writes: "In a move that has been termed 'positively Orwellian' by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility Executive Director Jeff Ruch, George W. Bush is ending public access to research materials at EPA regional libraries without Congressional consent. This all-out effort to impede research and public access is a [loosely] covert operation to close down 26 technical libraries under the guise of budgetary constraint. Scientists are protesting, but at least 15 of the libraries will be closed by Sept. 30, 2006."
the u.s. government over the last several months has been a massive binge of re-classifying previously declassified historical documents. i think they've done maybe 50,000 of them. this administration has a culture of secrecy and limit of access to information and this move is nicely in keeping with that ideology. my source on the document reclassification is here.
2 1337 4 u!
The Republican War on Science
Despite the inflammatory name, the book doesn't assert that Republicans are inherently anti-science, but it is a chronicle the past few decades of politicization of science, and how even though Liberals do their own part to misrepresent science, the overwhelming lions share of open distortion percieved by the overwhelming majority of scientists has been unfortunately solidly Republican. It's a rather impressive, well-documented book that I highly recommend showing a trend of scientific limitations and games like today's story.
Ryan Fenton
Could we arrange an information exodus program -- sending in people with scanners to go in and copy all of the data possible in the next 15 days?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
As a fellow government worker, I can attest to the fact that all this "consolidation" stuff is not just restricted to the Libraries & EPA stuff. We're feeling it in pretty much every branch, some worse than others.
Wars are expensive.. And the money's gotta come from somewhere.. Rather than raising taxes (which I'm sure they'll do anyway), they're cutting expenses elsewhere... Rather than fire people, they're "consolidating". Sounds better, but it's the same thing.
Has any other US president ever done as much damage to the institution of science in the US as Bush has?
Uh, according to the article you cite, Bush is taking action BEFORE Congress has had a chance to act on his budget proposal. He isn't waiting to get approval. Furthermore, they say that they will digitize the 80,000 documents beyond boxed and stored, but I'll be very interested to see how quickly that will happen and how well they will be indexed. And the point that institutional memory will be lost when librarians are laid off is not addressed at all. The article is a lot more accurate than you make out.
What came into my mind as i read this was a documentry i once saw on Discovery channel which talked about china.
China used to be one of the most advanced civilisations in the world. They developed so many stuff before any other country. Then suddenly some idiot in there decided to cut off china from the rest of the world and not only stop building technically advanced ships but actually destroy its unmatched fleet of ships. Shortly afterwards Britan was able to conquer the country using the technology that chinese themselves invented.
The fact that US seems to be closing libraries makes me wonder if its another version of the same events.
Whoever marked the parent +5 informative, please have a hanker at the two articles referenced. CXI's article is very light. The PEER article outlines concerns primarily from the enforcement branch of the EPA. Of the two articles referenced, the PEER article articulates
concerns presented by the very people who use the library. The Library Journal article CXI references indicates that the EPA is moving to enact budgetary proposals that have not been approved by Congress. While it is possible that Bush had nothing to do with this decision, he does appoint and presumably broadly direct the head of the EPA, Stephen Johnson.
While it appears to be true that an initiative to digitize and make available some documents (this will surely cost more than 2 million dollars in labor, storage costs, and network overhead related to retrieval and backup), it appears that only EPA-generated documentation will be available through interlibrary loan (I don't know how much of the library's content is EPA-generated documentation, and how much is third party documentation).
You are correct that not all libraries are closing. 10 out of 26 libraries are being closed, and other regional library services and hours are being reduced. These actions appear to be consistent with Bush's unwillingness to tighten environmental standards or actively seek prosecution of environmental polluters.
sloth jr
If you think that because an article attributes a decision to "the EPA" that means that the decision was not made by political appointees implementing administration policy, you're incredibly naive. Bush may well not have been personally involved in this decision, but it sure looks like a political decision, not something that EPA scientists and lawyers have come up with.
Yep, I missed it because it isn't in the article. What the article says is that "all EPA-generated materials will continue to be available by inter-library loan. That excludes material not generated by the EPA. You need to be more careful about accusing people of not reading the article. I've obviously read it more carefully than you have. Furthermore, even if this does mean that the boxed materials will be available by interlibrary loan, how easy do you think it will be to find what you need, and how long a delay will there be in getting the boxed materials out of storage? I know from personal experience that it can be a real impediment to research to have to wait several weeks or even days to get something out of storage, and that often it is difficult to identify what you need if you can't go look at it on the shelf online.
First, 'double-didgit' inflation was initiated under Nixon, partially to pay for Vietnam, but mostly a result of Nixon's choice to make the dollar fiat, as opposed to redeemable for gold. Inflation stayed in double-digits under Ford, whose idea to beat inflation consisted of wearing buttons with "Whip Inflation Now" printed on them. Inflation was tamed under Carter thanks to Volker jacking up the interest rate. An unpopular solution, but sometimes its necessary to take the punch bowl away. Reagan took the credit, and dumped Volker for Greenspan when he had the chance to restart the 'play now pay later' budget monkeyshines.
Speaking of Greenspan, its funny how Carter gets pegged as raising taxes when payroll 'deductions' were doubled by Reagan under Greenspan's insistence that the additional money would make SS fiscally sound. Reagan ended up wasting the additional money for the Star Wars boondoggle.
Another thing Reagan gets credit for is strengthening the US military. It was infact Carter who brought back the use of Special Forces after the cuts in the programs under Ford led to the failed Desert Eagle mission.
Carter's mistakes - maybe funding the Afghanistan resistance, which gave us Bin Ladin. The Carter Doctrine, which did nothing to discourage America's dependence on the Middle East's oil, and possibly not looking 'Presidential' enough to win another four years.
"First you get the Linux, then you get the power, THEN you get the women"
Let's see. The "War on Terror" has cost about US$430,000,000,000 so far over the last 5 years. This figure only takes into account the US investment, and does not include the cost to Iraq.
So, let's assume that money has been evenly spent over the last five years (it hasn't, as the first year or so were taken up by fabricating a reason to go into Iraq, and operations in Afghanistan, which had been hiding bin Laden, have always been secondary). So, that gives us a per-minute estimated cost of:
430,000,000 / ( 5 * 365 * 24 * 60 ) = 163622.526636225 or so.
So, US$2,000,000 would give us about 12.2 minutes.
That's an interesting way to break down the cost of the "War on Terror."
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Here's my question - is access to any information actually going to be lost? What resources do/did the EPA libraries provide? If it was just access to public data, I would think the Internet really would reduce the need for much more expensive libraries - so long as all the information is still available. In fact, if fraction of the budget cut were re-routed to beefing up the online archvives, access might even be improved, while still cutting cost.
The levee system was in disrepair because the federal funding for upkeep had been slashed to pay for the war in Iraq.
The Louisiana National Guard were all deployed to Iraq, stationed at Camp Liberty in Baghdad, while Katrina was ravaging the area.
Bush is the commander in chief and the Army Corps of Engineer fall under him.
Responsibility is his.
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
Yeah that's probably why he'd been working with other nations on counter-terrorism issues since 1995, and why dozens of (potential) attentats against american lands and allies were busted under his presidencies.
As far as Iraq goes, he stricly kept with the trade restrictions, and if you're bothered with Saddam's disregard for international laws, why ain't you disgusted by Bush&co's disregard for both national and international laws?
Hell, even on Saddam, he was a freaking bastard, but at least he was our bastard.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
No he didn't, what he did was get a country with a negative economic balance (i.e., which was losing money and had to borrow) into a country with a positive economic balance (in Clinton's later years as a president, the USA were earning money and could reimburse their debts or something)
In came Bushie, and the USA's national debt is now above 8500 billion dollars (increasing at nearly $2b/day)
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
How do they compare to Grant, Harding, and Nixon?
-----------
100% pure freak
Actually, that's false. USA Today revealed that Clinton's 'surplus' was really a $484 billion deficit. The print version included a chart (which I cannot find) showing that Bush's deficits are actually better than Clinton's.
Free speech
A 1-minute search on Google reveals this.
Getting vaguely back on topic, the US federal government has imposed an anti-R&D approach for decades.
Ask anyone in the US trying to do medical cannabis research if they've had any luck obtaining research materials, permits, or approval to do useful studies. In the meantime, the federal government denies the validity of all "foreign" research in Canada, the UK, Israel, Australia, etc.
What was the purpose of the IBM breakup a few decades ago, if not to stop a company from leveraging their own investment in R&D to continue growing their business? In theory it was because IBM had grown to a near monopoly, yet no action is taken against Microsoft when they are far closer to a monopoly than IBM ever was. Obviously market dominance was not the reason for the breakup.
Pharmaceutical research is often forced offshore because US regulations don't permit the kind of testing that would be needed to determine the efficacy of some drugs. Plus that means the US government and US pharmacorps don't have the embarassment of another national Thalidomide debacle -- future mistakes will be kept out of sight in foreign nations.
Bottom line is the US government has done a great deal to ensure that true R&D doesn't happen, because what is a great new product/service line to the owner is a huge threat to the status quo that pays the lobbyists and thereby the government's members. R&D is profitable for new companies, but it's a loss for the ineffective and staid "competition" that cuts R&D budgets in favour of short-term profits to satisfy the stock market.
Therein lies the crux of the matter: The US corporations and federal government, or rather their management, will happily let anything crumble and die, provided they can turn a profit now.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Take a look,_ cheney/
http://money.cnn.com/2002/08/07/news/economy/bush
This was the *revised* numbers, he had them reestimated when it showed he plunged the economy into the ground.
I for one wish a better Republican had been elected.
We won what? And if there was something we won, why are we still there years after "Mission Accomplished"? We lost more soldiers after "winning" than before...really now, what's the point?
The US government has pissed a lot of people off, and some of those people are willing to follow religious leaders who place no value on the lives of people who don't share their beliefs. That's the recipe for modern terrorism.
Regards,
Ross
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
That would be a cogent and valid point... if the "middle" could, by acquiring money (and where did you get that the same people trash-talk the rich as tell the middle class to mindlessly accrue wealth?) become rich. To put it in perspective, consider the top 1%, the truly rich, the "creamy layer", who had a quarter of the assets in this country in 1995. (I'll eat a lot of crow if that number's gone down since then, but let's say it's still that.)
Average income (the table breaks down the averages into two segments; I'm recombining them) is about $500k per year. Why, that's only a bit more than ten times what the median family makes; all we middle-class folk have to do is work ten times as hard!
Oh, wait, the assets average $6.8 million. So given that the median lifetime pre-tax income is about $1.8 million (wild guess there, $40k, working from 20 to 65)... hey, all we have to do is work for nearly four lifetimes without spending a cent. Eminently reachable! I have a hard time seeing the difference between the rich and the middle class sometimes myself!
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
In some ways I think his current actions with the libraries and Iraq are good examples of Bush's presidency. Using Executive action and Executive order to create sweeping changes in the way things are done
The leitmotif of the Bush presidency has been cowardice.
1) Don't use the veto, which is public and open to congressional challenge. Use signing statements, which are extra-legal and can't be challenged. What does the couragous President choose? Open disagreement and possible over-ride, or hiding his disagreements where they can't be challenged?
2) Attack before your enemies actually have any capacity to defend themselves. Isn't it interesting that Bush chose to attack Iraq, which he knew or reasonably ought to have known did not have WMDs, and has not chosen to attack North Korea, which he knows does have them? It's almost as if he was only willing to take on the fictional threat while letting the real one get away, literally, with murder on a scale that makes Saddam look like a piker.
3) Gerymander electoral districts rather than face fair elections.
4) Appoint friends rather than competent administrators to key posts in your government. After all, loyalty to you and to the party is far, far more important than loyalty to the country, and if they are loyal to you they can't be any kind of a threat to you. And to a coward, keeping threats at bay is the most important thing.
5) Abandon due process, open government, "speed and public trail" and generally all of the IVth, Vth and VIth ammendments to the Constitution, because they are fundamentally about exposing the workings of government to the light of day, and Bush is terrified of scrutiny.
Fill in a few of your own--there are no shortage of examples.
Closing libraries under false auspices is in keeping with all of this. It would take actual courage to openly make the EPA's job as much harder as this will do. So Bush et al have opted for stealth and dishonesty rather than an open, courageous statement of policy.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.