Hightower Lowdown

If you thought Washington couldn’t get any weirder, meet John Graham. He’s been installed by George W. as the czar of federal regulations, and his unspoken assignment is to weaken or kill any rule designed to protect your health and well-being if corporations deem that rule to be inconvenient —or worse, effective.

Graham is a notorious right-wing nut who has made a career fronting for corporations that subvert our nation’s health, labor and environmental laws.
How nutty is he? Graham recently engineered a change in America’s environmental policy, decreeing that henceforth any regulation to limit pollution should consider the relative monetary value of people’s lives based on their age. For example, instead of basing clean air enforcement on the assumption that all lives saved are equal in value, Graham wants older people’s lives to be discounted. He’s even got a price tag for you: If you’re under 70, you’re worth $3.7 million, but if you’re older than that, he knocks you down to only $2.3 million.

This new Bush policy has been dubbed the “senior death discount,” and it is so unprincipled that the head of the EPA has publicly disowned it. Graham, however, says that while the death discount won’t be applied just yet, he’ll still push it as official Bush policy.

To help stop this kook, check out the National Resources Defense Council at www.nrdc.org.