HIGHTOWER: Bush's Push for a Secret Government
Jim Hightower, AlterNet
July 22, 2002
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft are the Four Horsemen of Autocracy, passionate practitioners of secretive, executive government.
No surprise, since this is the way things are done in the corporate world, which all four spent their careers serving. This is a world of closed doors, where CEOs wield autocratic power and withhold as much information as they can from the public, the media, regulators, investors, workers, auditors, and even their own boards of directors. The self-serving, clandestine machinations within Enron, WorldCom, and the rest are not anomalies -- such is the prevailing ethos of today's executive suite.
Secrecy also is now the prevailing ethos of the White House: There's the secret government that Bush established; the constant refusal to release public records, including the administration's contacts with Enron and Halliburton; Bush's attempts to hide his father's presidential records and his own gubernatorial papers from public view; the secret war on terrorism, complete with secret arrests and closed military tribunals; the decision to hide the results of the Pentagon's Star Wars missile tests; the refusal to make public the SEC investigative files on Bush's slippery stock deal with Harken Energy Inc.
And now there's Bush's plan for a massive Homeland Security Department, creating a new domestic police agency with sweeping powers. This bureaucracy will have more armed federal agents with arrest power than any other branch of government. Yet George W.'s plan would shroud the Homeland agency's actions in secrecy -- he wants to exempt it from both the Freedom of Information Act and the Whistleblower Protection Act. Also, instead of an independent inspector general, Bush's proposal gives the new Homeland Czar veto power over any audits or investigations by the inspector general.
This is Jim Hightower saying ... It's time to stop the Four Horsemen of Autocracy.
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