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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Selectric II who wrote (237161)	3/13/2002 12:02:45 AM
From: MSI	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769667

You're bringing up a wider question of the all-powerful government. You are getting services, but at what cost? Here's a guideline to use: Does your all-powerful government grant itself rights that it denies to citizens? If so, you are no longer in a democracy. It must always be the other way around - citizens have basic rights that the government does not have. For example - privacy and public records. Citizens have a right of privacy and protection against unreasonable search and siezure. The government, on the other hand, has a duty to provide full disclosure on its business to citizens. Those records must be freely available, even if it causes embarassment to public servants. The only excuse is temporary bona-fide military secrets. Instead we have secret Presidential Papers, secret VP meetings, Magic Lantern to intercept your home computer, secret tribunals to decide what's bona-fide or not, and DOD Office of Strategic Disinformation whose first act is to declare (of course) it doesn't exist. Taxes not raised ? Do you think for a moment the hundreds of billions in the past few months in added spending is not a tax on you, your children and the future of this country? It certainly isn't free money. Services not cut back? I would say what about the $30 billion in DOD/intel services we pay for, year after year, but they haven't been cut back, because real services didn't exist in the first place. And yet those funds are increased. What about lack of SEC regulation? That cost Enron and GX shareholders over a hundred billion dollars, the stock market probably a trillion in market value, and probably a hundred thousand jobs, when you add Anderson's 80k jobs plus the effect of capital crunch on other companies. This isn't one administration, one party, or one department it's the out-of-control government bureacracy that shields accountability from the voters and allows insiders free reign. Bottom line, an all-powerful government was supposed to be the enemy of regimes like Reagan and Bush, but turns out to be a cozy alliance worse than any excesses imagined by critics of "the liberals".