CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS POST
III. Class Wars (Economics)
James Madison and Thomas Jefferson agreed that taxation should be proportional to one's share of property, and that the purpose of taxes was "the general welfare." As these founders recognized, there is certainly nothing wrong with people having different levels of income. But when the tools of government are used to enhance the standing of those at the top of the economic scale and to exacerbate the tension-filled gap between the "haves" and the "have nots," then government has ceased to live up to its end of the sacred trust that the people at large put in it. Here are some of the ways in which Mr. Bush has failed to live up to his duty to allow general prosperity, preferring instead to assist the wealthy to become wealthier:
* He has given massive tax cuts to the wealthy ($726 billion proposed for this fiscal year alone, cut back a the last minute by more level-headed Republicans who joined with Democrats to cut that amount), combined with massive spending, especially for the military, combined on the other side with massive cuts in government services such as Medicaid, foster care and adoption programs, school lunch programs, and student loans. The proposed tax cuts would give more than $93,000 to a family with a million-dollar income, while half of all taxpayers would receive $100 or less, this according to the Tax Policy Center of the Brookings Institution. According to the Financial Times, the stimulus the cuts can be expected to give to the economy would be "negligible;" b) in a related item, the Congressional Budget Office states forthrightly that the biggest cause of the massive deficit we have accumulated under Bush is the massive tax cuts for the wealthy;
* The Bush administration has claimed that "outsourcing," that is, the movement of jobs overseas, is good for the economy. But a list of the main "outsourcers" in corporate America just so happens to coincide with the top contributors to the Bush campaign: American Express, Bechtel, Dell Computers, Ford, General Electric, Hewlett Packard, and Sallie Mae, to name just some of them;
* The leading Republican strategist today, Grover Norquist, has made public the economic plans for the Bush administration and the right-wing ideology. He said the goal is "to starve the beast" (government) with trillions of dollars in deficits, until, as Bill Moyers summarizes it, "the United States government is so anemic and anorexic it can be drowned in a bathtub;"
* He has re-classified low-paying fast-food jobs as "manufacturing jobs" in order to cover up the massive loss of the latter type of job during his tenure as President;
* While giving tax cuts, he opposed giving health care to National Guard members, and proposed cutting $1.5 billion from funding for military family housing and medical facilities. In addition, he has cut $700 million from job training programs for those recently displaced by the movement of jobs overseas, and $225 million in funding for youth job training grants, and;
* his ideas for funding education include a cut of $270 million from Pell Grants for students, a cut of $230 million from vocational and community colleges, a freezing of Teacher Quality State Grants for teacher training, and an increase in his "No Child Left Behind Initiative" by elimination of 45 education programs and cutting back 18 education programs;
* his (failed) attempts to cut overtime pay for American workers can only be considered a war on the lower and middle class;
* Bush's veteran's package includes denials of hundreds of thousands of claims or "better-off" veterans, $250 annual enrollment fees.
IV. Moral Issues
It is certainly no secret that every President has lied on occasion to the American people. But when lying becomes pervasive and thus a modus operandi for a given presidency, that President and his administration have failed to set and lead by example of moral rectitude. Here are a few of the Bush administration's serious lies:
* Bush has claimed that he served a complete term in the Texas Air National Guard, but records show that Mr. Bush accumulated no flying experience during the entire year of 1972, nor is he on the payroll for the third quarter of that year. Furthermore, in Mr. Bush's annual performance review while in the service, dated May 2, 1973, it stated "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit" for the past year;
* Continuing with this theme of his military service, Mr. Bush stated that he has already released all records of his military service. The Washington Post, in response, stated that "no such information has been released," in response to which the administration released documents which they claimed "proved" Bush served during 1972-1973. However, the third quarter pay period records were missing from those documents. When the New York Times filed a Freedom of Information Request with the Pentagon to obtain them, the Pentagon said those records were "inadvertently destroyed," and that no paper back-up of them existed;
* the untrue charge that government labor unions were refusing to cooperate in key homeland security measures;
* Mr. Cheney has told almost too many lies to count, particularly about Halliburton and during the lead-up to the Iraq war. John Dean has the best collection of them I have read so far, but here are three that did not make the Dean's list: i) Iraq is "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but especially on 9/11." Mr. Cheney has apparently forgotten about Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and Afghanistan; ii) his insistence that Mohamed Atta, the head of the 9/11 hijackers, met in Prague with Iraqi intelligence officials before the attacks, even in the face of Czech President Havel's conclusion, along with his intelligence community, that there is no evidence for this; iii) Cheney's doing business with Cayman Islands and with Iran in defiance of a U.S. ban against such activities. The Grand Jury is now investigating these Cheney/Halliburton actions;
* The Bush administration kept the true cost of Medicare from the country, with prescription drug cards costing more than they claimed they would, with evidence that they knew this in advance. Even Richard S. Foster, the government's chief analyst of Medicare costs, said that the White House had participated in the decision to withhold information that indicated that Mr. Bush's proposed legislation would "be far more expensive than lawmakers knew;"
* Mr. Bush has stated, concerning his tax plan, that "by far the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom of the end of the economic ladder," when in fact, the Congressional bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation stated that households making less than $40,000 a year (i.e. the bottom half of the "economic ladder") received only 10% of Mr. Bush's tax cut;
* For more, Senator Charles Rangel has edited a documentation of the 237 most pernicious and important lies Bush has told. There are quite a few impressive collections of Bush lies, and the list is growing. See also David Corn, The Lies of George W. Bush; Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them; Michael Moore, Dude, Where's My Country?; Jim Hightower, Thieves in High Places. I have also done a Google search on "Bush lies," and "lying," and it turned up over three million hits!
The second way in which Mr. Bush has failed as a moral leader includes a host of immoral actions that violate the general sanctions of any given moral code. These include the following actions:
* Mr. Bush bilked the taxpayers of Texas millions of dollars, which he put into his pocket, through his shady dealings concerning the Texas Rangers baseball team and their new stadium;
* He has rewarded his main corporate supporters by giving them billions of dollars of business in Iraq;
* Mr. Bush regularly has protestors removed from his sight, from his vicinity, and from his motorcade route, to the point of having them arrested;
* Bush takes revenge on people who either criticize or leak even unclassified information to the press;
* he deliberately refuses to count Iraqi civilian casualties inflicted by our military;
* his administration has revealed the name of a CIA agent's wife, putting her life in danger and her career at an end, all for retaliation for taking issue with the President's lies about Iraq's attempting to buy "yellow cake" from Niger for nuclear weapons. This is still "under investigation" by our Justice Department;
* The Bush administration has planned to develop what they euphemistically call "mini-nukes" so that the U.S. can use nuclear weapons in a future war without destroying the world. Destroying even a part of the environment and the people for hundreds if not thousands of miles around the explosion by radiation is highly immoral and irresponsible. It also will lead to a new arms race, something from which we just emerged;
* the administration constantly attempts to keep Americans living in fear and thus quietly submissive to administrative actions by crying wolf regarding possible terrorist threats. This is especially disturbing because, in case after case, after the warning has been made, others come forward to demonstrate that the administration had no or very little evidence on which to base its warning. All the warnings that have been coming out this summer had little evidentiary basis to sound the alarms they did, including the so-called "threat to U.S. financial institutions;"
* they have obstructed investigators from everything from the 9/11 Commission to the latest investigation, that of the leak of the CIA operative's name (Valerie Plame). The delaying tactics of the administration on this case has caused not only a letter from four senators asking the President what he is doing, but it is raising suspicions about evidence tampering and legal obstruction of justice.
V. Violations of Constitutional and International Law: The Iraq Invasion
* it is now well known some of the biggest lies and misinformation Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, et. al. used to sell the war;
* Abu Graib, which involves Bush to at least the degree that he had his lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, send him a brief showing a legal way around being prosecuted for crimes violating the Geneva Convention regarding the torture of prisoners. Over and above this, however, news now comes out of President Bush signing off on the torture plans, and also sitting on videotapes of U.S. soldiers sodomizing young Iraqi boys. We have only seen the beginning of this massive scandal, which, if connected to Mr. Bush, would make him a war criminal;
* his deliberate ignoring of the civilian casualties inflicted by U.S. forces;
* his lies to Congress (an impeachable offense - why is the media not screaming about this, like they did for Clinton's lie about his BJ?), including telling Congressional leaders that Iraq was developing its nuclear capabilities and that it was connected to 9/11, so Mr. Bush wanted the Congress to act quickly, based on his promise that he would provide them with more information. He never did. In fact, the hype that culminated in Colin Powell's lie-filled speech to the United Nations has been completely discredited by numerous articles and authors. They knew full well that Iraq was not connected to 9/11, did not have nuclear weapons program, did not have WMD's, did not attempt to purchase uranium from Niger, did not have significant connections with al Qaeda, and did not meet with one of the 9/11 hijackers in Prague before the attack, yet they stated it all anyway. Even the Senate Intelligence committee, in its report on the intelligence failures prior to the invasion, concluded that the White House had "misrepresented" conflicting intelligence claims;
* blatant disregard of the international community in pushing for war;
* ignoring the international laws of war;
* ignoring the ethical need for a just cause (i.e. imminent threat) in order to go to war;
* giving contracts in Iraq to his corporate friends and campaign contributors. The list starts, of course, with Halliburton ($7 billion in Iraq oil contracts), but also includes big donors to the Republicans like Science Applications International Corporation (gave approximately $3 million to the Republican Party, and landed an Iraq contract for $82 million);
* the administration is covering up the fact that the U.S. is now also involved in what is called "extraordinary rendering," which means that a prisoner arrested in the U.S. is secretly taken to another country, such as Syria or Jordan or Pakistan, where torture is routinely done. They are called "ghost prisoners" because no one knows their whereabouts. That the U.S. does this often under the Bush administration is now becoming news;
* Mr. Bush has stated that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was done "to defend...the credibility of the United Nations," when the U.S. rejected the U.N. involvement prior to and after the invasion;
* keep in mind the reports from two well-respected public servants, former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill and former National Security Advisor Richard Clarke, both of whom have claimed consistently that Mr. Bush planned to attack Iraq right after 9/11/01. In addition to these men, British Ambassador to the U.S. Christopher Meyer said that Bush had made it clear at a dinner with Prime Minister Tony Blair, on 9/18/01, that he wanted to attack Iraq. The Washington Post has also confirmed this report. Also, Senator Bob Graham of Florida stated that a senior military commander told him in February of 2002 that "we are moving military and intelligence personnel and resources out of Afghanistan to get ready for a future war in Iraq." Also, U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix has consistently made the same claim; Bush's order that no media be permitted to show the flag-draped coffins returning with our dead soldiers from Iraq;
* The administration has engaged in economic bribery of other nations to join "the coalition of the willing" to send troops to assist in the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. For example, Israel was "rewarded" $4-5 billion in military aid for allying against Iraq; Jordan picked up about $1 billion; Egypt $1.5 billion; Poland, Hungary, and 15 other countries who sent troops split $308.1 million.
These are all very serious charges and very serious issues (my original list of Bush misdeeds that I used to write this article covers over sixteen pages!). It would seem clear that when a President and/or his administration engage in subterfuge and circumventions of democratic processes on a regular basis, the citizens are left with little choice but to replace that President. The possible response to these accusations on the part of supporters of Mr. Bush would be to attempt to change the subject by attacking John Kerry or "liberals." During discussions of this issue from now to the election, we cannot allow such failures to respond directly to the charge of Mr. Bush's undermining of democracy to be left unchallenged. Bush supporters owe the American people an explanation as to what it is that Mr. Bush has done for the general good, for the majority of people, that we should give him allowances for the acts he has performed so far? It is insufficient in reason to give simplistic or pietistic answers or to be a single-issue voter (e.g. "He protects us from terrorism," or "he is a Christian," or "he opposes abortion and gay marriage"). Such simple answers only bypass the charge we should be making of Mr. Bush: that he has ignored the Constitution, undermined democracy, acted immorally, and lost the standing America has around the world as a moral leader. These issues far outweigh the stands Mr. Bush might have on any given issue, or any small series of issues. It is my position that unless America wakes up and gets this man out of office this time around, it may be too late to maintain democracy in the future.
Dr. Robert Abele is a professor of philosophy at Illinois Valley Community College, located near Chicago. He has written articles on political philosophy and also on ethics and warfare, and is now in the process of completing a book on ethics and the invasion of Iraq. He also has a new book entitled A User's Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act, published by University Press of America, due out in November.
truthout.org |
