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May
20, 2003
Linda
Heard
The Cage of Occupation
Edward
Said
The Arab Condition
May
19, 2003
CounterPunch
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"Terror" Slut Steve Emerson
Eats Crow
Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
A Letter to Kofi Annan on Powell's Missing
Evidence
Ross
Vachon
Dennis Miller's New Gig: the Last
Refuge of Goofy?
John
Chuckman
Blair's Awkward Lies
Matt
Vidal
Corporate Media and the Myth of the Free Market
Michael
S. Ladah
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Robert
Fisk
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Elaine
Cassel
Clarence Thomas, Still Whining After All These Years
Jonathan
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Steve Perry
Play It Again, O-Sam-a
May
17 / 18, 2003
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Francis
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16, 2003
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15, 2003
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May
14, 2003
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McCarthy
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May
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May
19, 2003
Let Us Count the Reasons
Why
Ari Should Have Resigned in Protest
by RUSSELL MOKHIBER
and
ROBERT WEISSMAN
At the White House today, Ari Fleischer announced
that he will resign as press secretary to President Bush effective
in July. Ari says he has spent 21 years in government, he never
intended to spend the rest of his life in government, he's recently
married and wants to spend some time with his wife, he wants
to do some speaking and writing and take it a little easier.
But we wanted to know from Ari, concerned
as we are for him as a conscientious human being, whether there
was anything about President Bush that rubbed him the wrong way.
This is how it went:
Ari, one of your predecessors, Jerald
terHorst, resigned as President Ford's press secretary, he said,
as a matter of conscience -- because he couldn't defend President
Ford's pardon of President Nixon. Is there anything President
Bush has done as President, that made you think, even for a moment,
that you would resign as a matter of conscience?
Ari Fleischer: No.
Question: Not for a moment.
Fleischer: Not for a moment. Why should
there be?
We started to answer the question, but
Ari, realizing immediately that he had violated one of his cardinal
rules -- never ask a question of a reporter to which you don't
know the answer -- cut us off -- and he segued into a long-winded
answer how President Bush is better than sliced bread.
But since he asked, the question, "Why
should there be?" and didn't let us answer, we thought we
might try and come up with some of the reasons why, if we were
Ari -- that is, if we were conservative Republicans who cared
about conservatism -- we would resign in protest as a matter
of conscience.
We would resign because of the slaughter
of innocents that can be directly linked to President Bush wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq -- wars that could have been avoided
had the President even listened to his father and his father's
keepers -- like Brent Scowcroft and others -- to give peace a
chance, to not thumb your nose at the international community,
to follow the rules of international law.
We would resign because of the President's
failure to crack down on corporate and white collar crime, his
abject failure as a conservative Republican to uphold the rule
of law and put white collar criminals behind bars.
There is a long history of Republican
prosecutors who knew how to do this, including former U.S. Attorney
Rudolph Giuliani. But President Bush's administration has been
so infused with corporatists that they have driven the prosecutors
to despair.
Take the prosecution of pollution crimes.
(By the way, this is not trivial business. According to a book
review in yesterday's New York Times, "Martin Rees, Britain's
Astronomer Royal, a professor at Cambridge University, one of
the world's most brilliant cosmologists and a longtime arms control
advocate, gives civilization as we know it only a 50-50 chance
of surviving the 21st century.")
According a report released earlier this
month by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER),
the number of new cases referred by the Environmental Protection
Agency for federal prosecution has dropped dramatically during
the Bush Administration
"EPA chief Christie Whitman is quietly
presiding over the largest enforcement rollback in agency history,"
said PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. "Field agents say
that EPA management is not interested in investigating corporate
crime -- as a result, the enforcement program is dying from the
roots."
The PEER report found that new criminal
pollution cases referred by EPA for federal prosecution are down
more than 40 percent since the start of the Bush Administration,
new civil pollution referrals are down by more than 25 percent
under Bush, and with the drop in new referrals, the number of
environmental prosecutions, after initially holding steady, is
also beginning to fall.
We would resign because President Bush
has become a profligate spender, driving the country into bankruptcy
by shoveling billions in taxpayer monies to his buddies in the
war industry, with no heed to brazen conflicts of interest so
raw that the blistering is beginning to offend even the most
conservative of commentators, like Larry Klayman of Judicial
Watch, who has called on President Bush's father to resign as
a paid advisor to the Carlyle Group, a multibillion beneficiary
of the war build up.
In short, Ari, President Bush's war policy
has killed thousands of innocents, the administration is allocating
trillions of dollars to weapons and military spending and tax
cuts for the rich, while starving funding for vital social programs
and investments in public infrastructure, and while the world
looks to the Middle East, federal and state white collar prosecutors
are being stripped of their resources, and the corporate and
white collar criminals are ravaging the Middle West, and the
rest of the homeland.
Reason enough.
Russell Mokhiber
is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter.
Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational
Monitor, and co-director of Essential Action. They are
co-authors of Corporate
Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy
(Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999.)
Today's
Features
CounterPunch
Wire
"Terror" Slut Steve Emerson
Eats Crow
Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
A Letter to Kofi Annan on Powell's Missing
Evidence
Ross
Vachon
Dennis Miller's New Gig: the Last
Refuge of Goofy?
John
Chuckman
Blair's Awkward Lies
Matt
Vidal
Corporate Media and the Myth of the Free Market
Michael
S. Ladah
The Fine Print to Bush's Road Map
Robert
Fisk
Bush's Eternal War Backfires
Elaine
Cassel
Clarence Thomas, Still Whining After All These Years
Jonathan
Freedland
Ann Coulter's Appalling Magic
Steve Perry
Play It Again, O-Sam-a
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