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Why
Ari Should Have Resigned in Protest
by
Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
May
20, 2003
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. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt
for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage
Press, 1999; http://www.corporatepredators.org).