[corp-focus] Why Ari Should Have Resigned in Protest

[Robert Weissman]

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, http://www.multinationalmonitor.org. They are
co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the
Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press; http://www.corporatepredators.org).

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

This article is posted at: http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2003/000151.html