The following is an excerpt from Al Gore's New York Times bestselling book, "The Assault on Reason". This pretty much sums everything up about the current Administration and the slippery slope our nation is sliding down:
When the decision-making process is no longer dominated by reason, it quickly becomes far more vulnerable to outcomes determined by the use of raw power, and the temptation to corruption grows accordingly. And sure enough, in recent years there has been a series of gross examples of corruption and the fraudulent abuse of public power for private ends. The activities that now do the most harm to the health and integrity of American democracy are for the most part legal. And all of the abuses have on thing in common: The perpetrators have clearly assumed that they have little to fear from public outrage and that very few people will learn about their misdeeds.
All of them assume an ignorant public. Bush would not be able credibly to label a bill that increases air pollution "the clear skies initiative" - or call a bill that increases clear-cutting of national forests "the healthy forests initiative" - unless he was confident that the public was never going to know what these bills actually did.
Nor could he appoint Ken Lay from Enron to play such a prominent role in handpicking members to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Lay's choices were conveyed directly to the White House personnel officer, and there is every indication that Lay participated in interviewing prospects) unless the president felt totally comfortable that no one would pay attention to an obscure policy apparatus like the FERC. After members of the FERC were appointed with Mr. Lay's personal review and approval, Enron went on to bilk the electric ratepayers of California and other states without the inconvenience of federal regulators trying to protect citizens from the company's criminal behavior.
Likewise, that explains why many of the most important Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) positions have been carefully filled with lawyers and lobbyists representing the worst polluters in their respective industries, ensuring that those polluters are not inconvenienced by the actual enforcement of the laws against excessive pollution.
The private foxes have been placed in charge of the public henhouses. And shockingly, the same pattern has been followed in many other agencies and departments. But there is precious little outrage because there is so little two-way conversation left in our democracy.
Trees are falling right and left, but they don't seem to be making a sound. This behavior could never take place if there were the slightest chance that such institutionalized corruption would be exposed in a public forum that had relevance to the outcome of elections.
Thomas Jefferson warned that the concentration of power in the executive branch would lead to corruption unless there was full and vigorous scrutiny of its appointments by the public. Appointed positions in the federal government would, in effect, be auctioned off to the business interests most affected by the decisions made by those appointed. "Withdrawn from the eyes of the people", he wrote, "they (federal offices) may more secretly be bought and sold, as at market".
In Bush's ideology, there is an interweaving of the agendas of large corporations that support him and his own ostensibly public agenda for the government that he leads. Their preferences become his policies, and his policies become their business. The White House is evidently so beholden to the coalition of interests that has supported it financially that it feels it has to give them whatever they want and do whatever they say. While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors and powerful political supporters, he is morally timid - so much so that he seldom if ever says "no" to them on anything - no matter what the public interest might mandate.
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Just as the appointment of industry lobbyists to key positions in agencies that oversee their former employers results in a kind of institutionalized corruption and the abandonment of law enforcement and regulations at home, the outrageous decision to brazenly grant sole-source no-bid contracts worth $10 billion to Vice President Cheney's former company Halliburton - which paid him $150,000 annually until 2005 - has convinced many observers that incompetence, cronyism, and corruption have played a significant role in undermining U.S. policy in Iraq.
Not coincidentally, the first audits of the massive sums flowing through the U.S. authorities in Iraq now show that billions of dollars in money appropriated by Congress and Iraqi oil revenue have disappeared with absolutely no record of where they went, to whom, for what, or when. And charges of massive corruption are now widespread.
The president has rejected recommendations of antiterrorism experts to increase domestic security because large contributors in the chemical industry, the hazardous materials industry, and the nuclear industry oppose these measures. Even though his own Coast Guard recommends increased port security, he has chosen instead to reject the recommendation, relying on information provided to him by the commercial interests managing the ports, who don't want the expense and inconvenience of implementing new security measures.
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...television is a one-way medium. Individuals receive but do not send, they listen but do not speak, they are given information but do not share it in return, they do not comment on it in ways that others can hear. Therefore, automatically, their ability to use the tools of reason as participants in the national conversation is suspended.
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Thus, one of the most obvious and dangerous consolidations of power has formed in the media, where powerful conglomerates have used their wealth to gain more power and consequently more wealth. Physical and economic constraints on access to television in particular made this outcome largely inevitable. It's hard to understate how much media ownership has changed in the space of a generation. Today, it's rare to see a family-run media business with deep pride in its independence and a journalistic tradition that has survived over half a dozen generations. Such businesses are now part of conglomerates whose obligations involve meeting Wall Street's expectations rather than the Founder's expectations of the requisite for a well-informed citizenry.
Now that the conglomerates can dominate the expressions of opinion that flood the minds of the citizenry and selectively choose the ideas that are amplified so loudly as to drown out others that, whatever their validity, do not have wealthy patrons, the result is a de facto coup d 'etat overthrowing the rule of reason. Greed and wealth now allocate power in our society, and that power is used in turn to further increase and concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few.
- from the chapter, "The Politics of Wealth" in The Assault on Reason by Arnold Albert Gore, Jr.
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