Great Crimes By Government

Leaders

By James Donahue

An opinion piece by Robert Higgs in Elections, Politics, the State, offered an interesting perspective based on allegations that forced New York Congressman Vito Fossella to give up his bid for re-election this fall.

It seems that Fossella was arrested on a drunk driving charge on May 1, and the media, in following up on that offense discovered that Fossella also has had an illicit affair and fathered a child with a second woman, Laura Fay, a former military liaison to Congress.  All of this information has all but destroyed the man’s political career.

Higgs noted that while Fossella is quickly judged for personal sins, as defined by the American Christian standards of morality, he and his legislative colleagues have been freely committing “the greatest crimes,” including grand larceny, mass murder, arson and a vast number of other horrors, by authorizing and financing the actions of the Bush Administration.

He wrote: “not only may a member of Congress act as an accessory to great crimes, he is expected to do so, and rewarded lavishly by the public with re-election to office and all the honors and aggrandizements that accompany his entrenchment in that occult and wicked temple known as the Capitol.”

Higg’s final manifesto: “Steal a hundred dollars, go to jail; steal a trillion dollars, go on to fame and fortune as a public servant. Kill one man, go to the gas chamber; kill a million people, go on to well-paid retirement at public expense and big bucks on the lecture circuit.”

His lament was that Americans have “split their moral sense. Countless actions for which any normal person would be denounced to the heavens will serve to sustain a lifetime’s political career. Lie, cheat and steal and your friends will condemn and abandon you, but do the same on a hugely greater scale in your capacity as a public representatives and the voters will stand by you to the end.”

The crimes Higg is referring to are so numerous since Bush and his cronies came to power in 2001, they make a laundry list too long to fit in a single story. They include the lies that led us to two unnecessary wars, the administration’s hiring of favored and high-priced private contractors to not only help fight this war but provide services to the military and rebuild the infrastructure we bombed in Iraq, the executive orders that stripped the Environmental Protection Agency of its ability to enforce anti-pollution laws, the highly suspected manipulation of voting machines during elections in 2000 and 2004, and the planting of false information destroying reputations and even bringing felony charges against innocent public officials trying to fight back.

The problem has become so bad that efforts by some members of Congress to open impeachment hearings against both President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney have been thwarted because Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi refuses to put this issue “on the table.”

The latest issue, hearings by the House Judicial Committee over the smearing of former Alabama Democratic Governor Don Siegelman by high officials and the U.S. Department of Justice, has apparently struck a road block.

The committee has threatened to arrest former Bush advisor Karl Rove on charges of contempt for his refusal to testify under oath and in open session. Representative Robert Wexler noted that enforcement of the Congressional subpoena remains in the hands of Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey. Earlier efforts to force high government aids to testify on other matters have been blocked by Mukasey. Congress is consequently suing the attorney general in a federal court in an effort to force compliance.

All of this appears to be totally ignored by major media outlets even though it is being extensively covered by such Internet sites as Kos and Truthout. Consequently, there seems to be a general disinterest in the unprecedented secrecy being maintained by this administration, and its unwillingness to reveal its secret operations in spite of Congressional demands.

As one writer for Kos noted, “the only other option – minus doing nothing and hoping no one notices or draws any historical lessons from it – is impeachment. And we know where that’s at.

“The mechanics of the prosecution fall to the U.S. Attorney’s office. So what do you do if your subpoenaing people in an investigation of how the White House gave direct political marching orders for selective prosecutions to the U S. Attorneys, and your witnesses from the White House aren’t showing up, and they’re not being prosecuted either, because U.S. Attorneys are being ordered – essentially by the witnesses themselves – not to press the cases?”

The writer added that the Bush Administration “knows very well what tools are available to Congress, and how willing or unwilling it is to use them, and it plots its strategy for dealing with oversight accordingly.”

The story notes that because Mukasey is refusing to take action, administration officials have moved from a status of the “I don’t recall” loophole amid Congressional testimony, to “I don’t give a shit because I know you’re too afraid to do anything about it” loophole.