AMERICA'S FREEDOMS IN DANGER OF BEING BUSH-WHACKED

"You're free to speak your mind, my friend -- as long as you agree
with me. Don't criticize the Fatherland or those who shape your destiny,"
sang the rock band Steppenwolf more than 30 years ago.

The White House administration of George W. Bush could be singing the same
sardonic song. The corporate crew at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington
talk a good game about defending freedom while in reality seeming more and
more hell-bent on strangling and subverting the very freedoms that
Americans have fought for on battlefields abroad and at the barricades at
home for more than two centuries.

Bush and his bevy of big business buddies decry bureaucracy and big
government while at the same time pushing and plotting for a major big
government called the Office of Homeland Security. If Bush's plans go
through to create a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security,
Washington and the nation will have one more top-heavy government agency to
suck up tax dollars and spy on taxpayers with its proposed 170,000 employees.

Speaking at the high tech Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago last
Monday, Bush pushed his proposal to give Homeland Security Director Tom
Ridge and his burgeoning bureaucracy broad powers to spend the tax dollars
of all Americans without the traditional approval and oversight of
Congress. Smirking that "Congress needs to give up some of its turf,"
Bush showed the world the raw, reactionary and naked nature of his imperial
presidency. Depending on a cowering Congress and a jittery judiciary to
rubberstamp his plutocratic plans, the same George W. Bush who was
appointed president by a partisan Supreme Court decision after a dubious
sham of an election now tries to govern as though he has a real mandate
from the majority.

Bush told his Illinois audience on Monday the same old line that his
administration has been peddling since Sept. 11: "The terrorists hate
America because we love freedom."

One wonders just how much Bush and his big-bucks backers really love
freedom when the administration proposes using such citizens as meter
readers and cable television installers as spies for the government under
the Justice Department's TIPS program. The Terrorist Information and
Prevention System has even incurred the wrath of arch-conservative Georgia
Congressman Bob Barr who recently slammed the administration's proposal as
a "gross potential invasion of privacy by a million citizens doing the
government's dirty work."

On Capitol Hill, the smarmy and deaconish Mississippi GOP Senator Trent
Lott backed the TIPS program by sneering the usual right-wing cliche
against the right to privacy: "If you aren't doing anything suspicious,
what are you worried about?"

These days, all Americans should be worried about a government that
would try to get around the requirements of search warrants by using the
cable guy as a government spy. To its everlasting credit, the much-maligned
U.S. Postal Service quickly refused to participate in the TIPS fiasco, so
your friendly mail carrier will continue to be a representative of the
Postal Service and not the Department of Injustice.

Now Homeland Security boss Tom Ridge and his Bush administration
henchmen are discussing the ominous possibility of using the U.S. military
as an arm of domestic law enforcement. Though Ridge called such a scenario
very unlikely, nothing seems impossible under a right-wing regime that
considers warrantless searches and incognito imprisonment of citizens
deemed "combatants" by America's new King George. Those who think that
the Third Amendment's curbs on quartering troops on private property are
just archaic and long forgotten curiosities in the Bill of Rights may wake
up some sad morning to find Charlie Company bivouacking in the back yard.

Authoritarian government, avaricious corporations and apathetic
citizens threaten our freedoms more than any terrorist can. As Nazi-era
dissident Pastor Martin Niemoller sagely said, "In Germany they first came
for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a
Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I
did not speak out because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me and
there was no one left to speak out for me."