The Tyranny Project

excerpted from the book

Liberty Under Siege

by Walter Karp

Franklin Square Press, 1988, paper

 

[THE MYTH AND REALITY OF THE REAGAN PRESIDENCY]

 

THE TYRANNY PROJECT

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On February 17, President Reagan signed an executive order bestowing upon his office control over the implementing of laws, the "rule-making power," which Congress delegates exclusively to the heads of government agencies. Henceforth, under the new order the President's agents in the Office of Management and Budget can veto - in secret - any regulation needed to implement a law if in their private opinion its "potential costs" outweigh its "potential benefits"-the new cost-benefit quackery ensconced in the very heart of the government.

No such "centralized mechanism for presidential management of agency rule-making" has ever existed in this country, notes the report, not unsternly. It is a system "without precedent," without constitutional warrant-how lightly does the Constitution sit upon our dozing, glozing, truthless President!-without sanction by any act or intent of Congress, a clear violation of its fundamental intent in the matter: the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, which "specifically contradicts and precludes the administrative scheme established by the order." The order, in short, is a sweeping act of usurpation, "an unconstitutional act of executive legislation in violation of the separation of powers principle"- a "power grab," so a White House official cheerfully calls it.

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Ralph Nader tries through the Freedom of Information Act to obtain OMB's cost-benefit documents-"if indeed they exist," he adds in an angry letter to Stockman-but Nader tries in vain. "Executive privilege" cloaks the whole operation, conceals it even from Congress. The order, says Dingell, "allows green-eyeshaded OMB officials to manipulate cost-benefit numbers behind closed doors." Allows them in secret to decide that human life is worth as little as $22,500-so Dingell reports in 1985-a "potential benefit" so paltry that lifesaving is far outweighed by the cost of not killing Americans with toxic sludge and cancer-causing chemicals. It allows the OMB, our champions of "economic efficiency" to decide by ignorant fiat this September of 1981 that informing workers about the chemicals they handle will save only 400 lives, not 4,000, as agency experts contend, thereby leaving hundreds of thousands of people in dangerous and deadly ignorance. It allows the OMB this summer-operating through the Department of Transportation-to reinterpret a law so that almost no investigation of defective cars will ever lead to their mandatory recall. It allows the OMB to nullify in secret-public knowledge being deemed "contrary to the public interest"-a law ensuring fair employment for Vietnam War veterans. It allows the freedmen of the imperial palace-operating through the Department of Agriculture-to declare ketchup a vegetable and so curtail "out-of-control spending" on child nutrition; allows them to eliminate preventive medicine for 2 million poor children on the grounds that an ounce of prevention is not worth a pound of cure. Common humanity made a different cost-benefit analysis, but common humanity is not a shyster. It is likely that the OMB lies behind the campaign begun in secret this March to throw $2 billion worth of cripples off the disability rolls by declaring that, among other secret redefinitions, psychotics who can boil water are "employable" and so can be thrown to the wolves. The new order allows cruelty, brutality, pettiness and spite to course like an underground sewer through the entire Executive Branch.

In the space of twelve months, the new order saps and weakens civil rights laws, labor laws, mine safety laws, worker safety laws; gives OMB a grip of steel over the Environmental Protection Agency, casts the environmental laws into virtual limbo, prompting a young conservative lawyer at the agency to quit his job in "a matter of weeks," after finding what he called the "conservative approach to the implementation of laws a chimera. The actual approach includes a warning to every regional EPA office that "every case you do refer" for enforcement will "be a black mark against you."

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If President Reagan's efforts to reform regulation are seen simply as a set of favors for corporations, a new wave of anti-business populist sentiment may develop in the 1980's," a frightened champion of deregulation warns this summer. The warning is well founded, for despite the tides of inflation, despite the official triumph of corporate quackery, despite the President's urgent appeals for deregulation, the American people's deep conviction that the health, safety and environmental laws are high public goods remains wondrously unshaken. "A large majority of the public believe that government regulations and requirements are worth the extra costs they add to products and services," Gallup reports this June. Only 22 percent of the country, the Chamber of Commerce reports in November, want the laws relaxed to encourage economic growth.

How stupid and incorrigible is this national rabble, as exasperating to the economic Right as once it had been to the economic Left. It refuses to live exclusively in the "economy," cannot see America as "one big business," still lives in the American Republic, still judges of things, however weakly, dimly, sporadically, by the republican standard, so fatal to the ambitions of the Right, so detested, therefore, by the Right. "Government is seen as the defender of the little guy against powerful and uncontrollable forces. Even those who are generally opposed to regulation will support regulations seen as providing protection against powerful forces that an individual could not otherwise control." So reports the judicious National Journal Opinion Outlook Briefing Paper, Volume 1, Number 19, this August 24. The American people are almost universally unwilling, says a Briefing Paper some months later, "to transfer power to business." Unwilling to do exactly what the Right, above all else, wants done, has waited fifty years in the wilderness for the chance to get done?

The Freedom of Information Act must, perforce, be gutted outright. This summer the administration prepares the "Freedom of Information Improvement Act of 1981," which will "improve" the act by destroying its power to reveal the debauching of laws protecting J "the little guy" from those "powerful and uncontrollable forces" the Right wants to make more powerful and uncontrollable than ever. This summer, too, the OMB plans deep, destructive budget cuts-for do we not have deficits to reduce?-in programs that monitor environmental conditions, in programs for gathering social statistics, programs for measuring compliance with the laws. For why should the rabble find out the effects upon them of our liberation of capital from the laws they cherish? There is so much yet to be done! Public dissemination of public information must be brought under "cost-benefit" veto; the first steps have been taken this June by the tireless, relentless OMB. The pettifogging federal courts must somehow be kept from "unconstitutionally dubious and unwise intrusions into the legislative domain," warns Attorney General Smith, lest they bar our unconstitutional invasion of the legislative domain. Dissenting officials must be silenced somehow; already tens of thousands of officials are secretly signing agreements subjecting them to lifetime government censorship of anything they write related in any way to "sensitive compartmentalized information," Carter's bad seed blossoming far beyond the confines of the CIA. A fruitful idea is this of subjugation to censorship by contract, not lost on the OMB. Thousands of people do social research in America with government grants; study old-age programs, computers in school, housing vouchers, pesticides, levels of pollution, effects of malnourishment; ten thousand and one things that reflect well or ill upon government policies and the conditions of society. Why should they be free to publish at will with our money? What does academic freedom, so-called, mean to us? Let them be compelled, says the budget office, to agree, by contract, not to publish their findings anywhere, in any way, until a government official approves it for "accuracy of factual data and interpretation": ignorant power dictating to impotent knowledge; censorship without precedent in our history, for the rabble must not be permitted to judge for themselves the costs and the benefits of "economic efficiency" --our Baal, our Golden Calf, our holy talisman. It is by "economic efficiency," standard supreme, that we, the Right, judge the American people, find them unfit for self-government.

Thus matters are proceeding at the White House when the powerful head of a powerful committee warns his colleagues that a perilous usurpation has taken place before their eyes, "of paramount historical importance," in violation of the Constitution, the laws and the prerogatives of Congress, creating an engine of secret power that can be used-and is being used-to dispense corrupt privilege to powerful special interests; which can be used-and is being used-to nullify laws enacted by overwhelming congressional majorities, laws supported at this very moment by overwhelming popular majorities. Will the Democratic House, which only last year demanded a greater voice for Congress, the courts and the people in regulatory affairs, rise up against this brazen act of "executive legislation"? Will it champion the just sentiments of the people, give voice to their abiding "populist" fear of private economic power?

The answer is-silence; sovereign silence. The report concerning issues "of paramount historic importance" falls into the public realm as noiselessly as a pebble falling into a bottomless well. The Reaction prevails over all. No mere committee chairman can stand against it. The smiling mask will not be torn from the White House tyranny. The budget office will not be checked in its course, will pursue it ever more avidly year after year. Most of all, worst of all, the republican sentiments of the country will not be championed-not by Oligarchy serving itself. Better Reaganite tyranny under our checkrein than republicanism revived. Thus Power, unslumbering, calculates.

"What we are witnessing," says a spokesman for the ACLU this autumn, "is a systematic assault on the concept of government accountability and deterrence of illegal government conduct." True enough, but "we," the people, alas, are witnessing nothing, for the powerful keep their own counsel and cloak with their silence the systematic assault.

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Reagan's faltering leadership, his decline in public esteem, his weakening grip on the electorate-the all-important grip, without which disaster looms for the Reaction-lie implicit, unspoken, behind the topic at hand: Reagan's forthcoming budget, second installment of the "Reagan Revolution." An election-year budget it is, fraught with immense political danger; a recession-year budget, too, for 9.4 million Americans are out of work this December 1981, factories are falling idle, the good jobs are vanishing, "traditional family breadwinners" are out on the streets, bewildered and frightened.

The new budget has got to look "compassionate," warns Dole. No defense cuts, no food stamp cuts. The Pentagon cannot simply devour the poor a second time around. The "frontal assault on the welfare state" is utterly out of the question. The others agree, Laxalt included, but they warn and plead in vain. Defense cuts are not to be thought of. Every dollar of the $1.5 trillion figure plucked out of thin air has been forced upon us by our adversaries, says Reagan. Behind the wall of obstinacy is the simple truth: "The President," says Stockman, "didn't have it in him to overrule his Secretary of Defense."

Something must be done about the deficits-another reason to cut defense spending. Mr. President, says Senator Pete Domenici, you are going to pile up in three years a greater addition to the national debt than Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter combined: $150 billion is forecast for fiscal 1984, ostensible year of the balanced budget; $170 billion for fiscal 1986, even assuming five years of unexampled prosperity, so Stockman estimates in early November. Deficits huge, unprecedented-and growing, "a massive fiscal disorder," Stockman calls it. A tax increase is imperative, the Republican leaders warn Reagan. Alas, raising taxes fills Reagan with dread. "If our critics heard about it they'd be jumping for joy," he had said at an earlier meeting. The idea of a tax increase-and joyful critics-robs Reagan of his sleep, he complains to Deaver. What, then, is to be done about the deficits? Wait for revenue feedback, says the President. But there is no revenue feedback! How often has Stockman said this? To no avail. Besides, the President doesn't believe in pessimistic forecasts. He believes in "optimism." But the forecast includes the most optimistic assumptions, "supply side" triumphant. How can pessimism include optimism? Reagan cannot understand this.

"Go with your instincts, Mr. President," Treasury Secretary Donald Regan has told him. "These big deficit numbers you are getting are just forecasts anyway." Flight is the President's "instinct." Feckless toadying is Regan's. The "massive fiscal disorder" is bitter to contemplate, dangerous to deal with; sweet and effortless is the fantasy of feedback. The Republican leaders troop out of the 'White House, danger unaverted, defeated by escapism posing as unshakable faith and by weakness posing as strength.

What a burden upon Oligarchy is this President, a burden almost unbearable when the President's budget reaches Capitol Hill this February 8, 1982.

Stunning, shocking, brutal, a savage affront to justice is this second installment of the "Reagan Revolution." The military buildup, like a ravening beast, eats through the fisc once more: The White House wants a $43.4 billion increase in Pentagon spending authority for fiscal 1983. We are at the $258 billion level now; $116 billion more than the Pentagon commanded a mere two years ago; senseless, wanton engine of waste, grinding away in the midst of unheard-of triple-digit deficit a proposal so outrageous "it came under heavy fire from prominent conservatives ... and from liberals...

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... Marc Marks, a Pennsylvania Republican, takes the floor of the House on March 9 to vent his rage and despair at the brutal rule of the Right, his rage against the "President and his cronies whose belief in Hooverism has blinded them to the wretchedness and to the suffering they are inflicting... on the sick, the poor, the handicapped, the blue-collar, the white-collar workers, the small-business person, the black community, the community of minorities generally, women of all economic and social backgrounds, men and women who desperately need job training, families that deserve and desire to send their children to college."

... The country is stirring; Reagan is tottering. Anger sweeps the country when Americans learn that four huge corporations-DuPont, Texaco, RCA and General Electric, hugely profitable-all four-will get a tax refund, a chunk of our shrunken fisc to add to their profits, thanks to a provision of last year's tax act allowing corporations to buy and sell unused tax credits. Shocking epitome this of a tax code so hideously unjust that a family of four earning $200,000 a year, making average use of tax breaks, loopholes and shelters, pays an average federal income tax of 9 percent, so the New York Times reports four years hence, while a family of four earning $12,000 a year pays 16 percent into the Treasury. The affluent feed on the fisc; the deficit gnaws at the rest of us.

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By mid-March Reagan looks inept and inane. His approval rating, slowly falling since August last, now stands at 47 percent, according to Gallup, lower than any other modern President after so short a time in office.

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At this most critical moment, as the winter draws to a close, suddenly, amazingly, the voice of the people pierces through the cant of the Reaction-the voice of a citizenry, of people who talk to one another, who hear one another out, who take counsel with one another in the town meetings of New England, last relic of the old "ward republics" of America, which retain something of their ancient virtue still. What think you, fellow citizens, of this: a resolution calling upon the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to halt the testing and deployment of all nuclear weapons, the halt to be mutually verified, to commence at once. We are already equals in nuclear strength, let the nuclear arms race be stopped! And in 161 towns in Vermont, the little ward republics vote aye: The "freeze movement" bursts upon the public stage, surges, too, through California, surges through Massachusetts, beats at the doors of a dozen state legislatures, county councils, city halls, led by the clergy mainly, endorsed by Kennedy, Hatfield and Averell Harriman, old George Kennan, Billy Graham, William Colby, former director of Central Intelligence. It enlists "the unpolitical public," which is worst of all, warns Rostow, late of the Present Danger, now Reagan's arms control chief, in a frantic memorandum to the White House. A vast eruption of public sanity in the midst of the giant arms buildup, "too powerful, too elemental, too deeply embedded in the natural human instinct for self-preservation to be brushed aside" by governments, so Kennan confidently predicts. There are "local initiatives all over the country," reports Time. "It is a populist, popular movement that has really sneaked up on us," commanding at once the support of 70 percent of the population.

A vast popular revolt is this nuclear freeze against Present Danger lies and fear-mongering, the Reaction's lies, now Reagan's to defend. He tries, lies, fails, makes matters worse. A nuclear freeze is "dangerous," says the President on March 31, at his first televised evening press conference, after days of anxious preparation. Dangerous because the Soviet Union is the superior nuclear power, dangerous because the United States is afflicted by "what I have called, as you all know, several times, a window of vulnerability," the dreaded window forgotten a few months back when Reagan, obliging supporters in Utah and Nevada, decided to put the MX missile in a vulnerable silo, now hastily pressed into service again, prompting a reporter to ask: "Are you saying that we are vulnerable now, right today, to a nuclear attack?" How can the President say "no" to that, and blather instead about "perceptions" of weakness that nobody except our leaders can believe? A "no" answer vindicates the freeze; undermines the nuclear buildup, undermines the Soviet threat, the Cold War revival, the entire buildup and all that depends upon that. So Reagan says yes, why not? "The Soviets' great edge is one in which they could absorb our retaliatory blow and hit us again." Defenseless America, nuclear sword at our throat! America betrayed, too, by Presidents, statesmen and high-ranking generals criminally negligent almost, until I, Ronald Reagan, arrived on the scene. A storm of protests greets the President's coarse and reckless remarks. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General David Jones, feels compelled to repudiate them: The U.S. and the Soviets are nuclear equals; inferiority is a myth, he testifies before Congress. Former Secretaries of Defense curtly repudiate them. Neither side has superiority, says James Schlesinger, Defense Secretary under Nixon and Ford. Even Senator Jackson demurs. The truthiess President is a menace to the arms race, a menace to the entire buildup. Coarse demagoguery works on the inert, unattending mass; on a people awakened it turns on itself, a truth beyond Reagan's comprehension, but how instinctively do:) truthless Reagan fear and loathe an informed electorate!

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On March 26, "with a minimum of debate," the Democratic Party leaders complete their latest revision of the party rules-their post-Carter, anti-Carter, prevent-Carter rules; bestowing upon themselves some 550 "superdelegate" seats at the 1984 convention-we must be able to veto future Carters, must we not? They have altered the rules, in addition, to "make it easier for the party to consolidate around front-running candidates," a party official explains, meaning easier for party leaders, union ward heelers, the party's money men-the newly created Democratic Business Council-to pick one candidate-Walter Mondale is already chosen-fill his coffers, build his organization, bedeck him with endorsements, put the entire AFL-CIO at his disposal and place the party standard in his loyal, trustworthy hands. 0, blessed precious nominating power, keys of the kingdom, lost to us for so long, now in our grasp once more.

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And what is the compromise budget" offered by Tip and Jones and Rosty, serving "the common good"? For one thing, the largest increase in military spending the Congress can possibly enact. For another, a freeze on cost-of-living allowances for the elderly; lastly, repeal of the third installment of the Kemp-Roth tax cut. Thus the popular party in this year of hard times, elections and blue-collar grief! We shall take money from the taxpayers, money from the pensioners-and stuff the maw of the military Moloch. No demand for tax justice, no call for sanity, decency, honest frugality shall come from the popular party.

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And what say you to that, men of power? The answer comes five days later when [House-Senate conference reaches agreement on the budget for fiscal 1983-calls for a $32 billion increase in military spending authority, continues grinding the poor and the ailing, delivers "a vicious, venal attack on the working poor," so Congressman David Obey, the passed-over liberal, describes the House version of the budget, a Democratic House budget which is crueler to the needy and kinder to the Pentagon than the Republican Senate version. A budget, too, that forecasts steadily declining deficits-$60 billion by 1985-affirming and confirming Reagan's false, glozing feedback fantasy, knowingly affirming a known lie, for Reagan is tottering still and needs every prop that Oligarchy can muster. "The system is too fragile now to deal with the truth," some economist shrewdly remarks. So fragile that the Democratic House on August 5 votes-albeit narrowly-to confirm its faith in the President's fraudulent arms proposal, its belief in the fictitious "window of vulnerability," for Reagan and truth cannot coexist. We must rally around lies to save him!

Not a single weapon is canceled by Congress; mere "routine cheese-paring" only, says Congressional Quarterly. Not a piece of gross squandering is questioned. This year $6.8 billion is to be spent for our neo-World War II carriers and $3.2 billion cut from medical programs; $4.6 billion goes for the "flying Edsel" and the volume of student loans is reduced by 25 percent. "House Democrats," notes the New Republic, "again gave Mr. Reagan almost everything he asked for," although election time is nearing, although the recession is deepening, and Reagan himself continues declining in public esteem. Such is the miracle work of collusion. The murderous mandate no longer hangs around Reagan's neck; it now hangs around ours. Nor is there the slightest pause in the arms race. Let the 750,000 people who gathered by the river know this and mark it well. They gather in vain. Let sentiments of justice, common sense, public spirit, decency, sanity and compassion rot and shrivel and die in your breasts. Let every vestige of faith in yourselves-that which Lincoln bid the people never lose-be trampled and ground to dust. We shall make the truthless man our savior yet.

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In a surprise move," the Democratic House, under the leadership of Tip and Rosty, votes to offer no tax bill at all; will merely duck into the darkness of a House-Senate conference to dicker in private with Dole. The popular party wants no part of fairness, no part of tax justice, no part, were it possible, in the public life at all. It attributes this "most unusual" act of inaction to fear of "antagonizing business PACs," to the need for election campaign money, to "reluctance to offend certain interests," Drew of the New Yorker reports: the usual commercial excuses for deeper, noncommercial corruption.

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What can an ignorant, truthiess demagogue do? Poison the public mind, if he can, against those who dare stand in the way. The freeze movement is "inspired by not the sincere honest people who want peace, but by some who want the weakening of America." So Reagan tells a veterans' group in a speech this autumn. Its success is due to "foreign agents that were sent to help instigate and help create and keep such a movement going." So he says on another day this autumn. About this foreign agentry there is "no question," says Reagan. Any evidence? "Plenty"-alas, not forthcoming. The White House refers the inquisitive to the October issue of Reader's Digest. Such slander, defaming so many people of honor and esteem, so many tens of thousands of earnest clerics, Oligarchy cannot and will not vouch for.

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Two Americans out of every three, so a Washington Post poll shows this March 5, think Reagan cares more "about protecting the firms that are violating" the environmental laws than he does about protecting the environment, believe it and resent it.

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Fresh from the hustings, the great hundred-seat majority sits] idle, does nothing and worse than nothing, betrays every sentiment, virtually, that brought it into being. A majority of Americans want military spending cut, turning a deaf ear to the President's frantic talk of Russia's "evil empire," to his shameless lies about Soviet military spending far exceeding our own. The hundred-seat majority heeds not the electorate, heeds only the President, enacts a $32 billion increase in military spending authority. Does far worse than that: votes without hearings, without debate, without public knowledge, to give the Pentagon authority to conceal from the American people any information it can conceal from a foreigner under the export control laws; turns citizens into foreigners, turns the vast engine of waste and paralysis into a single vast secret of state-or tries to. Henceforth, a patriot in the Defense Department, outraged by the hideous waste and fraud, who dares speak out to his countrymen, risks ten years' imprisonment for violating the export laws, now distorted beyond recognition.

The great hundred-seat majority continues the nuclear arms buildup, although seven Americans out of ten want the freeze movement to triumph, despite all Reagan's slanders against it-how deaf are the people to the Great Communicator! The huge legislative majority continue the great work of subverting the public understanding, help Reagan overcome "the widespread suspicion that he may be unwilling to seek a diplomatically feasible arms control agreement"-as Congressional Quarterly tactfully puts it-by hailing his latest proposal for its "flexibility;" The hundred-seat majority; most important of all, votes at long last to deploy the MX in a vulnerable silo-"a formidable salvage operation undertaken by a curious coalition featuring President Reagan and Democratic moderates"-after the Speaker and White House organize a "bipartisan" commission to urge deployment. America must aim giant vulnerable missiles at Soviet silos in order to "communicate to the Soviets that we have the will essential to deterrence," says the commission. Meaning what? Meaning nothing. These pretexts are for congressional use only. Nothing to do with thee or me. Public life is not for thee and me. Collusion, like a vampire, drains it of all meaning, relevance, truth; of all that speaks to our condition as citizens.

So the hundred-seat majority takes pains not to harm the President by forcing him to veto popular programs, acts of justice, compassionate deeds. "Constant give-and-take between Congress and the White House produced bills that Reagan could sign." Why not give him bills to not-sign, asks Richard Ottinger, the angry, anguished liberal Democrat. Let us restore student loans; it would "sail through Congress" and let Reagan veto that. But the leadership will not allow it. The grinding of the poor is producing real misery and ugly neglect. "Two million kids are not getting measles and polio shots due to the budget cuts. That's something you can dramatize," says the angry, baffled liberal Democrat. "But the leadership is not doing anything." Three of five Americans polled this June think Reagan favors "the upper-income people." Do we of the hundred-seat majority wish to "dramatize" that bitter truth or any bitter truth? When Reagan threatens to veto a $1 billion appropriation for "politically popular programs," reports Congressional Quarterly, Democratic leaders, in panic, reduce it to $98 million, vetoing it themselves to spare Reagan the burden. "O'Neill has given the ball game to Reagan," says Ottinger, given the country to Reagan, given the American people to Reagan.

Given tyranny to the American people, for the Right's assault on the Republic grows more intense than ever this year, becomes a kind of mad, jeering defiance that almost unmasks itself.

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On January 7, the Justice Department, mocking justice, mocking law, issues illegal guidelines that bestow upon the Executive the power to charge prohibitive fees to those who use the Freedom of Information Act to enlighten the people-who are supposed to pay nothing, if possible, under the law as written and now debauched. "Federal agencies are obligated to safeguard the public treasury." Such is the thin piping pretext for this lawless assault on public information, our information, without which popular government is a farce, the frugality "saving" $150,000 a year, not to cut off the "liberal mass media"-the Right's pretended enemy-but rural weeklies, rather, and local radio stations, small-town dailies, free-lance writers; whatever is left of liberty, diversity and independence in our public life. That is what the Right truly fears and strives to stifle further this January 24.

The instrument of stifling is bizarre, jeering, mocking: a budget office change in its Circular A-122-" Cost Principles for Non-profit Organizations." Proposed are new accounting rules for the thousands of private organizations that receive federal grants to carry out government functions. All such organizations-from the Girl Scouts to the Izaak Walton League to the Association for Retarded Citizens-must forfeit federal funds if they speak out on public affairs, will be punished by forfeiture if they bring a fact to a congressional committee, make a comment on a federal regulation.

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... the administration stops funding the publication of the Survey of Income and Program Participation which measures the effect of its welfare policies; stops publishing the Annual Survey of Child Nutrition, The Handbook of Labor Statistics and the Annual Housing Survey; stops publishing bulletins on occupational health hazards; stops issuing warnings about newly discovered toxics; withholds health care data from local officials; eliminates or reduces "at least fifty major statistical programs," a House committee reports, on such matters as nursing homes, medical care expenditures, monthly department store sales, labor turnover. Stops publishing "U.S.-Soviet Military Dollar-Cost Comparisons," invaluable CIA reports that refute fear-monger exaggerations of Soviet strength. Let the rabble look to the White House, look to the Great Communicator, look to our Ministry of Truth for the lies, the "leaks," the official propaganda by which they shall live, henceforth.

On February 10, Reagan signs an executive order barring from the federal government's lucrative on-the-job charity drives "any organization that seeks to influence... the determination of public policy," yet another assault on public life and activity. Assaults our public life again a month later, by calling for an end to postal subsidies for libraries, schools, other nonprofit organizations, for why should we waste public money to support the diffusion, of knowledge, to subsidize a free people's conversation with itself. What waste. goes back to the early days of the Republic. The Ministry of Truth shall stop it here and now in the last days of this loathsome Republic, enemy of all we hold dear.

On February 24, the Justice Department orders three prize winning Canadian films-two on acid rain, one on nuclear war-labeled "political propaganda" under the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act. For we control the borders. Why should we leave them open to ideas we want kept from the people? So on March 3, the State Department denies a visa to Mrs. Salvador Allende, wife of the slain Chilean president. Her scheduled speech to church groups in San Francisco is deemed "prejudicial to United States interests." We shall use every power of government to suppress what we prefer the rabble not know.

On March 7, the Justice Department issues its new "guidelines" on "domestic security" and puts under police purview a vast range of our public life; allows the FBI to infiltrate any group, however free of criminal intent, on mere unsubstantiated charges that there is something to "inquire" about; allows the infiltration of any group that "supports" the infiltrated group, spreading the surveillance net wider; authorizes the Bureau to file "publicly available information" on any American it chooses to monitor, for any reason it wishes. Dare to emerge from "real world" obscurity, dare to enter the public world, and a free people falls under the purview of the federal police power-and into its files if it chooses.

And what say you, thus far, men of power, to this ruthless assault on freedom? Something is said and well said, in this subcommittee or that-honor to them-but nothing the least audible to the country at large. So little audible that three years hence this tyranny is still routinely described as "getting government off the back of the people." Such is the power of the lie in this age of collusion.

On March 11, the White House issues National Security Decision Directive 84, outwardly to stop "leaks"-a "high priority for the administration," says an accompanying statement. Less openly, to assault public life yet again, to gag the well informed by other means. Even outwardly the directive is brutal enough, another step in the Right's unresting campaign to terrify the Executive Branch into silence. The polygraph test, henceforth, will be used throughout the government to trace the source of "leaks"-an instrument of fear and intimidation, of false accusations, pretext for ugly harassment, arbitrary firing, invasions of privacy. Are you a lesbian, asks a polygraph tester of a thirty-seven-year-old spinster? "Have you ever put your mouth to another woman's sexual parts?" The FBI, henceforth, will investigate leaks, even when no crime is suspected, "thereby placing FBI agents at the beck-and-call of bureaucrats wanting to terrorize subordinates." So Safire angrily puts it this April 24.

Attached to these "anti-leak" measures, obscuring its purport momentarily, the President's directive orders all government officials with access to "secret compartmentalized information"-SCI-to submit their writings, books, articles, lectures, letters to the editor, to government officials for "pre-publication review" and approval.

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Thousands of distinguished Americans, whose patriotism cannot be impugned, whose opinions command respect, who can challenge the word of a President, are to be gagged by a truthless demagogue who cannot bear to be challenged, who this very May fires three sitting Civil Rights Commissioners, an act without precedent, destroying the commission's historic independence, for daring to question the Ministry of Truth. "It is not difficult to lie and deceive," Victor Hugo wrote in exile as he watched an elective despot degrade his beIoved France, "when the tongue of contradiction has been torn out." In the degraded Republic right now, tongues of contradiction are being mutilated so that the Right and its allies may more easily deceive us.

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Nicaragua and the Contras

A guerrilla force of 5,000 men, trained and armed by the CIA, has entered Nicaraguan soil, so the New York Times and the Washington Post inform the nation this April 3, "the first solid evidence that the Reagan administration is aiding groups bent on overturning the Sandinistas." "The Secret War Boils Over," exclaims Newsweek the next day-a "full-scale push" far beyond the "purported U.S. objective" of stopping arms shipments from Nicaragua to rebels in El Salvador. The "purported" objective is a lie. The real objective is a crime: violation of a law enacted by Congress December last, forbidding the U.S. to aid any armed force, our Hessians, for the "purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua." Congress stands defied; U.S. law stands defied; international law is mocked; public opinion is trampled upon; White House avowals are shown to be worthless, CIA testimony to Congress-from William Casey, director-is shown to be false. "A crisis of confidence," Senator Moynihan calls it, and so it is. Will the hundred-seat majority meet in caucus and cry out with one voice against this lawless tyranny and its truthless shill, against this 'White House demagogue who tells schoolchildren that free speech is a "privilege" which carries the "responsibility to be right," who talks of a "government right to confidentiality" who poisons the public mind, poisons the Republic itself, with his private, pseudo-constitution of tyranny? Is there just one senator in a hundred to force that truth upon the sheepish mass media giving it heart? One senator alone suffices, if he is brave enough and eloquent enough and makes the Republic his sword and buckler. The answer is: Not one in that hundred can be found, despite a "firestorm" over the gag rule, despite a "furor" over lifetime censorship, despite anger and dismay over the FBI's new police state powers, despite hostile subcommittee hearings. No matter. The Reaction rules over all, terrifies all, and the Reaction needs Reagan propped up, protected, exalted if possible. Seeks chiefly this of the tyranny of the Right-that it take care not to awaken, out of its own jeering spite and malice, the waning republican spirit of the country. The A-122 gag rule is reduced to vague intimidation through the efforts of jack Brooks and the House Government Operations Committee. National Security Decision Directive 84 is revoked in part. Let Reagan be lauded and his tyranny tempered. So Oligarchy decrees.

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On and on, day after day, the propping up of Reagan continues, for though the economy revives and Reagan's public esteem with it-from 38 percent "approval" in January to 48 percent this June-Power, unslumbering, can take no chances. The lying, lawless, ignorant "leader" must be exalted; the uneasy electorate suppressed and degraded; public life drained of all meaning and relevance. The Reaction is safe no other way.

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The Reagan -Carter debate and Carter's briefing book

In June 1983, a bizarre scandal erupts in the White House, threatens "the President's valued nice-guy reputation"-a curious little episode revealing much. It appears that David Stockman, while preparing candidate Reagan for his historic debate with Carter, had a copy of the President's briefing book, knew word for word what the President would say, the book reportedly provided by "a Reagan mole in the Carter camp." James Baker, now Reagan's chief of staff; admits he got the briefing book from Casey, then Reagan's campaign manager, a Wall Street blackguard, habitual liar, a "longtime Reagan favorite," Newsweek calls him, one who "inhabits a charmed circle within the Reagan administration," assiduous feeder of falsehoods to the President disguised as CIA reports. Casey has "no recollection" of any such book.

Such are the basic ingredients of 'Debategate": a spy in Carter's entourage dedicated to his defeat...

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Eighty-two percent of the country knows of the scandal; three of five Americans think it is a major political issue. And are 'White House treachery, cheating and lying not a major political issue? Do the people not have, as john Adams wrote, "an indisputable, unalienable, indefensible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers"? Dreaded indeed by Oligarchy is the people's knowledge of Reagan's character. In public, the Speaker says nothing, is described as "uncharacteristically quiet." In private, Albosta is rudely checked, his investigation stymied. The House Democratic leadership fears to look excessively partisan, so Congressional Quarterly reports; wants to "distance current Democratic officeholders from Carter's unpopular legacy," says Newsweek, while collusion, unmentioned and unmentionable, continues to drain public life of all meaning and relevance.

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Korean airliner

On August 31, 1983, a Korean airliner with 267 people aboard is shot down by a Soviet pilot hundreds of miles inside Soviet territory, after passing near sensitive military installations. Swiftly, Air Force intelligence puts together the story and passes it on to "the policy-makers." Nervous Soviet defenders had confused the off-course plane with a U.S. intelligence plane operating nearby, had tried and failed to identify the plane before destroying it. A confused, frightened Soviet air defense has hideously blundered, but what use is that truth to our leaders? Let it rot in limbo, while Secretary of State George Shultz goes before the American people to denounce the Soviets for coldly, deliberately, knowingly destroying a harmless civilian airliner. "Murder in the air," cries the press. A "heinous act," cries the President. The Korean airline massacre is denounced at the UN by our representative, Jeane Kirkpatrick, champion of Cold War and party oligarchy. Denunciations resound in the Congress. "An unbelievably barbaric act," cries Speaker O'Neill. "Horrible, inexcusable, outrageous," cries Minority Leader Byrd. By unanimous vote Congress declares the shooting "one of the most infamous and reprehensible acts in history"-nothing less. Mass hatred and bellicosity, twin banes of liberty, how dearly does Oligarchy love them! Reagan "couldn't have written a better script," says a Democratic Senate aide. "He looks like a man of reason, caution and balance-he looks like the President."

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Beirut - 1983

At 2:27 in the morning, Sunday, October 23, the President, on a golfing weekend in Augusta, Georgia, learns that a suicide attacker carrying a bomb in a truck has blown up the marine barracks in Beirut; 229 marines are reported dead. A demonstration, says the President, his voice "quavering" with emotion, of "the bestial nature" 0f our Levantine enemies, who, perforce, cannot bombard us in perfect safety from offshore warships, but must actually die in order to retaliate. The attack is "an appalling shock to the American people," so reports the press. But what is the shock? Is it the spectacle of wanton, predictable death that shocks, the folly of blind murderous meddling? In part at least? The United States has got to "retaliate"; the President has got "to do something," Newsweek remarks most urgently. "There is a lot of circumstantial evidence," says Defense Secretary Weinberger, "that points to Iran."

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Grenada - 1983

On October 25, the United States, in all its might and majesty, invades the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, site of a communist coup against a communist ruler, site of a medical school attended by a thousand Americans said by the White House to be in danger of their lives. No reporters join the armada. A total press censorship is put into effect. For the first time in our history, all military news will come from official bulletins as several thousand Americans attempt to subdue an airplane-less army of 700. "Members of Congress and ordinary citizens alike," notes Time, "wondered what had prompted President Reagan to take such drastic action against a tiny island. Coming only two days after the death of 229 Marines. .

Well we might wonder, ponder, ask ourselves hard, cruel questions. Is a demagogue President giving us a shabby bully's triumph to distract from a hideous bully's defeat? Believe this, or something akin, and the public world of America grows grim and cold indeed. Believe this and there is precious little left to believe in; nothing, in truth, to believe in, except in ourselves, politically alone, politically deserted, daily subverted by collusion; and in the Republic, daily corrupted, utterly voiceless. For twenty-four hours the country wavers in an agony of doubt-our moment of truth and dread of "\the truth. On the twenty-sixth a planeload of medical students from Grenada lands in America, television cameras present, countless millions watching. A few students kiss the ground. One cries out "God bless America, God bless Reagan, God bless our military." Suddenly, relief of the greatest intensity sweeps over the country, and joy unbounded, the "Grenada high," so-called. Away with terrible suspicions and gnawing doubts and the American world grown cold and grim. America is triumphant; Reagan is innocent. Let us hear no critics and no bad news. We will not listen, we will stop up our ears, stop our own hearts if we have to. Has the press been kept from Grenada? Good, cry millions of Americans. For they "only would have turned us against the decision to invade," turned us against our leaders, turned us back on our fears, our ç qualms, ourselves. We have not the strength left for this. A fabulist and liar is our leader. Let us live by fables and lies, by "Morning in America" and "America Is Back." A charmer inhabits the White House; let us bask in his charm. Not everyone, of course, but millions, enough for a landslide victory in the 1984 elections. Power, unslumbering, set out to exalt a tyrant and degrade a citizenry. October 26 marks the day its sad triumph stands revealed.


Liberty Under Siege

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