BUSH’S TOOTHLESS ‘OVERSIGHT’ BOARD
For public officials who get caught making a mess of a government program, the first rule is to obfuscate and procrastinate – and if that fails to deflect public outrage, rule No. 2 is to appoint an advisory committee.
This is what George W. has now done about the mess at the Food and Drug Administration, an agency set up as a watchdog over drug makers and others – but has now become a lapdog of the industries it’s supposed to oversee. Last fall, Bush and his FDA appointees were embarrassed by news that such widely used pain pills as Vioxx, Celebrex, and Bextra had been allowed on the market by the FDA, even though top agency officials and the drug makers had known for some time that taking these pills dramatically increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Initially, the White House tried to get away with rule No. 1, ducking and dodging the problem by declaring that it was an isolated incident and was being handled internally. But the criticism from the public, the media, and the Congress was not abated by this obfuscation, so now Bush & Company have announced the creation of – Ta Da! – The Drug Safety Oversight Board.
“Oversight” sounds powerful … except that Bush’s board is strictly advisory, is made up entirely of science officials from within the Bush administration (no independent experts allowed), comes with no new money for the essential task of doing more drug testing, has no independent authority to force the withdrawal of dangerous drugs, and does nothing to loosen the FDA’s tight ties to the big drug companies.
What we have here is nothing but a PR stunt – or, as Public Citizen’s director of health policy puts it, “a cruel hoax” on the endangered public.
How embarrassing that the Bushites now say the FDA must have an advisory board to warn patients about unsafe drugs. Hello, George: That’s what the FDA itself is supposed to do. Why not fix the agency, rather than create a toothless board?
PREACHING DEMOCRACY WHILE DRIFTING TO AUTOCRACY
The problem for U.S. presidents who jump on their moral high horse and gallop around the world loudly lecturing other nations’ leaders about freedom and democracy is that their presidential practices back here in America are often the exact opposite of what they’re preaching to others.
George W., our present preacher-in-chief, recently went on a highly publicized moralizing mission to Russia, where he publicly scolded President Putin for imposing anti-democratic measures on that country. Fine – Putin’s autocratic tendencies are abominable. But then George got caught up in asserting his own moral purity, declaring: “I’m perfectly comfortable in telling you our country is one that safeguards human rights.”
Well, yes, Americans certainly have a strong belief in that, and we’ve been striving for that ideal for two centuries – until BushCheneyRumsfeld & Company arrived. They have been energetically pushing America backward on human rights, ranging from insisting that the White House has a right to torture war prisoners to using federal police and the military to shut out and shut up Americans who protest Bush’s policies.
Filled with moral piety, however, George continued his democracy lecture, saying: “I live in a country where decisions made by government are wide open.” What an absurdly awkward thing for him to say, since Bush & Company are notorious for pushing a dangerous new culture of government secrecy in America. They have gone to court again and again to assert “executive privilege,” insisting that they have the autocratic right to hide all information about their decisions. They also maintain secret “no fly” lists, they have unilaterally suspended the public’s use of our right-to-know laws in case after case, they’ve doubled the number of government documents classified as “secret,” and they’ve claimed in several cases that not even Congress or the courts can examine their decisions.
Of course, even under Bush, America is nowhere near as bad as Putin’s Russia … yet.
This article appears in March 18 • 2005.