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OpinioNet Contributed Commentary - Doug Fiedor <dfiedor@home.com>
February 3, 2002
(Newsletter #259 - A Weekly View from the Foothills of Appalachia)
Dubya is a good salesman. It showed in the State of the Union. You just got to like the guy. He says what he means and means what he says. Unlike someone we knew for eight long years, Bush doesn’t lie. Sure, there was some socialism-light in the address. G. W. Bush is big government all the way. Well, most of the way, anyhow. On the other hand, both the President and Vice President are well trained businessmen and there is a budget to be balanced soon. The war effort is eating up funds. They will not raise taxes. Therefore, look for some dead wood in government to start getting cut by the end of this year. There’s plenty of needed culling to be done and they’re just the two to pick up the ax. In truth, there was only one real surprise in the State of the Union Address. This was the second time Dubya mentioned something called the USA Freedom Corps. But, there was no listing for Freedom Corps Tuesday night. It wasn’t until an address Wednesday at the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Winston-Salem, North Carolina that President Bush explained that remark. (1) "If you want to find out how you can join the USA Freedom Corps or, for that matter, figure out how to help to serve your community outside of the USA Freedom Corps -- because, as I understand, we’ve got it tied into websites, for example, the community services in Winston- Salem -- dial up usafreedomcorps.gov. Or you can call this number -- it sounds like I’m making a pitch, and I am. (Laughter.) This is the right thing to do for America. 1-877-USACorps. If somebody out there is interested in figuring out how to serve, it’s 1-877-USACorps." Then, Bush introduced John Bridgeland as the new Executive Director. And, he is requesting over $560-million to pay for this "volunteer" organization next year alone. So, I went to the new Freedom Corps web site and tried to see how difficult it would be to sign up. A couple clicks down into it I found Citizen Corps and clicked on "join." That was when my security software warned me that the certificates didn’t match and I was actually entering a FEMA web site. . . . . Because it is a bureaucracy, there is a USA Freedom Corps Blueprint (handbook) on the web site.(2) "The USA Freedom Corps will have a Council and Office within the Executive Office of the President. The Council will be chaired by the President and include the heads of key departments and agencies with public service programs and components." So much for creating a citizen’s "volunteer" group. It’s a full blown bureaucracy. Another one! Even before the founding Executive Order was signed, the bureaucracy’s regulations were being written. Most are rather straightforward and appear somewhat necessary to carry out the expressed intent. However, some open the door for later mischief (consider a Clinton or Gore as president) and one regulation is immediately rather ominous. For instance: "The Administration will submit legislation to amend the Higher Education Act to require every college and university to devote 50 percent of its Federal Work Study funds to community service, commonly known as Serve Study. In any given year, at least five percent of the students will be expected to work in the homeland security fields of public safety, public health, and emergency preparedness. Not all of the chain of command of this new bureaucracy is immediately straightforward, either. For instance, the goal is to: "Establish Citizens Corps Councils representing citizens in local communities, provide appropriate community designations, and encourage recruitment of Citizen Corps volunteers. The Councils would include leaders from law enforcement, fire and emergency medical services, businesses, community-based institutions, schools, places of worship, health care institutions, public works, and other key sectors. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will coordinate with states and local communities to support the establishment of the Councils." No organization so top-heavy with federal bureaucrats can ever be as effective as thousands of locally operated citizens groups. All such federal bureaucracies do is run up bills in increments of hundreds of millions of dollars. We must remember that the States have a long, colorful history of maintaining a very effective citizens’ volunteer security organization to protect neighborhoods, local towns and States. That was called the Citizen’s Militia. Local volunteer Citizen’s Militias worked well and cost the federal government absolutely nothing unless mustered into the regular Army. They also didn’t write more useless regulations impacting on the rights of the people. We should be downsizing that leviathan called the federal bureaucracy, not expanding it. It appears it is time to consider the concept of a truly volunteer Citizens Militia once again. Doug Fiedor Footnotes:
Read other commentaries by Doug Fiedor. You can e-mail Doug at dfiedor@home.com About Doug Fiedor. Copyright © 2002 by Doug Fiedor. -Published with permission All Doug’s newsletters are available at:
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