Monday, March 22, 2004
Business Roundtable to run the country via "CEO COM LINK" in case of "national emergency"
Tinfoil hat time? Nope. Not under Bush!
Well.
Where to begin.
I certainly don't remember voting for to hand over the government to CEOs in times of "national emergency"—especially when Bush is the one to declare an emergency. I've said before (back here) and will say it again: There's no good reason to regard the Bush regime as legitimate.
CEO COM LINK [is] a secure, exclusive telephone system established in November 2001 that allows chief executives to speak directly with Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge and other officials during a terrorist attack.
The exclusive communications network was created by the [Business] Roundtable for use by its members, 150 CEOs from Fortune 500 companies... (The Roundtable's chairman, Henry A. McKinnell, is the CEO of Pfizer, Inc., and recently was named a Bush Pioneer.)
CEO COM LINK has already been activated four times, all at Ridge's request.
Even in an administration notorious for its catering to corporate interests, CEO COM LINK affords the Business Roundtable an astonishing status. No other organization, public or private, has such a secure and open line to the top tier of government during a national disaster. ... No dedicated hot line like CEO COM LINK exists for any other group: not governors, mayors, firefighters, hospitals, or police.
When I asked John Castellani, the Roundtable President, whether CEO's profit motives might conflict with the government's interest in national security, he shot back that the two "were absolutely tied together with the same purpose."
CEO COM LINK is the only system of its kind in America, and as such is could, during a national emergency, allow for a kind of ad hoc governance by the Roundtable and its unelected CEOs.
Secretiveness on such matters seems to suit the DHS, the first U.S. government agency in history that has a separate division dedicated to serving the private sector.
Will the conversations that take place over CEO COM LINK be exempt from FOIA requests? I put the question to [a DHS spokesman], but he wouldn't say.
(via Tim Shorrock in Harper's magazine print edition, pages 81-3, not available online)
Well.
Where to begin.
I certainly don't remember voting for to hand over the government to CEOs in times of "national emergency"—especially when Bush is the one to declare an emergency. I've said before (back here) and will say it again: There's no good reason to regard the Bush regime as legitimate.
