STATEMENTS BY PAST FELLOWS<  Back
Joint Statement on the Homeland Security Act, 2002 Daniels and Younge Fellows

More than forty years ago, President Kennedy offered a vision to build a better world. We are here today to summon the nation away from a war on terrorism. To summon it to use its resources, gifts, and talents to create a better, more peaceful world.

President Bush's Homeland Security Proposal resembles Nazi Fatherland propaganda. Like Hitler's Reich Main Security Office, the creation of the Homeland Security Department involves the massive overtaking of various agencies. Also, by taking over the duties of many existing departments, Homeland Security becomes the most powerful of cabinet departments. It destroys any semblance of checks and balances in the executive branch. Democracy means nothing to President Bush, who will gain greater authority for himself and the executive branch if the Homeland Security Act is passed.

The Homeland Security Act is the culmination of President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft's USA Patriot Act. Passed with great secrecy and speed in the climate of fear following the September 11 attacks in 2001, the USA Patriot Act also gave more power to the executive branch, utterly demolished checks, balances, and other Constitutional safeguards against the abuse of government power, and violated the most fundamental human and civil rights guaranteed by law to all people in the United States. But the USA Patriot Act was only the first step in the President's agenda.

In order to move forward their vision of a new world order, President Bush and his allies plan to contain, isolate, and destabilize the communities of immigrants and peoples of color. The racial profiling and detention of Middle Easterners is a testimony to the white totalitarian state President Bush wants to create. Both the USA Patriot Act and Homeland Security Proposal call for tighter borders and immigration laws. Often people come here as a last resort, because modern imperialism, capitalism, and globalization have destroyed our homes. We must recognize how policies like these, as well as the national ID or driver's license policy, restrict our mobility and enclose us in ghettos. We refuse, in this day and age, to submit to this racism.

The Homeland Security Act institutionalizes the USA Patriot Act, creating a military state and a death-driven, rather than life-affirming, society. While the government spends almost $44.5 billion on education, it already spends more than twice that - $100 billion - on homeland security. Sections 301, 302, and 303 give the Secretary of Homeland Security control of the "functions" and "assets" of parts of the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and Department of Agriculture. Functions, as defined by the Act, are "authorities, powers, rights, privileges, immunities, programs, projects, activities, duties, responsibilities, and obligations." Assets are "contracts, facilities, property, records, unobligated or unexpended balances of appropriations, and other funds of resources (other than personnel)." Therefore, under the Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security can spend our national healthcare budget on military research and action, rather than on health, and thus move us toward a military state. The Secretary also has the authority to determine healthcare priorities. The Homeland Security Act thus creates a huge bureaucracy in which money and power flow through dangerous and complex channels. Not only will it be easier for officials to abuse power, but it will also be more difficult to hold them accountable.

While the USA Patriot Act legalizes, justifies, and even encourages previously illegal behavior, such as racial profiling, unwarranted searches, and invasions of privacy by law enforcement agencies, the Homeland Security Proposal creates the infrastructure for these things to take place.

Without the discretion and representation of the people, President Bush will be able to place his closest allies in key government positions. Because the Homeland Security Act also permits him to transfer funds between the different and diverse components of the Homeland Security Department, President Bush will have virtually unlimited access and control of America's resources.

Totalitarianism, not terrorism, is the threat we face. The Bush administration has issued a full-fledged attack on freedom. It has united the right-wing and more susceptible members of society in a fabricated war against an imagined enemy under the false banner of patriotism.

The greed and violence of this war of terror cannot last. Eventually there will be nothing left in such a world. But, as young people, we hold this nation and the world's futures in the palms of our hands. We are determined that there will be a future. In order to ensure this, we must respond with greater force and solidarity to this so-called "war on terrorism." We must be stronger than our oppressors, moved by the fiercest love for humanity. Because ours is a higher calling; ours is a call to just and lasting peace.