May 18, 2002	Saturday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 5, 1423

STOCKHOLM, May 17: Former US presidential candidate and consumer advocate Ralph Nader lashed out on Friday at the US administration and corporate America in the wake of the September 11 attacks, saying US President George W. Bush was a threat to his own country.

“Bush, by his policies and his recklessness and his stifling of dissent which restricts input into government decision-making ... is endangering our country,” Nader told reporters in Stockholm, where he was invited to speak by the Swedish Greens Party.

He likened Bush’s leadership following September 11 to “an out-of-control West Texas sheriff”.

A Green Party candidate in the 2000 presidential election, Nader also denounced the role of US defence manufacturers since the attacks, the rise of the “corporate welfare state” in America and the US government’s “attack on our constitutional rights and freedoms.”

“The expansion of the military budget has become so extreme that by next year, it will represent 50 percent of all discretionary expenditures of the US government,” he said.

“It is extraordinary that in a post-Soviet Union era, with no major enemy in the world to the United States, the military budget is at a post World War II record high.”

Nader, who was due to attend a European Greens summit in Berlin at the weekend, slammed the “exploitation of the post 9/11 period by giant corporations who are shaping our defence policy as a profitable business proposition rather than meeting legitimate defence needs.”

He also slung arrows at the airline, chemical and insurance industries, which, in a trend he described as the rise of the “corporate welfare state”, all tried to “take advantage of post 9-11 to increase their subsidies, handouts, giveaways, limited liabilities and tax loopholes.”

Perhaps most serious, he said, was the “organized attack, led by the autocratic ideologues under Attorney General John Ashcroft ... on our constitutional rights and freedoms, undermining our democratic processes — the very democratic processes that we say were attacked by the backers of the 9/11 massacre.”

He also criticized Bush for his “unbelievable hubris and arrogance” for “merging his identity with the United States of America and saying to the rest of the world ‘You’re either for us or against us’.”

“That has to be a new low mark in American history,” Nader said.

He speculated however that if Democrat Al Gore had been elected president rather than Bush, the US reaction would have been “identical”.—AFP