Haley Barbour, current Mississippi Governor, longtime RNC lobbyist, and potential Vice Presidential candidate for the GOP, refuses to make his financial holdings public. These records, which would show how much (or, as the case could be, how little) money he is getting from his old lobbying firm and their clients like the Casino Industry, Big Tobacco, and the Oil Industry. I could try and argue that leaders in each of these sectors have undue influence over Barbour through back room deals, all while we're being told not to look behind the curtain.... But the truth is that I do not know. The information has not been made available to me, to you, or to anyone else in America. And that is an injustice regardless of whether what we don't know hurts us or not.
This man, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, has failed the public. I am not talking about his decision to reallocate $600m away from low and middle income housing development Post-Katrina, which is the latest controversial issue Barbour must face (and this came from the prestigious, non-partisan RAND Institute, who called Haley out on this bad decision). No, I'm not going to dwell on that. I'm not even going to make the case that Haley has failed the public through his tendency to play to the advantage of his clients in Big Tobacco by moving funding out of successful programs like Mississippi's anti-smoking awareness campaign for children. Although, a word needs to be said about how Barbour sold out our kids' health as a favor to his old clients. Whereas the smoking rate among middle schoolers nationally only went down 12%,the Mississippi program had reduced smoking among middle schoolers by 48% before Barbour cut the program. Folks, although I could spend all morning belaboring the point that Haley Barbour has given Post-Katrina no-bid contracts to his relatives, this is not even the most egregious example of how he has failed the public either.
For there are other examples as well, and a recent letter to the editor chronicled a few of them:
One of Haley's first moves after he was elected in 2003 was to throw 65,000 elderly and disabled Mississippians off Medicaid. Only the actions of our Attorney General Jim Hood saved them from a horrible fate.
Next, he tried to put oil and gas rigs off our Coast. Only the quick organization of the 12 Miles South Coalition was able to counter this handout to big oil. Then Katrina struck.
It makes sense that a governor who took $100,000 as a lobbyist for big insurance would do nothing to help the homeowner in the post-Katrina insurance debacle. He just sat on the sidelines of the wrong team.
Recovery business has gone to family and former lobbyist friends. The firm of Henry Barbour, campaign treasurer, has landed about $2.4 million in Mississippi bond fees since Katrina. Back in June, the FBI raided Barbour's niece's company which maintained FEMA trailers.
But, again, that's not why I sat down to write this morning. What I want to address, instead, is something that should be much less controversial. It should be something that both parties expect from our nation's leaders. What I am talking about is how Haley Barbour refuses to make his financial holdings public. These records, which would show how much (or, as the case could be, how little) money he is getting from his old lobbying firm and their clients like the Casino Industry, Big Tobacco, and the Oil Industry. I could try and argue that leaders in each of these sectors have undue influence over Barbour through back room deals, all while we're being told not to look behind the curtain.... But the truth is that I do not know. The information has not been made available to me, to you, or to anyone else in America. And that is an injustice regardless of whether what we don't know hurts us or not.
We can all agree that there are fundamental concerns - which cross party and ideological lines - that we should all have about how Haley Barbour has refused to tell us, the people of Mississippi and of this great nation, what he is hiding.
I just want to make this clear to everyone reading these pages that we deserve to know the contents of Haley Barbour's blind trust (as the Attorney General requested over a year ago), because if the governor is still being influenced by special interests then he should be held accountable. We have some of the facts based on limited press coverage, and what we've learned is already quite disturbing. I've tried to post as much as I can on this blog over the course of the last week(here, here, and here), but I am outraged that this story has not become a national issue and that Haley Barbour is not being held accountable (...and so are many of you, if the blog comments and e-mails I've received are any indication). This leads me to my next point about the Haley Barbour scandal: the media has also failed the public.
The point, folks, is this: I am not going to accuse Haley Barbour of doing anything until I have all the facts. But we do not have all the facts, and he refuses to tell us the facts. It is the media's duty to report what they know - and learn more about what they do not know - regarding this case.
All we can do now is speculate because Haley Barbour would rather keep quiet and not tell the truth to his constituents and the media would rather not blow it out of proportion or cause a fuss. They'd rather play it safe.
If this was the attitude taken during the era of Upton Sinclair or during Watergate, then a great injustice would have been perpetrated against our nation and people would have suffered unnecessarily because the elites were making money by keeping things quiet. No one can deny this: we are not being told the truth about who is influencing Haley Barbour and the media has failed us by not pursuing this matter any further. If there are hideous facts underlying the blind trust and the no-bid deals, then history needs to remember them and we need to know them now, before election day. If the facts are made known and Haley Barbour is beyond reproach, then we need to know that too.
Frankly, the media has chosen to rest on its laurels and wait for new information to emerge rather than conduct intelligent, truth-seeking investigative journalism. Save for the recent piece in The New Republic and the work by a few local newspapers, there has been very little of the get-to-the-bottom-of-this attitude evinced by our media. I think it's time we remind ourselves of what the media should be doing in an open, democratic society, so here is a quotation that particularly struck a chord with me:
Preserve your independence of all demagogues and place-hunters and never submit to their dictation; write boldly and tell the truth fearlessly; criticize whatever is wrong, and denounced whatever is rotten in the administration of your local and state affairs, no matter how much it may offend the guilty or wound the would-be leaders of your party.
Make an earnest and conscientious journal; establish its reputation for truth and reliability, frankness and independence. Never willfully deceive the people, or trifle with their confidence. Show that your journal is devoted to the advocacy and promotion of their temporal interests and moral welfare.
- Joseph Medill
May 1869, Chicago Tribune,
From a speech given to editors and publishers
There is still time in the weeks to come for our journalists to show us what freedom of the press at its best can accomplish, because all we ask for are the facts, plain and simple. Without them, we no longer have true democracy. Instead, we are haplessly left only to believe what Barbour tells us we should be allowed to believe. I am ashamed of how the Governor is hiding the truth from his constituents; and I am ashamed of how the press is allowing him to persist in this. In so doing, both are failing the people of Mississippi. We cannot sit idly by; it is time to rectify this injustice.
-YD