Mother Jones video: "Conversation With a Conservative"

[G_j]

A Mother Jones video: "Conversation With a Conservative" Reagan administration veteran Clyde Prestowitz on the Bush administration's "radical" policies


Economist Clyde Prestowitz, a self-described "conservative, registered Republican," speaks about the Bush administration's economic, environmental, and international policies in a mini-documentary released today on MotherJones.com.



"The administration is not conservative, it's radical. But it uses the term 'conservative' to mask what it truly is," says Prestowitz. "If you look at the Bush administration, it has given us red ink in our federal budget deficits as far as the eye can see...The Patriot Act has been a restriction of individual rights. The states have been given unfunded mandates from the federal government, which most conservatives see as completely abhorrent. And we're engaged in a war in Iraq against a country that didn't pose a threat to us...I think that we are less safe today than we were three or four years ago."


Prestowitz is a former Reagan administration Commerce Department official, and is the founder and president of the Economic Strategy Institute, a Washington, DC-based trade policy think tank. He is the author of Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions. (Basic Books, 2003)


View the video at:
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/09/prestowitz_intro.html


A full transcript of Prestowitz's comments can be found at:
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/10/10_200.html


The interview is the first in a series of conversations with prominent conservatives to be released on MotherJones.com.