It is my intent to compile an ever expanding body of information: links, essays, articles, and publications to fight and win the war against criminal use of corporations in the United States. As the information is gathered here, it will be organized in a way to best facilitate the acquisition, deployment and utilization of the optimum complement of weapons of choice and tactics to identify, target, and eliminate the causes, function, and malignancy of corporatism aka fascism.

G.W. Bush: International Racketeer

OIL ROBBER BARONS

By Ted Lang

01/12/04: (ICH) CBS's "60 Minutes" featured former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in an exclusive interview with CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl, which aired Sunday, January 11th. The interview confirms what those who primarily rely on the Internet for up-to-date, accurate and to-the-point news coverage have known for almost over a year: the Bush administration had planned the illegal, unconstitutional and unnecessary invasion of Iraq completely independent of any retaliatory or preventive military considerations relating to 9-11. In fact, this interview, motivated to launch a new book authored by Ron Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, not only confirms the heavy evidence concerning the administration's underlying intentions with regard to Iraq, but raises some scary new ones as well.

Neil Mackay penned one of the earliest sources citing the U.S. plot against Iraq and Saddam back in September 2002. Entitled "Let's Not Forget: Bush Planned Iraq 'Regime Change' Before Becoming President," still carried on Information Clearing House's website, Mackay's piece starts: "A SECRET blue print for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001."

The article is among many that reveal a document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, written by the neoconservative think tank calling itself Project for the New American Century [PNAC]. Although some references have been made in the mainstream media to this "neoconservative" clandestine planning, including some minor references to it ensconced in sarcasm and derision by the likes of FOXNews icons Brit Hume and Fred Barnes, the revelation now by mainstream CBS News adds a completely new dimension. PNAC is now being discovered by mainstream America.

And Information Clearing House also still carries a comprehensive analysis of PNAC written by William Rivers Pitt on February 25, 2003, entitled "The Project for the New American Century," Pitt offers: "PNAC desires and demands one thing: The establishment of a global American empire to bend the will of all nations. They chafe at the idea that the United States, the last remaining superpower, does not do more by way of economic and military force to bring the rest of the world under the umbrella of a new socio-economic Pax Americana." But up till now, a major debate regarding America's real intentions at world domination has been largely suppressed, and this is due to the failure on the part of the mainstream media.

These revelations are, at this point in time, nothing new, but they have the potential of becoming extremely pivotal as regards their significance in the upcoming presidential elections. CBS News, is now fully on board as evidenced by their website's January 10th piece entitled, "Saddam Ouster Planned Early '01?" The article states, "The Bush Administration began making plans for an invasion of Iraq, including the use of American troops, within days of President Bush's inauguration in January of 2001 - not eight months after the 9/11 attacks, as has been previously reported." CBS quotes former Secretary O'Neill: "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go. For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do is a really huge heap."

The CBS report continues, "O'Neill, fired by the White House for his disagreement on tax cuts, is the main source for an upcoming book, 'The Price of Loyalty,' by Ron Suskind. Suskind says O'Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration was looking at military operations for removing Saddam Hussein from power and planning for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall - including post-war contingencies such as peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the future of Iraq's oil." [Emphasis added]

There is no longer any doubt that the Iraqi invasion was in absolutely no way justified. There have been, and still are, many horrifically violent and brutal dictators that the US government is not only allied with, but extremely protective of as well. They consistently violate human rights and perpetrate mass suffering and the mass murders of their people. The US government did absolutely nothing to mitigate the slaughter of over one million African people in Rwanda because it didn't serve the monetary and political interests of those in power at the time.

To their credit, FOXNews.com, usually a journalistic shill and apologist for the Bush administration, also posted an article on January 10th entitled, "O'Neill: Iraq Plans Began at Start of Bush's Term." In an article originated by the Associated Press, it is offered that, "The administration has not found evidence that the Iraqi leader was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks but officials have said that they had to consider the possibility that Saddam could have undertaken an even larger scale strike against the United States."

But then FOX offers that White House spokesman Scott McClellan "would not confirm or deny that the White House began Iraq war planning early in Bush's term. But he said, Saddam 'was a threat to peace and stability before September 11th, and even more of a threat after September 11. It appears that the world according to Mr. O'Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinions than looking at the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people,' McClellan said in Texas, where the president is staying at his ranch."

In a feeble effort at damage control, FOX did indeed acknowledge the administration's early pre-emptive designs against Saddam and Iraq, and offered also that "In July 2001, after an Iraqi surface-to-air missile was fired at an American surveillance plane, Bush's national security advisor put Saddam on notice that the United States intended a more resolute military policy toward Iraq." FOX also emphasized O'Neill's promotion of the new book. "CBS News correspondent Mark Knoller reported Saturday that, as the White House sees it, O'Neill's remarks are those of a disgruntled former official, and it should not have come as a surprise to O'Neill that the U.S. advocated Saddam's ouster," states the CBS article.

The article continues, "As for the charge that there were early plans to invade Iraq, Knoller says the official calls that 'laughable.' Suggesting that O'Neill doesn't know what he's talking about on this matter, the official told CBS News O'Neill had enough problems in his own area of expertise, so, 'Why should anyone believe he has a credible understanding of foreign policy?'"

One cannot help noticing via these cites how the Bush administration and its "officials" are spinning these revelations to blur the public's focus on this vital matter. The Bush lies of WMD, their readily available deployment, their nuclear, biological and chemical capability, robotic airplanes and drones, and all the other accusations made by Bush have been refuted. Is this being discussed? Notice how this unjustified and unconstitutional war has never been justified? Notice how Robert Mueller, III and George Tenet were never fired for their incompetence and 9-11 intelligence mismanagement? Notice how the only Bush administration official that was jettisoned has come back at him with a "get-even" plan?

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan tries to spin this issue as merely retribution on the part of one, single solitary "disgruntled employee," and another unidentified "official" offers that O'Neill's charges are "laughable." Aside form the fact that we should always dismiss quotes from an "unidentified" official as being "official," what precisely is so "laughable" about 500 of our military dead? What is so "laughable" about the thousands wounded and maimed?

What precisely is it that is so humorous concerning over one million Iraqis that have died because of the ten-year US embargo targeting one "enemy of the state" of the United States of America, such that all the Iraqi people have been made to suffer at the hands of "our" government? McClellan and the White House's spin that O'Neill represents a loony, lone voice in the wilderness just doesn't rub.

What of the protests of former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter who did everything in his limited power to stop this carnage well before Bush started it? Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children have died because of Bush's secret PNAC cabal. And our lust for oil and our lust for world dominance has indeed expanded PNAC's objectives to include advancing the state of Israel as the only nuclear power in the region, the latter exempted from many more UN resolutions than Saddam had ever violated. And the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has itself identified PNAC's collaborating members as American traitors.

What we have here is not an issue concerning one individual. Many Internet writers have written at length about the PNAC cabal. They, PNAC, are indeed a secret group, and a plotting cabal. And their numbers are a mere fraction of the large and growing number of Internet writers and readers who are fully informed of the deliberate lies, fraud and warmongering propaganda of the Bush administration. Their planning is NOT in the best interests of the United States and its people.

And where before the people of the world forgave America and its people for the unjust and threatening incursions of our military, they now no longer excuse our stupidity in allowing our out-of-control government to attack any and all sovereign states targeted by a tiny band of political plotters that represent a growing danger to all people on Earth.

If McClellan and the Bush White House desire to point to O'Neill as a small source of discontent within the administration, perhaps they ought to compare the number that comprises PNAC and the Bushies to one billion angry Muslims and the rest of the world. As writer William Rivers Pitt offered, "Americans enjoy their comforts, but don't cotton to the idea of being some sort of Neo-Rome."

It has become painfully clear that this horrendous, unnecessary loss of life, wealth and national security was sacrificed by an action undertaken to justify the monetary and political advantage of a small entity on a basis comparatively much smaller than that represented by former Secretary O'Neill's "disgruntlement."

All law-abiding, decent people the world over have always readily identified this type of immoral, self-serving behavior characterized by such reckless abandon for the rights of others. On a smaller scale of public recognition, O'Neill's revelations compare to the level of public awareness equating to the recognition of street crime: robberies, rapes, muggings, burglaries and the like. On a level typified by the crime generated by street gangs, perhaps the definition becomes "rampant crime." And on a national basis, it could be described as a combination of organized petty street criminals, street gangs, all consolidated within a national crime syndicate; in other words, it takes on what is commonly referred to as "organized crime" or "racketeering."

Can there be any doubt that as more and more Bush lies surface, as more and more reports and their confirmation unfold, that the Bush administration is beginning to resemble the demeanor of an organized criminal element? Where is the outrage? Where's the media? And when will we be outraged sufficiently to do something meaningful about it?

Opinion
Hail to the Robber Baron?
Published On 4/6/2005 12:00:00 AM
By YOSHI TSURUMI

Thirty years ago, President Bush was my student at Harvard Business School. In my class, he called former president Franklin D. Roosevelt, Class of 1904, a “socialist” and spoke against Social Security, unemployment insurance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other New Deal innovations. He refused to understand that capitalism becomes corrupt without democratic civic values and ethical restraints.

In those days, Bush belonged to a minority of MBA students who were seriously disconnected from taking the moral and social responsibility for their actions. Today, he would fit in comfortably with an overwhelming majority of business students and teachers whose role models are celebrated captains of piracy. Since the 1980s, as neo-conservatives have captured the Republican Party, America’s business education has also increasingly become contaminated by the robber baron culture of the pre-Great Depression era.

Bush is the first president of the United States with a Master’s of Business Administration (MBA). Yet, he epitomizes the worst aspects of America’s business education. To privatize Social Security, he is peddling a colossal lie about its solvency. Furthermore, Bush, along with today’s business aristocrats, shows no compassion for working Americans, robbing them to benefit big business and the very rich. Last year, due to Bush’s tax cuts, over 80 of America’s most profitable 200 corporations did not pay even a penny of their federal and state income taxes. Meanwhile, to pay for his additional tax cuts for the very rich, Bush is drastically cutting back several social services, such as federal lunch programs for poor children.

Business education has also produced former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling and other MBAs behind the malfeasances of Tyco, HealthSouth, Haliburton, AIG, and WorldCom. Many executives of corporate America who hold MBAs have also been engaged in the unethical acts of raiding their corporate treasuries at the expense of employees and stockholders. Emulating President Bush’s hubris, a multitude of CEOs in corporate America give themselves obscenely large bonuses that have little to do with their performance. In 1980, the CEOs of Fortune 500 large corporations received, on average, 70 times larger annual compensations than their average employees. Under the Bush Administration, comparable CEOs have come to give themselves 600 to 1,000 times larger annual compensations than their rank-and-file employees whose pay has stagnated. To pay for such self-dealt compensations, corporate aristocrats layoff their workers, cut ordinary employees’ health benefits, and outsource jobs abroad. Under the Bush Administration, over five million Americans have lost their health benefits, and the U.S. has lost over 2.7 million quality manufacturing jobs. President Bush and his rapacious “captains of piracy” of corporate America are destroying America’s democracy built up since Roosevelt’s New Deal era.

Meanwhile, American economics study has increasingly become a pseudoscience of mathematical formula manipulation that is devoid of humanity. This economics has conquered America’s business education and become fused with the robber baron culture of greed supremacy. American MBAs are taught to treat ordinary employees as disposable costs and to swallow uncritically the gospel that corporations exist only to reward abstract stockholders. MBAs are taught the pretend-science of manipulating accounting, finance, employees, customers, and stock prices. Financial games and hostile takeovers of competitors are taught to accomplish corporations’ sole objective—to make money and manipulate stock prices. Such a mistaken view of corporations has caused the dismal decline of American auto manufacturers while Toyota and Honda widen their market shares and profits in America, pursuing their goals of expanding employment and technological innovations.

To justify the robber baron culture, America’s business educators and economists falsely cite their demigod of laissez-faire market economics, Adam Smith. Little do they know that Adam Smith in fact scathingly castigated Bush’s type of government: business collusion and unfair taxes, Wal-Mart’s exploitations of labor and communities, and robber barons’ hubris. Nowhere in his 900-page book, The Wealth of Nations, does Smith even imply that those who knowingly harm others and society in their pursuit of personal greed also benefit their society. He rejects the notion that a corporation exists to make money without ethical constraints.

Yoshi Tsurumi is a professor of international business at Baruch College. He earned his Doctor of Business Administration from Harvard in 1968, and he taught at Harvard Business School from 1972 to 1976.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=506836

Published on Thursday, January 20, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
The Robber Barons' Party
Let's Bring Tea
by Thom Hartmann

The Robber Barons are back.

They're staging a celebration of their power in Washington, DC, where they help write the majority of legislation and hold captive all but a very few of our nation's legislators. The television networks they own are showing the party in all its pomp and ceremony. The newspapers and magazines they own are telling us what a fine time is being had by all in Washington, DC. The radio stations, networks, and talk show hosts they own are reassuring us that they know what is best, that all will be well, that "freedom is on the march."

Every generation, it is often said, must relearn the lessons of history. This generation is getting a crash course.

Shall we have a government of, by, and for We, the People? Or shall we be governed by a powerful elite made up of the super-rich, multi-national corporations, and well-paid shills who do their bidding?

It seems that the shift from FDR's vision of We the People to Reagan's vision of corporate governance has only happened in the past thirty years - when Reagan, in his first inaugural address, declared war on We the People by saying: "Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem."

But it's really a battle that's gone back to 1762, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote "The Social Contract," and directly challenged - for the first time in nearly two thousand years - the idea that people must be governed by a powerful father-figure King, Pope, or Feudal Lord.

"Man was born free," Rousseau opened his book with, "and he is everywhere in chains." Those chains, he suggested, were forged by a belief that people's inherent nature was weak and evil, and people were incapable of governing themselves. Rousseau - and, following him, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Franklin, and others among our nation's Founders - rejected the belief that society would disintegrate without kings, popes, or rule by a rich elite.

But the need for an all-powerful ruling elite was a notion that was strongly ingrained in the mind of the Western World at the time of our founding.

Thomas Hobbes, one of history's most eloquent spokesmen for the Reagan/Bush/Imperial type of worldview, wrote in his 1651 magnum opus "Leviathan," that without a strong and iron-fisted ruler, "in every man is enemy to every [other] man...."

"In such condition," Hobbes added, "there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Thus, without a powerful father figure ruler, Hobbes suggested, "it may be perceived what manner of life there would be, where there were no common power to fear..."

Liberty, Hobbes believed, was a dangerous thing. It produced misery.

Liberty, Rousseau asserted, was necessary for the fulfillment of human potential, and could bring about a paradise on earth.

The Founders of our nation and Framers of our Constitution rejected Hobbes and embraced Rousseau. But how, they asked, to achieve that liberty?

The solution was found in flipping seven thousand years of history on its head. Instead of people being ruled in the Hobbesian fashion by kings, popes, or the rich (feudalism/fascism), they set up a form of government wherein the people themselves rule, through elected officials answerable solely to the voters.

But even in the day of the Founders, not everybody agreed.

The early Federalists largely shared Hobbes' point of view, as John Adams often pointed out in his letters to Thomas Jefferson and others. When the Democratic Party became corrupt during the 1800s, they embraced it. When the reformist Republican Party - brought to national prominence by Lincoln - degenerated into the party of the rich and the well-bred after Lincoln's death, it embraced it. Other than the misgivings of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republicans have held this view ever since the great split of 1872 when the reformers left the party over a platform battle and set out to form the populist and progressive movements.

Thus, we see, the real battle here is between those who believe that free people can govern themselves - and have the right to keep out powerful interests that would corrupt government - and those who believe that a powerful father-figure is necessary for governance, the people should be kept largely in ignorance, the rich know best, and that We the People will only behave well when, as Hobbes wrote, there is "a common power to keep them all in awe."

Today's real battles in Washington, DC, and in state capitols across the nation are not just about privatizing Social Security, or turning Medicare into a feeding trough for the big pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

They're not only about drilling for oil in the Arctic while refusing to increase fuel efficiency standards for cars, doing away with the $100,000 tax break for purchasers of SUVs, or opening millions of acres of wild lands to loggers, miners, and developers.

They're not even about Bush putting one of the nation's worst polluters in charge of the Department of Energy, an insurance-industry mogul in charge of HHS and its Medicare program, or his appointing the former assistant director of the Cato Institute's Project on Social Security Privatization as Associate Commissioner for Retirement Policy at the Social Security Administration. These are just symptoms.

Today's real battles in the halls of government are about the survival of democracy itself.

Of course, conservatives aren't going to say so quite as bluntly. Ronald Reagan had to reassure the American people that he wasn't going to run us into debt and then turn our nation over to the multinational corporations. In his first inaugural, he had to add, "Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work-work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back."

But who was that "us" Reagan spoke of?

Clearly it wasn't recipients of what conservatives call the "socialist" Social Security or Medicaid programs. It wasn't those of us who are pleased to have the protection of unionized police and fire departments, public roads, clean air and water, safe food and drugs. It wasn't the people who had fallen on hard times as their jobs were shipped overseas and they found themselves in unemployment lines or needing government assistance to get back on their feet.

Reagan's "us" - as history clearly shows - was the feudal/fascist corporate elite. As was George H. W. Bush's "us." And many of Bill Clinton's DLC's "us." And, so ostentatiously today, George W. Bush's "us."

As we view today's ostentatious celebration of the corporate takeover of our government, We the People are faced with an historic challenge. As Franklin Roosevelt said in 1936, as the result of "new uses of corporations" a "new royalty" has emerged in America.

"It was natural and perhaps human," Roosevelt said, "that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. ... And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man."

And, as in the days of the Minute Man, today we find inspiration in the Boston Tea Party-like effort of Barbara Boxer to challenge the Ohio vote, or her principled stand, along with John Kerry and Robert Byrd, against the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice.

The Founder's ideals - although under siege - are still alive in America.

They live on in the many Americans who support progressive causes with contributions, send letters to the editors of their local papers, make calls to talk shows, attend protest rallies, pamphleteer by email, correspond with their elected representatives, and support progressive candidates for office.

They live on with those who mourn George W. Bush's coronation, who turn their back on him and his policies, who daily work for social justice, equality, and a world at peace.

But democracy will only survive in this nation if people like you and me continue to stand up, speak out, and keep bringing tea to the party.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection," "We The People," "The Edison Gene", and "What Would Jefferson Do?."

http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print....s05/0120-24.htm

The Robber Barons Return as the Bush Gang,
Small Time Crime: Bush and Cheney,
Mega-Crime: Three Decades of Class Piracy
excerpted from the book
Robbing Us Blind
The Return of the Bush Gang and the Mugging of America
by Steve Brouwer
Common Courage Press, 2004, paper

p1

NUMBER OF AMERICANS WITH NO HEALTH INSURANCE YEAR
1982 25 million
2002 43.6 million

NUMBER OF BILLIONAIRES IN THE USA
1982 13
2002 229
p1
A band of rich thugs has mugged the United States of America. For the second time in twenty years, the Bush Gang-otherwise known as The Family or The Dynasty-is pilfering our pockets and emptying the public treasury. Under the direction of George W, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, the members of this criminal clique are plundering our country t: again, just as they did in the 1980s and early l990s. What is more, as the nation slips inexorably toward economic chaos, the Bush Gang is drowning out criticism with the noise of war drums and blinding the American people with a frenzy of waving flags. Rather than fix things at home, they want to enlist our help in plundering the world.
America's destiny is now linked to the reckless and selfish pursuits of a corporate elite who are disregarding the well-being of the United States. Like the "Robber Barons" in the Late nineteenth century, the Bush Gang is devoted to the business of fleecing the American people and buying out the last vestiges of honest government. Through their policies, their political alliances, and their personal behavior, the members of Bush Gang I encouraged various kinds of criminal behavior in the 1980s-massive financial fraud in the Savings and Loan industry, "junk bond" scandals on Wall Street, and widespread government malfeasance. When they left office in the early 1990s, they saddled us with a long recession and a tremendous national debt. When Bush Gang 11 returned to the scene in 2001 and 2002, we immediately became aware of their participation-at Harken and Halliburton, Enron and Arthur Andersen-in a massive corporate crime wave that included many of the nation's biggest accounting firms, insurance companies, manufacturers, and financial institutions.
On top of this corporate criminality, the members of the Bush Gang were the central agents in thievery of even greater magnitude, the "mega-crime" of our era. They began to engineer the systematic robbery of the income and wealth of American working people during the 1980s, then pressured a weak Democratic administration to acquiesce to most of their demands in the 1990s, and finally resumed their project with renewed vigor with George W. Bush's election in 2000. This mega crime has resulted in the wholesale redistribution of money to a very small minority of wealthy Americans, thus leading to inexcusable levels of economic and social inequality in the United States. Consequently, our political system now resembles, as it did a century ago, a plutocracy-a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.
... more importantly, the Bush Gang represents a much larger group, the ultra-conservative, corporate upper class that has taken over our country just as they did a century ago. The last time a tiny, self centered minority held so much power, dominating the United States through their control of "Money Power" and the Republican Party, they were called the "Robber Barons." Though it might seem unfair to pick on a particular family by recasting the Robber Barons as the Bush Gang, these guys deserve the attention. The roots of Bush family power extend back to the beginning of the 20th century-George W and Jeb really are the great-grandchildren of the Robber Barons. The Bush family has a long record-their involvement in upper-class investment schemes, their promotion of dangerous intrigues in foreign affairs, their long-time participation in Republican politics, and their membership in a variety of elite institutions-that makes them ideal examples of how the corporate upper class maintains and wields its power in the United States.
p3
The Bush Gang is throwback to "The Gilded Age," that time over a hundred years ago when wealth was worshipped in all its forms and the nation was ruled by a band of notorious financiers and capitalists, which is why people called them Robber Barons.
p3
The economic and social evidence is overwhelming: the Bush Gang and the new generation of thieves have orchestrated a massive redistribution of America's wealth. They have taken from the poor, from the working class, and from a wide swath of the middle class, and given to the rich-that is, to themselves. The share of national income that goes to the bottom nine-tenths of the American people, the large majority who reside at the base of the economic pyramid, shrank from 67% of the total in the late 1970s to about 52% twenty years later. Analysis of statistics kept by the Internal Revenue Service shows that almost all of this missing income was redistributed to the very richest Americans, the top one percent of our population-in fact, their take of the loot, already a robust 9.3% of all American income in 1979, had more than doubled, to 20.8%, by 2000.
When you are being dispossessed, when your assets and income are shrinking due to the activities of others, then you are being robbed. When the perpetrators organize themselves purposefully to dispossess you, when they plunder your savings, then it is fair to call them a "gang." One dictionary definition fits them perfectly: "Gang-a group of people working together for criminal, disreputable ends."
Our whole notion of freedom in the United States is based upon a the willingness of citizens to speak up and throw self-satisfied elites out of power. Those who fought against the "Money Power" in the past, such as the Kansas farmers who helped invent the term "Robber Barons" in the 1880s, never apologized for calling them a criminal class. Mary Ellen Lease, an outspoken Populist leader of the time, told her Midwestern audiences that they could not afford to be shy. "Raise less corn and more hell!" she said.
She also told them where to go to recover their lost farms and stolen wages: "Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, or for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street."
Over the past few decades in the United States, there has been little popular criticism of the "elite," the small class of people who dominate corporate ownership and management. Obviously many critical voices are blocked by the corporations themselves, since they have successfully monopolized the major media. But there is another factor. There are no prominent politicians castigating members of the monied elite and calling them "malefactors of great wealth." And though some of us have heard vague references to "The Gilded Age," we seldom hear it applied to the society we live in today. Was the slogan invented by cranky losers who missed out on the American success story? Not so. The United States' most famous and humorous writer of the nineteenth century, Mark Twain, wrote his wickedly satirical novel, The Gilded Age, in 1873, thus giving a name to the first great wave of American corporate and financial thievery. The theme reappeared constantly in his writing for over forty years. When one of the most famous criminals of the era, the railroad scam artist and financier known as Jay Gould, died in 1892, Twain offered a mock eulogy:
The people had desired money before his day, but he taught them to fall down and worship it.... The gospel left behind by Jay Gould is doing giant work in our days. Its message is 'Get money. Get it quickly. Get it in abundance. Get it in prodigious abundance. Get it dishonestly if you can, honestly if you must.
In those days, the powerful indictments of a variety of outraged Americans-populist Democrats, trade union organizers, progressive Republicans, home-grown and immigrant socialists-changed our political culture. With their strong sense of morality and their powerful voices, they condemned "Money Power" for creating a culture of greed and dishonesty. The struggle against the corrupt supremacy of the rich went on for so long, roughly from 1865 to 1935, that three or four generations of Americans had to rebound from discouraging defeats before they finally triumphed. Along the way, they recruited the help of people from all social classes. One of them, President Theodore Roosevelt, the descendent of a wealthy New York family and a Republican, had the courage to defy a substantial sector of his own party and say: "We hold it to be a prime duty of the people to free our government from the control of money." In the same fashion, Woodrow Wilson, a fairly conservative Democrat, echoed the rhetoric of the populist chorus: "The masters of the government of the United States," he said, "are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States."
Even with such contributions at the presidential level, the popular campaign to promote more honest politics and progressive taxation faltered in the early decades of the 20th century. After World War I, the rich counterattacked by mounting an extraordinary celebration of the glory of their own money. Their exuberant excesses-cutting taxes, speculating in finance, and buying every possible extravagance (three attributes which reappeared in the 1980s and 1990s)-eventually brought the Roaring Twenties down to earth with an abrupt crash.
The Great Depression led to the disgrace and the downfall of the aristocracy of money. Franklin Roosevelt, backed by a massive popular coalition of working people, realized that it was in the interests of his party to keep the rich at bay and he was determined to keep it that way after his re-election in 1936: "I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it, these forces met their master."
That never quite happened. But for decades the equality and dignity fostered by the New Deal kept the nation focused on the health and happiness of middle-class and working-class Americans. The ultra-rich paid their high taxes, and lo and behold, they survived quite well, just slightly less wealthy than before. No aristocrats were marched off to the guillotine, nor did the nation's industries and businesses starve for capital. In fact, the United States lived through a golden era, from the 1940s to the 1970s, in which most of its citizens enjoyed unprecedented levels of economic growth and prosperity.
In recent decades, citizens of the United States of America developed amnesia about the financial piracy of the past. Many of us slipped into a delusional state, worshipping the gods of finance and luxury, tantalizingly displayed in ubiquitous advertising but not really within our reach, while forgetting that our real priorities still concerned work, family, and community. Some, it seemed, were bowing down before the false idols of Dow Jones and Wall Street and chanting the incantations they found in Money, Invest, and Fortune. Meanwhile most families were struggling to stay afloat, with mothers and fathers working many more hours per week simply to avoid slipping behind and going further into debt.
The "Bush Gang" Represents Unrestrained Upper Class Power
For years a number of authors, myself included, have written about the growing inequality in America. In the 1980s, I criticized the ultra-conservative path pursued by the Reagan/Bush administrations. And in the l990s I took the Clinton administration to task for doing too little to reverse this reactionary course, for all too often they simply acquiesced to the demands of powerful corporate interests. Many thoughtful writers were raising similar warnings-from moderate, liberal, and left perspectives-but, all in all, they barely touched the consciousness of most Americans. During the euphoria generated by the enormous Internet and stock market "bubble" of the late l990s, it was difficult to get anyone to pay attention to the pressing problems of real life on earth, such as repairing the social fabric of our country and fairly sharing the fruits of our labor.
From the vantage point of a new century, we can see that our worst suspicions have been confirmed. Economic analysis shows that the increasing inequality in the United States was not an unfortunate or transitory phenomenon, but the result of systematic plundering by the rich. Historical perspective places the Bush family and its political associates at the heart of this privileged elite. For this reason, the "Bush Gang" becomes a convenient and accurate metaphor for describing how the corporate upper class and the ultra-right wing of the Republican Party have manipulated the economy and the government for their own selfish ends.
From the moment the first George Bush took over leadership of the Task Force on Regulatory Relief in 1981, the Bush Gang mounted a very effective program of dismantling the rules and regulations that had controlled the predatory instincts of big business ever since the Great Depression. This led to the emergence of a new, low-wage corporate model that utilized every possible method of exploiting working people. In later chapters, we will explore how diverse corporate actors-WalMart, the meat-packing industry, and for-profit health care providers-used a combination of business deregulation and the outright coercion of labor to make their employees work harder, faster, longer, and for less pay. Squeezing working people-this is the legacy of the Bush dynasty. They did not do this primarily to be cruel; they did it to make more money.
And since we are talking about an upper class gang whose prime objective in life is money, we will devote considerable time focusing on how the rich have been getting it and keeping it-their methods of hauling in income; their preoccupation with accumulating wealth and capital; their obsession with avoiding taxes in order to augment their income and wealth all the more; and their insatiable appetite for other people's savings and Social Security.
We will also look at some important ideological elements that have helped the Bush brand of capitalism win out over American democracy. Their belief in the value of capital takes priority over all other human values; their support for the anti-democratic legal apparatus of corporations protects their class advantages; their isolation in elite organizations warps their ideas and social relations (the Bushes' Skull and Bones club is a prime example); and their monopolization of news and information in the corporate media spreads their views widely among the general population.
Finally, we will consider political questions that are of immense importance to the future of American democracy. What kind of lust for power and profit is driving the Bush Gang's compulsion to take over the world? Do the American people realize that they are rapidly losing both their money and their ability to influence their government?
George W and the Renewed Urge to Plunder and Pillage
Ever since the 1980s, grave damage has been done to the institutions that promote democracy and equality. The ultra-conservative program of serving the wealthy and punishing lower income Americans became so well-entrenched, even among many Democrats, that it ultimately gave free rein to corporate thievery. During the Clinton years, the Democratic Party occasionally tried to limit the most egregious methods which the corporate class used to bilk the majority of working Americans, but in most respects they fell under the influence of the Bush Gang, too. Frightened off by the vicious attacks mounted by the Republican Congress and the pit bulls of talk radio, Democrats attended to the agenda of their own wealthy campaign donors. For this reason, there was no effective Democratic opposition to the initiatives of the Bush Administration in 2001, even though the Democrats won more popular votes in the 2000 election.
This abdication of responsibility by the j Democrats allowed the reassembled Bush Gang to pursue the same objectives that guided the United States when Ronald Reagan and the first Bush Gang took office twenty years earlier. They wanted to 1 ) give huge tax breaks to the wealthy and the corporations; 2) begin a military build-up that reaps very high profits for defense industries; 3 ) ignore the increasing indebtedness of the private sector and the federal government; 4) disregard the general welfare of most citizens and their natural environment; 5) deregulate almost all corporate activity and financial markets; 6) limit constitutional freedoms and the rights of working people.
When the younger Bush was inaugurated, the U.S. government had a federal surplus o $129 billion. But less than two years later, by the autumn of 2002, the deficit hit $157 billion and kept growing, with shortfalls of over $450 billion predicted for 2003 and 2004.
p13
Robert Brenner, director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA
Between 1995 and 1999, the value of stock options granted to US executives more than quadrupled, from $26.5 billion to $110 billion, or one-fifth of non-financial corporate profits, net of interest. In 1992, corporate CEOs held 2 percent of the equity of US corporations; today, they own 12 percent. This ranks among the most spectacular acts of expropriation in the history of capitalism.
p13
An interesting analysis by United for a | Fair Economy (UFE), which specializes in interpreting economic trends for a popular audience, looked at the compensation of corporate CEOs whose companies were being investigated for improprieties by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US Justice Department, and other authorities. In the 23 major companies examined, including AOL Time Warner, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Kmart, Lucent Technologies. and Xerox, the CEOs were paid a combined total of over $1.4 billion from 1999 through 2001, or an average of $62.2 million each for the three year period. In contrast, the average CEO at the top 500 US corporations had cumulative earnings averaging $36.5 million for the same period of three years. Crime, it seems, was paying well, double the going rate for more honest executives. For the shareholders of these 23 companies, there was a different story-they lost $530 billion in stock value, or more than 73 per cent. Many workers at these companies, 162,000 of them, fared the worst- q7 they lost their jobs..
In September of 2002, Fortune surveyed 1,035 large companies whose market value had dropped at least 75 percent and found that insiders had cashed out to the tune of $66 billion, since January 1999.
p15
According to Federal Election Commission data, Bush received more than twice as much as Gore in individual campaign contributions for the 2000 election. He took in $101 million to Gore's $45 million. In order to gain this $56 million advantage, the Bush campaign sacrificed about $15 million in federal funds.
p20
Theft and Plutocracy
Lobbyists and corporations were dangling the bait for all comers throughout the 1990s. Many Democrats were scared silly that they would fall far behind the levels of political funding achieved by their rivals. They had good reason; they had lost badly in the money-raising races during the Reagan/Bush I years. So off they went, scurrying after big business, currying favor in the most obsequious ways. Clinton, with his "New Democratic" image that kept working people and unions at arms length, was quite adept at using the power of the White House to attract corporate donations, particularly from the burgeoning financial sector that loved his Secretary of the Treasury, Wall Street dynamo Robert Rubin.
Probably no one on the Democratic side outdid Joe Lieberman, the 2000 candidate for vice president and long-time devotee of the probusiness contingent known as the Democratic Leadership Council. He was a major supporter, often working hand-in-hand with Republicans, of changes in accounting rules and tax preferences that led directly to abuses of stock options and corporate bookkeeping. When the Senate pushed through rules stipulating that stock options given to employees (and in particular, to CEOs) did not have to be reported as expenses, this allowed corporate boards to keep grossly overcompensating their chief executives while inflating the levels of corporate profits at the same time. Many CEOs then went so far as to drive up the price of their newly acquired stock with bookkeeping tricks and sold off their inflated holdings through insider trading schemes before the stock values fell. After these scandals became public in 2002, Lieberman pretended to be appalled at the lack of corporate oversight by public watchdog agencies. But Arthur Levitt, the former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, had been deeply frustrated when Lieberman and others undermined his attempts to catch fraudulent behavior. He called the Democrat to account when he said:
Where was Lieberman? He was busy tying up the SEC in knots over auditors' independence, over the budget, and over options accounting.
Clinton and his henchmen did not cause the corporate crime wave, but were reacting to the burgeoning "Money Power" that had enveloped American politics. They felt they had no choice but to bargain with the big-time corporate brokers who had been feeding at the Republican trough throughout the 1980s. The "New Democrats" seldom showed the slightest interest in reviving the substantial ideas of the Old Democrats, such as instituting universal health care or restoring the rights of laboring people, themes that date back to the robust promises of the New Deal. In general, the Democrats were easily frightened back into line by a rabidly right-wing Congress and were held prisoner to the economic course that was dictated by big business.
p22
historian Sidney Schama
... the United States Inc. is currently being run by an oligarchy, conducting its affairs with a plutocratic effrontery which in comparison makes the age of the robber barons in the late 19th century seem a model of capitalist rectitude.
p26
Americans in the 1970s were starting to make demands that seemed unreasonable to the most powerful leaders of our economic institutions. Citizens groups agitated and petitioned for many things, and among their demands were the following: clean up the environment and stop burning so much oil; use workers' pension funds, which were burgeoning, to govern corporations in a more democratic manner; free up the labor process and wake unions up from their lethargic state; promote more opportunities and better wages for minorities and women; restrict the kinds of imperialistic policies that had led to the Vietnam War; and keep progressing on civil rights.
The prospect of a more democratic America was threatening to the rich in the early to mid-1970s. The bastion of big business, The Business Roundtable, which represented 200 of the largest American corporations, was formed under the guidance of John Connally, President Nixon's Secretary of Treasury.
p27
Nixon and Connally helped the Business Roundtable get started on plans to reassert corporate power and use the vast resources of big business to mold public opinion. The Roundtable asserted that "chief executives of major corporations should take an increased role in the continuing debates about public policy." Elite organizations dominated by Wall Street bankers, executives, and lawyers, such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, began discussing the problem of "too much democracy" in both industrialized and developing countries. They were finding it difficult to control the new varieties of political movements that were springing up everywhere. And new think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, or obscure ones given new life, such as the American Enterprise Institute, were suddenly funded in lavish style by a bevy of ultra-conservative, ultra-rich families such as Coors, Mellon, Bradley, and Olin. They were ready to launch their highly ideological, right-wing agenda into the middle of American politics.
As the moderately conservative elite and the very conservative foundations mounted their offensive, they were joined, for various reasons, by a number of middle-class allies: fundamentalist evangelists who proclaimed the moral decline of the United States; "nativist whites" who worried that they would lose ground if economic and political opportunities were extended to Hispanics and Blacks and Asians; and a variety of home-owners and small business owners who were being pinched financially and wanted to have their taxes reduced, and so naively threw in their lot with big business.
The Arrival of Bush Gang I
In the '80s, these economic and political forces combined to establish a new ultra-conservative, Republican era of government that has dominated the United States ever since. This power shift to the extreme right, with its unabashed devotion to the needs of rich Americans and the biggest corporations, has been attributed to various factors over the years-for instance, to the "Reagan Revolution" in the early '80s, the "New Christian Right" in the late '80s, or Newt Gingrich's "Conservative Revolution" in Congress in the mid '9Os. Looking backwards from the 21st century, however, it is apparent that this has been the era of the "Bush Gang." The Bush family and their political allies have been the dominant influence in and around the White House and they are perfect representatives of the ascendant upper class.
p28
Once in office, the Reagan and Bush regime immediately embarked on a campaign to lower taxes on the rich, cut regulation of business, restrict the activities of organized labor, and cut back on federal assistance for education, health, and other social needs.
p28
... the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was established in the 1930s to protect the right of Americans to bargain for a fair wage. The Reagan-Bush team did not abolish labor laws or the NLRB; it simply stacked the Board with appointees who were sure to take the side of big business in any disputes with labor unions. This tactic, combined with a reluctance to enforce regulatory laws on pollution and safety, allowed corporations to increase their profits without raising wages at the same time. Then, to make those profits even more valuable, income taxes on corporations and rich individuals were sharply cut. At the same time, many Americans experienced a decline in their wages and their standard of living, while almost all Americans were working more hours than they had in the 1970s and paying higher social security taxes.
Their first time through, riding into Washington on the coattails of Ronald Reagan, the Bush Gang and their associates pulled off a two-pronged assault on the stability of the economy. They approved large spending increases that benefited military contractors (their former business associates) by an inordinate amount. They let their campaign contributors and political pals play fast and loose with the nation's banking system. And through it all they got much richer.
Despite the shaky state of both the economy and the average family's finances at the end of the 1980s, the first Bush Gang kept basing its decisions on a very narrow foundation defined by parameters of accumulated wealth. When George I became President in 1989, he brought in three especially trusted associates with him: Secretary of Treasury Nicholas Brady, Secretary of State James Baker, and Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher. These old friends not only shared Bush's upper class training and background, but they also had a collective net worth of about $250 million between them.
By 1991, the average American family with the median income of $37,340 was working much more than it had twelve years earlier (two-earner families increased their working hours by about 10%), but hardly making more than they had in 1979 (less than a 3% increase; according to figures provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, the gain was less than a thousand dollars). This typical family was paying 27.6% of their income in combined federal, state, and local taxes.
The richest Americans fared much better, increasing their before-tax incomes by over 60% over the same period, while their overall tax rates continually declined until they approximated those paid by average citizens. One prominent example was the household of President George H.W. Bush, whose income varied from $0.5 million to $1.3 million per year from 1989 to 1991. Their total tax rate-state, local, and federal-ranged from 18% to 27%. The rate would have been higher except that George I listed his residence as a hotel in Texas, not the White House or the family home in Maine. Texas has no income tax, whereas the District of Columbia and the State of Maine levy a healthy income tax on the rich.
By 1992 most Americans were left with a very bad taste in their mouths. Not only had they been deprived of growth in their incomes but they were also saddled with a worrisome federal deficit and a steep recession. Twelve years of Reagan and Bush budget deficits, largely caused by a failure to collect sufficient taxes from the rich and by the expense of a ballooning defense budget, had more than quadrupled the federal debt. It climbed from less than $1 trillion when they took office to more than $4 trillion when they left. The American economy was a wreck-the commercial banking and financial system had barely survived numerous scandals, while the savings and loan system had been so thoroughly looted that taxpayers were left to pick up the bill that would climb to $500 billion (when annual interest payments were applied).
During the Clinton years a combination of factors-higher rates of taxation on the rich, the Earned Income Tax Credit granted to many low-paid workers, an increase in the minimum wage, and a period of lower unemployment- seemed to slow the growth of income inequality. But on many other issues, Clinton caved into the pressure of the mounting challenges from the conservatives. His willingness to lower the capital gains tax from 28% to 20% signaled an enthusiasm for aiding the big financial and investment institutions and the people who profited from them. His unwillingness to keep pursuing health care reform betrayed most Americans, and especially lower-income working people.
During the Clinton years a combination | of factors-higher rates of taxation on the rich, the Earned Income Tax Credit granted to many low-paid workers, an increase in the minimum wage, and a period of lower unemployment- seemed to slow the growth of income inequality. But on many other issues, Clinton caved into the pressure of the mounting challenges from the conservatives. His willingness to lower the capital gains tax from 28% to 20% signaled an enthusiasm for aiding the big financial and investment institutions and the people who profited from them. His unwillingness to keep pursuing health care reform betrayed most Americans, and especially lower-income working people.
p31
Clinton and Gore abandoned the natural constituency of the party that had been built up by the followers of Franklin Roosevelt during the Depression and the Second World War. That is to say, the Democrats were so busy trying to compete with the Republicans in wooing the wealthy and the upper-middle class that they did little of substance to serve working Americans. In fact, they often sided with the allies of the Bush Gang in promoting reactionary policies, such as the so-called "welfare reform," that punished the poor. No one was helping the wage and salary earners, the farmers and small business people, and the retired people ... had depended on strong government
p32
... political discussion in the United States is usually restricted to the moderate to conservative range that precludes discussion of class conflict. If "class warfare" is mentioned, it is because a conservative wants to suggest that certain matters should be kept off-limits in American political discussion ...
p34
According to The Washington Post, the president, the vice president, and their cabinet were the richest men ever to take over the executive branch of government. In particular, five of them-Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans, and Secretary of State Colin Powell-were together worth about $600 million dollars, according to their own self-disclosure statements. George W's own wealth was a little more modest, in the $20 to $30 million range, but that estimate did not take into consideration large sums he might inherit from his parents some day.
Most of these men, and the larger raiding party they brought into government with them, had already served loyally under the Reagan/Bush I administrations and they knew the routine very well. In the first half of the year 2001 they immediately reverted to the modus operandi that had been set forth back in 1981:
* Give extraordinary tax relief to very rich citizens and corporations.
* Build up the military with rapid increases in defense spending and weapons procurement. * Assert a very aggressive posture in international relations.
* Offer every possible kind of deregulation of business activity.
* Overlook the criminal activity of the businessmen who support their agenda. * Disregard the very real possibility of large federal deficits.
p34
The tax legislation of 2001 promised tax savings for all, which was only true to the extent that many average taxpayers enjoyed a small rebate on their 2001 tax payments (due to an amendment that originated in the Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives, not in the Bush administration). The real money, however, was written into the full ten-year program-52% of the tax benefits went to the richest 1% of Americans ...
p35
The Bush administration immediately renounced a series of foreign agreements, including the Kyoto Agreement on Global Warming and the International Criminal Court, that would have held it to true international standards. It also signaled the United Nations that it did not necessarily intend to comply with future U.N. decisions.
p35
As the depth of the economic downturn became apparent, the Bush administration did not pursue a broad-based plan of economic stimulus. Although they might have used deficit spending in a positive way to revive the incomes of average Americans or invest in public infrastructure, the Bush Gang chose instead to follow the exact same course that had led to very wasteful deficits throughout the 1980s and early l990s. They kept expanding the tax cuts for the rich at the same time they were increasing expenditures on defense and new weaponry. Thus, within their first year of retaking office, Bush Gang 11 relinquished the entire government surplus that had been so carefully cultivated in the previous few years and set a pattern for incurring large deficits for the coming decade.
In short, the Bush Gang immediately delivered the goods in 2001 that wealthy Republican supporters had paid for in advance.
p36
Bush Gang II wanted to eliminate the federal estate tax, the levy on inherited wealth that falls almost exclusively on the very rich. Currently, inheritance taxes only affect the top 2% of the population, and for most of those people who leave estates under $5 million, the consequences are generally mild. Estate taxes are designed to take the biggest chunk from a much tinier segment of the populace, the super rich-people like George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. In 1999, for instance, half of all federal inheritance taxes were paid by only 3,300 estates that had an average value of $17 million apiece.

Stealing Our Livelihood,
Hiding the Loot,
Taxes: Would Robbers Cheat?,
Breaking and Entering
excerpted from the book
Robbing Us Blind
The Return of the Bush Gang and the Mugging of America
by Steve Brouwer
Common Courage Press, 2004, paper
p39
If we look back to the beginning of the 20th century, around the time the Internal Revenue Service began keeping reliable income statistics, it is clear | that a huge share of American income ~ was controlled by the very rich, the top 1% of the population, and the upper middle class, the 9% below them. The trend reached its height during the runaway stock market boom of 1925-1929 when the top one-tenth raked in 47%-50% of all income. This happened in part because Andrew Mellon, the Republican Secretary of the Treasury throughout the 1920s, had succeeded in slashing the taxes of the upper class in 1926. This unleashed rampant financial speculation on the part of the rich. In 1928, just before the stock market crash of 1929, the top one tenth of Americans grabbed exactly half of the income, with the top one per cent gobbling up almost a quarter, or 24%, all by themselves. This left just 50% of all income for the large majority of Americans, the bottom nine tenths who did not benefit from the financial boom.
Although the Great Depression and the stricter regimen of the New Deal dampened the spirits of the rich throughout the 1930s, no one threw those "robber barons" in jail. But they did have to relinquish some of their power. Taxes were raised dramatically on the wealthiest citizens and the government provided work for masses of unemployed people through a variety of public programs. Most important, the U.S. Iabor movement for the first time in history was allowed to operate and organize freely after the Wagner Act was passed in 1935; it set up the National Labor Relations Board to protect workers' democratic rights and allowed the newly formed CIO to organize millions of factory workers and miners in industrial unions. Still, it took almost a decade for these measures, followed by the massive increases in industrial production required for World War 11, to really shift the economic playing field so it benefited the great majority of Americans. By the 1940s, economic outcomes were much more favorable for working people, whether they were wage earners, small proprietors, or salaried employees.
p40
For a remarkably long time, for over four decades from 1942 to 1985, the income share of the top 10% of American households was corralled within the range of 32-34%, while working people brought home a much bigger chunk of the bacon, 66-68%, than they had ever enjoyed before. Their high point, 68% of all personal income, was reached in the early 1950s. It was no accident that this occurred precisely when the percentage of union members among all employed people reached the level of 35-38%, which was an all-time high in the U.S. At the same time in some European countries, the rate of unionization rose as high as 60% to 90%, and included most white collar as well as blue collar workers.
p40
... toward the end of the 20th century ... the levels of taxation on the very wealthy had fallen so sharply that the worst sorts of speculation and corporate gambling were encouraged. The Bush Gang and their fellow travelers including many conservative Democrats) had managed to accomplish the same things that Calvin Coolidge and Andrew Mellon had engineered back in the Twenties.
By 1996-2000, the very wealthy and the upper middle class, the top 10% of the American population, were again collecting well over 40% of all personal income, finally reaching a level of 44% to 48% in 1999-2000.
p43
The stock market, though supposedly "democratized," is still primarily serving the immediate needs of the very rich. Mainstream press accounts have thoroughly exaggerated the amount of stock ownership among average Americans. It is true that more than 52% of Americans owned stock in some form in 2001, either through direct ownership or indirect means, such as mutual funds, retirement accounts, 401(k)s, and defined contribution pensions. On the other hand, their amounts of ownership were pitifully small. In 1998, the average stock holdings of people on the bottom rungs of economic ladder, the lowest 40%, were just $1,700 (only about 6% of this near-majority of Americans owned any stocks or mutual funds at all). The average stock holdings of someone in the middle 20% only amounted to $9,200; but the amount of stock held by the richest 1% was extraordinarily high, an average of $2,525,200, according to economist Edward N. Wolff. These very rich citizens held 48% of all publicly traded corporate stock ...
p46
Business leaders of the 1970s ... were upset by their mediocre returns on investment and wanted to increase corporate profitability... Upon taking office in 1981, the Reagan/Bush administration immediately designated working people-in particular, unionized citizens-as the enemy. As a demonstration of their resolve, they first attacked PATCO, the air controllers' union and forced all employees to resign; then they packed the National Labor Relations Board with anti-labor members. Unions, in their view, were a major cause of their mediocre profits. These businessmen and friends of big business tended to ignore the overriding international reality, that profits had fallen because capitalist industry worldwide had built up a tremendous overcapacity of production, thus competition between countries and corporations was driving down profit rates. This has been the classic example of capitalist crisis ever since Karl Marx identified it 150 years ago. Obviously, our captains of industry seldom read Marx or the able critics of capitalism who have followed in his wake up until the present day.
p47
By the early 1990s, the corporate anti-union campaign was supplemented by the overwhelming popularity of "downsizing" among corporate executives, who started laying off their employees like crazy, often dumping as many white collar employees as blue collar. The lay-offs and increased pressure on remaining workers were two of the factors that helped push profit rates up by the mid-1990s. The median wage for American men was $11.62 in 1995, exactly $2.04 below the male median wage in 1979, when its value was $13.66 (figures adjusted for inflation in 1995 dollars).
p48
Economist Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2002
The real median hourly wage in 1973 was $12.45 - measured in 2000 dollars. In 2000, it was about $12.90. Considering that the U.S. economy grew by 72 percent on a per-capita basis during that period, somebody got shafted.
p49
In 1980, the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies earned 42 times as much as the average American worker; by 1999, they earned 531 times as much. How was this possible?
It happened because the CEOs, with the help of senior managers working under them and the backing of elite conservative political supporters, were able to break or bypass the bargaining power of workers' unions and then harness all the desperate labor power of the unorganized. The CEOs did their job, according to the dominant ideology among the owners of capital, which was to maximize profits and stock value while minimizing labor costs.
p50
Paying for labor ... was not popular among America's corporate leaders and owners. Or to put it another way, they realized that not paying for labor was the most direct path to profits. This tactic has been a favorite of the owners of property ever since the great empires of antiquity imposed slave labor upon their subjects and the people they conquered. Feudal arrangements were hardly better, for the noble owners of productive property, the land, were always tempted to see just how little food and other necessities were required to sustain their working peasants. And in the primitive stages of capitalism, when globalization of trade by the Europeans opened up vast new opportunities to exploit labor, slavery was reintroduced as a method of extracting the highest return on investment. In the extreme, some plantation owners, for instance the English on their sugar islands in the Caribbean, found it "economical" to simply work their slaves to death, then acquire new ones.
Slave owners occasionally made a calculation that was remarkably similar to the one that was so popular with American CEOs operating in the supposedly "advanced" mode of late 20th century capitalism. Plantation overseers, especially those who were hired to produce very fast profits by absentee owners, decided it was more "efficient" to work people so hard that they were simply discarded, dead or alive. No one cared about the long-term health of the working people, the condition of the land, or the economic enterprise because those in charge-both plantation managers and owners-wanted to get their money quickly and get out.
This is not to say that contemporary American capitalists have determined that working people will be whipped and beaten until they keel over and die at their typewriters or cash registers. But clearly they did notice that American workers, being among the best-paid people in the world, could labor more hours and survive on less money than we did before. In the eyes of the corporate class of the late 20th century, the wages, salaries, and incomes of the large majority of Americans were downwardly flexible, and could bend and yield so that capital could be well served. Paying capital, at the highest rate possible, was in great favor because first, it is the primary job of capitalists to cultivate their capital. Secondly, as they experimented with limiting wage growth, restricting labor organizations, and subjecting workers to more stress, pollution, and injuries in the work place, there was not enough outrage expressed on the part of the general public and the forces of organized labor had become too weak to muster resistance all on their own. With relatively small expenditures of money, most conservative members of the owning class supported this reactionary change in our political economy. They found it easy to bankroll anti-labor campaigns within corporations and pro-wealth campaigns on the political circuit.
p53
Ronald Reagan, 1981, on signing the law deregulatilng the savings and loan industry
"I think we hit the jackpot with this one."
p53
Ronald Reagan
"What want to see above all is that this remains a country where someone can always get rich."
p54
... the richest 1% of the population, families with average fortunes of about $12 million as of 2002
... Below them, another 9% of the population is not doing badly, since they hold 38% of all stock in their hands and about as much of all financial assets. In the eyes of everyone but the top 1%, this 9% seems quite rich because the assets of the families in this group average about $1.1 million (ranging, in very rough terms, when all their assets, houses and possessions are included, from less than $600,000 to more than $2,000,000).
... The average wealth of the top 1 % was over $10 million per family in 1998, climbed to over $14 million in 2001, and settled back to around $12 million in 2002.
... the poorest 90% of the population, only own about 14% of corporate stock and 20% of all financial assets ...
p60
Ivan Boesky in a 1985 UC Berkeley commencement speech
"Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.
p60
The looting of the savings and loan industry [1980s] caused the failure of an entire wing of the banking industry. The S&Ls were originally created for the legally designated purpose of serving community homeowners. They promptly shifted gears as soon as they were deregulated in 1981, and began investing heavily in risky real estate development schemes instead. Their subsequent collapse left American taxpayers with a staggering bill to pay off, $500 billion when interest was included. The commercial real estate collapse in America's big cities and suburbs was set up by similar circumstances-a combination of deregulation, a stampede of legally questionable limited partnerships, changes in accelerated depreciation rules, and the manipulation of other tax laws. The losses of the large commercial banks were estimated to be even greater than the S&Ls, at $1 trillion and up. In this case, because the whole economy was at risk, corporate giants like Citibank were rescued through huge injections of capital from the Federal Reserve banks and very rich foreign investors.
In the 1980s, there was a warning sign about the nature of the Bush clan that should have been heeded. The family was showing a pronounced tendency to involve themselves in the wave of piracy that was endangering the financial health of the whole nation. While our current president was one case in point, and his Uncle Jonathan was banned from selling brokerage securities, the example of Neil Bush, brother of George W, was the most blatant. Neil probably had as many failed business ventures as George W, but some were more spectacular, especially the Silverado Savings and Loan in Colorado, which lost more than $1 billion when p it collapsed in the late 1980s.
From the figures above the reader can appreciate the fact that the fines assessed against Neil and his ganglet were far less than the real criminal damage to the economy and the taxpayers' pocketbooks. Moreover, Neil and his buddies did not really pay the damages, for the entire $49.5 million was paid off by liability insurance on their S&L and a special "legal defense fund" the Silverado directors had wisely created even before the institution collapsed and they were investigated. The cost of this one white-collar crime was far greater than all the armed bank robberies committed in the United State in 1987.
Neil Bush had found a way to pass on millions in unsecured loans to his friends, but did not seem to profit much himself from this criminal escapade. Undeterred, he promptly went out and signed up for a loan from the Small Business Administration, and received $2.35 million to finance his next endeavor, Apex Energy. That business flopped and he never repaid the loan.
Neil Bush's transgressions were but light snowflakes atop the tip of a giant corporate iceberg of crime, most of which stayed hidden from sight. The large majority of savings and loan irregularities were not properly investigated or prosecuted, even though the Federal Home Loan Bank Board found evidence of fraud and other criminal activity by managers and directors at 75% of the failing S&Ls. When the Office of Thrift Supervision was investigating Neil Bush's tricks in 1990 and decided not to prosecute, this undoubtedly had something to do with his father, George H.W., being president of the United States. The Bush family could have rightly claimed that their son was not getting preferential treatment because almost all the criminals working the same territory, the savings and loan racket, were going unpunished.
The first Bush administration let them all walk free! This gets to the essence of the Bush Gang's criminal influence over the past twenty years. More important than their own personal transgressions has been their propensity to let anything go. They deregulated and then looked the other way because these were their friends at work. The decade of the 1980s had produced theft, fraud, and undisciplined gambling with America's vast wealth. Business values had deteriorated to the point, said Business Week in a famous cover story, that America had become a "Casino Society.''
p65
Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, 1776
... as Henry Home (Lord Kames) has written, a goal of taxation should be to 'remedy inequality of riches as much as possible, by relieving the poor and burdening the rich.'
p65
When the Bush Gang moved into Washington in the 1980s they initiated another massive tax giveaway for themselves and their friends. Maximum tax rates on the richest individuals were lowered from 70% to 50% to 28%, so they were able to keep a bigger share of their rapidly growing pre-tax income.
Effective taxation on high incomes has always been lower than the official top rates because of the special tax categories and tax shelters granted to the rich. Therefore even when the Democrats increased the top marginal income tax to 39.6% in 1993, it produced a much more modest increase, from 22% to 27%, in the amount of taxes actually collected from the wealthiest Americans in 1996. When Bush Gang II returned to Washington in 2001 they immediately took up the task of individual tax reduction again, once again favoring themselves and other wealthy Americans by lowering their effective tax rate to 25% for 2001, with further reductions to 23% slated a few years down the line. They were simply resuming the program that was instituted during the reign of the Reagan/Bush administrations: in those 12 years the Bush Gang had engineered a staggering reversal of the American tradition of progressive taxation.
Worker's payroll taxes, the main source of federal revenues from low and middle income Americans, have increased dramatically, bringing in over 34.9% federal revenues in 2001 as opposed to just 6.9% in the 1950s. These revenues compensated for the drastic drop in corporate income taxes from 26.5% in the 1960s to 7.6% of federal revenue in 2001. In fact, it was the middle and working classes that were suffering higher taxation with very little representation, brought to them courtesy of Alan Greenspan, who was chairman of the Republican Council of Economic Advisors in 1983. That group successfully pushed for raising the rate of FICA withholding taxes (Social Security and Medicare) by about 20% between 1980 and 1990.3 In 1987 Greenspan was chosen to be chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, a post he was still holding sixteen years later under Bush II.
Over the long run, federal taxes on working families had doubled, going from 9% of their income in the 1950s to 18%, or even 20% in the mid 1990s. Because of the large social security increases, a small reduction in federal income taxes on working families in the 1980s did not offset this overall trend. There was a really big change, however, when it came to the income taxes of the rich.
With guidance from the Bush Gang, Ronald Reagan returned to that glorious decade of Coolidge and his youth, when the rich ran rampant and their income tax rate was below 30%. In 1986 the top marginal rate dropped to 28%. The results, compiled by the IRS a few years later, were striking:
Though these tax cuts for the rich were very generous, the federal tax system remains mildly progressive overall, in the sense that most rich people still pay a higher percentage of their income than do the poor. But at the state and local level, the rich won the taxation battle long ago. Many regressive state taxes, like the sales tax, end up penalizing the poor much more than the rich. The middle class, too, is taxed at a much higher rate than the richest 1% of taxpayers. State legislatures, even when they are not populated with anti-tax reactionaries, are very wary of insulting multinational corporations or very rich individuals by raising their taxes, since then they might move to another state or another country. Although most states have some form of income tax, many do not apply it too rigorously. As might be expected, the Bush boys gravitated to two of the six states that have no income tax at all, Texas and Florida. Jeb Bush's Florida ranks number two in terms of having the most unfair combination of state and local taxes in the nation.
p69
One of the great successes of contemporary conservatives has been to eliminate the distinction that even Andrew Mellon acknowledged was an element of fairness, the one between the "earned" income produced by one's labor and the "unearned" income produced by one's capital. By eliminating this conceptual barrier to all-out greed, the Bush forces have mounted a full scale attack on wages and salaries even though they are the product of a person's active work (even the bloated pay of the big CEOs is generally connected to showing up at work every day). The income of investors, however, is passive, the byproduct of wealth already amassed.
This passion for taxing work more heavily than non work has allowed the very richest Americans to enjoy lower tax rates than ordinary, run-of-the-mill rich folks.
p70
There are four pillars of progressive taxation that really aggravate the Bush Gang because they are direct or indirect taxes on capital: the capital gains tax, the corporate income tax, the progressive tax on all individual income because the highest incomes also tend to have the highest shares of capital income, and the estate tax that is levied at the death of very rich citizens. All of these were imposed in the first half of the 20th century so that there would be little chance for the wealthy owners of America's corporations and financial institutions to divert money from one kind of investment to another, thereby wiggling out from under the long arm of the tax man. If the Bush administration can destroy these restraints on capital, all remaining semblance of democracy in America will collapse, leading to outright victory and permanent domination by a committee of plutocrats.
p73
Franklin Roosevelt in 1935.
"The transmission from generation to generation of great fortunes by will, inheritance, or gift is not consistent with the ideals and sentiments of the American people."
p73
Theodore Roosevelt in his presidential message to Congress in 1906
"The primary objective should be to put a constantly increasing burden on the inheritance of those swollen fortunes, which it is certainly of no benefit to this country to perpetuate."
p73
Theodore Roosevelt
"... malefactors of great wealth, the wealthy criminal class."
p77
Congressman Hudson of Kansas spoke on behalf of the Income Tax Act of 1884
This method [the income tax lays the burdens on those possessing the ability to pay, and compels those who reap the harvests...to give more of that harvest for the common good. I know that many wealthy men are generous and charitable...On the other hand, the majority of the very wealthy are haughty, overbearing, autocratic, mean, and it is that class in particular that the income tax is designed to reach.
p82
Social Security has been our most reliable federal program for two thirds of a century. Retirement checks arrive reliably and are adjusted to keep up with inflation, while the government expense of running the program is very low. Because of its commitment to paying spouses who survive the original recipients, Social Security also serves as our largest life insurance program, its $12 trillion of insurance being worth more than all the policies of all private insurance companies combined. Its administration is incredibly efficient, costing less than 1% of total revenues because the aim of the Social Security Administration is to distribute the checks, not to turn a profit. This is far superior to the private sector, which keeps 12% to 14% of its premiums as the cost of doing business. Furthermore, Social Security is the most successful poverty program of all time, having reduced the poverty rate for people over 65 from 35.2% in 1959 to less than 10% forty years later. Without Social Security fully half of all senior citizens would fall below the poverty line.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Bush_Gan...lihood_RUB.html

Murdocracy in America,
International Thuggery
excerpted from the book
Robbing Us Blind
The Return of the Bush Gang and the Mugging of America
by Steve Brouwer
Common Courage Press, 2004, paper
p89
Constitution of the Knights of Labor, 1869
The alarming development and aggressiveness of great capitalists and corporations, unless checked, will inevitably lead to the pauperization and hopeless degradation of the toiling masses.
p98
Jim Hightower, former Secretary of Agriculture for the state of Texas
The corporations don't have to lobby the government any more. They are the government.
p117
25% of the people of Texas had no health insurance in the year 2000.
p125
International comparison of per capita health care costs - 1998
USA $4,270
Germany $2,400
Canada $2,250
Sweden $2,120
France $1,820
Japan $1,780
Italy $1,660
p125
Health care outcome: mortality and longevity (comparison of all countries)
1960 1990 1997
U.S. rank in infant mortality 12th 21st 24th
U.S. rank in longevity of males 17th 21st 22nd
U.S. rank in longevity of females 13th 17th 20th
p141
Thomas Jefferson, 1816
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws our country.
p141
Abraham Lincoln, 1864
Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow.

p141
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for president, June 27, 1936
For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face ~ of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor-other people's lives.
p144
Abraham Lincoln, 1864, in a letter to a friend
As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.
p157
E. Digby Bartzell, sociologist
The main function of an upper v class is the perpetuation of its power in n the world of affairs, whether in the bank, the factory, or in the halls of the legislature ...
p160
Benito Mussolini
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power."
p163
Albert Einstein, 1949
... private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult and in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions.
p163
Napoleon Bonaparte
There is only one thing in this world, and that is to keep acquiring money and more money, power and more power. All the rest is meaningless.
p167
The neo-conservatives are a small group of highly active political operatives-William Kristol, John Podhoretz, and Fred Barnes are three directly employed by Murdoch-who want U.S. conservatism to be an activist agent for international change. They are not too concerned with lowering taxes or keeping government out of the average citizen's life, which are two of the more standard conservative values, but are very interested in promoting conservative Judeo-Christian values and American style capitalism around the world. They see activist government as a plus, but are not so interested in the traditional government activism of the liberals. The neo-conservatives are the most aggressive practitioners of a long-standing American policy: fusing the strength of the U.S. government with American economic culture to overwhelm other nations, then requiring them to play by our free-trade capitalist rules and abandon their other economic and social priorities.
A key intellectual reference point to the neo-conservative thrust within the Bush administration is The Weekly Standard, a small, sprightly journal of political advocacy run by William Kristol, who was chief of staff for Dan Quayle during the Bush I years. The Weekly Standard was founded in 1995 by Rupert Murdoch for the express purpose of developing a new, more aggressive conservative voice. The editorialists and writers maintain very close relationships with the White House, The Wall Street Journal, The National Review, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and other conservative foundations. Often The Weekly Standard will produce an essay or editorial about a proposed government course of action, only to have it followed up by a policy statement at the White House or a longer, expository article in The Wall Street Journal. This is especially true of foreign policy issues.
For example, The Weekly Standard, at the very same time it was virulently attacking President Clinton about his sex life, was relentlessly prodding him to attack Iraq. With help from various scholarly-looking representatives from the right-wing think tanks, they kept a myth alive for the last five years of the Clinton presidency and into the 21st century-they insisted that there was a madman in the Middle East, Saddam Hussein, who was intent on destroying the United States. They linked the threat of the "Demon Iraq" neatly to the need to support Israel. They said that Israel was entitled to deal very harshly with the Palestinians, who, according to the editors, did not necessarily deserve their own land and nation. This new Israeli aggressiveness would require a similar display of determined force by the United States according to the neo-cons. The logical course of action then, was for the United States to arm itself sufficiently to assume its rightful place at the top of a new imperial order. In the neo-con view of the world, American hegemony would be benign, but wielded with a stern hand, and would assure that world oil supplies were stable and world markets open for business.
Neo-conservatives are so expansionist that they believe the government and the military can be hyper-aggressive agents of promoting American power all over the world, but especially in the Middle East. Godfather of the movement, Norman Podhoretz, wrote in the September 2002 issue of his journal Commentary that the list of the regimes "that richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya... the Saudi royal family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority....provided that the United States has the will to fight World War IV, 'the war against militant Islam' to a successful conclusion, and provided too, that we then have the stomach to impose a new political culture on the defeated parties." (Norman is the father of John Podhoretz, who was editor of The Weekly Standard before Murdoch moved him to the position of editorial page editor at The New York Post. )
Murdoch's band of neo-cons developed some of the highest profiles of anyone in the media business because they had the distribution power of the mighty News Corporation behind them. In the 1990s Fox News became a favorite of right-wing heavyweights on Capitol Hill because it linked The Weekly Standard with the ultra-conservative publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The National Review, Commentary, and The Washington Times. Among themselves, Rush Limbaugh, and a never ending stream of conservative pundits who appeared on the screen and on the printed page, they helped the right wing of the Republican Party attain a dominant public voice that it used to harass the Clintons unmercifully while simultaneously pushing the Democratic polity to the center-right.
p168
columnist Eric Boehlert of Salon
Who needs a vast right-wing conspiracy when you've got a vast right-wing network?
So wrote columnist Eric Boehlert of Salon in November 2000. as he deftly pointed a finger at the Murdoch network's use of John Ellis on election night. He was making a good point: why should the right wing do its dirty work in secret if the Fox network can do it more effectively in public.
There is, however, a much larger issue, and a much larger network that lies behind Murdoch's astute positioning in the media markets. His methods would not work nearly so well in the United States, which is so much bigger than the British and Australian markets that he previously dominated, without the vast web of right wing institutions that were already functioning when he decided to move to the U.S. and become an American citizen. Rich, ultraconservative gentlemen like Murdoch have financed this collection of think tanks, university programs, and policy foundations for thirty years. They supply the intellectual voices that not only shout at the public on Fox TV, but also get plenty of time to quietly persuade the more moderate viewers of PBS and parade experts onto news programming at ABC, CBS, and NBC.
The formation of a vast and relatively open right-wing network began with a few very rich, ultra-conservative families in the 1950s. For instance, William F. Buckley, a Skull and Bones member at Yale in the 1940s, was so upset that left-leaning professors were allowed to teach there that he used the family oil fortune to found The National Review, the granddaddy of the ultra-right publications. Out in Indiana, Dan Quayle's grandfather, the billionaire Eugene C. Pulliam, built a right-wing newspaper empire centered in Indianapolis, then extended it to Arizona where he became an early backer of Barry Goldwater in the 1950s. At the time, however, these efforts did not generate widespread support for right-wing causes among the business community. This meant that "true believers," such as Dan Quayle's father, Jim, had to operate on the radical-right fringe in groups such as the John Birch Society.
A key moment for the ascendancy of much broader right-wing influence came in the 1970s. Big business was becoming quite disgruntled with the political behavior of the American public, and a Republican president was frustrated with the amount of public dissent that assailed him because of his conduct of the Vietnam War. In 1971, shortly before he was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, Lewis Powell wrote an article for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce entitled "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System." The Chamber stamped it with the label "Powell Memorandum" and circulated it with their newsletter/magazine, Washington Report, which they sent out to influential leaders in business and politics. Powell warned that the country was being infected with an anti-corporate, anti-American mood, and that big business was being criticized by a variety of "perfectly responsible elements of society who shaped opinion: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual community." Powell urged the business world "to stop suffering in impotent silence, and launch a counterattack" so that it could persuade the public of the value of the "free enterprise system."
The "Powell Memorandum" succeeded in getting immediate results. Joseph Coors, ultraright scion of the Coors Brewing Company, reported that he was "stirred up," and "convinced" that he and other leaders of corporate America had been "ignoring a crisis." Determined to fix the situation, he joined with Richard Mellon Scaife, the ultra-conservative heir of the Mellon clan, to fund the 1971-1972 start-up of the Analysis and Research Association in Washington, DC. This organization soon became the most influential of the right-wing think tanks and renamed itself the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation differs from other non-profit, public policy foundations because it spends a larger portion of its budget, about 60 percent, on putting out an explicitly political message. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Heritage Foundation, "more than other think tanks, has extended its political influence by spending more money on raising funds and promoting its thoughts than on researching them."
The Heritage Foundation has been joined by a raft of far-right vehicles designed to change public opinion, such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Hudson Institute, and the Manhattan Institute. They distinguish themselves from older, middle-of the-road foundations, such as Ford and Rockefeller, which are certainly not anti-business, by devoting a large proportion of their funds to openly conservative political causes. All are very well-funded by corporate money and big fortunes that favor ultra-right politics, such as the Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Coors' Castle Rock Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and the J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust. The right-wing think tanks have been fantastically successful, for by the year 2000 their spokespeople were be found everywhere on television news and opinion shows, proudly holding forth and dominating coverage as the designated experts on almost any topic.
Occasionally conservative foundations have supported new Social Darwinist research such as Charles Murray's influential book, The Bell Curve (lavishly funded by the Bradley Foundation and the Pioneer Fund). In this way they were emulating the race research funded by the old Robber Barons and Skull and Bones crowd a century earlier, when they were infatuated with eugenics and the good breeding techniques required to reproduce the upper class. But mostly they steered clear of the old racist claims to power, and instead chose to support new fields such as "Law and Economics". According to political and economic analyst Robert Kuttner, "these ideas are reinforcing of the laissez faire ideal and thus very congenial to society's most powerful.''
The Olin Foundation, in particular, distinguishes itself by funding academic programs in "law and economics", thus following the advice that Justice Powell gave in his memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce in the early 1970s- "buy the top academic reputations of the country to add credibility to corporate studies and give business a stronger voice on the campus.''
Olin Foundation money has flowed to the best universities, in particular to fund programs in "Law and Economics" at places such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, Duke, MIT, Penn, and the University of Virginia, where they are "intended to strengthen the economic, political, and cultural institutions upon which ... private enterprise is based." The core values of Law and Economics reduce all human activity to the pursuit of individual self-interest in the marketplace, so that the law itself adheres to market and corporate values.
Because the Olin Foundation was interested in promoting more depth in political scholarship than the other conservative think tanks, it heavily backed significant conservatives in other academic programs, too-for example, in the humanities, Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago; and in politics and government, Samuel Huntington at Harvard. Huntington, who was a graduate school classmate of Henry Kissinger's and a fellow instructor with Zbigniew Brzezinski at Harvard in the early 1950s, shared with them an appreciation for the ways nations can gain hegemony through the exertion of military and diplomatic power. He was later picked to serve on the elite policy group, the Trilateral Commission, for whom he wrote one of his most famous comments in the 1970s: "Some of the problems of governance in the United States stem from an excess of democracy... needed instead is a greater degree of moderation in democracy." The problem was that Huntington's ideal of "moderation" was not democratic at all. "Truman," he wrote, "had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers.'' Always one with an ear for how the powerful wanted to exert their power, he anticipated the conflict between the United States and Islamic countries in his l990s book, The Clash of Civilizations, and cautioned the U.S. not to trust in conciliation and peaceful co-existence with these potential enemies.
Another major player on the far right is the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which was a small, obscure policy institution until it was launched into prominence at the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. President Nixon's Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, decided AEI's conservative opinions could be helpful to the administration, so he hosted a $25 million fund-raising dinner for the organization in his private Pentagon dining room in 1971. The AEI was off and running, so that by 1980 its annual budget was higher than the moderate and centrist think-tank, The Brookings Institution, which had previously dominated Washington policy studies. Besides defending the Vietnam War and an aggressive American foreign policy, AEI backed corporations who were fighting government regulatory agencies and organized labor.
By 1981, when Reagan/Bush took office, several hundred corporations were contributing 40 percent of AEI's budget. John B. Judis, in his book, The Paradox of American Democracy, points out that top CEOs were recruited to fund-raising posts, "including Walter Wriston of Citibank, Willard Butcher of Chase Manhattan, David Packard of Hewlett-Packard, Thomas Murphy of General Motors, and Reginald Jones of General Electric." A host of foundations connected to rich conservative families also contributed mightily because, like the corporations, they felt it was necessary to inculcate a fresh view of the world in the American people. According to Judis, "This version of reality pivoted on a simple formula: government rather than business was responsible for America's ills-from inflation and high energy prices to the slowdown in growth and the rise in unemployment."
The American people had come through the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandals with a deep distrust of the motives of American foreign policy and American business. Because the right-wing foundations endeavored to change these perceptions, they gradually won the trust of business leaders. The corporate executives had organized themselves, too, with encouragement from the Nixon White House in 1972, into a very powerful group, The Business Roundtable. The Roundtable had its origins in the "Construction Users Anti-Inflation Roundtable," a corporate group that was trying to lower construction costs by eliminating construction unions and forcing down the wages of skilled craftsmen. It turned into a lobbying group for 200 of the largest American corporations when the chairmen of GE and Alcoa met with Nixon's Treasury Secretary John Connally, his deputy Charls Walker, and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Arthur Burns to discuss a much larger business counteroffensive.
The government men urged the executives to bypass lesser powers, such as the broadbased Chamber of Commerce and the fragmented business and industry associations, and address their concerns directly to Washington. The idea was for big business CEOs to become powerful policy spokesmen themselves, appearing in person to tell Washington what they wanted. The stated purpose of the Business Roundtable was that "chief executives of major corporations should take an increased role in the continuing debates about public policy.'' In December of 2002, when George W. Bush and the rest of the gang became exasperated with Secretary of Treasury Paul O'Neill because of his opposition to some of the proposed tax cuts, they replaced him with John Snow, the CEO of CSX Corporation. Snow had acted as chairman of The Business Roundtable in 1996 and 1997.
p172
Alexis de Tocqueville
The manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up before our eyes is one of the harshest that ever existed in the world....If ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter.
p175
George W. Bush, 2001
We will export death and violence to the four corners of the Earth in defense of our great nation.
p175
Only one nation has ever been found guilty of terrorism by the International Court of Justice the United States in 1986 Some of the men who ran this secret terror operation- North, Abrams, and Poindexter-were convicted of Iying to Congress about their activities.
Two of the above were invited to rejoin the rejuvenated Bush Gang in Washington in 2001, along with two other men-Negroponte and Reich-who helped them plan their past terroristic activities. The third criminal, Oliver North, was too busy with his Fox TV show, "War Stories," to rejoin the others.
In 1986, the Reagan administration disregarded international law and ignored the order from the International Court of Justice, part of the World Court in The Hague, Netherlands, to desist from its hostile activities. The U.S. continued sponsoring, training, and supplying arms to the Contras, the army it had created to carry out illegal attacks on the nation of Nicaragua Several years earlier the Nicaraguan people had launched a left-leaning, democratic revolution and freed themselves from the long, brutal, dictatorship of the Somoza family. The United States government had supported the Somozas for decades, just as it had backed a string of right-wing dictatorships throughout Central America, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
The Reagan administration also disregarded the laws of the United States of America, in particular those that the U.S. Congress had passed earlier in the 1980s forbidding U.S. assistance to the Contra forces. Nicaragua, a poor nation with only three million people, was badly hurt by the repeated terrorist acts-its main harbor was mined to discourage civilian shipping, its medical personnel were massacred at rural clinics, and its citizens were tortured and murdered by the U.S. sponsored terrorists.
When Oliver North, Elliot Abrams, and John Poindexter-all operatives in the President's National Security clique-were called before Congressional Committees, they lied about their involvement in the subterfuge in Nicaragua. Their crazy plot involved selling arms illegally to the mullahs of Iran so that they could raise secret funds to buy weapons for the Contras. As their activities were gradually uncovered, President Reagan denied all knowledge. This may have been true, for during his second term the President was sleeping through many meetings and not always attentive when he was awake.
The Vice-President, Bush I, claimed he was "out of the loop," too, and denied any involvement. But this was much more difficult to believe, since he was not getting senile and had been in regular contact with all of the perpetrators. Much later, long after his underlings were convicted, then freed, George H.W. Bush's diary entry concerning Iran/Contra became public. The entry for November 5, 1986 read:
"I'm one of the few people that know fully the details.... This is one operation that has been held very, very tight, and I hope it will not leak."
George Bush I, the only president of the United States who was ever the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency ...
p176
Our war against Nicaragua was accompanied by even worse bloodshed, tortures, and massacres in Guatemala and El Salvador. In those countries, right-wing militaries trained and armed by the United States, and sometimes assisted by the CIA, slaughtered many thousands of people in order to suppress popular rebellions. For these small nations the toll was very heavy: an estimated 70,000 killed in El Salvador, 20,000 dead in the contra war in Nicaragua, 200 "disappearances" in Honduras, 200,000 people eliminated in Guatemala, most of them in the indigenous villages in rural areas. The Historical Clarification Committee, which met in the 1990s to review the human rights crimes committed in Guatemala, catalogued "626 massacres against Mayan villages."
The Reagan/Bush administration tried to claim it was backing the forces of democracy, but few believed this. One former Contra leader described their activities:
It is a gross fabrication to claim that the contras are composed of democratic groups.... As I can attest, the 'contra' military force is directed and controlled by officers of Somoza's National Guard.... During my four years as a contra director, it was premeditated policy to terrorize civilian noncombatants to prevent them from cooperating with the Government. Hundreds of civilian murders, tortures and rapes were committed in pursuit of this policy, of which the ~\ 'contra' leaders and their CIA superiors were well aware.
Edgar Chamorro, former member of the directorate of the main contra organization, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force.
p177
The United States was not fighting terror in our hemisphere in the 1980s, it was the exponent and exporter of terror. The death and destruction in Central America was expedited by a small subgang of Bush operatives. It seems ironical in the extreme that these men, who were tarred and feathered with a fair amount of ignominy for their participation in this disgraceful chapter of American history, have been recalled to the center of power. Now they are being asked to help prosecute a war against terror. On the other hand, their recall can be seen as a sign of their rehabilitation.
For Abrams, Poindexter, Negroponte, and Reich, this return to power also constituted an endorsement of their past actions. As illegal as their actions were, they were effective in the end. The countries in Central America were subdued and pacified, and are not a source of irritation to the United States any longer. Their current governments are feeble attempts at democracy and their social structures and economies so shattered by war that they are worse off now, in Guatemala and Nicaragua especially, than they were before Bush Gang l began its intrigues twenty years ago.
p177
The insular world of right-wing Washington, combined with the geopolitical imperatives of manning military installations and gathering information in all parts of the world, has over many decades produced men who live and breathe a covert version of "manifest destiny." They feel committed to advancing U.S. power no matter what obstacles they may face. In order to get the "bad guys," they think, it may be necessary to tear up the fabric of democracy. For such people, Admiral John Poindexter, Elliot Abrams, and Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North were not misguided zealots, nor criminal soldiers, but true heroes who were not appreciated by their countrymen.
p178
One of George W's first acts as president was to keep his father's papers, which were due to be released, locked away in secrecy.
p178
Elliot Abrams
In the Reagan and Bush I administrations, Elliot Abrams served as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs and later as assistant secretary of state for interAmerican affairs, supervising U.S. policy in Latin America and the Caribbean. In that capacity he constantly covered up the realities of Iran/Contra, oversaw much of the conspiracy, and lied about it to the press and Congress. Jim Lobe, of Foreign Policy in Focus, writes that "he clashed frequently and angrily with mainstream church groups and human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, who often accused him of covering up horrendous abuses committed by U.S.backed governments."
Journalist and film-maker Saul Landau reports that: "In his testimony to Congress, the scrappy Abrams made witness history when he declared: 'I never said I had no idea about most of the things you said I had no idea about.' The now 54 year old Abrams also explained in his autobiography that he had to inform his young children about the headline announcing his indictment, so he told them he had 'to lie to Congress to protect the national interest." He did not tell Congress about the horrific massacre in El Mazote, El Salvador, that he covered up for the Reagan administration by denigrating the work of very accurate reporters. Nor did he explain that U.S.-trained death squads had carried out 85% of the 22,000 "extra legal" killings in the country. Instead, Abrams defiantly told Congress how proud he was of the United States record in El Salvador: "The Administration's record on El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement."
During his forced absence from government, Abrams resided within the right-wing Ethics and Public Policy Center where he devoted a great deal of this energy to bolstering the arguments and political connections that kept elevating the right-wing, militarist agenda of Likud and its allies in Israel and the United States. Jim Lobe reported that "In Present Dangers, a book produced by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in 2000, Abrams outlined a new U.S. Mideast policy that called for 'regime change' in Iraq and for cracking down on the Palestinian Authority. Foreshadowing the current U.S. policy based on superior military power, Abrams recommended that in the Middle East 'our military strength and willingness to use it' should be the 'key factor in our ability to promote peace." Elliot Abrams was rehired by Bush Gang II in 2001 as National Security Council senior director for democracy, human rights and international operations, and then, in the first week of December 2002, he was transferred within the NSC to the position of director of Middle Eastern affairs. Given his extremely aggressive posture in all his foreign policy dealings, this can be seen as a preparation for tenacious warfare, expediting the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, threatening Syria and Iran, and reassuring Israel about its superior position vis a vis the Muslim countries that surround it.
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Otto Reich
In the 1980s, Otto Reich was chief of a department in the State Department that was ; called the Office of Public Diplomacy and staffed with CIA and Pentagon "psychological ; warfare" specialists. The function of the operation was to fool the American public about the nature of the conflicts in Central America by disseminating false information, discrediting reporters whose work the Reagan administration did not like, and using other means of mist leading propaganda. In short, the Office of Public Diplomacy was in the business of producing disinformation of the kind that is generally used to mislead an enemy during conventional warfare, except that during the unconventional and illegal Contra war it was being used to lie to journalists, Congressional committees, and the U.S. people. Reich "helped plant stories and opinion pieces praising the Contras in U.S. newspapers. It wasn't just the stories that were phony, so were the authors. Reich's office wrote them all." Congress, once it uncovered the illegal operations of this office, closed it down and Otto Reich barely avoided indictment.
Otto Reich was sent off as Ambassador to Venezuela after the Contra war, where he was able to secure the release of the jailed Cuban exile terrorist, Orlando Bosch. This man had been jailed for eleven years for his role in the worst instance of airline terrorism in the Western Hemisphere (up until September 11, 2001, that is). This was the bombing of a Cuban plane which killed all 73 civilians on board in 1976. The U.S. Justice Department had evidence of Bosch's involvement in more than 30 other terrorist acts, some of them committed within the United States, including a rocket attack on a Polish ship in Miami. With the help of Otto Reich and Jeb Bush, who was busy ingratiating himself with right-wing Cuban Americans in Florida, Bosch was pardoned by George Bush I in 1992.
In 2001, Reich rejoined the Bush Gang by taking over the Latin American desk at the State Department for just one year. The Administration used a special loophole that allowed for his temporary appointment without getting the approval of the Senate. This was because many Senators, such as Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, would have grilled him about his past activities and opposed his formal nomination. When the one year term expired, Reich was immediately appointed as a special Latin American envoy to the National Security Agency, another post that does not require congressional approval. This allowed him to keep pursuing his major preoccupation, which was the same as Abrams'-to overthrow regimes and control oil. The only difference was that Reich was assigned to raid and plunder in the Western Hemisphere (not the Middle East), where he was overseeing the destabilization of the government of Venezuela, the biggest American oil producer. He was also seeking to oust President Chavez, the democratically elected leader who was detested by the Bush Gang for his obstinacy and independent thinking, particularly on the issue of using Venezuela's vast oil revenues. Chavez had stated that he wanted to use the country's oil wealth to serve and educate the poor, who form the vast majority of the country's population.
Reich regularly met with Chavez's upper-class opponents in Washington to contemplate strategies, one of which was a constant barrage of attacks from the Venezuela's press and television, almost all of which are controlled by a right-wing business oligarchy. A military coup was engineered by the oligarchy in April 2002 after repeated consultations with Washington, but it failed. Then, in December of 2002, a large scale petroleum strike was engineered by state oil company executives in concert with a commercial business shutdown planned by the oligarchs and the rest of the upper class. Both actions failed to dislodge President Chavez. As of the spring of 2003, the Venezuelan upper class had failed in their coup attempts. The plots that Reich had helped initiate were as ill conceived as the Iran/Contra scandal and ended up as fiascos. The business shutdown in December hurt the middle class more than the poor, while the sabotage of the oil industry nearIy wrecked the economy and cost the country many billions of dollars. The oil shutdown also helped push the price of oil sky-high as the U.S.A. and the world braced for war in the Middle East.
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John Negroponte
John Negroponte was never pursued by Congress for his old role as the ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s, even though he was one of those responsible for coordinating aid to the Nicaraguan Contras and holding together the dictatorship of an assortment of Honduran generals. Although the level of brutality toward the people of Honduras was lo