From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Reply-To: covici@ccs.covici.com
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Unauthorized Biography of George Bush: part 31
Date: 6 Oct 92 9:56:45 GMT
Organization: Covici Computer Systems

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{XXIV: The End of
History} 

{``If the Emperor
Tiberius--George Bush--is elected, this
country will become a fascist state in
the first year he is in office, I
guarantee it.'' 
   --Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., April
15, 1988 
   campaign speech in Buffalo,
N.Y.} 

George Bush's inaugural address of
January 21, 1989, was on the whole an
eminently colorless and forgettable
oration. The speech was for the most
part a rehash of the tired demagogy of
Bush's election campaign, with the
ritual references to ``a thousand
points of light'' and the hollow pledge
that when it came to the drug
inundation which Bush had supposedly
been fighting for most of the decade,
``This scourge will stop.'' Bush talked
of ``stewardship'' being passed on from
one generation to another. There was
almost nothing about the state of the
U.S. economy. Bush was preoccupied with
the ``divisiveness'' left over from the
Vietnam era, and this he pledged to end
in favor of a return to bipartisan
consensus between the President and the
Congress, since ``the statute of
limitations has been reached. This is a
fact: The final lesson of Vietnam is
that no great nation can long afford to
be sundered by a memory.'' There is
good reason to believe that Bush was
already contemplating the new round of
foreign military adventures which were
not long in coming. 
   The characteristic note of Bush's
remarks came at the outset, in the
passages in which he celebrated the
triumph of the American variant of the
bureaucratic-authoritarian police
state, based on usury, which chooses to
characterize itself as ``freedom'':
``We know what works: Freedom works. We
know what's right: Freedom is right. We
know how to secure a more just and
prosperous life for man on
Earth--through free markets, free
speech, free elections, and the
exercise of free will unhampered by the
state. @s1 
   After the inauguration ceremonies
at the Capitol were completed, George
and Barbara Bush descended Pennsylvania
Avenue toward the White House in a
triumphant progress, getting out of
their limousine every block or two to
walk among the crowds and savor the
ovations. George Bush, imperial
administrator and bureaucrat, had now
reached the apex of his career, the
last station of the {cursus honorum}:
the chief magistracy. Bush now assumed
leadership of a Washington bureaucracy
that was increasingly focused on itself
and its own aspirations, convinced of
its own omnipotence and infallibility,
of its own manifest destiny to dominate
the world. It was a heady moment, full
of the stuff of megalomaniac delusion. 
   Imperial Washington was now aware
of the increasing symptoms of collapse
in the Soviet Empire. The feared
adversary of four decades of cold war
was collapsing. Germany and Japan were
formidable economic powers, but they
were led by a generation of politicians
which had been well schooled in the
necessity of following Anglo-Saxon
orders. France had abandoned her
traditional Gaullist policy of
independence and sovereignty, and had
returned to the {suivisme} of the old
Fourth Republic under Bush's
freemasonic brother Francois
Mitterrand. Opposition to Washington's
imperial designs might still come from
leading states of the developing
sector, from India, Brazil, Iraq and
Malaysia, but the imperial
administrators, puffed up with their
xenophobic contempt for the former
colonials, were confident that these
states could be easily defeated, and
that the Third World would meekly
succumb to the installation of
Anglo-American puppet regimes in the
way that the Philippines and so many
Latin American countries had during the
1980s. 
   Bush assembled a team of his
fellow Malthusian bureaucrats and
administrators from among those
officials who had staffed Republican
administrations going back to 1969, the
year that Nixon chose Kissinger for the
National Security Council. Persons like
Scowcroft, James Baker, Carla Hills,
and Bush himself had, with few
exceptions, been in or around the
federal government and especially the
executive branch for most of two
decades. 
   All the great issues of policy had
been solved under Nixon, Ford and
Reagan; the geopolitical situation was
being brought under control; all that
remained was to consolidate and perfect
the total administration of the world
according to the policies and
procedures already established, while
delivering mass consensus through the
same methods that had just proven
unbeatable in the presidential
campaign. The Bush team was convinced
of its own inherent superiority to the
Mandarin Chinese, the Roman and
Byzantine, the Ottoman, the Austrian,
the Prussian, the Soviet, and to all
other bureaucratic-authoritarian
regimes that had ever existed on the
planet. 
   Pride goeth ever before a fall. 
   The imperial functionaries of the
Bush team had chosen to ignore certain
gross facts, most importantly the
demonstrable bankruptcy and insolvency
of their own leading institutions of
finance, credit and government. Their
ability to command production and
otherwise to act upon the material
world was in sharp decline. How long
would the American population remain in
its state of stupefied passivity in the
face of deteriorating standards of
living that were now falling more
rapidly than at any time in the last 20
years? And now, the speculative orgy of
the 1980s would have to be paid for.
Even their advantage over the crumbling
Soviet empire was ultimately only a
marginal, relative, and temporary one,
due primarily to a faster rate of
collapse on the Soviet side; but the
day of reckoning for the
Anglo-Americans was coming, too. 
   This was the triumphalism that
pervaded the opening weeks of the Bush
administration. Bush gave more press
conferences during the transition
period than Reagan had given during
most of his second term; he reveled in
the accoutrements of his new office,
and gave the White House press corps
all the photo opportunities and
interviews they wanted, to butter them
up and get them in his pocket. 
   These fatuous delusions of
grandeur were duly projected upon the
plane of the philosophy of history by
an official of the Bush administration,
Francis Fukuyama, the deputy director
of the State Department Policy Planning
Staff, the old haunt of Harrimanites
like Paul Nitze and George Kennan. In
the winter of 1989, during Bush's first
hundred days in office, Fukuyama
delivered a lecture to the Olin
Foundation which was later published in
{The National Interest} quarterly under
the title of ``The End of History?''@s2
Imperial administrator Fukuyama had
studied under the reactionary elitist
Allan Bloom, and was conversant with
the French neo-Enlightenment semiotic
(or semi-idiotic) school of Derrida,
Foucault and Roland Barthes, whose
``zero degree of writing'' Fukuyama may
have been striving to attain. Above
all, Fukuyama was a follower of Hegel
in the interpretation of the French
postwar neo-Hegelian Alexandre Kojeve. 
   Fukuyama qualifies as the official
ideologue of the Bush regime. His
starting point is the ``unabashed
victory of economic and social
liberalism,'' meaning by that the
economic and political system reaching
its maturity under Bush--what the State
Department usually calls ``democracy.'' 
``The triumph of the West,
of the Western idea, is evident first
of all in the total exhaustion of
viable systematic alternatives to
Western liberalism.... The triumph of
the Western political idea is complete.
Its rivals have been routed....
Political theory, at least the part
concerned with defining the good
polity, is finished. The Western idea
of governance has prevailed.... What we
may be witnessing is not just the end
of the Cold War, or the passing of a
particular period of postwar history,
but the end of history as such: that
is, the end point of mankind's
ideological evolution and the
universalization of Western liberal
democracy as the final form of human
government.''
   According to Fukuyama, communism
as an alternative system had been
thoroughly discredited in the U.S.S.R.,
China, and the other communist
countries. Since there are no other
visible models contending for the right
to shape the future, he concludes that
the modern American state is the
``final, rational form of society and
state.'' 
   There are of course large areas of
the world where governments and forms
of society prevail which diverge
radically from Fukuyama's Western
model, but he answers this objection by
explaining that backward, still
historic parts of the world exist and
will continue to exist for some time.
It is just that they will never be able
to present their forms of society as a
credible model or alternative to
``liberalism.'' Since Fukuyama
presumably knew something of what was
in the Bush administration pipeline, he
carefully kept the door open for new
wars and military conflicts, especially
among historical states, or between
historical and post-historical powers.
Both Panama and Iraq would, according
to Fukuyama's typology, fall into the
latter category. 
   Thus, in the view of the early
Bush administration, the planet would
come to be dominated more and more by
the ``universal homogenous state,'' a
mixture of ``liberal democracy in the
political sphere combined with easy
access to VCRs and stereos in the
economic.'' The arid banality of that
definition is matched by Fukuyama's
dazzling tribute to ``the spectacular
abundance of advanced liberal economies
and the infinitely diverse consumer
culture.'' Fukuyama, it turns out, is a
resident of the privileged enclave for
imperial functionaries that is
northeast Virginia, and so has little
understanding of the scope of U.S.
domestic poverty and immiseration: For
Fukuyama, writing at a moment when
American class divisions were more
pronounced than at any time in human
memory, ``the egalitarianism of modern
America represents the essential
achievement of the classless society
envisaged by Marx.'' As a purveyor of
official doctrine for the Bush regime,
Fukuyama is bound to ignore 20 years of
increasing poverty and declining
standards of living for all Americans
which have caused an even greater
retrogression for the minority
population. 
   It is not far from the End of
History to Bush's later slogans of the
New World Order and the imperial Pax
Universalis. It is ironic but lawful
that Bush should have chosen a
neo-Hegelian as apologist for his
regime. Hegel was the
arch-obscurantist, philosophical
dictator, and saboteur of the natural
sciences; he was the ideologue of
Metternich's Holy Alliance system of
police states in the post-1815
oligarchic restoration in Europe
imposed by the Congress of Vienna. When
we mention Metternich, we have at once
brought Bush's old patron Kissinger
into play, since Metternich is well
known as his ego ideal. Hegel deified
the bureaucratic-authoritarian state
machinery of which he was a part as the
final embodiment of rationality in
human affairs, beyond which it was
impossible to go. Hegel told
intellectuals to be reconciled with the
world they found around them, and
pronounced philosophy incapable of
producing ideas for the reform of the
world. 
   The Bush regime thus took shape as
a bureaucratic-authoritarian
stewardship of the financial interests
of Wall Street and the City of London.
Many saw in the Bush team the patrician
financiers of the Nelson Rockefeller
administration that never was. The
groups in society which were to be
served were so narrowly restricted that
the Bush administration often looked
like a government that had totally
separated itself from the underlying
society and had constituted itself to
govern in the interests of the
bureaucracy itself. Since Bush was
irrevocably committed to carrying
forward the policies that had been
consolidated and institutionalized
during the previous eight years, the
regime became more and more rigid and
inflexible. Active opposition, or even
the dislocations occasioned by
administration policies were therefore
dealt with by the repressive means of
the police state. The Bush regime could
not govern, but it could indict, and
the Discrediting Committee was always
ready to vilify. Some observers spoke
of a new form of Bonapartism {sui
generis,} but the most accurate
description for the Bush combination
was the ``administrative fascism''
coined by political prisoner Lyndon
LaRouche, who was thrown in jail just
seven days after the Bush inauguration. 

   The Bush Cabinet
 
   Bush's cabinet reflected several
sets of optimizing criteria: 
   The best way to attain a top
cabinet post was to belong to a family
that had been allied with the
Bush-Walker clan over a period of at
least half a century, and to have
served as a functionary or fundraiser
for the Bush campaign. This applied to
Secretary of State James Baker III,
Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady,
Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher,
and Bush's White House counsel and top
political adviser, C. Boyden Gray. 
   A second royal road to high office
was to have been an officer of
Kissinger Associates, the international
consulting firm set up by Bush's
lifelong patron, Henry Kissinger. In
this category we find Gen. Brent
Scowcroft, the former chief of the
Kiss. Ass. Washington office, and
Lawrence Eagleburger, the dissipated
wreck who was named to the number two
post in the State Department,
Undersecretary of State. Eagleburger
had been the president of Kissinger
Associates. The ambassadorial (or
proconsul) list was also rife with
Kissingerian pedigrees: a prominent one
was John Negroponte, Bush's ambassador
to Mexico. 
   Overlapping with this last group
were the veterans of the 1974-77 Ford
administration. National Security
Council Director Brent Scowcroft, for
example, was simply returning to the
job that he had held under Ford as
Kissinger's alter ego inside the White
House. Dick Cheney, who eventually
became secretary of defense, had been
Ford's White House chief of staff.
Cheney had been executive assistant to
the director of Nixon's Office of
Economic Opportunity way back in 1969.
In 1971, he had joined Nixon's White
House staff as Don Rumsfeld's deputy.
From 1971 to 1973, Cheney was at the
Cost of Living Council, working as an
enforcer for the infamous Phase II wage
freeze in Nixon's ``Economic
Stabilization Program.'' The charming
Carla Hills, who became Bush's trade
representative, had been Ford's
Secretary of Housing and Urban
Development. William Seidman and James
Baker (and Federal Reserve Board
Chairman Alan Greenspan, a Reagan
holdover who was the chairman of Ford's
Council of Economic Advisers) had also
been in the picture under Gerry Ford. 
   Bush also extended largesse to
those who had assisted him in the
election campaign just concluded. At
the top of this list was Governor John
Sununu of New Hampshire, who would have
qualified as the modern Nostradamus for
his exact prediction of Bush's 9
percent margin of victory over Dole in
the New Hampshire primary--unless he
had helped to arrange it with vote
fraud. 
   Another way to carry off a top
plum in the Bush regime was to have
participated in the coverup of the
Iran-Contra scandal. The leading role
in that coverup had been assumed by
Reagan's own blue ribbon commission of
notables, the Tower Commission, which
carried out the White House's own
in-house review of what had allegedly
gone wrong, and had scapegoated Don
Regan for a series of misdeeds that
actually belonged at the doorstep of
George Bush. The members of that board
were former GOP Senator John Tower of
Texas, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, and former
Sen. Edmund Muskie, who had been
secretary of state for Carter after the
resignation of Cyrus Vance. Scowcroft,
who shows up under many headings, was
ensconced at the NSC. Bush's original
candidate for secretary of defense was
John Tower, who had been the point man
of the 1986-87 coverup of Iran-Contra
during the months before the
congressional investigating committees
formally got into the act. Tower's
nomination was rejected by the Senate
after he was accused of being drunken
and promiscuous by Paul Weyrich, a
Buckleyite activist, and others. Some
observers thought that the Tower
nomination had been deliberately
torpedoed by Bush's own discrediting
committee so as to avoid the presence
of a top cabinet officer with the
ability to blackmail Bush. Perhaps
Tower had overplayed his hand. In any
case, Dick Cheney, a Wyoming
congressman with strong intelligence
community connections, was speedily
nominated and confirmed after Tower had
been shot down. 
   Another Iran-Contra veteran in
line to get a reward was Bush's former
national security adviser, Don Gregg,
who had served Bush since at least the
time of the 1976 Koreagate scandal.
Gregg, as we have seen, was more than
willing to commit the most maladroit
and blatant perjury in order to save
his boss from the wolves (see Chapter
17). Later, when William Webster
retired as director of the CIA, there
were persistent rumors that the
hyperthyroid Bush had originally
demanded that Don Gregg be nominated to
take his place. According to these
reports, it required all the energy of
Bush's handlers to convince the
President that Gregg was too dirty to
pass confirmation; Bush relented, but
then announced to his dismayed and
exhausted staff that his second and
non-negotiable choice for Langley was
Robert Gates, the former CIA Deputy
Director who had been working as
Scowcroft's number two at the National
Security Council. As it turned out, the
Bush Democrats in the Senate proved
more than willing to approve Gates. 

   The Dismal Hundred Days
 
   Bush's first 100 days in
office fulfilled Fukuyama's prophecy
that the End of History would be ``a
very sad time.'' If ``post-history''
meant that very little was
accomplished, Bush filled the bill.
Three weeks after his inauguration,
Bush addressed a joint session of the
Congress on certain changes that he had
proposed in Reagan's last budget. The
litany was hollow and predictable: Bush
wanted to be the Education President,
but was willing to spend less than a
billion dollars of new money in order
to do it. He froze the U.S. military
budget, and announced a review of the
previous policy toward the Soviet
Union. This last point meant that Bush
wanted to wait to see how fast the
Soviets would in fact collapse before
he would even discuss trade
normalization, which had been the
perspective held out to Moscow by
Reagan and others. Bush said he wanted
to join with Drug Czar William Bennett
in ``leading the charge'' in the war on
drugs. 
   Bush also wanted to be the
Environmental President. This was a far
more serious aspiration. Shortly after
the election, Bush had attended the
gala centennial awards dinner of the
very oligarchical National Geographic
Society, for many years a personal
fiefdom of the feudal-minded Grosvenor
family. Bush promised the audience that
night that there was ``one issue my
administration is going to address, and
I'm talking about the environment.''
Bush confided that he had been
coordinating his plans with British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and
that he had agreed with her on the
necessity for ``international
cooperation'' on green issues. ``We
will support you,'' intoned Gilbert
Grosvenor, a fellow Yale alumnus, ``...
Planet Earth is at risk.''@s6 
   In order to be the Environmental
President, Bush was willing to propose
a disastrous Clean Air Act that would
drain the economy of hundreds of
billions of dollars over time in the
name of fighting acid rain. Bush's
first hundred days coincided with the
notable phenomenon of the ``greening''
of Margaret Thatcher, who had
previously denounced environmentalists
as ``the enemy within,'' and fellow
travelers of the British Labour Party
and the loonie left. Thatcher's
resident ideologue, Nicholas Ridley,
had referred to the green movement in
Britain as ``pseudo-Marxists.'' But in
the early months of 1989, allegedly
under the guidance of Sir Crispin
Tickell, the British ambassador to the
United Nations, Thatcher embraced the
orthodoxy that the erosion of the ozone
layer, the greenhouse effect and acid
rain--every one of them a
pseudo-scientific hoax--were indeed at
the top of the list of the urgent
problems of the human species.
Thatcher's acceptance of the green
orthodoxy permitted the swift
establishment of a total
environmentalist-Malthusian consensus
in the European Community, the Group of
7 and other key international forums. 
   Characteristically, Bush followed
Thatcher's lead, as he would on so many
other issues. During the first 100
days, Bush called for the elimination
of all chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) by
the end of the century, thus accepting
the position assumed by the European
Community as a result of Mrs.
Thatcher's turning green. Bush told the
National Academy of Sciences that new
``scientific advancements'' had
permitted the identification of a
serious threat to the ozone layer; Bush
stressed the need to ``reduce CFCs that
deplete our precious upper atmospheric
resources.'' A treaty had been signed
in Montreal in 1987 that called for
cutting the production of CFCs by one
half within a ten-year period. ``But
recent studies indicate that this 50
percent reduction may not be enough,''
Bush now opined. Senator Albert Gore,
Jr. of Tennessee was calling for
complete elimination of CFCs within
five years. Here a pattern emerged that
was to be repeated frequently during
the Bush years: Bush would make
sweeping concessions to the
environmentalist Luddites, but would
then be denounced by them for measures
that were insufficiently radical. This
would be the case when Bush's Clean Air
Bill was going through the Congress
during the summer of 1990. 
   After Bush's appearance before the
Congress with his revised budget, the
new regime exploited the honeymoon to
seal a sweetheart contract with the
rubber-stamp congressional Democrats,
who under no circumstances could be
confused with an opposition. The de
facto one-party state was alive and
well, personified by milquetoast
Senator George Mitchell of Maine, the
Democrats' majority leader. The
collusion between Bush and the
Democratic leadership involved new
sleight of hand in order to meet the
deficit-reduction targets stipulated by
the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law. This
involved mobilizing more than $100
billion from surpluses in the Social
Security, highway and other special
trust funds which had not previously
been counted. The Democrats also went
along with a $28 billion package of
asset sales, financing tricks, and
unspecified new revenues. They also
bought Bush's rosy economic forecast of
higher economic growth and lower
interest rates. Senate Majority Leader
Mitchell, accepting his pathetic
rubber-stamp role, commented only that
``much sterner measures will be
required in the future.'' Since the
Democrats were incapable of proposing
an economic recovery program in order
to deal with the depression, they were
condemned to give Bush what he wanted.
This particular swindle would come back
to haunt all concerned, but not before
the spectacular budget debacle of
October 1990. 
   In the spring of 1990, according
to an estimate by Sid Taylor of the
National Taxpayers' Union, the total
potential liabilities of the federal
government exceeded $14 trillion. At
that point, the official national debt
totaled $2.8 trillion, but this
estimate included the commitments of
the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance
Corporation, the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corporation, the Pension
Benefit Guarantee Corporation, and
other agencies. 
   Bush's inability to pull his
regime together for a serious round of
domestic austerity was not appreciated
by the crowd at the Bank for
International Settlements in Geneva.
Evelyn Rothschild's London {Economist}
summed up the international banking
view of George's temporizing on this
score with its headline, ``Bush
Bumbles.'' 
   A few weeks into the new
administration, it was the collapse of
the FSLIC, studiously ignored by the
waning Reagan administration, that
reached critical mass. On February 6,
1989, Bush announced measures that his
image-mongers billed as the most
sweeping and significant piece of
financial legislation since the
creation of the Federal Reserve Board
on the eve of World War I. This was the
savings and loan bailout, a new orgy in
the monetization of debt and a giant
step toward the consolidation of a
neo-fascist corporate state. 
   At the heart of Bush's policy was
his refusal to acknowledge the
existence of an economic crisis of
colossal proportions, which had among
its symptoms the gathering collapse of
the real estate market after the stock
market crash of October 1987. The
sequence of a stock market panic,
followed by a real estate and banking
crisis, closely followed the sequence
of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
But Bush violently rejected the
existence of such a crisis, and was
grimly determined to push on with more
of the same. This meant that the
federal government would simply take
control of the savings banks, the
majority of which were bankrupt or
imminently bankrupt. The depositors
might get their money, but the result
would be the debasement of the currency
and a deepening depression all around.
In the process, the U.S. government
would become one of the main owners of
real estate, buildings, and the
worthless junk bonds that had been
spewed out by Bush's friend Henry
Kravis and his partner Michael Milken
during the heady days of the boom. 
   The federal government would
create a new world of bonded debt to
pay for the savings banks that would be
seized. When Bush announced his bailout
that February, he stated that $40
billion had already been poured into
the S&L sinkhole, and that he proposed
to issue an additional $50 billion in
new bonds through a financing
corporation, a subsidiary of the new
Resolution Trust Corporation. 
   By August 1989, when Bush's
legislation had been passed, the
estimated cost of the S&L bailout had
increased to $164 billion over a period
of ten years, with $20 billion of that
scheduled to be spent by the end of
September 1989. 
   Within a few months, Bush was
forced to increase his estimates once
again. ``It's a whale of a mess, and
we'll see where we go,'' Bush told a
group of newspaper editorial writers at
the White House in mid-December.
``We've had this one refinancing. I am
told that that might not be enough.''
By this time, academic experts were
suggesting that the bailout might
exceed the administration's $164
billion by as much as $100 billion
more. Every new estimate was swiftly
overtaken by the ghastly spectacle of a
real estate market in free fall, with
no bottom in sight. The growing public
awareness of this situation, compounded
by the ongoing bankruptcy of the
commercial banking system as well,
would lead in July 1990 to a very ugly
public relations crisis for the Bush
regime around the role of the
President's son Neil Bush, in the
insolvency of the Silverado Savings and
Loan of Denver, Colorado. One of the
obvious reasons for Bush's enthusiastic
choice of war in the Persian Gulf was
the need to get Neil Bush off the front
page. But even the Gulf war bought no
respite in the collapse of the real
estate markets and the chain-reaction
bankruptcies of the savings banks: By
the summer of 1991, federal regulators
were seizing S&Ls at the rate of just
under one every business day, and the
estimates of the total price tag of the
bailout had ballooned to over $500
billion, with every certainty that this
figure would also be surpassed.@s7 
   The carnage among the S&Ls did not
prevent Bush from seeking an increase
in the U.S. contribution to the
International Monetary Fund, the main
agency of a world austerity that claims
upwards of 50 million human lives each
year as the needless victims of its
Malthusian conditionalities. The
members of the IMF had been debating an
increase in the funds each member must
pay into the IMF (which has been
bankrupt for years as a matter of
reality), with Managing Director Michel
Camdessus proposing a 100 percent
increase, and Britain and Saudi Arabia
arguing for a much smaller 25 percent
hike. Bush attempted to mediate and
resolve the dispute with a proposal for
a 35 percent increase, equal to an $8
billion additional payment by the U.S.
This sum was equal to more than three
times the yearly expenditure for the
highly successful Women, Infants and
Children (WIC) program of the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, savagely cut
during Bush's first year, which
attempted to provide a high-protein and
balanced food supplement to mothers and
their offspring.@s8 
   As the depression deepened, Bush
had only one idea: to reduce the
capital gains tax rate from 28 percent
to 15 percent. This was a proposal for
a direct public subsidy to the vulture
legions of Kravis, Liedtke, Pickens,
Milken, Brady, Mosbacher, and the rest
of Bush's apostles of greed. The
Bushmen estimated that a capital gains
tax reduction in this magnitude would
cost the Treasury some $25 billion in
lost receipts over six years, a crass
underestimate. These funds, argued the
Bushmen, would then be invested in
high-tech plant and equipment, creating
new jobs and new production. In
reality, the funds would have flowed
into bigger and better leveraged
buyouts, which were still being
attempted after the crash of the junk
bond market with the failure of the
United Airlines buyout in October 1989.
But Bush had no serious interest in, or
even awareness of, commodity
production. His policies had now
brought the country to the brink of a
financial panic in which 75 percent of
the current prices of all stocks,
bonds, debentures, mortgages, and other
financial paper would be wiped out. 
   If there was a constant note in
Bush's first year in office, it was a
callously flaunted contempt for the
misery of the American people. During
the spring of 1989, the Congress passed
a bill that would have raised the
minimum wage in interstate commerce
from $3.55 per hour to $4.55 per hour
by a series of increments over three
years. This legislation would even have
permitted a subminimum wage that could
be paid to certain newly hired workers
over a 60-day training period. Bush
vetoed this measure because the $4.55
minimum wage was 30 cents an hour
higher than he wanted, and because he
demanded a subminimum wage for all new
employees for the first six months on
the job, regardless of their previous
experience or training. On June 14,
1989, the House of Representatives
failed to override this veto, by a
margin of 37 votes. (Later, Bush signed
legislation to raise the minimum wage
to $4.25 per hour over two years, with
a subminimum training wage applicable
only to teenagers and only during the
first 90 days of the teenagers'
employment, with the possibility of a
second 90-day training wage stint if
they moved on to a different
employer.)@s9 
   This was the same George Bush who
had proposed $164 billion for bankrupt
S&Ls, and $8 billion for the
International Monetary Fund, all
without batting an eye. 
   This is also the George Bush who,
customarily during holiday periods,
joins his millionaire crony William
Stamps (``Auschwitz'') Farish III at
his Lazy F Ranch near Beeville, Texas,
for the two men's traditional holiday
quail hunt. This is the same William
Stamps Farish III whose grandfather,
the president of Standard Oil of New
Jersey, had financed Heinrich Himmler.
William Stamps Farish III's investment
bank in Houston, W.S. Farish & Co., had
at one time managed the blind trust
into which Bush had placed his personal
investment portfolio. Farish was rich
enough to vaunt five addresses:
Beeville, Texas; Lane's End Farm in the
Versailles, Kentucky bluegrass;
Florida, and two others. Farish's hobby
for the past several decades has been
the creation of his own top-flight farm
for the raising of thoroughbred horses,
the 3,000-acre Lazy F Ranch, with its
ten horse barns and four sumptuous
residences. Over the years, Farish has
saddled winners in the 1972 Preakness
and the 1987 Belmont Stakes, and bred
80 stakes winners over the past decade.
Farish, who is married to Sarah Sharp,
the daughter of a Du Pont heiress, had
worked with Bush as an aide during the
1964 Senate campaign. 
   Farish III is rich enough to
extend his largesse even to Queen
Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom,
probably the richest individual in the
world. The queen regularly visits
Farish's horse farm, traveling by Royal
Air Force jetliner to the Blue Grass
Airport in Lexington, Kentucky,
accompanied by mares which Her Majesty
wishes to breed with Farish's
million-dollar prize stallions. Farish
magnanimously waives the usual stud
fees for the queen, resulting in an
estimated savings to Her Majesty of
some $800,000. 

   Smear, Scandal and
Sanctions
 
   For George Bush, the exercise of
power has always been inseparable from
the use of smear, scandal, and the
final sanctions of police-state methods
against political rivals and other
branches of government. A classic
example was the Koreagate scandal of
1976, unleashed with the help of Bush's
long-time retainer, Don Gregg. It will
be recalled that Koreagate included the
toppling of Democratic Speaker of the
House Carl Albert of Oklahoma, who
quietly retired from the House at the
end of 1976. That was in the year when
Bush had returned from Beijing to
Langley. Was it merely coincidence
that, in the first year of Bush's
tenure in the White House, not just the
Democratic Speaker of the House, but
also the House Majority Whip, were
driven from office? 
   The campaign against Speaker of
the House Jim Wright was spearheaded by
Georgia Republican Congressman Newt
Gingrich, a typical ``wedge issue''
ideologue of the GOP's Southern
Strategy. Gingrich's campaign against
Wright could never have succeeded
without systematic support from the
news media, who regularly trumpeted his
charges and lent him a wholly
undeserved importance. Gingrich's
pretext was a story about the financing
of a small book in which Wright had
collected some of his old speeches,
which Gingrich claimed had been sold to
lobbyists in such a way as to
constitute an unreported gift in
violation of the House rules. One of
Gingrich's first steps when he launched
the assault on Wright during 1988 was
to send letters to Bush and to
Assistant Attorney General William
Weld, whose family investment bank,
White Weld, had purchased Uncle Herbie
Walker's G.H. Walker & Co. brokerage
when Bush's favorite uncle was ready to
retire. Newt Gingrich wrote: ``May I
suggest, the next time the news media
asks about corruption in the White
House, you ask them about corruption in
the Speaker's office?'' A similar
letter went out from the ``Conservative
Campaign Fund'' to all GOP House
candidates with the message: ``We write
to encourage you to make ... House
Speaker Jim Wright a major issue in
your campaign.''@s1@s1 Bush placed
himself in the vanguard of this
campaign. 
   When Bush, in the midst of his
presidential campaign, was asked by
reporters about the investigation of
Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese (no
friend of Bush) concerning his dealings
with the Wedtech Corporation, he
replied: ``You talk about Ed Meese. How
about talking about what Common Cause
raised against the Speaker the other
day? Are they going to go for an
independent counsel so the nation will
have this full investigation? Why don't
people call out for that? I will right
now. I think they ought to.''@s1@s2
Reagan followed Bush's lead in calling
for Wright to be investigated. 
   In January-February 1989, the
House took under consideration a pay
increase for members. Both Reagan and
Bush had endorsed such a pay increase,
but Lee Atwater, now installed at the
Republican National Committee, launched
a series of mailings and public
statements to make the pay increase
into a new wedge issue. It was a
brilliant success, with the help of a
few old Prescott Bush strings pulled on
key talk show hosts across the country.
Bush accomplished the coup of
thoroughly destabilizing the Congress
at the outset of his tenure. Jim Wright
was hounded out of office and into
retirement a few months later, followed
by Tony Coelho, the Democratic Whip.
What remained was the meek Tom Foley, a
pliable rubber stamp, and Richard
Gephardt, who briefly got in trouble
with Bush during 1989, but who found
his way to a deal with Bush that
allowed him to rubber-stamp Bush's
``fast track'' formula for the free
trade zone with Mexico, which
effectively killed any hope of
resistance to that measure. The fall of
Jim Wright was a decisive step in the
domestication of the Congress by the
Bush regime. 
   Bush was also able to rely on an
extensive swamp of ``Bush Democrats''
who would support his proposals under
virtually all circumstances. The basis
of this phenomenon was the obvious fact
that the national leadership of the
Democratic Party had long been a gang
of Harrimanites. The Brown Brothers
Harriman grip on the Democratic Party
had been represented by W. Averell
Harriman until his death, and after
that was carried on by his widow,
Pamela Churchill Harriman, the former
wife of Sir Winston Churchill's
alcoholic son, Randolph. The very
extensive Meyer Lansky/Anti-Defamation
League networks among the Democrats
were oriented toward cooperation with
Bush, sometimes directly, and sometimes
through the orchestration of gang vs.
countergang charades for the
manipulation of public opinion. A
special source of Bush strength among
southern Democrats is the cooperation
between Skull and Bones and southern
jurisdiction freemasons in the
tradition of the infamous Albert Pike.
These southern jurisdiction freemasonic
networks have been most obviously
decisive in the Senate, where a group
of southern Democratic senators has
routinely joined with Bush to block
overrides of Bush's many vetoes, or to
provide a pro-Bush majority on key
votes like the Gulf war resolution. 
   Bush's style in the Oval Office
was described during this period as
``extremely secretive.'' Many members
of Bush's staff felt that the President
had his own long-term plans, but
refused to discuss them with his own
top White House personnel. During
Bush's first year, the White House was
described as ``a tomb,'' without the
usual dense barrage of leaks,
counter-leaks, trial balloons, and
signals which government insiders
customarily employ to influence public
debate on policy matters. Bush is said
to employ a ``need to know'' approach
even with his closest White House
collaborators, keeping each one of them
in the dark about what the others are
doing. Aides have complained of their
inability to keep up with Bush's phone
calls when he goes into his famous
``speed-dialing mode,'' in which he can
contact dozens of politicians, bankers
or world leaders within a couple of
hours. Unauthorized passages of
information from one office to another
inside the White House constitute leaks
in Bush's opinion, and he has been at
pains to suppress them. When
information was given to the press
about a planned meeting with Gorbachov,
Bush threatened his top-level advisers:
``If we cannot maintain proper secrecy
with this group, we will cut the circle
down.'' 
   Bush routinely humiliates and
mortifies his subordinates. This
recalls his style in dealing with the
numerous hapless servants and domestics
who populated his patrician youth; it
may also have been reinforced by the
characteristic style of Henry
Kissinger. If advisers or staff dare to
manifest disagreement, the typical Bush
retort is a whining ``If you're so
damned smart, why are you doing what
you're doing and I'm the President of
the United States?''@s1@s3 
   In one sense, Bush's style
reflects his desire to seem ``absolute
and autocratic'' in the tradition of
the Romanov czars and other Byzantine
rulers. He refuses to be advised or
dissuaded on many issues, relying on
his enraged, hyperthyroid intuitions.
More profoundly, Bush's ``absolute and
autocratic'' act is a cover for the
fact that many of his initiatives,
ideas and policies came from outside of
the U.S. government, since they
originated in the rarefied ether of
those international finance circles
where names like Harriman, Kravis, and
Gammell are the coin of the realm.
Indeed, many of Bush's policies come
from outside of the United States
altogether, deriving from the
oligarchical financial circles of the
City of London. The classic case is the
Gulf crisis of 1990-91. When the
documents on the Bush administration
are finally thrown open to the public,
it is a safe bet that some top British
financiers and Foreign Office types
will be found to have combined
remarkable access and power with a
non-existent public profile. 


   Notes for Chapter XXIV
 
      
   1.
 {Washington Post,} Jan. 21,
1991.
 
   2.
 For Fukuyama's ``End of
History,'' see {The National Interest,}
Summer 1989, and Henry Allen, ``The
End. Or Is It?'' {Washington Post,}
Sept. 27, 1989.
 
   6.
 ``Bush's Earthly Pursuits,''
{Washington Post,} Nov. 18, 1988.
 
   7.
 See the transcript of Bush's
statement and news conference,
{Washington Post,} Feb. 7, 1989; ``With
Signs and Ceremony, S&L Bailout
Begins,'' {Washington Post,} Aug. 10,
1989; and ``Bush: S&Ls May Need More
Help,'' {Washington Post,} Dec. 12,
1989.
 
   8.
 ``Bush Backs Increase in IMF
Funds,'' {Washington Post,} Nov. 23,
1989.
 
   9.
 See House Democratic Study
Group, Special Report No. 101-45,
``Legislation Vetoed by the
President,'' p. 83.
 
   11.
 John M. Barry, {The Ambition
and the Power} (New York: Viking Press,
1989) pp. 621-22.
 
   12.
 {Ibid.}
 
   13.
 ``Bush: The Secret
Presidency,'' {Newsweek,} Jan. 1, 1990.
 


----
         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com