THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
2001: January
Page One
This page has been broken up into two pages because of file size considerations. The second portion can be accessed via a button link at the end of this page.
- January: One of Clinton's last appointments is the naming of Curtis Hebert to chair the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Oil profiteering and the "oiligarchy"
A Republican and close ally of Senator Trent Lott, Hebert is quite conservative and pro-business, but apparently not enough for Enron chairman Kenneth Lay, who shortly after Bush takes office calls Hebert to tell him that if he doesn't change his position on retail competition in the energy business, he would have Bush replace him on the commission. Molly Ivins writes, "It was a revealing episode. One of the president's corporate sponsors was threatening to fire the chair of the commission that regulated the contributor's business." Apparently Hebert wasn't responsive enough to suit Lay; three months after the phone call, Hebert was fired and replaced by a more Enron-friendly commissioner, Pat Wood. (Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose) - Early January: After two years of public input, the outgoing Clinton administration finalizes the so-called "Roadless Rule" that protects 60 million acres of national forest from additional road-building and development.
Global warming and the environment
Bush called it an environmental land grab even before his election, and said before a debate audience in October 2000 that Clinton and Gore had taken "40 million acres of land out of circulation without consulting local officials.... I just cited an example of the administration just unilaterally acting without any input." Bush's claim is completely false; the Forest Service conducted 600 public hearings on the proposal and catalogued over a million letters from American citizens urging the Service to implement the policy. Later in 2001, when the rule is challenged by industry groups, Bush's Department of Justice refuses to defend the rule in court, calling it insensitive to the needs of timber companies and local interests. It will take the intervention of environmental groups intervening "on behalf of the government" to keep the rule in place. But in June 2003 the administration once again goes on the attack. It will issue a decision that apparently keeps the "Roadless Rule" in place, but with some key footnotes. The millions of acres of Alaska's Tongass National Forest will be exempt, opening the forest to timber companies in spite of the fact that Tongass contains 30% of the world's remaining unlogged coastal temperate rain forest. The administration even exempts loggers from filing the required environmental impact statement because there will be "no significant environmental impact." Another footnote allows states to request further relaxations of the rules on roadbuilding and logging in their states' national forests, a policy of especial interest to many Western state governments. (Eric Alterman and Mark Green) - January 10: Incoming president George W. Bush, his vice president Dick Cheney, incoming Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and incoming Secretary of State Colin Powell go to the Pentagon to meet with Clinton's secretary of defense, William Cohen.
Iraq war and occupation
Cohen has been instructed to focus on the topic of Iraq instead of the usual general briefing. Afterward, as Bob Woodward writes in his April 2004 book Plan of Attack, "Bush and his team went downstairs to the Tank, the secure domain and meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Two generals briefed them on the state of the no-fly zone enforcement in Iraq. No-fly zone enforcement was dangerous and expensive. Multimillion-dollar jets were put at risk bombing 57mm antiaircraft guns. Hussein had warehouses of them. As a matter of policy, was the Bush administration going to keep poking Hussein in the chest? Was there a national strategy behind this, or was it just a static tit for tat? Lots of acronyms and program names were thrown around -- most of them familiar to Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell, who had spent 35 years in the Army and been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993. President-elect Bush asked some practical questions about how things worked, but he did not offer or hint at his desires. The Joint Chiefs' staff had placed a peppermint at each place. Bush unwrapped his and popped it into his mouth. Later he eyed Cohen's mint and flashed a pantomime query, Do you want that? Cohen signaled no, so Bush reached over and took it. Near the end of the hour-and-a-quarter briefing, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton, noticed Bush eyeing his mint, so he passed it over. Cheney listened, but he was tired and closed his eyes, conspicuously nodding off several times. Rumsfeld, who was sitting at a far end of the table, paid close attention, though he kept asking the briefers to please speak up or please speak louder. 'We're off to a great start,' one of the chiefs commented privately to a colleague after the session. 'The vice president fell asleep, and the secretary of defense can't hear.'" Days later, as preparation for Bush's takeover, Clinton and Bush meet for their "exit interview." Clinton gives Bush his list of his top five priorities. At the top of the list was dealing with Osama bin Laden. Clinton also discusses the tensions between Pakistan and India, who are threatening each other with nuclear strikes; the crisis in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine; he discusses North Korea; and he discusses Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Bush reportely shakes Clinton's hand after Clinton wraps up his presentation, and says, "Thanks for your advice, Mr. President, but I think you've got your priorities wrong. I'm putting Saddam at the top of the list." (Washington Post, Buzzflash) - The decision to name several Cabinet members is an interesting one.
Partisan Bush appointees
At the end of 2000, rumor had it that Donald Rumsfeld would be named head of the CIA, replacing Clinton appointee George Tenet. But Rumsfeld isn't sure he wants the job. In many ways, the naming of Colin Powell as Secretary of State ensures Rumsfeld's appointment as Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld is the champion of the new administration's hawks and neoconservatives, who fear Powell, a far more moderate figure and the only "superstar" in the group, will extend his influence over the Pentagon as well as the State Department. Rumsfeld was briefly considered as national security advisor, but that post had already been promised to former Chevron director Condoleezza Rice, a hawkish expert on the Soviet Union. One of Rumsfeld's first moves is to implement strong civilian control over the Defense Department over the top of the entrenched military bureaucracy. He initiates what becomes known as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), an overall transformation of how the military is organized and managed. John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate Schools explains: "Donald Rumsfeld wanted to build a smaller, nimbler and more networked military that could respond swiftly to threats anywhere in the world." But military leaders inside the Pentagon feel attacked, says former Secretary of the Army Thomas White: "All of a sudden the view of the army becomes 'Well, they're stodgy. They're intransigent, and they don't understand. They don't get it, what all this stuff is all about." At first, Rumsfeld is less than successful; the military leadership of the Pentagon considers Rumsfeld pushy, unprofessional, and ignorant of what the military requires, and because of Bush's early and ill-considered tax cuts, and his contentious and adversarial relationship with Powell, Rumsfeld finds himself unable to get the funds he wants for his transformation of the department. Many feel that Rumsfeld will be the first to leave the administration. Instead, Rumsfeld is rescued by 9/11, when, after the attacks, he leads the charge inside the White House to immediately retaliate, not just against Afghanistan, where the al-Qaeda leadership is ensconsced, but against Iraq. (PBS) - Incoming National Security director Condoleezza Rice doesn't support the neoconservatives' focus on Iraq;
Iraq war and occupation
a former government official recalls, "Her feeling was that Saddam was a small problem -- chump change -- that we needed to wall him into a corner so we could get on with the big issues: Russia, China, NATO expansion, a new relationship with India, and, down the road, with Africa." However, Bush, with the guidance of Dick Cheney, lards his Defense and State Departments with aggressive, hawkish neoconservatives, many from the think tank Project for a New American Century, who push for an invasion of Iraq virtually from the moment Bush takes the oath of office (see below). After 9/11, these neocons, led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and with the ear of Vice President Cheney, gain dominance in Bush's foreign policy, pushing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the adoption of "preemption" as the US's mainstay of its approach towards handling terrorism. (As Deputy Defense Secretary, Wolfowitz will helped Douglas Feith obtain his appointment as Undersecretary for Policy. Feith will then appoint Richard Perle as Chairman of the Defense Policy Board. All three have been repeatedly implicated in illegally providing US military technology and classified information to Israel, and all have advocated the overthrow of the Iraqi government Feith and Rhode recruit David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for the American Enterprise Institute, to serve as a Pentagon consultant. He will help create the secret Pentagon intelligence unit involved in developing Iraq intelligence.) Rice herself wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine just before being named to the position that too many US policymakers were "uncomfortable with the notion of power politics, great powers, and power balances," and warns that the "national interest" must not be confused with, or give way to, "humanitarian interests" or the interests of "the international community." Rice seems ready to help take the country in a far different, much more unilateral direction that even Bush I, who, with the guidance of Colin Powell and James Baker, forged the worldwide coalition that fought the Gulf War in 1991. Eric Alterman and Mark Green wonder if Rice "deliberately unlearned the lessons of Bush I diplomacy in order to serve at the behest of his more unilateralist-minded son." (Counterpunch/Global Exchange/Daily Kos, Seymour Hersh, Eric Alterman and Mark Green) - January 10 - on: The Pentagon issues its first report on the USS Cole bombing.
Islamist terrorism
The Navy will issue its own report on January 20. As part of the transition between administrations, Clinton's security officials, including director Sandy Berger and counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, meet repeatedly with incoming national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and other senior Bush officials, including Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley. Berger himself attends only one meeting, on the topic of countering terrorism: "I'm coming to this briefing," he says he told Rice, "to underscore how important I think this subject is." Later, alone in his office with Rice, Berger says he told her, "I believe that the Bush administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject." Rice will later deny to Time magazine any recollection of the briefing. - The terrorism briefing is delivered by Clarke, chair of the interagency Counter-Terrorism Security Group (CSG). Since the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000, he had been working on an aggressive plan to take the fight to al-Qaeda. The result was a strategy paper that he had presented to Berger and the other national security "principals" on December 20, 2000. But Berger and the principals decided to shelve the plan and let the next administration take it up. With less than a month left in office, they did not think it appropriate to launch a major initiative against Osama bin Laden. "We would be handing [the Bush Administration] a war when they took office on Jan. 20," says a former senior Clinton aide. "That wasn't going to happen." Now it was up to Rice's team to consider what Clarke had put together. According to Time in an August 2002 article, "Berger had left the room by the time Clarke, using a PowerPoint presentation, outlined his thinking to Rice. A senior Bush administration official denies being handed a formal plan to take the offensive against al-Qaeda, and says Clarke's materials merely dealt with whether the new administration should take 'a more active approach' to the terrorist group. (Rice declined to comment, but through a spokeswoman said she recalled no briefing at which Berger was present.)
- Other senior officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations, however, say that Clarke had a set of proposals to 'roll back' al-Qaeda. In fact, the heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads, 'Response to al-Qaeda: Roll back.' Clarke's proposals called for the 'breakup' of al-Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The financial support for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked, its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities stopped. Nations where al-Qaeda was causing trouble -- Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yemen -- would be given aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see a dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to 'eliminate the sanctuary' where al-Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden was being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime.
- "...Clarke supported a substantial increase in American support for the Northern Alliance, the last remaining resistance to the Taliban. That way, terrorists graduating from the training camps would have been forced to stay in Afghanistan, fighting (and dying) for the Taliban on the front lines. At the same time, the US military would start planning for air strikes on the camps and for the introduction of special-operations forces into Afghanistan. The plan was estimated to cost 'several hundreds of millions of dollars.' In the words of a senior Bush Administration official, the proposals amounted to 'everything we've done since 9/11.' And that's the point. The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush. It is quite true that nobody predicted Sept. 11-- that nobody guessed in advance how and when the attacks would come. But other things are true too. By last summer, many of those in the know-the spooks, the buttoned-down bureaucrats, the law-enforcement professionals in a dozen countries -- were almost frantic with worry that a major terrorist attack against American interests was imminent. It wasn't averted because 2001 saw a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's national-security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat."
- Time continues: "The winter proposals became a victim of the transition process, turf wars and time spent on the pet policies of new top officials. The Bush administration chose to institute its own 'policy review process' on the terrorist threat. Clarke told Time that the review moved 'as fast as could be expected.' And administration officials insist that by the time the review was endorsed by the Bush principals on Sept. 4, it was more aggressive than anything contemplated the previous winter. The final plan, they say, was designed not to 'roll back' al-Qaeda but to 'eliminate' it. But that delay came at a cost. The Northern Alliance was desperate for help but got little of it. And in a bureaucratic squabble that would be farfetched on The West Wing, nobody in Washington could decide whether a Predator drone -- an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and the best possible source of real intelligence on what was happening in the terror camps -- should be sent to fly over Afghanistan. So the Predator sat idle from October 2000 until after Sept. 11. No single person was responsible for all this. But 'Washington' -- that organic compound of officials and politicians, in uniform and out, with faces both familiar and unknown -- failed horribly." Newsweek notes that the plan would be quite expensive, on the close order of several hundred million dollars.
- Time notes that there are no guarantees that implementation of the Clinton plan to "roll back" al-Qaeda would have stopped the terror attacks of 9/11, especially since the focus was on countering terrorist organizations overseas. Yet, "[a]n aggressive campaign to degrade the terrorist network worldwide -- to shut down the conveyor belt of recruits coming out of the Afghan camps, to attack the financial and logistical support on which the hijackers depended -- just might have rendered it incapable of carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks. Perhaps some of those who had to approve the operation might have been killed, or the money trail to Florida disrupted. We will never know, because we never tried. This is the secret history of that failure." The Clinton administration's point men on fighting terrorism, Clarke, Berger, and CIA director George Tenet, were all convinced that al-Qaeda was an imminent and critical threat, not only overseas, but to targets in the US. All three wanted to ramp up the fight against terror, noting that while the Clinton administration had been quite successful in some areas, it had not been successful enough. But little was done under the early months of the Bush administration to counter terrorists, especially the Afghanistan-based al-Qaeda. Bush officials refused to meet with Northern Alliance officials, and never granted the Alliance any sort of official "ally" status. Not only did the Bush regime make it clear that they would not openly support the Alliance against the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies, it was relying on Pakistan to do the work in unearthing and neutralizing al-Qaeda operations, a task that Pakistan was not up to performing.
- Clarke finds himself increasingly ignored by Bush officials; he is seen primarily as a Clinton holdover, and his calls for action are repeatedly ignored. He is effectively demoted as part of an NSC reorganization. Time writes, "As the new administration took office, Rice kept Clarke in his job as counterterrorism czar. In early February, he repeated to Vice President Dick Cheney the briefing he had given to Rice and Hadley. There are differing opinions on how seriously the Bush team took Clarke's warnings. Some members of the outgoing Administration got the sense that the Bush team thought the Clintonites had become obsessed with terrorism. 'It was clear,' says one, 'that this was not the same priority to them that it was to us.' For other observers, however, the real point was not that the new administration dismissed the terrorist theat. On the contrary, Rice, Hadley and Cheney, says an official, 'all got that it was important.' The question is, How high a priority did terrorism get? Clarke says that dealing with al-Qaeda 'was in the top tier of issues reviewed by the Bush Administration.' But other topics got far more attention. The whole Bush national-security team was obsessed with setting up a national system of missile defense. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was absorbed by a long review of the military's force structure. Attorney General John Ashcroft had come into office as a dedicated crime buster. Rice was desperately trying to keep in line a national-security team -- including Rumsfeld, Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell -- whose members had wildly different agendas and styles. 'Terrorism,' says a former Clinton White House official, speaking of the new administration, 'wasn't on their plate of key issues.'
- "Al-Qaeda had not been a feature of the landscape when the Republicans left office in 1993. The Bush team, says an official, 'had to learn about [al-Qaeda] and figure out where it fit into their broader foreign policy.' But doing so meant delay. Some counterterrorism officials think there is another reason for the Bush administration's dilatory response. Clarke's paper, says an official, 'was a Clinton proposal.' Keeping Clarke around was one thing; buying into the analysis of an administration that the Bush team considered feckless and naive was quite another. So Rice instructed Clarke to initiate a new 'policy review process' on the terrorism threat. Clarke dived into yet another round of meetings. And his proposals were nibbled nearly to death. ...By now, Clarke's famously short fuse was giving off sparks. A participant at one of the meetings paraphrases Clarke's attitude this way: 'These people are trying to kill us. I could give a f*ck if Musharraf was democratically elected. What I do care about is Pakistan's support for the Taliban and turning a blind eye to this terrorist cancer growing in their neighbor's backyard.' It was Bush who broke the deadlock. ...One day in early spring, Tenet briefed Bush on the hunt for Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda's head of international operations, who was suspected of having been involved in the planning of the attack on the USS Cole. After the PDB, Bush told Rice that the approach to al-Qaeda was too scattershot. He was tired of 'swatting at flies' and asked for a comprehensive plan for attacking terrorism. According to an official, Rice came back to the NSC and said, 'The President wants a plan to eliminate al-Qaeda.' Clarke reminded her that he already had one. But having a plan isn't the same as executing it. Clarke's paper now had to go through three more stages: the Deputies' Committee, made up of the No. 2s to the main national-security officials; the Principals' Committee, which included Cheney, Rice, Tenet, Powell and Rumsfeld; and finally, the President. Only when Bush had signed off would the plan become what the Bush team called a national-security presidential directive."
- Clarke's new plan suffered the same fate as the Clinton-era plan: it was discussed, wrangled over, and ultimately ignored. As terror warnings mounted during the summer of 2001, Clarke and Tenet became figures of fun around the White House: "The guy was reading way too many fiction novels," says a counterterrorism official. "He turned into a Chicken Little. The sky was always falling for Dick Clarke. We had our strings jerked by him so many times, he was simply not taken seriously." Tenet's warnings suffered a similar fate. Finally, on September 4, Clarke and Tenet were able to schedule a meeting with senior Bush officials about the terror threat. The plan was finally approved -- after the 9/11 attacks. (Time, Buzzflash, Newsweek/Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Al Franken)
- January 14: George W. Bush tells the New York Times,
Bush's energy policies
"The California [energy] crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants." The confusing statement ignores the reality that energy companies such as Enron have been mercilessly gaming the California energy industry for years, causing huge spikes in energy costs at the expense of California energy consumers. Former Enron trader Steve Barth later says, "This was like The Perfect Storm. First our traders were able to buy power for $250 in California, sell it to Arizona for $1,200, then resell it to California for five times that amount." (See the April 17 item below.) (Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose) - January 14: Bush also tells the Times,,
George W. Bush
"Redefining the role of the United States from enablers to keep the peace to enablers to keep the peace from peacekeepers is going to be an assignment." What that means is anybody's guess. (New York Times/AllHatNoCattle) - Mid-January: In preparation for the new Bush-Cheney administration, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert makes a small but significant change in the way the legislature will operate with the executive branch. The Founding Fathers explicitly said over and over again that the three branches of government must be independent of one another. This is reflected in Congress: while the vice president technically presides over the Senate, and has a ceremonial office in the Senate building, no such arrangement exists in the House.
- Yet, Hastert quietly jettisons 212 years of American tradition by giving Dick Cheney a second office in the House side of the Capitol building. From now on, instead of the vice president coming to the House to negotiate with lawmakers, House members will come to him. "Offering office space to the vice president represented more than a breach in the symbolism concerning the powers and autonomy of the House of Representatives," says Scott Lilly, a former House committee clerk. "Hastert's plan was to convert the House into a compliant and subserviant role player inside the White House political organization." As authors Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein write in 2006, "Hastert succeeded in placing party over principle." (Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein)
- January 16: The Clinton administration issues an estimate that the US government will have a surplus of $2.4 trillion in non-Social Security funds over the next decade.
Bush's economic policies
The Bush administration issues its own forecast two weeks later of $3.1 trillion, a figure used to "prove" that Bush's huge tax cuts are affordable and will not cause deficits. However, studies by a wide range of analysts and institutes, including the Concord Coalition, the Brookings Institute, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, show that the $3.1 trillion figure is arrived at by using a number of accounting tricks and fudges, including speculative tax revenues and program cuts that were highly unlikely to occur. It also counts $400 billion in Medicare surplus funds, which are legally off-limits for government programs or tax cuts. The various analyses show that both Bush and Clinton estimates are far too optimistic -- that a projected surplus of $2.0 trillion is more likely, and perhaps even that figure is too high. With this figure, the Bush tax cuts will create immediate deficits (which is exactly what will happen). Bush's figures fail to include funds for his promised military buildup (not to mention the huge expenditures in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars which are already in the planning stages), funds for prescription-drug benefits, funds for Social Security privatization, and other likely expenditures. In total, Bush's figures overestimate the surplus by over a trillion dollars, and underestimate his tax cuts by $500 billion. Bush promotes his tax cuts as "urgent" to prop up the "faltering" economy. What he doesn't mention is that the bulk of his tax cuts do not kick in for several years, providing no economic relief for years and taking effect after the bulk of the surplus may have already disappeared (which, again, proves to be the case). Congressional Democrats will finally force Bush to add an immediate tax rebate of $300 for every single taxpayer and $600 for married couples -- however, this is not a tax rebate, but an advance against 2001 taxes which must be paid back, a detail overlooked by most taxpayers and the mainstream media. The "rebate" makes up less than 5% of the total package. A study by the Economic Policy Institute predicts that the "rebate" will stimulate consumer spending by a paltry 1.3% -- or, as David Corn asks, "could a 0.6 percent tail wag a $10 trillion dog of an economy?" Noted economist Paul Krugman is more pointed, writing, "[The Bush administration] simply waved their hands" and made hundreds of billions of dollars "disappear from the accounting.... This is white-collar crime, pure and simple." (David Corn, Paul Waldman) - January 19: The UN imposes additional sanctions on Afghanistan.
Islamist terrorism
The sanctions limit travel by senior Taliban authorities, freeze bin Laden's and the Taliban's assets, order the closure of Ariana Airlines offices abroad, and impose an arms embargo against the Taliban, but not against Northern Alliance forces battling the Taliban. This doesn't stop the illegal trade network the Taliban is secretly running through Ariana. Two companies, Air Cess and Flying Dolphin, take over most of Ariana's traffic. Air Cess is owned by the Russian arms dealer Victor Bout, and Flying Dolphin is owned by the UAE's former ambassador to the US, who is also an associate of Bout. In late 2000, despite UN reports linking Flying Dolphin to arms smuggling, the United Nations gives Flying Dolphin permission to take over Ariana's closed routes, which it does until the new sanctions take effect. Bout's operations are still functioning and he has not been arrested. Ariana is essentially destroyed in the October 2001 US bombing of Afghanistan. (CCR) - January 19: On Clinton's final day as president,
Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"
the Office of the Independent Counsel, led by Ken Starr's replacement Robert Ray, officially ends the entire Whitewater-Lewinsky investigation, abandoning the possibility of indicting Clinton for lying under oath and obstructing justice. In return, Clinton admits that he had not been fully truthful about his own actions: "I tried to walk a line between acting lawfully and testifying falsely," Clinton says, "but I now recognize that I did not fully accomplish this goal and that certain of my responses to questions were false." (Marvin Kalb)
Bush takes office
- January 20: George W. Bush takes office.
George W. Bush
Tens of thousands of protesters line the streets hurling insults and eggs at his motorcade, though the mainstream media largely refuses to report on the protests. "The media coverage of Bush's inauguration focused on the dignified pomp of the occasion," observes presidential historian Fred Greenstein. Enron donates $300,000 for the presidential inauguration ceremonies. Bush begins to rant against Iraq and Saddam Hussein almost from the moment he takes office; Vice President Dick Cheney directs outgoing defense secretary William Cohen to "focus on Iraq" in his briefing of the new president (see above). - Many officials from the Reagan/Bush and Nixon/Ford eras turn up again in this administration; Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell becomes Secretary of State, and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney is Vice-President. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held the same position under Gerald Ford in 1975-77. The only major figure to permanently remain in office is CIA Director Tenet, appointed in 1997 and reputedly a long time friend of Bush Sr. FBI Director Louis Freeh stays on until June 2001.
- Many Bush administration officials have deep connections with US oil corporations, including Bush, Cheney, and national security director Condoleezza Rice. Cheney continues to receive as much as $1 million a year from his former company, Halliburton Oil. Rice is a former member of Chevron's board of directors from 1991 through 2001, when she is tabbed as Bush's head of national security. She owns a quarter of a million dollars' worth of Chevron stock, and has had an oil tanker named after her (renamed by Chevron after she joined the Bush administration in order to avoid controversy). Rice was in charge of Chevron's public policy committee from 2000-2001, where she helped fight off shareholder resolutions demanding that Chevron improve its human rights and environmental practices in Nigeria.
cNew FCC chairman Michael Powell is not only the son of Colin Powell and an FCC commissioner since 1997, but a board member of America Online. Powell is expected to be far friendlier to the telecommunication industry and its desire to deregulate and consolidate the country's communications and media industry. (Boston Herald, Bushwatch, Washington Post, CNNfn/Antelope Valley Hub, Kevin Phillips, Amy Goodman and David Goodman, Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Laura Flanders)
Click here for a page covering the senior members of Bush's administration as named in January 2001.
- Kevin Phillips writes in his 2004 authoritative examination of the Bush family, American Dynasty:
Bush family
"Treating the Bush presidencies as growing out of a four-generation interaction with the so-called US establishment is, in a word, essential. Likewise, dealing separately with the administration of George H.W. and George W. -- or worse, ignoring commonalities of behavior in office -- is like considering individual planets while ignoring their place within the solar system." Of the incoming administration, Phillips writes, "Most twentieth-century presidents put in office by tight margins sought to be conciliatory to make up for want of a popular mandate. Not the Bush administration. Eschewing any inhibition based on lack of national consent or legitimacy, it governed from the start with an ideological edge. Family credentials and a powerful financial donor network had been the basis of the new president's nominations, and family connections quickly became a fount of federal appointments, including two for children of the five pro-Bush Supreme Court justices: Janet Rehnquist, daughter of the chief justice, became inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, while Eugene Scalia, son of Justice Antonin Scalia, became solicitor of the Department of Labor." Other powerful GOP families profited from the Bush ascension. The Bush campaign helped Elizabeth Dole, wife of Senator Bob Dole, win a Senate seat in North Carolina, a state in which she had not lived for decades. Secretary of State Colin Powell's son Michael became head of the Federal Communications Commission, and would work to further the corporate stranglehold on the US media. The son of Senator Strom Thurmond, Strom Thurmond Jr, was chosen to be US attorney from South Carolina despite the fact that he had graduated from law school a bare three years before and lacked the experience necessary for the post." (Kevin Phillips) - The newly installed President Bush is quick to name Enron, and other energy corporation executives, to high office in his administration in early 2001.
Oil profiteering and the "oiligarchy"
Kenneth Lay is one of five Bush Pioneers named to the Energy Department transition team. Three of the five team members, including Lay, are Texans from the energy industry. Vice-President Cheney, a Texan since 1995, is named to head the administration's energy policy task force. (62 of the 63 members of the task force have ties to corporate energy interests.) Patrick Wood, Lay's handpicked chairman of the Texas Public Utilities Commission, is named to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in May 2001, and becomes chairman in August, again sponsored by Lay. Nora Mead Brownell, who had supported Enron's attempts to deregulate Pennsylvania's energy industry, is named to FERC as well. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says later, "[E]nvironmental concerns went virtually unrepresented." - Lay also succeeds in having Glenn McCullough named as chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, an important energy agency in the southeast. Before McCullough's ascension to the post, the TVA had a "terrible" relationship with Enron, mostly over disputes over contracts that Enron refused to honor. McCullough will help smooth over relations between Enron and the TVA.
- Enron also enjoys tremendous access to Bush's Commerce Department. Donald Evans, Bush's Secretary of Commerce, is a Texas oilman and Bush family friend, and a supporter of Enron's global business ventures. Theodore Kassinger, named general counsel to the department, is a lawyer in Enron's firm of Vinson & Elkins. Robert Zoellick, Lay's confidant and fellow Enron executive, is named as the US's new trade representative, giving Enron direct access to the administration's efforts to steer the World Bank towards funding Enron's business ventures around the world. Former Enron executive Thomas White is named Secretary of the Army; White will work to further Enron's and Halliburton's desire to further privatize the US military, particularly in supplying its energy needs. Bush's chief economic advisor, Lawrence Lindsay, had served for a year on Enron's Advisory Board, and is a chief advocate of energy industry deregulation; he served simultaneously on Bush's campaign while still drawing $50,000 annually from Enron as a consultant, and described Enron's Kenneth Lay as a key contributor to the campaign both financially and policy-wise. Chief campaign strategist Karl Rove owns a considerable chunk of Enron stock, and has a personal relationship with numerous Enron executives. Former Enron lobbyist and Montana governor Mark Racicot will be named Republican national chairman in 2001.
- Other Texas energy companies are also well represented in the new administration. White House personnel director Clay Johnson owns a large amount of stock in the El Paso energy firm. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was a former director of Chevron, which owned a large part of Texas's Dynergy firm. "What suited Enron in most cases," writes Kevin Phillips, "also suited El Paso, Reliant, and Dynergy." Interior Department solicitor William Geary Myers comes from a position lobbying to preserve federal grazing subsidies, and finds himself representing the department in grazing cases. Partially due to Myers's influence, Interior will back off of a plan to double the fees for grazing on public lands it charges ranchers (currently, ranchers only pay 10% of market value). And Assistant Secretary of Energy for Fossil Energy Carl Michael Smith, a veteran of the oil industry, will tell a group of oil and gas industry representatives that his job is to determine "how best to utilize taxpayer dollars to the benefit of industry." Says the Sierra Club's Dan Becker, "The key lobbyists for all the key industries now hold key positions in this administration. The level of animus that they bring to their activities is unparallelled. The Reagan had [Interior Secretary] Jim Watt, but this administration has 25 Jim Watts, and in fact, Gale Norton [Secretary of the Interior] was one of Jim Watt's top deputies." Lobbyist Jack Abramoff is also named to the Department of the Interior transition team. (Mother Jones, Kevin Phillips, Paul Waldman, Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Ron Suskind)
- Kevin Phillips observes that Bush embraces the social and political positions of evangelical Christians that mandate free will as a solution to society's problems
Bush's economic policies
because it allows one to, in Phillips' words, "reject government programs and to insist that free will gave everyone equal opportunity to make something of him- or herself. If blacks or welfare mothers did not take advantage of the opportunity or if the rich did too well, these outcomes were individual, not structural. Government, to be helpful, should uphold personal religion and morality." The Southern Baptist Convention abandoned its decades-long support for structural problems of society -- reducing hunger, helping the poor, supporting family farms, aiding welfare families -- in favor of polemics touting personal responsibility and disapproving of abortion, homosexuality, sex in films and television shows, and Bill Clinton's morals. Bush has adopted much of the SBC outlook and woven it into his social and economic policies. In 2001, he will propose legislation abolishing estate and inheritance taxes, cut income tax brackets, attack organized labor, further deregulate the electricity industry, weaken occupational safety oversight, and reverse his promises to cut carbon dioxide emissions in favor of giving polluters more leeway to pump toxins into the environment. Federal deficits will reflect the tax cuts for the rich; dozens of states will be forced to slash educational, health, medical, and law enforcement spending in response to Bush's economic decisions. - Meanwhile, the media, and many Americans, can't or won't dig past the "compassionate conservatism" rhetoric to see the toxic effects of his economic policies. "[S]o insistently, for example, did he cloak his October 2001 economic 'stimulus' proposals in terms of job creation," Phillips writes, "that when poll takers told focus groups about some of the actual components -- nearly $700 million in tax rebates for General Electric and $250 million for Enron -- many startled citizens simply refused to believe the actual facts." His education rhetoric, spearheaded by the Children's Defense Fund phrase "Leave no child behind" and eventually reflected in the "No Child Left Behind" legislation package, is empty words -- his tax cuts will drain so much money from the economy that virtually none is left over to fund the program. CDF chairwoman Marian Wright Edelman says of the program, "The Bush administration's words say 'Leave no child behind.' The Bush administration's deeds say 'Leave no millionaire behind.'" The American Prospect writes of Bush's promises to fund education, health care, child care, Social Security, and other initiatives in light of his proposed $726 billion tax cuts: Phillips writes in retrospect, "George W. Bush is in a class by himself when it comes to prevarication. It is no exaggeration to say that lying has become Bush's signature as president." (Kevin Phillips)
- Another Bush appointee who garners little attention is Harold Rhode, a Middle East specialist who works under the Defense Department's Douglas Feith in the "Office of Net Assessment."
Partisan Bush appointees
Feith and Rhode, with neocon David Wurmser, help set up the Pentagon's Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, or Donald Rumsfeld's controversial "B" team of intelligence gatherers, whose focus is finding, or manufacturing, evidence to support regime change in Iraq and Iran, and to "prove" connections that don't exist between such disparate Islamic terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad, groups whose conflicting ideologies and objectives are ignored by the group. The group is one of the key sources of the misinformation later used by Bush officials to "prove" connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Rhode helps Feith "lay down the law about the department's new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation," in one instance accosting and haranguing a visiting senior Arab diplomat, telling him that there would be no "bartering in the bazaar anymore.... You're going to have to sit up and pay attention when we say so." Rhode will be a key player in Rumsfeld's purge of the Defense Department of veteran officials, including a number of generals, who fail to back Rumsfeld's transformation of the Pentagon into a strongly anti-Iraq department. Rhode appeared to be "pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with," says a former analyst. "They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the f*ck out of there." Rhode's and Feith's other source of new personnel is the American Enterprise Institute, a rabidly right-wing outfit with grandiose plans for the "transformation" of the Middle East into an American protectorate. According to Robert Ebel, the former top CIA oil expert, he said that ONA was, in Greg Palast's paraphrasing, "the dream factory that produced the fantasy oil gushers for [Paul] Wolfowitz" and Donald Rumsfeld. It is Rhode who is ultimately responsible for bringing Iraqi exile and convicted criminal Ahmad Chalabi in as the putative leader of the Iraqi "government" planned to replace Saddam Hussein, partly because they believe that once Hussein is ousted and Chalabi is in power, he will sell off Iraq's oil fields to US business interests. Chalabi, who is in reality a mole working for Iranian intelligence, has other plans. (SourceWatch, CCR, Greg Palast) - Bush's group of top officials,
Partisan Bush appointees
featuring five women, two African-Americans, a Hispanic, an Arab-American, an Asian-American, and a Democrat, is hailed as a "model of diversity" by the mainstream media, with the supposedly liberal New York Times leading the charge by favorably comparing the ethnic makeup of the Bush staff to that of his predecessor, Bill Clinton. The fact that Bush's executive branch (a much larger pool of officials) features dramatically fewer women and minorities than Clinton's escapes the media's notice, as does the fact that most of his officials are hard-right reactionaries, with few moderate Republicans represented. Even the National Organization for Women compliments Bush for elevating Condoleezza Rice to the position of National Security Director and former campaign communications director Karen Hughes to the position of White House counsel. (Laura Flanders) - January 20: The presidential papers of Ronald Reagan are scheduled to be released to the public (by Reagan's own decision),
Secrecy of Bush administration
but Bush invokes a clause in the Presidential Records Act to allow him 30 days to "review" the papers before releasing them. The papers will never be released; in November, Bush will issue an executive order giving him essentially carte blanche in deciding if and when any presidential papers will ever be released. Bush will later move to keep his father's papers secret as well. The 1978 PRA already exempts classified and other "sensitive" documents from being disclosed. Bush's order will declare that not only can a former President assert executive privilege over his papers against the will of the incumbent President (a measure Reagan instituted just before he left office) but that a sitting President could also block the papers of a predecessor, even if that predecessor had approved their release. The implications of this change are breathtaking. "The bottom line is that secrecy prevails in every situation when at least one party wants it," says Mark Rozell, a political science professor at the Catholic University of America and a leading scholar on executive privilege. Veteran political columnist Russell Baker later writes, "The Bush administration, in full Orwellian swing, has dubbed its executive order 'Further Implementation of the Presidential Records Act,' as if it were designed to enhance public access. According to White House spokesperson Anne Womack, 'This really didn't change anything.' The order, she says, is 'just about procedure. It doesn't talk about when, how or why.' At the time the order was signed, press secretary Ari Fleischer said it would mandate a 'more orderly process.... As a result of the new law that is now going into effect, and thanks to the executive order that the President will soon issue, more information will be forthcoming.' That remains to be seen. Whereas in the past the White House had to prove that it had a compelling reason to withhold information, Bush's executive order places the burden on researchers and others to prove that they have a compelling need for the information. This effectively eviscerates the Presidential Records Act." One clause of the order even allows a former president to appoint a representative to make the decision to withhold or release their client's records, a clause that leads presidential scholar Anna Nelson to ask, "...Do we want the children, grandchildren and fellow workers [of a former President] to make these decisions? These are public records." "This is a test of Congress to see how much the administration can get away with," says Steve Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. "It is not at all surprising the executive branch would want to operate in secret. The question is, How much will Congress accept?" Many observers feel that the Bush administration is laying the groundwork for an upcoming refusal to release documents that might link Bush officials, and perhaps Bush himself, to the Enron debacle. "secrecy in the Bush Administration is not limited to one or two individuals. It is a guiding philosophy," says Aftergood later in Bush's presidency. "Whether it is the war in Afghanistan or presidential records from two decades ago, the administration wants to control what the public is permitted to know. It is a dramatic shift from the Clinton administration, where there were several agency heads speaking out in favor of greater disclosure, and in which an unprecedented volume of declassified information was released." (Nation) - January 20: In one of his last actions as president, Bill Clinton pardons or commutes the prison sentences of around 140 people.
Clinton administration
The most controversial pardon may be that of Marc Rich, the financier who in 1983 fled the US to escape charges of tax evasion and doing business with Iran during the hostage crisis. Rich's wife, Denise, is a heavy contributor to the Democratic Party, leading to charges that Clinton's pardon was essentially bought and paid for by Denise Rich. Clinton explains his decision by noting that similar situations were settled in civil, not criminal court, and cites clemency pleas from Israeli government officials, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak. (Rich currently lives in luxury in Switzerland.) Other controversial decisions include the commutation of convicted cocaine dealer Carlo Anibal Vignali and the pardons of former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros, Clinton's brother Roger, Susan McDougal, former "terrorist" Patty Hearst, and Fife Symington, the former Republican governor of Arizona who resigned in 1997 and faced multiple charges of fraud involving savings and loan dealings. It is interesting to note that the Bush administration's almost paranoid sense of security does not apply to the Rich pardon; for the first time in history, transcripts of private conversations between a US president and a foreign leader are provided to the press when Bush officials leak partial transcripts of conversations between Clinton and Barak over the Rich pardon. Bush refuses to release other portions of the transcripts at the request of Clinton officials who realize that the rest of the conversations between Clinton and Barak show the Rich pardon in a more benign and understandable light. In addition, Bush officials release thousands of selected e-mails from senior Clinton officials in their attempt to smear Clinton over the pardon. Like the carefully selected portions of the Clinton-Barak transcripts, the e-mails are chosen to paint Clinton in the worst possible light. (Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Paul Waldman)
"The Christian community has a golden opportunity to train an army of dedicated teachers who can invade the public school classrooms and use them to influence the nation for Christ." -- evangelist James Kennedy, Center for Reclaiming America
- Evangelicals are also heartened by the hundreds of appointments from their ranks to offices in the new administration.
Religious conservatives
They are particularly pleased to see their colleagues named to positions where they could influence, and sometimes direct, the administration's responses to issues like abortion, gay rights, federal aid to religion, women's rights, birth control and family planning, and federal volunteer programs. - Kay Coles James, a religious activist who was the former dean of the Robertson School of Government at Pat Robertson's Regent University, is named head of the Office of Personnel Management, where she will push her anti-affirmative action agenda. (James and her husband Charles signed a 1998 Southern Baptist pledge that affirmed the wife's subserviant position in a family. Charles James lands a cushy position in the Department of Labor's civil rights division.) David Caprara, the director of Sun Myung Moon's American Family Coalition, is named head of AmeriCorps. John Ashcroft, a lay minister in the Pentecostal Assemblies of God, is named Attorney General, and in the prescribed Biblical manner, anoints himself with cooking oil before being sworn in. The Christian Legal Society's Carl Esbeck becomes Ashcroft's chief of the DoJ's faith based office. Eric Treene of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty becomes the DoJ's special counsel for religious discrimination. Jay Sekulow, from Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice, becomes an advisor to the DoJ's Office of Legal Education, where he will help draft a more permissive set of school prayer guidelines released by the Department of Education in 2003. Robert Brame is nominated for the National Labor Relations Board but will be forced to withdraw in 2001 when it emerges that he was a board member of Atlanta's American Vision, a group that advocated placing the United States under biblical law and opposed rights for women. Bush also will withdraw the nomination of Jerry Thacker as a member of the Presidential Advisory Committee on HIV and AIDS when the news breaks that Thacker, a conservative evangelical, consistently referred to AIDS as "the gay plague" and homosexuality as a "deathstyle, not a lifestyle." (The council also includes former congressman Tom Coburn, who publicly doubts the efficacy of condoms in preventing STDs.)
- But for every Thacker and Brame who will be forced to withdraw from service with the administration, hundreds of evangelicals and conservative Christians with strong agendas get in under the radar. One notable example is physician David Hager's nomination to head the Food and Drug Administration. Hager advocated the use of prayer by women suffering from premenstrual syndrome and other ailments, refused to discuss contraception with unwed female patients, and pledged to fight the FDA's 1996 acceptance of RU-486 as an abortion pill. Another is the naming of Nancy Pfotenhauer to the National Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women. Pfotenhauer, the president of the Independent Women's Forum, had fought against the Violence Against Women Act. The deputy of the Department of Health and Human Services, Wade Horn, is a founder of the National Fatherhood Institute, and has built a career on fighting supposed anti-male bias in domestic violence and child-custody laws; Horn's major claim to fame lays in his advocacy of using welfare laws to force recipients to get married, even to the point of withholding money from single mothers. (Kevin Phillips, Laura Flanders, Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
- Rhodri Jeffrey-Jones writes in his 2003 book The CIA and American Democracy:
Secrecy of Bush administration
"With the arrival of Bush Junior in the White House, it was immediately plain that secret intelligence would receive a high status and more money. While the CIA may have been the creation of a Democratic president (Harry Truman), it now seemed to be strongly favored by Republicans, notably conservative Republicans and especially the Bushes. Alarm bells began to ring for those who remembered past CIA excesses and who for years had campaigned for restrictions, oversight, and even abolition. But those sounds were soon drowned out by the deafening roar of 9/11." (Kevin Phillips) - Lewis Lapham writes in 2004,
Bush administration's contempt for democracy
"President Bush pledged allegiance to what have become the American house rules when, on arriving in Washington in the winter of 2001, he let it be known that he intended to run the government as if it were a business. Three years later it comes as no surprise that the ten-year federal budget projection has changed from a $5.6 trillion surplus to a $4 trillion deficit, or that our splendid little war in Iraq turns out to have been sold to the American public in the manner of a well-promoted but fraudulent stock offering. The man has been true to his word, the corporation of which he deems himself chairman and chief executive officer not unlike the ones formerly owned and operated by his friends and fundraisers at Enron and Arthur Andersen. The administration's economic and military schemes rely on budget analysts who rig their balance sheets with sham transactions (for African uranium), false data (establishing Saddam Hussein's connection to al-Qaeda), offshore special-purpose entities (to contain the otherwise invisible weapons of mass destruction). - Because the Bush administration's modus operandi resembles that of a corrupt monopoly (publicly owned but privately managed), much of its domestic and foreign policy can be understood in terms of the hidden surcharge and the dishonest annual report. 'Fraud' is another word for 'freedom,' 'to make a killing' the highest form of patriotism or praise. Mark up the price of the American military occupation of Iraq from $2 billion to $4 billion a month, or guide WorldCom into the desert of a $9 billion accounting error, and whether it is Donald Rumsfeld explaining the arithmetic to Tim Russert, or Bernard Ebbers, the president of WorldCom, answering the questions of a judge, the story follows a now-familiar script -- a once-trusted institution becomes entangled in the nets of perjury and graft, assets worth $100 million depart for points unknown, the stock price falls from ninety-five dollars to thirty cents a share, the company's pensioners are hounded into perjury. The high-end executives meanwhile cash their stock options at the best possible price, reward their own grand and petty larcenies with severance payments in amounts upward of $30 million, retain the apartments in Paris and the bank account in Zurich, go off to Colorado with the golf clubs and the skis. Transfer the procedure from the private to the public sector and the government fattens the defense budget by sending the soldiers and the ranks out to pasture in Iraq, clears the Pentagon's inventory of weapons no longer stylish, and distributes the construction contracts to any Texas friend of liberty willing to lend a hand with the oil derricks around Baghdad and the balloons at next year's Republican nominating convention." (Lewis Lapham)
- Journalist Joe Conason writes, "In stark contrast with their instantaneous hostility to Clinton, the 'liberal' Washington press corps gave Bush the longest honeymoon ever.
Conservative media slant
Within a few months, the servility of the media had become so appallingly obvious that the Washington Post editors finally offered an explanation on May 6, 2001. In a long article on the Style section's front page, correspondent John Harris confessed, 'Are the national news media soft on Bush? The instinctive response of any reporter is to deny it. But my rebuttals lately have been wobbly. The truth is, the new president has done things with relative impunity that would have been huge uproars if they had occurred under Clinton. Take it from someone who made a living writing about those uproars.' James Warren, then Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, offered a harsher assessment after the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner turned from satirical roast to presidential love fest. 'It was the perfect example of all the sucking up to Bush that's been going on every day in this town since he was elected,' growled Warren, whose paper endorsed Bush in November 2001. 'We have been effectively emasculated.... So far, we've made a virtue out of his shortcomings.'" Later, more evidence of anti-Gore bias is presented from some of the same right-wing pundits who ripped Gore during the campaign. "[H]e has been disliked all along," writes Post reporter Dana Milbank in August 2002. Hard-line conservative commentator and former Republican representative Joe Scarborough says he was stunned at the treatment Gore received from the media: "I think, in the 2000 election, [the media] were fairly brutal to Al Gore," Scarborough tells fellow pundit Chris Matthews in November 2002. Former Bush White House aide James Pinkerton tells Fox News, "Look, the problem with Gore is, nobody [in the press] really likes him." In August 2002, the strictly nonpartisan ABC News column The Note will express its dismay at the savaging of Gore, after a ferocious attack on Tipper Gore turns out to be completely false. "Al Gore is regularly treated unfairly by the press corps at large," the column observes. "Al Gore might have, like most humans, some flaws, but hasn't this unfair coverage gone on long enough?" (Joe Conason)
"This is not a family that would be taking over the world if they were not in politics. But they're good at becoming president. It's a curious niche."
-- Longtime Bush aide, quoted by Kevin Phillips
- January 20: Bush's first action as President is to reinstate the "global gag rule"
"Culture Wars"
blocking foreign aid to any family planning clinic that even mentions the word "abortion." As a result, many family planning clinics in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa have closed, resulting in the spread of AIDS and, ironically, an increase in abortions due to unwanted pregnancies. (Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose) - January 20: Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, directs federal agencies to freeze more than 300 pending regulations issued by the administration of Bill Clinton.
Bush administration's contempt for democracy
The regulations affect areas ranging from health and safety to the environment and industry. The delay, Card says, would "ensure that the president's appointees have the opportunity to review any new or pending regulations." The process expressly precludes input from average citizens. Inviting such comments, agency officials conclude, would be "contrary to the public interest." Almost all of the regulations are overturned, to the benefit of the corporations involved and the detriment of the American citizenry. (US News and World Report) - George W. Bush is the first President in American history to enter office with a criminal record,
George W. Bush
as well as the first president to be recorded as AWOL from military service, and the first modern candidate to refuse to take a drug test or answer questions about his former drug use. During his campaign, all of his records about his Texas governorship were hidden away in his father's Presidential library and locked away from public access, as are all records of SEC investigations of his former companies and all the minutes of the meetings of the public corporations in which he served as a board member. Some of his achievements will include:
- Removing more checks and balances, and having the least amount of Congressional oversight, than any presidential administration in US history;
- Signing more laws and executive orders amending the Constitution than any other president in US history;
- Refusing to intervene in the biggest energy crises in American history, refusing to investigate when widespread corruption is revealed, and refusing to use national reserves to help stabilize gasoline prices when they shot up to the highest levels in history;
- Creating the largest government department bureaucracy in the history of the United States;
- Being the first US president to establish a secret shadow government;
- Becoming the first president in US history to order an attack and military occupation of a sovereign nation, against the will of the United Nations and the world community;
- Setting the record for biggest annual budget spending increases, more than any other president in US history;
- Spending the budget surplus and all but bankrupting the US Treasury;
- Shattering the record for the largest annual federal deficit;
- Presiding over the largest single drop in the history of the stock market, and presiding over the biggest corporate stock market fraud in any market in any country in the history of the world.;
- Presiding over an economy that sets the record for most personal bankruptcies and foreclosures filed;
- Cutting unemployment benefits for more out-of-work Americans than any other president in US history;
- Slashing health care benefits for veterans;
- Appointing more convicted criminals to administration positions than any president in US history;
- Holding the US and world record for most corporate campaign donations, and having as his single biggest corporate donor the former CEO of Enron, Kenneth Lay, who led the company into one of the biggest single instances of corporate fraud in history;
- Having 9 members of his Defense Policy Board sit on the board of defense contractors or operating as advisers
- Spending more money on polls and focus groups than any president in US history;
- Changing US policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts;
- Setting the record for most vacation days ever taken by a president;
- Setting the record for the fewest press conferences of any president since the advent of TV;
- Dissolving more international treaties than any president in US history;
- Appointing the richest Cabinet in US history, with an average fortune of $10.9 million apiece;
- Setting the all-time record for number of administration appointees who violated US law by not selling their huge investments in corporations bidding for government contracts;
- Prompting the UN to remove the US from the Human Rights Commission and the Elections Monitoring Board;
- Withdrawing from the International Criminal Court, and refusing to allow inspectors access to US prisoners of war, therefore by default no longer abiding by the Geneva Conventions;
- Being the first president to refuse UN elections inspectors access to US elections (the 2002 elections).
- Economist and writer Paul Krugman
George W. Bush
will describe Bush and his administration as "revolutionary power...a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system." (Buzzflash)
