Sunday, October
26, 2008
The Failed Presidency of George W. Bush: A Dismal Legacy. --[PART II]
"Greed
is good. Greed is right. Greed Works."
Gordon Gekko,
corporate raider (played by Michael Douglas) in the movie Wall St.
“President [George
W.] Bush will be remembered as the most fiscally irresponsible president in
our nation’s history.”
Sen. Kent Conrad, Chairman of the Senate Budget
Committee
[The government's
decision to buy shares in the nation's leading banks] “is not intended
to take over the free market, but to preserve it.”
President George
W. Bush, October 14, 2008
"Our country for the first time in my life time has abandoned the basic principle of human rights. ...We've said that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to those people in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, and we've said we can torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime to which they are accused."
Jimmy Carter, former American
president
“After [this] war [against Iraq] has ended, the United States will
have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have to rebuild
America's image around the globe.”
Sen. Robert Byrd, (D-W.Va), March 19, 2003
Economically,
the Bush-Cheney administration is leaving behind a big financial and
economic mess. In fact, this is an administration that has
brought misery upon America by its misguided economic policies that have built
a mountain
of shaky debt and rendered dysfunctional large segments of the
American banking industry and large sectors of the U.S. economy, through
inappropriate deregulation to enrich greedy
special interest
characters, wheeler-dealers, corporate con men, professional short-sellers and
other scam artists and swindlers.
In so doing, it has
empowered rich parasitic speculators and turned the financial sector into a
giant casino, thus
risking the health of the entire economy.
Indeed, and to complete the picture, the Bush-Cheney
administration has emptied the public treasury, debased the U.S. currency and
fueled deflation, inflation
and, in the end, produced stagflation
and what can turn out to be a very
serious recession.
This is understandable. Over the last eight years, the
Bush-Cheney administration has adopted a laissez-faire policy based on a let-them-eat-cake ideology. It has pushed for economic
deregulation throughout the government, beginning with the de-fanging of the Securities
and Exchange Commission. It has pursued an aggressive policy of
deregulation of the large global investment banks, which were basically left to
self-regulate themselves and allowed to build up the largest mountain of flimsy
backed debt
instruments and risky financial derivative products
ever seen in history. It did the same thing for other regulatory agencies such
as the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, worker
safety and transportation agencies.
It is thus no accident that the Bush-Cheney
administration has presided over one of the worst financial collapses
and credit
crises in U.S. history, by
packing regulatory agencies with cronies whose mission it was to let rapacious
speculators and market manipulators go wild. The result has been the creation
of a casino-like speculative economy
that is now crashing down before our very eyes.
Under Bush-Cheney, financial markets became
manipulated by unscrupulous
bankers and by rapacious hedge funds,
as public regulation was reduced to a minimum. Millions of Americans lost their
homes through foreclosure and many more saw their working and pension incomes
eroded and destroyed by inflation and plant closings. And as what could be a protracted recession
proceeds, many more will lose their jobs
in the coming months, while some older employees may have to postpone their
retirement because of the disappearance of their pension money.
In a parody of President Abraham Lincoln, we can say
this has been an administration that deserved to be dubbed "a
government of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy." Some would not hesitate to say, also in
parody, that it has been "a government of Goldman Sachs, by Goldman
Sachs and for Goldman Sachs," considering the ubiquitous political and economic role which that firm
has played within the Bush-Cheney administration. President Bush's
own Chief of Staff, Mr. Joshua Bolten,
comes from Goldman Sachs.
And these days, everybody
pretends not see the real and potential conflicts
of interests of other public servants who are now on the giving
public side of things, at the U.S. Treasury, and who are going to be on the
receiving private side of public money, in a scant few months. It is the same
thing with a lot of what the U.S. Treasury
does. —Even the
Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mr. Mark Carney, is a former employee of Goldman
Sachs!
In a related matter, for historical purposes, it will
be remembered that, in the fall of 2008, the Bush-Cheney administration
sponsored a huge
rescue-plus-bailout of the largest speculative Wall Street
investment banks (which the Bush SEC had deregulated
on March 28, 2004) and of a host of other banking and insurance
institutions which had engaged in alchemy or synthetic finance and made risky
investments. To that effect, it is ready to place at risk close to $2.0
trillion of public money and let the public debt explode, with few conditions
attached to protect the public interest. In fact, the Bush administration stood
ready to advance hundreds of billions of dollars and only requested non-voting
preferred shares in the troubled banks and insurance companies
that it rescued from bankruptcy. As a consequence, contrary to what the
Roosevelt administration did in the 1930s, the U.S. government has no direct
say about the way the troubled financial institutions are managed and run, and
thus, if the bail-out were to be successful, most of the benefits would go to
bank owners and their executives; but, if things continue to deteriorate,
taxpayers will be the ones left holding the bag.
Some have said this is an example of corporate socialism for the rich.
In fact, this has nothing to do
with socialism per se, but everything to do with legal and unapologetical extortionism on a high level. For all these reasons, if the
ongoing recession and financial crisis were to turn into a full-fledged
economic depression, as it could possibly do, and as it did in 1873-1880 and
1929-1939, it would have to be dubbed by historians "the Bush-Cheney Grand
Economic Depression" of 2008-20(?).
George W. Bush will also be remembered for having financed his whimsical
and ill-conceived three-trillion-dollar
war of aggression against Iraq on credit, thus worsening the U.S. financial situation in the
world, perhaps irrevocably. He is leaving behind him a financial mess like no
one has seen since the great depressions following 1873 and 1929.
In all fairness, it must be said that some Democrats in Congress, the
so-called Bush Democrats who usually vote with Republicans on foreign policy
issues, have also been supporters of the Iraq
War from the beginning and have invariably voted for the
hundreds of billions of dollars required to finance it.
The Bush-Cheney
administration has presided over economic dislocations and greed-fed
financial bubbles, and it has been an agent
of poverty and
of financial and economic
crises. This is
an administration that will be sadly remembered for its huge tax cuts for
the super rich, for its huge fiscal deficits bequeathed to future generations and for
its huge and costly bailouts for speculators and high flyers, and very little
for families and ordinary citizens.
As a consequence, on the whole, Americans are today poorer than when
this duo took power eight years ago, while the gap
between the very rich and the average American has never been wider. It has
been a regime that has borrowed and borrowed, debased the currency, waged
unnecessary wars and doled out defense contracts in the most reckless possible
way, with a minimum of oversight and accountability.
• International Mess: An Irresponsible Attempt to
rekindle the Cold War
Internationally, Bush and Cheney not only started a war against Iraq,
a country that had never attacked the United States, but they also did their
utmost to recklessly restart the Cold War
with Russia. They did that by unilaterally abrogating the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty, by transforming NATO
into an offensive military alliance and
by installing anti-missile
sites, manned
by American soldiers, in former Warsaw Pact countries, such as Poland
and the Czech Republic,
and in former Soviet republics, right next to Russia's borders.
The Bush-Cheney administration designed a policy of encircling Russia
by arming pro-U.S. European client states. That is why they have directly
provoked Russia by incorporating six former Warsaw Pact nations and three former
soviet republics in the now offensive and U.S.-controlled military alliance
that is NATO.
They went as far as to openly support and arm aggression-prone governments in
some former Soviet republics, especially in Georgia,
the birthplace of Stalin. All this reflects a pro-active and aggressive
military stance against Russia designed to provoke Russia and restart
the Cold War,
thus dangerously increasing the chances of a nuclear world war.
Let us recall that when Khrushchev's Soviet Union tried to install missiles in Cuba in
1962, it nearly started a world war. Now, half a century later,
with Bush-Cheney, the brinkmanship is on the other side. They have acted irresponsibly
in provoking Russia, as if they did not mind restarting a cold war with that
country. Russian exasperation was well expressed by then Russian President Vladimir Putin when, in 2007, he said that “The
United States [under Bush and Cheney] has
overstepped its national borders in every way, and as a result, no one feels
safe. . . . such a policy stimulates an arms race.”
• Disrespect of Military Advice
George W. Bush
will be remembered as the man who brought within the walls of the White House
not only corruption and incompetence
in nearly every field of
activity—as well as a lack of moral fortitude in approving
torture—but also a quasi dictatorial gangster
mentality in dealing with Congress,
with the military, with other governments and with political opponents in
general. For instance, Bush fired more generals and admirals than any other
head of state since Adolf Hitler
in Germany, some seventy years ago. Among others, Bush fired or forced into
early retirement Gen. Eric K. Shinseki;
Gen. John Abizaid;
Gen. George
Casey; and Adm. William
J. Fallon, then top U.S. commander in the Middle East.
•
A Propaganda-prone
Administration
But perhaps one of
the greatest indictments of the Bush-Cheney administration is the way it has
used crude covert propaganda
techniques worthy of a totalitarian regime. Indeed, it has launched a sophisticated
propaganda campaign to manipulate
information and public opinion that has had the effect of
undermining democracy and the freedom of information. For one, it has subverted
the major American TV and radio networks by provided
them with false
independent "analysts".
Second,
it has paid
journalists
to push
surreptitiously for government programs. Third, it has intervened within news organizations,
using the power of government to have journalists
and producers fired when they didn't toe the government line. Fourth, the Bush
administration has embarked upon the business of censoring
movies.
And that is
only the tip of the iceberg, considering how pervasive the Bush-Cheney
administration's direct and indirect control of the media has been. Never has
American journalism and U.S.
corporate media been so corrupt and complicit, and this is because the United States has never had such
a corrupt administration, i.e. the 2001-2009 Bush-Cheney administration.
•
Conclusion
To conclude, it
should be obvious by now to anybody who has eyes to see that the Texan
politician named George W. Bush,
son of former President George H. Bush, was unqualified for high office. He has
amply and tragically demonstrated it. This is a politician who presided over an
administration that has acted as a wrecking crew, destroying most of everything
it has touched. [For more analysis on that, see my
book "The
New American Empire".]
In its
countless failures, the Bush-Cheney
administration has been an unhealthy mixture, rarely seen in a democracy, of
immorality, lawlessness and incompetence. —It won't be missed by most
people, both in the U.S. and around the world.
___________________________________________________________
Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University
of Montreal and can be reached at: rodrigue.tremblay@ yahoo.com.
He is the author of the book 'The
New American Empire'.
Visit his blog site at www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.
Author's Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com/
Check Dr. Tremblay's coming book "The
Code for Global Ethics"
at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/
_____________________________________
Posted, Sunday,
October 26, 2008, at 5:30 am
Email to a friend:
http://www.TheNewAmericanEmpire.com/tremblay=1101
Send contact, comments or commercial reproduction
requests (in English or in French) to:
N.B.: Messages may be published in our
weblog, unless you request otherwise.
Please register to receive free emails on new postings
of articles.
Send an email with the word "subscribe" to bigpictureworld@yahoo.com
To
"unsubscribe", write the word "unsubscribe" and send it to:
bigpictureworld@yahoo.com
Disclaimer: All quotes
enclosed in this article are believed to be accurately attributed, but no
guarantee is made, even after a thorough check, that some error cannot be
found.
The above is presented for educational
purposes only.