How Quickly We Forget
by Errington C. Thompson, MD
When George W. Bush raised his hand to take the oath of office, America was really in pretty good shape.
We had intervened in Bosnia with pretty good success, but we were a nation at peace. We had an economy that had just cooled off and recovered from the Dot-Com craziness. We had a federal budget surplus, low unemployment, a stable work-force. In less than eight years, all that changed. We were broke, scared, and President Bush had us fighting not one but two wars. Yet, somehow, the majority of Americans in a recent CNN poll view George W. Bush’s presidency favorably.
The economy
President Clinton turned over a budget surplus to George W. As soon as Bush took the oath of office he started working to cut taxes for the rich, and over the next four years, he pushed through one tax cut after another. We always heard the illogical statement that giving huge sums of money to the rich would be good for all of us. They would spend the money and stimulate the economy and create jobs for everyone.
Well, after a series of tax cuts, the economy still hadn’t taken off the way the administration had told us it would. We never saw the job growth we were promised. By the end of the Bush era, beginning in 2007, we were in the worst recession in 70 years, and by late 2008 the economy was losing 700,000 jobs per month! Why? It’s really simple.
Economic theory v. reality
One rich guy can’t spend as much as a thousand to ten thousand poor and middle-class families. Oh, he can buy another house, a boat, a new jet, a yacht or two … but that doesn’t come close to the spending power of thousands of Americans buying everyday items to make life a little better for themselves. For working people, every dollar that comes in goes out again, and the people they buy from spend it again, and again. A thousand people buy eggs, the grocery hires another employee, the chicken farm expands and buys more grain from the feed store, which hires another employee … The money multiplies because everyone circulates it, and the economy grows.
But if the money goes to the wealthy through tax cuts or bonuses, it doesn’t trickle down to the rest of us. That’s because when the rich guy—who already has everything he needs to live on—gets an extra million a year or so he buys some stock, or a vacation condominium, or that yacht. He doesn’t expand his business or “create jobs” unless the middle class wants to buy his products, and if they don’t get a raise, they can’t afford to. In fact, instead of more purchases, they cut back on medicine to buy food, or sell the car (and stop buying gas) to pay the rent.
Trickle-down economics has never made any sense and has never worked. This is a proven economic fact. Just look at Bush’s job numbers. He has the worst record of job creation since the Great Depression. Even Jimmy Carter, who is much maligned by conservatives, created more jobs per year than George W. Bush. And look at states where trickle-down Reaganomics is in full force: Kansas is a basket case, Wisconsin is miserable compared to Keynesian Minnesota, Louisiana is flat broke, New Jersey gets deeper in debt each year, even Texas is facing a major slowdown.
The banksters’ housing bubble
I don’t think we need to be reminded of how the Bush administration created an environment in which the Great Housing ClusterFraud was allowed to grow, flourish, and almost kill our economy. As Alan Greenspan continually pumped trillions of dollars into our economy, Wall Street was happy to come up with great ways to use that money to make more money. The housing bubble was one of the most complex fraud schemes ever devised—but it was fraud nonetheless. Here’s how it worked (for those who missed the three minutes the networks ever devoted to the story—and those too young to remember.)
Mortgage lenders and banks would hook Americans who just wanted a piece of the American dream. They would twitch their noses and approve Americans for loans they clearly weren’t qualified for. They’d falsify documents meant to show borrowers’ income, and they’d even falsify the borrowers’ signatures! Then they’d “lend” $250,000 for a $300,000 house (actually worth $150,000) to a family with a $20,000-a-year income.
These mortgages were sliced and diced like sausages. Rating agencies would then take some sort of magic potion and turn a poorly rated single mortgage into prime AAA+ mortgage derivatives. Wall Street would then sell these shiny new pieces of junk to pension funds that were required to buy “low risk” financial tools. Once the original mortgage was sold, the banker had no liability when the borrower defaulted.
With no one enforcing rules and regulations, these crooks were allowed to rip off Americans for years—until the music stopped and everything came tumbling down. The banks and mortgage lenders and insurance companies that guaranteed the mortgages—all the folks who got us into the mess—were facing collapse. And who bailed them out? We did! The same taxpayers who’d been ruined by them saved their necks!
Where was our CEO president with the Harvard MBA? Where was Alan Greenspan, the guru of finance? Where was the Secretary of the Treasury? Where was the SEC? Everyone was asleep at the wheel as our economy went tumbling over the cliff toward the worst recession since the Great Depression.
Lies, lies, and more lies
Although Bush could be nominated for the worst President in the last 100 years based on nothing beyond the aforementioned failures, we also have to factor in his repeated failures in Iraq to accurately evaluate how bad his presidency truly was.
First of all, not one but four different lies were tied together to get us into war: Iraq was said to have mobile chemical weapons; there was the phony Saddam-Al Qaeda connection; there was the advanced nuclear weapons program-aluminum tubes and yellow cake from Niger; and there was Iraq’s “responsibility” for 9/11.
For those of us who were worried about the cost of this all-out war, Bush and his deputies put our minds at ease—or at least lulled most of the public with their lies. They insisted that Iraq had more than enough oil reserves to pay for the war, and that the country’s refineries would be up and running within months of the invasion. These were the refineries and oil fields that had been nationalized in 1971, but that Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney, Bush’s Vice President, fantasized would be given back to American and British oil companies after we got rid of Saddam.
Four-star General Eric Shinseki, veteran of several tours in Vietnam, testified before Congress that we would need “somewhere in the neighborhood of several hundreds of thousands of troops” to secure the peace. Shinseki was quickly marginalized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bush advisor Paul Wolfowitz, who force-fed us a daily diet of “Americans will be greeted as liberators” in Iraq, and securing the peace would be “a cake-walk.”
Let’s fast-forward a couple of years. Iraq was falling into what was looking like a civil war: there were car bombings and suicide bombs at mosques and other religious sites almost on a daily basis. So the administration decided on The Surge—an offensive in which we would inject more troops and more resources in order to give the Iraqis enough space to create a functional government and have “normal” elections. Bush stated that the objectives of the surge were “unified, democratic federal Iraq that can govern itself, defend itself, and sustain itself, and is an ally in the War on Terror.”
Unfortunately—and not surprisingly given the failure of the entire Iraq-war enterprise—almost none of those objectives were met. The Iraqis never formed a functional government outside Baghdad.
And then came ISIS
As we read about the advances of ISIS in Iraq and Syria we must remember that Bush was one responsible for creating an environment where ISIS could grow and flourish. Paul Bremer, Bush’s first guy who was in charge in Iraq—the equivalent of the old British vice-regent or a 19th-century plenipotentiary—fired everyone in the Iraqi Army. We didn’t ask them to build roads or string electrical wires; we didn’t put them to work as police; we didn’t utilize their knowledge or training—we didn’t even collect their weapons! Instead Paul Bremer just told 400,000 young, armed, Iraqi men to take a hike. You’re fired. No more salary, no income to support your families, no subsidies for food or gas money. You’re on your own.
So where did all of those proud fighters go? First, many joined the newly formed al-Qaeda in Iraq. Others signed up with Sunni or Shiite insurgent groups (depending on their own loyalties.) Later, some became ISIS.
We never secured the peace in Iraq. Never. Instead, as Colin Powell said, “You break it, you own it.” Well, George W. Bush invaded Iraq without a plan to secure the country and no idea how to pay for the intervention; he broke it, and he owns all that has happened there since.
One of the funniest, saddest, most pathetic things I have heard recently was a neoconservative explaining how Bush kept us safe. The moderator was simply nodding in agreement. Well, as I recall, 9/11 happened while Bush was president. The anthrax terrorist attack also happened on Bush’s watch. Clinton had warned Bush that al-Qaeda was a huge threat: Bush ignored him. National Security Advisor Richard Clark warned Bush of the likelihood of a terrorist attack on American soil: Bush ignored Richard Clark. Bush was given a National Security Advisory letter explaining of how al-Qaeda could attack: Bush ignored the NSA as well.
The worst president in history?
Bush failed us on a number of fronts, domestic and international, economic and military, cultural and political. I’m not ready to give him a pass on his presidency, are you?
