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Subject: The United States: Bush's record

Le Monde diplomatique

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ELECTION 2004 SPECIAL
The United States: Bush's record

By Serge Halimi

Despite the usual voter apathy of Americans, the turnout on
2 November is expected to exceed European levels (1). Will
that be because of 9/11 and George Bush's response to it -
the provocative policies coming out of the White House; the
enthusiasm with which, on the pretext of reacting to the
attacks on New York and Washington, it proposed a
"preventive" war against Iraq? When the neoliberals realised
that there was nothing to fear about the coercing power of
the state - provided that they did the coercing - the
political process was validated further. The electoral
waverers, the lukewarm, the blasé, all quickly went to
ground.

This is as much a referendum on the current administration
as an election. Bush has two rare, if not unique,
distinctions: he was elected even though he received fewer
votes than his opponent and he is the son of a former
president. His enthronement was less democratic than
dynastic. The election result conferred no particular
mandate on him, and certainly no endorsement for a terrible
leap to the right, an imperial inflection of the
international order or the militarisation of American
society and foreign policy.

The Democrats - for whose victory many European politicians
and commentators hope so that once again they can say "We
are all Americans" (2) - prefer to attribute this
transformation of the political landscape of the United
States to some "vast rightwing conspiracy" involving the
media and the Supreme Court. But that ignores the way that
President Clinton left behind him a party in disarray,
without any clear plan and in a minority in the House of
Representatives, the Senate and in the states.

The Republicans have the security of knowing that they hold
the White House, Congress and the governorships of
California, Texas, New York and Florida. But they want more.
They want it all and they want to keep it for a long time. A
few more reactionary judges in the Supreme Court would allow
them to secure their conservative revolution and roll back
forever what little remains of the progressive achievements
of the 20th century. Civil liberties would be an issue: the
Supreme Court - although it was responsible for Bush's
election - felt obliged to remind him this July that "a
state of war is not a blank cheque for the president" and
that "history and common sense teach us that an unchecked
system of detention carries the potential to become a means
for oppression and abuse of others". The neoliberal and
authoritarian ambitions of the Republicans are transparent;
but there was no rightwing plot to force both John Kerry and
John Edwards to vote in favour of the USA Patriot Act and
support the war in Iraq. Do either of them have any regrets?
They go on claiming they do not.

The first of the two major policy initiatives of the White
House is mired in a murderous military stalemate. The second
has ruined the US public finances. The Republicans claimed
that massive federal tax cuts would boost the economy and
reduce unemployment. And when the right decides to spend its
way to recovery, it doesn't get hung up on details. As
Vice-President Dick Cheney remarked, "Reagan proved that
deficits don't matter" (3). Between 2001-04 the federal
budget plunged from a surplus of $100bn to a deficit of
$415bn (3.6% of gross national product). This, plus the
likelihood of the balance of payments deficit reaching
$540bn in 2004 (5.1% of GNP), led Peter Peterson, former
Secretary for Commerce under President Nixon, to conclude:
"This administration and the Republican Congress have
presided over the biggest, most reckless deterioration of
America's finances in history" (4).

So for the first time since Herbert Hoover (1929-33) an
outgoing US president will leave behind him fewer jobs than
existed at his inauguration. The disaster of 9/11 cannot be
blamed for everything. If a leftwing government had dared
handle the major macroeconomic indicators with such
nonchalance, financiers, leader-writers and the markets
would undoubtedly have ordered in a team of IMF doctors to
prescribe a course of structural adjustments from which the
patient would never have escaped. No such medicine was
forced on Bush.

The Republicans' plan is crystal clear. They help the rich
by lowering federal taxes. This creates deficits which force
them not only to reduce public spending (apart from the army
and "homeland security"), but also to make people pay for
things that used to be free and pay more for everything
else. In the last decade California has spent more on
prisons than on universities. But that is not enough. Some
40 states plan to charge inmates for their time in jail (5),
while students at public, and therefore significantly more
affordable, universities face increases in their
already-high registration fees (+13% in 2003, +10.5% this
year).

That is how the Republican scheme works. First you cut taxes
for the most wealthy on the pretext that deficits don't
matter; then - when it turns out that they do matter
somewhat - you increase taxes and "voluntary" contributions
such as health insurance, higher education fees and
childcare. In October 2003 Bush outlined his plan to
privatise pensions and professional training, which in
future will, he hopes, be funded by lifelong, tax-exempt
accounts managed by each individual. Then the president
explained his premise: "There's an old saying, 'No one ever
washes a rental car.' You see, when you own something, you
care about it. When you own something you have a vital stake
in the future of our country." That's his idea of a social
policy - collective solidarity compared with a
badly-maintained car. That's some philosophical project...
And other countries are currently trying to emulate it.

Since the Reagan presidency, Republicans have been prepared
to acknowledge class struggle, but they view it one-sidedly.
According to a recent study by the Congressional Budget
Office, Bush's tax policies mean that in 2004 the 1% of
Americans who earn more than $1.2m a year will be, on
average, $78,460 better off. The 20% of Americans earning a
mere $16,620 a year will gain on average only $250 from tax
cuts, which will surely be promptly be eaten up by increases
in indirect taxation. Even in percentage terms the rich have
done better. As for the minimum wage, which, at $5.15 an
hour, has not been increased since 1996, its real value has
fallen to a 1955 low.

While millions of people were still transfixed by the
television images of the attacks on the World Trade Centre
and the Pentagon, an advisor to the United Kingdom transport
minister sent a memo to senior officials in her department
telling them: "It is now a very good day to get out anything
we want to bury." The same idea evidently occurred to
others. Have Bush's constant reminders about the war on
terror been made with the intention of propping up his
political position? The New York Times listed 28 examples
over the last two and a half years of alarming or alarmist
official warnings, usually coinciding with bad economic or
military news. Most of these alerts were unspecific about
the nature or location of the threat. The others referred
only vaguely to possible attacks on bridges in California,
the Statue of Liberty, a nuclear power station in Arizona,
or financial centres in New York and Washington ...

To be fair to the Bush administration, it has not allowed
such anxieties to distract it from priorities. Even when the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were at their height, it found
time to redirect health, social and environmental policies
to favour business. Take measures to combat accidents in the
workplace: since 2002 the US has repealed five times more of
these than it has initiated (6).

So calamitous is Bush's record that without the help of fear
and the war on terror, he would long since have faced an
election defeat like that of his father in 1992. But Kerry
is less wily than Clinton, the 1992 winner, and the
incoherence of his position on Iraq works against him. After
much wavering, he now describes the war as "a colossal error
of judgment" (7). He hopes that the recalcitrant allies of
the US will be willing, if asked, to make a military
contribution to the prolongation of this "colossal error".
There, he may be overestimating the seductive powers of a
Democrat president...

If there is a Kerry victory, the Democrats have promised
modest domestic policy improvements (tax, health insurance,
the minimum wage), largely dependent upon the outcome of the
Congressional elections, also on 2 November. Bush's
re-election can only benefit those whom the last four years
have already blessed. They would love to quicken the pace of
change further by giving the current president the popular
mandate that he failed to secure four years ago.

Read also on Le Monde diplomatique website :

What's the matter with West Virginia?
by Serge Halimi (October 2004)
http://mondediplo.com/2004/10/02usa

The America that will vote for Bush,
by Tom Frank (February 2004)
http://mondediplo.com/2004/02/04usa

John Kerry, the enlightened hawk,
by Michael Klare (July 2004)
http://mondediplo.com/2004/07/02kerry

United States: unfree press,
by Eric Klinenberg (April 2004)
http://mondediplo.com/2004/04/13medias

To read more articles and a list of selected websites:

http://mondediplo.com/2004/10/00bush

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(1) The usual comparison between the turnout in the US and
that in Europe exaggerates the rate of abstention in the US,
where current figures compare the percentage of those who
vote with the population of voting age, rather than with
registered voters, as is usual in Europe. In November 2000
51.3% of Americans of voting age went to the polls, but out
of 67.5% of those registered.

(2) The title of Le Monde's editorial the day after the
attacks.

(3) The remark was made during a conversation in November
2002, according to Paul O'Neill,Treasury Secretary between
2001 and 2003. See Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George
W Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill,
Simon & Schuster, New York, 2004, p 291.

(4) Peter G Peterson, Running On Empty : How the Democratic
and Republican Parties are Bankrupting Our Future and What
Americans Can Do About It, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New
York, 2004.

(5) Some states have already begun. See Fox Butterfield,
"Many Local Officials Now Make Inmates Pay Their Own Way",
The New York Times, 13 August 2004.

(6) Amy Goldstein and Sarah Cohen, "Bush Forces a Shift In
Regulatory Thrust", The Washington Post, 15 August 2004.

(7) On the wisdom of the war in Iraq, the Democratic party
platform made this decisive pronouncement in July: "People
of good will disagree about whether America should have gone
to war in Iraq.

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