Molly Ivins - Bushwhacked

BUSHWHACKED

Life in
GEORGE W. BUSHS
AMERICA

Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose

RANDOM HOUSE NEW YORK

This book is dedicated to the memory of
six great and wonderfully nonconformist Texans.
They all persisted in the good fight to
make our state and our country a better place.
They were not well behaved.

To John Henry Faulk, freedom fighter, died 1990

To Bob Eckhardt, congressman, scholar, and cartoonist, died 2001

To Billie Carr, political organizer, died 2002

To Warren Burnett, trial lawyer, died 2002

To Maury Maverick, lawyer, writer, and curmudgeon, died 2003

To Malcolm McGregor, legislator, bibliophile, and pilot, died 2003

We loved them all. It was the grandest privilege to know them.

Introduction

This book is about the connections between what happens in peoples lives and the decisions made by often obscure parts of the federal government. Some concept, eh? Policy matters; stop the presses. There was a time when explaining how what the government does affects ordinary people was considered political reporting. But reporters somehow became more fixated on the polls, the consultants, the horse race, and the partisan bickering; ordinary people pretty much fell off the screen. Were still here. The difference between one underassistant secretary and another assistant undersecretary is still turning peoples lives upside down; indeed, it can be the difference between life and death.

While the Washington press corps, ever more courtierlike, focuses on the White House, we found that starting at the other end, with average citizens, provides a much clearer view of what is happening in America.

The good news is that nothing will cheer you up more about this country than getting out and talking to the people in it. We were prepared to a play a dirge on our literary violin for the hapless victims of various misbegotten and mean-spirited policies. Unfortunately for our purposes, we kept finding Americans who are tough, funny, sassy, brave, smart, and full of fight. They get pissed-off, they endure, they fight like hell, they start all overwhatever it takes. They dont waste time feeling sorry for themselves. Still, its remarkable how easy it is for some casual, not necessarily malicious, but not-very-well-thought-through change in a policy, made by some clueless citizen in Washington, can simply wreck peoples lives.

We found heroes all over hell and gone. Most of them are ordinary people, some of them are government bureaucrats, and a few of them are even politicians.

More or less in the duh category, we found that government no longer works for most of the people of this country. It works for big corporations, it works for big campaign donors, but it works less and less for average Americans. While talk of Christian compassion wafts through Washington, people are not only getting screwedlosing their life savings, their pensions, their health insurance, their jobs, and unemployment comptheyre also getting sick, getting hurt, and even dying because the peoples interest now takes second place to that of big-money contributors. A government of big corporations, by big corporations, and for big corporations has thousands of ramifications for the people, few of them good. As the acolytes of large corporations increasingly take over the various regulatory agencies that are supposed to keep corporate power in checka process now so far advanced its faintly comicalthe results veer between infuriating and frightening.

After more than two years of George W. Bushs administration, it is becoming clearer that we are looking at people with an agenda driven by ideology. They believe the free market can solve all problems, that government is generally bad, that we should privatize everything we possibly can, that there is no such thing as global warming, that the environment is unimportant, and that worker safety will be protected by benign employers. We have seen a serious degradation of civil liberties matched by an equally remarkable increase in property rights. And in the middle of all this came that tragic spanner-in-the-works, September 11.

All this abstract, ideological, the-free-market-is-God, Ayn Rand piffle is doing cruel things to real people. This book is about them.

We are, as always, optimistic to the point of idiocy, and although not much given to Simple Solutions, we consider public campaign financing the necessary first step, the sine qua non, as they rarely say in Lubbock, for fixing this deal.

Our biggest problem with the Bush administration is that for us its dj vu all over again. We spent six years watching the man as governor of Texas, the basis for our 1999 book, Shrub. We were tempted to begin this book by observing, If yall hadve read the first book, we wouldntve had to write this one. Cooler heads prevailed.

In Texas we have been dealing with postpartum blues since George W. left for Washington. He left us with tax breaks for the rich that make it impossible for government to provide basic services for working people. With bills written by energy lobbyists working the cash-and-carry model of government perfected here in Texas. He eliminated the most basic workplace protections. Those of us who knew the president when he was governor of a low-tax, low-service, no-regulation state are very seriously not amazed by what he has done in Washington.

Terry Allen, a great songwriter out of Lubbock, penned one called Lubbock on Everything. Kind of feels to us like the Bush years are Texas on Everything.

Texas has a lot of things suitable for export. The songs of the Flatlanders or the Dixie Chicks come to mind; ruby-red grapefruit from the Rio Grande Valley, boots from El Paso, sweet crude from Odessa, and brown shrimp from Corpus Christi. But public policy stamped MADE IN TEXAS is like Hungarian wineit does not travel well. In fact, it ought to be embargoed. Very few laws passed east of the Sabine or south of the Red River are safe for national consumption.

As president, Bush had his first big legislative victory in a tax cut that turned a $127 billion surplus into a $288 billion deficit. Been there. As governor, Bush inherited a $6 billion surplus, pushed through two major tax breaks for property owners, and promised they would grow the economy so much the state would never even miss the money. Two years after he left were looking at a $10 billion deficit, and rising.

Pay-to-play energy policy. Done that. When Bushs own appointees to our state environmental-protection agency warned that the public was demanding a cleanup of the most contaminated air in the country, Governor Bush secretly turned the job over to the presidents of the Marathon and Exxon oil companies. Every jot and tittle of the governors 1999 bill to clean up refineries was written by an oil-company lobbyist. Only under the threat of a lawsuit did Texans find out who wrote the law that encouraged polluters to volunteer to reduce emissions. (Bush had two voluntary emissions-control programs here in Texas. One involved polluting industries. The other was directed at adolescent males, who were encouraged to try abstinence. Only 3 of our 8,645 most obnoxiously polluting refineries actually volunteered to cut back on their toxic emissions. Numbers on teenage boys are not yet in.) No one in Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio was shocked to see Vice President Cheney turn the nations energy policy over to the oil companies and then refuse to turn over the records of those meetings to the public. Seen that.

Killing regulations put in place to protect working people from job injuries? Old news in Texas. When workers in our Panhandle meatpacking factories won lawsuits against the worlds biggest kill-cut-and-wrap company, Governor Bush pushed through tort reform, legislation that made it almost impossible for workers to sue their employers. Then a Bush appointee to the Texas Supreme Court* made it flat impossiblehe ruled that any employee consulting a lawyer about workplace hazards could be fired. See a lawyer? Lose your job. Bush vetoed so many labor bills down here that one Houston legislator still swears the governor vetoed a worker-protection bill that was actually defeated on the house floor by the governors staff.