THERE IS LITTLE doubt, when scholars study the George W. Bush administration a few decades later, that the historians will scratch their heads over a difficult problem:
How did the most powerful ruling class in history let a group of far-right operators turn the U.S. government into an ideological casino, gambling with trillions of the corporate elite's own hard-unearned dollars?
From a conservative point of view, the Bush record is stunning. The government budget, famously in surplus after Bill Clinton presided over the 1990s high-tech boom and the gutting of the welfare system (what Europeans call social security), is now in enormous, perhaps irreversible deficit.
Half-trillion dollar annual deficits stretch into the indefinite future, threatening to choke the recovery and making the U.S. economy hostage to the uncertain confidence of foreign purchasers of bonds.
This mess is the combined result of several policy choices. First were three rounds of tax cuts vastly tilted toward the wealthiest minority of the population. Second was a "war on terror" with the conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq, which the administration pretended the U.S. population would not have to actually pay for. subsidy of the military technological sector, embodied in "Star Wars" missile defence against nonexistent threats and plans for the full-scale militarization of space in coming decades (the high-publicity plan to colonize the Moon and Mars are a subsidiary of this literally lunatic project).
All this on top of the fact that the U.S. military's personnel resources, including civilian reserves, are stretched to the absolute limit—a fact well known to the amalgam of Bush rallies the troops for the long-planned invasion of Iraq nationalist and Islamist guerrillas who are professor and New York Times columnist blowing up troop convoys and civilian soft targets in "liberated" Iraq these days.
Speaking of the war, the mainstream press Third is a spectacular expansion of the has long since reported what many antiwar activists understood from the beginning that the U.S. conquest of Afghanistan, launched two weeks after 9/11, was consciously designed as the curtain-raiser for "regime change" in Iraq.
In fact, the grand plan was a multi-course imperial feast: Afghanistan was the appetizer, Iraq would be the soup, Iran the main course and then Syria for dessert. In the event, of course, the appetizer hasn't been welldigested and the soup went wrong-way
down the windpipe, so the rest of the meal has been postponed at least for the duration of the electoral season if not permanently. Finally, there is a growing consciousness- led perhaps by insurance companies that pay more attention than the government to real costs -that accelerating climate change really does threaten to bring about an authentic global environmental catastrophe. From outside the administration, elite critics like Princeton economics Paul Krugman have been hammering at the mendacity and irresponsibility of the Bushies. These voices have now been joined by a former insider, the fired Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in his widely publicized book written with a former Wall Street Journal reporter.
In media interviews, O'Neill has made clear that he along with Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan supported the first Bush tax cuts for purposes of stimulus. Subsequent cuts, he claims, which had no economic rationale, were pushed through by Bush's advisors, who essentially coerced Greenspan's public approval.
O'Neill states that his own attempts to argue economic common sense to the presi dent were met essentially with glassy blank stares. In language unusual for Cabinet secretaries past or present, he describes meetings as a blind president addressing a deaf Cabinet. This seems to have been particularly true as regards Saddam Hussein's mythical Weapons of Mass Destruction.
In fact, little of what O'Neill has to say is particularly surprising. Rather, it's the source and the timing, at the outset of the presidential election year, that suggests a real degree of concern amongst elites over the Bush administration's course.
Beyond source material for those future historians, who may be assessing the Bush administration's legacy in a distinctly hotter and less pleasant world, will the O'Neill reve lations have a direct impact on the election?
It's very hard to say, but this writer's guess is that they won't matter much unless there is a sharp and premature shock to the economic recovery before November '04. It wil be in the next downturn, two years (give-ortake) down the road, when things get visibly scary. There have been some rumblings that some fiscal conservatives, who would like to exercise a degree of discipline over a second Bush term, may attempt to dump Vice-president Cheney, who might be vulnerable to charges of war-profiteering and other shady dealings.
So far in this surreal season, the only open anti-Cheney campaign is being waged in the press of the sinister weirdo cult leader Lyndon LaRouche, but it is possible, if the Bush campaign appears wobbly, that some "moderate" Republican elites might try to target Cheney. As we say — only in America.
(The writer is an editor of the U.S. socialist bimonthly AGAINST THE CURRENT, which you can check out at www.solidarity-us.org)
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