What Bush did to the US

This picture shows what the Bush pro-business policies did to the US householder:



The legacy of "successes" of the Bush administration:

• A "war of choice" in Iraq against a non-existent threat of "weapons of mass destruction. Cost to the US, somewhere around $1 trillion.


• A pro-business policy that turned a blind eye to corporate fraud, a policy of non-regulation, and selling government to the lobbyists to the point of letting lobbyists write key legislation. The string of 2001-2002 scandals: Enron, World Com, Global Crossing, Adelphia, etc., etc. Cost to the US: trillions.


• Mismanagement of the credit crisis leading to a complete meltdown of financial markets. Cost to the US: $14 trillion in household wealth, 9.5% unemployment, trillion dollar bailouts.


• Tax cuts for the rich that turned a government surplus into deficits as far as the eye can see. Cost to the US: it created large deficits in place of the Clinton surpluses and it ties the hands of the current government in spending to get out of the current slump.


• A "torture is OK" directive that resulted in Abu Ghraib, deaths and torture at special secret CIA prisons around the world, and at Guantanamo. An "interrogation" technique that included 183 waterboardings of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.


• An anti-government ideology ("government is the problem not the solution") that allowed government regulation to deteriorate, security to be slack, and emergency preparedness to be abandoned. Cost to the US: numerous food poisoning outbreaks, poisoned imports from China, the blind eye to the PDB in the summer of 2001 stating "Bin Laden Determined to Attack the US" and the disregard for coordinating security forces, e.g. have the FBI and CIA talk about what terrorists to watch for, and the catastrophe of New Orleans where the citizens were left fending for themselves in a flooded city for nearly a week while "heckova job Brownie" floundered and failed to mobilize any rescue.


• The spreading of a poisonous intolerance with a smarmy quasi-religious "family values" campaign while the poor were left with no resources, the health programs for kids such as S-CHIP were vetoed, and the need to increase the minimum wage were blocked at every turn.