Syndicated columnist Ivins and her cowriter Dubose also wrote Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush before the 2000 election, and as they put it, "If y'all had've read this first book, we wouldn't've had to write this one." Obviously, no bones are made about their point of view. But unlike some partisan books on both sides, which rattle off a string of injustices and call names, these authors have another agenda. Oh, they still call names, but using something of a case-study format, they show what the Bush domestic program has meant to individual citizens in particular and the populace in general: laid-off workers in Philly who can't get extensions of their benefits while the wealthy got a dividend tax windfall. In the Mississippi Delta, the hands of catfish-house workers are painfully twisted by arthritis, but with the backing of the business community, the Bush administration killed ergonomics protection. And so it goes with pro-pollution policies and a "faith-based foreign policy [which is] terrifying in an apocalyptic way." Like a fire-and-brimstone preacher, Ivins informs readers it is "time to raise hell" and gives them some ways to do just that, including fighting the evil of campaign fundraising, which turns politicians into commodities to be bought and sold. Although the sourcing could be more specific, the writing itself is pure Ivins, frank and funny and eminently readable. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Ivins is surely one of the nation’s most adroit political commentators.” —People
“A sprightly catalogue of every destructive policy decision the Bushies have made in their first two-and-a-half years. . . . Sure to delight the president’s critics and madden his fans.” —The Washington Post Book World
“Ivins and Dubose are worthy heirs of the honorable tradition of muckraking.” —Paul Krugman, The New York Review of Books
“A thorough (and thoroughly researched) condemnation of our 43rd president's domestic policy. . . . The intensely individual stories make this much more than a tart tongue-lashing. . . . Illuminating reading.” —Austin American-Statesman U.S.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
From Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, authors of Shrub, Bushwhacked is a hilarious, no-holds-barred look at George W. Bush and his administration, and an essential book for understanding the full, destructive impact of his presidency.
For years, bestselling political commentator Molly Ivins has been sounding the alarm about George W. Bush. In Shrub, her 2000 skewering of presidential candidate Bush, the inimitable Ivins, with co-author Lou Dubose, offered a devastating exposé of Dubya?s career and abysmal record as governor of Texas. Now, in their second book on our current White House occupant, Ivins and Dubose take the wire brush to the Bush presidency and show how he has applied the same flawed strategies he used in governing Texas to running the largest superpower in the world.
Bushwhacked brings to light the horrendous legacy of the Bush tax cut, his increasingly appalling environmental record, his administration?s involvement in the Enron scandal, and the real Bush foreign policy?botched nation building in Kabul and Baghdad, alienation of former allies?and, unfortunately, much more. Ivins and Dubose go beyond the too frequently soft media coverage of Bush to show us just how damaging his policies have been to ordinary Americans??the Doug Jones Average,? rather than the Dow Jones Average. Bushwhacked is filled with sharp observation, humor, and compassion for the people often ignored by the federal government and the Washington press corps.
With the war on terrorism posing unprecedented challenges to our civil liberties, and with the Bush economic policy in shambles, it is high time for a close look at the state of our Union. Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose provide just that in Bushwhacked?an incisive, entertaining, and damning indictment of the Bush presidency.
We've been Bushwhacked
Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose on:
Dubya?s involvement in the failure of Harken Energy Corporation:
?There are countless subjects on which George W. Bush might have pleaded ignorance in 1990, but a failing oil business was not one of them.?
Dubya?s accomplishments as governor of Texas:
?As full-time residents of the state that gave you tort reform, H. Ross Perot, and penis-enlargement options on executive health plans, we?re obliged to warn you that if Dubya Bush really had exported ?the Texas Miracle,? the country would be in deep shit.?
Dubya?s environmental record:
?Bush has a chemical-dependency problem, but it?s not cocaine. It?s Monsanto, Dow, and Union Carbide. They wrote the checks that put him in the Texas governor?s mansion....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.?
Why the Republican Party is the party of unregulated meat and poultry:
?The Republicans win elections in the ?red states? in the center of the country, where cattle and chickens are produced and slaughtered. Democrats win their elections in the ?blue states? on the coasts. Republicans use the USDA to pay off their contributors in the red states. The result of that crude electoral calculus is laissez-faire food-safety policy whenever a Republican is in the White House. (If you must eat while the Republicans control the White House, both houses of Congress, and the judiciary, you might want to consider becoming a vegetarian about now.)?
About the Author
Molly Ivins’s column is syndicated to more than three hundred newspapers from Anchorage to Miami. A three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, she is the former co-editor of The Texas Observer and the former Rocky Mountain bureau chief for The New York Times. Her freelance work has appeared in Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. She has a B.A. from Smith College and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University. Her first book, Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?, spent more than twelve months on the New York Times bestseller list.
Lou Dubose has worked as a journalist in Texas for twenty years. He has been editor of The Texas Observer and politics editor of The Austin Chronicle, and is the co-author of Boy Genius: Karl Rove, the Brains Behind the Remarkable Political Triumph of George W. Bush. His freelance work has appeared in The Nation, Texas Monthly, The Washington Post, the Toronto Globe and Mail, the Liberty, Texas, Vindicator, and other publications. He lives with his wife, Jeanne Goka, in Austin.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1.
Aloha, Harken
In the long run, there is no capitalism without conscience; there is no wealth without character.
—George W. Bush on Wall Street, July 9, 2001
In the long run, we are all dead.
—John Maynard Keynes on the long run, 1924
There he was. On the Tuesday after a long Fourth of July weekend. In the ballroom of an ornate Wall Street hotel that once housed the New York Merchants Exchange. Standing in front of a blue-and-white backdrop with the words corporate responsibility printed over and over on it, in case you should miss the point. Promising us “a new ethic” for American business. Our president, Scourge of Corporate Misbehavior.
It was like watching a whore pretend to be dean of Southern Methodist University’s School of Theology. But as Luther said, hypocrisy has ample wages.
“Harken,” said the Bush camp over and over, “was nothing like Enron.” Interestingly enough, it was exactly like Enron in each and every feature of corporate misbehavior, except a lot smaller. A perfect miniature Enron.
By the summer of 2002, it had long been known that twelve years earlier Bush made a pile by selling his stock in Harken Energy Corporation just before it tanked. At the time, he was serving both on Harken’s board and on a special audit committee looking at the company’s financial health. As he spoke on Wall Street, stories were surfacing about Harken’s sham sale of a subsidiary to a group of company insiders. The acquisition was financed by an $11 million loan guaranteed by the seller, Harken Energy. In other words, a fake asset swap to punch up Harken’s annual profit-and-loss statement.
The “sale” of Aloha Petroleum, from Harken to Harken, was again Enron writ small and so outrageous that the SEC stepped in, declared the accounting unacceptable, and forced the company to restate its earnings. Bush unquestionably knew about the deal.
Even if he had convinced the public that earlier stories about his $848,560 insider trade, his failure to report it to the SEC, his low-interest loans from Harken to buy company stock (a practice he particularly denounced in his Wall Street speech, as though he had never heard of such an unseemly scam before), and the Enron-esque sale of Aloha Petroleum were all what he described as “recycled stuff,” he was still surrounded by bad stories about to break. Enron was ripe for federal prosecution; Bush and Enron’s CEO, Ken Lay, his single largest campaign contributor, had been tight for years. Halliburton was being investigated by the feds for fraudulent accounting practices put in place when Dick Cheney was CEO. Congress was investigating the secretary of the Army for his role in the collapse of Enron, in the fleecing of electricity customers in California, and for his failure to divest himself of Enron stock in a timely manner.
SEC chief Harvey Pitt had so many previous business connections with the firms he was now regulating, he had already had to recuse himself in twenty-nine cases being pursued by the SEC. Bush’s hard-nosed, hard-assed political adviser, Karl Rove, had owned $108,000 in Enron stock and, more important, knew the Enron CEO because he was Bush’s biggest funder. Two of Bush’s economic advisers had worked as consultants for Enron. And the newly disgraced Ken Lay had convinced Bush to dump the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Curtis Hebert, and to replace him with the candidate of Lay’s choice, a Port Arthur, Texas, homeboy. Before giving Bush the word to dump Hebert, Lay had a come-to-Jesus session with Hebert himself, telling him to embrace free markets and deregulation or, Lay said, things would end badly for Hebert. They did.
Considering the circumstances, heckfire and brimpebbles were the best GeeDubya could manage as he wagged his fingers at Wall Street’s corporate criminals. What could he say about Lay: “I never had sexual relations with that man”? What he actually said, as the cock crowed, was, “He was an Ann Richards supporter.” Kenny Boy, I hardly knew ye.
The stock markets responded to Bush in July as they had to bin Laden in September. Three days after Bush’s Sermon on Wall Street, the Dow Jones had lost 7.4 percent of its value and Standard & Poor’s 500 was down 6.8 percent. Three weeks after the speech, with more Harken stuff breaking, the market fell 390 points in one day. It took a corporate-responsibility bill—written entirely by Democratic senator Paul Sarbanes and vigorously opposed by Bush almost until the day it was passed unanimously by the House—to save the president and staunch the stock market’s hemorrhaging.
The Bushies naturally would have preferred to put all this “recycled stuff” behind them and return to their agenda—including shifting Social Security funds into the stock market. But before we leave the subject, consider some wisdom from Jerry Jeff Walker, the Texas singer-songwriter. Walker met the man who inspired his first hit, “Mr. Bojangles,” when they were both in jail in New Orleans. Years later, a reporter for National Public Radio asked Walker if he had worried about winding up in a drunk tank when he was in his early twenties. “No,” Walker said. “It was just one time. You start worryin’ when there’s a pattern.”
With GeeDubya Bush, M.B.A., there was a pattern. The pattern was: after he fouled up, a friend of Daddy’s always showed up to bail him out. Either because Bush managed to seduce the press corps in 2000 or because Al Gore failed to raise the issue, the press started to notice Bush’s business pattern only in the wake of the wrecks of Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Adelphia, etc. As the economy contracted and stock values plummeted in mid-2002, reporters began to focus on Bush’s M.O.
Bush walked away from the Texas “awl bidness” in 1990 with almost a million in cash—after a career during which he lost more than $3 million of other people’s money. Here he was advocating “a new ethic” on Wall Street despite his own business dealings, which couldn’t even pass the “old ethic” test. The earlier dealings had been the subject of a pro forma investigation directed by the man President Bush the Elder appointed head of the SEC, and the investigation itself was conducted by a man who had worked as GeeDubya’s personal lawyer before joining the SEC. A few of GeeDubya’s deals, particularly a series of critical bailouts of his ever-sinking oil-field ventures, are truly astonishing—not just because of the volume of dollars flowing out of Northeastern banks and disappearing in Texas but because the transactions made little or no economic sense.
A company balance sheet can be misleading. There was leaseholds, there was momentum.
—candidate george w. bush on philip uzielli’s $1 million bailout of arbusto
One of Bush’s white knights, a friend of the Bush family consigliere* James Baker III, is so interesting that to leave him out is the journalistic equivalent of a breach of fiduciary responsibility. Philip Uzielli’s $1 million cash-for-trash deal in 1982 allowed GeeDubya to keep his company alive long enough to sell it to Spectrum 7, then to sell the again-sinking Spectrum 7 to Harken and then to unload his sinking Harken stock—just before the bad news became public—for a large enough profit to buy 2 percent of the ownership of a baseball franchise that made him $15 million in less than nine years. Philip Uzielli (“Uzi” to GeeDubya) is a Panamanian businessman and Princeton classmate of James Baker. In 1982 he was listed as CEO of Panama’s Executive Resources and as a director of Harrow Corporation and Leigh Products. As we reported in Shrub, when GeeDubya’s company, Arbusto, was in a terminal cash crunch, Uzi showed up and paid $1 million for 10 percent of a failing company valued at $382,376, according to the company’s financial statements. In other words, Uzielli paid $1 million for $38,200 in equity. Bush had changed the name of Arbusto to Bush Exploration after his father became vice president. (GeeDubya says arbusto is the Spanish word for “bush,” although Cassell’s Spanish/English Dictionary translates it as “shrub,” the source of one of GeeDubya’s nicknames.) By the time of the corporate name change, Arbusto had drilled so many dry holes that West Texas oilmen called it “are-busted.” Mr. Uzielli lost his entire $1 million investment but later told reporters he didn’t regret it. He described his investment with Bush as “a losing wicket” but said “it was great fun.” What a sport.
Arbusto was not an oil company so much as it was a tax write-off company, taking advantage of the IRS tax-code provision that allowed investors to deduct up to 75 percent of their losses in the
*Maureen Dowd, columnist for The New York Times, was apparently the first journalist to use the word consigliere to describe Baker’s role in the Bush family.
oil business. Bush didn’t strike oil, he struck money from friends of his daddy. After the Uzielli bailout Bush Exploration was acquired by Spectrum 7. Spectrum 7 was owned by William DeWitt, Jr., son of the owner of the Cincinnati Reds. DeWitt couldn’t pay Bush for what remained of Bush Exploration, so he sort of took him in, made him CEO and a director, paid him $75,000 a year and $120,000 in consulting fees, and gave him 1.1 million shares of Spectrum 7 stock.
Two years later Spectrum 7 had lost $400,000 in six months and was $3 million in debt. So Harken stepped in. The Texas-based company bought Spectrum 7 for $2 million in Harken stock. Of the $2 million, $224,000 in shares went to Bush, along with options to purchase more.
There was no malfeeance [si...
