Among Busrole in the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population. The task force, which Bushh's most important contributions to the neo-Malthusian cause while in Congress was his
helped found and then chaired, churned out a steady stream of propaganda claiming that the world
was already seriously overpopulated; that there was a fixed limit to natural resources and that this
limit was rapidly being reached; and that the environment and natural species were being sacrificed
to human progre"down bred," or ress. Bush's task force sought to accredit the idea that the human race was beingduced in genetic qualitys by the population growth among blacks and other non-
white and hence allegedly inferior races at a time when the Anglo- Saxons were hardly able to
prevent their numbers from shrinking.
Comprised of ovevanguard organization which heard testimony fromr 20 Republican congressmen, Bush's Task Force was a kind of M assorted "race scientists, sponsored legislationalthusian (^)
and otherwise propagandized the zero- growth outlook. In its 50-odd hearings during these years,
the task force provided a public forum to nearly every well-known zero-growth fanatic, from Paul
Ehrlich, founder of Zero Population Growth (ZPG), to race scientist William Shockley to the key
zero-growth advocates infesting the federal bureaucracy.
Giving a prestigious Congressional platform to a discredited racist charlatan like William Shockley
in the year after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King points up the arrogance of Bush's
committment to eugenics. Shockley, like his co-thinker Arthur Jensen, had caused a furore during
the 1960's by advancing his thesis, already repeatedly disproven, that blacks were gentically inferiorto whites in cognitive faculties and intelligence. In the same year in which Bush invited him to
appear before the GOP task force, Shockley had written: "Our nobly intended welfare programs
may be encouraging dysgenics--retrogressive evolution through disproportionate reproduction of
the genetically disadvantaged...We fear that 'fatuous beliefs' in the power of welfare money,
unaided by eugenic foresight, may contribute to a decline of humsociety." an quality for all segments of
To halt what he saw as pervasive down breeding of the quality of the US gene pool, Shockley
advocated a program of mass sterilization of the unfit and mentally defective which he called his
"Bonus Sterilization Plan." Money bonusany person not paying income tax who had a genetic deficiency or chronic disease, such as diabeteses for allowing oneself to be sterilized would be payed to (^)
or epilepsy, or who could be shown to be a drug addict. "If [the government paid] a bonus rate of
$1,000 for each point below 100 IQ, $30,000 put in trust for some 70 IQ moron of 20- child
potential, it might return $250,000 to taxpayers in reduced cost of mental retardation care, "
Shockley said.
The special target of Shockley's prescriptions for mass sterilizations were blacks, whom he saw as
reproducing too fast. "If those blacks with the least amount of Caucasian genes are in fact the most
prolific and the least intelligent, then genetic enslavement will be the destiny of their next
generation," he wrote. Looking at the recent past, Shockley said in 1967: "The lesson to be drawnfrom Nazi history is the value of free speech, not that eugenics is intolerable."
As for Paul Ehrlich, his program for genocide included a call to he US governmemt to prepare "the
addition of...mass sterilization agents" to the US food and water supply, and a "tough foreign
policy" including termination of food asounded then, this latter point has become a staple of foreign policy under the Bush Administration.id to starving nations. As radical as Ehrlich might have (^)
On July 24, 1969, the task force heard from Gen. William Draper, then national chairman of the
Population Crisis Committee, and a close friend of Bush's father, Prescott. According to Bush'
resume of his family friend's testimony, Draper warned that the population explosion was like a