slums, and farmers went bankrupt more rapidly than at any other time in the memory of man.
Living standards had been in a gradual but constant decline since the days of Nixon, and it began to
dawn on more and more families who considered themselves members of the middle class that they
could no longer afford their own home, nor hope to send their children to college, all because of the
prohibitive costs. The Bureau of the Census made sure in 1990 not to count the number of those
who had become homeless during the 1980's, since the real figure would be an acute politicalembarrassment to George Bush: were there 5 million, or 6, as many as the total population of
Sweden, or of Belgium?
New jobs were created, but most of them were dead-ends for losers at or below the mimimum wage
that presupposed illiteracy on the part of the applicant: hamburger sales and pizza home deliverywere the growth areas, although a smart kid might still aspire to become a croupier. Behind it all
lurked the pervasive narcotics trade, with hundreds of billions of dollars a year in heroin, crack,
marijuana.
For the vast majority of the US population (to say nothing of the brutal immiseration in thedeveloping countries) it was an epoch of austerity, sacrifice, and decline, of the entropy of a (^) society
in which most people have no purpose and feel themselves becoming redundant, both on the job
market and ontologically.
But for a paper thin stratum of plutocrats and parasites, the 1980's were a time of unlimitedopportunity. These were the practioners of the monstrous financial swindles that marked the decade, (^)
the protagonists of the hostile takeovers, mergers and acquisitions, leveraged buy-outs, greenmail
and stock plays that occupied the admiration of Wall Street. These were corporate raiders like J.
Hugh Liedkte, Blaine Kerr, T. Boone Pickens, and Frank Lorenzo, Wall Street financiers like Henry
Kravis and Nicholas Brady. And these men, surely not by coincidence, belonged to the intimatecircle of personal friends and close political supporters of George Herbert Walker Bush.
If the orgy of usury and speculation during the 1980's can be compared to a glittering and exclusive
dinner party, and Liedtke, Kerr, Pickens, Lorenzo, Kravis, and Brady were the invited guests, then
surely George Bush was the host and arbiter elegantiarum who presided, deciding according to hisown whim who would receive an invitation and who would not, and setting the norms for
acceptable conduct. By late 1991, the long-deferred bill for these lucullian entertainments was about
to arrive. The exhausted working people and destitute unemployed must present the bill to the
founder of the feast, the whining and greedy enfant gate' of American politics, George Bush, the
man whose idea of privation would be a life without servants, and whose concept of a domesticagenda would be a plan to hire two maids and a butler.
One of the landmark corporate battles of the first Reagan Administration was the battle over control
of Getty Oil, a battle fought between Texaco, at that time the third largest oil company in the United
States and the fourth largest industrial corporation, and J. Hugh Liedkte's Pennzoil. George Bush'sold partner and constant crony, J. Hugh Liedtke, was still obsessed with his dream of building
Pennzoil into a major oil company, one that could become the seventh of the traditional Seven
Sisters after Chevron and Gulf merged. But the sands of biological time were running out on
"Chairman Mao" Liedkte, as the abrasive Pennzoil boss was known in the years after he became the
first US oilman to drill in China, thanks to Bush. The only way that Chairman Mao Liedkte couldrealize his lifelong dream would be by acquiring a large oil company and using its reserves to build (^)
Pennzoil up to world-class status.
Liedtke was the chairman of the Pennzoil board, and the Pennzoil president was now Blaine Kerr, a
former lawyer from Baker & Botts in Houston. Blaine Kerr was also an old friend of George Bush.