would make sweeping concessions to the environmentalist Luddites, but would then be denounced
by them for measures that were insufficiently radical. This would be the case when Bush's CleanAir Bill was going through the Congress during the summer of 1990.
After Bush's appearance before the Congress with his revised budget, the new regime exploited the
honeymoon to seal a sweetheart contract with the rubber-stamp Congressional Democrats, who
under no circumstances could be confused with an opposalive and well, personified by milquetoast Senator George Mitchell of Maine, the Democrats'ition. The de facto one party state was
Majority Leader. The collusion between Bush and the Democratic leadership involved new sleight
of hand in order to meet the defecit targets stipulated by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law. This
involved mobilizing more than $100 billion from surpluses in the Social Security, highway, and
other special trust funds which had not previously been counted. The Democrats also went alongwith a $28 billion package of asset sales, financing tricks, and unspecified new revenues. They also (^)
bought Bush's rosy economic forecast of higher economic growth and lower interest rates. Senate
Majority Leader Mitchell, accepting his pathetic rubber-stamp role, commented only that "much
sterner measures will be required in the future." Since the Democrats were incapable of proposing
an economic recovery prograBush what he wanted. This particular swindle would come back to haunt all concerned, but notm in order to deal with the depression, they were condemned to give
before the spectacular budget debacle of October, 1990.
In the spring of 1990, according to an estimate by Sid Taylor of the National Taxpayers' Union, the
total potential liabilities of the US Federal government exceeded $14 thousand billion. At that pointthe national debt totalled $2.8 billion, but this estimate included the committments of the Federal
Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Pension
Benefit Guarantee Corporation, and other agencies.
Bush's inability to pull his regime together for a serious round of domappreciated by the crowd at the Bank for International Settlements in Geneva. Evelyn Rothschild'sestic austerity was not (^)
London Economist summed up the international banking view of George's temporizing on this
score with its headline, "Bush Bumbles."
A few weeks into the new administration, it was the collapse of the FSLIC, studiously ignored bythe waning Reagan Administration, that reached critical mass. On February 6, 1989, Bush
announced measures that his image-mongers billed as the most sweeping and significant piece of
financial legislation since the creation of the Federal Reserve Board on the eve of World War I.
This was the savings and loan bailout, a new orgy in the monetization of debt and a giant step
towards the consolidation of a neo-fascist corporate state.
At the heart of Bush's policy was his refusal to acknowledge the existence of an economic crisis of
collossal proportions which had among its symptoms the gathering collapse of the real estate market
after the stock market crash of October, 1987. The sequence of a stock market panic followed by a
real estate and banking crisis closely followed the sequence of the Great Depression of the 1930's.But Bush violently rejected the existence of such a crisis, and was grimly determined to push on
with more of the same. This meant that federal government would simply take control of the
savings banks, the overwhelming majority of which were bankrupt or imminently bankrupt. The
savings banks would then be sold off. The depositors might get their money, but the result would be
the total debasement of the currency and a deepening depression all around. In tfederal government would become one of the main owners of real estate, buildings, and thehe process, the US
worthless junk bonds that had been spewed out by Bush's friend Henry Kravis and his partner
Michael Millken during the heady days of the boom.
The federal government would create a new world of bonded debt to pay for the savings banks that