United States into the ionosphere, with the total almost quadrupling over a little more
than ten years to approach the fantastic total of $3.25 thousand billion. In 1989, it was
estimated that total debt claims in the US economy had attained almost $25 thousand
billion, and their total has increased exponentially ever since. The debt of state and local
governments, corporate debt, consumer debt --all expanded into the wild blue yonder. In
the meantime, the Great Lakes industrial region became the rust bowl, the Sun belt oil
and computer booms collapsed, the great cities of the east were rotten to the core with
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 political embarrassment 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 delivery were 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
the developing 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
unlimited opportunity. 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 intimate circle 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 his own 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