Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (72 page)

Republican National Committee chairman Kenneth Mehlman was not subtle about this: “One of the things that can happen in Washington when you work in an agency is that you forget who sent you there. And it’s important to remind people—you’re George Bush people . . . If there’s one empire I want built, it’s the George Bush empire.”
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The quaint notion that federal employees are actually responsible to the people who pay their salaries seems to have gone down the drain as well.

To be sure, they continued to invoke the banner hoisted by GOP activist Grover Norquist, who famously declared, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” But in practice, the only parts that went down the drain were the ones that were distasteful to friends. The Food and Drug Administration, the agency that monitors the safety of what Americans put into their bodies, faced drastic Budget cuts and restrictions in its abilities to inspect products before they went to market.
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At one congressional hearing, former FDA chief counsel Peter Barton Hutt said the agency was “barely hanging on by its fingertips.” He begged for more funding and skilled personnel.
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Faced with the overwhelming evidence of climate change, the Bush administration seemed content to pass the buck. Though the Supreme Court provided the Environmental Protection Agency with the power to create emissions standards for motor vehicles, EPA administrator Stephen Johnson found that even his agency’s modest suggestions fell on deaf White House ears. He had his staff write a draft of new regulations for limiting carbon emissions, but once sent to the White House, it “fell into a black hole.”
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Nearly every federal agency became politicized. The regulated were controlling the regulators, and cooking the books. A few career employees were willing to speak out. At NASA, leading climate scientist James Hansen revealed how the White House had worked to suppress the truth about climate change.
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David Kuo, former deputy director of the office of faith-based initiatives, claimed that the White House used taxpayer funds to plan events that recruited evangelical votes for the Republicans.

Government spending mainly took a hit in areas such as food stamps, energy assistance, community development, public housing, and the like. But once the Bush team had inflicted pain on the needy, they opened the public spigot of largesse for their friends. The well-connected benefited from contracts, jobs, and the indulgence of forbearing regulators. Financial institutions were rewarded for recklessness. Just as Poppy Bush had sheltered savings and loan executives from the consequences of their own greed, W. bailed out big investment houses such as Bear Stearns that had rewarded their executives with giant bonuses for taking even bigger—and ultimately dangerous—risks with other people’s money. These moves violated the bedrock conservative principle that people must bear the consequences for their own actions. Yet these gamblers were taken care of, and W. himself was never made to answer for the policy. Even a measure presented as in the public interest, like the Medicare prescription benefit plan, was essentially a political play, with a Cinderella’s slipper for the pharmaceutical industry thrown in.

In 2007, W. vetoed the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), which would have utilized an increased tobacco tax to provide health coverage to millions of uninsured children. Bush’s decision reflected his distaste for anything resembling universal health care. “After all,” the president suggested, “you [can] just go to an emergency room.”
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As
Times
columnist Paul Krugman pointed out, the S-CHIP program would have cost less over five years than the country spends on four months in Iraq. So W.’s opposition to the program was philosophical in nature. After all, if the nation were to experience a federal health care program that worked, what would stop people from demanding universal health care?

Krugman saw this as representing a fundamental Bush doctrine:

He wants the public to believe that government is always the problem, never the solution. But it’s hard to convince people that government is always bad when they see it doing good things. So his philosophy says that the government must be prevented from solving problems, even if it can. In fact, the more good a proposed government program would do, the more fiercely it must be opposed.
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W.’s crony statism and his contempt for regulation helped plunge the nation into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Even before the crash of 2008, he presided over the poorest job-creation rate in modern history. And according to a series of USA Today–Gallup polls, only once in Bush’s eight-year reign did even a slight majority of respondents characterize the economy as “excellent” or “good” rather than “fair” or “poor.”
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The cronyism was rampant, the corruption rife. The name of the GOP’s favorite super-lobbyist and fixer, Jack Abramoff, became a synonym for “business as usual.” If one did not believe in government by the people to begin with—as the Bush crew didn’t—what difference did such behavior make? How can one degrade that which one already holds in contempt? The result was evident in scandals large and small. Every week came new revelations about no-bid contracts awarded to contributors, loyal functionaries hired despite dubious qualifications, regulations and data skewed on behalf of powerful industries, and on and on.

For the cooperative and the connected, lack of qualifications was no bar. It became so evident that the
New Republic
devoted an entire issue to indexing the Bush “hackocracy.”
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A typical appointment was Julie Myers, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Homeland Security Department. Ms. Myers is the niece of General Richard Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She had recently married the chief of staff for Michael Chertoff, who was secretary of Homeland Security. This led Frank Rich to label the appointment a “nepotistic twofer.”
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Even conservative columnist Michelle Malkin noted, “Great contacts, but what exactly are the 36-year-old lawyer’s main credentials to solve . . . dire national security problems?” She answered: “Zip, Nada, Nil.”
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Myers’s main qualification: working for Kenneth Starr, the man who prosecuted the Monica Lewinsky case.

Regulatory agencies hung out the sign: Foxes, Report to Henhouse Duty. All manner of chemical, nuclear, and coal industry executives and the like rushed in to provide oversight of their former (and future) employers.

Even when the administration seemed to be taking care of ordinary people, there was always a skunk at the picnic’s close. The historic overhaul of Medicare was within a few years marred by revelations of fraud and improper payments to medical equipment manufacturers, to the tune of $2.8 billion.
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All in the Family

It seemed there was always room at the table for contributors and friends. It wasn’t just the occasional Billy Carter or Roger Clinton who regarded the White House as a winning lottery ticket. It was an entire clan that had built its political rhetoric around the need to curb government spending.

The dossier is thick. Back in 1985, while Poppy was vice president, third son Neil Mallon Bush had become a director of the Silverado Savings and Loan. Soon he was embroiled in one of the biggest financial scandals in U.S. history—one that cost taxpayers about one billion dollars.
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In February 1993, a month after Poppy Bush left office, the World Trade Center was bombed. In the wake of that, an American firm with Kuwaiti backing got a contract to provide security to the buildings, and Poppy’s fourth son, Marvin, joined the board, remaining until 2000. W.’s brother Jeb, the one Poppy and Barbara thought would rise highest, set up shop in Miami and established strong ties to the right-wing Cuban exile community. He was quickly brought under the wing of Armando Codina, a real estate developer and longtime political supporter of the family and its staunch backing of the Cuba embargo; Jeb got a 40 percent share of the real estate company’s profits without investing in the firm. The duo were bailed out for a loan default with taxpayers footing the bill, in excess of $3 million.
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With a Bush back in the White House, the process required a bit more subtlety. Neil Bush, brother of the “education president,” backed by money from Kuwait and elsewhere, was busy selling educational software to the Saudis.
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William “Bucky” Bush, Poppy’s younger brother and W.’s uncle, sat on the board of ESSI, a St. Louis–based firm that received multiple no-bid contracts from the Pentagon.
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One was for equipment to help search for—and protect soldiers from—what turned out to be Iraq’s nonexistent store of chemical and biological weapons.
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Friends of the family also got a piece of the taxpayer’s dollar. Ernie Ladd, W.’s faithful buddy since his days supervising Bush’s community service at Project PULL in inner-city Houston, started getting military contracts for spray-on plastic coating.
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And then of course there was Poppy. After leaving the White House, he began accepting handouts from grateful past beneficiaries of one generation of Bushes and those hopeful for largesse from the next. In 1998, Poppy addressed an audience in Tokyo on behalf of telecom company Global Crossing and accepted stock in the soon-to-go-public corporation in lieu of his normal $100,000 overseas speaking fee. Within a year, that stock was worth $14.4 million.
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Poppy also became an adviser to, and speechmaker for, the Carlyle Group, a secretive private equity firm that made its name buying low-valued defense contractors, using connections to secure government contracts, then selling the firms at huge profits. Poppy joined Carlyle in 1995 and earns between $80,000 and $100,000 per speech on its behalf.
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As a former president with access to CIA briefings, Poppy is an indispensable asset to Carlyle. “Imagine what a global enterprise, that does large amounts of business with arms contractors and foreign governments, could do with weekly CIA briefings,” wrote business journalist Dan Briody, author of a book on the Carlyle Group.
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Whether or not Carlyle was a direct beneficiary of inside information, the company’s investors have made more than $6.6 billion off the Iraq War. Referring to the beginning of the war, Carlyle’s chief investment officer said: “It’s the best eighteen months we ever had. We made money and we made it fast.”
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The myriad cozy financial deals involving Bushes and their friends and associates have attracted only sporadic media interest. This is in contrast to the frenzied coverage of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s investment in the Arkansas real estate venture Whitewater. The couple actually lost money in the deal, and an independent investigation headed by Clinton nemesis Kenneth Starr found no evidence of illegality. Other Democrats, in particular Barack Obama, saw every aspect of their personal lives scrutinized, often with the most nefarious possible interpretation.

The Bush crew’s political operation required exemption from, and therefore control over, the law. Thus the infamous White House crusade to fire uncooperative United States attorneys—the highest prosecutors, each supervising his or her own regional office. Most of the targets, though loyal Republicans, had refused to pursue prosecutions that were overtly political in nature.
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Even when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales stepped down in the scandal’s wake, his nominally independent-minded replacement, Michael Mukasey, declined to pursue charges against the Justice Department. “Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime,” he said.
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That same approach helped former Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, whose jail sentence was commuted after he was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame case.

In 2005, W. nominated Harriet Miers, his friend and fellow Texan, to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court—even though she had never before served as a judge and lacked distinction among her legal peers. Miers’s main qualification was that she had handled some of W.’s most delicate matters in the 1990s. In W.’s gubernatorial campaign, Miers “was deemed to be just the right person to inoculate George W. Bush against any further inquiries into his legal and business dealings.”
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As detailed in chapter 18, it was Miers who helped Bush escape scrutiny for his membership in the controversial Rainbo Club. Thus, even the highest court in the land was to house a Bush family enforcer.

BECAUSE OF THEIR contempt for government, Bush and Cheney ended up flubbing the most essential function of government from a conservative standpoint: security and defense.

The tendentious justification for the invasion of Iraq was only one obvious example. In some ways, an even more striking one was the fiasco of the response to Hurricane Katrina.

The botched handling of Katrina cut deep; and the reason for it was the same as for the other derelictions and misdeeds. Government was to be a honeypot for cronies and supporters, and a grindstone for ideological axes. It did not exist to solve problems—and therefore under Bush it ended up creating more of them.