• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 393 0

and assured him and the other rescue workers he was with them. In August 2002, he pocket-vetoed $150 million in emergency first-responder grants. Bush touted the $3.5 billion in “new” funding for first responders, but Congressional Quarterly reports, “According to the administration’s own budget documents, the Bush plan for funding first responders amounts to double-entry bookkeeping: changes in the ledger that would result in no net increase in the amount of money flowing to cities, counties and states.” New York City was supposed to get $90 million in federal aid to monitor the health of workers at Ground Zero. That money was to have been included in the overall post–September 11 aid package for New York but was shifted to a separate $5.1 billion spending plan that Bush rejected. Bob Beckwith, the tired fireman Bush hugged at Ground Zero, considered attending the 2003 State of the Union address as a silent protest but later decided not to.

The No Child Left Behind funding is examined in an earlier chapter—a cut of $90 million below the previous year’s funding and $7 billion less than Congress had authorized. Under Title I, to help the poorest children, Bush proposed only 18 percent of the increase that was in his own bill. After-school centers were frozen in his budget, so 50,000 fewer children can be served. English-language training also got a freeze despite an estimated increase of 300,000 students who need assistance. Bush proposed 95 percent less than was in his own bill for school libraries.

We have also looked at his record on corporate reform. The rhetoric is great: “Employees who have worked hard and saved all their lives should not have to risk losing everything if their company fails. Through stricter accounting standards and tougher disclosure requirements, corporate America must be made more accountable to employees and shareholders, and held to the highest standards of conduct.” Then he proposed 40 percent less than authorized for the SEC, and when that wouldn’t fly, he coughed up 26 percent less than authorized. The SEC has accomplished no significant corporate reforms.

Meanwhile, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (formerly graced by Mrs. Phil Gramm) distinguished itself in a true “Jo Moore moment” in midwar. The CFTC was set up to protect investors from abusive practices in commodities trading, and to that end this alert guardian watchdog of the public interest proposed three new rules in March 2003 that would, according to The New York Times, “reduce the quality of disclosure required in reports of past performance, increase the opportunity for advisers to put some clients’ or their own interests ahead of others’ and curtail the already lax regulation on operators of hedge funds. Using language that could have come straight out of an Enron annual report, the commission said the rules would streamline regulation, allowing ‘greater flexibility and innovation.’ ” For those of you who are a little vague about these advanced vehicles of capitalist gambling, Muriel (Mickie) Siebert, head of Muriel Siebert & Company, Inc., speaks our language. The first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, Siebert calls hedge funds “derivatives on steroids” and has been advocating their regulation for years.

Just to remind you of exactly how risky these funds are, the International Herald Tribune reported on September, 26, 1998, “The near-collapse of one of Wall Street’s most highly respected hedge funds sent shudders through global financial markets for a second day as more banks warned of losses, share prices tumbled in Asia and Europe, and regulators questioned why some investors roam so free of oversight.

“On Wall Street and in other financial centers, shock competed with a growing fear that the near-death experience of Long-Term Capital Management LP, one of the most aggressive but respected of the so-called hedge funds, would trigger a spiral of damage through international financial markets.” Basically, this thing was so close to blowing—the financial equivalent of “the China syndrome”—you don