• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Killing regulations put in place to protect working people from job injuries? Old news in Texas. When workers in our Panhandle meatpacking factories won lawsuits against the world’s biggest kill-cut-and-wrap company, Governor Bush pushed through “tort reform,” legislation that made it almost impossible for workers to sue their employers. Then a Bush appointee to the Texas Supreme Court* made it flat impossible—he ruled that any employee “consulting” a lawyer about workplace hazards could be fired. See a lawyer? Lose your job. Bush vetoed so many labor bills down here that one Houston legislator still swears the governor vetoed a worker-protection bill that was actually defeated on the house floor by the governor’s staff.

Not only is Texas not surprised. For a change, we’re ahead of the country. After Bush left, we had us a little spate of what we call ree-form. The 2001 session of the Texas Legislature had to clean up some of the mess Governor Bush left behind. A conservative Republican senator from Dallas introduced a bill to rescind the $2.9 billion tax cut Bush passed. The voluntary-emissions law written by an industry lobbyist was replaced by a law that compels polluting industries to clean up. A hate-crimes bill that includes protections for gays and lesbians (that was the deal-buster for Bush) passed both houses and was signed by the Republican who took over as governor here after the Supreme Court appointed Bush president. Roadblocks to Medicaid, in a state with the nation’s highest percentage of poverty, were eliminated by the hard work of a Hispanic senator from South Texas and an African-American house member from Houston. The Great State’s Legislature even passed a law that would have ended execution of the mentally retarded. But that one was too much for Bush’s designated successor. Governor Goodhair** Perry vetoed the bill because he finds that executing people who lack the wits to understand either crime or punishment is a matter of Christian duty.

The 2000 presidential campaign focused so much attention on the state of the Great State that it has actually done us good. The good news is that the first post-Bush session of the Texas Legislature almost made our mock license-plate motto “Texas: Mississippi with Good Roads” obsolete.* We’re no longer a Third World state. The bad news is, to borrow a line from a Texas boogie band, “We’re Bad, We’re Nationwide.” The worst public policy created in Texas has gone national. “I’d like to have the opportunity to show Washington how to handle a budget surplus,” our Republican governor said in 1999. And has he ever.

Here’s the kicker. Six months after that speech, when one of the boys on the bus asked him about the fiscal crisis Texas was facing in the legislative session ahead, candidate Bush said, “I hope I’m not around to deal with it.”

He’s not.

He was our governor.

Now he’s your president.

1.

Aloha, Harken

In the long run, there is no capitalism without conscience;

there is no wealth without character.

—GEORGE W. BUSH ON WALL STREET, JULY 9, 2001

In the long run, we are all dead.

—JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES ON THE LONG RUN, 1924

There he was. On the Tuesday after a long Fourth of July weekend. In the ballroom of an ornate Wall Street hotel that once housed the New York Merchants Exchange. Standing in front of a blue-and-white backdrop with the words CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY printed over and over on it, in case you should miss the point. Promising us “a new ethic” for American business. Our president, Scourge of Corporate Misbehavior.

It was like watching a whore pretend to be dean of Southern Methodist University’s School of Theology. But as Luther said, hypocrisy has ample wages.

“Harken,” said the Bush camp over and over, “was nothing like Enron.” Interestingly enough, it was exactly like Enron in each and every feature of corporate misbehavior, except a lot smaller. A perfect miniature Enron.

By the summer of 2002, it had long been known that twelve years earlier Bush made a pile by selling his stock