Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [77]
The land is not only destructible, it is painfully frail—there are still scars left in the earth from the wooden wagon wheels along the Oregon Trail. Because the land is arid, it cannot heal itself—once it’s screwed up, it stays that way; it doesn’t come back from overgrazing, clear-cut timber, or anything else. As Walter Prescott Webb argued in The Great Plains, one of the great ecological tragedies in America is that anyone ever put a plough in the earth west of the ninety-eighth parallel.
Economically, the West has always been treated like a colony, its natural resources exploited, usually by Eastern corporations that then move on, leaving ruin behind. The West is dotted with more ruins than Italy. It is necessary to live lightly on that land. The most precious and scarce of all the West’s resources is water. To poison water in the West is to commit an act of such shortsighted folly that it is a wonder even greed can blind people to the monumental stupidity of it.
Ranchers here fear what’s coming in the northeast corner of a state as fragile as any in the American West. Drilling companies are buying and “holding” leases. Waiting on the final word from Washington. Waiting for the BLM to decide. “The BLM is very aware of what’s gone on out here,” Clark said. “There’s no reason they can’t do this right. And if they don’t do it right, they can ruin us.”
10.
Warm in the White House
First and first and foremost, we’ve got to make sure we fully fund LIHEAP, which is a way to help low-income folks, particularly here in the East, pay their high fuel bills.
—GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE, BOSTON, OCTOBER 2000
Let’s begin by demonstrating our grasp of the obvious: George W. Bush has never faced the choices Luz Cruz wakes up to every day. He doesn’t know much about cold houses. Maybe that’s why he refused to release the $300 million in federal funds that would have helped Cruz keep her house warm in the winter of 2003. This remarkable example of compassionate conservatism is enough to make you wonder if the country has completely lost its gag reflex. While the president was cutting the heating subsidy for people in Luz Cruz’ desperate circumstances, he was also pushing a $337 billion cut in dividend taxes that benefits only the very rich. Bloomberg News Service applied Bush’s proposed tax cuts to Bush’s own 2002 tax returns and to those of Vice President Cheney. The resulting savings would be $44,500 for Bush and $326,555 for Cheney.
If you think Bush later changed his mind and released $200 million in the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) funds in January 2003, you have been misinformed. The story was just complex enough so that it was reported wrong. More on that later.
ON A SATURDAY morning in late January 2003 Luz Cruz sat at the kitchen table in her North Philadelphia home. Her three children sprawled on the floor watching cartoons. Piles of bills were scattered across the kitchen table waiting for Cruz to puzzle her way through them. It was 15 degrees F. outside and the house was almost warm, but the bills had Cruz sweating. The eastern seaboard was in the grip of a cold spell that brought snow to the Carolinas’ Outer Banks and single-digit temperatures to Philadelphia. Cruz owed the gas company $992.45 and had no idea how she was going to pay it. In a rich Puerto-Rican–flavored Spanish sprinkled with English, she told the story of how she got into this fix.
“Mi mamá era mi backup,” she said. Unfortunately, mamá the backup died a year ago. Luz’ husband divorced her and went back to Puerto Rico. She has yet to see her first child-support check. Her eleven-year-old daughter, Jennifer, a child with large, expressive eyes who is timid in two languages, has chronic asthma. At times Jennifer requires treatment every four hours with a nebulizer, a portable appliance that allows her to breathe a medicated mist. When she goes into respiratory distress, she checks into a nearby hospital.