George Bush may no longer be President, but the way he and his cronies set out to de-regulate, destroy and defenestrate all the protections that the constitution and the laws of the US guarantee us as citizens and the land itself, all for his contributors and cronies in big business.
Under his stewardship, national parks were opened to clear-cutting and logging- with roads built at the expense of taxpayers, the clean-air act was essentially gutted, and taxes on the middle class and poor rose while taxes on the rich were reduced. The number of available jobs fell Due to outsourcing, and big corporations did their best to roll over the little people who worked for them.
How? They redefined what pollution was so that the biggest polluters could keep right on polluting. They redefined "manufacturing" so that assembling anything, even Burgers at McDonald's, is now considered a "Manufacturing job". And they made policing the polluters harder when companies could voluntarily submit to policing. If they didn't want to, they were left alone.
Insanity! But if that doesn't make you angry, it should. Our country's greatest strength- its middle class and protections for workers, have been systematically stripped away from us. And that's if you still *have* a job. And all those high-tech jobs that were supposed to be the jobs of the future? Shipped overseas to places where workers will do the same work for less pay that Americans. All on George W. Bush's watch when he made it easier than ever for corporate Czars to do so.
Read this book and it will truly open your eyes to corporate culture of corruption, and how Bush helped it along by basically bending over to corporate interests. Any corporation who paid Bush money to get elected got their investment back many times over in repayments from Bush while he was in office, and many lobbyists for big business reaped a dividend by getting their own lobbyists offered positions in the cabinet or in government office, At least two members were promoted to positions where they got to pass judgement on the claims they had written as lobbyists- you get two guesses as to what they did, and the first one doesn't count.
Reading this book can make you feel sick to your stomach. I know I did, both during and after reading it. Hightower pulls no punches and lets Bush, his cronies and Corporate Masters have it with both barrels. Hightower might be a humorist, but this is not humor. It's just a sickening catalogue of "business as usual" in the Bush White House. The fact that Bush got re-elected after pulling the sorts of stuff he and his cronies did is just stunning and a condemnation of the voters who elected him, and the rest of the nation, who stood by and let it happen. Not just once, but twice.
I can't exactly say I liked this book. It made me angry, so angry I wanted to scream and rage and cry. I found it powerfully affecting and upsetting. But I do think I would recommend it to others, both to inform and to make them say, "Not again. Not ever again."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment