BY NORM DIXON

George Walker ("Dubya") Bush wasted no time before
signalling that his government will move rapidly to
implement sweeping pro-big business measures and
right-wing social policies. Bush and his cabinet are
already training their sights on abortion rights, public
education, access to welfare, affirmative action and
environmental protection regulations.

On January 22, his first day on the job, Bush banned US
government funds going to international family planning
groups that, even indirectly, acknowledge a woman's right
to have an abortion. The decision was a calculated
"thumbs up" to thousands of right-wing anti-choice
zealots who had mobilised that day in Washington to
demand the reversal of the US Supreme Court's 1973
landmark "Roe versus Wade" ruling which in effect
legalised abortion.

A message delivered to the demonstrators on Bush's behalf
by anti-choice leader and Republican Congressperson Chris
Smith declared that the Bush regime was committed "to
build a culture of life". The anti-choice crusaders were
reminded that Bush has ordered a review of the US
government's approval of the RU-486 birth termination
drug and will approve legislation banning late-term
abortions if the Clinton-vetoed bill is again passed by
Congress.

On January 23, Republicans introduced into Congress
measures to implement Bush's plan to dismantle the public
education system and transfer it over time to privately
owned and religious institutions. Bush wants to introduce
annual literacy and maths tests for public school
students to establish "standards". Schools will have
three years to boost students' scores to a set level. If
they cannot, federal funds would be stripped from them
and allocated as "vouchers" to parents to spend at
private institutions.

Bush's agenda closely mirrors, especially his welfare,
education and reproductive rights policies, that pushed
by the US corporate-sponsored right-wing think tanks and
foundations. Most of his cabinet members have close
associations with big business and individuals and
organisations from across the far-right of US capitalist
politics — from the "mainstream" to the outright kooky —
including Bush junior himself.

During his campaign for the Republican presidential
nomination and the presidential election itself, Bush
carefully cultivated support from the far-right Christian
fundamentalist organisations inside and outside the
Republican Party. These organisations provided many of
Bush's campaign foot soldiers and will expect a lot in
return.

According to the January 21 Christian Science Monitor,
"Observant evangelical Protestants, the core constituency
of the `religious right', voted 84% for Bush, making up
almost one-third of all his supporters. Together with
observant mainline Protestants and Catholics, religious
conservatives accounted for better than half of all
Republican ballots."

Last February, Bush gave a speech at the notoriously
anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic and racist Bob Jones
University in South Carolina. In response to criticism,
Bush's spokesperson Mindy Tucker stated: "From our point
of view, this is a place where there are lot of South
Carolina conservative voters."

Bush's nominee for the key post of attorney general, John
Ashcroft, made the pilgrimage to Bob Jones University on
May 8, 1999, to accept an honourary degree. In his
speech, Ashcroft paraphrased (badly) passages from the
bible upon which Christian fundamentalists base their
anti-Semitic rantings. These passages have been used down
the ages as the theological basis for pogroms against
Jews.

Ashcroft is closely aligned to the Christian Coalition
and far-right evangelist Pat Robertson. A former state
attorney general in Missouri and a former senator, he is
in favour of passing legislation and amending the US
constitution to ban abortion even if the woman is the
victim of incest or rape. He is a leader of the campaign
to criminally outlaw late-term abortions. At the same
time, he has attempted to ban the birth control pill and
IUDs.

Ashcroft's control of the Justice Department will give
the radical right control of the selection of federal
judges, including the Supreme Court. It is the Supreme
Court that can overturn the Roe versus Wade ruling.

Ashcroft was the author of the "charitable choice"
provision of the 1996 welfare "reform" law, which
legalised the delivery of publicly funded welfare
services by churches and "faith-based" organisations. It
permitted religious groups to promote their religious
beliefs while delivering services and refuse to employ
people with different or no faith.

He has sponsored another bill, the "Charitable Choice
Expansion Act", that if passed will speed the
privatisation of government services and make their
delivery more dependent on the moral dictates of
right-wing religious outfits.

Now responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws,
Ashcroft once hailed Confederate generals and politicians
who fought the US Civil War to defend slavery as
"patriots" and stated that they should not be portrayed
as having fought for "some perverted agenda". A St. Louis
Post-Dispatch editorial noted that Ashcroft has "built a
career out of opposing school desegregation ... and
opposing African Americans for public office".

Other notable supporters of Ashcroft are the reactionary
National Rifle Association and the more extreme Gun
Owners of America. The "pro-life" Ashcroft loves a good
execution and he successfully organised to prevent the
appointment of a judge who he considered not sufficiently
enthusiastic about imposing the death penalty.

Another Bush cabinet member who seems to have a soft spot
for the slavocracy is interior secretary Gale Norton. In
a 1996 speech to the right-wing Independence Institute,
Norton, who was Colorado attorney general at the time,
declared that "We lost too much" when the South was
defeated in the civil war.

While state attorney general, Norton used the slogan
"states' rights", the battle cry of Southern slave
states, to fight federal environmental controls, and land
and cultural rights for indigenous people. She also
opposed affirmative action.

`Conservative labyrinth'

Beginning in the 1960s, the US right began marshalling
its resources to shift US capitalist policy debate
sharply to the right. Researcher Sally Covington points
out that the assault was spearheaded by "a core group of
12 conservative foundations" backed by the fortunes of
some of the richest capitalists in the US.

These foundations in turn funded and promoted dozens of
"think tanks" and "researchers" — many with dubious
political backgrounds. The influence of these
organisations reached their peak during the Reagan, Bush
senior and Clinton administrations. Their ideas dominate
Bush junior's team.

According to Covington, "In 1994, [the 12 core
foundations] controlled more than $1.1 billion in assets;
from 1992-94, they awarded $300 million in grants, and
targetted $210 million to support a wide array of
projects and institutions. They channelled $80 million to
right-wing policy institutions actively promoting an
anti-government, unregulated markets agenda. Another $89
million supported conservative scholars and academic
programs, with $27 million targeted to recruit and train
the next generation of right-wing leaders in conservative
legal principles, free-market economics, political
journalism and policy analysis. And $41.5 million was
invested to build a conservative media apparatus, support
pro-market legal organisations, fund state-level think
tanks and advocacy organisations, and mobilise new
philanthropic resources for conservative policy change."

Covington added that the foundations singled out
"aggressive and entrepreneurial organisations committed
to government rollback through the privatisation of
government services, devolution of authority from federal
to state and local governments and deep cuts in federal
anti-poverty spending".

This powerful and rich "new conservative labyrinth"
launched its most sustained and vitriolic attacks on the
welfare system and its recipients.

Behind the seemingly learned discourse that emerged from
this army of "experts", "researchers" and "analysts",
lurked good old-fashioned racism. Vast sums of corporate
money, a legion media-savvy spokespeople and professors
with impressive credentials allowed KKK politics to
become respectable and mainstream again, and it was
embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike.

In the 1980s, the CIA-linked Manhattan Institute
sponsored and heavily promoted a book by Charles Murray,
Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-80, which
claimed that anti-poverty programs reduced the incentive
to marry, discouraged workers accepting low-wage jobs and
encouraged poor unmarried women to have children. The
underlying argument was that it was the moral failings of
the poor that made them poor and government welfare
perpetuated poverty, rather than alleviating it, and
traps them in a cycle of "welfare dependency".

Murray is best known as one of the authors of the 1994
book, The Bell Curve, which continues the theme began in
Losing Ground. The books' central claim was that
African-Americans have a lower IQ than whites and Asians.
The book claimed that African-Americans and Latinos are
disproportionately poor because they are objectively less
intelligent, not because of institutionalised racism and
poor environments.

The message of The Bell Curve was that improved welfare
and affirmative action programs could not improve the
position of blacks and the poor. More than that, Murray
wrote, "The United States has policies that inadvertently
social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the
wrong women... We urge that these policies, represented
by the extensive network of cash and services for
low-income women who have babies, be ended."

Racism

Murray's respectable mask had slipped just enough to
reveal the ugly face of racism. It soon emerged that
almost all the "research" that Murray relied on to
justify the central arguments of The Bell Curve had been
funded by the Pioneer Fund, a racist outfit whose mission
is to promote the elimination of "genetically unfit"
individuals and races.

Established in 1937 by Wickliffe Draper, a millionaire
textile industry magnate and admirer of the Nazis who
campaigned to have African-Americans sent ``back'' to
Africa, the Pioneer Fund's charter stated the
foundation's mission was "racial betterment" and to help
the people "deemed to be descended primarily from white
persons who settled in the original 13 states prior to
the adoption of the Constitution of the United States".

Draper was not a lone kook — he had plenty of company.
The 1930s eugenics movement had the support of many
leading US capitalists, including the Rockefellers, Henry
Ford, Andrew Carnegie, JP Morgan, Andrew Mellon, Averell
Harriman and Prescott Bush, Bush junior's grandfather.
Many, including Prescott Bush, were admirers of Hitler
and had invested heavily in Nazi Germany.

The fund's first president, Harry Laughlin, advocated the
forced sterilisation of the "genetically unfit" and
argued that Jews were innately "feebleminded". Another
founder, Frederick Osburn, described Nazi Germany's
forced sterilisation of the disabled and others as "a
most exciting experiment".

The Pioneer Fund's current president, Harry Weyher, has
refused to distance the fund from its founders' views and
has denounced the desegregation of schools in the US
South. The fund's treasurer is a former leading member of
the fascist Coalition of Patriotic Societies and was a
supporter of apartheid South Africa's "well-reasoned
racial policies".

Other beneficiaries of the Pioneer Fund's largess have
included Roger Pearson, a well-known neo-fascist activist
in Europe and the US, and Arthur Jensen, who published
research in the 1970s that also claimed blacks were less
intelligent.

While advocating the crudest forms of racist eugenics —
like gas chambers, sterilisation and deportation — is no
longer possible, far-right elements like Murray, the
Manhattan Institute and the Pioneer Fund seem to believe
their goals can be achieved by the elimination of
welfare.

Which brings us back to Bush junior and his crew.
Murray's Losing Ground and The Bell Curve have become
handbooks for the anti-welfare, anti-affirmative action
and school privatisation lobbies.

Welfare "reform" pin-up boy Tommy Thompson has been
appointed by Bush to deprive the poor of welfare
services. As Bush's secretary for health and human
services (HHS), Thompson will be in charge of the
department that oversees the Medicare and Medicaid health
system and other welfare services.

Thompson, who was elected governor of Wisconsin in 1986,
succeeded in slashing the number of people in the state
receiving welfare by 92%. Wisconsin under Thompson also
set the pace in diverting public education funds to
private and religious schools by way of vouchers.

The Bell Curve's Charles Murray was a consultant for
Thompson's Wisconsin Works (W-2), which eliminated
welfare for families with dependent children and replaced
it with a system that forced recipients to work,
regardless of their circumstances, for an average of $7
an hour wage. There is no safety net for those that
cannot meet the stringent requirements. In the first year
of W-2, the black infant mortality rate in Milwaukee
increased by 37%.

Thompson will also have responsibility for the food and
Drug Administration and US Surgeon General's office, both
of which can restrict women's reproductive rights. As
governor, Thompson restricted Wisconsin women's right to
have abortions. He signed into law the most restrictive
abortion law in the US, including life imprisonment for
doctors who perform late-term abortions. The law was
later overturned by a federal court.

While Thompson is the most prominent operative of the
right-wing think tanks in Bush's team, he is not alone.
Two of Bush's senior domestic policy advisers, Stephen
Goldsmith and Floyd Flake, are listed as Manhattan
Institute "experts", along with the ubiquitous Charles
Murray, on the institute's web site. Goldsmith has
referred to Murray as a "brilliant scholar".

Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, multimillionaire
shareholder and CEO of Alcoa, is a fellow at the Rand
Corporation and the American Enterprise Institute. Gail
Wilensky, architect of Bush's plans to "reform" Medicare,
is a John M. Olin Foundation grant recipient and serves
on the boards of eight health care corporations.

Labour secretary Elaine Chao, who will be responsible for
industrial relations, is a former vice-president of Bank
of America Capital Markets Group and a Heritage
Foundation fellow. She won Bush's nomination after Linda
Chavez was forced to withdraw when it was discovered she
had employed an undocumented worker in her home. Chavez
was a researcher at the Manhattan Institute and has
received $200,000 in grants from the John M. Olin
Foundation. Despite her Latino heritage, she was a leader
of the racist English First Movement. On its web site,
Chavez quotes from Charles Murray, author of The Bell
Curve.

Energy secretary Spencer Abraham is a founder of the
right-wing Federalist Society. It's goal is to
politically dominate the legal profession, especially at
the level of the judiciary. It stands for eliminating
welfare, affirmative action and bilingual education. It
is funded by the leading foundations. Its most prominent
members are Supreme Court judges Scalia and Clarence
Thomas, whose votes were crucial in delivering the ruling
that put the George Bush junior's in the White House with
a minority of popular votes.

`Welfare' for the rich

While Bush junior's gang rails against welfare for the
poor, they are not averse to state "welfare" for
themselves. In the 1980s, Bush's oil business partners
used him as the front-person for the purchase of the
Texas Rangers baseball team. They felt that being George
Bush's son would attract investors so they handed him 10%
of the team.

The new owners promptly threatened to relocate the team
unless the city of Arlington built a new stadium.
Arlington spent $150 million on the stadium, which
boosted the value of the Texas Rangers franchise. So much
so, that when the team was sold, Bush junior pocketed a
cool $14.9 million. Not bad, considering his initial
investment was $600,000 of borrowed money.

In 1990, Bush junior's struggling oil company Harken
Energy was granted a contract to drill for oil off the
coast of the Gulf state of Bahrain, shunting aside the
oil giant Amoco, even though the company had no
experience in off-shore operations. Suggestions that the
Bahrain government was attempting to curry favour with
the US president, George Bush snr, were denied.

Just as suddenly, a Harken Energy director was invited to
participate in private White House briefings on Middle
East policy. In May 1990, the Harken board member learned
that Washington was considering an oil embargo of Iraq.

In June, Bush junior suddenly sold 212,000 of his Harken
shares, raking in more than $848,500. In August, Iraqi
troops invaded Kuwait and the value of Harken's shares
dropped 25%.

After Dick Cheney, President Bush senior's defence
secretary during the 1991 Gulf War and now Bush junior's
vice-president, left the Pentagon, he became CEO of
Halliburton, a Texas construction and engineering outfit
that services oil companies and the US military. He
cashed in on his official contacts within the government,
military, the oil industry and Middle east governments.
Almost overnight, the middle-sized Halliburton's business
swelled to $15 billion in annual sales with contracts in
120 countries. Cheney entered the White House this year,
around $50 million richer.