George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

unaided by eugenic foresight, may contribute to a decline of human quality for all
segments of society."
To halt what he saw as pervasive down breeding of the quality of the US gene pool,
Shockley advocated a program of mass sterilization of the unfit and mentally defective
which he called his "Bonus Sterilization Plan." Money bonuses for allowing oneself to be
sterilized would be payed to any person not paying income tax who had a genetic
deficiency or chronic disease, such as diabetes or epilepsy, or who could be shown to be a
drug addict. "If [the government paid] a bonus rate of $1,000 for each point below 100
IQ, $30,000 put in trust for some 70 IQ moron of 20- child potential, it might return
$250,000 to taxpayers in reduced cost of mental retardation care, " Shockley said.
The special target of Shockley's prescriptions for mass sterilizations were blacks, whom
he saw as reproducing too fast. "If those blacks with the least amount of Caucasian genes
are in fact the most prolific and the least intelligent, then genetic enslavement will be the
destiny of their next generation," he wrote. Looking at the recent past, Shockley said in
1967: "The lesson to be drawn from Nazi history is the value of free speech, not that
eugenics is intolerable."
As for Paul Ehrlich, his program for genocide included a call to he US governmemt to
prepare "the addition of...mass sterilization agents" to the US food and water supply, and
a "tough foreign policy" including termination of food aid to starving nations. As radical
as Ehrlich might have sounded then, this latter point has become a staple of foreign
policy under the Bush Administration.
On July 24, 1969, the task force heard from Gen. William Draper, then national chairman
of the Population Crisis Committee, and a close friend of Bush's father, Prescott.
According to Bush' resume of his family friend's testimony, Draper warned that the
population explosion was like a "rising tide," and asserted that ``our strivings for the
individual good will become a scourge to the community unless we use our God- given
brain power to bring back a balance between the birth rate and the death rate." Draper
lashed out at the Catholic Church, charging that its opposition to contraception and
sterilization was frustrating population -control efforts in Latin America.
A week later, Bush invited Oscar Harkavy, chief of the Ford Foundation's population
program, to testify. In summarizing Harkavy's remarks for the August 4 Congressional
Record, Bush commented: "The population explosion is commonly recognized as one of
the most serious problems now facing the nation and the world. Mr. Harkavy suggested,
therefore, that we more adequately fund population research. It seems inconsistent that
cancer research funds total $250-275 million annually, more than eight times the amount
spent on reproductive biology research."
In reporting on testimony by Dr. William McElroy of the National Science Foundation,
Bush stressed that "One of the crises the world will face as a result of present population
growth rates is that, assuming the world population increases 2 percent annually, urban
population will increase by 6 percent, and ghetto population will increase by 12 percent."