George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

domestic agenda: crime, drugs, education, urban crisis, federal budget deficits and a
constant squeeze on the middle class, the backbone of our democracy."
What Hyland's backers had in mind as remedies for these problems boiled down to
modern versions of the Mussolini fascist corporate state. Hyland's litany that Bush had to
pay more attention to domestic crises and especially the battered US economy soon
became the stock rhetoric of Democratic presidential candidates demanding a transition
from Bush's voluntary corporatism (the "thousand points of light") to the compulsory
corporatism of Gen. Hugh Johnson's National Recovery Administration, with an
economy organized into obligatory, state-controlled cartels to reduce wages and cut
production. This was the reality that lurked behind the edifying rhetoric about poverty,
joblessness, and the decline of the middle class purveyed by the official Democratic
presidential contenders who finally emerged by the end of 1991. But for Bush, the
Hyland article was a clear indication that Wall Street was becoming disenchanted with
his policies.
On a number of occasions, Bush threatened to renew the air war against Iraq. One threat
of air strikes came between July 25 and July 28, using the issue of alleged Iraqi
concealment of nuclear programs. Then, in what amounted to an early campaign foray
into a number of western states, Bush made new threats between September 18 and
September 20, including an enraged monologue at the Grand Canyon in the company of
the ghoulish Scowcroft.
Bush was determined to exploit the momentum gained during the violence and extortion
of the Gulf crisis to further the cause of Anglo-American economic war and trade war
against Germany, Japan, the developing countries, and the Soviet bloc. In mid-February,
in the midst of the Gulf war, Bush's resident harpie at the Trade Representative's Office,
Carla Hills, had virtually declared war against the western European Airbus consortium,
accusing this group of firms of protectionism, subsidies, and violations of exisiting
GATT regulations. On June 27, 1990, Bush had announced his "Enterprise for the
Americas" in effect a plan for a free trade zone stretching from the North Pole to Tierra
del Fuego, all to be subjected to unbridled looting by the US dollar. At that time Bush
had stated that "the US stands ready to enter into free trade agreements with other
markets in Latin America and the Caribbean... and the first step in this process is a trade
agreement with Mexico." During the Gulf buildup, Bush had met with Mexican President
Carlos Salinas de Gortari in Salinas's home town of Agualeguas in northern Mexico. The
leading item on the agenda was the Wall Street demand for a US-Mexico free trade
agreement which, together with the exisiting US-Canada free trade arrangement, would
amount to a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The negotiation of this
deal would begin during 1991. The essence of NAFTA was a wholly deregulated free
trade zone in which remaining factories and other businesses in the United States would
move their operations to Mexico in order to take advantage of an average hourly wage of
98 cents an hour as against $11 an hour in US manufacturing. The legal minimum wage
in Mexico was the equivalent of 59 cents an hour. It was a plan for runaway shops on an
unprecedented scale; the Mexican sweat shops or "maquiladoras" were so brutal in their
exploitative practices as to constitute an "Auschwitz below the border." Salinas visited