Republican Give Aways

George W. Bush is more than the perfect puppet Reagan was; he's truly one of us. We don't have to convince him of the benefits of helping out the rich and powerful — he's known them all his life. Billionaires bought him the education his brains couldn't — Andover, Yale, Harvard — then bailed out his failed business ventures, and paid his way into politics. As a result, George is as dedicated to realising our vision for America as we are!

Tax Cuts, the Deficit and Destroying Public Services

We love George's tax cuts! They mean trillions for us and tidbits for everyone else. Better still, they've left Americans with a crippling debt that their children will be paying back to us (guess who loaned Bush the money for a tax cut?!) for years to come while the Government slashes social security, education and health care to avoid going bankrupt

Now there are some, even among billionaires, who criticize George’s fiscal policy as dangerous. They say you can’t cut taxes during a war and a recession, and simultaneously massively increase spending on weaponry and corporate subsidies in the Medicare and energy bills. They point to our huge deficit and massive future debt. But these people miss the point. We have nothing to fear from debt and deficit — it’s all owed to us! The government has borrowed money from us to give back to us in tax cuts and subsidies, and now it will be the joe-taxpayer who will owe us big for the next 30 years. The icing on the cake — we can now use the debt and deficit to justify slashing spending on social security, health care and all those other terrible New Deal programs that put people before corporations. George Bush has the most visionary economic policy we could draft up for him.

Investment: $200 million to Bush's 2000 election campaign
Return: $1.1 trillion in tax cuts
Percent Return: 550,000%

Medicare and Pharmaceuticals

The health of Americans is important to us. In fact, it's worth about $1.6 trillion a year! And now George is helping us make even more money from this booming business. He's protecting our profits by barring cheaper drugs from abroad, while his new Medicare bill guarantees that the government can't negotiate bulk drug prices from our companies

The American drug industry is a real cash cow for us, the most profitable one in the world. Over the 3 years of the Bush presidency, our drug companies averaged 17% profit. Nobody beats that, and it’s all thanks to George. But the best is yet to come. The President has passed a strong Medicare bill that prohibits the government from butting their noses in and negotiating drug prices with our drug companies. So, 61.1 percent of the Medicare dollars that will be spent by the government will be added to drug company profits. This means an estimated $139 billion in increased profits over eight years for the world’s most profitable industry. At $17 billion annually, this means about a 38 percent rise in drug maker profit, in addition to our 17% profit margin now. A nice return on our drug companies’ investment of only $44 million in the Republicans since Bush was elected. We were scared that importation of cheaper drugs from countries we don't yet control, like Canada and Australia, might undermine our profit, but the President passed laws banning this evil practice, and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (whose largest source of campaign money is drug companies) advocates forcing Canada to raise its own drug prices to protect us from competition. That’s smart!

Investment: $44 million in Drug Company donations to Republicans since 2000
Return: $139 billion in additional Drug Company profits over 8 years
Percent Return: 315,900%

{The ultimate plan is more insidious; it is to bankrupt Medicare, and cutting other programs. Already student loans have been cut $12.5 billion, and also part of the provision for federal funding of assisted living. The parties of big business only pay public programs lip service—jk}

Defense Contracting

Most Presidents keep our Defense Contractors happy, but George is special. He's increased the defense budget, turned over lucrative government services to our companies and topped it all by destroying Iraq with our most expensive bombs and then paying us to re-build it! So while America gets more wars, less money for social programs, families and the future, we get $250 billion

Our man Bush gave us a scare when he campaigned in 2000 with a promise to scrap outdated Cold War weapons programs. We stood to lose over $68 billion in lucrative (if useless) defense contracts. But that just turned out to be just campaign talk, and thankfully Bush has kept all our programs and increased the defense budget by $90 billion! We knew we had nothing to worry about since both George W and George Sr. have been employees of the Carlyle Group, a defense contractor that many of us are invested in. Bush then kindly looked the other way while we failed to pay $3 billion in taxes. Meanwhile, Bush has increased the privatization and outsourcing of the Department of Defense to a record $150 billion annually, so more contracts for us! And finally, we had a good war like we haven’t had since 1990. The attack on Iraq brought in over $60 billion in contracts which Bush ensured were reserved privately for us, without even the hassle of making it look like we were competing!

Investment: $23.5 million in Defense Contractors' donations since 2000 to Republicans
Return: Approximately $251 billion
Percent Return: 1,068,000%

Energy

George is an oil man, Cheney is an oil man. We're all oil men! From Kyoto to Iraq, George has ensured that whether it's global warming or global peace, our profits come first. He even let us write his new energy bill and give ourselves $30 billion of your money in new subsidies.

Of all the billionaires George has helped, oilmen are the most fortunate. Right from the start, VP Dick Cheney invited energy CEOs to the White House and required the National Security Council to work with them on foreign policy. (The ever-skeptical public wanted minutes of these meetings, but one of our companies paid for a trip for Cheney and the Supreme Court Chief Justice together, so we don't have to worry about them.) In the first case, we invaded Iraq and pledged the revenues from its future oil sales to American companies. Bush also pulled out of the Kyoto treaty on global warming, which would have cost us a bundle. Young George’s recent energy plan provided for over $30 billion in new subsidies to our oil and gas companies. Even when oil and gas prices are high, like now, we sell the story that our profits need augmenting with taxpayer money. The president’s so-called ‘alternative energy’ plans don’t scare us, they’re actually windfalls for us old energy people — like when he created a way for us to declare coal a new fuel by spraying starch on it, and avoid $1.3 billion in taxes!

Investment: $108 million from Oil Companies since 2000 to Republicans
Return: $30 billion
Percent Return: 27,778%

Workers' Overtime Coverage

Overtime pay may keep millions of families afloat, but it sure costs us a lot of money! That's why George has fought the whining public and the Congress to remove 8 million workers' right to overtime pay, potentially saving us $1.9billion a year, forever!

Paying our workers salaries is a necessary evil. But paying them overtime? It’s really too much. But a 1938 law — damn that New Deal! — means that 90 million of them have a right to time and a half pay. Worse, we have to shell out $2bn worth of litigation each year quibbling over entitlements when we try to take them away illegally. Not any more! Our man in the White House has seen to that. Earlier this year, Bush changed the law so that 8 million middle-income workers, including nurses, lost their right to overtime pay. He cleverly inserted a provision increasing the number of low income workers covered by the overtime law so he could claim he was fighting for the little guy. But just in case it might annoy us, his Department of Labor kindly included in their report some helpful “tips” to us employers on how to avoid paying these workers their extra money — our favorite: cut the newly eligible workers’ wages, then add the overtime to equal the original salary . Like we couldn’t have thought of that ourselves! Of course, the workers and their unions protested the changes, as did bi-partisan groups in both houses of Congress. But we lobbied hard for it. So our boy did what he always does — he ignored the public and bullied and bought off the Congress. He knows as well as we do that if — as one worker put it — “it means longer hours with less pay”, it must be a good thing for his friends the Billionaires. The whole deal stands to save us employers about $1.9 billion a year.

Investment: $6 million from Business Associations since 2000 to Republicans
Return: $1.9 billion per year forever
Percent Return: 31,667% per year

Media Consolidation

George knows the value of having media that'll make him look good, and we know the value of controlling what you think (and of making $billions doing it). Again, George has stood alone against a public outcry, a bi-partisan Congress and the foundations of America's democracy to ensure that our mega-media corporations can get even bigger.

Investment: $25.7 million from media corps to Republicans since 2000
Return: Control over what every American thinks and buys — priceless

Environment

Once, governments fought to protect your health and preserve the environment for your children. Maybe they just didn't appreciate how much money could be made? But George does. He's undone decades of terrible, anti-Billionaire policies and fought hard for our rights to make billions polluting the air, endangering health and wrecking the natural world

Time and again, our man George has made the Billionaires’ choices - corporate profits over public health.

Take the Clear Skies Initiative, submitted to Congress in February 2003. Ingeniously employing a name that sounds "environmental," the Clear Skies Initiative would actually eviscerate the Clean Air Act by allowing power plants to emit far greater quantities of sulfur, mercury and nitrogen pollution than they are currently able to. Sure, kids would get asthma, adults would have higher risks of lung cancer and women with elevated mercury levels would give birth to children with neurological impairments. However, the owners of these power plants — that’s us! — would come away with billions upon billions of dollars. We can almost taste the money pouring in already!

In the old days, the role of government was to stop polluters in order to protect the health of the people. Our president has the courage to stand up and fight for polluters’ rights. Under Bush’s tenure, the Environmental Protection Agency has dropped sixty-two environmental standards enacted by previous Administrations to protect the public health. As a result of the Administration’s refusal to enforce environmental protection laws against its wealthy campaign contributors (that’s you and me!), the EPA's two most senior enforcement officials resigned after decades of work. But Bush won’t stop at rollbacks. He even suppresses evidence that the public is being poisoned by its policies. For example, the Administration suppressed an EPA finding that mercury was poisoning millions of Americans — especially children. Such principled courage is rare in the modern White House.

Nowhere was President Bush’s devotion to corporate profits over public health more evident than in our dear friend Dick Cheney’s secret Energy Policy Task Force. The Vice President met with some of the nation’s biggest polluters and their lobbyists to construct an energy policy that would reward Republican campaign contributors in the oil, coal, electric-utility and nuclear industries. The result of these closed-door meetings? Policies that will hopefully open protected areas of the East and West coast, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and areas around Yellowstone Park to oil and gas drilling. Meanwhile, the Task Force resulted in the gutting of research into alternative energy sources and efficient energy use. Some members of Congress insisted the President reveal the names of the members of this Task Force. When the White House had the strong ethics to refuse, the non-partisan General Accounting Office took the unprecedented step of suing the Executive Branch to force them to release the names. But despite the pressure, Bush and Cheney held firm to their principles. Even when a United States District Judge ordered the Administration to release its Task Force records, the Administration censored materials that would point a finger at corporate lobbyists. They have implemented our agenda from start to finish, protecting our identities all the while. Now that’s loyalty

Iraq War

For years our "Bomb the Arabs and Steal Their Oil!" bumper sticker has gone unheeded. That is, until George came along. The Middle East has been a constant irritation to us Billionaires for decades. Finally we've gone in and taken control. WMD, human rights, whatever. We've got the oil and that means serious money. Dead US soldiers, dead Iraqis, enraged Muslim world, increased terrorist threats? As long as our profit margins are healthy, we'll make it through.

There’s been much debate about the Iraq war, whether there were WMDs, whether it was justified on human rights grounds or not. We think there’s no need to complicate the issue. The Iraq War makes sound financial sense. At 115 billion barrels, Iraq has the world's second largest proven oil reserves (after Saudi Arabia). At a current price of approximately $45 per barrel that's 4,140 billion dollars. America is the world's largest consumer of crude oil, using more than 7 billion barrels in 2003. We need Iraq's oil. Our SUVs, Hummers, and stretch limousines need Iraq's oil. Our factories in America and foreign (non-unionized) countries need Iraq's oil. Yes, the price in American lives is real. But 1000 American dead and 13,000 Iraqis is a small price to pay for years of profits and prosperity. These dead soldiers are noble patriots, dying for our way of life. True, the Weapons of Mass Destruction were never found, but the oil is still there, and it's ours (once George signs that permanent Force Deployment Agreement with our new Iraqi government).