DUBYA GOES TO WASHINGTON

"I think Bush is going to fashion himself a 21st Century Franklin Roosevelt. This is a question of his legacy." -- Stephen Moore, Free Enterprise Fund

DUBYA GOES TO WASHINGTON

On the backlot of our nation's capital, where dreams of democracy are factory-farmed for ever-hungry audiences, this summer's blockbuster is in full production. Starring George Dubya Bush, an upright soul pines for simpler days when God-fearing Americans were unsullied by Big Government. At great self-sacrifice, and considerable expense, he gathers kinfolk and belongings and heads to The Beltway, where he battles -- and, ultimately, triumphs over -- the commonweal's most treacherous enemy: Social Security.

Along the yellow brick road, he meets and enlists selfless lobbyists, broad-minded think-tankers, under-appreciated CEOs and courageous business coalitions eager to help realize his utopian dream. No more will women, children and the elderly be held hostage by wicked Democrats. No more will injured and disabled workers be manipulated by evil New Dealers. In Dubya's free market world, all will be left to their own ingenious devices, free to sink or swim on their own accord, beholden to no other citizen, free to invest and consume to their heart's content. Every man a king; or, at least, an owner.

So the story goes.

If the corporate media are to be believed, the Bush administration's effort to "reform" social security is a straightforward attempt to confront a looming, if somewhat murky, fiscal "crisis." In the he-said/she-said rate journalism, any difference (or similarity) of opinion is simply that. All viewpoints are created equal although not given equal time. Ideology is window-dressing and, therefore, unworthy of serious examination. And what is actually a bitter and long-standing argument about what kind of society we should have -- and what we owe each other as citizens -- is reduced to a horse race on ESPN.

A NEW DEAL

Without doubt, Social Security has done more to help America's poor than any other federal program. It was set up with one goal in mind: making sure old people didn't die in the gutter. The program is based on a formula that pays lower-income workers a higher share of their contributed wages than those who earn more, essentially redistributing income downward. Government figures show old-age poverty in America has dropped from the 1930's rate of roughly 50 percent to about 10 percent today.

Getting that result wasn't easy.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in 1932, the country was mired in the Great Depression. Three years after the stock market crash of 1929, ten million Americans were unemployed; another eighteen million were on relief. Businesses were hemorrhaging red ink and the country was in crisis.

To stem a rising tide of dissatisfaction, Roosevelt's administration opted to "reorganize capitalism... to overcome the crisis and stabilize the system...to head off the alarming growth of spontaneous rebellion...(the) organization of tenants and the unemployed, movements of self-help, (and) general strikes in several cities," writes Howard Zinn.

Brushing aside the privatization-based policies of the Republican administration of Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt called for a "new deal" for working people being hustled in a card game fixed for the rich. His administration closed all banks to assess their fiscal soundness. With backing from a Democratically-controlled Congress, it loosened credit, insured deposits through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and passed the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial from investment banking.

Equally controversial was the administration's use of public funds to kick-start the economy. It created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civilian Works Administration, the Public Works Administration and the National Recovery Administration. The administration also took a direct role in developing the country's natural resources, establishing the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration.

But the Great Depression lingered. In California, novelist Upton Sinclair campaigned for governor on an "end poverty" platform. Meanwhile, Louisianan Huey Long took his ''share the wealth'' movement national. In an early version of talk-show radio, populist firebrand Rev. Charles Coughlin blasted bankers and other societal parasites to an audience of millions. Broadcasting from The Shrine of the Little Flower over the airwaves of WJR in Detroit, the founder of the National Union for Social turned the rage of the so-called Common Man into a spiritual crusade.

"We are determined," he railed in 1993, "once and for all to attack and overpower the enemy of financial slavery; to oppose and to defeat those who still support the ancient heresy of the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few...In this venture can we rely on you, on every sane American to take his place in the ranks of justice? The real fight is just beginning."

TAKE TWO

Shuffling the deck again, the Roosevelt administration forwarded the Social Security Act, which made available retirement benefits and unemployment insurance, and matched state funds for mothers and dependent children. (It excluded farmers, domestic workers, and old people; and offered no health insurance, prompting historian Paul Conkin to note: "The meager benefits of Social Security were insignificant in comparison to the building of security for large, established businesses." )

Nevertheless, to avoid creating another welfare-type programs vulnerable to future political attack, Roosevelt insisted the program be self-supporting, which resulted in the creation of a trust fund. To build a future reserve, the New Dealers doubled the initial level of the payroll tax to 2 percent, applied up to a cap that was initially set at $3,000 of income. This compromise added a regressive aspect to the plan, shielding the highest income brackets.

"The public, strongly supported the new program, but conservatives attacked it as a socialistic scourge," Roger Lowenstein of the New York Times writes. "Playing on the fact that each worker was to receive a government number, the Hearst papers published front-page illustrations of a man wearing a chain with a dog tag. Henry Ford said Social Security could cost Americans their basic freedoms, like the right to change jobs or to move from one town to another."

Opposition didn't stop there.

In the media scripts of the day, the Hyde Park patrician was denounced as a "traitor to his class." The economic elite -- the same group that Dubya now serves -- considered Roosevelt a threat to their interests and treated him accordingly. On the editorial pages, he was subjected to constant barrages and denounced as a would-be dictator. Foreshadowing media attacks on Clinton, FDR's reputation further suffered from posthumous revelations about an extramarital relationship.

However, "The issue that sparked the loudest protest was one that still burns today: the trust fund," Lowenstein notes. "Alfred Landon, the Republican who ran against Roosevelt in 1936, called (social security) 'a cruel hoax' on the American people. His platform, sounding uncannily that like that of Republicans today, stated, 'The so-called reserve fund . . . is no reserve at all, because the fund will contain nothing but the government's promise to pay.' "

When the New Deal came to an end, the country -- and capitalism -- remained intact. The rich still controlled the nation's wealth, as well as its laws, courts, police, newspapers, churches, colleges......the same system that had brought depression and crisis -- the system of waste, of inequality, of concern for profit over human need -- remained, Zinn notes.

More important was the long-term political impact.

Since the Civil War, Republicans had dominated presidential politics. Between 1856 and 1932, only two Democrats were elected to the White House, with neither gaining a majority of the popular vote. The New Deal weakened previously Republican blocs of midwestern farmers and African Americans, resulting in a new and powerful Democratic coalition. In 1936, Democrats became the nation's majority party and remained so for decades.

In his 1936 campaign against Kansas governor Landon, Roosevelt blasted Republicans as "economic royalists" and "reactionaries." Ultimately, however, it was WWII rather than his policies that pulled the country out of its economic nosedive. Still, this only son of Mayflower descendants became known as the 20th-century president most connected to America's poor and underprivileged.

"I should like it to be said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match," Roosevelt said. "I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master."

TRUST FUND BABY

As previously mentioned, the social security trust fund was created not for budgetary reasons but political ones. For decades, the fund was left alone. In 1983, supply-side economics and swelling unemployment pushed the system into a modest deficit (it was taking about a nickel less than each dollar spent). Declaring doom's pending arrival -- in about 31 years -- current Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan led a commission that proposed a series of benefit cuts and tax increases later embraced by President Ronald Reagan and Congress.

Not everyone agreed. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York called Greenspan's scare a phantom. The proposed increase, Moynihan said, just masked the drop in tax revenues stemming from Reagan's tax giveaways. Characterizing the plan as "thievery," he said the rich were benefiting from stolen goods, essentially keeping income tax cuts while the people below them paid more.

Ultimately, Greenspan's plan generated more money than was needed to pay benefits and the trust fund began to swell, first by tens and then hundreds of billions of dollars a year. This allowed Mr. Reagan and the first President Bush to present annual budgets showing much lower deficits.

"What the government actually did with the excess Social Security taxes was use them to allow the rich to enjoy big tax cuts. It used the excess Social Security tax to make up for part of the taxes from which the rich were excused in 1981. If effect, the government took dollars from Joe Lunchpail so the rich could stuff even more into their silk pockets," writes David Cay Johnston.

"That is, the money was used in a socialist scheme to redistribute income. Only instead of taking from those with big incomes to dole out money to the poor, this money was used to redistribute income up."

Because social security is a pay-as-you-go system, current workers contribute payroll taxes to provide benefits for the retired, the disabled and their families. Program administrators estimate payroll taxes will start falling short in 2018. By 2042 -- with the trust fund exhausted -- the only money left to pay benefits will come from annual payroll taxes, about enough to pay 75 percent of scheduled benefits.

THE BIG FIX

Off-stage, Dubya's war in Iraq and tax cuts for the rich have plunged the federal budget back into an ocean of red. Shouting the system is "broke," he wants to let workers divert one-third (up to 4 percent) of their payroll tax deductions from the trust fund into 401(k)-type accounts called Personal Investment Accounts (PIAs).

Touting an "ownership society," Dubya claims he wants workers to have their own piece of Wall Street. What he doesn't say is that the stock market remains the privilege of an elite group with nearly 90% of all shares held by the wealthiest 10% of America's households.

Worse still, his plan, if enacted, would deplete the trust fund even faster. At the same time, these PIAs would be managed by banks, Wall Street brokers, insurance companies, mutual funds. These financial institutions would levy administrative fees and other surcharges if participants switched from one fund to another, left or re-entered the workforce, or arranged for annuities at retirement.

At the same time, these financial institutions would make huge profits from the interest they would charge for financing the federal government's additional borrowing of $2 trillion in "transition costs." (Dubya's administration plans to offer Treasury Bonds at above normal interest rates.) And more profits will be had from reinvesting the several trillion dollars worth of PIAs.

A REGULAR GUY

Within the myth-making factory that is our political process, Dubya has been re-costumed from a silver spoon baby into a hard-scrabble, up-by-his bootstraps, bible-totin' oil man. With regularly scheduled leg-ups from media squires, his family has "elected two presidents in close succession...gained control of two of the four biggest states and developed their extended family into an entourage akin to the lesser royals who deputized for Britain's House of Windsor," writes Kevin Philips.

Hollywood production's aside, however, Dubya's inheritance is unmistakable. "Dynasties," Philips notes, "tend to show continuities of policy and interest-group bias -- in the case of the Bushes, favoritism toward the energy sector, defense industries, the Pentagon, and the CIA, as well as insistence on tax breaks for the investor class and upper-income groups." Just as he wanted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's head because he "tried to kill my daddy," Dubya has long been gunning for Social Security.

While a prep school senior at Andover, he got a copy of Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign manifesto, "Conscience of a Conservative." Goldwater -- who 40 years ago was considered a little too edgy by middle-of-the-road Republicans -- claimed the program "it is not actuarially sound" and said he wanted "to make Social Security solvent, to improve it."

In 1978, while running for a West Texas congressional seat -- using money from raised from Daddy's business buddies and Mommy's Christmas card list -- Dubya told an audience at the Midland Country Club social security "will be bust in 10 years unless there are some changes." Ideally, he said, people should be "given the chance to invest the money the way they feel."

Two decades later, as he prepared in 1997 to run for President, then-Texas governor Dubya consulted with Jose Pi?era (architect of Chile's ill-fated conversion to private-market retirement under a military dictatorship) and Ed Crane (head of the Cato Institute and a determined crusader for toppling Social Security). At the time, he said: "I do believe that privatizing Social Security is the most important issue facing the nation."

Another right-winger puts it more bluntly.

"Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state," said Stephen Moore, president of the Washington-based Free Enterprise Fund, which backs privatization. "If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state."

STICKING TO THE SCRIPT

But that stuff isn't in the script.

In the Age of Dubya, the name of the game is spin. Think tanks, supposed experts, public relations flaks, editorialists/propagandists and network talking heads are all enlisted in an unrelenting campaign of disinformation.

"Back in 1981, the symbolism of a television show like Dynasty might have been acceptable to the Regans, but two decades later, Republican officials had a warmer kind of screen image in mind for the Bushes. 'When you're talking about Clinton fatigue, part of it is that we loved Ozzie and Harriet,' explained Ron Kaufman, George H. W. Bush's former political director. 'We really did. People want Little House on the Prairie to be real, and the Bushes represent that.' "

In a recent New York Times story, reporters David Barstow and Robin Stein wrote: "Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies...have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years."

"Many" segments, they continued, "were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgment of the government's role in their production...In essence, (these) video news releases seek to exploit a growing vulnerability of television news: Even as news staffs at the major networks are shrinking, many local stations are expanding their hours of news coverage without adding reporters."

Unfortunately, this kind of propaganda seems a lot more reliable than having Dubya explain his social security plan himself. In a February public appearance in Tampa, he said: "Because the...all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those...changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be...or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled."

So much the better, then that faux reporters like Karen Ryan, Armstrong Williams and Jeff "Gannon" Guckert shill for Hack-in-Chief Karl Rove, whom GOP apparatchiks gleefully describe as running the social security scam like any other political campaign. The typical Rove (formerly senior presidential adviser and now deputy chief of staff overseeing domestic and international policy) campaign targets key constituencies; marshals the Republican Party apparatus; enlists allies among Democrats; encourages well-heeled outside supporters to mount attacks on the opposition.

"I don't think there is any question that Karl Rove is masterminding the whole Social Security strategy," Stephen Moore said. "There are regular meetings the White House has with all the groups to make sure everyone is singing from the same hymnal."

"The White House feels it can't afford to lose on this," he said.

As they did during the last presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee geared up a research operations center and an online petition drive. (The committee manages a database of 1.4 million volunteers.) "We're setting up an operation that is employing a campaign- type infrastructure, campaign-style tactics and really bringing election-year intensity to the debate,'" said Brian Jones, RNC communications director.

In January, the Washington Post reported Dubya's buddies were launching a market-research project to figure out how to pitch privatization "in the most comprehensible and appealing way" while Republican marketing and public-relations gurus were building consulting teams to promote it.

"The campaign will use Bush's campaign-honed techniques of mass repetition, never deviating from the script and using the politics of fear to build support -- contending that a Social Security financial crisis is imminent when even Republican figures show it is decades away," the Post said.

The key is to stay "on message."

To make Republicans just that, Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., Rep. Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio, came up with a 108-page social security playbook outlining political benefits and communications strategies. Among the main points -- 1) Suggest That GOP Lawmakers Create a Sense of Panic, 2) Insist This Won't Hurt Their Chances of Re-Election, 3) Tell Them to Sell the Plan With Idealism, 4) Suggest That This is a Possible Huge Conservative Victory.

Talking points, meanwhile, include directions to use "simple language" and "small numbers;" say "personalization" not "privatization;" emphasize "building wealth" as opposed conserving "nest egg(s);" acknowledge concerns but don't get trapped by them; and never, ever admit "social security lifts seniors out of poverty."

The sales strategy also instructs Republicans to write constituent letters saying, "If social security disappears, 15 million seniors will find themselves living on the streets. No one wants that to happen. That is why I support moving only a portion of current payroll tax into personal accounts, while the rest continues to support the guaranteed floor of protection."

MOVIE NIGHT

Instead of getting meaningful information about who stands to gain from social security "reform" -- i.e., a scheme to redistribute money from the majority of people who work to the minority of people who work for and own banks and brokerage firms -- we get a remake of Frank Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" in which Dubya fights for us little people. (In the 1939 classic, Jimmy Stewart plays a boy scout leader and local hero. When a senator from an unnamed middle America state dies, Stewart gets appointed by a corrupt governor. He goes to Washington where he learns the harsh realities of politics. The David-and-Goliath plot was one of the first movie portrayals of government as corrupt.)

An example of the "typical American" Dubya's trying to help is Tad DeHaven. On December 9th, the CBS Evening news profiled DeHaven in a report on social security. He was characterized as a "poster child for Social Security reform: 28 years old, a college graduate, in the work force for six years, getting married next May, expected to retire in 2042. That's the year Social Security goes broke."

CBS doled out candy about DeHaven's personal life but never said he worked for the National Taxpayers Union, a conservative lobbying group dedicated to Social Security privatization. Nor did it report he has also worked at the allied Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation. Still, the network noted DeHaven "is fully on board the plan to establish private accounts for Social Security" and "argues doing nothing is not an option."

Meanwhile, on January 11th, ABC's Good Morning America profiled Bill and Vicki Wilson, a two-income couple with two kids and "retirement 20 years off. The show enlisted "expert" Michael Tanner (of the Cato Institute) to analyze their situation. Tanner said under the current system, Bill should receive approximately $2,250 and Vicki $2,200 per month-- but that there's a "catch."

Not having to bother with an opposing viewpoint, he wrongly claimed that if the Wilsons turned over some money to private investment accounts it "would be enough to bring you back up above what you otherwise would get" after proposed benefit cuts. But the numbers he gave showed them worse off after privatization. With benefit cuts and "a small investment in a private account and a modest return," their total Social Security benefits under the privatization plan were estimated to be about $300 less per year than the income that they would get if the system were unchanged.

MEDIA LOBBY

Dumping social security is big business. There'll be plenty of money to go around. It just doesn't make sense for corporate media to rock a boat holding one big happy family. In fact, many of the business groups backing "privatization" share lobbyists with the same media companies that are supposed to provide the information necessary to an engaged, responsible citizenry.

In 2000, the parent companies of the Big Five television and cable broadcasters (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox) dole out nearly $27 million on lobbying firms. Meanwhile, between 1998 and 2003, "the lobbying expenditures by the broadcast industry jumped 74 percent while the Federal Communications Commission considered further relaxation of monopoly ownership regulations

More specific examples include Walt Disney (ABC) and General Electric (NBC, MSNBC) which share the lobbying firm Verner, Liipfert et. al, with Aetna Inc., the Heritage Foundation, the New York Stock Exchange, PhRMA, General Motors, Philip Morris, Citigroup, and weapons makers Raytheon, Harris Corp. and the Carlyle Group (which employs Dubya's Daddy). The News Corporation (Fox News Channel) and GE shared lobbyists with Enron a year before it imploded, as well as with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a major player behind the privatization plan.

With billions of dollars up for grabs, corporate America is pulling out all the stops. Republicans and their business allies plan to spend anywhere from $50 million to $200 million pitching privatization. Supporters include representatives from the conservative 60 Plss Association, America?s Community Bankers, the National Retail Federation, the Mortgage Bankers Association and the Business Roundtable.

The Coalition for the Modernization and Protection of America's Social Security -- which counts the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the corporate-funded USANext as members -- has launched a $20 million "Generations Together" outreach effort. The counterfeit grass-roots campaign hopes to recruit 100,000 volunteers to pack town hall meetings and rallies, and make phone calls and write letters to Congress.

Meanwhile, Progress For America, a group of Dubya backers like A. Jerrold Perenchio, chief executive of Los Angeles-based Univision Communications Inc., is airing commercials using images of FDR saying: "It took courage to create Social Security; it'll take courage and leadership to protect it."

FADE TO BLACK

In the climactic scene of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," Jimmy Stewart exercises his (pre-Patriot Act) First Amendment right to speak his piece. Standing before a pre-dominantly cynical audience of fat cat legislators, Stewart filibusters -- another quaint vestige of democracy -- for 23 hours to stave off trumped up corruption charges and keep himself from being tossed out of the Senate.

As he does so, a radio commentator observes:

"Half of official Washington is here to see democracy's finest show, the filibuster, the right to talk your head off, the American privilege of free speech in its most dramatic form. The least man in that chamber, once he gets and holds that floor by the rules, can hold it and talk as long as he can stand on his feet providing always, first, that he does not sit down, second, that he does not leave the chamber or stop talking. The galleries are packed. In the diplomatic gallery are the envoys of two dictator powers. They have come here to see what they can't see at home. DEMOCRACY IN ACTION."

Later, he stalls for time by reading portions of the Declaration of Independence, then trots out some down-on-the-farm insights on American ideals:

"Now, you're not gonna have a country that can make these kind of rules work, if you haven't got men that have learned to tell human rights from a punch in the nose... I wouldn't give you two cents for all your fancy rules if, behind them, they didn't have a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness and a - a little lookin' out for the other fella, too...That's pretty important, all that. It's just the blood and bone and sinew of this democracy that some great men handed down to the human race, that's all."

Railing against "jungle law" and trumpeting "human liberties," an exhausted Stewart winds up his speech saying, "You think I'm licked. You all think I'm licked. Well, I'm not licked, and I'm gonna stay right here and fight for this lost cause even if this room gets filled with lies like these, and the Taylors and all their armies come marching into this place. Somebody'll listen to me. Some... "

Stewart staggers, faints and collapses on the floor, dumping over a basket of telegrams. The female love interest screams from the gallery. The tragically corrupt senior Senator from Stewart's unnamed state rushes from the floor toward a cloakroom. Shots ring out. He struggles with lawmakers who prevent him from killing himself.

In true Hollywood fashion, he screams in a public confession: "I'm not fit to be a Senator. I'm not fit to live. Expel me! Expel me! Not him." Returning to the Senate floor, he proclaims, "Every word that boy said is the truth! Every word about Taylor and me and graft and the rotten political corruption of our state. Every word of it is true. I'm not fit for office! I'm not fit for any place of honor or trust. Expel me!"

Unlike Stewart, Dubya's "ownership" America is strictly dog-eat-dog.

"I love the idea of people being able to own something," he says. "People from all walks of life, all income levels are willing to take risks to start their own company. ... And I like the idea of people being able to say, I'm in charge of my own health care ... I particularly like the idea of a Social Security system that recognizes the importance and value of ownership."

So it is written, the financially fortunate -- the five percent of the empire clutching 60 percent of its wealth -- hold no civic obligations to the rest of us. With the "law" on their side, they can rape and pillage to their hearts' content, free to roam in tricked-out Humvees in search of fresh consumables. In this global context, social justice is the cost of doing business, ownership "a populism born in the Hobbesian belief that we all struggle alone in a world where life is nasty, brutish and short."

Verily, the words of the prophets Smith, Friedman and Greenspan have been made flesh. Even the lowest among us is merely a capitalist unborn, a sacred fetus of the Free Market awaiting re-birth amidst not 73 virgins but a bottomless trust fund and unlimited credit. We are God's little entrepreneurs, celebrated Masters of the Universe, sanctified and infallible, spreading goodness and democracy through merger, acquisition and the occasional "police action."

If there is anyone among us who knows why we may not be joined together in this holy fantasy, let him not speak but be scorned as "liberal," "traitor," "perverted" and "God-hating." Let us pray the evil-doers find Christ's love -- under the owner's manual and a 9 mm Glock -- in the glove compartment of a brand new Cadillac Escalade. And forgive them the sin of considering their brother's future in poverty's gutter.

###

SOURCES

"A People's History of the United States," Howard Zinn
"The Populist Persuasion," Michael Kazin
ibid Zinn
"A Question of Numbers," Roger Lowenstein, New York Times, January 16, 2005
"Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich And Cheat Everybody Else," David Cay Johnston
ibid
"American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," Kevin Phillips
"Neutering Social Security," Jim Hightower...
ibid Philips
The Complete Bushisms, http://slate.com/id/76886/
"CBS, CNN Mislead on Social Security," Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, December 13, 2004
"ABC Muddles the Social Security Debate," F.A.I.R., January 14, 2005
"The Media Lobby," Alexander Lynch, March 11, 2005
"Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," http://www.filmsite.org/mrsm.html
ibid
George Bush, on his "Ownership Society" agenda, Dec. 16, 2004, from "Corporate Americans," by Joshua Holland, AlterNet, posted January 18, 2005
ibid