Using rhetoric of compassion, a president who owes his career to unearned breaks is defining his presidency as the regime of no second chances. Not for individuals, nor for the planet, nor for anyone except the wealthy and well-connected. Think back to his bankruptcy bill, pushed through, on the eve of a recession, by credit card companies that gleefully send cards to your dog, cat, and 12-year-old, but don't want you to be able to make a fresh start if you lose your job or have a medical crisis. If you went bankrupt under the old system, you paid some costs, but at least you could get out from under. Now, thanks to these key Bush funders, if your luck runs bad, you're indentured for life.

Now on the edge of passing the final House-Senate conference, the bankruptcy bill sets a pattern-one that threatens to persist unless the Democrats act far more aggressively than they did before the Jeffords switch. Those with power have long believed that whatever damage they do to individual lives or communities, they themselves can skate through, exempt from costs. But the Bush administration is giving the wealthy more chances and subsidies than ever, and creating ever-harsher policies for the rest of us, left to scavenge in the ruins. If we mess up, we're left with only empty phrases. When Bush proposed cutting funding for abused children, after-school programs, low-income childcare, health care, and housing, he did so with kind and gentle words-in part to give an extra $53,000 per year to those one in a hundred Americans whose annual incomes average a million. If you grow up in poverty, however, you're now even more likely to stay there. Is the pace or design of your workplace leaving you crippled? Wave good-bye to ergonomics standards that took a decade to craft, but have now been gutted. Hunger-relief lobbyists worked for years to get Congress to oppose user fees in international aid programs, which prevented people without money from getting health care or going to school unless they paid the institutions that served them. Bush has now reversed the stand. The Clinton administration belatedly passed a rule making it more difficult for corporations that consistently violated laws to bid for federal contracts.