I thought about taking lessons from the corrupt politicians on how to obtain wealth.
The Bush Family seems to know a lot about it. Take a look for yourself.
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you have to focus on" – GW Bush
"You have to look at the entire Bush Family in this context -- as if the family ran a corporation called ‘Frauds-R-Us,’
George Jr.’s specialty was insurance and security fraud.
Jeb’s specialty was oil and gas fraud.
Neil’s specialty was real estate fraud.
Prescott’s specialty was banking fraud.
And George Sr.’s specialty? All of the above." -- Lt. Cmdr. Al Martin, US Navy,(Ret)
"While opportunism isn’t new in U.S. politics, never did so many in one family extract so many dollars from taxpayers as when George Bush senior was president a decade ago" -- David E. Scheim, author of Contract on America.
"What you’ve got with Bush [George senior] is absolutely the largest number of siblings and children involved in what looks like a never-ending hustle." -- Republican pundit Kevin Philips
"Texas businessmen [are] not crooks, "they just have an over-developed sense of the extenuating circumstance."" -- Molly Ivins
Just too many jinks, links
Updated - 05/12/03: (Information Clearing House) I started this second part with the objective of extending the dossier on the Bush Gang, but I quickly realised that short of writing a (very long) book, I’d never be able to encapsulate all of it in the easy-to-digest form of an essay, hence the external pages, so that if you want to pursue a particular character or company, all you need do is click on a particular link. You'll find that many of the names and companies are cross-linked, pointing to the intricate network of associates that the Bush clan have built up over the years. No doubt if one were to do the same thing with Rockefeller, you'd end up with the same rats nest of associations (pun intended).
Gangster Capitalism
And in any case, the critical issue is not so much the individual goings-on of these ne’er do wells, but that they are typical of a system, which since its foundation (one built on slavery, genocide, continental land theft and gangster capitalism) has utterly corrupt institutions which it nevertheless claims make it the bastion of the ‘free world’! As the saying goes, they have ‘no shame’.
Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil
The other really important question to ask is how can one family which has so many skeletons in the family closet, get away with such dirty dealings and over such a long period of time without being called to task? It’s as if the mass media goes deaf, dumb and blind when the name Bush comes up. For no matter what your politics are, left, right or indifferent, a family which has its fingers in so many dirty dealings has surely got to get you thinking about exactly what kind of country it is you live in (if you’re an American) and what kind of world is it that’s dominated by a country with a media (not to mention a legal system) that’s quite content not to challenge its president or his lying, thiefing family and their tenticular network of associations which includes: the Mafia, the Chinese Communist Party, Japanese Triads, the Vatican, Central American drug smugglers and gun runners, international arms dealers, the Ayotollah Khomeini (RIP), Cuban-American terrorists, money laundering, illegal arms sales, countless conflicts of interests, nepotism, coverups, tax avoidance, SEC fiddles and banking scams? A veritable ‘school for scoundrels’.
The fact that this litany of evil is effectively left unscrutinised and unquestioned by the dominant media, or, on the few occasions when it is mentioned, it’s only ‘in passing’, reveals the cynical, opportunistic attitude toward not only the concept of access to information, but acting on it. The system also makes a complete mockery of the so-called moral approach used by the leaders of the ‘free world’ when they accuse others of the same behaviour. Is it any wonder that we have populations who have ‘dropped out’ of the political process. Where is the accountability? Where indeed?
It’s a shell game
In recent years the problem has been excerbated by the ‘gutting’ of the government through wholesale deregulation and privatisation, which has enabled those with the ‘right’ connections to gain access to vast gobs of money in the form of subsidies and lucrative contracts (eg Marvin Bush’s Ignite corporation, or the Kuwaiti Harken Oil deals, Choicepoint’s Homeland Security contracts and the software company it uses, Sybase Inc which has Bush family connections). The effect has been to turn various and sundry government agencies into hollow shells. Companies can then effectively write themselves blank cheques or simply ignore the toothless edicts issued by the regulators (eg the SEC over the Silverado S&L scandal).
Assault on Liberty
The assault on the rights of citizens, won at great cost and over generations of struggle, has since the 1970s, been steadily eroded to the point that we are now left with a façade of the original, a cardboard mockup that has all the appearances democracy, civil rights and so forth but virtually no substance. Our cynical leaders would have us believe that,
"Failure to vote, as Britain’s Chancellor remarked after the last UK election,
is the mark of the satisfied citizen."
Perry Anderson
Satisfied or cynical? Or perhaps fatalistic about a system which has systematically encouraged its citizens to disenfranchise themselves?
Ultimately of course, it exposes the real nature of the political class and who it really serves – the rich and powerful and their utter disdain for those without any real power. With ‘elections’ being reduced to no more than tokenised democracy (only about a quarter of the electorate actually bother to vote in US national elections and a fraction more in the UK), it’s no surprise that firstly, there is no genuine representation ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’, but just as importantly, the total lack of representation or accountability encourages an arrogance and bravado on the part of the power elite that they can get away with anything, because they we let them (and they do)!
The 4th Estate – Absentee Landlords
A comparable process is at work in the ‘4th Estate’ who have reduced journalism (when they bother to actually cover the real stories) to another hollow shell, where the act of merely reporting is now considered sufficient to fulfill their obligations as ‘watchdogs’ of the nation’s affairs. The thought of actually leading with a story, and pursuing it, day after day, until someone actually takes notice and says, ‘enough is enough’ is simply not permitted because the same corporations that own the media are also part and parcel of the same power elite that’s busy ripping off the nation and holding the world to ransom.
Par for the Course
Forget ‘Dynasty’, although maybe they got the idea for the programme from the Bush posse. Staggering, is all I can say about the Bush family saga. Yet actually it’s par for the course as they say and not at all exceptional in the annals of the US power elite. The history of US capitalism is made up of family dynasties of one kind or another, from the robber barons of the Du Ponts, Mellons, Morgans, Rockefellers, Carnegies and Kennedys, through to the newcomers like Enron, Worldcom, Halliburton, Bechtel, Harken, Carlyle and so forth. And, like the landed aristocracies of England, they marry into each other’s families, go to the same schools and universities, sit on each other’s corporate boards and invest in each other’s business dealings. Importantly, they watch each other’s backs and for obvious reasons.
The Actors
Below are the sections in alphabetical order, of some of the companies and individuals connected to the Bush family (or vice versa). Clicking on the bold link at the start of each section will take you to a page of additional links.
Arbusto Oil and the bin Laden Connection
Oh what a tangled Web we weave. Salem bin Laden, one of 57 children their father Mohammed sired with his 12 wives, and Bush were founders of the Arbusto Energy oil company in Texas (I assume not with the 12 wives as well).
He died in a plane crash -- like his father -- but not before the Arbusto Energy Oil Company, founded in 1978, had become hugely successful. Later, Spectrum 7 Corp bought out Arbusto (now called Bush Exploration Co). In 1986, with the company on the verge of bankruptcy, it was purchased by Harken, and even though Bush Exploration Co had debts of $3 million, Harken paid Bush $2 million for his stock.
See also the BCCI (Bank of Credit & Commerce) connection below, another murky international scandal involving drug money laundering etc which one of the original investors in Arbusto, James R. Bath, a Houston businessman and old friend of GWB was involved in.
"Time magazine described Bath in 1991 as "a deal broker whose alleged associations run from the CIA to a major shareholder and director of the Bank of Credit & Commerce." BCCI, as it was more commonly known, closed its doors in July 1991 amid charges of multibillion-dollar fraud and global news reports that the financial institution had been heavily involved in drug money laundering, arms brokering, covert intelligence work, bribery of government officials and—here's the kicker—aid to terrorists."
James Hatfield
John Ashcroft: Attorney General And Defender Of The Confederacy
Corporate Connections:
AT&T; Microsoft; Schering-Plough; Enterprise Rent-A-Car; Monsanto