Charles Shaw: Critical Analysis - The Bush Empire

"Almost everybody knows that George W. is the son of the 41st President. But fewer know that the family has wielded power in corporate boardrooms and capital corridors for a century and a half. On his mom's side, he's related to Franklin Pierce, the 14th President (1853-57). His dad's paternal grandfather, Samuel P. Bush, was an Ohio steel executive and the first president of the National Association of Manufacturers. Samuel's son, Prescott, became a Connecticut senator. Prescott's wife, Dorothy, was the daughter of George Herbert Walker, a co-founder of Brown Brothers Harriman, the oldest and largest private investment house on Wall Street. The Walker family helped finance the construction of Madison Square Garden and the Belmont Park racetrack--and later owned a big chunk of the New York Mets"
--Business Week, Nov 15, 1999

The previous quote embodies the public face of the Bush family, one of the richest and most influential American political dynasties in all our history. But it is almost shocking how little people actually know about the Bush family, particularly the history of the Bush men. I thought we might look beneath the veneer at the true face of America's political dynasty.

I am going to open with a story that is guaranteed to blow your hair back. This is a story that has been impossible to confirm in the mainstream press. Of course, this is part of the whole story, and why curiously the story keeps surfacing and disappearing all over the Internet. At the very least, this story is referred to enough to qualify as a modern legend. This is the extraordinary story of a dinner date that was scheduled to happen on March 31st 1981, the day of the strange assassination attempt on the life of former President Ronald Reagan. What should have been the biggest story of the 1980's seems to have been wiped clean from history, systematically prevented from ever again being mentioned by corporate media.

Held at the home of Neil Bush, the son of George Herbert Walker Bush, who himself was the very ambitious former CIA director and current Vice President, the guest of honor at the dinner party (which was quickly cancelled after news of the failed attempt on the life of the President), was Scott Hinckley, the brother of John Hinckley, the man who just that afternoon shot President Ronald Reagan, coming one half-inch from killing him.

A half-inch from putting George H.W. Bush, into the White House.

The Bush team's response to this chilling revelation on the planned dinner date was to barricade themselves behind a wall of the biggest PR Firms in the nation and issue the following statement "This horrible coincidence has been devastating to the Bush Family. Our condolences go out to all involved. And we hope to get the matter behind us as soon as possible." (sic)

As the story goes, the Bush Team decided to pawn it off as, of all things, "bad coincidence." In the days that followed, Washington whitewashed the story, backroom deals were struck, the spin doctors went into action, and an army of PR agents descended onto Washington to wipe clean from history this awful blemish, which might be "misinterpreted" should it ever get out.

Misinterpreted? Yes, because since 1970 both George Bush Sr. and John Hinckley Sr. were friends and fellow oil industrialists in Texas and Colorado, and Hinckley had given substantial sums of money to the failed 1980 Bush Presidential campaign. In 1978 Neil Bush lived in Lubbock, Texas while managing his brother George Jr's (our President) failed campaign for Congress. John Hinckley Jr. lived in Lubbock that year as well.

Coincidence? Apparently so. We are also supposed to believe that John Hinckley, Jr. was mentally disturbed, and, as the Bush story went, shot Reagan to please actress Jodie Foster, and his Uncle George had absolutely nothing to do with the entire incident, even indirectly and unwittingly.

Allegedly, the only mention of it to appear on national television was a brief comment by NBC's John Chancellor who was absolutely floored by the revelation and mentioned it during his newscast against the demands of NBC management. NBC quickly jumped in and censored it. The revelation was never mentioned again in any mainstream media outlet.

Having no chance to make it into the history books, the story resurfaced with the advent of the Internet. But something is happening here as well. The story is continually being expunged from the net, even as you read this. In 1999 one could find nearly a thousand independent articles pertaining to this story, then all of the sudden (strangely coinciding with the launch of the Bush 2000 Presidential campaign), one by one the pages and sites relating to the story started to disappear. Today there are but paltry few who are keeping the story alive. Since I first looked into this two years ago, three sources with virtually identical claims have vanished.

Is there a chill running down your spine yet? If there isn't, there should be. In a normally functioning society with a true free press, this many coincidences would sound a nuclear alert. Apparently, Congressman Larry MacDonald spoke out against it, but his plane crashed. But it wasn't just any plane it was the infamous Korean Air Lines 007, the flight that was shot down by Soviet fighters as it unexplainably veered into Soviet airspace. Many suspect it was an insider deal. Unless the Soviet MIG pilots were blind, it would have been awful hard to mistake a commercial jumbo jet airliner with a twenty-foot long corporate logo, broadcasting on a commercial frequency, for an American spy plane on a covert mission in broad daylight. Allegedly, this deal was for certain unfettered Soviet meddling in places like Afghanistan in the following years. Again, no way to prove it, but we should ask ourselves why political plane crashes have come to be known, euphemistically, as the "Wellstone Special"? If one were to count the number of fatal plane crashes that befell people connected to our four most recent Presidents, you start to toy with another unfathomable coincidence.

You may wonder how a real-life occurrence could be wiped clean from history, or how all these claims about the Bush family are never mentioned in the mainstream media. The answer was painfully simple. Through Executive Dominion over public records, Presidents and Governors can expunge any record they see fit. And as far as the government and the corporate media is concerned, if there is no public record of an event, it did not exist.

The claim against the Bush men, specifically GHW, GW, and Jeb, is that they carefully and systematically expunged records starting with the 2000 Presidential Election and dating back to the days of great-grandfather Samuel Prescott Bush, in effect making the Bushes public record look cleaner than the Brady Bunch. But no one gets to where these people have being honest and virtuous. These stories have been widely reported, but I would like to cite Michael Zezima's Saving Private Power: The Hidden History of the Good War (Soft Skull Press) and George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin, as excellent sources of this forgotten history.

Being duly diligent, the only remaining question is motive? If the assumption-and it's a doozy-is that somehow then Vice President GHW Bush was involved in the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, we are forced to ask what would he have to gain, did he have the wherewithal, and why would he need to resort to assassination? Well, we know he had the money, power, and intelligence. We know that since he became President in 1988 the world has changed in a very dramatic fashion, mostly in a way that has benefited him (i.e. the "New World Order"). Yet we know he lost the 1980 Presidential primaries and the nomination to Reagan by overwhelming numbers, that Reagan was incredibly popular and had an appeal Bush would never have, and that Bush learned he was not very popular, particularly in the wake of former President Carter's housecleaning at the CIA which left 1000 of Bush's operatives out of work (it's ok, most of them now work for the Carlyle Group).

We have to acknowledge that by asking these questions, this story becomes immediately vaulted alongside the Kennedy Assassination into the pantheon of the "Great American Conspiracy Theory." But conspiracies can be revealed and "demystified" using simple history and common sense. Eventually you come to realize even the "conspiracy theory" itself is part of the public relations apparatus, meant to discredit those who poke too deeply as loonies and crackpots. The trick is having the right history. So, let's get up to speed on the First Family, and then see what conclusions we can draw.

SAMUEL PRESCOTT BUSH (1863-1948)

The Grand Patriarch of the Bush clan founded the Buckeye Steel Castings Company in 1894 as The Buckeye Malleable Iron & Coupler Company. They manufactured steel car couplers for trains, truck bodies, bolsters, truck fenders, yokes, etc. Samuel, as did all the other Industrialists of the time, grew very wealthy and influential.

The U.S entered World War I in 1917. In the spring of 1918, Samuel P. Bush, became chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms and Ammunition Section of the War Industries Board, taking national responsibility for government assistance to his own Remington Arms Company and other weapon makers. Through these weapons manufacturers, Samuel Bush made and sold arms to 75% of the WWI combatants on both sides.

Tarpley and Chaitkin say:

"With the war mobilization conducted under the supervision of the War Industries Board, U.S. consumers and taxpayers showered unprecedented fortunes on war producers and certain holders of raw materials and patents. Hearings in 1934 by the committee of U.S. Senator Gerald Nye attacked the "Merchants of Death", war profiteers such as Remington Arms and the British Vickers company, whose salesmen had manipulated many nations into wars, and then supplied all sides with the weapons to fight them. Most of the records and correspondence of Samuel Bush's arms- related section of the government have been burned, "to save space" in the National Archives. This matter of destroyed or misplaced records should be of concern to citizens of a constitutional republic. Unfortunately, it is a rather constant impediment with regard to researching George Bush's background: He is certainly the most "covert" American chief executive."

Samuel Bush was labeled a "Merchant of Death" in the years following the Great War as investigations began into the instigators of the war and of the new emerging world militarism. The German Army under the Kaiser was the largest and most well armed in the world in 1914, and they were largely armed by Samuel Bush. After WWI, Germany was stripped of their arms, but Samuel Bush was allowed to keep his millions, and his arms business was allowed to grow and prosper. In 1944 he was awarded a huge government contract to make armor casings for WWII. He died shortly after the war ended in 1948, within months of the passage of the National Security Act.

PRESCOTT BUSH

Prescott S. Bush was born on 15 May 1895 to Samuel Prescott Bush and Flora Sheldon Bush and was raised in Columbus, Ohio. He received a B.A. from Yale University in 1917 and completed his Army career in 1919. Bush joined the firm of Brown Brothers and Company became a partner in 1930. In 1921 he married Dorothy Walker. The couple had five children, one of whom, George Herbert Walker Bush, would become the forty-first President of the United States. During his career, Prescott Bush served as a US Senator from Connecticut, and as director of several nationally known corporations, including the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the Wanadium Corporation of America, and Prudential Insurance.

Prescott also carried on the time honored Bush family tradition of German double-dealing by financing the Nazi industrialists on the NYSE. He was ordered by Congress to cease and desist on October 20, 1942. Under the "Trading With the Enemy Act" the US, seized the shares of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC). The UBC was established to send American money to Germany to finance the reorganization of its industry under the Nazis. Prescott Bush was a Director and shareholder. The largest shareholder was E. Roland Harriman of Brown Brothers Harriman, the oldest and largest private investment house on Wall Street of which Prescott Bush was the managing partner. Prescott's father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, was a co-founder of Brown Brothers Harriman.

If you didn't already know, you should probably understand that during the 1930s, some very prominent Americans like Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, and Joseph Kennedy were big fans of Hitler, and there was much concern in global power centers about rebuilding the highly efficient German industrial economy following WWI. Germany lay mired in catastrophic inflation, but the German "work ethic", as embodied by the hyperproductive Nazis, was very appealing to the American Industrial Titans. Michael Zezima says "One Third Reich supporter who never required a disclaimer was Henry Ford, the autocratic magnate who despised unions, tyrannized workers, and fired any employee caught driving a competitor's model. Ford, an outspoken anti-Semite, believed that Jews corrupted gentiles with 'syphilis, Hollywood, gambling, and jazz'. In 1918 he bought and ran a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, that became an anti-Jewish forum." Ford built plants in Cologne Germany that implemented Aryan-only hiring practices, and which miraculously survived Allied bombing raids. Ford also reportedly gave Hitler $30,000 as a present for Hitler's niece.

UBC's leading German partner was the notorious Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, who wrote a book admitting much of this called "I Paid Hitler." Among the companies financed was the Silesian-American Corporation, which was also managed by Prescott Bush. The company was vital in supplying coal to the Nazi war industry (you'll see the significance in a second). It too was seized as a Nazi-front on November 17, 1942. The largest company Bush's UBC helped finance was the German Steel Trust, responsible for between one-third and one-half of Nazi iron and explosives.

It gets worse. There is another buried story about a deal between William Stamps Farish, Prescott Bush, the Standard Oil Co (Rockefeller Family), and the I.G. Farben Company, a German chemical cartel that manufactured Zyklon-B, the poison gas used in the Nazi death chambers. This deal, it is alleged, financed and built the Auschwitz Labor Camp, which opened on June 14, 1940 to produce artificial rubber and gasoline from coal. The Hitler government supplied political opponents and Jews as the "labor force". Apparently, after pleading "no contest" to charges of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis, William Stamps Farish was fined $5,000. Similar fines were levied against the Standard Oil Company. This of course did not interfere with the millions of dollars that Farish had acquired as Chairman, President, and major stockholder of the Standard Oil Company. Prescott Bush pocketed a hefty sum as well. And all the US government sought in exchange for spinning the story to focus exclusively on the Jewish Holocaust (which had a whole host of benefits) was the use of certain petroleum patents that this company had given to the Nazis, the so-called "Auschwitz patents".

GEORGE HERBER WALKER BUSH

George Herbert Walker Bush has lived a life straddling the three most powerful entities on the planet, the Banking, Petrochemical, and Arms/Intelligence industries. His family branched out from banking to the oil business during the Texas boom, and GHW Bush decided to parlay his considerable wealth and influence into a series of political jobs en route to the eventual Presidency.

He served two terms as a Representative to Congress from Texas. Twice he ran unsuccessfully for the Senate. Then he was appointed to a series of high-level positions: Ambassador to the United Nations, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Chief of the U. S. Liaison Office in the People's Republic of China, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It was as head of the CIA during the Cold War that he is rumored to have done his most heinous acts, and why most of these acts have been downplayed or disregarded. It seems that the American government has no culpability and can do no wrong so long as they are fighting Fascists, Communists, or Terrorists. The public has accepted this and, worse, come to encourage it under these false pretenses. More on that later, but for now, we can only begin to imagine what GHW Bush did and excused away in the name of "National Security".

We assume Poppy Bush expunged his own CIA narcotrafficking operations with Panamanian Dictator Manuel Noriega [2][3][4], dealings in the Iran-Contra scandal, his extended and close relationship with the Saudi Royals and the Bin-Laden family, which led to his arming the Mujahadeen against the Soviets. We don't know the truth about his complicity with son Neil in the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal, and his own arms deals through the Carlyle Group, what Poppy Bush does now in his "retirement". Shadowy "Public Relations" heavyweights like the Carlyle Group, Bechtel Group, and Wackenhut invest in eventualities that lead to the use of force to control populations. All are government security contractors with deep ties to both the military and the intelligence community. Wackenhut's specialty is incarceration, and they run America's prison systems. They also have their own very lethal private army - the same goes for the Bechtel Group, run by former US Secretary of State George Shultz.

The Carlyle Group [2] [3 - most recent] is basically a collection of the heaviest of heavyweight political insiders who buy failing military contractors at bargain basement prices. The reason why they buy the failing discounted companies is because the Defense Department appropriations guidelines requires that companies be in existence for a certain time before being allowed to enter government contracts. Then, with all the requirements and appearances in place (very much like a mob "front") they are free to do insider deals with their buddies in government. That's the Carlyle Group in a nutshell.

Who's on the board of the Carlyle Group? George Bush Sr., Bush's former Secretary of State James Baker, Former Conservative British Prime Minister John Major, and Frank Carlucci, former Defense Secretary and Princeton University wrestling teammate of current Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The most widely reported case of the Carlyle group's malfeasance was the Crusader Tank debacle, a lemon of a tank that Carlyle tried to ram down the throats of the military to the tune of some $14 billion dollars. The politicos fought hard for this useless tank and only sacrificed the program when it became clear that had they continued pushing for a useless weapons system, it would have become the poster child of defense appropriations corruption and a lightning rod for critics. Remember the $400 hammer and the $10,000 toilet seat? Same people.

The Carlyle Group and those like them, privately held corporations, have a disproportionate level of influence in American government affairs, and are in fact not aiding but undermining the security of the United States of America by perpetuating a militaristic world culture in order to continue to expand their fortunes and spheres of influence. As mentioned before, it took acts of Congress to get Samuel Bush and Prescott Bush to halt their undermining of American security for profit. Does it look like the George's are up to granddad's old tricks? If they aren't, again, this is surely another amazing coincidence.

GW. BUSH

The dossier on the current Bush president looks even worse. Taken as a whole, about the only thing of significance GW Bush did before being selected for the Presidency was to cover up his many stupendous screw-ups. He ran for Congress and lost. He produced a Hollywood B movie that flopped. He bought an oil company, but couldn't find any oil in Texas, and the company, Harken Energy, financed in part by the Bin Laden family, went bankrupt shortly after he sold off all his stock. He bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a deal that took land using taxpayer money, but failed to turn much of a profit or bring the team to success. His biggest move was to trade Sammy Sosa to the Chicago White Sox (the Sox are responsible for trading a pre-steroid Sosa to the Cubs). With his father's help (and his name) he was elected Governor of Texas.

As Governor of Texas he changed pollution laws to benefit energy companies and made Texas the most polluted state in the Nation, and Houston replaced Los Angeles as the most smog-ridden city in America. He cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas government to the tune of billions in borrowed money. He set the record for most executions by any Governor in American history.

To reach the Presidency, Bush set the record for most campaign fundraising trips than any other president in US history, the record for most corporate campaign donations (2000), and is currently on the road raising a record-breaking $200 Million dollars for his 2004 Presidential re-election campaign having just signed new legislation that prevents his Democratic counterparts from ever raising that level of funding. GW Bush became President after losing the popular vote by over 500,000 votes with the help of his father's appointments to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. His accomplishments, if they can be called that, are numerous. Here are just the basics.

After being selected by the Supreme Court in an election debacle that polarized the nation like no way since the Civil War, during his first year in office he set the all-time record for most days on vacation by any president in US history, golfing away the entire month of August 2001 before returning to preside over the worst security failure in US history the following September. As President, GW Bush invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, spent the $7 trillion budget surplus and emptied the treasury en route to upping the Defense budget to a composite $700 Billion dollars a year and shattering the record for biggest annual deficit in American history at $400 Billion and rising, all while handing back nearly three quarters of a trillion dollars to the richest 10% of the country. Continuing his Texas tradition, Bush was the first president in decades to execute a federal prisoner while being the first president in US history to enter office with a criminal record.

In response to the 9/11 attacks, he signed more laws and executive orders amending the Constitution than any president in US history, created the largest Government bureaucracy since Roosevelt while slowly dismantling Roosevelt's contributions, and had a prepared draft of the Patriot Act ready to sign into law, giving the Executive Office the ability to wage war, appropriate funds, and control social freedoms in a an emperor-like manner.

In his first two years in office over 2.5 million Americans lost their jobs, and in response he cut social services and unemployment benefits for more out-of-work Americans than any president in US history. Under his Administration the nation set the economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12-month period, and watched the biggest volume and percentage drop in the history of the stock market.

He presided over the biggest energy crises in US history and refused to intervene when corruption was revealed. The most blatant corruption came from his good friend, campaign contributor and fellow Houstonian Kenneth Lay, Chairman of Enron. Bush presided over the highest gasoline prices in US history while refusing to use the national reserves. His energy policies call for new drilling in a National Wildlife Sanctuary in Alaska, refusal of the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming, and the co-opting of the Iraqi, Caspian Basin, and Indonesian oil and gas reserves. To accomplish much of this, he dissolved more international treaties than any president in US history, claiming they were all of a bygone era, while refusing new 21st Century international treaties like the International Criminal Court in an attempt to shield many Americans from war crimes charges. His Administration has also made it clear they view the United Nations as an "obsolete" entity, particularly after the UN unilaterally opposed the American invasion of Iraq, and removed the US from the High Commission on Human Rights and the Elections Monitoring Board, while Bush refused United Nations election inspectors during the 2002 US elections.

Lastly, he filled his cabinet, the richest of any administration in US history, with Energy and Defense Executives who have substantially profited from the above mentioned wars and energy crises, while the rest of the nation is beset with the above listed miseries.

Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President tried to tell the story of this spoiled, drug-addled sociopath with electric charm and enough muscle behind him to occupy Washington. During 2000, the original publisher St. Martin's Press received threats from Bush campaign lawyers, and sat by as author Jim Hatfield was destroyed in public. St, Martin's withdrew their edition of 70,000 from stores with promises to burn them. Soft Skull Press republished the book, but ran into corporate media intent on attacking the author. A Texas lawsuit shut down distribution of the book, Hatfield's life became the bigger story, and the message he was trying to send seemed destined to remain unheard. Under the relentless assault of a public smear campaign of epic proportions, Hatfield committed suicide in 2001.

The book talks about two major incidents in the formative years of the President, his 1973-1974 18-month AWOL stint from the Texas Air National Guard where he was serving to avoid Vietnam, and his much reported but nearly impossible to confirm 1972 drunk driving and cocaine arrest with his younger brother Marvin. Mostly, Fortunate Son is a portrait of an extremely fortunate heir who was so ill suited to business and responsibility that he would have been better suited leaving his affairs to a squadron of rhesus monkeys.

But you don't need a book to chronicle this current President's transgressions, they are occurring right in front of our eyes. The more he pushes Wilsonian rollbacks, Empire, and the abrogation of civil rights, the more people willingly seem eager to cede their long fought rights away under the outmoded and overplayed rubrics of "patriotism" and "national security". Besides their rights, Americans have also ceded nearly all their savings. Only the wealthiest have money, the rest of America is flat broke or worse, deep in debt. Yet we are told that polls say more than half the American people approve of Bush? But in our daily life nearly everyone around us seems to despise (and certainly distrust) this Bush President. Why is that?

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Charles Shaw is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Newtopia Magazine. An author, editor, and activist, Charles has become an accomplished writer and his fiction and political essays are featured by newspapers, literary journals, columnists, and bloggers. Recently, he was a featured presenter at the Creative Class Summit in Memphis and has lead media workshops for Students for a Sensible Drug Policy. His fiction series, "DIALOGUE: Conversations Between the Ethereal and the Unmedicated" (where he meets with famous dead people) can be found regularly at Web Del Sol, and will open on stage in Chicago in October of 2003. His debut novel, Unfinished Portraits, will arrive in stores sometime next year (or so he is told). Current projects include the first Newtopia book, A Vision of Newtopia: Collected Essays on Common Sense Politics; a follow-up novel, The Schnitzel Famine; and a play. The Birth of the Cool, adapted from the outstanding book by Lewis MacAdams. His work has appeared regularly in Newtopia, Clamor, Punk Planet, UR Chicago, and 3am Magazine. A 1992 graduate of Boston University, he has lived in Boston, NYC and Los Angeles, but now lives happiest of all in his native Chicago, lovin' every minute of it. You would too.

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