Thorns in the
Rose Garden
‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’
There are two passions which have a powerful influence on the affairs of men.
These are ambition and avarice; the love of power, and the love of money.
Benjamin Franklin, at the Constitutional Convention,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - 1787
Sightings from The Catbird Seat
~ o ~
January 14. 2008
Bush Brings Promise of Arms Sale
on First Visit to Saudi Arabia
Janine Zacharia and Holly Rosenkrantz
Jan. 14 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush brought to Saudi Arabia today a promise to provide “smart bomb” technology for his host, as the U.S. leader made his first visit to a crucial ally in the Middle East.
Saudi King Abdullah had his own gift for Bush, a heavy, gold necklace and medallion that is a sign of friendship and respect, a theme Bush is seeking to push during his two-day visit to the kingdom at a time when oil prices are hovering around $100 per barrel.
The administration announced today it was formally notifying Congress of its plans to sell Boeing Co.'s satellite-guided smart-bomb kits to the Saudis. The package is part of a broader sale to Persian Gulf allies of as much as $20 billion in arms to shore up support against Iran's nuclear ambitions.
The visit is an opportunity for the two leaders to ``renew their ties,'' National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Riyadh. Relations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have been fraught since the U.S. led an invasion of Iraq in 2003 against Saudi advice.
On the Saudi agenda for meetings during the next two days is pressing the U.S. for stronger efforts to help create a Palestinian state, talks about U.S. plans in Iraq, and dealing with Iran's nuclear program through diplomacy.
Little has been said publicly about oil prices as Bush has made his way through four of the world's major producers: Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and now Saudi Arabia, which alone produces 25 percent of the world's oil.
Oil Talk
``They talked about oil,'' Ed Gillespie, Bush's senior adviser, said when pressed on the issue. Bush and the Arab leaders discussed the ``vast demand'' in the world market. Bush said alternative energy was a part of his agenda and also mentioned the need for more nuclear energy.
That was as specific as a statement on oil given by any White House official during the trip. Hadley refused to predict whether oil would be discussed in Bush's one-on-one meeting with Abdullah tonight.
The state of the U.S. economy and financial markets also topped the Arab leaders' concerns. Bush reassured leaders of the United Arab Emirates that their investment is still welcome in the U.S. after U.S. lawmakers in 2006 forced DP World, based in Dubai, to drop a bid to run American ports.
They asked if ``investment by the UAE is welcome in the United States'' and the ``president reassured them that it very much was, that the United States is open for foreign investment,'' Hadley said.
Fundamentals
Bush also reassured the UAE leadership that the ``underlying fundamentals'' of the U.S. economy remained sound, Hadley said.
Many officials also have asked questions about the U.S. presidential campaign. Gillespie said one official, who he didn't identify, asked him who he thought would win the Michigan primary tomorrow night.
During this trip, Bush has powered through an intensive schedule of cultural events. Last night he admired falcons and feasted on a Bedouin-styled dinner in the UAE desert. Today, he visited the historic home of Sheikh Saeed al Maktoum, the grandfather of the current ruler of Dubai in the UAE.
There Bush was greeted by young girls who sang and danced for him, while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, accustomed on her own trips to a punishing schedule of diplomatic meetings, sipped a fresh strawberry juice alongside Bush's other top aides. Bush visited a Dubai cultural center and then met with young Arab leaders and entrepreneurs atop Dubai's boat-shaped luxury Burj al Arab hotel.
Tomorrow, Bush will again set aside high diplomacy and visit a national history museum and King Abdullah's ranch.
Asked to explain the timing and significance of Bush's sudden late-in-his-presidency cultural touring, Hadley said: ``It's a good part of getting him to see and be seen in the region.''
To contact the reporter on this story: Holly Rosenkrantz in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia at hrosenkrantz@bloomberg.net ; Janine Zacharia in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia at jzacharia@bloomberg.net
December 28, 2007
Stephen Ross, dealmaker
New York real estate magnate Stephen M. Ross has been cutting deals at a whirlwind pace in recent weeks.
Centerline Holding Company, which he chairs, today announced that Freddie Mac would securitize its $2.8 billion bond portfolio. Centerline said it would also receive a $131 million investment in January from the Related Cos.
Centerline execs said the moves were designed to reduce debt, attract capital for growth and shelter the firm from volatile interest rates.
Yet several stockholders participating in the company’s online conference call this morning described the arrangement as a sweetheart deal benefitting Ross and his companies at the expense of public shareholders.
Ross also chairs Related Cos. Jeff T. Blau, Related’s president, is a managing trustee of Centerline. A third Centerline trustee, Robert J. Dolan, is dean of the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, named for its prime benefactor.
Related had a large cash infusion earlier this month, when several firms invested a total $1.4 billion. Mubadala Development Co. of Abu Dhabi and the Olayan Group of Saudi Arabia put in about $1 billion. Goldman Sachs and Michael Dell’s investment company, MSD Capital, invested an additional $400 million for a 7.5% stake, placing Related’s value at more than $5 billion.
Ross told the Wall Street Journal that Related opened talks for the cash infusion before the mortgage crisis erupted. The market “was so good we knew it wouldn’t last,” he said.
Ross formed Related 25 years ago to develop and manage government-assisted rental apartments. Over the last two decades, the company has become heavily involved in luxury residential and commercial projects, including Manhattan’s Time Warner Center.
Related is also developing properties around Penn Station, and is bidding on a massive project to redevelop the Hudson Yards on the city’s west side.
On another front, the Miami Herald reported two weeks ago that Ross and Jorge Perez were talking to Wayne Huizenga about buying the Miami Dolphins. Perez is the managing general partner of Related’s Florida operations.
http://news.muckety.com/2007/12/28/stephen-ross-dealmaker/265
For more, GO TO > > > The Vultures in WCI Communities
From AMERICAN DYNASTY - Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Deceit in the House of Bush, by Kevin Phillips:
INDIANA BUSH AND
THE AXIS OF EVIL
As president, Bush senior gloried in the Gulf War and the 1989 invasion of Panama, both cast as strikes for democracy–even if the dictators attacked were former friends. Over a decade...his web of covert international relationships prompted charges of his participating in and covering up in three actual or alleged illegalities: the Republican Party’s “October Surprise” negotiations with Iran in 1980, supposedly undertaken to ensure that no hostages taken in Iran would be released before the election; the Iran-Contra scandal; and “Iraqgate,” secretly arming Iraq from 1984 to 1990 before hurriedly changing course after Saddam Hussein took Kuwait.
Two catchphrases recur in the family resume: “arms deals” and “clandestine operations.” A third recurring association would be “cover-up.”
George W. Bush was a willing recipient of the inheritance–witness the CIA and BCCI ties of some who finance him, from Arbusto to Harken Energy a decade later. For example, James Bath, who invested fifty thousand dollars in the 1979 and 1989 Arbusto partnerships, probably do so as U.S. business representative for rich Saudi investors Salem bin Laden and Khalid bin Mahfouz (Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law). Both men were involved with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the rogue bank and occasional CIA front known for financing arms deals – indeed, bin Mahfouz owned 20 percent of its stock.
Bath, who made his fortune investing for the two Saudis, was a colorful Texan – and then some. According to former Houston Post reporter Pete Brewton, Bath was “an asset of the CIA, reportedly recruited by George Bush himself” in 1976 to keep the Agency up to date on Saudi activities.
A decade later, Harken Energy, the company willing to handsomely buy out George W.’s crumbling oil and gas business, had its own CIA connections. Chairman Alan Quasha was the son of a Philippine lawyer connected to the Nugan Hand Bank, a notorious Australian bank closely linked to the CIA.
Equally to the point, 17.6 percent of Harken’s stock was owned by Abdullah Bakhsh, another Saudi magnate reported by some to be representing Khalid bin Mahfouz.
A U.S. Senate subcommittee investigating BCCI in 1992 reported on how the bank bought friendship and favors from politicians around the world; details of the investigation were published in two books: False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire, by Peter Truell, and The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI, by Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne. According to the latter, the story of the Bush involvement in the BCCI scandal involved the “trails that branched, crossed one another or came to unexpected dead ends.”...
As we have seen, Jeb Bush began his business career in Miami collaborating with Cubans tied to the CIA or to kindred intelligence agencies in pre-Castro Cuba. He socialized with Adbur Sakhia, BCCI’s Miami branch manager and later its top U.S. Official. Jeb Bush’s partners and early associates included a number of Cuban emigres with CIA, Nicaraguan ‘contra, or Batista-era Cuban intelligence connections.
To say that armaments, clandestine operations, and money-laundering banks recur in the history of the Walker-Bush family is no exaggeration at all. No other presidents have been so caught up in this kind of foreign policy. And the Bushes’ preoccupations are not clear until you consider the whole dynasty. It is the dynastic aspect that truly reveals the pattern – the clandestine behavior over multiple generations....
September 24, 2007
DAN RATHER: TASED AND CONFUSED
The Still-Unreported Story of “Top Gun” George Bush
by Greg Palast
New York- Newly unearthed records reveal that, in 2004, when Americans were in the midst of a brutal electoral battle over whether to reelect a president posing as a war hero, a commanding US reporter, Dan Rather, went AWOL.
Just three months before the election, Rather had a story that might have changed the outcome of that razor-close race. We now know that Dan cut a back-room deal to shut his mouth, grab his ankles, and let his network retract a story he knew to be absolutely true.
In September 2004 when Rather cowered, Bush was riding high in the polls. Now, with Bush’s approval ratings are below smallpox, Rather has come out of hiding to shoot at the lame duck. Thanks, Dan.
It began on September 8, 2004, when Rather, on CBS, ran a story that Daddy Bush Senior had, in 1968, put in the fix to get his baby George out of the Vietnam War and into the Texas Air National Guard. Little George then rode out the war defending Houston from Viet Cong attack.
The story is stone-cold solid. I know, because we ran it on BBC Television a year before CBS (see that broadcast here). BBC has never retracted a word of it.
But CBS caved. So did Dan.
That’s according to Rather’s written confession, his law suit, which is as much a shameful set of admissions as it is a legal complaint. In the suit filed Thursday, Rather tells us that Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom, owner of CBS, was “enraged that the [Air Guard] Broadcast had hurt CBS in the eyes of the Bush administration.”
Viacom then set out to, “divert public attention from the accurate facts reported in the Broadcast concerning President Bush’s service (and lack thereof) in the TexANG during the Vietnam War; and enable CBS and Viacom to curry favor with the White House….”
Redstone roared and Dan, hearing his Dark Lord’s voice, admits he then “refrained from defending” the truths in the Broadcast. Dan shut his mouth, he confesses, in return for 30 pieces of Viacom silver: a promise that “his contract would be extended.”
Had Rather stood up to the Viacommunist thugs and defended his story, President Kerry and our nation could today express gratitude for his public service. Instead, Dan traded the public interest for airtime on 60 Minutes. Yuck.
Now Dan is shocked to find that the network snakes didn’t live up to their slimey bargain with him. Well, Dan, that’s what happens with snakes. Get in bed with them and wake up slimed.
The Story Still Not Reported
By contrast, BBC never backed down from the story of the fix that got Little George out of ‘Nam. We had a smoking hot document [view it here] and an interview with the crucial source: the man who confessed to making the call for Bush to the head of the Air Guard.
No, I won’t give you his name. I don’t expose sources - unlike Dan and CBS. That’s another thing that makes me just FURIOUS. Rather revealed, then blamed, a source, retired Air Guard officer Lt. Col. Bill Burkett. Burkett, an Abilene rancher, is a courageous, stand-up guy. [See The Real Lt. Col. Burkett]. But after standing up with Dan, he was ruined, ostracized from the cattle business. No one would sell him feed. Dan got a multi-million dollar kiss-off from Viacom. Burkett got dead cows and bankruptcy.
And there’s more. More that Dan didn’t report. As I said, Dan picked up an old story, one that I reported, as did others, in 1999. But we added our discovery of a confidential document which had walked its way out of the files of the US Department of Justice. It was a whistleblower statement that explained why the Lt. Governor of Texas, Ben Barnes, who arranged for George W. to get into the Air Guard, kept silent about it for 35 years. It states that, in 1997, Governor George W. Bush overruled his state’s Lottery director and gave a billion-dollar contract to a company tied to Barnes. Barnes received a cool fee of $23 million from the contractor.
This is a devastating accusation. And one that’s more serious than the scandal of a draft-dodging rich kid’s vile use of daddy’s connections three decades ago. Here was evidence of gross abuse of public office by Governor Bush to pay off a crony who kept silent while Bush ran for the presidency.
US Reporting: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
But how could I expect Rather to take on the tough story when he wouldn’t stand by the easy one? In June 2002, two years before his media lynching, Rather explained his Fear of Reporting in an interview on BBC Television (cautiously, to a European audience only):
“It’s an obscene comparison but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around people’s necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. It’s that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore-in on the tough questions so often. Again, I’m humbled to say I do not except myself from this criticism.”
This is what’s so frustrating about Dan Rather. He’s two people: a real journalist locked inside a television news-actor begging for air-time. Indeed, disgustingly, in his law suit, he conceals his inner reporter by claiming he only “narrated” the draft dodge story. For shame.
But what about all those other preening birds on the chicken ranch known as US television news? Rather tells us he wasn’t alone in failing to ask tough questions. Not one damn US reporter asked Bush at a press conference, “Yes or no, Mr. President: Did your daddy call Ben Barnes to get you out of the war in Vietnam?”
[For the record, BBC did ask for the President’s denial or admission. We got none. And when Dan’s CBS boss, Leslie Moonves, said Dan’s story, “ignored information that cast doubt” on the revelation that Bush Sr. put in the fix to get his son into the Air Guard, I asked Moonves to provide that information. In fact, I offered him $100,000 for his info which would have shown Dan’s story false. He never produced it.]
The same week Dan confessed that he agreed to shut up, a journalism student, Andrew Meyer of Florida, insisted on asking tough questions of the man Bush defeated, John Kerry. For Andrew’s impertinence, he was hit with 50,000 volts from a taser.
Andrew is just a student and still needs a couple of lessons in posing questions properly. (Lesson One: “Wear a grounding wire.”) But Andrew has the next lesson down pat: ask the question they don’t want to hear when they don’t want to hear it. Rather could use a few lessons in journalism himself - from Andrew - about taking the heat for the story.
Seeing Andrew’s arrest and Dan’s complaint, I was thinking that perhaps, instead of tase-ing those reporters who ask questions, we might tase those who don’t.
* * * * *
Greg Palast is the author of “The Necklace-ing of Dan Rather” in the New York Times bestselling book, Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans - Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild (Penguin 2007).
Sign up for Palast’s investigative reports at www.GregPalast.com, check out the whole story in the documentary Bush Family Fortunes support the Palast Investigative Fund here.
http://www.gregpalast.com/dan-rather-tased-and-confused/
NAZIS IN THE ATTIC
By Randy Davis
...Like Nixon, George Bush was deeply involved with supporting the Nazis in the Republican's closet. In fact, support for the Nazis was a Bush family tradition which goes back more than six decades and, once again, to Allen Dulles.
Loftus and Aarons write: "The real story of George Bush starts well before he launched his own career. It goes back to the 1920s, when the Dulles brothers and the other pirates of Wall Street were making their deals with the Nazis. . . ."
THE BUSH-DULLES-NAZI CONNECTION
"George Bush's problems were inherited from his namesake and maternal grandfather, George Herbert 'Bert' Walker, a native of St. Louis, who founded the banking and investment firm of G. H. Walker and Company in 1900. Later the company shifted from St. Louis to the prestigious address of 1 Wall Street. . . .
"Walker was one of Hitler's most powerful financial supporters in the United States. The relationship went all the way back to 1924, when Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist, was financing Hitler's infant Nazi party. As mentioned in earlier chapters, there were American contributors as well.
"Some Americans were just bigots and made their connections to Germany through Allen Dulles's firm of Sullivan and Cromwell because they supported Fascism. The Dulles brothers, who were in it for profit more than ideology, arranged American investments in Nazi Germany in the 1930s to ensure that their clients did well out of the German economic recovery. . . .
"Sullivan & Cromwell was not the only firm engaged in funding Germany. According to 'The Splendid Blond Beast,' Christopher Simpson's seminal history of the politics of genocide and profit, Brown Brothers, Harriman was another bank that specialized in investments in Germany. The key figure was Averill Harriman, a dominating figure in the American establishment. . . .
"The firm originally was known as W. A. Harriman & Company. The link between Harriman & Company's American investors and Thyssen started in the 1920s, through the Union Banking Corporation, which began trading in 1924. In just one three-year period, the Harriman firm sold more than $50 million of German bonds to American investors. 'Bert' Walker was Union Banking's president, and the firm was located in the offices of Averill Harriman's company at 39 Broadway in New York.
"In 1926 Bert Walker did a favor for his new son-in-law, Prescott Bush. It was the sort of favor families do to help their children make a start in life, but Prescott came to regret it bitterly. Walker made Prescott vice president of W. A. Harriman. The problem was that Walker's specialty was companies that traded with Germany. As Thyssen and the other German industrialists consolidated Hitler's political power in the 1930s, an American financial connection was needed. According to our sources, Union Banking became an out-and-out Nazi money-laundering machine. . . .
"In [1931], Harriman & Company merged with a British-American investment company to become Brown Brothers, Harriman. Prescott Bush became one of the senior partners of the new company, which relocated to 59 Broadway, while Union Banking remained at 39 Broadway. But in 1934 Walker arranged to put his son-in-law on the board of directors of Union Banking.
"Walker also set up a deal to take over the North American operations of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, a cover for I.G. Farben's Nazi espionage unit in the United States. The shipping line smuggled in German agents, propaganda, and money for bribing American politicians to see things Hitler's way. The holding company was Walker's American Shipping & Commerce, which shared the offices at 39 Broadway with Union Banking. In an elaborate corporate paper trail, Harriman's stock in American Shipping & Commerce was controlled by yet another holding company, the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, run out of Walker's office. The directors of this company were Averill Harriman, Bert Walker, and Prescott Bush. . . .
". . . In a November 1935 article in Common Sense, retired marine general Smedley D. Butler blamed Brown Brothers, Harriman for having the U.S. marines act like 'racketeers' and 'gangsters' in order to exploit financially the peasants of Nicaragua. . . .
". . . A 1934 congressional investigation alleged that Walker's 'Hamburg-Amerika Line subsidized a wide range of pro-Nazi propaganda efforts both in Germany and the United States.' Walker did not know it, but one of his American employees, Dan Harkins, had blown the whistle on the spy apparatus to Congress. Harkins, one of our best sources, became Roosevelt's first double agent . . . [and] kept up the pretense of being an ardent Nazi sympathizer, while reporting to Naval Intelligence on the shipping company's deals with Nazi intelligence.
"Instead of divesting the Nazi money," continue the authors, "Bush hired a lawyer to hide the assets. The lawyer he hired had considerable expertise in such underhanded schemes. It was Allen Dulles. According to Dulles's client list at Sullivan & Cromwell, his first relationship with Brown Brothers, Harriman was on June 18, 1936. In January 1937 Dulles listed his work for the firm as 'Disposal of Stan [Standard Oil] Investing stock.'
"As discussed in Chapter 3, Standard Oil of New Jersey had completed a major stock transaction with Dulles's Nazi client, I.G. Farben. By the end of January 1937 Dulles had merged all his cloaking activities into one client account: 'Brown Brothers Harriman-Schroeder Rock.' Schroeder, of course, was the Nazi bank on whose board Dulles sat. The 'Rock' were the Rockefellers of Standard Oil, who were already coming under scrutiny for their Nazi deals. By May 1939 Dulles handled another problem for Brown Brothers, Harriman, their 'Securities Custodian Accounts.'
"If Dulles was trying to conceal how many Nazi holding companies Brown Brothers, Harriman was connected with, he did not do a very good job. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, word leaked from Washington that affiliates of Prescott Bush's company were under investigation for aiding the Nazis in time of war. . . .
". . . The government investigation against Prescott Bush continued. Just before the storm broke, his son, George, abandoned his plans to enter Yale and enlisted in the U.S. Army. It was, say our sources among the former intelligence officers, a valiant attempt by an eighteen-year-old boy to save the family's honor.
"Young George was in flight school in October 1942, when the U.S. government charged his father with running Nazi front groups in the United States. Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, all the shares of the Union Banking Corporation were seized, including those held by Prescott Bush as being in effect held for enemy nationals. Union Banking, of course, was an affiliate of Brown Brothers, Harriman, and Bush handled the Harrimans' investments as well.
"Once the government had its hands on Bush's books, the whole story of the intricate web of Nazi front corporations began to unravel. A few days later two of Union Banking's subsidiaries -- the Holland American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation -- also were seized. Then the government went after the Harriman Fifteen Holding Company, which Bush shared with his father- in-law, Bert Walker, the Hamburg-Amerika Line, and the Silesian- American Corporation. The U.S. government found that huge sections of Prescott Bush's empire had been operated on behalf of Nazi Germany and had greatly assisted the German war effort." (1)
"Try as he did," continue the authors, "George Bush could not get away from Dulles's crooked corporate network, which his grandfather and father had joined in the 1920s. Wherever he turned, George found that the influence of the Dulles brothers was already there. Even when he fled to Texas to become a successful businessman on his own, he ran into the pirates of Wall Street.
"One of Allen Dulles's secret spies inside the Democratic party later became George Bush's partner in the Mexican oil business. Edwin Pauley, a California oil man, was . . . one of Dulles's covert agents in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations . . . a 'big business' Democrat. . . .
Among the key posts held by Pauley were: treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, director of the Democratic convention in 1944 and, after Truman's election, Truman appointed him the "Petroleum Coordinator of Lend-Lease Supplies for the Soviet Union and Britain."
Just after the end of World War II, "in April 1945 Truman appointed Pauley as the U.S. representative to the Allied Reparations Committee, with the rank of ambassador," as well as "industrial and commercial advisor to the Potsdam Conference, 'where his chief task was to renegotiate the reparations agreements formulated at Yalta.' As one historian noted, the 'oil industry has always watched reparations activities carefully.' There was a lot of money involved, and much of it belonged to the Dulles brothers' clients."
At the same time, report Loftus and Aarons, "the Dulles brothers were still shifting Nazi assets out of Europe for their clients as well as for their own profit. They didn't want the Soviets to get their hands on these assets or even know that they existed. Pauley played a significant role in solving this problem for the Dulles brothers. The major part of Nazi Germany's industrial assets was located in the zones occupied by the West's forces. As Washington's man on the ground, Pauley managed to deceive the Soviets for long enough to allow Allen Dulles to spirit much of the remaining Nazi assets out to safety. . . .
"Pauley, a key player in the plan to hide the Dulles brothers' Nazi assets, then moved into another post where he could help them further. After successfully keeping German assets in Fascist hands, Pauley was given the job of 'surveying Japan's assets and determining the amount of its war debt.' Again, it was another job that was crucial to the Dulles clique's secret financial and intelligence operations." (2)
After Pauley retired from government work he went back to being an independent oil man. Loftus and Aarons state that: "In 1958 he founded Pauley Petroleum which: . . . teamed up with Howard Hughes to expand oil production in the Gulf of Mexico.
"Pauley Petroleum discovered a highly productive offshore petroleum reserve and in 1959 became involved in a dispute with the Mexican Government, which considered the royalties from the wells to be too low.
"According to our sources in the intelligence community, the oil dispute was really a shakedown of the CIA by Mexican politicians. Hughes and Pauley were working for the CIA from time to time, while advancing their own financial interests in the lucrative Mexican oil fields. Pauley, say several of our sources, was the man who invented an intelligence money-laundering system in Mexico, which was later refined in the 1970s as part of Nixon's Watergate scandal. At one point CIA agents used Pemex, the Mexican government's oil monopoly, as a business cover at the same time Pemex was being used as a money laundry for Pauley's campaign contributions. As we shall see, the Mexican-CIA connection played an important part in the development of George Bush's political and intelligence career. . . .
"Pauley, say the 'old spies,' was the man who brought all the threads of the Mexican connection together. He was Bush's business associate, a front man for Dulles's CIA [Allen Dulles was CIA director then], and originator of the use of Mexican oil fronts to create a slush fund for Richard Nixon's various campaigns. . . .
"Although it is not widely known, Pauley, in fact, had been a committed, if 'secret,' Nixon supporter since 1960. It should be recalled that Nixon tried to conceal his Mexican slush fund during the Watergate affair by pressuring the CIA into a 'national security' cover-up. The CIA, to its credit, declined to participate. Unfortunately, others were so enmeshed in Pauley's work for Nixon that they could never extricate themselves. According to a number of our intelligence sources, the deals Bush cut with Pauley in Mexico catapulted him into political life. In 1960 Bush became a protege of Richard Nixon, who was then running for president of the United States...
"The most intriguing of Bush's early connections was to Richard Nixon, who as vice president had supervised Allen Dulles's covert planning for the Bay of Pigs [invasion]. For years it has been rumored that Dulles's client, George Bush's father, was one of the Republican leaders who recruited Nixon to run for Congress and later convinced Eisenhower to take him on as vice president. There is no doubt that the two families were close. George Bush described Nixon as his 'mentor.' Nixon was a Bush supporter in his very first tilt at politics, during his unsuccessful run for the Senate in 1964, and turned out again when he entered the House two years later.
"After Nixon's landslide victory in 1972, he ordered a general house cleaning on the basis of loyalty. 'Eliminate everyone,' he told John Ehrlichman about reappointments, 'except George Bush. Bush will do anything for our cause.' . . . According to Bush's account, the president told him that 'the place I really need you is over at the National Committee running things.' So, in 1972, Nixon appointed George Bush as head of the Republican National Committee.
"It was Bush who fulfilled Nixon's promise to make the 'ethnic' emigres a permanent part of Republican politics. In 1972 Nixon's State Department spokesman confirmed to his Australian counterpart that the ethnic groups were very useful to get out the vote in several key states. Bush's tenure as head of the Republican National Committee exactly coincided with Laszlo Pasztor's 1972 drive to transform the Heritage Groups Council into the party's official ethnic arm. The groups Pasztor chose as Bush's campaign allies were the emigre Fascists whom Dulles had brought to the United States. . . .
". . . Nearly twenty years later, and after expose's in several respectable newspapers, Bush continued to recruit most of the same ethnic Fascists, including Pasztor, for his own 1988 ethnic outreach program when he first ran for president.
"According to our sources in the intelligence community," state the authors, "it was Bush who told Nixon that the Watergate investigations might start uncovering the Fascist skeletons in the Republican party's closet. Bush himself acknowledges that he wrote Nixon a letter asking him to step down. The day after Bush did so, Nixon resigned.
"Bush had hoped to become Gerald Ford's vice president upon Nixon's resignation, but he was appointed U.S. ambassador to the UN. Nelson Rockefeller became vice president and chief damage controller. He formed a special commission in an attempt to preempt the Senate's investigation of the intelligence community. The Rockefeller Commission into CIA abuses was filled with old OPC [Dulles's Office of Policy Coordination] hands like Ronald Reagan, who had been the front man back in the 1950s for the money-laundering organization, the Crusade for Freedom, which was part of Dulles's Fascist 'freedom fighters' program." (3)
In 1988, Project Censored, a news media censorship research organization, awarded the honor of "Top Censored story" to the subject of George Bush. The article revealed "how the major mass media ignored, overlooked or undercovered at least ten critical stories reported in America's alternative press that raised serious questions about the Republican candidate, George Bush, dating from his reported role as a CIA 'asset' in 1963 to his Presidential campaign's connection with a network of anti-Semites with Nazi and fascist affiliations in 1988." (4)
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/randy/swas5.htm
For more, GO TO > > > Apartheid, Hawaiian Style; Freedom To Sing; Parrots in the Newsroom; Tracking the Flock of AIPAC Vultures; Vampires on Gilligan’s Island
May 8, 2003
HOOSIER CASE INCLUDES BUSH
BUDGET DIRECTOR
Allegations of stock dumping by IPALCO officials investigated
By Mark Jewell, Associated Press
INDIANAPOLIS - Indiana securities investigators have subpoenaed White House budget director Mitch Daniels as part of an inquiry into alleged stock dumping at a Hoosier utility, a regulator said yesterday.
Daniels, who said Tuesday that he is leaving his White House job, is among about 30 former executives of IPALCO Enterprises Inc. asked to provide information about their sales of stock leading up to the utility’s 2001 acquisition by AES Corp of Arlington, Va., said Keith Griffin, deputy commissioner of the Indiana Securities Division.
Griffin said, “We’re looking into the whole transaction to see if any parts of it violated Indiana securities laws.”
Daniels’ resignation sets up a likely run for Indiana governor. He is expected to announce his gubernatorial run by summer.
Griffin declined to comment further on the subpoenas, which were issued Friday in a year-long state investigation of the sale....
IPALCO also is the subject of a lawsuit by former employees who suffered losses in their retirement funds when AES shares plummeted from $49.60 after the merger closed in March 2001. Shares hit 92 cents last October but have since recovered some, closing yesterday at $6.25 on the New York Stock Exchange.
A separate shareholder lawsuit alleges securities violations, claiming that the directors knew or should have known that AES shares were far more volatile than IPALCO stock. Securities rules prohibit execution from trading on information not available to other shareholders.
When Daniels left IPALCO’s board to join the Bush administration in January 2001, he sold millions of dollars worth of stock, including 60,000 shares of IPALCO, for a profit of $552,540....
Daniels is not a defendant in the lawsuit over the retirement fund losses, but is named in the securities lawsuit.
July 19, 2002
Bush Baggage?
His Call for Corporate Responsibility Raises
Questions of His Business Past
By Chris Bury
Since President Bush went to Wall Street demanding, "a new ethic of personal responsibility in the business community," the stock markets have responded with a resounding "raspberry."...
Bush's clarion calls for cleaning up corporate corruption have largely fallen on deaf ears, analysts suggest, because Wall Street sees them more as rhetoric than reform. Even that rhetoric has lost steam since it has collided with questions about the president's own business past.
Bush has insisted, often quite testily, that such questions have long been put to rest. Stories about a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into his activities in the Harken Energy Company did surface briefly in previous Bush campaigns, including his 2000 race for president.
But the recent wave of corporate scandals has reporters re-examining old SEC documents posted on the Web site of a Washington watchdog group, the Center for Public Integrity. Its director, Charles Lewis, says the documents demonstrate a certain "hypocrisy" in the president's current calls for corporate reforms.
"Here he is lecturing Wall Street about corporate responsibility, including loans to themselves … when he himself was with a company that was skating on the edge of propriety," notes Lewis.
Bush Got Loans of Type He Now Condemns
In his Wall Street speech, President Bush called for "an end to all company loans to corporate officers." But back when Bush was a corporate director at Harken, he got the very loan deals he now condemns.
In 1986 and 1988, those loans allowed him to buy 105,000 shares in the company at interest rates far below the prevailing prime rates. Such loans, while perfectly legal, are surely politically inconvenient in today's climate.
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