Bush Family Treason
by Barbara Boyd and Anton Chaitkin
April 6—Lyndon LaRouche describes Jeb Bush’s Presidential candidacy as a deadly, unfolding strategic potential in a world already careening toward financial collapse and world war. A speculative monetarist cancer is destroying the nations of the trans-Atlantic system. Wishing to retain their hegemony, the Anglo-American oligarchy threatens Russia and China with nuclear war. The present ugly caricature of the once great United States can be attributed to George H.W. Bush’s tenure in the Vice Presidency and Presidency, George W. Bush’s eight years in office, and the six-plus years America has suffered under its successor-in-interest, Barack Obama—what LaRouche calls the Bush League of Nazis.
The history of the Bush family, dating back to Jeb’s grandfather Prescott, and his great-grandfather George Herbert Walker, is a history of Anglo-American financier treason against the founding principles of the United States, a war against Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Lincoln, McKinley, Roosevelt, and Kennedy, who all fought to found and advance the revolutionary American system of economics against attacks and subversion by the British imperial system. Each new generation of Bushes presents itself as a markedly dumber version of the same fundamental species. They have no principles or morals, aside from abject loyalty to family and to the London/Saudi/Wall Street axis they serve. Anglophilic to the core, they proudly trace their roots to the House of Windsor.
No Bush has ever been his “own man,” the status Jeb Bush trumpets for himself at every public occasion. This claim is so ridiculous that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has taken to calling him “I Am My Own Man Bush.” Being your “own man” implies a thinking identity, imagination, and bedrock moral principles, all of which the Bushes lack. For character, the Bushes have substituted one burning ambition, first set forth by Prescott and grandfather George Herbert Walker for George H.W. Bush, and then by George H.W. Bush for his sons George and Jeb—to exercise the power of the U.S. Presidency on behalf of Wall Street.
In 1992, EIR published George Bush, The Unauthorized Biography, an exhaustively researched book, used by Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaign as a manual for understanding the Bush species, breaking what had been the family’s firewall of secrecy. Other books have followed. After reviewing the literature, we provide here an updated series of vignettes to demonstrate why Jeb Bush poses such an imminent danger. This is our opening overview; we will publish more in upcoming issues.[1]
Prescott Bush, the Hitler Project, and the Secret Government
Nazi Links: The relevant species history begins with E.H. Harriman acquiring the bankrupt Union Pacific Railroad, financed through the British royal family’s private financier, Sir Ernst Cassel, Cassel’s New York partner Jacob Schiff, and members of the Rockefeller family. Like everything else on Wall Street, the financiers traded on what others had created. In 1919, G.H. (Bert) Walker, a St. Louis-born, British-schooled operative of British and Morgan bankers, set up a private bank for E.H. Harriman’s sons, Averell and Roland, W.A. Harriman and Company.
In 1926, Bert brought his son-in-law, Prescott Bush, into this enterprise, Prescott and Roland Harriman having sworn lifetime blood oaths to each other as members of Yale’s secret satanic Skull and Bones society. Beginning in 1920, W.A. Harriman and Company under Bert Walker’s direction, began looting post-World War I Germany, acquiring control over shipping (the Hamburg-America ship line), and buying into steel production and raw materials. When the Depression hit, W.A. Harriman merged with Brown Brothers, the British family investment firm of Montagu Norman, the pro-Nazi head of the Bank of England. Brown Brothers Harriman was the largest private investment bank in the United States, and Prescott Bush was installed as its managing director. According to his account, Prescott presided over the weekly Thursday partners meeting at the firm, assisted by “silent and properly attired British floor attendants.”
Prescott Bush presided over a banking complex tightly interwoven with the funding centers for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. Most notable was their subsidiary, the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), a money-management front for Fritz Thyssen, the leading German steel and coal tycoon. Brown Brothers Harriman was also the bank of the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company, which included Thyssen’s Nazi business partner Friedrich Flick among its owners, and utilized slave labor from Auschwitz in its operations. In addition, Bush was the director of a number of companies associated with Thyssen, including the Silesian American Corporation. Thyssen, by his own account, was the chief financier of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman had bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal, and U.S. Treasury bonds to Germany, both feeding and financing Hitler’s war build-up.
The lawyers for Brown Brothers Harriman in their Nazi dealings were the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen Dulles, both of whom were intimates of Prescott Bush throughout their lifetimes. John Foster Dulles continued his support for Hitler right up to Hitler’s attack on Britain, promoting Hitler as a marcher lord who would destroy emergent Russia. He was joined in this project by Montagu Norman, then at the Bank of England and formerly at Brown Brothers, the family bank, who coordinated the Hitler project for the British elites.
In the Autumn of 1942, the U.S. government seized the assets of UBC and Silesian American Corporation under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
Any remaining doubt about Prescott Bush’s witting participation in the Anglo-American Hitler project is removed when the 1932 International Congress of Eugenics is considered, together with Prescott’s lifelong devotion to eugenics and population control. The Congress was held at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and paid for by Averell Harriman, Bush’s favorite partner. It featured Nazi doctor Ernst Rudin, who was unanimously elected by the assembled as President of the International Federation of Eugenics Societies. The society advocated sterilization of mental patients, execution of the insane, criminals, and the terminally ill, and race purification by preventing births to parents of “inferior blood stocks.” These measures were allegedly necessary to prevent lesser breeds from monopolizing the world’s finite resources.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1933, he threw down the gauntlet to Prescott and his ilk in his first inaugural speech, condemning the money-changers of Wall Street: “They have no vision and when there is no vision the people perish. Yes, the money changers have fled from their high seat in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore the temple to ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.” Prescott Bush hated FDR, remarking later: “The only man I truly hated lies buried in Hyde Park.” Upon FDR’s death, Prescott, the Dulles brothers, and their Wall Street friends went to work dismantling FDR’s America, replacing it with the structures of speculative finance and the Cold War national security state.
The Security State: Beginning in the Truman Administration, and more emphatically in the Eisenhower Administration, the British/Wall Street financier retainers took the reins of U.S. national security policy. Manipulation of U.S. public opinion through mass profiling and advertising campaigns and destabilizations, and coups against governments unwilling to kowtow to the Anglo-Americans, became the order of the day. These operations were run through special situation groups functioning in the White House.
In a joint operation with British intelligence, the Dulles brothers overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran. In 1954, they staged a coup against Guatemala’s President, who refused to obey the dictates of the United Fruit Company, utilizing a pastoral letter from Cardinal Spellman of New York, supporting the coup as a critical ingredient. Their “Gladio” operation, featuring unrepentant former Nazis as a first line against any putative Russian invasion of Europe, resulted in numerous terrorist destabilizations of Europe throughout the 1960s and 1970s, with its Nazi heirs forming Victoria Nuland’s “freedom fighters” in Ukraine today. Their actions against Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam led to America’s first population war and the destruction of the military of the United States. Infamously, they planned the overthrow of Fidel Castro in the Bay of Pigs, a fiasco which resulted in Allen Dulles’s firing in the early days of the Kennedy Administration.
Prescott Bush and his close friend, National Security Advisor Gordon Gray, father of H.W.’s close friend C. Boyden Gray, were President Eisenhower’s favorite golf partners. Prescott moved to Washington as the U.S. Senator from Connecticut in 1952, and was privy to all of the Dulleses’ secret government operations. Two of Prescott’s intelligence projects from that period played a critical role in shaping the secret government and its operations to the present day—the H. Smith Richardson Foundation and the National Strategy Information Center. Prescott Bush argued strenuously throughout his life against any oversight by Congress or others over the covert operations conducted by his friends in the secret government.
The Bush family knew H. Smith Richardson of the Vicks Chemical Company through Sears Roebuck Chairman, Gen. Robert F. Wood (ret.). Wood had been president of America First, which lobbied against America entering the war against the Nazis, and Richardson had provided the start-up money for America First. The H. Smith Richardson Foundation was organized by Eugene Stetson, Jr., Richardson’s son-in-law, who worked for Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman as an assistant manager. H. Smith Richardson took part in the CIA’s MK-Ultra program, which featured large-scale testing of psychotropic drugs, including LSD, on unwitting U.S. citizens. The Foundation trained intelligence operatives for the U.S. government, including the CIA, and participated in off-the-books Agency operations.
The National Strategy Information Center was founded in 1962, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, by Prescott Bush, Prescott Bush Jr., William Casey, and Leo Cherne. Its director was Frank Barnett, former program director for Smith Richardson. One of its key operatives was Roy Godson. Early on, the Center conduited funds to the London-based Forum World Features, functioning as if it were a genuine wire service, which circulated CIA-authored “news stories” to 300 newspapers internationally.
According to Bush family lore, when George and his brothers visited Prescott, they heard again and again Prescott’s furious ramblings about Kennedy’s mistake at the Bay of Pigs and the Communist threat emerging in Latin America. According to Prescott, Allen Dulles’s invasion plan was well thought out, but Kennedy lacked the guts to carry it through. There is a well-founded belief that when Jack Kennedy fired Allen Dulles over the Bay of Pigs disaster, he signed the death warrant for his own assassination by Wall Street, London, and their secret government. The Cuban exiles trained to invade Cuba under infamous Miami CIA Station Chief Ted Shackley, became the center of all future Bush operations in Florida. They were essential to the development of Jeb Bush’s Florida political and business career. The continued subjugation of the Americas on behalf of Wall Street became a continuing family obsession.
George H.W. Bush: The New World Order
When Jeb Bush gives his stock campaign speech, he insists that he loves his father and his brother, unconditionally, and believes they were great Presidents. But, like everyone else who exists in a family, he can’t be held accountable for whatever sins his very different relatives committed. He says he won’t “re-litigate” the Iraq War, referring only vaguely to “mistakes” which were made. He points to his Mexican wife, his Catholic faith, his Texas education, and his alleged moderate wonkish political views as distinguishing him from his father and his brother. Why not? Similar public relations gambits to camouflage and hide the true Bush nature have worked in the past.
According to the lore, after attending Yale and joining Skull and Bones, George H.W. Bush broke from Prescott’s Anglo-American financier mold by becoming an “independent” Texas oilman, making his fortune in the hardscrabble Permian basin of West Texas. George W. Bush also landed in the Texas oil business following the same Yale education and dip in Satanism, but became a Christian fundamentalist in the course of overcoming early struggles with alcohol. All of these distinctions are, as the actual history shows, without a difference.
G.H.W. landed in Texas courtesy of a job arranged for him by his beloved Uncle Herbie, son of grandfather George Herbert Walker, and by Prescott, at Dresser Industries, the holder of important patents on oil-drilling equipment, and a significant defense contractor. W.A. Harriman and Company purchased Dresser in 1928. Midland, Texas, where G.H.W. spent most of his early career, was the oil industry outpost for Wall Street. The West Texas town was filled with Ivy League graduates out to exploit Texas oil with Wall Street money. G.H.W.’s early ventures were backed by Uncle Herbie and diverse Brown Brothers Harriman clients, including Eugene Meyer of the Washington Post.
The key venture for G.H.W. was Zapata Offshore Company, founded in 1954, a “pioneer” in offshore drilling platforms. Zapata had platforms in the Caribbean (conveniently, 40 miles off the Cuban coast), near Medellín, Colombia, in the Gulf of Mexico, Trinidad, Borneo, and the Persian Gulf. Clients included the Kuwait Shell Petroleum Development Company, beginning G.H.W.’s long relationship with the brutal emirate of Kuwait. During the 1960s, Zapata Offshore’s contracts were increasingly with Royal Dutch Shell, the Anglo-Dutch heart of Big Oil. As a result Zapata Offshore had British insurance, British investors, British directors, and drilling sites in British Commonwealth oil fields in much of the world. Recent accounts about Zapata Offshore, based on interviews with intelligence veterans, provide substantial evidence that it was a Dulles Brothers proprietary for the CIA and an off-the-books purchasing agent for the agency. Zapata Offshore’s board included Jimmy Gammell, a significant figure in British intelligence circles.
In 1963-64, G.H.W. first ran for public office against Sen. Ralph Yarborough of Texas, a race he lost. His platform included opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a government-in-exile invasion of Cuba, a “limited extension” of the war in Vietnam including use of tactical nuclear weapons, right to work laws, complete deregulation of the economy, and rabid opposition to government-sponsored infrastructure projects. He ran more successfully in 1966 as a “moderate,” when his J. Walter Thompson advertising campaign guru insisted that issues should play no part in the campaign. “Over and over again, on every television set in Houston, George H.W. Bush was seen with his coat slung over his shoulder, his sleeves rolled-up, walking the streets of his district, grinning, gripping, sweating, letting the voters know he cared. About what, he never made clear.” (Joe McGinnis, The Selling of the President 1968 [Trident Press: 1969].)
In Congress, Bush revived the British royal family’s Hitler eugenics project, this time in the more “moderate” form of Zero Population Growth, committing slow genocide against developing countries by denying them the means of existence and launching perpetual wars.
As head of the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population, Bush promoted the racist William Shockley, who advocated a program of mass sterilization of the unfit and mentally defective to stop the “down-breeding” of the gene pool. The special targets of Shockley’s program were African-Americans. He also promoted Paul R. Ehrlich, who advocated the addition of mass sterilization agents to the water supply and a tough foreign policy, including termination of food aid to starving nations. As Richard Nixon’s liaison to China (1974-75), G.H.W. proposed that Deng Xioping sterilize his population in order to curb population growth. At the same time, Henry Kissinger was writing National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200, establishing population control as a national security program of the United States. NSSM 200 justified the U.S. commitment to enforcing zero population growth policies on the Third World (including wars and famines) by noting that the U.S. could not obtain needed natural resources from these countries if their people were too numerous, and could resist the looting of their nations.
Following his brief stint as CIA Director (1976-77), G.H.W. became an international investment banker from 1977 through 1980. He chaired the executive committee of the First International Bank of Houston and directed First International Bankshares Ltd., both subsidiaries of the Interfirst Group. According to numerous sources, G.H.W.’s main job was attracting Saudi and other Gulf money. He had strong ties to the Saudi royal family beginning with Zapata Offshore’s operations in the Persian Gulf; that relationship was cemented during Bush’s tenure at the CIA, with the Saudis already recognized as Wall Street’s critical Middle Eastern ally and a premier source of off-the-books funding for covert ops. When the Saudis made Prince Bandar their U.S. Ambassador during the Bush White House years, he became so close to the Bush family that he was nicknamed Bandar Bush.
Throughout this time, Prescott was furiously promoting G.H.W. as the appropriate choice for U.S. Vice President, first with Nixon—based upon Prescott’s close ties to Nixon and early financial sponsorship of his career—then with Gerald Ford. Nixon made him UN Ambassador and then chairman of the Republican National Committee, where he played a significant role in the Watergate conspiracy. Ford made him U.S. liaison to China, and CIA Director, where he was instrumental in stopping exposure by the media and Congress of the deadly covert ops and molding of public opinion which were the hallmark of the bankers’ CIA. G.H.W. was finally forced down Ronald Reagan’s throat as the price for Wall Street’s support in the 1980 general election.
During the 12 years of the Reagan/Bush Administration, and then the Bush Administration, the financial oligarchs moved ruthlessly to restore their world order, which had been interrupted by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, large-scale protests against the Vietnam War, and Watergate and the exposés of the secret government which followed. As Vice President, defying the Constitution, George H.W. Bush took over most national security functions as head of the National Security Council’s Special Situation Group. The structures for a new national security state were largely decided for him, however, during the Reagan transition, by papers prepared by Prescott Bush’s National Security Information Center, which ran the Consortium on Intelligence outlining the new aggressive policies. The Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Richard Mellon Scaife-associated foundations, had all worked for years to plan and provide the rationales for the new national security state. Not coincidentally, the same foundations sponsored the U.S. revival of the works of Nazi Crown Jurist Carl Schmitt and his U.S. protégé Leo Strauss, who became key philosophers for the neo-conservative movement.
Executive Order 12333, which Reagan signed in December 1981, reorganized the U.S. intelligence community, authorized widespread NSA spying and record collection on individuals deemed threats to the national security, and authorized the government to lie to the population about its covert operations. The intelligence reorganization was accompanied by something called, ironically, “Operation Truth,” an overt black and white propaganda campaign run through the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy and the CIA, to sell Washington’s foreign adventures to a hesitant U.S. population. Its key players were Walter Raymond, a black propaganda specialist for the CIA who moved to the White House, and Otto Reich, a radical Cuban exile rightist who was a favorite of the Bush family. Operation Truth went after reporters who dared to disagree with Administration policies, intimidating and threatening the publishers who employed them, and slandered and attacked the Administration’s opponents. Almost all serious investigative journalism from mainstream U.S. media stopped in the wake of these operations.
Lyndon LaRouche became a target of these Bush League operatives when President Reagan adopted LaRouche’s proposal for a Strategic Defense Initiative in early 1983, against the advice of most of his advisors, including all of those associated with G.H.W. Bush. A massive media campaign demonizing LaRouche was ginned up by Wall Street financier John Train in a series of “salons” in New York City featuring major print and broadcast media, neo-conservative political operatives, career LaRouche-hater Dennis King (whose defamatory book on LaRouche was paid for by the Smith-Richardson Foundation), and various government officials.
CIA documents in the Kennedy assassination archive show that G.H.W.’s initial Zapata Oil partner and lifelong friend, Thomas J. Devine, ran covert CIA operations out of John Train’s investment house as a partner there. The Train firm was described as a cover for such operations. The National Strategy Information Center’s Roy Godson, a consultant to Reagan’s NSC, has been described in the court testimony of former Reagan National Security Council official Richard Morris, a special assistant to NSC head William Clark, as the center of internal administration operations against LaRouche, along with Walter Raymond and Kenneth DeGraffenreid.
Four events stand out in the decadent 12 years G.H.W. was in the White House: Iran/Contra in Reagan’s second term; G.H.W.’s population war against Iraq; the lost chance of 1989; and the deregulation of the U.S. economy into the casino economy strangling the majority of the U.S. population today.
Reagan/Bush pushed hard, on behalf of Wall Street, for complete deregulation of the economy, systematically undoing all of the Roosevelt Administration’s measures to protect the economy from the predators, including undoing key provisions of the Glass-Steagall regime. The Savings & Loan crisis, with Wall Street eagerly picking up the pieces, and the depression which commenced in 2008, are the most dramatic results of their policies.
The first Iraq War occurred when the increasingly psychologically challenged hyper-manic Poppy Bush changed his position, taking his marching orders directly from British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who challenged his manhood. Bush ordered the U.S. invasion of Iraq, allegedly to save Saudi Arabia from the potential depredations of Saddam Hussein, because Saddam had invaded the brutal Emirate of Kuwait, Bush’s former oil-drilling and financial clients. Saddam invaded after the U.S. and Britain had essentially told him that they would take no action if he did so. Thousands of Iraqis were killed in this initial attempt to destroy the viable states of the Middle East through war and genocide, redrawing the map, and reducing population to end all resistance to Anglo-American economic schemes.
Similarly, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Bush declined the opportunity to employ actual American System economics, such as the Marshall Plan, to use Europe’s existing high-technology platform in the Paris-Vienna-Berlin triangle as a productive pivot in rebuilding the devastated economies of the former Soviet Union. Instead, after Thatcher delivered the Crown’s wishes, Bush imposed policies which looted and destroyed these already devastated economies outright under the rubric of globalization. No state was going to ever again be allowed to challenge Anglo-American dominance: a New World Economic Order had come into being.
We will take up Iran/Contra below in discussing Jeb Bush’s career. He played a significant role in those events.
The Bush Babies: Come the Leviathan?
A quick overview of Bush family political deception can be gained by watching one Presidential debate, George W. Bush’s Oct. 12, 2000 foreign policy debate with Al Gore. In it, Bush promised, as a central plank of his “compassionate conservatism,” to pursue a “humble” foreign policy, avoiding the “Ugly American” stigma, where America dictates to other nations because “we know best.” He decried “arrogance” in foreign affairs. He argued that the American military was overextended, and that it was not America’s role to be the world’s policeman. He also attacked the idea of nation-building as absolutely contrary to his core beliefs.
George W. Bush was not supposed to be the next generation President after George H.W.—that role had been reserved for Jeb. Both ran for governor in 1994. Jeb lost his race in Florida to Lawton Chiles. George W., “handled” by Karl Rove, won his race against Ann Richards. Former Reagan National Security Advisor Richard Allen said that papa George H.W. Bush sported a fantastic resumé with no fundamental identity or principles—in Allen’s words, “there was no there, there.” George W. Bush presented the same personality without the resumé—in fact, a resumé which required endless cover-ups and fixes. He was the perfect vessel for the fascist dreams of Dick Cheney and the neo-conservative lunatics at the Project for a New American Century. They immediately set to work creating the present U.S. police state and global imperium in the wake of the Saudi attack on 9/11. The LaRouche movement covered the Nazi ideological roots of these events in the pamphlet series, “Children of Satan,” including Hitler’s use of the Reichstag Fire, which he staged, in order to consolidate his rise to power.
George W. Bush evaded the draft, abused cocaine and alcohol, and went bust, but financially benefitted in every business venture he touched, bailed out by G.H.W.’s networks. Early investors in his oil exploration company included George L. Ohrstrom, Jr. of The Plains and Loudoun County in Virginia, a classmate of his father at Greenwich County Day School in Connecticut, who was, according to his son, a very secretive person rumored to work in intelligence. Another was Jim Bath, a cutout for the Bush family’s longtime and massive financial support from the Saudis. Writing in Salon magazine in 2004, author Craig Unger puts Saudi investments in Bush family-related enterprises at $1,477,100,000.
When his first oil venture collapsed, G.W. was rescued by a company called Spectrum 7, an oil exploration company vested by the Dewitt family of Cincinnati. It merged with Bush Exploration, making George W. the new company’s CEO, providing him a salary and stock. In September 1986, with Spectrum 7 near collapse, Bush was rescued by an even stranger entity—Harken Energy.
Robert Sherrill, writing in the Texas Observer, described Harken as having “direct links to institutions involved in drug smuggling, foreign currency manipulation, and the CIA’s well-documented role in the destabilization of the Australian government.” Harken received money early in its existence from George Soros, who was still a major stockholder when Bush entered the firm. At the time of W’s involvement, one of its main investors was Harvard University. Richard J. Stone, Jr., the longtime chairman of Harvard Corporation, had been in the Texas oil business in the 1950s. G.H.W.’s crony in Zapata, Thomas J. Devine, had been treasurer of Stone’s Texas oil company. When Harken went public amidst financial difficulties, Jackson Stephens of the powerful Arkansas Stevens family arranged the underwriting of a stock offering by the Union Bank of Switzerland worth $25 million. As part of that deal, a seat on the board was given to its major investor, a Saudi sheikh whose banker, Khalid bin Mahfouz, was a shareholder in the infamous drug- and Saudi-connected intelligence front, BCCI bank. Harken also received huge investments from the Rupert clan of South Africa, which had close ties with the apartheid regime.
When Harken started to collapse, it suddenly beat out oil giant Amoco for offshore drilling rights in Bahrain, despite the fact that it had never drilled offshore or worked in a foreign country. The company’s stock soared and George Bush cashed out his shares two months later, with a profit of nearly $850,000. Bush and other insiders knew, however, that the company was near collapse, raising a strong smell of insider trading.
Next, Bush, with his $850,000, and further help from father’s friends and his own Yale friend Roland Betts, purchased a piece of the Texas Rangers baseball team. Karl Rove, who started his career as an assistant to G.H.W. at the Republican National Committee, loved to portray Bush as a manager of the Rangers. That, and W’s “born-again” Christian cure of his drug addictions, provided the story by which this incompetent could be sold to the public.
And Now Comes Jeb
Despite the claim that Jeb is the smart Bush baby, his profile is not that much different from his brother’s. Both were heavily involved in G.H.W.’s Presidential campaigns, both enjoy significant support from Wall Street and London, both claim policies of “compassionate conservatism,” whose true meaning is fascism with a democratic face.
After graduating from the University of Texas with a degree in Latin American studies, Jeb’s first job was as a banker, first in Texas and then in Venezuela. He worked for Texas Commerce Bank, a bank associated with G.H.W’s close advisor and former Secretary of State Jim Baker. Jeb came back to the United States to work for his father’s 1980 Presidential campaign in Florida. He immediately inserted himself into Miami’s Cuban exile networks, a hotbed of continuing anti-Castro and other CIA operations.
Based on Armando Codina’s fanatical support of G.H.W., and knowledge that the Bush name would open many doors, the wealthy Cuban real estate investor made Jeb his partner. Codina put Bush’s name on his company roster and gave him 40% of the profits despite the fact that Jeb had no experience in real estate. According to the St. Petersburg Times, one Miami real estate deal in 1984 was typical. Bush invested just $1,000 in an office building called Museum Tower. By 1990, he sold out for $346,000, all courtesy of Codina.
In 1992, Mother Jones examined the Bush family’s business dealings. With respect to Jeb, after detailing several shady deals, it spoke to a prosecutor who dealt with Jeb’s association with Miguel Recarey. He told them that in considering whether Jeb was a crook, or merely stupid, he concluded that Jeb was stupid.
The Recarey case is typical. Recarey was a Cuban exile who, according to the Washington Post,
“collected assault rifles, traveled with heavy security, and had his office wired with sophisticated eavesdropping equipment. He had a checkered past that included jail time for income tax evasion. He bragged about his ties to Tampa crime boss Santo Trafficante, Jr.”
Trafficante, of course, played a central role in CIA assassination attempts against Fidel Castro.
Recarey had a booming health maintenance organization, IMC, which was participating in a federal pilot project to test the viability of HMOs in reducing Medicare costs. When he needed a special waiver to expand his business, Jeb joined in a lobbying effort for Recarey in Washington, D.C., after receiving a $74,000 consulting fee from Recarey on a real estate deal which never took place. IMC collapsed amidst charges of massive Medicare fraud. Recarey fled the country after receiving an expedited IRS refund on taxes, finding sanctuary first in Venezuela, then in Spain.
But IMC was more than a federal boondoggle funded by Bush “free enterprise,” “kill them by cutting medical care” proponents. According to Oliver North’s notebooks from the Iran/Contra scandal, IMC was providing free medical treatment for G.H.W.’s illegal Contra “freedom” fighters.
Numerous sources place Jeb playing a central role in G.H.W.’s illegal activities on behalf of the Contras. Miami was a central recruiting ground for the Contras, and a hotbed of the money laundering which funded their activity after Congress prohibited federal funding in 1984. G.H.W. had escaped indictment by Lawrence Walsh in the Iran-Contra scandal by claiming he was “out of the loop.” As the Walsh investigation was winding down and there was no possibility that G.H.W. would be prosecuted, he turned over a long-subpoenaed diary which stated that he knew more than anyone about this covert action. When G.H.W. became President, he pardoned all the key Reagan Administration officials Walsh had indicted.
In their efforts to fund the Contras covertly, the CIA and G.H.W. turned to the Saudis, who put in millions, and to drug running, particularly cocaine. Early in the operation, the CIA obtained a waiver from Attorney General William French Smith, which excused them from reporting drug-running activities by “contractors.” The Contra drug-running and financing activities included support from the Medellín cartel and networks associated with former Nazi Klaus Barbie. More significantly, the Contras were savage killers who engaged in genocide throughout Central America. Journalists who sought to expose the Contra role in the flood of cocaine that hit the United States, including the San Jose Mercury’s Gary Webb, were subjected to harassment, ridicule, and firing by their publishers. Years later, the CIA admitted that it knew that Contra financing involved drug dealing.
In 1986, at the height of the Contra efforts, Jeb joined the five-person board of a new Swiss-owned bank in Miami called the Private Bank and Trust. The Miami Herald described the bank as a place where “the money of wealthy foreigners,” mostly Latino investors, “is managed—very discreetly.” The newspaper noted the bank’s “extreme secrecy.” Some of its clients were said to be linked to the drug cartels. Four years later, federal regulators seized the private bank, based on misappropriation of client funds.
Jeb also partnered in business with Richard Lawless, Jr., a former top CIA official and a major figure in the Iran/Contra dealings. Lawless was reportedly close to central figures in the Contra scandal, including lawyer David Addington and Alan Fiers, Jr.
These efforts of Jeb and his father on behalf of CIA-connected terrorists were not limited to the Contras. Jeb and his father were both crucial to the pardon of Orlando Bosch, who blew up a Cuban civilian airliner carrying the Cuban Olympic fencing team, and engaged in other terrorist incidents. Bosch’s pardon was opposed by the Justice Department, which noted that he was an unrepentant terrorist. There is much evidence that G.H.W. sat on intelligence as CIA chief which could have prevented the assassination of Orlando Letelier, a leading opponent of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, on the streets of Washington, D.C.
In his 1994 run for the Florida governorship, Jeb advocated privatizing every aspect of government. His program called for a popular referendum on any tax increases. He adopted what he called a “Phoenix plan” for welfare reform, limiting assistance to two years by the state, abolishing federal assistance to Florida for welfare, requiring recipients to name the fathers of their children, submit to random drug tests, and to work. He advocated doubling the number of Florida’s prisons, ending parole, and jailing juveniles rather than having them “in therapy.” His most frequently stated topic was acceleration of death penalty executions in Florida, allowing only one appeal, and abolishing the right to habeas corpus guaranteed in the Florida constitution. He campaigned for privatizing education through vouchers and charter schools.
Jeb started his gubernatorial campaign with a wide lead based on a significant national mobilization of funds from the Bush networks. G.H.W., appearing in Florida to campaign for his favorite son, acted like the man who was all used up. According to press accounts, he started crying when he attempted to talk about Jeb at campaign rallies. When Bush’s opponent Lawton Chiles finally took the gloves off and shined a light on Jeb’s business dealings, Jeb lost. In 1998, he ran again, adopting the same moderate, really no-issues campaign, that had been employed by G.H.W. in his race for Congress. The Democratic Party candidate was an effective “no show,” and the party itself had imploded, just prior to the campaign, based on a walk-out by the Black Caucus, some of whom supported Jeb.
In his 1994 campaign and after, Jeb attributed his shady business activities prior to the governorship to his being “naive.” Following his stint as governor, however, the same pattern continued. Determined, as he said, “to make a lot of money,” he hooked up with a company called InnoVida, whose chief executive was Carlos Osorio. According to the subsequent SEC complaint against Osorio, he recruited Jeb because he thought it would “add an air of legitimacy to InnoVida.” One of the company’s owners had been convicted of cocaine trafficking prior to the Bush association. Another board member had also been arrested for smuggling cocaine. The company’s dirty financial dealings had resulted in multiple lawsuits. All of this information was publicly available, had Bush engaged in the most basic due diligence. He joined InnoVida anyway. The company went belly-up in a shower of indictments and jail terms.
Jeb Bush became an advisor to Lehman Brothers shortly before its collapse, and was even approached to use Bush family influence to seek a bailout deal through Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. He sat on the Board of the British Barclay’s bank, which was a central player in the Libor rate-fixing scandal.
With respect to foreign policy, Jeb appears to be an unrepentant neo-conservative despite his effort to surround himself with G.H.W.’s so-called “realist” faction. He signed the manifesto for the Project for a New American Century in 1987, a document critical in engineering the never-ending genocide and terrorism in the Middle East. He now calls for U.S. military interventions against Iran, and similar policies which could readily ignite World War III. In short, he is, in every respect, a member of the species “Bush,” a species which has, at best, evolved from Nazi to universal fascist.
[1] The most important of the newer books on the Bush family are Russ Baker’s extensively researched Family of Secrets, and Kevin Phillips’ The Bush Dynasty. Robert Parry continues to be the most diligent reporter on the Bush family’s secret government apparatus.