Bush League
Facts you need to know about George Walker Bush Jr., the next president of the United States.
Mr. Bush is a member of the Republican Party, which advocates strong families, personal responsibility, free enterprise, and a strong military.
He has raised $58 million so far for the 2000 presidential campaign. His only serious opponent at the moment is Senator John McCain, a likable war-hero whose key platform is campaign finance reform. Well, I suppose you could consider Mr. Forbes as a candidate too. Like Mr. Bush, he has lots of money, but he doesn’t have very much charisma. I don’t think he has much of a chance.
McCain has raised about 1/10th of what George W. Bush has raised. The story is that he cannot win, no matter how much people like him, because you just can’t beat $58 million dollars. If this is true, then we are essentially admitting that the Republican nomination for president is almost entirely about money. That’s not completely bad-- you have to have some measurable prospect of success in order to raise money. And the candidates that have lots of their own money to spend, like Ross Perot and Forbes, haven’t actually done very well. Still, it makes you wonder.
George W. Bush has raised his $58 million from people who don’t expect any special favours in return. Nothing at all. Right.
Former Chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl, is in big, big trouble right now because he accepted about $1 million from unidentified donors. The German people are outraged and the Christian Democratic Party is at its lowest point in the polls in fifty years. They think he might have pedaled some influence in exchange for that $1 million.
How can they possibly be so cynical and suspicious?
In 1979, George W. Bush-- he of the "self-reliance" principle-- created Arbusto Energy all by himself, with money from family and friends in high places, including Lewis Lehrman, the Rite-Aid drugstores chairman, and William Draper III who was later appointed by President Reagan to the Export Import Bank, and, the famous and slick James Baker III. George W. Bush, by then a seasoned pro, then ran for Congress, and lost badly to a Democrat. Then his business nearly went bankrupt, but a good friend of the family helped arrange a $1 million investment from Philip Uzielli.
Bush smartly merged his company with a partnership called Spectrum 7, thanks to a couple of old Yale buddies. This venture also collapsed. Then a company called Harken Energy Corporation bought Spectrum 7 and gave Bush a seat on the board and $120,000 a year as a "consultant".
Then Bush moved to Washington to help manage his father’s successful campaign against Michael Dukakis. He got to meet a lot of rich, influential people. Very nice for him.
In 1989, Bush was invited to join a partnership that was purchasing the Texas Rangers baseball team. Though he owned a measly 2% of the team, Bush was the most visible of the owners, attending every home game. The reported purchase price of the team was $86 million, but nobody seems to be able to explain how they arrived at that figure, since the total amount paid by the new owners is no where near it.
While Bush was attending ball games (and his father was president), Harken Energy continued to flounder and lost $40 million. Just when it was ready to die, the Emirate of Bahrain came to the rescue with big bucks.
The Emirate of Bahrain. I guess he just happened to be passing through Texas that day and spotted a great investment opportunity, right?
Why would some Arab oil Emirate half a world away come and rescue a tiny little Texas drilling company? Well, did it help that the U.S. State Department and the American ambassador to Bahrain (one of those big party donors who gets rewarded with a plum post, Charles Hostler) were good friends of George Bush Sr., President of the United States of America?
After making a good dollar on his investment in Harken, Bush sold his shares, by coincidence, just before Iraq invaded Kuwait (driving down the share values of every oil company dealing in the Gulf). Amazing good luck there, George. The Securities and Exchange Commission thought the timing was a little too fortuitous and investigated.
If you own shares of a company and you are also one of the executives of that company, as George W. Bush Jr. was, then it is very illegal to sell off your shares on the basis of information you have received which is not generally available to the other stockholders. You have essentially cheated the other shareholders by dumping the consequential losses entirely on their shoulders.
Now, do you honestly think they might have found a case of "insider trading" involving the President’s own son? Do you?
Then, in 1990, Mr. Bush decided that his team needed a new ballpark. Following standard procedure in the U.S. (but not, apparently, in Canada), he threatened to move the team to a different town, unless the city of Dallas built him a stadium for almost nothing and turned over 270 acres of valuable real estate. Hm. Do I hear the phrase "self-reliance" echoing in the distance? Surely Mr. Bush was not, like some indolent welfare cheat, prospering through government largesse?
The mayor said, "yes, sir, Mr. Son of the President" and forked over the taxpayer’s dough. He even had a recalcitrant owner’s property condemned by the city so the baseball team could pay less than half it’s assessed value. The family sued and were awarded $4 million. Harper’s Magazine described the jury as "outraged". But, hell, come election time, that’s only 12 votes.
As governor, Bush appointed a gentleman named Tom Hicks, an investment broker, to the Board of Regents of the University of Texas. This gave Hicks access to the University’s endowment fund which was worth about $13 billion. Isn’t that amazing? That’s a lot of money for a university to have. This money was generated by oil found on property that had been donated to the University many, many years ago. It belonged to the taxpayers of the State of Texas. Mr. Bush wanted to make sure that those taxpayers got good value out of their investments, I guess. But Mr. Bush and Mr. Hicks didn’t seem to like the fact that the fund was administered in such a way that the public could actually check up on what the administrators were doing with it. Very inconvenient. So what Governor Bush did was pass legislation transferring control of a lot of that money to a body called UTIMCO, which, unlike the Board of Regents, was shielded from public accountability by different rules and regulations. In addition, Honest George appointed other generous donors to the Republican party to the Board of Regents. It was all quite cozy and "legal".
Hicks used his position with UTIMCO to obtain information about companies that were interested in obtaining investments from the Regents’ fund. The same information, you should know, is very, very useful to a company like Hicks, Muse, which manages leveraged buy-outs for a percentage. Very, very useful. Suddenly, University money began pouring into companies managed or controlled by Hicks, and by Republican loyalists, former White House staffers under Nixon and Reagan, and friends of George Bush Jr. By a coincidence, Hicks, Muse began to also do a lot of business with many of these companies.
Meanwhile, George’s dad, George senior, got himself a posh post-presidential job with a company called Carlyle, which pays him large sums of money, usually in the form of stock, for making speeches at events sponsored by itself.
Finally, Mr. Hicks decided that he too was a baseball fan. He bought the Texas Rangers for three times the price that Bush and his partners had paid for it. Three times! And, surprise, surprise, George W. must have bought some more shares: he now had a 12% stake. But wait-- he didn’t actually "buy" those shares. What? With his own money? Are you kidding?! His partners in the team gave him the shares. For nothing! Boy, these are generous people! Of course, they might have been expressing gratitude for all the hard work George did, persuading the Mayor of Dallas and the governor, Ann Richards, to build the team a stadium under terms that do kindness to the word "sweetheart". Or maybe it was in gratitude for his encouragement and support of Mr. Hicks’ activities at the University of Texas. Who knows?
This is the man who wants to "restore" integrity and decency to the White House. Reminds me of Nixon’s oft-quoted promise to get crime off the streets of America.
The odd thing about Bush is how utterly brazen he is. His entire life has been about nothing other than using other people’s money to accumulate personal wealth. Even so, he never hit the big time until he finally got his hands on the public purse.
He didn’t do anything useful as governor (just as his father never did anything particularly useful as president). He has no vision, no great plan, no interesting policies. He doesn’t even pretend to, really. He merely dispatches correct slogans and party mantras and grooves on the adoration.
Nixon was equally "conservative", in that bizarre credentialist sort of way that provides the currency of political debate in the U.S. But, ironically, he was far more interested in political issues and policy and strategy than George Jr. is. By gosh, you could even say that Nixon had a twisted way of holding the welfare of the nation dear to his heart. You can’t say the same thing about Bush. It just doesn’t show.
Bush Jr. is about as calculating and cynical as they come. I can’t figure out why he’s running. I think he just wants to add "president of the United States" to his resume, and then get on with the post-presidential jackpot of honorary chairmanships and board appointments.
McCain, like Nixon, has some kind of vision about things. He’s a bit of a pragmatist, and a bit foolish at times. I like him more than Bush because at least he has some idea of the real purpose of a politician.
Bush is constantly touted by the media as being from an old "patrician" family, a phrase that nicely implies respectability and dignity. Let’s consider the family:
Prediction: if elected, Bush’s administration will be the most corrupt since Taft. Bush will bring in a staff that will make Haldeman, Erlichman, and Colson look like boy scouts. These guys will know that their time is limited, so they will make the best of their 15 minutes of fame: there will be graft and pillaging on a grand scale. The George W. Bush administration will collapse after three years in scandal and disarray. The next administration after that will finally introduce substantial changes to the campaign finance rules.
[notes: 2011-12 -- I forgot one thing-- it's only corruption if it isn't normal operating procedure; what Bush did was make corruption (eg. Cheney's secret meetings with the oil industry, outsourcing military supplies and operations, deregulation, tax cuts for the rich) routine government procedure, which meant there was no entity to "scandalize" this behaviour.
