(The following article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on May 20, 2013)
When George W. Bush became the Republican Governor of Texas, “he arrived indebted to dozens of industries and wealthy patrons” and “repaid some of his supporters with choice political appointments,” according to the Center for Public Integrity’s The Buying of the President 2000.
The same book indicated what the political situation was like in Texas state politics in 2000 -- before Texas’s governor moved into the White House in 2001 after receiving fewer popular votes than the Democratic Party candidate in the 2000 U.S. presidential election:
"One of the most prestigious political appointments is a seat on the University of Texas board of Regents. The board is filled with Bush’s top-dollar donors. The chair of the UT Regents is Donald Evans, Bush’s old friend and longtime fund-raiser who, as the finance chairman for Bush’s presidential bid, has overseen the campaign’s record-shattering fund-raising drive. Evans is the chief executive officer of Tom Brown, Inc., an oil and gas company based in Midland, Texas.
"In 1989, Bush joined the board as an outside director. He received $12,000 a year plus stock options for attending several meetings and participating in conference calls... Shortly after he was elected governor of Texas, Bush sold his Tom Brown holdings for a profit of $297,550.
"Another regent and top Bush patron is A.R. `Tony’ Sanchez, the chairman and chief executive of Sanchez-O’Brien Oil and Gas Corporation... Sanchez and his mother also own a controlling stake in International Bancshares Corporation, the holding company of International Bank of Commerce, a Texas banking chain founded by his father in 1966. Over [George W.] Bush’s career, Sanchez, members of his family, and employees of his companies have given him at least $230,150, making them his No. 2 career patron…
"Bush owed few people more than Richard Rainwater, the Fort Worth financier... Rainwater launched an investment company in 1994, Crescent Real Estate Equities Company... In 1997, Bush backed a plan to cut state property taxes that would have saved Crescent some $2.5 million in state taxes... Later that year,...Bush signed a bill into law that produced a $10 million windfall for Crescent... Dallas taxpayers were to foot most of the bill for the new sports arena…Rainwater, through Crescent, bought a 12 percent stake in the Mavericks. Under the purchase agreement, Crescent will get $10 million when the arena is completed…
"The Texas Teachers’ Retirement System...sold two office buildings and a mortgage on a third to Crescent in 1996 and 1997 at a $70.4 million loss... At the time of at least one of the sales, Bush owned about $100,000 worth of Crescent stock... The University of Texas Investment Management Company [UTIMCO]...has steered close to $1.7 billion of its assets into private investments; a third of that money has gone into funds run either by...[UTIMCO Chairman Hicks]’s business partner or by Bush patrons...
"Industries that have provided the bulk of Bush’s campaign contributions have gotten his help in a variety of endeavors, from staving off pesky environmental regulations and shielding themselves from consumer lawsuits to driving off meddlesome investigators... According to a study by Public Research Works, Bush raised $566,000 from...polluters for his two gubernatorial campaigns. And from March 4, 1999 to March 31, 1999 Bush raised $316,300... They included: Enron ( Bush’s No. 1 career patron); Vinson & Elkins (Bush’s No. 3 career patron), a law firm that represents Enron and Alcoa, a...polluter; and companies owned by the Bass family (Bush’s No. 5 career patron)."
And, coincidentally, some of the same ultra-rich folks who bankrolled former Texas governor Bush’s campaigns in the 1990s have apparently been donating a lot of money in the 21st-century to fund the campaigns of the current governor of Texas, former 2012 GOP presidential primaries candidate Rick Perry.
Between 2001 and Oct. 23, 2010, for example, Perry (a former U.S. Air Force officer who is the son of former Haskell County Commissioner Ray Perry) received $337,027 in campaign contributions from Lee Bass, $100,000 in campaign contributions from Sid Bass, and 265,000 in campaign contributions from Ray Hunt, according to the Texans for Public Justice website.
The same website also recalled that “as Texas' longest-serving governor, Rick Perry raised $98.9 million from 2001 through Oct. 23, 2010,” and that “Perry raised almost $49 million (or 50 percent of this money) from 193 mega donors who gave him $100,000 or more.”
Between 1990 and 2000, the number of people who lived in Austin increased from 465,622 to 656,562; and the number of people who lived in the Austin-Round Rock metropolitan area increased from 846,227 to 1,249,763 during the same period.
According to the “Forty Acres and a Shul: `It’s Easy as Dell’” essay by Cathy Schechter that appeared in Lone Stars of David: the Jews of Texas, between 1990 and 2000, Austin ’s Jewish-affiliated population also increased from 5,000 “to more than 10,000," and “by 2002, the American Jewish Yearbook estimated the city’s Jewish population at 13,500.”
But “the appearance of young `Dellionaire’ Jews who made millions in the brave new world of high-technology took the mellow Austin Jewish community by surprise.” Yet by 2007, Texas billionaire Michael Dell -- with an estimated personal wealth that year of $17.2 billion -- was the wealthiest ultra-rich person in Texas .
But in 2007 Robert Bass was still worth $5.5 billion, Ray Hunt was worth $4 billion, Sid and Lee Bass were worth $3 billion, and Ed Bass was worth $2.5 billion, according to Bryan Burrough's The Big Rich. The same book also noted that in 2007, coincidentally, “Hunt Oil received a lucrative concession to drill in northern Iraq,” and “Sid Bass, whose family, along with the Hunts, ranked among Bush’s largest financial backers, was photographed alongside the president, Laura Bush, and the queen of England...”
Showing posts with label George W. Bush. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George W. Bush. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Hidden History of Texas: 1974-1995--Part 19
(The following article was originally posted on The Rag Blog on May 7, 2013)
During the 1970s and early 1980s the folks who inherited the oil industry-based wealth of ultra-rich white Texans like Sid Richardson and H. L. Hunt continued to make big money -- and to use that big money to exercise a special influence in both Texas state politics and U.S. national politics.
As Bryan Burrough’s The Big Rich observed:
"For the state’s actual oilmen, the party that began with the 1973 [Arab oil] embargo, ran for 5 solid years. Drilling boomed. Profits mushroomed. Then, in 1978, things got even better... In just 7 short years prices rose 2,000 percent... By 1976...the children of H.L. Hunt’s two Dallas families and the corporations they controlled, were thriving as never before.
"Thanks in large part to rising oil prices, the Hunts were probably the world’s wealthiest family... Their net worth hovered in the $6 billion to $8 billion range, easily topping the next wealthiest American families, the Mellons and Rockefellers...
"The most successful Hunt during the 1970s was Ray, who began making over his father’s old Hunt Oil Company much as his Reunion project was changing the face of downtown Dallas... In 3 short years he quadrupled the size of Hunt Oil’s staff, increased its offshore leases from 100,000 to 1 million acres... Ray started a new magazine just for Dallas, D... By 1982 Texas Oil had luxuriated in a solid 10 years of record-high prices..."
And, coincidentally, the sixth-largest contributor of campaign funds for one of Texas’s representatives in the U.S. Senate during the 1980s and 1990s, Phil Gramm, came from the Bass Enterprises investment firm that the Bass family relatives of Sid Richardson formed after Richardson’s death, while the seventh-largest contributor of campaign funds for former U.S. Senator Gramm during this period was Ray Hunt’s Hunt Corporation, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s 1996 book, The Buying of the President.
But once the demand and market price for oil began to drop after 1982, many of the independent local oil companies in Texas began to lose money or go out of business; and many could not pay off the loans that major banks in Texas had given them during the boom years of the 1970s and early 1980s. So “in October 1983... First National of Midland collapsed” and “in the next decade 9 of the 10 largest Texas banks would follow suit,” according to The Big Rich.
In 1981, membership in the Texas labor union locals that were affiliated with the Texas AFL-CIO had “peaked at more than 290,000," according to the www.texasaflcio.org website. But the number of Texas workers who were Texas AFL-CIO-affiliated union members “then dropped dramatically during the oil bust of the 1980s;” and by 1995 membership was just 197,462, according to the Texas AFL-CIO’s website.
By the end of the 1980s many of the deregulated Savings and Loan (S&L) thrift institutions in Texas’s banking industry also had collapsed in a big way, after “real estate developers bought thrifts so they could have a private piggy bank to finance office buildings and condos no one needed,” “con artists set up loan scams and used thrifts to launder money,” and “thrift executives cooked the books and paid themselves high bonuses when their banks were actually losing money,” according to the 1991 edition of Louis Rukeyser’s Business Almanac.
As The Buying of the President observed in 1996, “Texas has the unpleasant distinction of topping the list of states with the most S&L failures with 65,” and “the state was second only to California in terms of the value of assets held by failed thrifts: California thrifts had $18,358 billion in assets compared with Texas’s $18,279 billion.”
And, coincidentally, the U.S. president who signed the S&L industry bail-out bill in 1989, George Herbert Walker Bush, was both a former Texas oil industry and banking executive and the father of Neil Bush -- who was sued by federal regulators “for regulation violations that allegedly contributed to the $1 billion collapse of Silverado Banking, a Denver thrift,” according to Louis Rukeyser’s Business Almanac.
Between 1974 and 1995 another son of the U.S. President who launched Gulf War I against Iraq in early 1991 (who, himself, would become the governor of Texas in 1995 and the U.S. President who launched both the endless U.S. war in Afghanistan in October 2001 and the endless U.S. war in Iraq in March 2003) -- George W. Bush II -- also worked as an executive in Texas’s oil industry.
Before joining with the Bass family’s former money manager and other business partners to purchase the Texas Rangers baseball team in 1989, former Republican Texas Governor Bush was an executive at the Harken Oil and Gas firm that both Harvard University and the ultra-rich Bass family financially backed.
Another ultra-rich Texas billionaire, Ross Perot, was able to exercise a special influence on the direction of U.S. presidential politics during the 1990s -- by spending $65 million of his surplus personal wealth to finance his own 1992 campaign to gain control of the White House -- for which over 19.7 million U.S. voters cast ballots in November, 1992 (and for which over 7.8 million U.S. voters also cast ballots in November, 1996).
Perot had gained his initial big wealth in 1966 after his private family business, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), suddenly became super-profitable when Texas Blue Shield/Blue Cross -- whose computer/data processing department Perot then headed -- received a lucrative contract from the U.S. government’s Social Security Administration to develop a computerized system for paying the Medicare bills;” and Perot’s Texas Blue Shield/Blue Cross employer then gave Perot’s private EDS firm “a subcontract to take over their data processing on the new Medicare program using, of course, the system just developed at government expense” (by the same firm whose computer/data processing department Perot headed), according to a November 1971 Ramparts magazine article.
And it was also during the 1974 to 1995 period of Texas history that a Democrat, Ann Richards, was the governor of Texas (between 1991 and 1995), and that more than 70 people were killed on April 19, 1993, following a 51-day siege and an armed attack by U.S. federal government law enforcement agents on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
During the 1970s and early 1980s the folks who inherited the oil industry-based wealth of ultra-rich white Texans like Sid Richardson and H. L. Hunt continued to make big money -- and to use that big money to exercise a special influence in both Texas state politics and U.S. national politics.
As Bryan Burrough’s The Big Rich observed:
"For the state’s actual oilmen, the party that began with the 1973 [Arab oil] embargo, ran for 5 solid years. Drilling boomed. Profits mushroomed. Then, in 1978, things got even better... In just 7 short years prices rose 2,000 percent... By 1976...the children of H.L. Hunt’s two Dallas families and the corporations they controlled, were thriving as never before.
"Thanks in large part to rising oil prices, the Hunts were probably the world’s wealthiest family... Their net worth hovered in the $6 billion to $8 billion range, easily topping the next wealthiest American families, the Mellons and Rockefellers...
"The most successful Hunt during the 1970s was Ray, who began making over his father’s old Hunt Oil Company much as his Reunion project was changing the face of downtown Dallas... In 3 short years he quadrupled the size of Hunt Oil’s staff, increased its offshore leases from 100,000 to 1 million acres... Ray started a new magazine just for Dallas, D... By 1982 Texas Oil had luxuriated in a solid 10 years of record-high prices..."
And, coincidentally, the sixth-largest contributor of campaign funds for one of Texas’s representatives in the U.S. Senate during the 1980s and 1990s, Phil Gramm, came from the Bass Enterprises investment firm that the Bass family relatives of Sid Richardson formed after Richardson’s death, while the seventh-largest contributor of campaign funds for former U.S. Senator Gramm during this period was Ray Hunt’s Hunt Corporation, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s 1996 book, The Buying of the President.
But once the demand and market price for oil began to drop after 1982, many of the independent local oil companies in Texas began to lose money or go out of business; and many could not pay off the loans that major banks in Texas had given them during the boom years of the 1970s and early 1980s. So “in October 1983... First National of Midland collapsed” and “in the next decade 9 of the 10 largest Texas banks would follow suit,” according to The Big Rich.
In 1981, membership in the Texas labor union locals that were affiliated with the Texas AFL-CIO had “peaked at more than 290,000," according to the www.texasaflcio.org website. But the number of Texas workers who were Texas AFL-CIO-affiliated union members “then dropped dramatically during the oil bust of the 1980s;” and by 1995 membership was just 197,462, according to the Texas AFL-CIO’s website.
By the end of the 1980s many of the deregulated Savings and Loan (S&L) thrift institutions in Texas’s banking industry also had collapsed in a big way, after “real estate developers bought thrifts so they could have a private piggy bank to finance office buildings and condos no one needed,” “con artists set up loan scams and used thrifts to launder money,” and “thrift executives cooked the books and paid themselves high bonuses when their banks were actually losing money,” according to the 1991 edition of Louis Rukeyser’s Business Almanac.
As The Buying of the President observed in 1996, “Texas has the unpleasant distinction of topping the list of states with the most S&L failures with 65,” and “the state was second only to California in terms of the value of assets held by failed thrifts: California thrifts had $18,358 billion in assets compared with Texas’s $18,279 billion.”
And, coincidentally, the U.S. president who signed the S&L industry bail-out bill in 1989, George Herbert Walker Bush, was both a former Texas oil industry and banking executive and the father of Neil Bush -- who was sued by federal regulators “for regulation violations that allegedly contributed to the $1 billion collapse of Silverado Banking, a Denver thrift,” according to Louis Rukeyser’s Business Almanac.
Between 1974 and 1995 another son of the U.S. President who launched Gulf War I against Iraq in early 1991 (who, himself, would become the governor of Texas in 1995 and the U.S. President who launched both the endless U.S. war in Afghanistan in October 2001 and the endless U.S. war in Iraq in March 2003) -- George W. Bush II -- also worked as an executive in Texas’s oil industry.
Before joining with the Bass family’s former money manager and other business partners to purchase the Texas Rangers baseball team in 1989, former Republican Texas Governor Bush was an executive at the Harken Oil and Gas firm that both Harvard University and the ultra-rich Bass family financially backed.
Another ultra-rich Texas billionaire, Ross Perot, was able to exercise a special influence on the direction of U.S. presidential politics during the 1990s -- by spending $65 million of his surplus personal wealth to finance his own 1992 campaign to gain control of the White House -- for which over 19.7 million U.S. voters cast ballots in November, 1992 (and for which over 7.8 million U.S. voters also cast ballots in November, 1996).
Perot had gained his initial big wealth in 1966 after his private family business, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), suddenly became super-profitable when Texas Blue Shield/Blue Cross -- whose computer/data processing department Perot then headed -- received a lucrative contract from the U.S. government’s Social Security Administration to develop a computerized system for paying the Medicare bills;” and Perot’s Texas Blue Shield/Blue Cross employer then gave Perot’s private EDS firm “a subcontract to take over their data processing on the new Medicare program using, of course, the system just developed at government expense” (by the same firm whose computer/data processing department Perot headed), according to a November 1971 Ramparts magazine article.
And it was also during the 1974 to 1995 period of Texas history that a Democrat, Ann Richards, was the governor of Texas (between 1991 and 1995), and that more than 70 people were killed on April 19, 1993, following a 51-day siege and an armed attack by U.S. federal government law enforcement agents on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
Monday, March 4, 2013
50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Bush I And The JFK Assassination
Coincidentally, a few days after JFK was ambushed on November 22, 1963, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memorandum to the U.S. State Department regarding the JFK assassination. According to an article, "`George Bush' C.I.A. Operative" by Joseph McBride, which appeared in the July 16/23, 1988 issue of The Nation magazine, this November 29, 1963 FBI memorandum was "subject headed `Assassination of President John F. Kennedy Nov. 22, 1963" and "In it, Hoover reports that the bureau had briefed `Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency' shortly after the assassination..."
The same Nation article also revealed that "a source with close connections to the intelligence community confirms that Bush started working for the agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a cover for clandestine activities." The Nation's intelligence community source had "worked with the agency in the late 1950s and through the 1960s" and he stated that Bush "was involved in the Caribbean" and "I know he was involved in the suppression of things after the Kennedy assassination.'"
Plausible Denial: Was The CIA Involved In The Assassination of JFK? by Mark Lane also noted that:
"There is evidence suggesting that [George] de Mohrenschildt served as a CIA control officer who directed Oswald's actions. De Mohrenschildt died from a gun shot just as he was about to be questioned by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. After his death, his personal telephone book was located. It contained this entry: `Bush, George H.W. (Poppy) 1412 W. Ohio also Zapata Petroleum Midland.'"
(Downtown 6/17/92)
The same Nation article also revealed that "a source with close connections to the intelligence community confirms that Bush started working for the agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a cover for clandestine activities." The Nation's intelligence community source had "worked with the agency in the late 1950s and through the 1960s" and he stated that Bush "was involved in the Caribbean" and "I know he was involved in the suppression of things after the Kennedy assassination.'"
Plausible Denial: Was The CIA Involved In The Assassination of JFK? by Mark Lane also noted that:
"There is evidence suggesting that [George] de Mohrenschildt served as a CIA control officer who directed Oswald's actions. De Mohrenschildt died from a gun shot just as he was about to be questioned by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. After his death, his personal telephone book was located. It contained this entry: `Bush, George H.W. (Poppy) 1412 W. Ohio also Zapata Petroleum Midland.'"
(Downtown 6/17/92)
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Obama Team Was Briefed By George W. Bush's Administration
“Former president George W. Bush is earning major money on the speaking circuit in his post-presidential life....Bush has made an estimated $15 million since leaving the White House. The former president reportedly boasts a speaking fee between $100,000 and $150,000…”
--from a May 20, 2011 huffingtonpost.com article
Obama Team Was Briefed By George W. Bush’s Administration
Most grassroots U.S. anti-war activists believe that former U.S. President George W. Bush, former U.S. Vice-President Cheney and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair should be brought to trial on war crimes allegations as a result of their role in launching the 20003 US/UK/Nato attack on people in Iraq. Yet between 2009 and 2012 former U.S. President George W. Bush has apparently been allowed to earn a lot of money from his post-White House career book contracts and speaking fees, instead of being indicted by the Democratic Obama Administration’s Justice Department for possible war crimes and violation of the Nuremberg Accords.
One reason might be because the Republican Bush Administration apparently briefed the Democratic Obama Administration in a helpful way prior to the January 20, 2009 inauguration of 2012 Democratic presidential candidate Obama. As Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter recalled in his 2010 book The Promise: President Obama, Year One:
--from a May 20, 2011 huffingtonpost.com article
Obama Team Was Briefed By George W. Bush’s Administration
Most grassroots U.S. anti-war activists believe that former U.S. President George W. Bush, former U.S. Vice-President Cheney and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair should be brought to trial on war crimes allegations as a result of their role in launching the 20003 US/UK/Nato attack on people in Iraq. Yet between 2009 and 2012 former U.S. President George W. Bush has apparently been allowed to earn a lot of money from his post-White House career book contracts and speaking fees, instead of being indicted by the Democratic Obama Administration’s Justice Department for possible war crimes and violation of the Nuremberg Accords.
One reason might be because the Republican Bush Administration apparently briefed the Democratic Obama Administration in a helpful way prior to the January 20, 2009 inauguration of 2012 Democratic presidential candidate Obama. As Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter recalled in his 2010 book The Promise: President Obama, Year One:
“…Obama was grateful for the generous help extended by everyone in the Bush White House from the start of the transition…President Bush made a point of making sure that the Obama team was fully briefed on all national security matters. The result was a series of meetings, the first ever between outgoing and incoming senior officials…”
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