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home >> the library >> curtis lang archive >> BAD COMPANY: Part 1
BAD COMPANY: Part 1
Page 6: HOUSTON SUGAR DADDY << Previous: A GOOD BIDNESS CLIMATEHOUSTON SUGAR DADDY
The symbiotic relationship between George Bush and the Texas Raj emerged crystal clear during the late 1970s after Bush left the CIA. From Carter's victory in 1976 until the end of 1980, George Bush conducted a continuous campaign for president and/or vice-president. This took its toll on the Bush finances.
 As usual, a powerful, sharklike father figure came to Bush's rescue. In 1978, future Bush Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher, oilman, real estate entrepreneur, business crony of Ferdinand Marcos, and Republican fundraiser for presidents Nixon, Ford, and Bush, cut George Bush in on a partnership in one of the largest tank-barge companies in America, called Hollywood Marine Inc., a subsidiary of Hollywood Holdings. Secretary of State James Baker also invested in the same Hollywood partnership beginning that same year.
In 1980, as Bush continued his never-ending campaign for president, he managed to scrape together an income of only $36,063, of which $5000 came from Hollywood Marine. So far, Bush has reportedly received $130,000 from this investment and stands to receive $20,000 a year in the future.
Mosbacher told The Washington Post that he considered the barge business to be a "very, very good investment" and admitted that allowing Bush into his limited partnership constituted "not a big favor, but a favor."
Mosbacher, whom the president calls "as close a confidant as I've had," currently oversees an agency charged with monitoring American waterways for pollution, yet apparently sees no conflict of interest in owning large chunks of a company that is one of the largest polluters of American rivers, harbors, and other inland waterways, according to Common Cause, Hollywood's barges, small marine trailer tanks for use on the nation's fragile inland waterways, have spilled over 200 times since 1980, according to government documents.
Apparently, the fact that Mosbacher involved the president in his business as a favor, that this cash cow is vital to the president's financial well-being, and that Bush appointed Mosbacher as one of the major regulators of his own business bothers neither Mosbacher, Baker, nor Bush.
The Texas Raj has always believed that those who bear the burden of government should also profit from it. That's one proposition that both George Bush and Ronald Reagan could agree on--probably the only one during the 1980 primary season, when they bashed one another mercilessly in their quest for the Republican nomination. When Bush lost Texas to Reagan, it was clear that the Gipper had won, voodoo economics and all. Bush, the eternal fair-haired boy, managed to convince a hostile Ronald Reagan to take him on as surrogate son, establishing for himself an activist, involved vice-presidency under Reagan's sometimes wandering tutelage.
By this time, Bush's sons were certainly old enough to consciously absorb the lessons of the 1980 campaign--fight like hell to be your own man and to achieve power on your own, but if you fail, use every available means to ingratiate yourself with a real man of power, and you'll win in life every time.
Reagan always found it hard to believe that George Bush was a real conservative. But if being a real conservative means enabling the rich to profit from the dismantling of government programs, as Reagan demonstrated, then Bush and his friends in the Texas Raj certainly had no quarrel with that.
To prove his commitment to using government as a vehicle for private gain, as vice-president Bush headed the Task Force on Regulatory Relief, a typically hard-nosed administration witch-hunt that sparked a wave of mindless deregulation of all types of industries, creating the climate for environmental and financial hazards ranging from the dumping of hazardous waste in sewers to the trillion-dollar savings and loan scandal.
Bush proclaimed in 1988 that one of his "proudest accomplishments as Vice President has been to help eliminate needless government regulations that have stifled our economy, raised prices and cost jobs."
But Ralph Nader's Public Citizen found that in case after case Bush and his deregulatory zealots "placed the economic interests of the oil, drug, auto, chemical and other industries above the health and safety of the nation."
The most damning indictment of vice-president Bush remains the host of unanswered questions surrounding his role in the Iran-contra scandal, since it is known that several of Bush's deputies coordinated Oliver North's guns-and-drugs pipeline, and that Bush himself engineered a sweet aid deal for Honduras in exchange for Honduran acceptance of a new role as contra military base in the Nicaraguan war. George Bush's pivotal role in coordinationg Ronald Reagan's secret little wars was institutionalized in 1981, when Reagan set up the National Security Planning Group (NSPG) and charged chairman George Bush with running America's "real crisis management unit" with "final authority for covert operations by the CIA," writes John Prados, in Keepers of the Keys.
Reagan took the NSPG quite seriously--he attended three NSC or NSPG meetings a week. The sordid Iran-contra episode probably did more to damage Washington ethics than any other single event in modern history--but it was far more than a mere national security scandal. It sent a larger moral message as well, one with personal implications.
"Part of the explanation for the collapse of any serious conflict-of-interest yardstick to restrain the mingling of party politics, personal business and the for-profit modification of U.S. foreign policy is simple," charges Kevin Phillips, author of The Politics of Rich and Poor. "Back in the mid 1980s, the line between private industry, private financial bankrollers and foreign policy was dissolved in the Iran-contra blueprint to aid the Nicaraguan rebels. Since then, Persian Gulf bankers and Washington consultants have become de facto assistant secretaries of state and assistant U.S. trade representatives."
 Nor was this the only instance in which Vice-President George Bush played a crucial role in trading with America's enemies. George Bush successfully lobbied to have over $800 million in loan credits and technology delivered to Saddam Hussein, over the objections of the Pentagon, between 1987 and the start of the gulf war. Covert assistance also flowed to Iraq during the Reagan-Bush years.
"Bush's efforts reflected a pattern of personal intervention and support for aid to Iraq that extended from his early years as vice president...through the first year of his own presidency and almost to the eve of the Persian Gulf war," Murray Waas and Douglas Frantz reported recently in the Los Angeles Times. Following in Prescott Bush's footsteps, George Bush helped with the re-industrialization of a belligerent dictatorship that America eventually had to confront in battle.
If this is how George Bush imparts family values, and aristocratic notions of high-minded public service, then America had better find another role model. Meanwhile, the Bush family dynasty, with all its cousins and campaign handlers, will continue to promote the president's reputation as a patrician exemplar of noblesse oblige. That facade will come in handy on the campaign trail, where George Bush and his family continue to prove the truth of an old adage by Mark Twain: "Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves--and
how little we think of the other person."
Bush family research coordinated by Billy Treger. Further assistance by Jane Ludlam, Erica Nicotra, and Sabine Guez.
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