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Bush1 41 H

21 tags?! including his own b41; rogue's gallery, promote primary

bak 819 3 24

elected 1988, lost 1992

 (Horton ad beat dukakis)

reauthorized clean air act; went to Rio; commissioned NAS study

see iran contra

see montreal

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fork one, no corps?

chevron, enron, halliburton, kinder morgan, saudi , harlan crow, hunt oil, erik prince? blackwater

gulf war one to defend from Saddam (former ally, iran iraq war?)

clarence thomas?

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iraq.war.juhasz

...Texan. After all, Bush was born in Connecticut, and he returned to the East Coast at age fifteen to attend the prestigious Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts, followed by college and business school at Yale and Harvard, respectively. As a result of his loss, Bush vowed that he "would never be out-Texaned again" in his political career.21 In 1984, Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation bought out Bush's oil companies. Although both of Bush's companies had failed, they were purchased and Bush was retained as Spectrum 7's chairman and CEO likely due to the fact that his father had recently become vice president of the United States. Spectrum 7, which owed more than $3 million in debts by 1986, was saved through a merger with Harken Energy, which retained Bush as a board member and consultant.22 Tapping into his many friendly and profitable connections to the Saudi royals, Bush raised $25 million for Harken by bringing Saudi real estate tycoon Sheikh Abdullah Taha Bakhsh onto the board. Harken subsequently received a gas and oil exploration contract with Bahrain in 1989. 23 After working on his father's presidential campaign as liaison to the religious right, Bush began his second career as an owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team in 1989. When he sold his shares in 1998, he earned more than $14.5 million in profit. In the interim, he was elected governor of Texas in 1994 and again in 1998.

Bush's policies as governor deeply favored corporations and the wealthy. For example, in 1999 Houston overtook Los Angeles as the smoggiest U.S. city. This was due in part to Bush's decision to allow Texas's more than 800 oil refineries and chemical plants (which were contributing 900,000 tons of pollution annually) to choose whether or not they would comply with the state's clean air regulations, rather than requiring them to do so. Bush cut taxes on corporations and individuals and increased policies directing financial benefits to both.

As a result, by 2000, Texas ranked forty-ninth among states in overall taxes collected and fiftieth in per capita state spending. Economic inequality overall in Texas rose dramatically during Bush's tenure as the incomes of those at the top soared and those in the middle and bottom either stagnated or dropped. Texas then joined Louisiana and New York as the three states with the worst income inequality in the nation.24

Bush was very good to the oil and energy sectors, and they, in turn, were very good to him. Kenneth Lay and the Houston-based energy services company, the Enron Corporation, were Bush's all-time career patrons, contributing more money than any individual and company to his political campaigns. That is, before Enron was found guilty of defrauding its investors, including the State of California, of billions of dollars, which led to the company's 2001 bankruptcy and Lay's 2004 indictment on eleven counts of securities fraud (for which he is currently standing trial). In fact, Bush had an unprecedented ability to raise money for his campaigns. Charles Lewis of the Center on Public Integrity put it this way: "George W. Bush has altogether redefined the parameters of political fundraising," shattering all previous fundraising records in 1999 to 2000 and again in 2003 to 2004.25 George W. Bush certainly had the right connections and the right politics, but, if there were any doubts that he belonged in the Pax Americana brotherhood, he put them all to rest with his 2002 National Security Strategy,

...Khalilzad served as a paid adviser for the California-based Unocal Oil Corporation (purchased by Chevron in 2005). In the mid 1990s, he conducted risk analyses for Unocal on a proposed 890-mile, $2-billion, 1.9-billion-cubic-feet-per-day natural gas pipeline project, which would have extended through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Khalilzad's work brought him "into direct discussions with Afghanistan's Taliban and even led him to advocate publicly in support of the regime. In 1996, he penned a Washington Post Op-Ed titled "Afghanistan: Time to Reengage," in which he argued "The Taliban does not practice the anti-US, style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran.... We should ... be willing to offer recognition and humanitarian assistance and to promote international economic reconstruction. ... It is time for the United States to reengage [the Taliban]."17 In 2001, the Washington Post reported, "Four years ago [December 1997] at a luxury Houston hotel, oil company adviser Zalmay Khalilzad was chatting pleasantly over dinner with leaders of Afghanistan's Taliban regime about their shared enthusiasm for a proposed multibillion-dollar pipeline deal."18...

Chapter 4 The Corporations BECHTEL, CHEVRON, HALLIBURTON, AND LOCKHEED MARTIN

As the CEO of Halliburton Energy Services, the board of directors doesn't sit me down and say "John, make this a better planet." They want us to make and create wealth for our shareholders and employees. So the only way we can adopt a sustainability agenda is it must create sustainable wealth for all our shareholders. —John Gibson, Halliburton president and CEO, February 2004 Corporate globalization continues as a model, despite the devastation it is known to cause, for one very simple reason: It works—only not in the way that its advocates promise. It has successfully restricted the ability of governments and communities all over the world to regulate the activities of multinational corporations.

As a result, these companies have been freed to scour the globe in search of the cheapest locations to produce, the most abundant natural resources, and the most business-friendly governments. Under the theory of "what is good for corporations is good for everyone," laws the world over, including in the United States, have been rewritten specifically to benefit corporate growth and profit.

The result is an unprecedented shift in global economic power from countries to corporations and a concurrent concentration of wealth in the hands of an ever-shrinking group of the ultra-wealthy and powerful. In many ways, corporations have supplanted governments as the dominant economic force in the world. In 2002, corporations represented fifty-two of the hundred largest economies in the world.2 The sales of the largest 200 corporations are growing faster than overall global economic activity. The largest corporations (by revenue) are heavily concentrated in the United States. According to Forbes magazine, in 2005, 75 of the 200 largest corporations were U.S.- based— more than the next three nations combined: Japan (28), France (21), and Germany (20).

Therefore, if corporate globalization worked not only to make corporations rich but also to make everyone better off, as its advocates promise, we would expect its benefits to be most evident in the United States. The theory is that wealth generated by these companies should trickle down the American economic ladder, lift the poor out of poverty, and spread wealth across the nation. The reality is that the wealth being generated by the companies is locked firmly at the top.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are not only getting poorer but are also increasing in number. In fact, since 1983, the only segment of the U.S. population that has experienced large wealth gains is the richest 20 percent.3 Just compare CEO pay to that of the average worker. Twenty years ago, U.S. corporate CEOs earned on average forty-two times more than production workers. Today, they earn a whopping 431 times more. 4 Put another way, if the average production worker's pay had kept pace with that of CEOs, he or she would be taking home more than $110,000 a year instead of less than $28,000.

Likewise, the average minimum wage earner would be taking home over $23 an hour instead of $5.15. Imagine what one could do with an extra $18 an hour— perhaps afford a better place to live, child care during work hours, or health insurance for the entire family. Instead, in 2004, while seventy-six more Americans became billionaires, poverty increased (both the number of poor people and their percentage of the total population), real median earnings of full-time workers fell, median household income fell, fewer people had health insurance, and more people were living in poverty even though they had jobs.5

How do low pay and no health insurance translate in real-life terms? The 2005 UN Human Development Report found that the infant mortality rate in the United States is comparable to that in Malaysia—a country with a quarter the income. The UN report also found that infant death rates are higher for black children in Washington, DC, than for children in Kerala, India. Inequality as a result of corporate globalization policy is not restricted to the United States; it is a growing global phenomenon.

Professor Robert Wade of the London School of Economics, the most respected economist following this trend, reported in the Economist magazine, "Global inequality is worsening rapidly. ... Technological change and financial liberalization result in a disproportionately fast increase in the number of households at the extreme rich end, without shrinking the distribution at the poor end... .The richest 10 percent pulled away from the median, while the poorest 10 percent fell away from the median, falling absolutely and by a large amount."6

Corporate globalization persists as a model, therefore, because it works for a specific group of people. Of course, when it comes to the distribution of benefits between corporations and governments, or between CEOs and the rest of us, it can be very difficult to determine where one group ends and the other begins with the Bush administration. The president, vice president, and the secretaries of the U.S. Defense, Energy, Treasury, and Commerce Departments are all former corporate CEOs. The secretaries of the U.S. State, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation Departments are all former corporate executives or directors.

The oil sector is prominently represented in both the Bush Agenda and the Bush administration. It is worth repeating that, for the first time in American history, the president, vice president, and secretary of state are all former energy company officials, and the only other U.S. president to come from the oil or energy business was George W. Bush's father. More specifically, both the president and vice president are former chief executives of Texas-based oil services companies with deep financial and political ties to the Middle East. Furthermore, both the president and secretary of state have more experience as oil executives than they do as public servants.

Prior to his 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush had spent eleven years in the oil business and just six in government service. Similarly, before she became Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice had spent ten years on the board of directors of Chevron, but less than three working for the government. Of these three people, only Vice President Cheney can claim more experience in the government than as an oil company executive, with some thirty years as a federal employee versus five years as CEO and president of the world's largest oil services company, Halliburton.

The defense industry is also well represented in the Bush administration—particularly Lockheed Martin, which boasts no fewer then • sixteen current and past executives and directors (including the vice president's wife) who have served in George W. Bush's administration. The construction industry also has a strong presence, most notably the Bechtel Corporation, with key Bechtel executives—including company CEO Riley Bechtel—situated in influential positions in the administration. Chevron, Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, and Bechtel represent three key pillars of the Bush Agenda: oil, war, and building the infrastructure of corporate globalization. As detailed in the next chapters, not only have their past and present executives directly shaped the Bush Agenda, but the companies continue to profit from its implementation today. '

For example, while Cheney was secretary of defense for George H.W. Bush, his Defense Department paid the Halliburton Corporation $9 million to study whether the military's logistics services should be privatized. After Halliburton determined that the services should be privatized, it was awarded the first privatization contract. Three years later, Cheney became CEO of Halliburton. From this position, he advocated for war against Iraq while his company simultaneously conducted at least $73 million of work for Hussein.

As vice president, he has ushered the country into war against Iraq, while Halliburton has received U.S. government contracts in Iraq worth nearly $ 11 billion to perform services privatized under Cheney's watch. Halliburton's stocks have tripled since the Iraq invasion. Cheney is a stockholder of both Halliburton and Lockheed Martin shares....

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meh

George H.W. Bush - Ballotpedia

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thom

an 3 24 no lnx

Bill Barr laid the foundation for today’s MAGA movement

How Bill Barr laid the foundation for today’s MAGA movement

Thom Hartmann

March 11, 2024

With nepo-daughter-in-law Lara Trump taking over the GOP, Donald Trump has essentially declared the “old Republican Party” — the party of Reagan and Bill Barr — dead, arguing that it no longer exists in the form it’s taken since the 1970s.

At a Virginia rally a week ago Saturday, Trump said his neofascist MAGA movement has taken over the Republican Party, that it “represents 96%, and maybe 100%” of Republicans, and that, “We’re getting rid of the Romneys of the world. We want to get Romneys and those out.”

While many in the GOP love the nativist, authoritarian turn the party’s taken, others — like former Attorney General Bill Barr — are mourning the loss of the old guard, calling Trump’s actions “despicable” and “nauseating.”

But what is — or was — the old GOP that Bill Barr so loved?

While not as openly fascist as the MAGA movement, the Republican Party of the past five decades or so was frighteningly corrupt and based, itself, on lies and corruption.

Just this week, The New York Times revealed how Bill Barr apparently inserted himself into a Justice Department criminal investigation of a billion-dollar corporation for allegedly corruptly hiding their income offshore to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

As the Times notes:

“In the months leading up to the canceled interview in the Netherlands, Caterpillar had enlisted a small group of well-connected lawyers to plead the company’s case. Chief among those was William P. Barr, who had served as attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration.”

And, the Times reported, one of the lead investigators into Caterpillar’s tax avoidance scheme came right out and complained that because of Barr’s involvement:

“It appears that Caterpillar was given special political treatment that the average U.S. citizen cannot obtain.”

But helping out alleged tax cheats is just the tip of the iceberg of “old GOP” corruption and lies since the days of Nixon and Reagan.

— They lied that if we cut taxes on the morbidly rich, the benefits would “trickle down” to everybody else.

— They lied that if labor unions were destroyed, “job creators” would create “prosperity” and pay workers better.

— They lied that if “originalist” judges were put on the Supreme Court, the rights to vote, abortion, and birth control would be protected.

— They lied that Reagan’s 1983 decision to stop enforcing our anti-trust laws would make business “more efficient” and create opportunities for entrepreneurs and locally-owned businesses.

— They lied that if we forbade the federal government from negotiating drug prices, consumers and taxpayers would save money.

— They lied that if we privatized Medicare, like George W. Bush did in 2003 with his Medicare Advantage scam, the system would save money.

— They lied that racism was “over” in America with the election of Barack Obama, so if the Supreme Court simply let former Confederate states do whatever they wanted, there would be no more suppression and purging of Black voters.

Every one of those lies was intended to increase the wealth and power of the morbidly rich at the expense of average working-class Americans.

But most important, the Bill Barr old-school Republicans lied that they’d protect our democracy and bring honesty and integrity to American politics. Barr’s own history is probably the best example of how dangerous and destructive that lie has been.

The depth and breadth of Barr’s possible crimes against democracy while Attorney General for Trump are just now coming into clearer focus. We shouldn’t be surprised: like Ghostbusters, Bill Barr has been the “Who ya gonna call?” guy for Republican presidents committing treason for over 30 years.

Most people know that when the Mueller investigation was completed — documenting ten prosecutable cases of Donald Trump personally engaging in criminal obstruction of justice and witness tampering to prevent the Mueller Report investigators from getting to the bottom of his 2016 connections to Russia — Barr buried the report for weeks while lying to the American people about its content.

(Merrick Garland, Barr’s heir to the AG job, is still hiding large parts of the report from the American people, another reason President Biden should replace him.)

While shocking, this was not Bill Barr‘s first time playing cover-up for a Republican president who’d committed crimes that could rise to the level of treason against America.

He’s the exemplar of the “old GOP” that helped Nixon cut a deal to prolong the Vietnam War in 1968, worked with Reagan in 1980 to sell weapons to Iran in exchange for holding the hostages to screw Jimmy Carter, and stole the 2000 election from Al Gore in Jeb Bush’s Florida.

Instead of today’s GOP, exemplified by Nazi marches, white trash like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and racist rhetoric against immigrants, Barr’s “old GOP” committed their crimes wearing $2000 tailored suits and manipulating the law to their advantage.

For example, back in 1992, the first time Bill Barr was U.S. Attorney General, iconic New York Times writer William Safire referred to him as “Coverup-General Barr” because of his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s involvement in Reagan’s scheme to steal the 1980 election through what the media euphemistically called “Iron-Contra.”

On Christmas day of 1992, the New York Times featured a screaming all-caps headline across the top of its front page: Attorney General Bill Barr had covered up evidence of crimes by Reagan and Bush in the Iran-Contra “scandal.” (see the bottom of this article)

Earlier that week of Christmas, 1992, George H.W. Bush was on his way out of office. Bill Clinton had won the White House the month before, and in a few weeks would be sworn in as president.

But Bush Senior’s biggest concern wasn’t that he’d have to leave the White House to retire back to one of his million-dollar mansions in Connecticut, Maine, or Texas: instead, he was worried that he may face time in a federal prison after he left office, a concern nearly identical to what Richard Nixon faced when he decided to resign to avoid prosecution.

Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh was closing in fast on Bush and Reagan, and Bush’s private records, subpoenaed by the independent counsel’s office, were the key to it all.

Walsh had been appointed independent counsel in 1986 to investigate the Iran-Contra activities of the Reagan administration and determine if crimes had been committed.

Was the criminal Iran-Contra conspiracy limited, as Reagan and Bush insisted (and Reagan said on TV), to later years in the Reagan presidency, in response to an obscure hostage-taking in Lebanon?

Or had it started in the 1980 presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter with treasonous collusion with the Iranians, as the then-president of Iran asserted? Who knew what, and when? And what was George H.W. Bush’s role in it all?

In the years since then, the President of Iran in 1980, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, has gone on the record saying that the Reagan campaign reached out to Iran to hold the hostages in exchange for weapons.

“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan,” President Bani-Sadr told the Christian Science Monitor in 2013, “had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”

That wouldn’t have been just an impeachable and imprisionable crime: it was every bit as much treason as when Richard Nixon blew up LBJ’s 1968 peace talks with North and South Vietnam to win that November’s election against Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Walsh had zeroed in on documents that were in the possession of Reagan’s former defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, who all the evidence showed was definitely in on the deal, and President Bush’s diary that could corroborate it.

Elliott Abrams had already been convicted of withholding evidence about it from Congress, and he may have even more information, too, if it could be pried out of him before he went to prison. But Abrams was keeping mum, apparently anticipating a pardon.

This was the moment the “old GOP” was at the height of its power and prestige, and Bush and Barr weren’t about to let it be exposed for the criminal enterprise that the “party of Lincoln” had become.

Weinberger, trying to avoid jail himself, was preparing to testify that Bush knew about the deal to hold the hostages and even participated in it, and Walsh had already, based on information he’d obtained from the investigation into Weinberger, demanded that Bush turn over his diary from the campaign. He was also again hot on the trail of Abrams.

So Bush called in his attorney general, Bill Barr — the respectable scion of the “old GOP” — and asked his advice.

At that point Barr, along with Bush, was already up to his eyeballs in cover-ups of other shady behavior by the Reagan administration.

Safire had started referring to Barr as “Coverup-General” in the midst of another scandal — Bush illegally selling weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein — because the Attorney General was already covering up for Bush, Weinberger, and others in the Reagan administration with a scandal the newspapers called “Iraqgate.”

Ironically, that illegal sale of weapons to Saddam Hussein in the late 1980s and early 1990s was cited by George W. Bush, Bush’s son, as part of his justification for illegally invading Iraq in 2003.

On October 19, 1992, Safire wrote in The New York Times of Barr’s unwillingness to appoint an independent counsel to look into Iraqgate:

“Why does the Coverup-General resist independent investigation? Because he knows where it may lead: to Dick Thornburgh, James Baker, Clayton Yeutter, Brent Scowcroft and himself [the people who organized the sale of WMD to Saddam]. He vainly hopes to be able to head it off, or at least be able to use the threat of firing to negotiate a deal.”

Now, just short of two months later, Bush was asking Barr for advice on how to avoid another very serious charge in the Iran-Contra crimes they committed to defeat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. How, he wanted to know, could they shut down Walsh’s investigation before Walsh’s lawyers got their hands on Bush’s diary?

In April of 2001, safely distant from the swirl of D.C. politics, the University of Virginia’s Miller Center was compiling oral presidential histories, and interviewed Barr about his time as AG in the Bush White House. They brought up the issue of the Weinberger pardon, which put an end to the Iran-Contra investigation, and Barr’s involvement in it.

Turns out, Barr was right in the middle of it.

“There were some people arguing just for [a pardon for] Weinberger, and I said, ‘No, in for a penny, in for a pound,’” Barr told the interviewer. “I went over and told the President I thought he should not only pardon Caspar Weinberger, but while he was at it, he should pardon about five others.”

Which is exactly what Bush did, on Christmas Eve when most Americans were with family instead of watching the news. The holiday notwithstanding, the result was explosive.

America knew that both Reagan and Bush were up to their necks in the Iran-Contra hostages-for-weapons scandal, and Democrats had been talking about treason, impeachment, or worse.

The independent counsel had already obtained one conviction, three guilty pleas, and two other individuals were lined up for prosecution in the case that lost Jimmy Carter the White House. And Walsh was closing in fast on Bush himself.

The second paragraph of the Times story by David Johnston laid it out:

“Mr. Weinberger was scheduled to stand trial on Jan. 5 on charges that he lied to Congress about his knowledge of the arms sales to Iran and efforts by other countries to help underwrite the Nicaraguan rebels, a case that was expected to focus on Mr. Weinberger’s private notes that contain references to Mr. Bush’s endorsement of the secret shipments to Iran.” (emphasis added)

History shows that when a Republican president is in serious legal trouble, the “old GOP’s” go-to guy was Bill Barr.

For William Safire, Iran-Contra was déjà vu all over again. Four months earlier, referring to Iraqgate (Bush’s criminally selling WMDs to Iraq), Safire opened his article, titled “Justice [Department] Corrupts Justice,” by writing:

“U.S. Attorney General William Barr, in rejecting the House Judiciary Committee’s call for a prosecutor not beholden to the Bush Administration to investigate the crimes of Iraqgate, has taken personal charge of the cover-up.”

Safire accused Barr of not only rigging the cover-up, but of being one of the criminals who could be prosecuted.

“Mr. Barr,” wrote Safire in The New York Times in August of 1992, “...could face prosecution if it turns out that high Bush officials knew about Saddam Hussein’s perversion of our Agriculture export guarantees to finance his war machine.”

He added:

“They [Barr and colleagues] have a keen personal and political interest in seeing to it that the Department of Justice stays in safe, controllable Republican hands.”

Earlier in Bush’s administration, Barr had succeeded in blocking the appointment of an investigator or independent counsel to look into Iraqgate, as Safire repeatedly documented in the Times.

In December, Barr helped Bush block indictments from another independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, and eliminated any risk that Reagan or George H.W. Bush would be held to account for Iran-Contra.

Walsh, wrote Johnston for the Times on Christmas Eve, “plans to review a campaign diary kept by Mr. Bush.” The diary would be the smoking gun that would nail Bush to the scandal.

“But,” noted the Times, “in a single stroke, Mr. Bush [at Barr’s suggestion] swept away one conviction, three guilty pleas and two pending cases, virtually decapitating what was left of Mr. Walsh’s effort, which began in 1986.”

And Walsh didn’t take it lying down. The Times report noted that:

“Mr. Walsh bitterly condemned the President’s action, charging that ‘the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.’”

Independent Counsel Walsh added that the diary and notes he wanted to enter into a public trial of Weinberger represented:

“{E]vidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.”

The phrase “highest ranking” officials almost certainly included Reagan, Bush, and Barr himself.

Walsh had been fighting to get those documents ever since 1986, when he was appointed and Reagan still had two years left in office. Bush’s and Weinberger’s refusal to turn them over, Johnston noted in the Times, could have, in Walsh’s words:

“[F]orestalled impeachment proceedings against President Reagan” through a pattern of “deception and obstruction.”

Back in the 1990s, Barr successfully covered up the involvement of two Republican presidents — Reagan and Bush — in two separate and impeachable “high crimes,” one of them almost certainly treason committed just to win a presidential election.

And now we learn he apparently went so far as to cover up Trump’s involvement with Putin, leading to multiple opportunities for Trump to extort Ukraine and pass sensitive intelligence along to Russia.

Trump is proudly proclaiming that Barr’s old GOP is dead, replaced by the hateful, nativist MAGA movement. Old-school Republicans are wringing their hands, and some are even leaving the party.

But is the difference really that big?

The corrupt “old GOP” merely laid the foundation for today’s MAGA movement: in many ways Trump was the inevitable next step, after 50-plus years of catering to the morbidly rich while taking a meat-axe to voting rights and the rule of law.

Don’t be fooled: the crocodile tears of those like Bill Barr and the “ex-Republicans” who fill the cable airwaves daily longing for a return of their “Grand Old Party” are every bit the con of Iran-Contra, Bush v Gore, and Citizens United.

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1992 election

George H. W. Bush 1992 presidential campaign - Wikipedia

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https://time.com/6169294/climate-change-politicized-in-1990s/ eugene linden

Because the markets are where the money is, politicians followed. Nothing illustrates this more vividly than the dizzying evolution of George H.W. Bush starting in 1988. Aware of the upsurge in interest in environment during that year, Bush vowed to be the environmental president. On Aug. 31, 1988 in a campaign speech, he said, “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the ‘greenhouse effect’ are forgetting about the ‘White House effect’. In my first year in office, I will convene a global conference on the environment at the White House. It will include the Soviets, the Chinese… The agenda will be clear. We will talk about global warming.”

Bush actually did convene a conference once president, but sometime between his campaign speech and the conference in April, the “lobbyist effect” came into play. The Chinese were not invited, and the briefing papers for cabinet members warned them not to use the phrases “global warming” or “greenhouse effect.” This is akin to convening a conference on pandemics and forbidding your aides from mentioning COVID-19.

The battle to contain global warming was lost in the 1990s. The mixed messages coming from the U.S. on global warming undercut efforts to convince China and other emerging nations to eschew coal and “leapfrog” fossil fuels in powering their industrialization. China leapfrogged the U.S., but it was in greenhouse gas emissions and not in the adoption of renewables. A study of 2019 emissions by The Rhodium Group found that China accounted for 27% of total emissions that year, two and a half times more than the U.S., and equivalent to more than the combined emissions of the 27 nations in the European Union and the 38 nations in the OECD.

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rev door mil logistic bd, hallib charged govt for meals never provided; did intial study  bush 41 that said pvt cheaper but real # 2x more $

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/study-says-nearly-half-of-defense-spending-for-9-11-wars-went-to-private-contractors

Sep 13, 2021 5:58 PM EDT

Up to half of the $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon since 9/11 went to for-profit defense contractors,a study released Monday found. While much of this money went to weapons suppliers, the research is the latest to point to the dependence on contractors for war-zone duties as contributing to mission failures in Afghanistan in particular.

In the post-9/11 wars, U.S. corporations contracted by the Defense Department not only handled war-zone logistics like running fuel convoys and staffing chow lines but performed mission-crucial work like [dyncorp]training and equipping Afghan security forces — security forces that collapsed last month as the Taliban swept the country.

Within weeks, and before the U.S. military had even completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban easily routed an Afghan government and military that Americans had spent 20 years and billions of dollars to stand up. President Joe Biden placed blame squarely on the Afghans themselves. “We gave them every chance,” he said last month. “What we could not provide them was the will to fight.”

But William Hartung, the author of Monday’s study by Brown University’s Costs of War project and the Center for International Policy,and others say it’s essential that Americans examine what role the reliance on private contractors played in the post-9/11 wars. In Afghanistan, that included contractors allegedly paying protection money to warlords and the Taliban themselves, and the Defense Department insisting on equipping the Afghan air force with complex Blackhawk helicopters and other aircraft that few but U.S. contractors knew how to maintain.

“If it were only the money, that would be outrageous enough,” Hartung, the director of the arms and security program at the Center for International Policy, said of instances where the Pentagon’s reliance on contractors backfired. “But the fact it undermined the mission and put troops at risk is even more outrageous.”

At the start of this year, before Biden began the final American withdrawal from Afghanistan, there were far more contractors in Afghanistan and also in Iraq than U.S. troops.

The U.S. saw about 7,000 military members die in all post-9/11 conflicts, and nearly 8,000 contractors, another Costs of War study estimates.[total pvt out# mil 150k?]

The Professional Services Council, an organization representing businesses contracting with the government, cited a lower figure from the U.S. Department of Labor saying nearly 4,000 federal contractors have been killed since 2001.

A spokeswoman pointed to a statement last month from the organization’s president, David J. Berteau: “For almost two decades, government contractors have provided broad and essential support for U.S. and allied forces, for the Afghan military and other elements of the Afghan government, and for humanitarian and economic development assistance.”

U.S. officials after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks embraced private contractors as an essential part of the U.S. military response.

It started with then-Vice President Dick Cheney, [nope bush 41 hallib study to pvtize]the former CEO of Halliburton. Halliburton received more than $30 billion to help set up and run bases, feed troops and carry out other work in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2008, the study says. Cheney and defense contractors argued that relying on private contractors for work that service members did in previous wars would allow for a trimmer U.S. military, and be more efficient and cost effective.

By 2010, Pentagon spending had surged by more than one-third, as the U.S. fought dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a post-9/11 American, politicians vied to show support for the military in a country grown far more security conscious.

“Any member of Congress who doesn’t vote for the funds we need to defend this country will be looking for a new job after next November,” the study notes Harry Stonecipher, then the vice president of Boeing, telling The Wall Street Journal the month after the attacks.[up 3-5% /yr soon to hill trillion; reconciliation 3.5 trill over 10 years so this is 2x?!]

And up to a third of the Pentagon contracts went to just five weapons suppliers. Last fiscal year, for example, the money Lockheed Martin alone got from Pentagon contracts was one and a half times the entire budgets of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the study.

The Pentagon pumped out more contracts than it could oversee, lawmakers and government special investigators said.

For example, a Florida Republican Party official made millions on what lawmakers charged were excess profits when the U.S. granted a one-of-a-kind contract for fuel convoys from Jordan to Iraq, the study notes. The electrocution of at least 18 service members by bad wiring in bases in Iraq, some of it blamed on major contractor Kellogg, Brown and Root, was another of many instances where government investigations pointed to shoddy logistics and reconstruction work.

The stunning Taliban victory last month in Afghanistan is drawing attention now to even graver consequences: the extent to which the U.S. reliance on contractors may have heightened the difficulties of the Afghan security forces.

Jodi Vittori, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel and scholar of corruption and fragile states at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was not involved in the study, points to the U.S. insistence that the Afghan air force use U.S.-made helicopters. Afghans preferred Russian helicopters, which were easier to fly, could be maintained by Afghans, and were suited to rugged Afghanistan.

When U.S. contractors pulled out with U.S. troops this spring and summer, taking their knowledge of how to maintain U.S.-provided aircraft with them, top Afghan leaders bitterly complained to the U.S. that it had deprived them of one essential advantage over the Taliban.

Hartung, like others, also points to the corruption engendered by the billions of loosely monitored dollars that the U.S. poured into Afghanistan as one central reason that Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government lost popular support, and Afghan fighters lost morale.

Hillary Clinton, while secretary of state under President Barack Obama, accused defense contractors at risk in war zones of resorting to payoffs to armed groups, making protection money one of the biggest sources of funding for the Taliban.

The United States also relied, in part, on defense contractors to carry out one of the tasks most central to its hopes of success in Afghanistan — helping to set up and train an Afghan military and other security forces that could stand up to extremist groups and to insurgents, including the Taliban.

Tellingly, Vittori said, it was Afghan commandos who had consistent training by U.S. special operations forces and others who did most of the fighting against the Taliban last month.

Relying less on private contractors, and more on the U.S. military as in past wars, might have given the U.S. better chances of victory in Afghanistan, Vittori noted. She said that would have meant U.S. presidents accepting the political risks of sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, and getting more body bags of U.S. troops back.

“Using contractors allowed America to fight a war that a lot of Americans forgot we were fighting,” Vittori said.

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https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-september-14-2021/

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bush-had-a-lasting-impact-on-climate-and-air-policy/

obit

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Bush Had a Lasting Impact on Climate and Air Policy

The late 41st president started the national climate assessment and enacted policies to target acid rain

By Scott Waldman, E&E Newson December 3, 2018

Bush Had a Lasting Impact on Climate and Air Policy

The late President George H.W. Bush is the reason why President Trump has been asked about climate change in the last week more than at any other time in his presidency.

Through legislation he signed in 1990, Bush started the National Climate Assessment, a sweeping study documenting climate change’s impacts on the United States. The Trump administration released the latest iteration on Black Friday and has since downplayed its definitive body of research, making false claims about its accuracy and inadvertently drawing more attention to the clear science that shows Americans will be increasingly at risk as a result of climate change.

Bush’s presidency came during a different time, when bipartisan actions to reduce greenhouse gases and other pollutants seemed possible, observers said. The very existence of the NCA is a reminder that Republicans in Washington once crafted aggressive climate policy.

“We know that the future of the Earth must not be compromised,”Bush told the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1990. “We bear a sacred trust in our tenancy here and a covenant with those most precious to us—our children and theirs.”

Bush died Friday in his Houston home. He was 94.

It was during Bush’s presidency that the federal government stepped up its work on global warming and established an ongoing account of the latest research into how the country would be affected by climate change. Bush was also president during the development of the Montreal Protocol, which drastically cut the chlorofluorocarbons that were destroying the ozone layer.

Through a 1989 presidential initiative, Bush established the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a program encompassing 13 federal agencies that seeks to understand the changing Earth system. The following year, he signed into law the Global Change Research Act of 1990, which mandated that the National Climate Assessment come out every four years.

Top Bush aides recognized that climate change was a serious issue that would require a policy response, according to a series of formerly classified memos released to The Washington Post in 2015 by the National Security Archive.

“If the climate change within the range of current predictions actually occurs, the consequences for every nation and every aspect of human activity will be profound,” acting assistant secretary of State Richard Smith wrote in a 1989 memo.

Thirty years ago, crafting international agreements to address climate change was a Republican concern. Bush’s presidency was a different era for Republican environmental policy,but also a turning point that shifted away from aggressive actions, said William Reilly, who served as EPA administrator under Bush.

“Bush did everything anyone could have asked of on him on climate except commit to stabilization,” he said. “He committed to very substantial research budget to major investments by NASA on upper atmospheric ozone monitoring and on climate monitoring. NOAA was well-funded.”

Bush’s actions on climate change came after what may be his strongest environmental legacy, the signing of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments. The revisions to the act changed the way the country regulates several key pollutants.

“Building on Congressional proposals advanced during the 1980s, the President proposed legislation designed to curb three major threats to the nation’s environment and to the health of millions of Americans: acid rain, urban air pollution, and toxic air emissions,” EPA states on its website. “The proposal also called for establishing a national permits program to make the law more workable, and an improved enforcement program to help ensure better compliance with the Act.”

Significantly, the amendments targeted acid rain that was destroying forests and lakes, dramatically reducing the pollution that caused the problem to such an extent that it is no longer a major issue in the United States.

But the political capital Bush spent on the Clean Air Act diminished his work on climate policy, Reilly said. At the Group of Seven meeting in Paris in 1989, environmental groups trashed Bush for not committing to a stabilization of greenhouse gases, Reilly recalled.

That convinced Bush that pushing too far on environmental policy would hurt him politically with his base while failing to win any converts on the other side.

“That was kind of the beginning of Bush’s disillusion about his likely winning popularity by things he did in the environment,” Reilly said. “From the point of view of the environmentalists, he was Reagan’s vice president. And he did the Clean Air Act, he got really nothing for it ... Bush decided finally, and the people around him had decided long before, that the environment would not work for him politically.”

Since Bush left office, his Republican predecessors, George W. Bush and Trump, have been increasingly hostile to climate science and have resisted meaningful policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Much of their criticism has centered on the economic costs of environmental policy, a stance that environmental groups have widely denounced.

The latest National Climate Assessment shows that climate change will kill more Americans, displace thousands and cost tens of billions of dollars annually. Democrats have touted the findings as evidence that the government needs to craft significant climate policy and have promised to use its revelations in court cases challenging the administration. Some Republicans have acknowledged that the report requires action from Washington, as well, but most have questioned its findings without presenting any evidence to the contrary.

Trump has said he doesn’t “believe” the report. The United States was the only country at the Group of 20 meeting this weekend to refuse to sign a statement reiterating support for the Paris climate accord (see related story).

By contrast, the late Bush was able to craft bipartisan environmental policy that has had a lasting effect, said Jason Bordoff, a former Obama administration energy and climate policy aide and the founder of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

“From promoting cap and trade to curb acid rain to an international agreement protecting the ozone layer to climate change research, President George H.W. Bush was part of a Republican tradition of support for environmental protection, science and bipartisan cooperation that unfortunately is too rare these days,” he said.

Environmental groups have been some of the harshest critics of George W. Bush and Trump. By contrast, they issued a number of statements of praise for the environmental legacy left by George H.W. Bush.

“By cutting pollution from cars, trucks, power plants and other sources, the measures have sharply reduced toxic chemicals in the air we breathe, dangerous ozone and the acid rain that was destroying American forests,” said Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement. “The measures decreased asthma attacks, bronchitis, heart disease and other ills, preventing some 200,000 premature deaths and 20 million lost days at work or school every year to deliver up to $90 in public health benefits for every dollar invested in compliance.”

Bush was capable of seeing that protecting the economy and the environment did not have to be in contrast, said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, who worked with Bush to help pass the bipartisan Clean Air Act amendments as well as ratify the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Krupp said Bush deserves credit for curbing acid rain pollution that was devastating Northeastern forests in the 1980s. He noted that sulfur dioxide pollution, which caused the acid rain, has been cut 88 percent since 1990.

“He knew that our country matters far more than political party or personal ambition, and that the national interest demands that we protect America’s precious natural heritage,” Krupp said in a statement. “And he knew that there is no inherent conflict between environmental progress and economic progress, because the well-being of the nation requires both.”

Reporter Robin Bravender contributed.

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/dianna-ortiz

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Sister Dianna Ortiz—US nun who survived Guatemala torture and became human rights champion—dies at 62

Common Dreams February 22, 2021

Sister Dianna Ortiz, a Catholic nun from New Mexico whose 1989 abduction, rape, and torture by U.S.-backed Guatemalan forces led to her becoming an outspoken peace, human rights, and anti-torture activist, died Friday in Washington, D.C. at the age of 62 after battling cancer.Ortiz—who wanted to be a nun since she was a little girl—joined the Ursuline Sisters of Mount Saint Joseph, part of a 400-year-old Roman Catholic order dedicated to the education of girls and the care of the sick and needy, when she was still a teenager. She taught kindergarten for a decade before moving to Guatemala in 1987 at the age of 28.

Years later Ortiz explained that she wanted "to teach young indigenous children to read and write... and to understand the Bible in their culture."

It was dangerous work at a dangerous time. Guatemala was ravaged by decades of civil war that followed a 1954 CIA coup deposing Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically-elected progressive president. U.S.-backed right-wing military dictatorships, some of which perpetrated genocidal violence against the country's Mayan population, followed.

The 36-year civil war left over 200,000 Guatemalans dead, more than 600 villages destroyed, and countless people—mostly Mayan campesinos—displaced.

"Every family in San Miguel had people who had been tortured, disappeared, or killed," Mary Elizabeth Ballard, an Ursuline sister who had arrived in Guatemala a year before Ortiz, told the literary magazine Agni in a 1998 interview. "No family was untouched."

By early 1989 Ortiz was receiving threatening letters imploring her to leave Guatemala. She eventually did depart, traveling to the Urusline motherhouse in Kentucky. But only for a short while.

"She had a great love for the Guatemalans," explained Luisa Bickett, another Ursuline sister who worked in San Miguel.

"I heard a man's deep voice behind me: 'Hello, my love,' he said in Spanish. 'We have some things to discuss.'"

—Ortiz

Ortiz returned to Guatemala in September 1989. By the following month, she was receiving death threats. For her safety, Ortiz decided to seek refuge at Posada de Belén, a convent and religious retreat 170 miles (270 km) from San Miguel in Antigua.

On November 2, Ortiz was reading in the convent's garden when her life was forever changed. In an interview with Kerry Kennedy, she recalled that:

I heard a man's deep voice behind me: 'Hello, my love,' he said in Spanish. 'We have some things to discuss.' I turned to see the morning sunlight glinting off a gun held by a man who had threatened me once before on the street. He and his partner forced me onto a bus, then into a police car where they blindfolded me.

We came to a building and they led me down some stairs. They left me in a dark cell, where I listened to the cries of a man and woman being tortured. When the men returned, they accused me of being a guerrilla and began interrogating me. For every answer I gave them, they burned my back or my chest with cigarettes. Afterwards, they gang-raped me repeatedly.

Ortiz was then moved to another room with another woman prisoner. Some men returned with a video camera and a machete, which Ortiz thought would be used to torture her. Instead, she says she was forced to kill the other woman.

"What I remember is blood gushing, spurting like a water fountain... and my cries lost in the cries of the woman," she recalled. Her captors then threatened to release video of her attacking the woman if she refused to cooperate. Then:

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I was lowered into a pit full of bodies—bodies of children, men, and women, some decapitated, all caked with blood. A few were still alive. I could hear them moaning... A stench of decay rose from the pits. Rats swarmed over the bodies... I passed out and when I came to I was lying on the ground beside the pit, rats all over me.

Ortiz said that a North American man her torturers called "Alejandro" was present during her ordeal. When he realized she was an American, he helped her get dressed and drove her away while apologizing. "He said he was... working to liberate [Guatemala] from communism," Ortiz recalled.

Darleen Chmielewski, a Franciscan nun who was one of the first people to see Ortiz after her escape, described her friend as in "a state of shock." The two women went to the home of the the Vatican representative in Guatemala City, who had offered Ortiz refuge.

"Diana wanted to take a bath," Chmielewski recalled. "I helped her wash and saw all the cigarette burns... she just cried and took baths."

Two days later, Ortiz was back in the United States. "After escaping from my torturers, I returned home to New Mexico so traumatized that I recognized no one, not even my parents," she told Kennedy. "I had virtually no memory of my life before my abduction; the only piece of my identity that remained was that I was a woman who was raped and forced to torture and murder another human being."

Ortiz also felt forced to do something unimaginable for many nuns. "I got pregnant as a result of the multiple gang rapes," she told Kennedy. "Unable to carry within me... what I could only view as a monster, I turned to someone for assistance and I destroyed that life."

"I felt I had no choice," explained Ortiz. "If I had had to grow within me what the torturers left me I would have died."

Ortiz's torment continued as she sought—and was denied—justice. U.S. embassy officials accused her of staging her abduction in a bid to thwart the George H.W. Bush administration's military aid to Guatemala. Cigarette burns—111 of them, according to a U.S. doctor who examined her—told a different story.

"The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan army's death squads—my torturers themselves."

—Ortiz

In a bizarre twist, Guatemalan officials claimed Ortiz faked her kidnapping to cover up a violent lesbian affair, a rumor subsequently spread by U.S. officials. Previously, the Reagan administration had undertaken a similar effort to discredit another Ursuline nun, Dorothy Kazel of Cleveland, Ohio, who along with three other American churchwomen was kidnapped, raped, and executed in El Salvador by U.S.-backed troops in 1980.

Even though she was back in the relative safety of the United States, Ortiz received menacing phone calls and anonymous packages, one containing a dead mouse wrapped in a Guatemalan flag. However, undaunted, she made three trips to Guatemala to testify against the government there.

Ortiz tasted victory, albeit of a largely symbolic nature, in April 1995, when a federal judge in Boston ordered Gen. Héctor Gramajo, the Guatemalan defense minister who had tried to discredit Ortiz, to pay her and eight other torture victims a combined $47.5 million.

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In 1996 Ortiz held a five-week fasting vigil in front of the White House, where she demanded that the U.S. government declassify all documents about human rights abuses in Guatemala since the 1954 coup. Hillary Clinton, then first lady, invited Ortiz to her office. During their meeting, Clinton did not rule out the possibility that "Alejandro" was a past or current U.S. operative.

Ortiz's relentless pursuit of justice eventually compelled the United States to declassify long-secret documents revealing details of U.S. cooperation with Guatemalan security forces before, during, and after the time of her abduction, including an admission that the U.S. embassy was in contact with members of a death squad.

The documents also showed that Gen. Gramajo had been trained in counterinsurgency tactics at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), where military and police officials from Latin American allies—many of them dictatorships—were instructed in counterinsurgency and democracy suppression using course manuals that advocated the torture and execution of civilians.

The files also proved that the U.S. was supporting Guatemalan forces guilty of perpetrating genocide. In 1999, President Bill Clinton apologized to the Guatemalan people for the U.S. role in the bloodshed, terror, and repression.

"The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan army's death squads—my torturers themselves," Ortiz later wrote. "The United States was the Guatemalan army's partner in a covert war against a small opposition force, a war the United Nations would later declare genocidal."

Ortiz's suffering left her with an acute awareness of human rights issues and a desire to work in service of those rights. In 1998 she founded Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), and in 2002 published The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth. In the 2000s Ortiz was a vocal opponent of the George W. Bush's torture program in the so-called War on Terror.

Last year, she was named deputy director of Pax Christi USA, part of an international Catholic peace movement.

Recently, Ortiz worked for nuclear disarmament and led Pax Christi's work commemorating the 75th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

As for her recovery, Ortiz wrote in The Blindfold's Eyes that despite years of therapy at Chicago's Marjorie Kovler Center for torture survivors, "no one ever fully recovers" from torture, "not the one who is tortured, and not the one who tortures."

Ortiz never not stopped searching for the whole truth of what happened to her back in 1989.

"No one ever fully recovers, not the one who is tortured, and not the one who tortures."

—Ortiz

"I demand the right to a future built on truth and justice," she told Kennedy. "My torturers were never brought to justice. It is possible that, individually, they will never be identified or apprehended. But I cannot resign myself to this fact and move on. I have a responsibility to the people of Guatemala and to the people of the world to insist on accountability where it is possible."

"I know what it is to wait in the dark for torture, and what it is to wait in the dark for the truth," said Ortiz. "I am still waiting."

Ursuline Sister Larraine Lauter was with Ortiz when she passed away on Friday. Lauter called her friend "unfailingly good."

"Dianna walked through the very worst of hell and came out with love," she told the Catholic Standard. "It's hard to believe that bad things happen to good nuns, but they do. Her legacy is for us to be nonviolent. Her legacy is a witness to nonviolence and to love in the face of evil and to redemption. That's her legacy, to teach us that that's possible."

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This is when the GOP turned away from climate policy

Scott Waldman and Benjamin Hulac, E&E News reportersPublished: Wednesday, December 5, 2018

https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060108785/

At the start of the George H.W. Bush presidency, the Republican Party fretted about the dangers of climate change. By the end, it was focused on doubt and inaction.

Since then, the party has drifted further away from the conclusion of scientists and from policies to address global warming.

Bush embraced climate science in the 1980s and campaigned on protecting Americans from its dangers.

"Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect forget about the 'White House effect,'" Bush said in a 1988 campaign speech. "As president, I intend to do something about it."

But as soon as Bush got into office, the administration started to work against meaningful policy on climate change, observers say, even as it crafted strong positions on air pollution to defeat the threat of acid rain.

After his decision on the Clean Air Act amendments, Bush had to be "dragged kicking and screaming" to international climate talks and ceded a chance to make meaningful policy at a time when the world had not yet politicized climate science, said Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University geosciences professor who attended some of the early climate talks as an observer.

"I wish we had gotten more leadership out of him, the kind of leadership that he showed on acid rain," he said. "If he had exerted the same kind of leadership on climate change, we would be further along today."

The Bush presidency was a "debate over denialism in microcosm," saidJerry Taylor, president of the Niskanen Center and a former climate skeptic who now works to convince conservatives about the dangers of climate change.

Conservatives around the world, including former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, were worried about climate change and looking for policy solutions. Instead, skeptical forces grew stronger, pushed by Washington-based think tanks such as the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. While Bush ignored those groups on acid rain, he acquiesced on climate change.

"The GOP during the Bush presidency pivoted from a position of being torn on how to respond to climate change," Taylor said. "This issue could have gone either way, but we know which way it went. The party could have been on climate change where the party is on acid rain, which is accepting it as a real thing and with some responsibility for a government response and total peace with the decision."

Bush aides wanted to establish the administration as having strong environmental credentials, topping the leaders of England, Canada and France in advance of an economic summit held in July 1989. In a State Department memo that has been declassified, the agency recommended that the United States focus on policies that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions,including supporting nuclear power.

"The theme which runs through these proposals, and which I recommend the President stress, is that of wise, active stewardship over the resources of our planet," a State Department official wrote. "This is a responsibility we have to ourselves and as our legacy to future generations. Every man, woman and child can make a meaningful contribution to carrying out this responsibility. This approach links individual responsibility with national and international responsibility."

Bush used his presidency to foster stewardship in minor ways.

He continued work already underway at the Council on Environmental Quality and the White House science and technology office. And he created the Environment and Conservation Challenge Awards — a program to highlight environmental protection and generate "environmental awareness" — and a recycling network for federal agencies, which hadn't existed before.

While Richard Schmalensee, an economic adviser to Bush, described climate change in a 1990 memo as a theory, the president had already warned of its dangers.

Before reaching the White House, he stumped before a crowd on the banks of Lake Erie in southeast Michigan, where he said he would make climate change a centerpiece of his administration.

"In my first year in office, I will convene a global conference on the environment at the White House," Bush said at the Lake Erie Metropark in 1988, adding that he would invite the Chinese, the Soviets and officials from emerging economies.

"The agenda will be clear," Bush said. "We will talk about global warming. We will talk about saving our oceans and preventing the loss of tropical forests. And we will act."

Months earlier, James Hansen, a NASA scientist, had testified before a Senate committee that the Earth was warming and that humans were the reason.

In his remarks in Michigan, Bush appeared to reference that testimony.

"1988 is the year the Earth spoke back," Bush said. "Our land, water and soil support a remarkable range of human activities. But they can only take so much. We must remember to treat them not as a given, but as a gift."

As then-President Obama argued on a 2015 trip to the Everglades, Bush came from a period when addressing environmental threats — climate change included — was bipartisan in America.

"George H.W. Bush was the first president, globally, to acknowledge the impacts of climate change and that we needed to do something about it," Obama said. "This is not something that historically should be a partisan issue."

In the spring of 1990, Bush did hold a White House summit on the science and economics of "global change" — climate change — a fact he highlighted in a letter the next year to Congress.

The White House wrote in the letter that scientists at the time warned that temperatures could rise "10 to 50 times faster than anything in recorded history" if humans continued to burn fossil fuels.

Still, the administration underscored uncertainties in the science, specifically over sources of greenhouse gases, sea-level rise, and connections between power plants and carbon emissions.

"Significant scientific uncertainty still attends global climate change," the White House said.

Despite Bush's endorsement of Hansen's work on the campaign trail, his administration would later interfere in the public presentation of that research. In 1989, Hansen complained that the Bush administration's Office of Management and Budget toned down the severity of his conclusions before they were delivered to a Senate committee headed by then-Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.). That move would foretell later efforts by the administration of President George W. Bush to water down conclusions by climate scientists before they were publicized.

Hansen blames the elder Bush's chief of staff, John Sununu, for misleading the president on climate science.

Sununu was more interested in those who rejected the emerging climate science, including a number of researchers who have continued to battle against consensus science today. Some of them, includingPat Michaels of the Cato Institute, continue to have influence in the Trump administration and have encouraged the rollback of climate protections. Sununu ran his own rudimentary climate models and said that scientists were wrong.

Still, Hansen said Bush pushed forward with the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was a meaningful step forward at the time, and one that President Clinton and the younger Bush neglected to push ahead on.

"The Framework Convention on Climate Change, the product of Rio in 1992, was exactly the right response to all that was revealed in the 1980s," Hansen said in an interview yesterday. "The elder Bush deserves much credit for that. He was being pushed in a very bad direction by the elder Sununu, a real jackass from my perspective as a scientist."

Bush showed hints of taking climate action again near the end of his presidency. But he punted.

Bush was immersed in a tough campaign, which he would ultimately lose, when he bucked members of his party and spoke at the Earth Summit in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. Bush said he had come with a climate plan in hand. It would focus on energy efficiency, forestry, new technologies and clean air.

He signed an agreement to create a "framework convention on climate change" — the U.N. body that would go on to become the UNFCCC.

"I invite my colleagues from the industrialized world to join in a prompt start on the convention's implementation," Bush said. "Let us join in translating the words spoken here into concrete action to protect the planet."

Bush pledged environmental funding to poorer nations."We come to Rio recognizing that the developing countries must play a role in protecting the global environment but will need assistance in pursuing these cleaner growth," he said.

But then, his administration did little to follow through with those pledges or to fight for something more concrete than a framework. In the end, Bush balked at the most meaningful part of the Rio gathering — setting specific emissions reduction targets.

It turns out Bush was correct. The models showing warming have been borne out, and the problem has worsened, as Hansen predicted. According to the most recent version of the National Climate Assessment, the models may have underpredicted the worst effects. This year and the past three have been the warmest in recorded human history.

So, for all his talk, Bush's climate legacy is that he walked away from pushing a policy that would restrict greenhouse gases at the very moment that the top scientists in the world were saying it posed a crisis for humanity, said Oppenheimer, the Princeton professor.

The resulting void was filled with political fights that have worsened under the Trump administration.

"The real shame is that we saw this coming and we had a chance to get ahead of the impacts of climate change before they manifest themselves, and we just didn't do it," Oppenheimer said.

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my rough notes:

Bush 41 himself of course was a new england preppie rich kid cosplaying texas cowboy/oil man [pork rinds and all). Chevron and Enron and halliburton funders; he followed the law on National Climate Assessment his son would suppress, and attended Rio Summit, however reluctantly. Some binding measures? Bush refused to sign bio-diversity treaty for fear of hurting pharma; ideas previously seen as fringe became more mainstream, and set the stage for Kyoto; split on rich vs poor countries presage Copenhagen fail?

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blog obit hmn, seems legit

https://athenareads.home.blog/2020/01/11/the-environmental-president-and-the-mission-to-planet-earth/

In the past 40 years, most of the Presidential nominee in the United States, and prime minister candidates around the world, never forgot to mention during their election campaigns how much they care about the environment and our planet.

George W. Bush, Barak Obama, Hilary Clinton, Boris Johnson, even Donald Trump announced last August that he wants clean air and clean water.

But it was George H. W. Bush the first nominee who  declared that he wanted to be ‘the environmental president’.  “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the ‘greenhouse effect’ are forgetting about the White House Effect,” he said the then Republican Presidential nominee, in a speech in Michigan in August 1988, raising the expectations for action on climate change.

True to his word, upon entering office as the 41st President of the United States, in January 1989, George H.W. Bush instructed his own Domestic Policy Council Working Group on energy, environment and natural resources to deal with the issue of global change.

In late 1980s, the environment and climate change were emerging as mainstream political issues in many countries. Green parties were sprouting in most democracies and people were ready to pay attention when clear, specific programmes are offered. The increased in frequency warnings of global change, and several events, such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound in March 1989 helped keep attention on climate change and environmental issues. And James Hansen once again made headlines, when during his presentation to Senator Al Gore’s subcommittee on Space, Science and Technology, in May 1989, he accused the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) of altering the testimony about global warming that he was about to give before the House Science Committee. According to the revised copy, the cause of climate change was still unknown. Later, Hansen recalled that NASA headquarters told him to accept the changes or otherwise he wouldn’t testify. I will come back on this topic on a later post.

While, nature was sending warms and scientists made gusty predicaments about the future climate – yes, it’s 40 years since scientists warned us, – at the Paris summit meeting, on July 14-16, 1989, the Group of Seven (G7) largest industrial market economies put together emphasis on the need for far reaching environmental initiatives. For the first time, there was top-level recognition that poverty and environment are linked problems that must be addressed in a common context. It sounds incredible, but we are discussing this symbiotic relationship for 40 years. In particular, the French President Francois Mitterrand, supported the idea of a European environmental agency and pointed out that there was no “political authority capable of taking decisions on a global scale” and that “the level of decision is not equal to the risk.”

In the meantime, early on 1989, President Bush, created a National Security Council Policy Coordinating Committee on Oceans, Environment and Science chaired by Frederick Bernthal, an assistant secretary of State. The purpose of the committee was to coordinate climate change policy. The line of authority ran from Bernthal through theSecretary of State, James Baker, and the National Security Advisor, Brent Skowcroft, to the President.

Due to its low position, the Bernthal committee had limited ability to shape policy, leaving the control of climate change to high-ranking administration and especially to President’s chief of stuff, John Sununu, who emerged as Bush’s single most influential advisor on climate change policy. An MIT-trained engineer, Sununu has supported Bush early in his presidential campaign when he was governor of New Hampshire. Conservative, intelligent, and abrasive, Sununu was deeply sceptical of global warming theories and with the OMB Director Richard Darman, opposed to any policies to regulate carbon dioxide emissions in response to threats of climate change.

A few days after the Paris summit, on the anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, President George H.W. Bush set out his plans for a bold new program of Lunar and Mars exploration. He proposed a 10-year Apollo-style plan, ending with “a journey into tomorrow – a journey to another planet – a manned mission to Mars,” saying that it “was humanity’s destiny to explore, and America’s destiny to lead.” The National Space Council which came into being on February 1989 and it was chaired by Vice President Dan Quayle, played an extremely activist role in attempting to revitalize the stagnant civilian space program. The NSC was disbanded in 1993, and relaunched in June 2017 by the Donald Trump administration. How useful would it be, it remains to be seen.

But the same day, President Bush, announced another initiative.  A 25-year effort using a network of satellites to understand how the Earth’s atmosphere, seas and living creatures function as a global system.  It was NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS), the centrepiece of the agency’s Mission to Planet Earth which was envisioned as one of the nation’s most encompassing and urgent scientific programmes.Costing the U.S. up to $30 billion over 15 to 20 years (although the precise number is difficult to compute), it was going to create the first system of unmanned satellites able to observe and measure the actions of major components of the global environment as they interact.

Selby Tilford, called it “without any doubt the largest science programme the agency has ever undertaken”.  With the new name and an expanding bureaucratic-scientific coalition of potential users behind it, the Mission to Planet Earth was also received well by politicians. And it wasn’t long that it was portrayed as an essential element of the U.S. Global Change Research Program and the first problems and disagreements appeared. This will be the topic of the next post. 1/11/20 [i cannot find it]

https://athenareads.home.blog/category/climate-histories/

---

Featured Image: President George H.W. Bush proposed a grand space vision, the Space Exploration. Source: The Space review  http://www.thespacereview.com/article/102/1

Sources and further reading:

===

1988 spkr http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Wright demo, coup by gingrich

James Claude Wright, Jr. (born December 22, 1922), usually known as Jim Wright, is a former DemocraticU.S. Congressman from Texas who served 34 years in the U.S. House of Representatives and was the Speaker of the House from 1987 to 1989. Wright resigned from the House in 1989 because of a scandal. succeeded by Tom foley (ntbcw mark do not lick the pages]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_1990

1990 off yr so dem picked up house seats, slight majority

went to Rio, commissioned NAS study?

Ten years on, and theEarth Summit - this time called the World Summit on Sustainable Development - moves to South Africa, where it will open in Johannesburg on Aug. 26.  The issues will be water and sanitation, energy, agricultural productivity and food security, biodiversity and ecosystem management, and health. All will be wrapped under the rubric of sustainable development - or, roughly, how to manage global economic growth without environmental loss.  A decade ago, the leaders also had far-reaching plans. They agreed to treaties to combat climate change and to protect plants and animals, the rich said they would help the poor develop, and they all adopted a huge blueprint to guide themselves through it.  But there are few today who would argue that the promises of Rio have been met.

 "There was really quite a buzz at Rio," said Tony Carritt, who attended the summit as a reporter and is now media relations manager for the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen. "There was a feeling that things would actually happen. Then as soon as Rio was over the momentum went out of it."  Most, if not all, of the major issues facing the Earth Summit - pollution, environmental destruction, poverty - are still around. 

Indeed, many of the clashes between competing interests that dominated Rio are expected to be on display once again. The U.S. official's comments about a "circus" in 1992, for example, reflected Washington's dismay at hearing a drumbeat of demands that the rich West share its wealth with the poor and adopt policies that it did not necessarily see as being in its interests.Then-President George Bush refused to sign the Earth Summit's biodiversity treaty, fearing it would hurt U.S. pharmaceutical interests, and generally found himself cast in the role of Rio party-pooper. A decade later, his son, President George W. Bush, may not even attend and has been lambasted for pulling out of the Kyoto agreement, a follow-on pact from Rio's treaty on climate change.

===

WASP GOP came out of NE est'b and helped new right texas sun belt RR revo

==

===

**Trump isn’t an aberration': Paul Krugman reveals how the :{GOP's 'moral rot' laid the groundwork for Trumpism:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:**

By Cody Fenwick, AlterNet

He's the embodiment of the worst parts of the party. READ MORE»

With the death of President George H.W. Bush, many conservatives and former Republicans are nostalgic for the old days of the party and bemoan the dark turn the GOP has taken under President Donald Trump. But as economist Paul Krugman argued Monday, the groundwork for Trumpism had been laid long before his rise.

Trump's habit of denying reality and spinning baseless conspiracy theories that fit his preferred vision of the world is a direct outgrowth of the GOP's denial of climate change science, according to Krugman.

"Donald Trump isn’t an aberration, he’s the culmination of where his party has been going for years," he wrote.

Bush the elder does, though, come off relatively well in Krugman's recounting of events.

"The G.O.P. wasn’t always an anti-environment, anti-science party. George H.W. Bush introduced the cap-and-trade program that largely controlled the problem of acid rain," he wrote. "As late as 2008, John McCain called for a similar program to limit emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming."

He continued:

But McCain’s party was already well along in the process of becoming what it is today — a party that is not only completely dominated by climate deniers, but is hostile to science in general, that demonizes and tries to destroy scientists who challenge its dogma.

Trump fits right in with this mind-set. In fact, when you review the history of Republican climate denial, it looks a lot like Trumpism. Climate denial, you might say, was the crucible in which the essential elements of Trumpism were formed.

Because so much of the media tries to play the part of a neutral arbiter in politics, the parties get painted as mirror images in many respects. This is true even while much of mainstream media acknowledges, at least at times, that it's the Democratic Party's views that accurately reflect the reality of climate change, and that Trump really does spread misinformation constantly.

But they'll still refer to the problems of "partisanship" as if its a problem of equal weight for both parties. It's just not true, though. Both parties and every faction of the American political debate have their problems. But it's the Republican Party and the conservative movement that have deeply buried their heads in the sand with regard to climate change in a way that no other major party across the globe has done. The left-wing has its biases, but the right-wing has a unique problem with the truth.

And then there's the problem of industry-funded corruption.

"The truth is that most prominent climate deniers are basically paid to take that position, receiving large amounts of money from fossil-fuel companies," Krugman wrote. "But after the release of the recent National Climate Assessment detailing the damage we can expect from global warming, a parade of Republicans went on TV to declare that scientists were only saying these things “for the money.” Projection much?"

A related point was made separately by ex-Republican Max Boot in a column for the Washington Post on Monday.

Industry lobbying, he observed, "influences ordinary conservatives who fall for the shoddy 'studies' and shallow op-eds designed to minimize the threat of climate change. I ran some of those articles myself years ago when I was the op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal."

It's a deep point about the Republican Party, but the country has yet to grapple with the basic point: The GOP is fundamentally opposed to fundamental facts, and it's not going to get better on its own.

==

==

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bush-srs-brand-conservatism-paved-way-trump-heres-real-reason-right-wingers-hates

amanda m

As soon as I saw that former President George H.W. Bush had passed away on Saturday morning, I knew one thing for certain: Many liberal and centrist critics of Donald Trump would be eager to use Bush's death as an opportunity to shame Trump. The urge would be to establish Bush as a dignified statesman, to contrast him with the leering, smirking troll who currently occupies the White House.

It's an understandable urge. Nostalgia is a powerful weapon, and the argument that our current situation is the result of clean break from a more noble past is a powerful one. But it's also a misleading claim. Trump is the direct result of decades of Republican politicians embracing racial demagoguery and culture war hysterics to create political support that they'd never get by running on an agenda of tax breaks for the rich and deregulation. It's a matter of historical fact that Bush played a major role in this.

So I took to Twitter to remind my largely liberal following of this, pointing out some historical facts about Bush: He had appointed an accused sexual predator to the Supreme Court, that he had switched from pro-choice to anti-choice out of political expedience, and he had hired Roger Ailes to help run a political campaign that relied heavily on race-baiting. The point, I hoped, was clear: These are all literally things Trump also did. Bush helped lay the groundwork for Trump's rise.

Within a few hours, I was deluged on Twitter by people attacking me, largely with gendered insults like "cunt" and "twat," claims that women shouldn't be allowed to vote and insults about my looks. I also got threats, including one emailed to me that called me a "Toxic Marxist" and read, "We as a nation are approaching the point where our war of words is quickly becoming actual shooting war."

The source of the dogpile was easy enough to figure out: Breitbart had sent its vituperative audience to harass me,  falsely implying that I had insulted Bush by putting "F**k Him" in the headline.

To be clear, I did not use any invective against Bush or issue any insults, nor did I wish to. I certainly did not curse like that in my tweets. I have no ill will towards Bush as a person. Nor were my tweets really aimed at conservatives at all. They were meant to share historical facts with liberals to dissuade them from using false narratives about Bush in an effort to shame Trump.

This is hardly the first time right-wing media has turned a firehose of harassment against me, and I doubt it will be the last. A great deal of ultra-conservative propaganda is focused on holding up journalists who are considered "liberal" and inviting their audiences to engage in a two-minute hate.

If you're a journalist or pundit who rejects authoritarianism, especially if you're female or a person of color, your time in the barrel is coming. It's not fun, but I know from experience that the mob will move on when Breitbart dangles the next hate object in front of them. It's an intimidation tactic to silence the free press, and the best thing to do is not to be intimidated.

Still, I want to highlight what happened because the incident distills the way right-wing media has trained its audiences to be hateful and reactive, and to eschew anything resembling engagement or critical thinking. The folks coming at me on Twitter had plenty of insults, but showed no evidence that they had actually listened to my points before lashing out. They had been instructed to believe I was a bad person saying bad things, and they followed orders blindly, spewing insults and threats, without bothering to engage with my points.

If they had actually bothered to understand what I wrote, I wonder if they would have been so mad. After all, my argument was that Bush was more like Trump than a lot of people think. Now, I personally think that's a bad thing, but why should Breitbart readers? They love Trump. They think Trump is a good person and that he is doing good things for the country. Presumably, they ought to believe it's a compliment to say that someone is like Trump.

Everything I recounted about Bush, from the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the "Willie Horton" ad, were things Trump supporters like. It's genuinely weird to say, "This person did a thing you like," and have people lash out at you, spewing bile and threats. Their reaction was something like a Democratic voter screaming invective at someone who said that Hillary Clinton shares a lot of the same views that Ted Kennedy once held.

It's tempting to suggest this lashing out is because even Trump supporters know, on some level, that Trump is a vile person and therefore perceive it as an insult to say that anyone has anything in common with Trump. But honestly, I doubt most of them had actually read the tweets they were told were so evil, much less understood that the point was to draw a comparison between Trump and Bush. They just knew I was a liberal and a woman and that Breitbart told them I was bad. That was more than enough.

There's a tendency in much of the mainstream media these days to hand-wring about "both sides" engaging in "tribalism," as if liberals and conservatives have both abandoned policy and ideological discourse and instead have embraced a politics of mindless hate towards the other side. But this incident is yet another reminder how false that narrative is.

The reality is, as the last election showed, the left does engage in ideas and philosophical debate about ideology. While the discourse can get heated at times, at the end of the day, the "liberal" identity is still focused on a set of beliefs about how to shape government and society to further goals like equality, justice and fairness. But the right is increasingly organized around a blind, irrational hatred of liberals, one that has little to do with their ideas. On the contrary, sites like Breitbart are actively discouraging engagement with ideas and instead simply defining conservatism as a loathing of anything or anyone deemed "liberal."

==

**how Bush Sr.'s pardons for Iran-Contra conspirators set the stage for Trump’s impunity**

ByGreg Grandin,Democracy Now

As the media lauds George H.W. Bush’s legacy, we look at his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. READ MORE»

==

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/3/mehdi_hasan_on_george_hw_bushs

obits hagiography but pardoned 6 iran contra right before they testify and could implicate?!

willie horton ad // caravan, crack bought in laf pk WH but guy lured there, had to be given address

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/3/remembering_george_hw_bushs_inaction_on AIDS

==

http://www.alternet.org/environment/george-bush-srs-cabinet-was-worried-about-climate-change-27-years-ago

4/16

The agreement that was hammered out in Paris at the U.N climate talks in December was be a great step forward towards addressing the growing threat of climate change. But lost amongst the applause for the accord is a question that needs to be answered: Why did it take so long, and are we too late?

Recently,**memos from the George H.W. Bush**administration were released that detailed conversations between Bush Sr.’s cabinet members, where they discussed the growing threat of global climate change…27 years ago.

The Hill posted parts of those conversations:

“Global climate change is the most far-reaching environmental issue of our time,” a 1989 memo from Acting Assistant Secretary of State Richard J. Smithsaid. “If the climate change within the range of current predictions actually occurs, the consequences for every nation and every aspect of human activity will be profound.”

Writing to Secretary of State James Baker,Smith said, “As you yourself stated we cannot wait until all the uncertainties have been resolved before we act to limit greenhouse gas emissions and to prepare for whatever climate change we are already committed to.”

Those conversations took place over 27 years ago, and in the present day, leaders in the United States are still having debates about climate change. And not just about how to act, but we’ve regressed to the point that we are still debating whether or not the problem even exists.

But Bush Sr. was not the first Republican president to understanding the growing threat of climate change. The recently released memos also tell us that the problem was discussed among Ronald Reagan’s cabinet members.

These two Republicans were then followed by Democrat Bill Clinton (whose vice President, Al Gore, has been one of the leaders in the United States pushing for action on climate change), then by Republican George W. Bush, and finally by Democrat Barack Obama.

And it wasn’t until the summer of 2015—more than 30 years after the first U.S. presidents were warned about the dangers of growing emissions—that we got our first real set of rules to reduce our carbon emissions in a meaningful way.

So why did it take so long when both Reagan and Bush Sr. were advised of the threats?

The memos shed some light on the fact that both men, and their respective advisors, were actually trying to accomplish something with regards to climate change action:

In connection with the Montreal Protocol (negotiated in 1987 and put into effect in 1989), both Reagan and Bush 41 showed a clear desire to tackle environmental concerns and to lead the global community in that effort, according to the documents. Protests by the Domestic Policy Council, led by Attorney General Edwin Meese,and other agency heads led Reagan to step in to ensure adoption of the final set of U.S. objectives for the treaty. Bush basically shared his predecessor’s views on entering office in January 1989.

Both presidents’ secretaries of state, George P. Shultz and James A. Baker III, played key roles in blocking efforts by other Cabinet secretaries to frustrate implementation of more environmentally friendly policies. For example, memos for senior State Department officials in today’s posting note that “Global climate change is the most far reaching environmental issue of our time” and that notwithstanding the need for continued research, “We simply cannot wait—the costs of inaction will be too high.”

Republicans have rightfully taken a lot of heat for their refusal to accept the science behind climate change, but clearly this wasn’t always the case.

Unfortunately, this new information only raises more questions than it answers. For example, Bush Sr. built on the success of Reagan’s Montreal accord, so why did Bill Clinton drop the ball?

George W. Bush’s father believed in climate change, so why did he refuse to acknowledge the threat until his last few years in office, and then he still refused to act? (He also pulled us out of the Kyoto Protocol.)

And most importantly, why did Barack Obama—the first president to address climate change in both campaigns and since taking office—take seven years to give us an emissions reduction rule?

We can blame obstruction from deniers or the influence of fossil fuel money all day long, and they do deserve a large share of the blame. But the politicians are not the main problem. The real problem lies with American voters. They are the ones who put science deniers in office, and they are the ones who are not demanding action.

Voters hold all of the power in the United States, and until they realize this, we will continue to get watered down safety standards that pay lip service to the problem while the planet continues to burn.

Farron Cousins is the executive editor of The Trial Lawyer magazine, and his writings have appeared in publications such as California's Information Press and Pensacola's Independent Weekly.  He has also worked for the Ring of Fire radio program with hosts Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Mike Papantonio since August 2004, and is currently the producer of the program, in charge of guest booking, research, and scripting the week's show.  Farron also runs Mike Papantonio's publishing company - Seville Publishing. Farron received his bachelor's degree in Political Science from the University of West Florida in 2005 and became a member of American MENSA in 2009.  F

==

Jeb Bush Trashes Father’s Clean Air Legacy to Woo Far Right-Wing

John Walke, NRDC Action Fund

Jeb Bush trashed the Clean Air Act last week. He was speaking to the far right-wing Club for Growth, notorious for mounting mostly unsuccessful challenges from the right against Republican candidates during congressional primaries.

A Washington Post reporter attended the speech and posted some of Bush’s remarks on Twitter:

So Jeb Bush thinks the Clean Air Act “stifled the ability for people to rise up.” Does he mean polluting corporations that a 5-4 Supreme Court says are people?

Or does he mean that loud clamor for “rising up” by ordinary Americans, who consistently voice very strong support for the Clean Air Act and clean air safeguards, with large majorities across the political spectrum Bob Marley, Mr. Bush ain’t.

Jeb Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush, signed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 after 89 Senators and 401 House members (including 154 Republicans, all but 16) voted for the law.

President Bush’s signing statement said he took “great pleasure in signing [the Clean Air Act] as a demonstration to the American people of my determination that each and every American shall breathe clean air.”

Newspapers at the time called the president’s signing of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 “the single most distinguished policy achievement of the Bush administration.”

The Clean Air Act is estimated to achieve almost $2 trillion in yearly benefits to the American people by 2020. These vast benefits are delivered in the form of “significant reductions in air pollution” related premature death and illness, improved economic welfare of Americans, and better environmental conditions.” The estimated annual costs to achieve these benefits will be about $65 billion by 2020. [graph omit]

So this staggering Bush senior achievement is one that Bush junior singles out for condemnation. It’s bewildering. One might even say it takes one’s breath away.

Does Jeb Bush know of any federal law that accomplishes greater benefits for Americans relative to the cost? Would a law personally acceptable to him need to achieve $3 trillion in benefits compared to an even tinier fraction of costs? Mr. Bush’s applause line for the extreme right does not yield those answers.

Clean Air Act benefits vastly outweighs costs over the entire study period in this exhibit. But what about any impacts to economic growth due to Clean Air Act implementation?

This chart shows that over the period from 1990 through 2008, primarily due to the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 signed by President Bush, U.S. Gross Domestic Product increased by more than 64 percent while the six most common air pollutants regulated by the Act decreased 41 percent. [grapgh]

Stifling, I say.

I cannot help but wonder whether a related clean air benefit prompted Jeb Bush’s condemnation of airline regulations. Does he mean another law signed by his father, one that “banned smoking on all domestic flights of less than six hours?”

I cannot tell you how many flights I have been on since then where stifled passengers were loudly demanding the right to rise up and fill airplane cabins with choking tobacco smoke.

The Post reporter also tweeted this Jeb Bush comment to the Club for Growth:

It makes you wonder what Bush would have said if he were speaking to the Hair Club for Men.

That “growth at all cost” mentality reminded me of an article I had read: “To Tackle Pollution, China to Drop Pursuit of Growth at All Costs.” The “growth at all cost” vision thing espoused by Bush has resulted in China having some of the most despoiled and deadly air pollution in the world.

The Chinese people are rising up alright—against dangerous air pollution....

http://ecowatch.com/2015/03/03/jeb-bush-trashes-fathers-legacy

==

==

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/George_H.W._Bush

George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President of the United States, was born on June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts.

He was a student leader at Phillips Academy in Andover and, on his 18th birthday, he enlisted in Navy to become an aviator. After completing the 10-month course, he was commissioned as an ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserve on June 9, 1943, several days before his 19th birthday, which made him the youngest naval aviator to that date.

After finishing flight training he was assigned to Torpedo Squadron (VT-51) as photographic officer in September 1943. As part of Air Group 51, his squadron was based on U.S.S. San Jacinto in the spring of 1944. San Jacinto was part of Task Force 58 that participated in operations against Marcus and Wake Islands in May, and then in the Marianas during June. On June 19 the task force triumphed in one of the largest air battles of the war. On his return from the mission Bush's aircraft made a forced water landing. A submarine rescued the young pilot, although the plane was lost as well as the life of his navigator. On July 25 Bush and another pilot received credit for sinking a small cargo ship off Palau.

After Bush's promotion to Lieutenant Junior Grade on August 1, San Jacinto commenced operations against the Japanese in the Bonin Islands. On September 2, 1944, Bush piloted one of four aircraft from VT-51 that attacked the Japanese installations on Chichi Jima. For this mission his crew included Radioman Second Class John Delaney and Lieutenant Junior Grade William White, who substituted for Bush's regular gunner. During their attack four TBM Avengers from VT-51 encountered intense antiaircraft fire. While starting the attack, Bush's aircraft was hit and his engine caught on fire. He completed his attack and released the bombs over his target, scoring several damaging hits. With his engine on fire, Bush flew several miles from the island, where he and one other crew member on the TBM Avenger bailed out of the aircraft. However, the other man's parachute did not open, and he fell to his death. It was never determined which man bailed out with Bush. Both Delaney and White were killed in action. While Bush waited four hours in his inflated raft, several fighters circled protectively overhead until he was rescued by the lifeguard submarine U.S.S. Finback. For this action Bush received the Distinguished Flying Cross. During the month he remained on Finback Bush participated in the rescue of other pilots.

Bush subsequently returned to San Jacinto in November 1944 and participated in operations in the Philippines. When San Jacinto returned to Guam, the squadron, which had suffered 50 percent casualties of its pilots, was replaced and sent to the United States. Through 1944 he had flown 58 combat missions for which he received the Distinguished Flying Cross, three Air Medals, and the Presidential Unit Citation awarded aboard the San Jacinto.

Because of his valuable combat experience, Bush was reassigned to Norfolk Navy Base and put in a training wing for new torpedo pilots. He was later assigned as a naval aviator in a new torpedo squadron, VT-153. With the surrender of Japan, he was honorably discharged in September 1945 and then entered Yale University.

In January 1945, Bush married Barbara Pierce (Barbara Bush) with whom he had six children: George Walker Bush, Robin (who died as a child), John (known as Jeb Bush), Neil Mallon Bush, Marvin Bush, and Dorothy.[1]

Bush attended Yale University, where he was tapped as a member of the Skull & Bones Society and graduated as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Following graduation, Bush "embarked on a career in the oil industry of West Texas."[2]

In 1950, Bush started the oil royalty company Overby Development Company with John Overby. After favorable changes in the U.S. policy concerning offshore drilling [3], Bush and his partner started the Zapata Petroleum Corp. with fellow Midland "Yalies" Liedtke and Liedtke. The company would later merge with a handful of other companies to form "Pennzoil", while Bush went off on his own with the Zapata Offshore Corp. (thought to be a corporate front for intelligence operations in the Gulf of Mexico, and today, Latin America, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian area.)

"Like his father, Prescott Sheldon Bush, who was elected a Senator from Connecticut in 1952, George became interested in public service and politics. He served two terms as a Representative to Congress from Texas. Twice he ran unsuccessfully for the Senate. Then he was appointed to a series of high-level positions: Ambassador to the United Nations, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in the People's Republic of China, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency" from 30 January 1976 (Pres. Ford) to 20 January 1977 (Carter inauguration).[4][5]

"In 1980 Bush campaigned for the Republican nomination for President. He lost, but was chosen as a running mate by Ronald Reagan. As Vice President, Bush had responsibility in several domestic areas, including Federal deregulationand anti-drug programs, and visited scores of foreign countries. In 1988 Bush won the Republican nomination for President and, with Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana as his running mate, he defeated Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in the general election."[6]

"Bush faced a dramatically changing world, as the Cold War ended after 40 bitter years, the Communist empire broke up, and the Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union ceased to exist; and reformist President Mikhail Gorbachev, whom Bush had supported, resigned. While Bush hailed the march of capitalism, he insisted on restraint in U. S. policy toward the group of new nations."[7]

"In other areas of foreign policy, President Bush sent American troops into Panama to overthrow the corrupt regime of General Manuel Noriega, formerly a CIA asset, who was threatening the security of the canal and the Americans living there. Noriega was brought to the United States for trial as a drug trafficker."[8]

"Bush's most lucrative opportunity came when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, then threatened to move into Saudi Arabia. Vowing to free Kuwait, Bush rallied the United Nations, the U. S. people, and Congress and sent 425,000 American troops. They were joined by 118,000 troops from allied nations. After weeks of air and missile bombardment, the 100-hour land battle dubbed Desert Storm routed Iraq's million-man army."[9]

"Despite unprecedented popularity from this military and diplomatic triumph, Bush was unable to withstand discontent at home from a faltering economy, rising violence in inner cities, and continued high deficit spending. In 1992 he lost his bid for reelection to Democrat William Jefferson Clinton."[10]

Contents [hide]

Bush and tobacco issues

George H.W. Bush appointed David Kessler as head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1990.[11]

Affiliations

Resources and articles

Related Sourcewatch articles

References

  1. ↑ Council of Advisors, World Food Prize, accessed December 9, 2007.
  2. ↑ Directors, Academy of Political Science, accessed April 15, 2008.
  3. ↑ Honorary Patrons, Global Leadership Foundation, accessed January 11, 2010.

External links

Profiles

Articles & Commentary

This article may include information from Tobacco Documents Online.

===

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._W._Bush

**Clarence Thomas** – 1991

Early career

Thomas was admitted to the Missouri bar on September 13, 1974.[^^34]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas#cite_note-FOOTNOTEFoskett2004139-33) From 1974 to 1977, Thomas was an Assistant Attorney General of Missouri under then State Attorney General John Danforth, who met Thomas at Yale Law School. Thomas was the only black member of Danforth's staff.[^^35]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas#cite_note-FOOTNOTEFoskett2004138-34) As Assistant Attorney General, Thomas first worked at the criminal appeals division of Danforth's office and moved on to the revenue and taxation division.[^^36]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas#cite_note-FOOTNOTEFoskett2004139.E2.80.93140-35) Retrospectively, Thomas considers Assistant Attorney General the best job he has ever had.[^^37]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas#cite_note-FOOTNOTEFoskett2004147-36) When Danforth was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976 to 1979, Thomas left to become an attorney with Monsanto Company in St. Louis, Missouri, the only private sector job he would ever have.[^^38(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas#cite_note-FOOTNOTEFoskett2004147.2C_149-37)

  DDT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto

palast

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Poppy Strikes Gold

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Originally Posted July 9, 2003

By Greg Palast

This excerpt is taken from Greg Palast's bookThe Best Democracy Money Can Buy available from www.gregpalast.com

George W. could not have amassed this pile if his surname were Jones or Smith. While other candidates begged, pleaded and wheedled for donations, the Bushes added a creative, lucrative new twist to the money chase that contenders couldn't imitate: "Poppy" Bush's post–White House work. It laid the foundation for Dubya's campaign kitty corpulence and, not incidentally, raised the family's net worth by several hundred percent.

In 1998, for example, the former president and famed Desert Stormtrooper-in-Chief wrote to the oil minister of Kuwait on behalf of Chevron Oil Corporation. Bush says, honestly, that he "had no stake in the Chevron operation." True, but following this selfless use of his influence, the oil company put $657,000 into the Republican Party coffers.

That year Bush père created a storm in Argentina when he lobbied his close political ally, President Carlos Menem, to grant a gambling license to Mirage Casino Corporation. Once again, the senior Bush wrote that he had no personal interest in the deal. However, Bush fils made out quite nicely: After the casino fiap, Mirage dropped $449,000 into the Republican Party war chest.

Much of Bush's loot, reports the Center for Responsive Politics, came in the form of "bundled" and "soft" money. That's the squishy stuff corporations use to ooze around U.S. law, which prohibits any direct donations from corporations.

Not all of the elder Bush's work is voluntary. His single talk to the board of Global Crossing, the telecom start-up, earned him stock worth $13 million when the company went public. Global Crossing's employees also kicked in another million for the younger Bush's run. (We'll meet Global Crossing again in Chapter 3.)

And while the Bush family steadfastly believes that ex-felons should not have the right to vote for president, they have no objection to ex-cons putting presidents on their payroll. In 1996, despite pleas by U.S. church leaders, Poppy Bush gave several speeches (he charges $100,000 per talk) sponsored by organizations run by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, cult leader, tax cheat—and formerly the guest of the U.S. federal prison system. Some of the loot for the Republican effort in the 1997–2000 election cycles came from an outfit called Barrick Corporation.

The sum, while over $100,000, is comparatively small change for the GOP, yet it seemed quite a gesture for a corporation based in Canada. Technically, the funds came from those associated with the Canadian's U.S. unit, Barrick Gold Strike.

They could well afford it. In the final days of the Bush (Senior) administration, the Interior Department made an extraordinary but little noticed change in procedures under the 1872 Mining Law, the gold rush–era act that permitted those whiskered small-time prospectors with their tin pans and mules to stake claims on their tiny plots. The department initiated an expedited procedure for mining companies that allowedBarrick to swiftly lay claim to the largest gold find in America. In the terminology of the law, Barrick could "perfect its patent" on the estimated $10billion in ore—for which Barrick paid the U.S. Treasury a little under $10,000. Eureka!

Barrick, of course, had to put up cash for the initial property rights and the cost of digging out the booty (and the cost of donations, in smaller amounts, to support Nevada's Democratic senator, Harry Reid). Still, the shift in rules paid off big time: According to experts at the Mineral Policy Center of Washington, DC, Barrick saved—and the U.S. taxpayer lost—a cool billion or so. Upon taking office, Bill Clinton's new interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, called Barrick's claim the "biggest gold heist since the days of Butch Cassidy." Nevertheless, because the company followed the fast-track process laid out for them under Bush, this corporate Goldfinger had Babbitt by the legal nuggets. Clinton had no choice but to give them the gold mine while the public got the shaft.

---

In 1998, for example, the former president and famed Desert Stormtrooper-in-Chief

wrote to the oil minister of Kuwait on behalf of Chevron Oil Corporation. Bush says,

honestly, that he "had no stake in the Chevron operation." True, but following this

selfless use of his influence, the oil company put $657,000 into the Republican Party

coffers.

That year Bush pere created a storm in Argentina when he lobbied his close political ally,

President Carlos Menem, to grant a gambling license to Mirage Casino Corporation.

Once again, the senior Bush wrote that he had no personal interest in the deal. However,

Bush fils made out quite nicely: After the casino flap, Mirage dropped $449,000 into the

Republican Party war chest.

Much of Bush's loot, reports the Center for Responsive Politics, came in the form of

"bundled" and "soft" money. That's the squishy stuff corporations use to ooze around

U.S. law, which prohibits any direct donations from corporations.

Not all of the elder Bush's work is voluntary. His single talk to the board of Global

Crossing, the telecom start-up, earned him stock worth $13 million when the company

went public. Global Crossing's employees also kicked in another million for the younger

Bush's run. (We'll meet Global Crossing again in Chapter 3.)

And while the Bush family steadfastly believes that ex-felons should not have the right to

vote for president, they have no objection to ex-cons putting presidents on their payroll.

In 1996, despite pleas by u.s. church leaders, Poppy Bush gave several speeches (he

charges $100,000 per talk) sponsored by organizations run by Rev. Sun Myung Moon,

cult leader, tax cheat-and formerly the guest of the U.S. federal prison system.

Some of the loot for the Republican effort in the 1997-2000 election cycles came from an

outfit called Barrick Corporation. The sum, while over $100,000, is comparatively small

change for the GOP, yet it seemed quite a gesture for a corporation based in Canada.

Technically, the funds came from those associated with the Canadian's U.S. unit, Barrick

Gold Strike.

They could well afford it. In the final days of the Bush (Senior) administration, the

Interior Department made an extraordinary but little noticed change in procedures under

the 1872 Mining Law, the gold rush-era act that permitted those whiskered small-time

prospectors with their tin pans and mules to stake claims on their tiny plots. The

department initiated an expedited procedure for mining companies that allowed Barrick

to swiftly lay claim to the largest gold find in America. In the terminology of the law,

Barrick could "perfect its patent" on the estimated $10 billion in ore-for which Barrick

paid the U.S. Treasury a little under $10,000. Eureka!

Barrick, of course, had to put up cash for the initial property rights and the cost of

digging out the booty (and the cost of donations, in smaller amounts, to support Nevada's

Democratic senator, Harry Reid). Still, the shift in rules paid off big time: According to

experts at the Mineral Policy Center of Washington, DC, Barrick saved-and the u.s.

taxpayer lost-a cool billion or so.

Upon taking office, Bill Clinton's new interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, called Barrick's

claim the "biggest gold heist since the days of Butch Cassidy." Nevertheless, because the

company followed the fast-track process laid out for them under Bush, this corporate

Goldfinger had Babbitt by the legal nuggets. Clinton had no choice but to give them the

gold mine while the public got the shaft.

Barrick says it had no contact whatsoever with the president at the time of the rules

change.1 There was always a place in Barrick's heart for the older Bush-and a place on its

payroll. In 1995, Barrick hired the former president as Honorary Senior Advisor to the

Toronto company's International Advisory Board.

1 Barrick has responded to every allegation reported in my first report on the company in a

manner certain to get my attention: The company and its chairman sued my papers, Guardian and

the Observer. While I have a distaste for retort by tort, I have incorporated their legitimate

concerns to ensure their views are acknowledged. More on the suit in Chapter 8.

Bush joined at the suggestion of former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, who,

like Bush, had been ignominiously booted from office. I was a bi~ surprised that the

president had signed on.

When Bush was voted out of the White House, he vowed never to lobby or join a

corporate board. The chairman of Barrick openly boasts that granting the title "Senior

Advisor" was a sly maneuver to help Bush tiptoe around this promise.

I was curious: What does one do with a used president? Barrick vehemently denies that it

appointed Bush "in order to procure him to make contact with other world leaders whom

he knows, or who could be of considerable assistance" to the company. Yet, in September

1996, Bush wrote a letter to help convince Indonesian dictator Suharto to give Barrick a

new, hot gold-mining concession.

Bush's letter seemed to do the trick. Suharto took away 68 percent of the world's largest

goldfield from the finder of the ore and handed it to Barrick. However, Bush's lobbying

magic isn't invincible. Jim Bob Moffett, a tough old Louisiana swamp dog who heads

Freeport-McMoRan, Barrick's American rival, met privately with Suharto. When Suharto

emerged from their meeting, the kleptocrat announced that Freeport would replace Bush's

Canadians. (Barrick lucked out: The huge ore deposit turned out to be a hoax. When the

con was uncovered, Jim Bob's associates invited geologist Mike de Guzman, who

"discovered" the gold, to talk about the error of his ways. Unfortunately, on the way to

the meeting, de Guzman fell out of a helicopter.)

Who is this "Barrick" to whom our former president would lease out the reflected

prestige of the Oval Office? I could not find a Joe Barrick in the Canadian phone book.

Rather, the company as it operates today was founded by one Peter Munk. The

entrepreneur first came to public notice in Canada in the 1960s as a central figure in an

insider trading scandal. Munk had dumped his stock in a stereo-making factory he

controlled just before it went belly up, leaving other investors and government holding

the bag. He was never charged, but, notes Canada's Maclean's magazine, the venture and

stock sale "cost Munk his business and his reputation." Yet today, Munk's net worth is

estimated at $350 million, including homes on two continents and his own island.

How did he go from busted stereo maker to demi-billionaire goldbug? The answer:

Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi arms dealer, the "bag man" in the Iran-Contra arms-forhostage

scandals. The man who sent guns to the ayatolla teamed up with Munk on hotel

ventures and, ultimately, put up the cash to buy Barrick in 1983, then a tiny company

with an "unperfected" claim on the Nevada mine. You may recall that Bush pardoned the

coconspirators who helped Khashoggi arm the Axis of Evil, making charges against the

sheik all but impossible. (Bush pardoned the conspirators not as a favor to Khashoggi, but

to himself.)

Khashoggigot out of Barrick just after the Iran-Contra scandal broke, long before 1995,

when Bush was invited in. By that time, Munk's reputation was restored, at least in his

own mind, in part by massive donations to the University of Toronto. Following this act

of philanthropy, the university awarded Munk-adviser Bush an honorary degree. Several

students were arrested protesting what appeared to them as a cash-for-honors deal.

Mr. Munk's president-for-hire did not pay the cost of his rental in Indonesia. The return

on Barrick's investment in politicians would have to come from Africa.

Mobutu Sese Seko, the late dictator of the Congo (Zaire), was one of the undisputed

master criminals of the last: century having looted hundreds of millions of dollars from

his national treasuryand a golfing buddy of the senior Bush. That old link from the links

probably did not hurt Barrick in successfully seeking an eighty-thousand-acre goldmining

concession from the Congolese cutthroat. Bush himself did not lobby the deal for

Barrick. It wasn't that the former president was squeamish about using the authority of his

former posts to cut deals with a despot. Rather, at the time Bush was reportedly helping

Adolf Lundin, Barrick's sometime industry rival. Africa specialist Patrick Smith of

London disclosed that Bush called Mobutu in 1996 to help cinch a deal for Lundin for a

mine distant from Barrick's.

Rebellion against Mobutu made the mine site unusable, though not for the company's

lack of trying. In testimony in hearings convened by the minority leader of the House

Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Human Rights, expert Wayne Madsen alleged that

Barrick, to curry favor with both sides, indirectly funded both and thereby inadvertently

helped continue the bloody conflict. The allegation, by respected journalist Wayne

Madsen, has not been substantiated: The truth is lost somewhere in the jungle, where

congressional investigators will never tread.

Though Barrick struck out in Indonesia and the Congo, the big payoff came from the

other side of the continent. The company's president bragged to shareholders that the

prestige of the Mulroney-Bush advisory board was instrumental in obtaining one of the

biggest goldfields in East Africa at Bulyanhulu, Tanzania. Barrick, according to its

president, had hungered for that concession-holding an estimated $3 billion in bullionsince

the mid-1990s, when it first developed its contacts with managers at Sutton

Resources, another Canadian company, which held digging rights from the government.

(See footnote 1.) Enriched by the Nevada venture, Barrick could, and eventually would,

buy up Sutton. But in 1996, there was a problem with any takeover of Sutton: Tens of

thousands of small-time prospectors, "jewelry miners," so called because of their

minuscule finds, already lived and worked on the land. These poor African diggers held

legal claim stakes to their tiny mine shafts on the property. If they stayed, the concession

was worthless.

In August 1996, Sutton's bulldozers, backed by military police firing weapons, rolled

across the goldfield, smashing down worker housing, crushing their mining equipment

and filling in their pits. Several thousand miners and their families were chased off the

property. But not all of them. About fifty miners were still in their mine shafts, buried

alive.

Buried alive. It's not on Bush's resume, nor on Barrick's Web site. You wouldn't expect it

to be. But then, you haven't found it in America's newspapers either.

There are two plausible explanations for this silence. First, it never happened; the tale of

the live burials is a complete fabrication of a bunch of greedy, lying Black Africans

trying to shake down Sutton Resources (since 1999, a Barrick subsidiary). That's what

Barrick says after conducting its own diligence investigation and relying on local and

national investigations by the Tanzanian government. And the company's view is backed

by the World Bank. See Chapter 8 for more on this.2

2 A bit of confusion here: Barrick swore to my paper that the alleged killings "related to a time

years before [Barrick] had any connection whatsoever with the company to which the report

referred." Yet Barrick's president and CEO, Randall Oliphant, told Barrick's shareholders that

prior to their acquisition of Sutton, "we followed the progress at Bully (i.e., Bulyanhulu) for five

years, remaining in close contact with the senior management team." That would connect them to

the mine in 1994. The mining company wants me to report their version of events. Okay, here's

both of them.

There's another explanation: Barrick threatens and sues newspapers and human rights

organizations that dare to breathe a word of the allegations-even if Barrick's denials are

expressed. I know: They sued my papers, the Observer and Guardian (for more on that,

see Chapter 8). Barrick even sent a letter to the internationally respected human rights

lawyer Tundu Lissu, a fellow at the World Resources Institute in Washington, DC,

outlining its suit against the Observer and warning that it would take "all necessary steps"

to protect its reputation should the Institute repeat any of the allegations. Barrick's threats

are the least of Lissu's problems. For supplying me with evidence-photos of a corpse of a

man allegedly killed by police during the clearance of the mine site, notarized witness

statements, even a police video of workers seeking bodies from the mine pits-and for

Lissu's demanding investigation of the killings, his law partners in Oar es Salaam have

been arrested and Lissu charged by the Tanzanian government with sedition.

In 1997, while Bush was on the board (he quit in 1999), Mother Jones magazine named

Barrick's chairman Munk one of America's "10 Little Piggies"--quite an honor for a

Canadian-for allegedly poisoning the West's water supply with the tons of cyanide

Barrick uses to melt mountains of ore.

Notably, one of the first acts of the junior Bush's Interior Department in 2001 was to

indicate it would reverse Clinton administration rules requiring gold extractors to limit

the size of waste dumps and to permit new mines even if they were likely to cause

"substantial, irreparable harm." The New York Times ran a long, front-page story on this

rule-relaxing windfall for Nevada goldmining companies, but nowhere did the Times

mention the name of the owner of the largest gold mine in Nevada, Barrick, nor its recent

payroller, the president's father.

http://www.ethosworld.com/library/Greg-Palast-The-Best-Democracy-Money-Can-Buy-%282003%29.pdf

next: 

Did Our President Spike the Investigation of bin Laden?

=

Prescott bush supported McC censure (nazi $?)

---

conflict of interest 

http://www.ringnebula.com/project-censored/1976-1992/1991/1991-story10.htm

=

hmmn  satanic cults?

http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/randy/swas5.htm

This article may be reproduced in any non-commercial medium but please include the entire text and the URL. For commercial use contact Emperor's Clothes.

http://www.tenc.net * [Emperor's Clothes]
Nazis in the attic, part 6

By Randy Davis 

GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH

...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)

EDWIN PAULEY

"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 admini-strations . . . 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)

--------------------------------- 

FOOTNOTES: GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH ---------------------------------

1 - The Secret War Against the Jews, pp. 357-361

2 - Ibid., pp. 362-364

3 - Ibid., pp. 365-371

4 - The 1993 Project Censored Yearbook: The News That Didn't Make The News - And Why, Project Censored; Dr. Carl Jensen, Director., pp. 230.

Nazis in the attic  BIBLIOGRAPHY BY SECTION

INTRODUCTION

The Irony of Democracy: An Uncommon Introduction to American Politics Second Edition, By Thomas R. Dye and L. Harmon Zeigler Duxbury Press, CA. 1972

The Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to Lockheed By Anthony Sampson The Viking Press, NY. 1977

U. S. CORPORATIONS AND THE NAZIS

Facts and Fascism By George Seldes (Assisted by Helen Seldes) Sixth Edition In Fact, Inc., NY. 1943

Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949 By Charles Higham Delecorte Press, NY. 1983

Even the Gods Can't Change History: The Facts Speak for Themselves By George Seldes Lyle Stuart, Inc., NJ. 1976

Power, Inc.: Public and Private Rulers and How to Make Them Accountable By Morton Mintz & Jerry S. Cohen Viking Press, NY. 1976

The Plot to Seize the White House By Jules Archer Hawthorn Books, 1973

It's A Conspiracy!: The Shocking Truth About America's Favorite Conspiracy Theories By Michael Litchfield / The National Insecurity Council EarthWorks Press, CA. 1992

The Secret War Against The Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed The Jewish People By John Loftus and Mark Aarons St. Martin's Press, NY. 1994

One Thousand Americans By George Seldes BONI & GAER, NY. 1947

Spooks: The Haunting of America The Private Use of Secret Agents By Jim Hougan First Bantam Edition William Morrow and Co., NY. 1979

The Sovereign State of ITT By Anthony Sampson Stein and Day, NY. 1973

Democracy for the Few By Michael Parenti Fourth Edition St. Martin's Press, NY. 1983

THE NEW WORLD (DIS)ORDER

Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time By Carroll Quigley Second Printing Wm. Morrison, NY. 1974

The American Establishment By Leonard Silk & Mark Silk First Discus Printing Avon Books (by arrangement with Basic Books), NY. 1981

The New Germany and the Old Nazis By T.H. Tetens Random House, NY. 1961

Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effect on the Cold War By Christopher Simpson Weidenfeld & Nicolson, NY. 1988

Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and Soviet Intelligence By Mark Aarons & John Loftus First U.S. Edition St. Martin's Press, NY. 1992

Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes: From JFK to the CIA Terrorist Connection By Jonathan Vankin Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., NY. 1992

RICHARD MILHOUSE NIXON

High Treason: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the New Evidence of Conspiracy By Robert J. Groden and Harrison Edward Livingstone Berkley Edition Berkley Books, NY. 1990

GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH

Censored: The News That Didn't Make the News -- And Why By Carl Jensen Shelburne Press, Inc., NY. 1993 hmmn

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