Newsletter
RSS Feed
Donate
Blog Roll
Arthur Silber
Angry Arab
Antiwar.com
A Tiny Revolution
Gore Vidal
William Blum/Killing Hope
Baltimore Chronicle
Buzzflash
Magnificent Valor
The Distant Ocean
Glenn Greenwald
Horton/Harper's
Informed Comment
Vast Left
TomDispatch
Truthdig
Welcome to the Sideshow
Winter Patriot
Andy Worthington
Alicublog
Counterpunch
Mark Crispin Miller
Dennis Perrin
Booman Tribune
Crooks and Liars
ConsortiumNews
Eschaton
Black Agenda Report
LRB Blog
The Raw Story
Sadly, No!
James Wolcott
William Bowles
European Tribune
Iraq Vets Against the War
Blues and Dreams
Bright Terrible Spirit
| Worm Turning: The True Base of the Bush Dynasty |
 |
 |
 |
| Written by Chris Floyd |
| Tuesday, 19 June 2007 16:53 |
*Note: I wrote this piece shortly after the 2004 election. It still seems highly relevant to our predicament today.* There has been much throwing about of brains on the subject of George W. Bush's further lurch to the Right since he limped over the election finish line with his tiny, 1 percent, fraud-marred majority. And to be sure, the wholesale purges he has instituted throughout his regime -- replacing a slew of merely cringing sycophants with cringing, drooling, groveling sycophants -- will indeed hasten the United States' degeneration into corpo-religious authoritarianism along the lines of Franco's Spain.But all the earnest disquisitions about Bush's "ideology" entirely miss the point -- and increase the fog that the Regime deliberately spreads over its true interests. For the heart of this slouching beast is neither left-wing nor right-wing; it's strictly Bush-wing. Anyone even slightly acquainted with the history of the Bush dynasty knows what makes these preppy puppies run -- and it has nothing to do with conservative principles or moral values or national security or world freedom. It's not ideology, but investments -- the gobbling up of unearned, risk-free lucre on the grandest scale imaginable. Naturally, the pursuit of this kind of piratical wealth leads to certain kinds of policies that can at times be mistaken for a political philosophy. For example, the Bush Regime's devotion to Big Oil, the military, tax cuts, corporate deregulation and unbridled executive power could be seen as the expression of a coherent, if repellent, worldview: Social Darwinism -- survival of the fittest, might makes right, winner takes all. Likewise, the Regime's embrace of religious and cultural fundamentalism resembles an ideological stance of unbending zeal and moral certitude, encompassing the whole of reality. Taken together, these traits present a formidable picture of a thoroughgoing ideological juggernaut, well-plated with philosophical, academic, legal and theological armor. But underneath all this bristling array there is nothing but a tiny white maggot of greed, wriggling and gorging on scraps of rotting meat. No deep beliefs or high ideals inform the Bushist ethos, which can be boiled down to one sentence: Grab your pile and screw anybody who gets in the way. War, energy and corporate finance just happen to be where the money is at. And raw, secretive political power -- unfettered by courts, laws, legislators or public scrutiny -- is the most effective way to safeguard and augment these investments. That is not to say that the Bushist credo lacks all nuance. There is in fact a very important refinement to their wormy greed: Loot should always be obtained without the slightest risk to your own financial position. The "free market" must be shunned at all costs -- and manipulated by string-pulling, deceit and intimidation when competition is unavoidable. Thus the Bush model is to cozy up to governments -- preferably strongman regimes free to ladle out public money to their favorites with no questions asked. That's why Bush patriarch Prescott, pa and grandpa to presidents, invested heavily in Nazi war industries throughout the 1930s -- and kept on investing even after the German war machine was grinding through Europe. That's why George I made his mogul bones by pumping oil with repressive royals in Kuwait. Later, when he had a government of his own to play with, George sent U.S. troops to bail out his Kuwaiti partners after another of his business clients, Saddam Hussein, got too frisky in a border dispute. George I would end his career as a corporate bagman, roaming the Earth in search of insider deals and choice "privatizations" from Saudi princes, Asian dictators, African tyrants, South American sleaze merchants and Europork peddlers. George II's murky road to fortune was likewise paved with insider trading, no-risk loans and mysterious infusions of foreign cash, including a bailout from a firm embedded in the octopus of BCCI -- the renegade banking cartel that the U.S. Senate called the "largest criminal organization in world history," which cloaked drug deals, gun-running, nuke trafficking and "black ops" by the CIA and other intelligence services behind a protective wall of bribes that reached into nearly every government on Earth. Of course, the best of all possible worlds is controlling the government yourself -- and Dubya has certainly raised crony capitalism to dizzy heights, tearing down whole countries just so his investor pals (and his family) can reap the profits of "reconstruction." But again, it is the maggoty hankering for easy money that truly drives Bushist militarism, not any kind of ideological or religious vision. For such crude minds, the surest way to guarantee that floods of public boodle keep pouring into your private pocket is to scare the hell out of people and keep them scared with war and rumors of war. The decidedly un-butch Bushes are not really bloodthirsty. They don't sit in dark corners and cackle over the idea of children being chewed to pieces by American bombs. Nor do their nostrils flare with righteous rage at the thought of homosexuality or abortion or nipples on national television. It's just that war profiteering, corporate rapine and cynical pandering to the public's worst instincts are the easiest way to get the unearned riches they crave -- and the perks and power they feel are their birthright as an ancient branch of the American aristocracy. Perhaps if they could obtain these same privileges as easily by other, less horrific means, they would. As it is, they take the world as they find it, and go about their business without fretting over the consequences -- the dead, the ruined, the spreading hate, the poisoned planet. Why should they care? As the maggot cannot see beyond the meat, so too these men of greed-stunted understanding can see nothing of worth outside their own bottomless appetites. *Original version published in the Nov. 26, 2004 edition of The Moscow Times. Extensive annotations, from the original, can be found after the jump.* *** The Carlyle Group The Center for Public Integrity New Army Chief is Carlyle Man San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 19, 2004 Bush's Ancestor's Bank Seized by Government Associated Press, Oct. 18, 2003 Bush-Nazi Link Confirmed New Hampshire Gazette, Oct. 10, 2003 Bush-Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951: Federal Documents New Hampshire Gazette, Nov. 7, 2003 Heir to the Holocaust: Prescott Bush, $1.5 Million and Auschwitz Clamor Magazine, May/June 2002 The BCCI Affair Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Dec. 1992 Why the Gulf War was not in the National Interest The Atlantic Monthly, July 1991, Bush's Night of the Long Knives The Guardian/Salon.com, Nov. 17, 2004 The Hidden History of America's War on Iraq Synthesis/Regeneration, Winter 2003 The Barreling Bushes Los Angeles Times, Jan. 11, 2004 The Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush Kevin Phillips interview, Buzzflash.com, Jan. 4, 2004 Bush's Brother Has Contract to Help Chinese Chip Maker Los Angeles Times, Nov. 27, 2003 Consultant On Iraq Contracts Employed President's Brother Financial Times, Nov. 27, 2003 All in the Profiteering First Family Prince George's Journal, Feb. 23, 2004 The Family That Preys Together Covert Action Quarterly, Summer 1992 Father and Grandfather Bush The Art of Deception, 2004 Bush's Texas: Dark Heart of the American Dream The Observer, June 16, 2002 The Bush Family Saga The Oregon Coast News-Signal, Nov. 6, 2002 Bush, Inc. Salon.com, Aug. 21, 2003 Bush Family Values Mother Jones, Sept/Oct 1992 Bush Secret Effort Helped Iraq Build Its War Machine Los Angeles Times, March 23, 1992 Iraqgate: Confession and Coverup Consortiumnews.com, May/June 1995 Carlyle's Way Red Herring, Dec. 11, 2001 [Carlyle Group] Gets Fat on War The Guardian, March 23, 2003 Crony Capitalism Goes Global The Nation, April 1, 2002 Gitmo Trials Continue Despite Court Ruling The New Standard, Nov. 18, 2004 The Bush Dynasty's Dark Magic Salon.com, Jan. 27, 2004 Bin Laden Money Flow Leads to Midland, Texas In These Times, October 2001 Spies Hide as Bank of England Faces BCCI Charges Observer, Jan. 19, 2003 Funding Terror: The Role of Saudi Banks In These Times, Dec. 20, 2002 Ex-U.S. Official Says CIA Aided Baathists Reuters, April 20, 2003 Rumsfeld's $9 Billion Slush Fund Slate.com, Oct. 10, 2003 The CIA Goes Corporate Slate.com, Nov. 4, 2003 The BCCI Affair: Matters for Further Investigation Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Dec. 1992 Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq in Time of War Despite Use of Gas New York Times, Aug. 18, 2002 Iraqgate: Confession and Coverup Consortiumnews.com, May/June 1995 Firewall: Inside the Iran-Contra Coverup Consortiumnews.com, 1997 Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the Bush Oil Team Centre for Research on Globalisation, March 23, 2002 Sun Myung Moon, North Korea and the Bushes Consortiumnews.com, Oct. 11, 2000 Rev. Moon, the Bushes and Donald Rumsfeld Consortiumnews.com, Jan. 3, 2001 The Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Hooking George Bush Consortiumnews.com, 1997 archives The Bush Family Oligarchy Consortiumnews.com, Aug. 14, 2000 George H.W. Bush, the CIA and a Case of State Terrorism Consortiumnews.com, Sept. 23, 2000 The Bush Dynasty and the Cuban Criminals The Guaridan, Dec. 2, 2002 blog comments powered by Disqus |
