Despite Silverado and Voodoo, Fortune Still Smiles on the President’s Brother
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer

Ah, it’s nice to be Neil Bush.

When you’re Neil Bush, rich people from all over the world are eager to invest money in your businesses, even though your businesses have a history of crashing and burning in spectacular fashion.

When you’re Neil Bush, you’ll be sitting in a hotel room in Thailand or Hong Kong, minding your own business, when suddenly there’s a knock at the door. You answer it and a comely woman strolls in and has sex with you.

Read the complete expose

This is kinda interesting. Jack Abramoff’s bio on the Greenberg-Traurig website, circa 2003. This is the lobbying firm he worked for at the time, one of the most powerful and influential players in the GOP “K Street Project”, designed to create a permanent Republican majority hold on power indefinitely in America. Notice all his credentials. Lots of references to involvement with the Republican Party.

The White House Criminal Conspiracy
By Elizabeth de la Vega
The Nation

    Legally, there are no significant differences between the investor fraud perpetrated by Enron CEO Ken Lay and the prewar intelligence fraud perpetrated by George W. Bush. Both involved persons in authority who used half-truths and recklessly false statements to manipulate people who trusted them. There is, however, a practical difference: The presidential fraud is wider in scope and far graver in its consequences than the Enron fraud. Yet thus far the public seems paralyzed.

    In response to the outcry raised by Enron and other scandals, Congress passed the Corporate Corruption Bill, which President Bush signed on July 30, 2002, amid great fanfare. Bush declared that he was signing the bill because of his strong belief that corporate officers must be straightforward and honest. If they were not, he said, they would be held accountable.

    Ironically, the day Bush signed the Corporate Corruption Bill, he and his aides were enmeshed in an orchestrated campaign to trick the country into taking the biggest risk imaginable - a war. Indeed, plans to attack Iraq were already in motion. In June, Bush announced his “new” pre-emptive strike strategy. On July 23, 2002, the head of British intelligence advised Prime Minister Tony Blair, in the then-secret Downing Street Memo, that “military action was now seen as inevitable” and that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Bush had also authorized the transfer of $700 million from Afghanistan war funds to prepare for an invasion of Iraq. Yet all the while, with the sincerity of Marc Antony protesting that “Brutus is an honorable man,” Bush insisted he wanted peace.

    Americans may have been unaware of this deceit then, but they have since learned the truth. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted in June, 52% of Americans now believe the President deliberately distorted intelligence to make a case for war. In an Ipsos Public Affairs poll, commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org and completed October 9, 50% said that if Bush lied about his reasons for going to war Congress should consider impeaching him. The President’s deceit is not only an abuse of power; it is a federal crime. Specifically, it is a violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 371, which prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States.

Read the rest of the article Here

“Bush has one of the emptiest faces in America. He looks to have no more depth than spit on a rock. It could be that the most incisive personal crime committed by George Bush is that he probably never said to himself, ‘I don’t deserve to be president.’ You just can’t trust a man who’s never been embarrassed by himself. The vanity of George W. stands out with every smirk. He literally cannot control that vanity. It seeps out of every movement of his lips, it squeezes through every tight-lipped grimace. Every grin is a study in smugsmanship.” - Norman Mailer

- Posted by Scott Velniak for USTV Media

Sidney Blumenthal’s essay in The Guardian is worth a read. Lets hope this cabal can be removed from power with a lot less damage and destruction than some others that have been holed up in bunkers in times past.

His administration has become its own republic of fear, and Bush is a prisoner to the right.

One year after his re-election President Bush governs from a bunker. “We go forward with complete confidence,” he proclaimed in his second inaugural address. He urged “our youngest citizens” to see the future “in the determined faces of our soldiers”, to choose between “evil” and “courage”. But as he listened that day, Vice-President Dick Cheney knew the election had been secured by a cover-up.

Read the Essay

Sidney Blumenthal writes in his appropriately titled report “Republicans Gone Wild” that historians in the future will examine the implications and nuances of the Abramoff affair, the K Street Project and the trajectory of the Republican Congress from the dawn of its “revolution” to its Thermidorian dusk. For now, however, the matter is in the hands of the prosecutors.

For more than a decade, Abramoff ran wild. From the offices of two major law firms, Preston Gates & Ellis and Greenberg Traurig, he traded in politicians and clients with abandon. He used false charities and phony think tanks, doled out all-expenses-paid trips, and opened his own Capitol Hill steakhouse called Signatures, where he picked up congressmen’s tabs, to become wealthy and influential. He moved effortlessly from being a “friend of Newt,” former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, to being a “friend of Tom,” former Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. His associates from his College Republican days, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, were his musketeers. Reed, former president of the Rev. Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, became Abramoff’s instrument for buying and manipulating leaders of the religious right to grease his elaborate schemes to bilk Indian tribes that had hired him to help them win approval of their casinos. These were just a few of the Abramoff ploys now being untangled by prosecutors.

In his brazenness, extravagance and heedlessness, Abramoff was one of a kind. Almost all lobbyists earning the kind of money he raked in follow the Washington rule of melting into the scenery. But Abramoff is not simply unique; he is also symptomatic. Abramoff’s crimes are not illustrations of Washington generically gone haywire. He was not an accident waiting to happen. Nor was he just the latest in a dime-a-dozen scandals. Nor does he represent the vice of both parties. Above all, what he is not is a lobbyist who “bought Washington.”

Abramoff has been an integral part of the Republican political machine that has flourished since the 1994 takeover. He has created vast slush funds at the disposal of DeLay (for example, the U.S. Family Network, financed by Russian oil tycoons), worked hand in glove with DeLay’s political operatives, and supported the Republican congressional leadership with funds and favors. Abramoff’s lobbying and politics are inextricable, one and the same, allowing him to simultaneously serve as a valuable member of the Republican machine and be out for himself. He was not the most significant player; nor was his tens of millions more money than bigger figures made. (Haley Barbour, former chairman of the Republican National Committee and former senior partner of a major Washington law firm, and currently governor of Mississippi, comes to mind.) But Abramoff, more than those with more influence or wealth, has the distinction of being the culmination of the recent history of the Republican Congress.

This is an excellent piece for those who want a good synopsis of what this whole scandal is about.

What is clearly apparent is the fact that Jack Abramoff is 100% GOP.

Read The Full Article Here

After last year’s Katrina and Supreme Court fiascos provoked catcalls of “cronyism” from all sides, the Bush administration learned something about making appointments. The lesson: Be more subtle.

Read Nick Burt’s column from In These Times

This is rich. Jack Abramoff producing his own version of ‘Rambo’ meets ‘Red Dawn’. And produced with the cooperation and support of the apartheid regime of South Africa, no less! (making it having been a potentially criminal enterprise in violation of sanctions against that government).

Nineteen eighty-six marked the height of Dolph Lundgren’s powers. Following his triumphant portrayal of Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, Hollywood pundits touted Lundgren as the Swedish Schwarzenegger. With his girlfriend, the flat-topped Jamaican actress Grace Jones, he formed a muscle-bound glamour couple that paparazzi could hardly resist. Therefore, it made little sense that Lundgren would follow a rookie producer into a small African kingdom to make a B-movie called Red Scorpion. 

It didn’t make any sense, except that the film’s producer was Jack Abramoff–the same Jack Abramoff who bilked Indian tribes of $80 million and brought down the most powerful House Republican in the process. But, long before his siren song seduced congressmen like Tom DeLay onto the ethical shoals, it tempted the Scandinavian Adonis to abandon his burgeoning stardom for what seemed like a big-ticket production. Abramoff’s winning quality was that he thought big and took others there with him. When he put together a production, even on his maiden film, he didn’t just sign up a major studio. He signed up foreign investors to help cover his ambitious budget. He even signed up a foreign army to make the action scenes seem real. As he mulled the Red Scorpion offer, Lundgren got a tempting taste of Abramoff’s largesse, when, thanks to the producer, he starred in his very own grip-and-grin photo-op with the president of the United States. “In [Lundgren’s] living room somewhere, there is a photo of him with Ronald Reagan,” the movie’s production manager, Avi Kleinberger, told me. 

Last spring, Kleinberger ran into Lundgren at the Cannes Film Festival. They began discussing the Abramoff scandal, which had just begun to spill into the international press. As the rest of the world expressed shock at Abramoff’s venality, Lundgren shrugged. “Look, he was always connected with politicians, and you just had a feeling about the guy,” he told Kleinberger. “I knew it was going to end badly for him.” 

Read The New Republic Article

I guess this is the GOP’s idea of what ‘public access’ is.

The chief of an Indian tribe represented by the lobbyist Jack Abramoff was admitted to a meeting with President Bush in 2001 days after the tribe paid a prominent conservative lobbying group $25,000 at Mr. Abramoff’s direction, according to documents and interviews. The payment was made to Americans for Tax Reform, a group run by Grover G. Norquist, one of the Republican Party’s most influential policy strategists.

Grover Norquist is in on this scam, as well. No wonder he wants to see government eliminated. Government provides things like investigatory oversight and police services, and those things are threats to him and the racket he and his cohorts seem to be running.

The Washington Monthly was on to this years ago. Read their expose Here

A couple of points come to mind in regards to the economic ties to the Bush Crime Family relative to the Dubai Ports World (DPW) deal. (As some already know, DPW is “state” owned, which is to say that it belongs to the family of the Emir of Dubai, who is an absolute monarch, as George W. Bush apparently imagines himself to be.)

DPW is a major investor in the Carlyle Group, to which the Bush family is intimately connected. Former President Bush sits on their board, is a senior consultant for them, and has been involved in extensive deals with their investors in the past, including the Harken Energy/Arbusto deals. Although there is no direct paper trail, it is widely thought that George W. Bush’s Arbusto got some startup money from Salem Bin Laden, because Bin Laden’s sole U.S. Representative, Houstonian James Bath, invested 50,000 dollars when the company was formed. (George W. Bush says that he started Arbusto with his own money, which is misleading at the very least, because it implies that he got nothing from investors.) Former Senator James A. Baker (R.), a Bush family ally, is a partner in the Carlyle Group. The Carlyle Group also retained former Prime Minister John Major as a senior advisor for its Asian operations; numerous alumni of the Reagan and Bush I administrations have worked for Carlyle, as have the former Presidents of both the Philippines and South Korea.

Most of this information comes from or was confirmed by one of the following Bushwatch pages:

http://www.bushwatch.net/bushmoney.htm
http://www.bushwatch.com/bushcarlyle.htm

There is also a Common Dreams reprint of this article from the Portugal News:

The Guardian has also done extensive reporting on this money connection.

- Ed Lacy
USTV Media