On Bush Nepotism And American War-Profiteering

"The sinews of war are endless profits."
- Cicero, Orationes Philippicæ, v (c. 60 B.C.)

How have the upper classes in every ostensibly Christian society managed to sustain the blatantly immoral practice of war-profiteering? In the American context, this question can be reduced to a twenty-first century version of Cicero's maxim: "How does our military-industrial complex make predatory killing so lucrative for its war profiteers?" Toward answering that question, it will be useful to examine the Bush Family Dynasty's most recent war-profiteering activities. [1] [2]

George "Dubya" Bush's paternal uncle, William H.T. "Bucky" Bush of St. Louis, recently managed to profit from his nephew's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the amount of $450,000.00. How? Through his seat on the board of a St. Louis-based defense contractor, Engineered Support Systems Incorporated ("ESSI").

"Bucky" Bush was appointed to ESSI's Board of Directors in 2000, for which ESSI promptly remunerated him with 8,438 stock options. [3] Over the next five years the price of ESSI's stock soared 1,000%. Why? Largely because the Bush administration, beginning in 2002, had awarded several hundred million dollars worth of no-bid, sole-source, gold-plated military contracts to ESSI. Hence, Bucky's stock options were worth nearly a half million dollars when he decided to cash them in on January 18, 2005.

Dan Kreher, ESSI's Vice President for Industrial Relations, acknowledged that: (1) his company routinely lobbies for government defense contracts in Washington, DC; and (2) "Having a Bush doesn't hurt. ... It certainly doesn't hurt to have people who know who to talk to." When translated from Corporatespeak to colloquial English, this means: "Uncle Bucky sure did create a gold mine for ESSI when he got his nephew, Dubya, to punch our ticket on the war-profiteers' gravy train!"

Unsurprisingly, Bucky has denied that he telephoned anyone in Washington to win those government contracts for ESSI. Quoth the uncle: "I don't make calls to the 202 area code!" Sure. As if we didn't know that plausible-denial-through-linguistic-trickery is an indispensable component of the Bush Family Dynasty's oeuvre! Perhaps Bucky is merely floating this sophomoric Whopper of Mass Deception: (1) while he himself called neither the White House nor the Pentagon directly; (2) he failed to disclose that he did call Houston, whereupon he successfully persuaded his older brother, George H.W. "Poppy" Bush, to telephonically lobby at least one key Washington official -- like, say, Dubya or Rummy -- concerning ESSI's pressing contractual needs.

Of course, not everyone is a full-fledged aristocrat who can depend on nepotism to become a war-profiteer. However, the American upper class's lesser silver-spoons can always rise through the military-industrial complex ranks via the usual method: revolving-door cronyism. And when they've finally achieved the war-profiteer's moneyed status, they can always employ elite K-Street lobbyists to persuade the Washington bribeocracy's most powerful influence-peddlers -- certain "superpatriots" on the House and Senate Armed Services committees to whom their "campaign contributions" and extravagant perks invariably flow.

It's true that ESSI has been blessed by the neoconservatives' bloodsoaked demi-god, Mars. "Company officials acknowledge that the war [in Iraq] is an economic boon to the firm." [4] Indeed, Uncle Bucky's ESSI has done so well since 2002 that it recently purchased a Virginia-based military contractor, Spacelink International LLP, for $150.5 million. Moreover, ESSI's projected annual revenue for 2004 is somewhere between $990 million and $1 billion. And ESSI shows further evidence of having been blessed by Mars, the god of war, insofar as it has lucrative military contracts with those shining exemplars of democratic governance, China and Saudi Arabia.

That's right, folks! ESSI's patriots are selling state-of-the-art military hardware to both the totalitarian PRC and the authoritarian House of Saud so they can vanquish external opponents and suppress internal usurpers! [5] These war-profiteers must have been meditating too long on cheap-labor conservatism's regressive mantras: "Democracy's just a liberal fraud that shall not reach good old Riyadh; it will never rise again from the square at Tianenmen; free trade requires outsourcing your jobs to China's slave-labor gulags!"

But wait! The Pentagon's inspector general is currently investigating undisclosed "anomalies" in ESSI contracts from 2002 that are worth $158 million. However, not to worry! We all know it's inevitable that Uncle Bucky and his corporate cronies will be found innocent of any wrongdoing because "the past is prologue."

Let's flash back to 1990, when George W. Bush reaped a hefty profit of $317,430.00 from his sale of $828,560.00 in Harken Energy stock, just before it plummeted in value. The Securities Exchange Commisssion ("SEC") launched an investigation into Dubya's transaction because it met the criteria for the crime of insider-trading: a seemingly-fortuitous stock sale that was actually a dump-off based on an inside tip from someone at Harken Energy. Nevertheless, the SEC unexplicably dropped its insider-trading investigation and Dubya was suddenly exonerated in 1991. [6] Note that Dubya's father, George H.W. "Poppy" Bush, was the USA's president in 1991.

One of the West's core principles -- equal justice under the law -- is ceasing to exist inside Mr. Bush's increasingly crypto-fascist banana republic version of "democratic" governance. Sadly, the Bushites are swiftly replacing it with arbitrarily-dispensed exemptions from the rule of law, granted to themselves and the "elite people" who possess either direct personal connections to the Bush Family mandarins or enough wealth to buy special favors from their corrupt-to-the-core appointed officials! Furthermore, ESSI and Halliburton-style cronyist war-profiteering has become rampant inside an American economy that is addicted to war.

Based on the Bush Dynasty's vice-riddled familial habit patterns, one can easily imagine a certain dysfunctional rancher using his ludicrously-overdeveloped monarchistic sense of entitlement to impose gratuitous advice on his privileged clientele during their second-term visits to Crawford, Texas: "Folks, it pays big dividends to remember this little tip, culled from the lives of great Americans like Poppy, Bucky, and myself! Whenever you're in a terrible jam, it always helps to consult a powerful relative who can: (A) start an international war that will rescue your company from a sea of red ink during global capitalism's cyclical recessionary doldrums; or (B) make a telephone call that will force an investigatory agency to back down before they can indict you. Finally, we're the "haves" and "have-mores" whereas they're the "have-nots," so we must avoid any handwringing over the fate of the petit bourgeois. Their laws simply do NOT apply to us; laws exists ONLY to constrain the little people! Ya'll keep that in mind now, ya hear?" [7] [8]

1. The Bush Family Dynasty is illustrative because they have a multi-generational history of war-profiteering in America. For instance, documents recently discovered in the National Archive have confirmed that GWB's ancestors engaged in significant war-profiteering activities with the Nazis. They implicate his paternal grandfather, Prescott Bush, and his maternal great-grandfather,

5. Read the facts about Georgr W. Bush's nepotistic avoidance of a criminal indictment for his insider-trading violations -- unlike Martha Stewart -- in Buzzflash.com's article, "The Bush-Harken Insider Trading Collection":

http://www.buzzflash.com/perspectives/bush_harken.html

6. Read about the dysfunctional Bush brothers' history of quasi-criminal business dealings in Robert Trigeaux's 10-29-00 SPT article, "Influence And Bailouts A Business Tradition In Bush Family," at:
http://www.sptimes.com/News/102900/Business/Influence_and_bailout.shtml

7. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush's unnecessary Iraq War is currently costing American taxpayers $5 billion per month. Additionally, the Pentagon's budget allocation for FY 2006 is a whopping $417 billion, but really is $499 billion after one includes Mr. Bush's $82 billion supplemental appropriation request to fund his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that half-trillion dollars doesn't include the military's budget for intelligence! Read Helen Thomas' 2-25-05 CD essay, "$9 Billion Goes Missing In Iraq":

8. Finally, these explain why the experts on international law uniformly regard Mr. Bush's Iraq War as an illegal non-defensive war of aggression, and its implications for US policy in Iraq and the so-called "Bush Doctrine of Preemptive War":
A. Nicholas Davies' outstanding must-read 12-31-04 OJ essay, "The Crime Of War: From Nüremberg To Fallujah":
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/123104Davies/123104davies.html
B. Richard Norton-Taylor's 2-23-05 GU article, "Revealed: The Rush To War": http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1423304,00.html

Author:
Evan Augustine Peterson III, J.D.,
is the Executive Director of the
American Center for International Law ("ACIL").