Bush Fulfill's Grandfather's Dream

June 27, 2008 at 11:02:00

Bush Fulfills His Grandfather's Dream

by David Swanson Page 1 of 1 page(s)

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It's remarkably common for a grandson to take up his grandfather's major project. This occurred to me when I read recently of Thor Heyerdahl's grandson taking up his mission to cross the Pacific on a raft. But what really struck me was the BBC story aired on July 23rd, 2007, documenting President George W. Bush's grandfather's involvement in a 1933 plot to overthrow the U.S. government and install a fascist dictatorship. I knew the story, but had not considered the possibility that the grandson was trying to accomplish what his grandfather had failed to achieve.

Prescott Sheldon Bush (1895 to 1972) attended Yale University and joined the secret society known as Skull and Bones. Prescott is widely reported to have stolen the skull of Native American leader Geronimo. As far as I know, this has not actually been confirmed. In fact, Prescott seems to have had a habit of making things up. He sent letters home from World War I claiming he'd received medals for heroism. After the letters were printed in newspapers, he had to retract his claims.


If this does not yet sound like the life of a George W. Bush ancestor, try this on for size: Prescott Bush's early business efforts tended to fail. He married the daughter of a very rich man named George Herbert Walker (the guy with the compound at Kennebunkport, Maine, that now belongs to the Bush family, and the origin of Dubya's middle initial). Walker installed Prescott Bush as an executive in Thyssen and Flick. From then on, Prescott's business dealings went better, and he entered politics.

Now, the name Thyssen comes from a German named Fritz Thyssen, major financial backer of the rise of Adolph Hitler. Thyssen was referred to in the New York Herald-Tribune as "Hitler's Angel." During the 1930s and early 1940s, and even as late as 1951, Prescott Bush was involved in business dealings with Thyssen, and was inevitably aware of both Thyssen's political activities and the fact that the companies involved were financially benefiting the nation of Germany. In addition, the companies Prescott Bush profited from included one engaged in mining operations in Poland using slave labor from Auschwitz. Two former slave laborers have sued the U.S. government and the heirs of Prescott Bush for $40 billion.

Until the United States entered World War II it was legal for Americans to do business with Germany, but in late 1942 Prescott Bush's businesses interests were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Among those businesses involved was the Hamburg America Lines, for which Prescott Bush served as a manager. A Congressional committee, in a report called the McCormack-Dickstein Report, found that Hamburg America Lines had offered free passage to Germany for journalists willing to write favorably about the Nazis, and had brought Nazi sympathizers to America. (Is this starting to remind anyone of our current president's relationship to the freedom of the press?)

The McCormack-Dickstein Committee was established to investigate a homegrown American fascist plot hatched in 1933. Here's how the BBC promoted its recent story:

"Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by right-wing American businessmen. The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression. Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy."

Actually, if you listen to the 30-minute BBC story, there is not one word of so much as speculation as to why this story is so little known. I think a clue to the answer can be found by looking into why this BBC report has not led to any U.S. media outlets picking up the story this week.

The BBC report provides a good account of the basic story. Some of the wealthiest men in America approached Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, beloved of many World War I veterans, many of them embittered by the government's treatment of them. Prescott Bush's group asked Butler to lead 500,000 veterans in a take-over of Washington and the White House. Butler refused and recounted the affair to the congressional committee. His account was corroborated in part by a number of witnesses, and the committee concluded that the plot was real. But the names of wealthy backers of the plot were blacked out in the committee's records, and nobody was prosecuted. According to the BBC, President Roosevelt cut a deal. He refrained from prosecuting some of the wealthiest men in America for treason. They agreed to end Wall Street's opposition to the New Deal.

Clearly the lack of accountability in Washington, D.C., did not begin with Nancy Pelosi taking Dubya's impeachment off the table, or with Congress' decision to avoid impeachment for President Ronald Reagan (a decision that arguably played a large role in installing Prescott Bush's son George H.W. Bush as president), or with the failure to investigate the apparent deal that George H.W. Bush and others made with Iran to not release American hostages until Reagan was made president, or with the failure to prosecute Richard Nixon after he resigned. Lack of accountability is a proud tradition in our nation's capital. Or maybe I should say our former nation's capital. I don't recognize the place anymore, and I credit that to George W. Bush's efforts to fulfill his grandfather's dream using far subtler and more effective means than a military coup.

Bush the grandson took office through a highly fraudulent election that he nonetheless lost. The Supreme Court blocked a recount of the vote and installed Dubya.

Prescott's grandson proceeded to weaken or eliminate most of the Bill of Rights in the name of protection from a dark foreign enemy. He even tossed out habeas corpus. The grandson of Prescott, that dreamer of the 1930s, established with very little resistance that the U.S. government can kidnap, detain indefinitely on no charge, torture, and murder. The United States under Prescott Bush's grandson adopted policies that heretofore had been considered only Nazi policies, most strikingly the willingness to openly plan and engage in aggressive wars on other nations.

At the same time, Dubya has accomplished a huge transfer of wealth within the United States from the rest of us to the extremely wealthy. He's also effected a major privatization of public operations, including the military. And he's kept tight control over the media.

Dubya has given himself the power to rewrite all laws with signing statements. He's established that intentionally misleading the Congress about the need for a war is not a crime that carries any penalty. He's given himself the right (just as Hitler did) to open anyone's mail. He's created illegal spying programs and then proposed to legalize them. Prescott would be so proud!

The current President Bush has accomplished much more smoothly than his grandfather could have imagined a feat that was one of the goals of Prescott's gang, namely the elimination of Congress.




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http://www.davidswanson.org

DAVID SWANSON is a co-founder of After Downing Street, a writer and activist, and the Washington Director of Democrats.com. He is a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, and serves on the Executive Council of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, TNG-CWA. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including Press Secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, Media Coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as Communications Coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Swanson obtained a Master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia in 1997

Bush Aide Admits Manipulating Opinion on Iraq

Bush Aide Admits Manipulating Opinion On Iraq
Published on Wednesday, May 28, 2008Source: Guardian
Now he tells us: George Bush's former press secretary Scott McClellan has admitted that the Iraq war was "unnecessary" and a "strategic blunder" that was sold to the American people through manipulative propaganda campaign.McClellan's memoirs are described as "surprisingly scathing". He was a loyal press secretary until April 2006, but has now spilled the beans on how the war was sold to the American people.
The memoirs are due to be published on Monday, but the website Politico.com and the Washington Post have got hold of early copies.
McClellan's admissions include:
*Bush relied on propaganda "in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option".* The administration was not "open and forthright on Iraq".* On the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative and the subsequent coverup, "I allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood".* The press were too deferential to the White House on Iraq* Steve Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, offered to resign over the erroneous claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium.* "The Iraq war was not necessary"

With Contempt An Open Letter To Diann Feinstein

With ContemptAn Open letter to Dianne Feinstein By Michael Piotrowski
Dianne,18/05/08

"ICH" -- -You may be surprised and offended by my familiar salutation, but you have lost the right to be addressed as Senator Feinstein. Although I have voted for you in every single election I could (a lot, I'm 60), you have failed miserably as my elected Senator. I now completely withdraw my support for you and the Democratic Party. For the past seven years I have begged and pleaded with you do your job and uphold the solemn oaths you have repeatedly sworn to protect and defend the Constitution of these United States and its laws. Your standard pablum response has been a patronizing pat on the head and a vacuous reassurance that someday something might be accomplished through further legislation, providing Bush doesn't veto it or your colleagues disapprove. Your latest such response (written correspondence, 29 April 2008, regarding torture) is the final straw. I am tired of your sorry excuses and dilatory tactics. Your failure to do your duty has helped bring us to this sorry state of affairs.I was deeply disappointed, but completely unsurprised, by your utter disregard for the Constitution, the law and what is morally right. From what I can deduce from your actions, words and behaviors, protecting your position, your party, and your class are your driving motivations, not governing, not protecting the NATION (you remember the 99% of us who aren't wealthy?), not respecting the rule of law. Despite his assertations to the contrary and your obsequeious submission to them, the President is not, repeat NOT, above or beyond the law whether in peacetime or wartime. In wartime, the President is Commander-in-Chief, and as such is subject to the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice as much as the lowest private is. He stands in violation of that code, and YOU accept it. Beyond the many laws this criminal has violated and could be prosecuted for, there is the Constitutional remedy you have repeatedly refused to employ: impeachment.It is far too late for you to ever regain the respect I once had for you and your party, but at least you might reduce the degree of contempt in which I now hold you. DO THE RIGHT THING: stand up for immediate impeachment. Before you tell me that it is the House's responsibility (trust me, I apparently know more about this than you do), let me point out that it is YOUR responsibility to LEAD. The House will do nothing unless and until the Senate signals its willingness to go forward with it. If your argument is that elections are near and soon he will be out of office, kindly explain to me in a written response that actually addresses the points I'm raising, why that excuses criminal behavior (illegal wiretaps, use of outlawed torture, kidnapping and assassination as government policy, corruption, fraud, cronyism, lying as official policy [Pat Tilman, Abu Graib, Jessica whatever-her-name was}). Failure to impeach this criminal will be the deathblow for this nation. We may stagger on a few years, but I see the end of the United States looming as clearly as the demise of the USSR. Failure to impeach, to hold a fellow member of your socioeconomic class actually responsible for the harm he has caused us will make most doubt the whether the return on investment, the cost of supporting a system that works against 99% of us, is worth it. The Soviet citizens decided that their system wasn't worthy of support and ended it: the same is already happening here.As an example of why this is occuring, I cite the response I will receive from your office regarding this email. Despite the time, care and thought I have put into it, not only will you not read this, you will probably be completely oblivious to it. I will recieve yet another pablum response thanking me for my interest, citing some meaningless future bill that might be remotely related to one or two of the issues I've raised, written by some juvenile intern hoping to make his or her fortune in politics. In other words, I have wasted my time and thought with trying to communicate with you: you and this system are unworthy of any further support. I will be showing the response I receive from you to many people in my social circle, and advise them to vote one last time for true change. No, not for Obama or Hilary or McCain or any other Democrat or Republican. I will advise them to vote for ANYONE who is not a Republicrat. When that fails to get the message through, as it will, my advice will be to start doing what the Senate does: ignore any laws and resposibilities they don't like, as there is no longer a valid contract between the citizens and their "elected" officials.Mark my words: you have perhaps a year, maybe two, before the riots start. High gas prices, high food prices, incompetent disaster relief, home foreclosures, lack of jobs, and a loss of faith in the system will combine to create chaos. If your aides were to look up my previous correspondance with you they will find that I accurately predicted the lack of WMD, the quagmire that is Iraq, and a number of other things. I'm sure you believe that if we can just get throught the election, everything will be better with a Democratic President. Wrong: whoever is president will soon discover that we are broke, the business class has no interest in rectifying anything, and we are bereft of influence. More people will lose their homes while you and your colleagues pump billions into corporations "that are too big to fail". Those corporations will take that tax money and invest it outside the United States. The kicker is going to be TV, in February '09. When you have millions of people with no home, no work, no money, hugely expensive gas and food, and nothing much to do besides watch TV, and you take THAT away from them what exactly do you think they will do? Vouchers for new TVs or adapters don't help if you can't afford to feed your children. The subsequent riots will spin completely out of control with most of the National Guard deployed overseas.While most of this is too far gone to stop, it might yet be mitigated if you do the right thing and support the impeachment of Bush and his cronies. Unfortunately, my concerns are going into the empty head of some ignorant intern who is likely going to have to look up some of the words I've used (and still not comprehend them). So to you who is actually reading this: hide and watch as our country falls over the next two years or so and when it happens, remember that she was warned well in advance and nothing you could do would get her to do anything constructive about it, because that would require more sacrifice and selflessness than she, or anyone in Washington for that matter, is capable of.Despite all that, I still expect a written response, if only to annoy the office. But don't worry: I don't expect anything like a reasoned, respectful response, just more phony pablum.with contempt,Michael Piotrowski - Citizen, Vietnam Vet, Educator, former Democrat