-------------------------------------------------------- http://www.e-book.com.au/got2.htm A Government of Thieves How the Bush Administration steals from the US people (and the world) There's no longer any countervailing power in Washington. Business is in complete control of the machinery of government. - Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labour The thieves in action Stolen - money, social services and jobs US citizen's taxes fuel the war profits of a secretive group of people growing ever richer at their expense. This "government of thieves" practises a revolving door of war for business and business for war . The Bush administration has promoted a huge increase in military spending for purposes such as invading Iraq, providing an enormous source of extra profit for big defence contractors and military-corporate shareholders, who at the same time have also been given large tax cuts by Bush & his cronies. All this money is in effect stolen from the remaining 90% of the population. As a consequence, education, health, social welfare and many other useful or vital areas of government must be cut back. As well, numerous jobs are lost in these fields. Many ordinary people are suckered into voting for Bush by appeals to patriotism and religion - this from the family that has failed to find Osama bin Laden, but which protects the Saudi elite whose oil dollars work to promote Islamic fundamentalism against more moderate forms of Islam and all other religions and creeds. Stolen - the lives and limbs of America's young as cannon fodder Over two thousand dead and over fifteen thousand wounded US soldiers already in Iraq (by the end of October 2005), with no end in sight. Instead, we see a war growing daily. How many more will be sacrificed for corporate interests? Is it reasonable to defame lives lost already by using them as an excuse to squander thousands more? There is no light at the end of this tunnel - instead the oil flares of Iraq illuminate a US occupation that more & more resembles a Vietnam-style guerilla war that is going down the tube. It's the poor who serve, while the rich just get richer on the "patriotism of scoundrels" The Bush administration represents a corrupt group of people who together with a few toadies abroad have stolen control of Western civilisation by deception. In President Bush's own words , his personal "base" is "the haves and the have mores". He finds that amusing, while the young men and women of America suffer and die for him and his ruthless, moneyed corporate elite. The children of this elite do not suffer and die in Iraq, that fate is reserved for the financially downtrodden. That's why rising unemployment does not bother the elite, for a lack of jobs elsewhere makes it easier to recruit poorer young people into the armed forces, and to keep "lesser folk" fearful for their future and so more compliant to authority. And here's the proofŠ The new elite of America with their hands in the till The Carlyle Group This huge investment company (it manages over US$13 billion in assets) is headed by Frank Carlucci, a former Defence Secretary and National Security Council head under President Reagan. Carlucci was also Donald Rumsfeld's college roommate at Princeton. Richard Darman, formerly President Bush Sr's director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the managing director. Highly paid "consultants" to the company include several retired world leaders. If you ever wonder why some world leaders support the Iraq war so strongly against the wishes of their populations, the retirement rewards can be considerable. Not the least of the retired leaders is President George Bush Sr ., who is a large Carlyle stockholder, sometime Carlyle board member and has earned substantial fees working for Carlyle since he left office. Indeed he has received at least US$80,000 per "speaking engagement", although it seems to be his personal contacts and presumed ability to influence the powerful that prompted such generous compensation. Bush senior's connection with the company presumably began when his son, George W. Bush , was offered a director's position on the board of a Carlyle subsidiary, Caterair, in 1990 when his father was President. Bush Sr. is also senior advisor of Carlyle's Asia Advisory Board. As well, the first President Bush twice visited the bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia (November 1998 & January 2000) on Carlyle business besides other meetings with family members elsewhere. Another key Carlyle figure as a "senior counsellor" is James Baker (James A. Baker III), a former Republican Secretary of State and close Bush family friend. Baker was leader of the final "Team Bush" grab for office during the disputed election process in Florida in 2000 (he was notorious for dropping the mask briefly on TV & snarling outright the Bush determination to seize power). A huge Carlyle investment has been in the United Defence company, suppliers of many of the armoured vehicles for the Iraq war. Carlyle is now finally selling out of that company, but not before making enormous profits (the bin Laden family were earlier offered a 40% return on their investment in Carlyle). Other lucrative benefits for Carlyle's investments deriving from the Bush wars have come from USIS, a privatised former federal agency that does security vetting for a huge range of sensitive positions, and EG&G, a weapons testing & related services company recently sold by Carlyle for a handy US$675 million. Aircraft components subsidiaries of Carlyle such as Vought Aircraft and Composite Structures also promise well for the group's bottom line, in the light of the critical use of aircraft in the Bush administration's wonderfully profitable business of the "war against terror". Among other current Carlyle investments are Lier Siegler Services, providing logistics and maintenance, and Federal Data Systems, selling information technology to the US Air Force and other government agencies. The Carlyle Group gave some US$358,000 to Republican candidates in 2000. They have since profited handsomely from their investment. Carlyle, the Bush family and the Saudis Perhaps the most embarrassing single detail about Carlyle is that on the morning of September 11 2001, it was holding its annual investor's conference at the Washington Ritz-Carlton Hotel, a gathering that included Shafiq bin Laden , half-brother of Osama . Following on from that is the scandal of how numerous members of the Bin Laden family were able to leave America after 9/11 on a special flight approved by the White House, without any adequate cross examination. But we should not really be surprised at that, considering the considerable ties between the Bush family and the bin Ladens. (Later the bin Ladens withdrew their Carlyle investments, or so we are told. With the secretive Carlyle Group you have to rely on their word). However numerous other Saudi investors, including the Saudi royal family, continue to have large amounts of capital invested in Carlyle. Given that nearly all of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals and none were Iraqis, it would have been more" logical" - given the new Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strikes - for the US to invade Saudi Arabia rather than Iraq in order to quell Al Qaeda and cut off its funding sources and recruiting ability. Instead, ties of profit by Bush family & administration members ensured that the Saudi regime would be protected at all costs, even though it funds the Wahabist Islamic evangelical push around the world, from which nearly all Al Qaeda members derive. When it comes to religion versus family profit, born-again George has no hesitation in short-changing his own Christian evangelical constituency in favour of underwriting rich Saudi Islamic fundamentalists instead. The current President Bush also has an uncle, a brother of his father, named William Bush . William Bush, nicknamed "Bucky", holds a director's seat on the board of a St Louis, Missouri-based company called Engineered Support Systems Incorporated (ESSI). ESSI has recently done "very well thank you" as a military contractor to the Pentagon. Uncle Bucky personally has done even better. In fact in January 2005 he sold 8,438 share options in the company for around $450,000 as just one benefit. No-bid contracts relating to the Iraq war have helped the company to record profitability. An interesting point is that in 2003, ESSI was granted contracts for equipment to help search for, and protect US soldiers from Iraq's chemical and biological weapons, the ones that didn't exist. Of course no one involved in trumping up a fictitious case for the Iraq invasion knew that - or did they? If they did, it's interesting how cleverly you can perpetuate a scam within a scam if you have the right connections. And in a final Team Bush irony, key Carlyle figure James Baker , who is one of the closest friends and political operatives of the Bush family, has donned his lawyer's hat to represent members of the Saudi royal family against family members of 9/11 victims who are suing them. When it comes to family values the Bushes leave no victims unburned. The President has also selected a former partner of Baker's law firm, Bob Jordan, as his ambassador to Saudi Arabia (confirmed in this position on 5 October 2001). *Let's not forget the independent operatives. A single example is Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush's campaign manager for 2000, whose New Bridge Strategies "consulting" company is based on extracting fees advising on how to cash in on Iraqi "reconstruction" investments. Vice President Dick Cheney and Halliburton Dick Cheney, US Defence Secretary under President Bush Sr, moved from Government into an industry he used to regulate and then back to Government again, becoming as a result the richest member of "Team Bush". As Defence Secretary under Bush senior Cheney had pushed a decision to privatise not only support services for US forces overseas but even much of the logistics planning for deployments. Indeed in 1992, shortly before Cheney left government, the Halliburton company received the first private contract ever of the latter type. As Chief Operating Officer of Halliburton from 1995 Cheney was then able to reap the rewards of his groundwork, as the company's military contracts grew like Topsy. In his last year at Halliburton (2000), before becoming US Vice-President, Cheney received a staggering US$26.4 million from the grateful company in salary, bonuses, stock options and sale of stock received as compensation for giving up his position (he held Halliburton stock worth US$46 million in 2001). Annual "deferred compensation" payments of roughly US$150,000 per year he has received since taking on his "public responsibilities" are of course tiny by comparison, but probably pay a few minor pressing bills. Not since Sir Basil Zaharoff has anyone done so well from promoting war. The wages of militarism are indeed magnificent for war profiteers of his ilk. Although under the Clinton presidency Haliburton later lost some of its rich contracts, once Cheney was back in a senior Govt position the gravy train hurtled off again as never before. In 2001 Halliburton won back the big LOGCAP contract, and became pre-eminent supplier of provisions and facilities for the overseas "war on terror", even making the cages for captives at Guantanamo Bay. Then there was the no-bid "just-about-everything to do with oil" contract for Iraq, given to Halliburton after the company was asked to help write the specifications for a contract it was then awarded without competition (!). Truly, the new golden age of the war profiteers was here with a vengeance. So it's no surprise to learn that the board of Halliburton had found it in their hearts to donate around US$672,000 to Republican candidates from 1999 to 2002, small change compared with their sales growth. The Vice President's family doesn't exactly suffer from his holding such a powerful position either. Cheney's daughter Elizabeth was handily appointed as principal deputy assistant Secretary of State and the second-ranking US diplomat for the Middle East in March 2005. Her husband, Philip Perry, has also since been nominated by President Bush, on the timely date of April 1st 2005, to the plum job of general counsel of the Homeland Security Department, overseeing 1500 lawyers. Mr Perry was formerly a partner in the law firm Latham & Watkins where he was a lobbyist for the weapons firm Lockheed Martin. Ah, what are family and friends for, in the GoT, if not to share the largesse of government? And you can always browse Lockheed Martin & the Bush arms gravy train below for another interesting Cheney family connection. Richard Armitage , the prominent assistant secretary of state, worked as a consultant to Halliburton before taking up his present job. Admiral Joe Lopez , Pentagon military aide to Cheney when he was US Defence Secretary and a four-star former commander in chief of U.S. forces in southern Europe, was recruited to Halliburton by Cheney, and given the highly-paid job of senior vice president in charge of dealings between Halliburton's major subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root and the Pentagon. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld The present US Defence Secretary also once served as Defence Secretary to President Ford. Failing in a bid to become Republican candidate for President, he then entered business to became a senior executive with several major companies. In 1983 President Reagan appointed him as Special Presidential Envoy to the Middle East, where he supervised the warming relationship with Saddam Hussein into an alliance in which the US was to supply intelligence, military technology and the necessary ingredients to make weapons of mass destruction. What Rumsfeld should have said if he was honest in 2003 was "Well I know that Saddam used to have WMD anyway, because I arranged for him to get them!" Being even then interested in Iraq's oil, Rumsfeld also discussed with Iraqi Premier Tariq Aziz the possibility of an oil pipeline through Jordan to the Red Sea. Less than coincidentally, the pipeline had in fact been proposed by the Bechtel Corp. for which then Republican Secretary of State George Schultz had worked. Bechtel Corp ., another of the Bush administration's "crony companies", today has a contract for a minimum of US$680 million for rebuilding some of the damage done in Iraq. Indeed a contract awarded to Bechtel through secret procedures (by the US AID agency) was later expanded by a further US$350 million. Out of government again, Rumsfeld secured a number of senior business appointments in the 1990s, including CEO of General Instruments and a board position with Gulfstream Aerospace (where Secretary of State Colin Powell was another board member). The latter company was acquired by weapons makers General Dynamics in 1999, and Rumsfeld sold his stock for a tidy US$11 million. Rumsfeld was also on the board of Swiss-based engineering company ABB. The problem with this was that they sold two nuclear reactors to North Korea in a US$200 million deal. Rumsfeld's selective amnesia, already apparent concerning his earlier dealings with Saddam Hussein, has kicked into overdrive on this issue. Apparently it bypassed his attention span altogether, even though it can be proved he attended board meetings where the matter was discussed. former Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz (now heading the World Bank) Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz is regarded as the leading architect of the 2003 Iraq invasion plan. A PNAC member, he worked as a consultant for the giant Northrop Grumman aircraft and weapons systems company before becoming Donald Rumsfeld's deputy. Northrop Grumman also owns the Vinnell Corporation, which was awarded the contract to train a new Iraqi army. NB: Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are the "big three" who between them receive over a quarter of the Pentagon's contracts budget - a share worth over US$ 41 billion in 2002, plus billions more from other Govt. departments such as Homeland Security. And that share of an expanding budget (which has risen $100 billion in two years) seems liable to grow further through their "fortunate connections" in the Bush Administration. Defence Policy Board Member Richard Perle A prominent neo-conservative, PNAC and American Enterprise Institute member & leading Iraq war advocate, Perle's patrician manner belies his relentless money-grubbing. He has three times been caught for misusing his Defence Policy Board position for personal financial gain. The Defence Policy Board, a semi-official advisory body, has access to both classified information and upper-level defence officials, and offers advice to the Government on strategic policy, weapons procurement and other defence-related matters. On one of these three occasions, early in 2003, Perle had to resign as chairman of the DPB. This first issue was Perle using the notorious Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi (a middleman in the Iran Contra scandal) to arrange a meeting under false pretences with a hugely wealthy Saudi industrialist, Harb Saleh al-Zuhair. The real purpose was to solicit US$100 million for Perle's personal investment company, Trireme Partners L.P. Tireme was registered in November 2001, soon after 9/11 (like "Dubya's" grandfather Prescott Bush and the Harrimans dealing with the new Nazi regime in 1930's Germany, Perle wasted no time in moving to take advantage of the "different world" of business opportunities after 9/11). Adnan Khashoggi was later to declare that:"Trireme's business potential depended on a war in Iraq taking place". Tireme itself more modestly declares that it invests in companies "of value to homeland security and defense". On a second occasion Perle offered to help telecommunications company Global Crossing get Government approval to sell a high-tech subdivision to China in return for a US$725,000 fee if he was successful. A third corrupt instance was, when working as a consultant for the Loral Corporation , Perle attempted to curry influence for that corporation so they would be allowed technology transfer to China, when Loral had already been charged with improperly selling China information that might assist the performance of China's nuclear ballistic missiles & their ability to target America. Many believe it was also Richard Perle who improperly passed secret information to onetime Iraqi protégé Ahmad Chalabi concerning the cracking of the Iranian intelligence code, which Chalabi then passed on to the Iranians, compromising US intelligence operations. However others believe it was Paul Wolfowitz or even Donald Rumsfeld himself who did so (so far none of the three has been willing to clear his own name by fingering the guilty party). Perle's selective patriotism appears to be a security threat to the USA, but because he is among like-minded friends in the Bush Administration & has close ties to Defence Secretary Rumsfeld he remains on the DPB, busy advocating wars, strategies and spending that will help line his pockets. Indeed two other Tireme executives are also DPB members. In addition Boeing, for reasons best known to itself, has invested $20 million with Perle's company Tireme. Worse, a 2003 study by the US Centre for Public Integrity showed that nine out of thirty Defence Policy Board members had significant ties to arms industry companies (e.g. retired Admiral David Jeremiah and retired Air Force General Ronald Fogelman were receiving payments as consultants from Boeing). Unsurprisingly, the companies with whom the nine were linked had been successful with over US$76 billion of contracts in one year alone. Perle is also on the boards of Turkish company FNSS, which makes US armoured vehicles under licence for United Defence, and British company the Autonomy Corporation, which holds a major US contract for "homeland defence" activities. Lockheed Martin & the Bush arms gravy train Lockheed Martin is now reputedly the world's largest weapons manufacturer. George W. Bush's direct connection with this huge "defence & aerospace" corporation began when he was Governor of Texas. There Lockheed attempted to gain a contact to become official benefits screeners for welfare and Medicaid in that state, a privatisation policy "Dubya" supported but could not get passed. Not surprisingly, for if the arms makers are to both dominate foreign policy and control social welfare as well, there seems little point in having a US government at all. Later, Lockheed Martin Vice-President for corporate strategy & development Bruce Jackson served as Finance Chairman for the 2000 Bush campaign - and also as Chair of the Republican Party foreign policy platform committee, about as blatant a conflict of interest as an arms company executive could attempt. "I wrote the Republican Party's foreign policy platform," Jackson is reported as boasting. Unsurprisingly he is also a board member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Bruce Jackson Presumably it was on the basis of enormous additional profits expected during a Bush administration rather than mere executive greed that the CEO's pay at Lockheed Martin rose more than fourfold from US$5.8 million in 2000 to US$25.3 million in 2002. Some "Lockheed people" on board with Bush *Peter B. Teets , former Lockheed Martin Chief Operating Officer, has been appointed Undersecretary of the Air Force and Director of the National Reconnaissance Office. *Former Lockheed executive Everet Beckner has been appointed administrator for defence programmes at the National Nuclear Security Administration. (Lockheed Martin jointly with the Bechtel Corporation and a third company has a contract to run the NNSA Nevada Test Site where it is planned to test nuclear weapons again. Lockheed will also earn almost two billion per year running the Sandia Laboratories nuclear weapons design facility in New Mexico). *** *Stephen Hadley , formerly a lawyer with Shea & Gardner representing Lockheed Martin, was appointed Deputy National Security Advisor. *Otto Reich , formerly a lobbyist for Lockheed Martin when they were seeking to reverse the ban on US hi-tech weapons sales to Latin America, was nominated for Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs. *Norman Mineta , Secretary for Transportation, and Michael Jackson , Deputy Secretary for Transportation, were both Lockheed Martin vice-presidents before their appointments by President Bush. *Lynne V. Cheney , wife of US Vice-President Dick Cheney, was a board member of Lockheed Martin for the period 1994-2001, picking up a handy US$120,000 per year for the privilege. (Mrs Cheney other lucrative directorship's include AXP Mutual {an American Express subsidiary}, the Union Pacific Resources Group, & the Reader's Digest Association. As a director of Union Pacific when it merged with Anadarko Petroleum, Lynne Cheney received Anadarko stock worth $250,000 to $500,000. Her husband's major source of vast wealth, Halliburton, had done business with Anadarko Petroleum since 1959. ***The grand architect of this new nuclear strategy, the Dr Strangelovian figure Keith Payne, believes that a full-scale nuclear war could reasonably be fought and won, since America might suffer "only" twenty million casualties. Payne's National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP) receives substantial funding from arms makers and has a Lockheed Martin executive on its board. So under Bush's renewed nuclear bombs push, the lunatics are truly running the asylum - and equally, the arms makers are on a wondrous merry-go-round of milking the Government, then running it, and back for more again, all under the benign gaze of George Walker Bush. The US President is truly a worthy descendant of his great-grandfather the first George Walker, the amoral financial hustler extraordinaire after whom he was named. Team Bush, Team War Profiteers Earlier this month, the President also asked for an additional $20 billion for Iraqi reconstruction as part of his larger supplemental appropriations request. Unfortunately, the President provided no assurances that the billions of dollars in new contracts will not be awarded through similarly secretive processes . United States Senators Joseph I. Lieberman & Frank R. Lautenberg, Sept. 23, 2003. Many other lesser members of Team Bush or the official Bush administration too numerous to list here have for the past five years (nearly) been working the revolving door of war business and government, to great personal financial advantage. In Part Three we will also detail how various Bush relatives are personally benefitting from the war in Iraq and the "War on Terror". The grim truth is that the threat President Eisenhower warned about in 1961 is today the primary reality of the Bush governance, and the carpetbaggers of Washington are setting the tone for an era of war profiteering without equal in all human history. Only an aware and committed citizenry can hope to stop them. Latest News... In a radio address on 27 August 2005, President Bush called for Americans to be prepared for "more sacrifice" in Iraq. But who is to do the sacrificing? Not the President or any of his relatives and associates, that's for sure. They don't send their sons and daughters to fight in Iraq, they have "better things" to do. Mr Bush's "haves and have mores" prefer to rake in enormous windfall war profits generated by companies they have investments in, and which offer many of them high-paid jobs and extraordinary perks in the scandalous "revolving door" between the current US government and the big business corporations now profiting so hugely from this war. We've all heard of Halliburton, so closely associated with Vice President Cheney. But here are a group of giant American corporations now doing "very nicely indeed thanks" out of the Iraq war as at the second half of 2005: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Honeywell and United Technologies. Behind them come dozens of medium-sized companies and hundreds of smaller ones for whom, far from sacrifice, war is a bonanza. Lockheed Martin's net profit, for example, jumped 41 percent in the first six months of 2005. With orders worth US$73 billion to hand, their gravy train looks like rolling on for quite some time. Boeing's military division reported sales of US$15.3 billion in January-June 2005, with operating profits rising 16 percent to US$1.7 billion. Northrop Grumman's half-year earnings rose no less than 45.3%... The latest Bush appointments on the blood money gravy train: The new Deputy Secretary of Defence Gordon England, (replacing prominent Iraq war advocate Paul Wolfowitz, who became president of the World Bank), has previously held executive positions with both Lockheed Martin Corp and General Dynamics Corp. Below him, being nominated by President Bush as Secretary of the Air Force is Michael Wynne - even though the US Senate has previously refused to confirm Mr Wynne as the Pentagon's acquisition chief, because of concerns about a whole range of Air Force weapons-buying scandals. And who has the White House put forward for a replacement Secretary of the Navy? None other than Donald C. Winter, a current executive of Northrop Grumman Corp. Remember them from the windfall profits list? And what happens to the honest ones? A senior contracting official, Ms Bunnatine Greenhouse, who criticised the Pentagon's decision to give Halliburton a multibillion-dollar, no-bid contract for work in Iraq, was sacked at the end of August 2005 for "poor performance". Yes indeed, the people in power find any criticism of all this revolving door corruption to be a very "poor" show, from their point of view. The dismissal, described by her attorney as bearing "the hallmark of illegal retaliation," handily scotches the investigation into her embarrassing finger-pointing at the thieves in action. Said Ms Greenhouse, "I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR (a division of Halliburton) represents the most blatant and improper abuse I have witnessed" in 20 years working on government contracts. Afinal word Many of the big corporations that own much of the US media are doing their best to avoid letting you read, see, or hear information they don't want you to know about, or try to ensure that such information is at any rate relegated to obscurity. The Web, and the publishing of books (both physical and e-books), remains the last free bastion of "the inconvenient truth". If sites like this one are forced off the Web, you'll know why. We hope that a kinder, more globally responsible America will eventually triumph over the military-corporate elite who have at present usurped government and fooled many of the American people into supporting them. Many thanks to sources and international colleagues too numerous to list. -- -------------------------------------------------------- http://cyberjournal.org "Apocalypse Now and the Brave New World" http://www.cyberjournal.org/cj/rkm/Apocalypse_and_NWO.html Posting archives: http://cyberjournal.org/cj/show_archives/?date=01Jan2006&batch=25&lists=newslog Subscribe to low-traffic list: •••@••.••• ___________________________________________ In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
