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| Chapters From the Book "Worse Than Watergate" by John Dean, Richard Nixon's White House Lawyer |
| Chapter2 from the book worse than Watergate |
| Chapter 3 from the book Worse Than Watergate |
| ChapterFour, Worse Than Watergate |
| Part of Chapter five from John Dean's book worse than Watergate. |
| Chapter 6 |
For those of you who enjoy quality disinformation you should be in heaven listening to Bush preach democracy
in Russia. How many of you are nieve enough to believe a democratically elected socialist government in
Germany would be cutting corporate tax rates from 25% to 19%. For those who believe democracy still
exists how many of you believe a labor qovernment in Great Britain would have as its goal for Blairs third
term the objective of adding public funded private competition to the national health service. I got news for
you morons. These are the types of things US puppet governments normally do to pasify the masses while
enriching favored special interests. Its conservative US crackpots using the CIA to force their ideology on
the world. So whats new.
The GM Ford story is a lot of fun. The criminals in the energy and healthcare industry have bankrupt the
US auto industry. Bill Clinton is probaly saying I told you so. Early in Clintons first term he tried to force
the auto industry to improve automotive efficiency. They let him know whose boss and told him where he
could go. They got their jobs running the auto industry by parrotting the conservative party line. I suppose
they were obligated to tell him to take a hike. Although GM execs did back Kerry and his health care plan
their was little they could do to help get him elected against Bush CIA backed campaign.
The Parent Trap
Social Security "reform" is being touted as fiscal liberation for the young. What will young families do when
it condemns them to care for their elders? By James K. Galbraith
BUSH is selling his partial privatization plan for Social Security to young voters as a replacement for a
"won't be there"-so it's said-when they retire. But in the tortured tales of financial crisis, the effects IS
proposal on future family life haven't often been mentioned. They should be. For it is not too much to say
the Bush's plan, if enacted, would impose a "family responsibility system" for elder care. And down the road,
that would tear many American families to shreds.
Old age is a time of economic, physical, and psychological stress. People grow frail. They fall ill. They
require medicine. They require care. They deplete their savings.
And while in the American family mythology of the "good old days" the burden of coping fell on a sturdy,
middle aged farmer or shopkeeper, in truth America's old were never well treated until Social Security came
along. In great numbers, they died off, poor and alone, soon after they could no longer work. If elderly
retirees were not a great burden on their families back then, it was because, in large part, they did not
exist.
Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security in 1935, but for a generation benefits were low. Into the 1960s,
almost one-third of the elderly lived below the poverty line. Then two things changed. The first was Lyndon
Johnson's Medicare, in 1965, which lifted the capricious burden of health care costs for the aged. The
other was the Social Security amendments of 1972, the result of a curious bidding war between Richard
Nixon and Wilbur Mills (chair of the House Ways and Means Committee and a candidate for president) during
the primaries. These imendments meant that, by the early 1980~{poverty rate for seniors was below that
of the rest of the population. By the end of the 1990s, it had fallen to just 10 percent.
The compound achievement of Roosevelt, Johnson, and Nixon had a rich benefit for families.
America's elderly were no longer dependent on their adult children. This was especially terrific for seniors
who did not have children. But it was also good for those who did-they were no longer obliged to come
around, hat in hand, to their sons and daughters. And-a point often neglected-it was equally excellent for
the offspring. They no longer faced the financial hazards of needy parents in old age, or the conflicts with
siblings over who would pay for what.
Once the elderly were provided the means to enjoy long retirements, their life expectancies soared, and the
proportion of the population living above the retirement age necessarily rose. When the government started
picking up the medical bills, the health care industry also mushroomed, creating the cornucopia of services
and treatments we have today. Thus, as Social Security lightened the burden on families, the total costs of
care for the elderly shot up.
On whom did these costs fall? Answer: They were and are distributed over the entire working population by
means of the payroll tax. The spread was not even. Those with incomes above the earnings cap paid a
smaller share of income than those with lower earnings. Those with income from investments escaped
contributing on that income. Still, everyone who worked did contribute. They did so whether or not they
personally had living. parents to support, whether or not their own parents were needy at any given time.
The sharing out of the costs-one of the greatest national enterprises in history made it possible for almost
all of America's elderly to live long lives of modest comfort. Social Security helped the family in two other
important ways. It provided disability benefits for those who could no longer work. permitting them to keep
their families intact. And for those who died young, it provided survivor's benefits that help a widowed
parent raise her (or his) children. Today, about a third of Social Security benefits go to the disabled and to
surviving spouses and their minor children. Of new beneficiaries, 20 percent are survivors, and more than 15
percent are disabled. NOW COMES President Bush, with a proposal (the full details, as I write, are still
undisclosed) to cut Social Security benefits and to establish, in partial compensation, a system of personal
stock accounts into which payroll tax revenues could be funneled. This plan is being sold to young Americans
as a way of making them "self-supporting." But the effect, in many cases, would be exactly the reverse.
Under Bush's plan many of today's young working people, when they are old, will become financially dependent
on their own kids.
Nobody would argue that those who currently depend on Social Security are rich-the average new recipient
gets $895 a month.
Bush's proposal would cut everyone's baseline benefits by decoupling them from average wage increases and
linking them instead to cost of living increases, which are lower.
Under present law, the elderly enjoy some of the wider economy's productivity gains; under Bush's proposal
they would not, and baseline benefits would fall dramatically. Bush claims that these cuts will be made up for
by income generated by privatized Social Security accounts. But your return would have to beat 3 percent
after inflation for you to come out ahead. Some might do so well, many would not; there is no guarantee that
future stock returns will match past performace. On top of that, if private accounts permit investor chose.
many will make bad or unlucky choices, and accounts will be depleted by fund managers' fees. Even if the
accounts don't permit choice, they will be subject to market timing. If the accounts don’t permit choice,
they will be subjest to market timing. If the market tanks the day before you retire, your screwed. This is
not a minor consideration. As everyone has known since 1929, a market crash often precedes a recession-in
which older workers especially are permanently displaced. Think of it as a double gift: First you lose your
pension, then your job. Fun. Finally, private accounts can never provide for survivors whose parents die
before accumulating a nest egg, or the disabled.
Bush's plan is a form of Russian roulette played with the lives, not of today's elderly, nor even those in late
middle age, but of today's young Americans. Many of these future elderly will be thrown back on the mercy
of their families. But the demographic realities have changed. The future elderly will live even longer than
this generation, and their care will be more costly than ever before.
There is no way in the world that their children will be able to support them, as Bush's family responsibility
system would force many to do. Who, even now, has an attic where a mother-in-law could go?
The most likely consequence is death.
The survival rates of America's future elderly-today's working young-would drop. For those seniors who have
no families to fall back on, life will simply become nastier, more brutish, and shorter. And what about those
whose families exist, but can't or won't do enough? There will be many. Even well meaning families-as most
are-will suffer torments of conflict and guilt as they try to make hard choices between their parents and
their children. Will they choose the past or the future? The cruelty of family life under this scheme is hard
to fathom.
Why aren't young people focused on this? Why do they only hear about the supposed "financing crisis" of
Social Security?
The answer lies in the propaganda and misinformation spread by those who would profit from changes to the
system-fund managers who want the commissions and insurance companies who want to reclaim the market
that Social Security took away long ago. President Bush's proposal strives to serve these supporters (and
preserve his tax cuts)-it's that simple.
As for the so-called dependency ratio-the number of retirees per worker, another key indicator of "crisis"
for the scare mongers it's irrelevant. Yes, dependency is rising, and yes, that means that the burden of
elder care falls on fewer and fewer workers. But whatever the economic consequences, this is merely a
demographic fact. It has nothing to do with Social Security. Dependency will rise whether Social Security is
preserved, privatized, or even abolished. It will rise under all variations of the privatization scheme.
Unless they really do die sooner, the elderly will not go away.
Therefore, income will have to be set aside to meet their needs. From any rational point of view, the only
issues are how much must be set aside, and on whom will this burden fall. We can continue to share are part
of the burden. In doing so, we recognize the reality that as the costs of caring for the elderly rise, a
collective system is not only affordable, but is actually the only way we can provide decently for all.
Or we can pass the burden over to the most fragile, uncertain, uneven, at-risk institution in America today.
That's the family, in case you haven't heard.
Social Security Reform is Simply a Diversion
by Robert B. Reich
The president just ended a 60-day whirlwind tour to try to sell his Social Security plan. But almost everyone
inside the Beltway, and a growing number outside, know it's going nowhere.
Polls show most Americans don't want to tinker with Social Security. Many Republicans, facing re-election,
don't want to touch it. Why still flog it?
Because Social Security is a place holder. As long as it remains on the domestic agenda, it blocks
consideration of the real domestic crisis President Bush doesn't want to touch: the health care system.
Consider the symptoms. Medicare, the government's health care program for the elderly, is heading toward
bankruptcy faster than Social Security. Its future unfunded liabilities are seven times larger. Social Security
is projected to be in financial trouble in four decades; Medicare, within 10 years.
Medicaid, the government's health care program for the poor, is also in trouble. Its costs are rising so fast
the White House and congressional Republicans want to whack it by $10 billion over the next five years. But
governors don't want Medicaid cut. States pick up half its cost. If the feds bow out, states will have to make
up the difference.
Symptom No. 3 is the increasing number of Americans without health insurance. Ten years ago, when
President Clinton's proposal for universal health care tanked, 38 million lacked health insurance. Now, 44
million are without it at some point during the year.
Meanwhile, Americans who get health insurance through their employer are suffering sticker shock. That's
because companies are rapidly shifting the escalating costs onto their employees. They're doing it through
higher co-payments and larger deductibles and premiums.
The last symptom is the huge financial burden on companies that can't shift rising health care costs onto
employees because of union contracts. For example, every car General Motors produces costs thousands
of extra dollars because of GM's health care tab. Health care is the single most contentious labor-
management issue today.
But it's possible to control health costs and at the same time give Americans far more health security.
One step is to use the government's bargaining clout to cut the prices medical providers and suppliers
charge. Through Medicare and Medicaid, the U.S. government is the biggest health purchaser in the world.
It has the heft to get pharmaceutical companies to agree to far lower drug prices. The same bargaining
power could be used to bring down prices of other health care supplies and services.
Another step is to offer every American the chance to buy basic health insurance for the family at say, a few
hundred dollars a year. The low cost would be possible because so many Americans would be in the same
plan, generating vast economies of scale. In such a uniform system, transacting with a doctor or hospital of
your choice would be as easy as using an ATM.
As a result, far more Americans would get regular checkups, and health problems could be prevented.
Chronic illnesses such as heart disease could be identified before they got out of control. And catastrophic
illnesses such as cancer could be treated early. We'd end up with lower costs and better care.
It's the perfect time to respond to America's health care crisis. With the middle class squeezed by soaring
costs, big companies reeling and governors screaming, the political momentum is there.
But the Bush administration doesn't want to tackle it. Doing so would require an active role for government,
and they're ideologically opposed. They know the nation can pay attention to only one big domestic crisis at
a time. So they're using the fake crisis of Social Security as a diversion.
That's a shame. The real crisis of health care demands the nation's real attention.
Robert B. Reich, former U.S. secretary of Labor, is professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis.
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2004
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, AlterNet. Posted January 26, 2005.
The year's most egregious price gougers, polluters, union-busters, dictator-coddlers, fraudsters, poisoners,
deceivers and general miscreants. Story Tools
It is never easy choosing the 10 Worst Corporations of the Year – there are always more deserving
nominees than we can possibly recognize. One of the greatest challenges facing the judges is the directive
not to select repeat recipients from last year's 10 Worst designation.
The no-repeat rule forbids otherwise-deserving companies – like Bayer, Boeing, Clear Channel and
Halliburton – from returning to the 10 Worst list in 2004.
Of the remaining pool of price gougers, polluters, union-busters, dictator-coddlers, fraudsters, poisoners,
deceivers and general miscreants, we chose the following – presented in alphabetical order – as the 10
Worst Corporations of 2004:
Abbott Laboratories: Drug-Pricing Chutzpah
Chutzpah. Webster's defines the Yiddish term now incorporated into English slang as: 1. unmitigated
effrontery or impudence; gall. 2. audacity; nerve.
In the next edition, they may want to add: 3. See Abbott.
In December 2003, the company raised the U.S. price of its anti-AIDS drug Norvir (generic name ritanovir) by
400 percent. That is, unless the product is used in conjunction with other Abbott products – in which case
the price increase is zero.
Norvir has become an increasingly important treatment in recent years. Scientists have discovered that
while Norvir is generally too toxic for safe use as a protease inhibitor (one category of anti-AIDS drugs), in
lower doses it works well as a booster to increase the efficacy of other protease inhibitors. As a result,
Norvir is frequently prescribed along with other protease inhibitors.
The Norvir price increase does not apply when the product is used as a booster with another Abbott
protease inhibitor (in the combined product Kaletra). Thus the impact of the Norvir price increase is to make
Kaletra far cheaper than rival combinations of Norvir and non-Abbott protease inhibitors.
Norvir is especially important for patients in need of a "salvage therapy" of new and powerful treatments
because their virus has become resistant to other medicines.
Lynda Dee, co-chair of the AIDS Treatment Activists Coalition's Drug Development Committee, called the
price increase for these patients, who may have no choice as to the medications they need to survive,
"pharma-terrorism perpetrated against the patients who need new drugs the most."
Abbott said the price spike was justified by its need to raise money for research and development. "New
medicines cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop," Jeffrey Leiden, president and chief operating
officer of Abbott's Pharmaceutical Products Group, told a National Institutes of Health meeting in May.
Moreover, Leiden said, the price increase would not deny any patients access to the drug. The price
increase does not apply to federal AIDS drug programs, which cover 54 percent of people with HIV/AIDS.
Price increases only apply to private insurers and to uninsured individuals, who Abbott says can get the
product for free under a special program it operates.
Making the Abbott price jump especially pernicious in the eyes of consumer advocates was that the drug
was invented on a grant from the U.S. federal government.
Because of the U.S. government's financing role, Essential Inventions, Inc., a nonprofit corporation created
to distribute affordable public health and other inventions, in January petitioned the government to
exercise its "march-in" rights under the federal Bayh-Dole Act and issue an open license to generic firms to
produce their own version of Norvir.
"Essential Inventions is asking the Bush administration to adopt a simple rule – U.S. consumers should not
pay more for drugs invented on government grants," said Essential Inventions president James Love.
Following the U.S.-only price increase, Norvir is 5 to 10 times more expensive in the United States than in
other high-income countries.
But NIH rejected the Essential Inventions proposal, arguing that companies that obtained licenses to
government-funded inventions have a duty only to commercialize the inventions. NIH does not have
authority to consider the price at which a product is sold and the impact of the price on access, the agency
ruled – even though the Bayh-Dole Act says government-funded inventions should be made "available to
the public on reasonable terms."
"If Secretary Thompson agrees that quadrupling the price of a life-or-death AIDS drug, rigging the market,
and discriminating against U.S. consumers is 'reasonable,' you can't help but wonder what the [s]ecretary
considers unreasonable," said Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, in criticizing the NIH decision.
AIG: Deferred Prosecutions On the Rise
When the world's largest insurer, American International Group Inc. (AIG), was charged by federal
prosecutors with crimes in November, it quickly cut a deal with the Justice Department that ended a criminal
probe into its finances with a deferred prosecution agreement.
In a deferred prosecution, the corporation accepts responsibility, agrees not to contest the charges, agrees
to cooperate, usually pays a fine and implements changes in corporate structure and governance to prevent
future wrongdoing.
If the company abides by the agreement for a period of time, then the prosecutors will drop the criminal
charges.
In a non-prosecution agreement – like the one secured by Merrill Lynch's in 2003 with New York Attorney
General Eliot Spitzer – prosecutors agree not to bring criminal charges in exchange for corporate fines,
cooperation and a change in corporate structure and governance.
"This comprehensive settlement brings finality to the claims raised by the SEC and the Department of
Justice," said AIG Chair M. R. Greenberg. "The role of the independent consultant complements our own
transaction review processes. We welcome this enhancement to our overall risk management and control
mechanisms."
Under the deal with AIG, an AIG subsidiary was charged with a crime for the next 12 months, but then the
charge will be dismissed with prejudice – if AIG abides by the deferred prosecution agreement.
As part of the agreement, AIG and two subsidiaries will pay an $80 million penalty, and $46 million into a
disgorgement fund maintained by the SEC.
Federal officials in October filed a criminal complaint charging AIG-FP PAGIC Equity Holding Corp., a
subsidiary of AIG, with violating the federal securities laws, by aiding and abetting PNC Financial Services
Group, Inc. (PNC) in connection with a fraudulent transaction to transfer $750 million in mostly troubled loans
and venture capital investments from subsidiaries off of its books.
These transactions were previously the subject of a deferred criminal disposition involving PNC.
Earlier this year, the Department dismissed the criminal complaint against a PNC subsidiary, after the
company fulfilled its deferred prosecution agreement obligations.
Merrill, AIG and PNC are three of 10 major corporations that have settled serious criminal charges with
deferred prosecution, no prosecution or de facto no prosecution agreements over the last two years.
Companies are getting off the criminal hook with these agreements, which were originally intended for
minor street crimes. Now they are being used in very serious corporate crime cases.
If a crime has been committed – and there is little doubt that crimes have been committed by the
corporations in these cases – then the companies should plead guilty and pay the penalty. If prosecutors
want to impose change on the corporation, they can do this after securing a conviction through probationary
orders. Right now, corporate lawyers are teaming up with prosecutors to go after individual executives
while the company's record is wiped clean.
Coca-Cola: KillerCoke.org vs. CokeKills.org
On KillerCoke.org, you'll find a raft of information on Coke and its bottlers' operations in Colombia. There is
extensive documentation of rampant violence committed against Coke's unionized workforce by paramilitary
forces, and powerful claims of the company's complicity in the violence.
An April 2004 report from a fact-finding delegation headed by New York City Council member Hiram
Monserrate contends:
"To date, there have been a total of 179 major human rights violations of Coca-Cola's workers, including nine
murders. Family members of union activists have been abducted and tortured. Union members have been
fired for attending union meetings. The company has pressured workers to resign their union membership
and contractual rights, and fired workers who refused to do so."
"Most troubling to the delegation were the persistent allegations that paramilitary violence against workers
was done with the knowledge of and likely under the direction of company managers."
Allegations such as these formed the basis of a lawsuit filed in 2001 by the International Labor Rights Fund
and the United Steelworkers of America in U.S. courts against Coke on behalf of a Colombian trade union
and union leader victims of violence at Coke bottling facilities in Colombia.
In 2003, a federal court dismissed the claims against Coke, arguing that its relationship with the owners of
the Coke bottling plant in Colombia was too attenuated to hold the soft drink multinational responsible for
human rights abuses at the plant. The plaintiffs have since refiled their complaint – they argue the original
decision was mistaken, but that Coke's subsequent purchase of the Colombia bottlers means the company is
now clearly responsible for the bottlers' actions.
Strangely, for the response to KillerCoke.org, you can check out CokeKills.org. That site, which is operated
by Coke, redirects you to CokeFacts.org.
Here's what Coke has to say:
"The pervasive violence in Colombia, and the targeting of union members by its perpetrators, has,
unfortunately, touched The Coca-Cola Company in a very personal way. Employees of our Company and
bottling partners in Colombia have been threatened, kidnapped, and some have even been murdered ... In a
lawsuit in Colombia, the court concluded that the bottler not only took proper steps to initiate investigation
by the authorities, but went further to enhance its workers' safety by heightening security at the plant."
Leave aside for the moment the issue of Coke's legal liability. The idea that Coke can't control the behavior
of its bottlers is simply implausible. It can control them if it so chooses – just the way that clothing retailers
can control the actions of their manufacturers, but even more so.
Instructive in raising questions about Coke's good-faith concern for its workers is its unwillingness to
support an independent investigation into the Colombia allegations – even after the company's former
General Counsel, and the former assistant U.S. attorney general, Deval Patrick, had committed to one.
Coke's refusal to authorize an investigation reportedly contributed to Patrick's decision to resign from the
corporation.
Dow Chemical: Forgive Us Our Trespasses
At midnight on Dec. 2, 1984, 27 tons of lethal gases leaked from Union Carbide's pesticide factory in Bhopal,
India, immediately killing an estimated 8,000 people and poisoning thousands of others.
Today in Bhopal, at least 150,000 people, including children born to parents who survived the disaster, are
suffering from exposure-related health effects such as cancer, neurological damage, chaotic menstrual
cycles and mental illness. Over 20,000 people are forced to drink water with unsafe levels of mercury,
carbon tetrachloride and other persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals.
Activists from around the world – including human rights, legal, environmental health and other experts –
mobilized this year to demand that Dow Chemical, the current owner of Union Carbide, be held accountable.
Twenty years after this disaster, the company responsible for this catastrophe and its former executives are
still fugitives from justice. Union Carbide and its former chairman, Warren Andersen, were charged with
manslaughter for the deaths at Bhopal, but they refuse to appear before the Indian courts.
Here is part of Dow's statement on Bhopal:
While Dow has no responsibility for Bhopal, we have never forgotten the tragic event and have helped to
drive global industry performance improvements. This is why Responsible Care was created and why these
standards are essential for the protection of our employees and the communities where we live and work.
Our pledge and our commitment is the full implementation of Responsible Care everywhere we do business
around the world.
Dow has no responsibility for Bhopal? The people of Bhopal don't agree. They say Union Carbide was
responsible, and if Union Carbide is now owned by Dow, then Dow is responsible.
In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the crime of Bhopal, we present here 20 things to remember
about Dow Chemical – the company now responsible for Bhopal and a fugitive from justice.
20. Agent Orange/Napalm: The toxic herbicide and jellied gasoline used in Vietnam created horrors for young
and old alike.
19. Rocky Flats: The top secret Colorado site managed by Dow Chemical from 1952 to 1975 remains an
environmental nightmare.
18. Body burden: In March 2001, the Centers for Disease Control reported that most people in the United
States carry detectable levels of plastics, pesticides and heavy metals in their blood and urine.
17. 2,4-D: One of the key ingredients in Agent Orange, the toxic defoliant used in Vietnam, 2,4-D is still the
most widely used herbicide in the world.
16. Mercury: In Canada, Dow had been producing chlorine using the mercury cell method since 1947. Much
of the mercury was recycled, but significant quantities were discharged into the environment. In March 1970,
the governments of Ontario and Michigan detected high levels of mercury in fish in major waterways. Dow
was sued by state and local officials for mercury pollution.
15. PERC: Perchloroethylene is the hazardous substance used by dry cleaners everywhere. Dow tried to
undermine safer alternatives.
14. 2,4,5 T: One of the toxic ingredients in Agent Orange.
13. Busting unions: In 1967, unions represented almost all of Dow's production workers. But since then,
according to the Metal Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, Dow undertook an "unapologetic campaign to rid
itself of unions."
12. Silicone: The key ingredient for silicone breast implants made women sick. Litigation continues over
silicone breast implants, removed from the market more than a decade ago.
11. DBCP: The toxic active ingredient in the Dow pesticide Fumazone. Doctors who tested men who worked
with DBCP thought they had vasectomies, because no sperm was present.
10. Dursban: Trade name for chlorpyrifos, a toxic pesticide, proved to have nerve agent effects. It was
tested on prisoners in New York in 1971. It replaced DDT when DDT was banned in 1972. A huge seller, in
June 2000, EPA limited its use and forced it off the market at the end of 2004.
9. Dow at Christmas: "Uses of Dow plastics by the toy industry are across the board," boasted Dow Chemical
in an internal company memo one Christmas season. Among the chemicals used in these toys are
polystyrene, polyethylene, ethylene copolymer resins, saran resins, PVC resins, or vinyls and ethyl cellulose.
8.The Tittabawassee: A river and river basin polluted by Dow in its hometown, Midland, Mich.
7. Brazos River, Freeport, Texas: A February 1971 headline in the Houston Post read: "Brazos River is Dead."
In 1970 and 1971, Dow's operation there was sending more than 4.5 billion gallons of wastewater per day into
the Brazos and on into the Gulf of Mexico.
6. Toxic Trespass: From Trespass Against Us: Dow Chemical and the Toxic Century by Jack Doyle: "Dow
Chemical has been polluting property and poisoning people for nearly a century, locally and globally –
trespassing on workers, consumers, communities, and innocent bystanders – on wildlife and wild places, on
the global biota and the global genome."
5. Holmesburg Experiments: In January 1981, a Philadelphia Inquirer story revealed that Dow Chemical paid a
University of Pennsylvania dermatologist to test dioxin on prisoners at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia in
1964.
4. Worker deaths: Dow has a long history of explosions and fires at its facilities. In May 1979, an explosion
ripped through Dow's Pittsburgh facility, killing two workers and injuring more than 45 others.
3. Brain tumors: In 1980, investigators found 25 workers with brain tumors at the company's Freeport, Texas
facility – 24 of which were fatal.
2. Saran Wrap: The thin slice of plastic invaluable to our lives, Saran Wrap was produced by Dow until
consumers went looking for Dow products to boycott.
1. Bhopal.
GlaxoSmithKline: Deadly Depressing
GlaxoSmithKline, Paxil and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs): It was the story that
foreshadowed and strikingly paralleled the controversy surrounding Merck, Vioxx and Cox-2 inhibitors.
With the antidepressant Paxil (generic name: paroxetine), the story was driven primarily from the United
Kingdom, by the BBC program Panorama and a public interest group called Social Audit. They called
attention to the severe side effects from the drugs; notably that they are addictive and lead to increased
suicidality in youth.
In 2003, the evidence of dangerous side effects had piled too high for British regulators to continue to
ignore them. In June, the UK health experts advised that children should not be prescribed Paxil.
In February 2004, Panorama reported on internal documents from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) showing the
company knew that Paxil could not be proved to work in children.
In March 2004, days after the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (the UK's drug
regulatory agency) advised that Paxil dosages should be kept to low levels, an expert participating in the
Paxil review resigned, claiming the agency had possessed evidence for more than a decade suggesting that
Paxil dosages should be kept low, but failed to act on it.
By this time, the story had started to heat up in the United States. Dr. Andrew Mosholder, of the FDA Office of
Drug Safety, had conducted an analysis of clinical trials related to antidepressant use in children, and found
a heightened risk of suicidality. But his superiors refused to let him present his findings to an advisory
panel convened to look at the issue in the wake of the British action.
According to an investigation by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the FDA actually tried to get Mosholder to
present data that deceptively underrepresented the risk of suicidality.
Although Paxil is not approved by the FDA for prescription to children, doctors routinely write "off-label"
prescriptions for the product for children, a practice permitted under FDA rules. More than two million
prescriptions for Paxil were written for children and adolescents in the United States in 2002.
In April 2004, the Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, published a paper showing that clinical test
data did show problems with prescribing Paxil and other SSRIs to children.
In June, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer filed suit against Glaxo, charging the giant drug maker
with suppressing evidence of Paxil's harm to children, and misleading physicians.
GSK responded in a statement that it "acted responsibly in conducting clinical studies in pediatric patients
and disseminating data from those studies. All pediatric studies have been made available to the FDA and
regulatory agencies worldwide."
Spitzer's complaint cited a 1998 GSK memo which states that the company must "manage the dissemination
of these data in order to minimi[z]e any potential negative commercial impact."
Responding to Spitzer's suit, GSK claimed that, "As for the 1998 memo, it is inconsistent with the facts and
does not reflect the company position."
The New York complaint asserted as well that "GSK has repeatedly misrepresented the safety and efficacy
outcomes from its studies of paroxetine as a treatment for MDD [Major Depressive Disorder] in a pediatric
population to its employees who promote paroxetine to physicians."
In August, the company settled with Spitzer for $2.5 million, plus a commitment to maintain the policy of
posting clinical trial results, for all drugs marketed by the company.
The next month, the Star-Ledger of New Jersey reported on a Glaxo memo from the year before, instructing
the company's sales force not to talk to doctors about company data showing dangers from prescribing Paxil
to kids.
In October, the FDA ordered Glaxo and other SSRI makers to include a "black box" warning with their pills.
The warning says SSRIs double the risk of suicide in children, though some medical researchers say the
number should be higher. At least one GSK clinical trial showed 7.5 percent of youth taking Paxil suffering
from suicidality (versus zero percent among those taking a placebo).
Glaxo continues to insist that it disclosed information to appropriate authorities as soon as it discerned
important results from its clinical studies.
Hardee's: Heart Attack on a Bun
When Hardee's introduced the Thickburger this year, Jay Leno joked that it was being served in little
cardboard boxes shaped like coffins.
With other major fast food outlets moving to green salads, Hardee's revels in big beef. From Hardee's press
release of Nov. 15, 2004:
Now Hardee's is introducing the mother of all burgers – the Monster Thickburger™. Weighing in at two-
thirds of a pound, this 100 percent Angus beef burger is a monument to decadence, yet is still a throwback,
as it features lots of meat, cheese and bacon on a bun.
Clearly, Hardee's, a subsidiary of CKE Restaurants, Inc. of Carpinteria, Calif., is not worried about the public
health aspects of unleashing the monster into the marketplace.
Eating one Thickburger is like eating two Big Macs or five McDonald's hamburgers. Add 600 calories worth
of Hardee's fries and you get more than the 2,000 calories that many people should eat in a whole day,
according to Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) earlier this year charged KFC Corporation, owner of the Kentucky Fried
Chicken national restaurant chain, with making false claims in a national television advertising campaign
about the relative nutritional value and healthiness of its fried chicken.
The false claim? KFC said that eating fried chicken, specifically two Original Recipe fried chicken breasts, is
better for a consumer's health than eating a Burger King Whopper.
The FTC says that while it is true that the two fried chicken breasts have slightly less total fat and saturated
fat than a Whopper, they have more than three times the trans fat and cholesterol, more than twice the
sodium, and more calories.
KFC settled the case.
But there will be no law enforcement action brought against Hardee's. Hardee's makes no pretensions that
the Hardee's Thickburger is good for you, and has no qualms about the impact of the monster on the public's
health. The fast-food pusher's new advertising campaign is straight up: "Be afraid. Be very afraid."
As The New York Times put it in an editorial, "It is a setback for public health, but a triumph for truth in
advertising."
Merck: 55,000 Dead
It's not as if people in power didn't know about the impending disaster – what David Graham, a Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) drug safety official, calls "maybe the single greatest drug-safety catastrophe in
the history of this country.''
Testifying before a Senate committee in November, Dr. Graham put the number in United States who had
suffered heart attacks or stroke as result of taking the arthritis drug Vioxx in the range of 88,000 to 139,000.
As many as 40 percent of these people, or about 35,000-55,000, died as a result, Graham said.
The unacceptable cardiovascular risks of Vioxx were evident as early as 2000 – a full four years before the
drug was finally withdrawn from the market by its manufacturer, Merck, according to a study released by the
Lancet, the British medical journal.
"This discovery points to astonishing failures in Merck's internal systems of post-marketing surveillance, as
well as to lethal weaknesses in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's regulatory oversight," Lancet
editors wrote.
Authors of the Lancet study pooled data from 25,273 patients who participated in 18 clinical trials conducted
before 2001. They found that patients given Vioxx had 2.3 times the risk of heart attacks as those given
placebos or other pain medications.
Merck withdrew Vioxx on Sept. 30 of this year after a company-sponsored trial found a doubling of the risks
for heart attack or stroke among those who took the medicine for 18 months or more.
Merck says it disclosed all relevant evidence on Vioxx safety as soon as it acquired it, and pulled the drug
as soon as it saw conclusive evidence of the drug's dangers.
"Over the past six years," Merck CEO Raymond Gilmartin told the Senate Finance Committee at the
November hearing where Graham made his big splash, "since the time Merck submitted a New Drug
Application for Vioxx to the FDA, we have promptly disclosed the results of numerous Merck-sponsored
studies to the FDA, physicians, the scientific community and the media and participated in a balanced,
scientific discussion of its risks and benefits."
Until the September clinical trial results came in, Gilmartin said, "the combined data from randomized
controlled clinical trials showed no difference in confirmed cardiovascular event rates between Vioxx and
placebo and Vioxx and NSAIDs other than naproxen. When data from the APPROVe study [the September
results] became available, Merck acted quickly to withdraw the medicine from the market."
But there is evidence that strongly suggests a different version of the story.
The Lancet findings came in the wake of new disclosures that suggest Merck was fully aware of Vioxx's
potential risks by 2000.
The Wall Street Journal revealed emails that confirm Merck executives' knowledge of their drug's adverse
cardiovascular profile – the risk was "clearly there," according to one senior researcher.
"Given this disturbing contradiction – Merck's own understanding of Vioxx's true risk profile and its attempt
to gloss over these risks in their public statements at the time – it is hard to see how Merck's chief
executive officer, Raymond Gilmartin, can retain the confidence of the public, his company's most important
constituency," the Lancet editors wrote.
Dr. Graham, the federal drug-safety reviewer, continues to seek to publish his study demonstrating the
dangers of Vioxx, but he has been delayed and demeaned by top officials at the Food and Drug
Administration.
At the Senate hearing, Dr. Graham said that the FDA "as currently configured is incapable of protecting
America against another Vioxx," because of ties between agency reviewers and the pharmaceutical industry.
Graham says that as a result of his testimony, his bosses have threatened to toss him out of the FDA's drug
safety unit.
At the Senate hearing, Graham said that at least five medications currently on the market pose such risks
that their sale ought to be limited or stopped. Graham named the five as Meridia, Crestor, Accutane, Bextra
and Serevent.
In November 2004, Forbes.com named David Graham "face of the year."
We join with Forbes in saluting Graham "for his steadfast advocacy of drug safety and his willingness to
blow the whistle on his bosses."
McWane: Death on the Job
The New York Times ran a three-part series by David Barstow and Lowell Bergman that exposed the
egregious safety record of McWane Inc., a large, privately held Alabama-based sewer and water pipe
manufacturer.
Nine McWane employees have lost their lives in workplace accidents since 1995. More than 4,600 injuries
were recorded among the company's 5,000 employees.
According to the series, one man died when an industrial oven exploded after he was directed to use it to
incinerate highly combustible paint. Another was crushed by a conveyor belt that lacked a required
protective guard.
Three of McWane's nine deaths were the result of deliberate violations of safety standards. In five others,
safety lapses were a contributing factor.
According to the Times, McWane pulled the wool over the eyes of investigators by stalling them at the
factory gates, and then hiding defective equipment. Accident sites were altered before investigators could
inspect them, in violation of federal rules.
When government enforcement officials did find serious violations, "the punishment meted out by the
federal government was so minimal that McWane could treat it as simply a cost of doing business."
"After a worker was crushed to death by a forklift that apparently had faulty brakes, an Occupational Safety
and Health Administration investigation found defects in all 14 of the plant's forklifts, including the one
involved in the death," the Times reported. The fine was just $10,500. Employers are further protected by the
workers' compensation system, which can make it hard for victims to sue."
According to the Times, in one McWane oven explosion that killed an employee, Frank Wagner, McWane
"hired a well-connected lobbyist to lean on Dennis Vacco, then New York State's attorney general, and
ended up with a settlement in which it did not admit responsibility for the death."
The experts who looked at the case determined that the explosion that killed him was the result of reckless
criminal actions by McWane, which was operating a cast-iron foundry in Elmira, N.Y., where Wagner worked.
"The evidence compels us to act," the prosecution team wrote in a confidential memorandum to Vacco in
1996. The team urged him to ask a grand jury to indict McWane and its managers on manslaughter and other
charges. A grand jury inquiry, senior investigators believed, could have taken them up the corporate ladder,
the Times reported.
But Vacco never sought an indictment against McWane for any crime.
Only after an unusual intervention by the United States attorney in Buffalo, who threatened federal charges,
did McWane agree to plead guilty to a state felony and pay $500,000.
"But as the company and Mr. Wagner's widow are quick to note, that charge, a hazardous-waste violation,
specifically did not hold McWane accountable for Mr. Wagner's death," the Times reported.
"It was a reckless act on the part of certain individuals in that company that caused the death of that person.
I'll believe that till the day I die," says Donald Snell, who supervised the state environmental agency's
investigation. "The ends of justice were not met."
As the Times series showed, in plant after plant, year after year, "McWane workers have been maimed,
burned, sickened and killed by the same safety and health failures."
McWane says it is changing – and it's certainly paying more attention to PR after the Times series.
"Over the last several years, our Company has embarked on significant changes that are focused on setting
the industry standard in employee safety, health and environmental programs," asserts a May 2004 report
from the company on health and safety.
That doesn't exactly jibe with what company managers call "the McWane way" – what federal and state
regulators characterized to the Times as a "lawless" and "rogue" operation that ruthlessly sought profits
with disregard for worker safety and well-being.
Now, consider this:
McWane is responsible for nine worker deaths and countless injuries.
Scott Peterson was responsible for the death of his wife and unborn child.
Which one did the mass television media focus on?
Who got the death penalty?
And why?
Riggs Bank: The Pinochet Connection
Being a military dictator is not as easy as it looks.
You need suppliers of weapons. You need an army to work with you. And, if you are a crook – as most
military dictators are – you need a bank to hold on to your money.
That's where Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C. comes in.
An explosive report from the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on
Governmental Affairs, issued in July, revealed that Riggs illegally operated bank accounts for former Chilean
dictator Augusto Pinochet, and routinely ignored evidence of corrupt practices in managing more than 60
accounts for the government of Equatorial Guinea.
An ongoing internal investigation by Riggs has revealed that the bank's dealing with Pinochet dates back to
1985, while the Chilean despot remained in power, according to a November Washington Post report.
Riggs has not so far been cited for civil or criminal violations in connection with the Pinochet money-
laundering scheme. In May, the bank paid $25 million in fines in connection with money-laundering violations
related to the Equatorial Guinea and Saudi Arabian governments.
The bank is the subject of ongoing criminal investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S.
Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, according to recent filings with the Securities and Exchange
Commission.
Riggs, which traces its history back to 1840, likes to brag about serving such historical figures as President
Abraham Lincoln (and 19 other presidents) and American Red Cross founder Clara Barton, and having
supplied the gold for the purchase of the state of Alaska.
It capitalized on its venerable reputation in Washington to become the banker to the embassies that dot the
city and the large foreign diplomatic corps resident in the U.S. capital.
Riggs eagerly sought to service them all, apparently even when dictators and their families requested the
bank engage in illegal activities to launder money.
The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report found that from 1994 until 2002, Riggs opened at
least six accounts and issued several certificates of deposit (CDs) for Pinochet while he was under house
arrest in the United Kingdom and his assets were the subject of court proceedings. The aggregate deposits
in the Pinochet accounts at Riggs ranged from $4 million to $8 million at a time.
What is now becoming apparent is that Riggs was collaborating with Pinochet even a decade earlier, with a
scale of activity not yet clear.
Riggs was not a passive or unknowing actor in this drama. According to the Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations report, high bank officials solicited Pinochet's business, the bank helped Pinochet set up
offshore shell corporations and open accounts in the names of those corporations to disguise his control of
the accounts, altered the names of his personal accounts to disguise their ownership, and otherwise
worked to help him hide his money flow.
Although these activities seem to violate U.S. banking rules, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
(OCC) did not take enforcement action against the bank after it learned of these matters in 2002. That
presumably was not unrelated to the fact that the OCC examiner at Riggs soon thereafter went to work for
Riggs.
This is not just a matter of avoiding taxes or failing to follow legalistic rules. These are the actions that
reward dictators, and help them live lavishly after stepping down from power. They come at the expense of
the dictator's victims – thousands of dead and tortured in the case of Pinochet. For those who need a
reminder of Pinochet's brutality, see www.memoriaviva.com for a moving list and pictures of victims.
Pinochet is not the only dictator for whom Riggs undertook money laundering.
Equatorial Guinea is a small, oil-rich West African country dominated by a dictator, President Teodoro Obiang
Nguema Mbasago. Obiang, his family and cronies live a life of luxury, while the rest of the country remains
desperately poor.
The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report found that from 1995 until 2004, Riggs Bank
administered more than 60 accounts and CDs for the government of Equatorial Guinea, Equatorial Guinea
government officials or their family members. Money laundering to cover up corruption appeared to be
routine.
Combined, these accounts represented the largest relationship at Riggs Bank, with aggregate deposits
ranging from $400 to $700 million at a time.
Riggs does not deny these activities took place, and its internal investigation is continuing. A number of
Riggs employees involved in the scandals have been fired or demoted. In July, Riggs announced that it was
going to be acquired by PNC Financial Services Group (about which see the profile of AIG above) for more
than $700 million. Ongoing legal problems at Riggs could derail the deal, which is supposed to be
consummated early in 2005, but for now both parties say it remains on.
Wal-Mart: The Workfare Company
You only have to look at the cover of Wal-Mart's 2004 Annual Report to know the company is facing trouble
unlike any it has had to handle before.
"It's my Wal-Mart," asserts the slogan on the cover of the annual report.
At the bottom are these claims: "Good Jobs * Good Works * Good Citizen * Good Investment."
Missing is any reference to "Always Low Prices."
Stepped up and novel community and legal challenges confronting the company are making the mammoth
retailer expend energy on repositioning its image. Hence the annual report, the major image-oriented
television ads, the sponsorships on National Public Radio – listened to by few of its shoppers – and the
huge surge in campaign contributions. Wal-Mart and its managers gave more than $2 million to federal
candidates in the last U.S. electoral cycle, more than any oil company, and almost triple the level the
company donated in the 2000 elections.
The company faces a class action lawsuit on behalf of 1.6 million women workers, alleging rampant
employment discrimination at Wal-Mart.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has announced plans to spend $25 million a year with the
ultimate goal of unionizing Wal-Mart, the largest private U.S. employer.
And the company – which has already lost more than 200 site fights – faces an even more-intensified
resistance to its efforts to locate new stores, as it increasingly seeks to enter markets in more urban areas.
In April, voters in the largely African-American and Latino working class town of Inglewood, California
rejected a referendum that would have allowed Wal-Mart to open a Supercenter without being subject to
normal municipal reviews.
But while on a bit of a public relations defensive, the company remains the colossus of U.S. – and
increasingly global – retailing. It registers more than a quarter trillion dollars in sales. Its revenues account
for 2 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product.
The company takes in more than one in five dollars spent nationally on food sales, and market researcher
Retail Forward predicts Wal-Mart will control more than a third of food store industry sales, as well as a
quarter of the drug store industry, by 2007. Wal-Mart is the largest jewelry seller in the United States,
"despite the fact that the prime target market for jewelry – high-income women from 25 to 54 years – are the
least likely of all consumers to shop for jewelry in discount channels," as Unity Marketing notes. Wal-Mart is
the largest outlet for sales of CDs, videos and DVDs. And on and on.
For two years running, Fortune has named Wal-Mart the most admired company in America. It is arguably the
defining company of the present era.
The company's business model has relied on new innovations in inventory management, focusing on
ignored markets (low-income shoppers in rural areas – though this is now changing), and squeezing
suppliers to lower their margins. But it has also relied centrally on undercompensating employees and
externalizing costs on to society.
A February 2004 report issued by Representative George Miller, D-California, encapsulated the ways that
Wal-Mart squeezes and cheats its employees, among them: blocking union organizing efforts, paying
employees an average $8.23 an hour (as compared to more than $10 for an average supermarket worker),
allegedly extracting off-the-clock work, and providing inadequate and unaffordable healthcare packages for
employees.
Miller's report's innovation was in documenting how Wal-Mart's low wages and inadequate benefits not only
hurt workers directly, but impose costs on taxpayers. The report estimated that one 200-person Wal-Mart
store may result in a cost to federal taxpayers of $420,750 per year – about $2,103 per employee. These
public costs include:
$36,000 a year for free and reduced lunches for just 50 qualifying Wal-Mart families.
$42,000 a year for Section 8 housing assistance, assuming 3 percent of the store employees qualify for such
assistance, at $6,700 per family.
$125,000 a year for federal tax credits and deductions for low-income families, assuming 50 employees are
heads of household with a child and 50 are married with two children.
$100,000 a year for the additional Title I [educational] expenses, assuming 50 Wal-Mart families qualify with
an average of two children.
$108,000 a year for the additional federal healthcare costs of moving into state children's health insurance
programs (S-CHIP), assuming 30 employees with an average of two children qualify.
"There's no question that Wal-Mart imposes a huge, often hidden, cost on its workers, our communities and
U.S. taxpayers," Miller said. "And Wal-Mart is in the driver's seat in the global race to the bottom,
suppressing wage levels, workplace protections and labor laws."
Wal-Mart's abuses are giving rise to countervailing efforts, but it is an open question whether the company
has amassed such power that it will be able to defeat such initiatives.
In California, in November, the company was able to stave off by a 51-to 49 percent margin a proposition that
would have required every large and medium employer in the state to provide decent healthcare coverage
for their workers, with the employer contribution set at a minimum of 80 percent of costs.
Wal-Mart dumped a half million dollars into the anti-Proposition 72 campaign just a week before the vote.
"As one of California's leading employers, we care about the health of our 60,000 employees here," said Wal-
Mart spokesperson Cynthia Lin, in celebrating the defeat of Proposition 72. "That's why we provide our
employees with affordable, quality health care coverage."
"Prop. 72 was never about Wal-Mart," she claimed. "It was about allowing businesses to operate without
unreasonable government mandates, it was about the survival of small businesses and it was about
consumer choice in healthcare benefits."
The biggest immediate challenge facing Wal-Mart is the class action lawsuit filed by its women workers. The
women allege that Wal-Mart pays female workers less than men, promotes men faster than women and men
above more competent women, and fosters a hostile work environment. A federal judge ruled in June that
the case could proceed as a class action.
"We strongly disagree with his decision and will seek an appeal," says company spokesperson Mona
Williams. "While we cannot comment on the specifics of the litigation, we can say we continue to evaluate
our employment practices. For example, earlier this month Wal-Mart announced a new job classification and
pay structure for hourly associates. This new pay plan was developed with the assistance of third party
consultants and is designed to ensure internal equity and external competitiveness."
Liza Featherstone, who has chronicled the claims of the women employees in her book Selling Women
Short, says women workers report "a pattern of arbitrary, very subjective decision-making by management."
They report business meetings being held at Hooter's or strip clubs.
The contradiction of a self-righteously moral company – which won't sell racy magazines or CDs with parental
advisory labels – permitting such behavior is a reflection of women employees' powerlessness. "Unlike its
female workforce," Featherstone writes, "the women who shop at Wal-Mart can't be ignored, and many of
them have conservative values."
But while Wal-Mart is willing to bend to consumer demand on marginal issues like covering over the
headlines on Cosmopolitan magazine, it is not so flexible on respect for worker rights. Nor is there any sign
of a consumer rebellion on anything like the scale necessary to make the company revisit its employment
policies.
Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman are co-authors of On the Rampage: Corporate Predators and the
Destruction of Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press). Robert Weissman is general counsel
for Essential Inventions, a nonprofit mentioned in the Abbott profile.
Kevin Phillips, Author of "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of
Bush"
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
"Now what I get a sense of from all of this -- and then topped obviously by spending all the money in 2000 to
basically buy the election -- is that this is not a family that has a particularly strong commitment to American
democracy. Its sense of how to win elections comes out of a CIA manual, not out of the Declaration of
Independence or the Constitution." -- Kevin Phillips
Hey, you would expect this kind of talk from a lefty, right. But Kevin Phillips ain't no lefty. He's a former Nixon
staffer and authored "The Emerging Republican Majority" back then. He hasn't had any transformation that has
turned him into a -- God Forbid! -- Democrat. As he tells BuzzFlash, he voted for Reagan twice and would have
eagerly voted for John McCain.
He hasn't stopped being Republican. It's just that he's appalled at what the Republican Party has become under
the Bush dynasty.
In "American Dynasty," Phillips weaves evidence of the Bush family's dynastic sense of entitlement -- and
corruption -- throughout this erudite book.
"Few have looked at the facts of the family's rise, but just as important, commentators have neglected the thread --
not the mere occasion -- of special interests, biases, scandals (especially those related to arms dealing), and blatant
business cronyism" Phillips writes in his preface. "The evidence that accumulates over four generations [of the
Bush family dynasty] is really quite damning."
"Three generations of immersion in the culture of secrecy...deceit and disinformation have become Bush political
hallmarks," Phillips notes.
Entitlement, elitism, privilege, secrecy, mediocrity, corruption, financial cronyism, bailouts of family failures by the
taxpayers -- these are some of the true characteristics of the Bush Dynasty, according to Phillips.
To Phillips, however, the greatest threat to America posed by the Bush dynasty is not its inherent unfitness to rule.
What most offends and angers Phillips is the threat that the imposition of the Bush dynasty on America poses to
democracy itself. The American rebellion in 1776 represented the creation of a nation built on the foundations of a
government elected by the people, not determined by the restoration to power of corrupt bloodlines.
No book makes a stronger case against an American sitting in the White House who believes that he is in power
because of hereditary entitlement and divine choice. Patriots rebelled against King George in 1776. Phillips notes
that Americans have the opportunity to dethrone the Bush dynasty at the polls in 2004.
That is if the electronic software is not rigged in favor of the monarchy.
To buy "American Dynasty" as a BuzzFlash premium, go to:
EXCERPTS
Introduction
Concern about the first U.S. dynastic presidency first emerged in 2000, prompted by skeptics of the Bush
succession, as well as by amateur historians unnerved by analogies to the seventeenth-century English Stuart and
eighteenth-century French Bourbon restorations. The topic gained credibility when the 2002 elections confirmed
George W. Bush’s popularity and the war of early Spring 2003 displayed his personal commitment to renewing his
father’s unfinished combat with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Controversial wars and geopolitical ambitions, after all,
have frequently originated as dynastic ambitions.
Other institutional aspects warrant national concern. Dynasties tend to show continuities of policy and interest-
group bias—in the case of the Bushes, favoritism toward the energy sector, defense industries, the Pentagon and
CIA, as well as insistence on tax breaks for the investor class and upper income groups. Families restored to
power also have a history of revenge against old foes—George W. Bush’s record has included retiring such
taunters of his father as Texas Governor Ann Richards (in 1994) and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Bush helped
to force him out after the 1998 elections) and apppointing former officials dating back not just to his father’s term
but to the Ford administration of 1974-76, a virtual incubator of the Republican Party’s Bush faction.
This dynasticism was hardly a phenomenon unique to the United States. In the first few years of the twenty-first
century, the restoration of old European royal houses was discussed in Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and Italy. As in
the United States, the principals were political
Another questionable aspect of dynastic control is the effect of biological inheritance. History is all too familiar
with the Hapsburg nose, and the Tudor temper. Some pundits have queried whether heredity might explain certain
behavior shared by the two Bush presidents —frenetic activity, scrambled speech, the hint of dyslexic
arrangements of thought. Although the press has been reticent to pursue such matters, they do have a genuine
relevance. Three, perhaps four, generations of Bushes have displayed great capacities for remembering names,
faces and statistics. Dallas News reporter Bill Minutaglio, a biographer of the younger Bush, discovered that
George H.W. Bush, “went so far as to tell his spokesman Marlin Fitzwater to gather together the photographs of
the Washington press corps so he could memorize all their names; the Bush men were always startlingly better
than anyone else at memorizing names.” At the same time, both father and son hve shown little talent for
conceptualization or abstraction. Is it a coincidence? Dynasty, with its subordination of individual achievement to
gene pools and bloodlines, involves a gamble on the nuances of that heredity.
In the United States, as we will see, the twentieth-century rise of the Bush family was built on the five pillars of
American global sway: the international reach of U.S. investment banking, the emerging giantism of the military-
industrial complex, the ballooning of the CIA and kindred intelligence operations, the drive for U.S. control of
global oil supplies and a close alliance with Britain and the English-speaking community. This century of upward
momentum brought a sequence of controversies, albeit ones that never gained critical mass—such as the
exposure in 1942 of Prescott Bush’s corporate directorship links to wartime Germany, which harked back to over-
ambitious 1920s investment banking, the Bush family’s longtime involvement with global armaments and the
military-industrial complex (that latter was big enough by 1961 that President Eisenhower warned against it) and a
web of close connections to the CIA, ones that began decades before George Bush’s brief CIA directorship in
1976. Threads like these weigh may not weigh heavily on individual presidencies; they are many times more
troubling in a dynasty.
We must be cautious here not to transmute commercial relationships into latter day conspiracy theory, a
transformation that epitomizes what historian Richard Hofstadter years ago called the “paranoid streak” in
American politics. (Ttry a Google internet search for “George Bush and Hitler,” for example.) On the other hand,
worries about conspiracy thinking should not be inhibit inquiries in a way that blocks sober examination, which
often more properly identifies some kind of elite behavior familiar to sociologists and political scientists alike.
The particular evolution of elites within nations that became leading world economic powers over the last four
centuries is something I have discussed in several previous books, especially Wealth and Democracy (2002). The
growth of a nation’s “establishment” to its zenith is invariably an accretive process, not a sequence of plots. Still,
“old boy” networks or their equivalents are usually important. They can—and do— help to bury inconvenient
memories or embarrassing documentation.
Treating the Bush presidencies as growing out of a four-generation interaction with the so-called U.S.
establishment is, in a word, essential. Dealing separately with the administrations of George H W. and George W.
—worse, ignoring linkages of behavior in office—is like considering individual planets while ignoring their orbits
and solar system.
Four examples are illustrative. One is the repeated use of family influence in arranging or smoothing difficulties
over the military service of three generations: Prescott, George H. W. and George W. Similarly, the involvement
of four Walker and Bush generations with finance—in several cases, the investment side of the petroleum
business—helps to explain their recurrent pre-occupation with investments, capital gains and tax shelters. George
W. Bush’s 2003 commitment to ending taxation of dividends simply extended his father’s repetitive calls for
reducing capital gains tax rates as the solution to any weakness in the national economy. Third, the family’s ties to
oil date back to Ohio steelmakere Samuel Bush’s relationship to Standard Oil a century ago, while it ultimately
dynastic connection to Enron spanned the first national Bush administration, the six years of George W. Bush’s
governorship of Texas, and the first year of his Washington No other presidential family has made such enduring
efforts for a single corporation. Finally, there is no previous parallel to the relationships betwen the Bushes and
the CIA and its predecessor organizations, which began in the invisible-ink and Ashenden, Secret Agent days of
George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush. Quite simply, analyzing separately the two Bush presidencies risks
losing sight of such essential and revealing leitmotifs.
Arguably, a clan lacking a continuity probably could not have succeeded in establishing a dynatic presidency. It
would not have developed the requisite establishment interface. The term “dynastic” is used here to describe a
fact, not a theory: the succession of 2000 in which the eldest son of a defeated president was eight years later
chosen and inaugurated as the next president of his father’s party. Such inheritance has no American precedent; it
trespasses, at least spiritually, on the governance framed by Washington, Franklin, Jefferson and Madison.
Hereditary rulers were to be feared, the founders knew, even when, like the 15th century Medicis of Florence,
they initially chose to keep the framework of the republic.
The election of 2000 became an obvious pivot by marking a full-fledged family restoration, which necessarily
established a dynasty. “Restoration” may—at first, probably will—seem to many Americans like a strained, overly
European analogy. Chapter 3 will flesh out the term’s appropriateness. The election of 1994, however, must then
become a secondary milestone. That year’s outcome served to anoint eldest son George W. Bush, already the
most logical to follow in his father’s footsteps.
Winning the Texas governorship made him the family political heir instead of his younger brother, who lost a
statehouse bid in Florida. Named like his father, looking eerily like him, and having a similar electoral base in
Texas, George W. produced much more of a “restoration” psychology among voters than could have been
managed by his younger brother Jeb (who had a different look, a different state and a later birth.) Also to the point,
the 1994 elections previewed the motivational potential for a restoration: the moral anger of a large portion of the
American electorate – pollster Gallup came to call them “the revulsed” -- with the new president, Bill Clinton. Not
a few voters became apologetic, survey takers found, for having turned the elder Bush out of office in 1992.
In short, the case for a “restoration” entails its own chronology. Any “Bush Era,” for better or worse, must be
defined retroactively, in essence backdated, to include George H. W. Bush’s own triumph in1988 and subsequent
four-year White House tenure. Were history to posit a Bush Era through 2008, the two family presidencies might
well name the entire two decades, turning the Clinton years into the political equivalent of sandwich filler.
Conversely, were Senator Hillary Clinton to achieve a second restoration in 2008, this one Clintonian, public
perception might well lurch toward some American equivalent of the 15th century Wars of the Roses, during which
the English crown passed back and forth between several generations of the houses of York and Lancaster. When
Democrat Albert Gore, himself a minor dynast (son of a U.S. Senator), announced that he would not make a second
run against Bush, opinion polls showed Mrs. Clinton immediately becoming the favorite of the Democratic rank
and file for 2004. Her own inclination, pundits said, was to wait for 2008 and a possible race against Jeb Bush.
National politics, in short, began to take on the aura of a great family arena. Of the four wives of the major party
presidential nominees in 1996 and 2000, two quickly gained U.S. Senate seats: Hillary Clinton in 2000 and
Elizabeth Dole in 2002. A third, Tipper Gore, decided not to make a Senate bid in Tennessee. What Laura Bush
will do on leaving the White House remains to be seen. Seats in the U.S. Senate, in the meantime, began to pass
more like membership in Britain’s House of Lords.
Republican Senator Frank Murkowski, returning to Alaska to become a governor after the 2002 election,
appointed his daughter to his open U.S Senate seat. In doing so, he took advantage of a new state law (which too
late became controversial) allowing him to appoint his own successor. In Clinton’s Arkansas, meanwhile, 36-year-
old Michael Pryor went to the Senate where his father had served for 18 years. Mrs. Dole went to the Senate
where her husband had earlier been Majority Leader, albeit from a different state.
Regionally, the prime example has been New England. In Rhode Island, Republican Lincoln Chafee took the
Senate seat of his father, John Chafee, when the latter died in1999. Next door, Edward Kennedy occupied the
Massachusetts Senate seat vacated by his brother when he became president, and just to the west in Connecticut,
Senator Christopher Dodd sits where his father sat from 1958 to 1970. Parenthetically, both senators from New
Hampshire are the sons of former governors. One of those from Maine is the wife of a former governor.
Some of the heirs have not lacked for humor. Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy, speaking at a roast,
acknowledged the new Chafee in the Senate: “Now when I hear someone talk about a Rhode Island politician
whose father was a senator and who got to Washington on his family name, used cocaine and wasn’t very smart, I
know there is only a 50-50 chance it’s me.”
Dynasticism, then, is clearly not just a matter of the Bush presidency. Deeper currents were swirling – in politics,
economics, culture and public opinion. Yet the 1996-1998 jelling among Republicans of a commitment, backstopped
by favorable national polls, to running the Bush family’s eldest heir for the presidency was a vital catalyst. It
helped to legitimize a larger trend, broadening its momentum.
Religion furnished another critical engine. To many Republicans and independents, Bush family appeal was
resurrected in 1993-1994 by the moral turpitude of Bill Clinton, deepened by ongoing by ongoing revelations and
eventual impeachment. However, despite this tide—or perhaps because of how it aroused Southern fundamental
constituencies—George W. Bush succeeded only by emphasizing and displaying unusual personal religiosity. He
became the prodigal son, brought back to God after waywardness and crisis. From 1994 to 2000, he repeatedly
used biblical language about good and evil. One could almost hear the words of Daniel and Jeremiah. So close did
he draw to evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant leaders that in 2001, the Washington Post saw him replacing
evangelist Pat Robertson as the leader of the U.S. Religious Right. To have suggested any similar role on the part
of his father would have been a joke.
Without this fortuitous politics of moral restoration, the Bush opportunity to dynasticize the presidency might well
have failed like the Kennedy attempts in 1968 (Robert F. Kennedy) and 1980 (Edward Kennedy). Still, the notion
of restoration did make more basic sense as a replanting of some form of conservatism. Indeed, by the
Millennium, new traditional, even fundamentalist, political and religious forces were at work in many parts of the
world.
For all that guides to royalty and aristocracy remained something less than required reading in U.S. politics, they
were regaining relevance in European chanceries and even in the popular press. Kings and ruling families began
their own comeback. Spain restored Juan Carlos of the House of Bourbon to its vacant throne in 1975. The major
tide of monarchical restoration in Europe, however, overlapped the Bush accession in the United States.
In late 2000, following the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic, the new Serbian government allowed Crown Prince
Alexander II of Yugoslavia and Serbia to return to Belgrade, shortly thereafter allowing him use of the former
royal palace. Bulgarians, for their part, elected the claimant king, Simeon II, as prime minister in 2002. Romania’s
King Michael I, a cousin of British Queen Elizabeth, came back to Bucharest in 2001, recognized as a former head
of state and given possession of an old family chateau. In early 2003, Prince Victor Emmanuel of the House of
Savoy, his family exiled since 1945, returned to Italy for the first time in pursuit of restoration. With three-quarters
of the population favorable, the Italian parliament had already set approval in motion. Officials of the Bush
administration discussed restoring royal houses in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Meanwhile, in contrast to the sophisticated 1990s dialogue saluting globalization, Internet democracy and the
supposed end of history, much of the world’s population, especially its poor and dispossessed, was participating in
a quite dissimilar expression—a tide of fundamentalist and evangelical religion, often with a strong admixture of
nationalism. Compared to the few nations seeking restorations and kings, this larger trend, affecting Protestants,
Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists alike, dwelt on prophets and
pharaohs, awaited or feared ones (red calves, mahdis and antichrists), holy cities and desecrating unbelievers,
along with jihads, end times, raptures and ultimate Armageddon.
Well might embattled Americans, weary of warfare in the land of the Holy Sepulcher, yearn for the simple “family”
issues propounded in the cultural politics of the 1980s and 1990s— mere programmatic courtship directed at low
and middle-income voters stressed by two-earner households, lengthened work hours, day care and tax pressures.
Unfortunately, by the time these humdrum issues were lost in stock market crashes, terrorism, and war in the early
2000s, little net economic progress had been made. If anything, the stress on ordinary families was greater.
Thus the irony: that the dominant “family-related” trend taking the United States into the 21st century turned out
to be a form of classic reaction. In economics, it favored aristocracies of both capital and skills, from Wall Street to
major-league baseball. Family values were brandished to save multi-millionaires from the federal inheritance tax.
In politics, “family” bred dynasties and elite entrenchment. Even more broadly, amid the fear of additional
barbarian attacks in the 9/11 vein, Americans slid towards another historical reversal: allowing the 18th century
republic to be reconceptualized as an embattled 21st century imperium, with stresses and strains not unlike those
that plagued 3rd or 4th century Rome.
The central purpose of this book is to interweave several strands of analysis and thought that ought to be
considered together. One was the political and religious fundamentalism gaining strength as the new century
unfolded. George W. Bush was part of this. A second involved the ever-changing importance within the United
States of different economic sectors and elites—from investment banking and oil to the military-industrial complex.
The third is the 20th and early 21st century emergence of the Bush family, which this volume seeks to track along
a trajectory of American wealth and power through the heydays of Wall Street investment banking, Ivy League
clubdom and Texas petropolitics into the post-World War Two emergence of the CIA and rise of the national
security state.
Until now, a different, midcentury-flavored saga has mostly been told around careers like those of Dean Acheson,
Robert Lovett and Averell Harriman, who played their starring national roles in the late 1940s, 1950s and early
1960s. Now a new dynasty warrants an updated and differently focused examination. The Bushes and their initially
more influential Walker family in-laws were also “present at the creation,” to use Acheson’s term, but in
secondary capacities. The family stepped into public visibility only in 1952, when Prescott Bush, managing partner
at Brown Brothers Harriman, for many years the nation’s biggest private investment bank, won election to the U.S.
Senate from Connecticut. He also became a favorite golf partner of President Eisenhower, also impressing the
then-Vice President Richard Nixon.
When Nixon, in turn, won the presidency in 1968, he would treat George H.W. Bush, a first-term Congressman, as
befit the son of Prescott Bush. The younger Bush had also been commended to Nixon by former Republican
presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey, probably the one man most responsible for convincing Dwight
Eisenhowe