Bush Family Businesses Financial History & Bankruptcy - it's ugly

[DesEtoiles]

How many of W's companies declared bankruptcy?
by JLFinch




Thu Mar 10th, 2005 at 23:59:35 PST

A thoughtful poster elsewhere reminded me of this very pertinent fact.

All of Bush's business dealings prior to politics were consumate disasters - save the fact that Poppy's friends bailed him out almost every time.

I wish I had the time to put together all of the details, so that we could all call Congress and the media tomorrow and ask:

How many times did one of Bush's businesses declare bankruptcy?


How many times was bankruptcy narrowly avoided, thanks to Poppy's well connected and well-heeled friends?

Ahh, the soft bigotry of the old-boy network.

Where's the PERSONAL RESPONSIBILTY?  Where's the "moral obligation" to see that the debt is repaid?

And let's not limit ourselves to W.  Neil and Jeb have their own ulgy histories with financial failures.  Perhaps most notably, Neil's involvement with Silverado, the collapse of which cost tax payers about a billion dollars.

There's some very interesting background here:

http://bushwatch.org/family.htm

Here's a snippet from that:

"1982 After $3 million is poured into Arbusto with little oil and no profits, just tax shelter George W. Bush changes the company name to Bush Exploration Oil Co. Subsequently he is kept afloat by an investment from Philip Uzielli, a Princeton friend of James Baker III. For the sum of $1 million, Uzielli bought 10% of the company at a time in 1982 when the entire enterprise was valued at less than $400,000. Subsequently, to save the company George W. Bush merges with Spectrum 7, a small oil firm owned by William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds. DeWitt had graduated from Yale a few years earlier than Bush and was the son of the former owner of the Cincinnati Reds. Bush becomes president of Spectrum 7. He also gets 14% of the Spectrum's stock. Meanwhile, 50 original investors in Arbusto get paid off at about 20 cents on the dollar."

"1989...Neil Bush bails out of JNB Exploration, the firm where he became president with a $100 ante, leaving his partners to worry about its debt. Days earlier he forms Apex Energy with a personal investment of $3000. The rest of the money -- $2.7 million -- comes from an SBA program designed to help "high risk start-up companies." Like JNB, it proves to be just that. Apex will later go belly-up with no assets."

"1990 Federal regulators give Bush son Neil the mildest possible penalty in the $1 billion failure of the Silverado S&L. The deal is so good that Bush drops his appeal. Among other things, Neil, as a Silverado director, voted to approve over $100 million in loans to his business partners.

January: George W. Bush sells two-thirds of his Harken Energy stock at the top of the market for $850,000, a 200% profit, but makes no report to the SEC until March 1991. Bush Jr. says later the SEC misplaced the report. An SEC representative responds: "nobody ever found the 'lost' filing." One week after Bush's sale, Harken reports an earnings plunge. Harken stock falls more than 60%. Bush uses most of the proceeds to pay off the bank loan he had taken a year earlier to finance his portion of the Texas Rangers deal."

More good background can be found at this (now dated) article from Mother Jones:

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1992/09/bushboys.html

And a fascinating aside from that source:

"Oil companies had learned, during the years of the long Iran-Iraq war, that trouble in the gulf hurts companies with oil interests because, for one thing, at the first sound of a rifle shot in the gulf region, Lloyds of London jacks up insurance rates on oil tankers and company installations. The "wartime" rates are very high and cut deeply into company profits and investor confidence. If things really get out of hand, pipelines are destroyed and waterways are mined."  

Is that why we had the pre-mature declaration of "Mission Accomplished" using the specific words "the end of major combat operations"?

Is that what the NeoCons are really all about - stabilizing the region for low-risk oil production for their own (and their cronies') financial benefit?

[Bridget Burke]

1. "Fortunate Son" covered Bush's business history in detail.

After the first edition was supposedly destroyed, I found a big pile at the local Half Price Books. The "coke bust" bit was supposedly the important revelation--were details falsified by Rove to discredit the story? Was the author driven to suicide?

To me, the most valuable parts of the book are the rather dull chapters detailing Shrub's failed businesses. All the investors & their connections are thoroughly documented. Not sexy at all, but increasingly relevant. (Yes, the Bin Ladin's appear....)

[NVMojo]

2. Hypocrisy is one of their high points.

[Just Me]

3. It's okay for the powerful to prey on the weak, doncha' know.

It's also acceptable to impose greater legal and economic burdens on the common folks that the wealthiest ones.