by Lou Dubose
<snip> Party loyalty, and the creative use of their minority status in Congress, is the Democrats’ best hope of slowing the Bush agenda and perhaps beginning the gradual process of returning to power. The Republicans became a majority in the House by using whatever mechanisms the institution provided — they even invented some — to expose the Democrats and offer up the Republican Party as the solution to the problems created by the corrupt, entrenched majority. In 1983, Newt Gingrich formed the Conservative Opportunity Society, a cabal of young right-wing Republicans, and took on the House Democrats. When Clinton was elected in 1992, they turned their attention to the White House. They never relented until they broke the Democratic majority stranglehold. They won the House in 1994 only because Clinton overreached — in his attempt to overhaul health care and his ban on assault weapons. <snip>
Second terms allow time for new scandals to ripen or old scandals to be dug up by reporters, and with the Bush Dynasty there is more metastasizing than politics and policy. Don’t look to the U.S. Department of Justice to do its job. Los Angeles Congressman Henry Waxman has done a better job of investigating Dick Cheney’s Halliburton than Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will ever do. But the business dealings of Bush — and Cheney — still could come back to bite them. "George W. Bush was either incredibly lucky or he is a crook," Austin journalist Robert Bryce writes in Cronies. Bryce makes a compelling argument that the Bush Dynasty is the beneficiary of and a vector for the spreading of the crony capitalism that gives the brown skies of Texas the smell of cooking petroleum and cooked books. After all, Martha Stewart is doing time for a lesser rap than the president dodged in 1990. George Bush Jr., as he was known at the time, used his position as a board member serving on an in-house audit committee to make a quick $318,420 by dumping his Harken oil stock before it went in the tank. Then he used his father’s position as president to smooth things over at the Security and Exchange Commission. (It helped, as Bryce reports, that the SEC was headed by Bush appointee Richard Breeden, an attorney from the Baker & Botts law firm in Houston. And that the SEC general counsel was James Doty, who also came out of Baker & Botts and had handled the paperwork when Bush bought his 2 percent of the Texas Rangers baseball team. The current Baker in the Houston law firm is James Baker III, who ran Team Bush’s Florida recount in 2000.) That’s an old story, and Bush survived it. Maybe he is lucky.
But his administration has institutionalized corruption, which is a more current story. It handed Halliburton a $7 billion no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq’s oilfield infrastructure, while former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney was still drawing a check from the company. It looked the other way at Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root’s over-the-top bills for gasoline in Iraq, allowing Karl Rove to sit in on White House conferences with companies in which he held stock. It appointed Baker III special emissary to the former Soviet republic of Georgia, while Baker & Botts was doing pipeline deals in the region. <snip>
It’s also known that former Enron executive Ken Lay met with the vice president and others on the task force before the company gamed the market to increase the price of electricity in California. After meeting with Lay, Cheney adopted his policy recommendation and opposed the energy-rate caps that would have saved California billions of dollars and a summer of rolling blackouts. Was there a quid pro quo for Enron, the company that had nurtured and underwritten Bush’s political career? At another Enron crime scene back in Texas, prosecutors are leaning on Lay’s wife about the insider stock deals she’s alleged to have made. Lay will probably talk to keep his wife out of jail. A talking Ken Lay is never good for the Bushes. The $750,000 political contributions Lay and others at Enron gave Bush while he was in Texas might be explored in court. If federal prosecutors are too timid to ask about the political cash, one of the trial lawyers representing thousands of stockholders robbed by Enron might be inclined to do so. And there are those Bush-family closet skeletons wearing the red-checked kaffiyehs so fashionable in the House of Saud. Bush’s business relations with representatives of the country that provided the pilots for the 9/11 attacks extend through Houston banks, energy companies and law firms. One House of Bush, House of Saud book has already been done, and reporters and authors are still working that fertile ground. <snip>
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/09/features-dubose.php
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