Why the Jeb Bush Candidacy
Must Be Squashed Now
by Nancy Spannaus
Feb. 24—Not every politician is defined by his or her family, yet there is no question but that John Ellis (Jeb) Bush speaks for the evil Bush family dynasty which, from grandpa Prescott Bush’s support for Hitler, through George W. Bush’s disastrous record of pre-emptive war, has acted to destroy the true United States tradition on behalf of London/Wall Street financial interests. Not only is there a seamless policy continuity with his family predecessors, but Presidential aspirant Jeb knows there is. He even began his recent speech at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs by speaking on behalf of “all of us in the Bush family.”
The British Empire’s operation to launch Jeb Bush’s Presidential candidacy has to be stopped, Lyndon LaRouche stated Dec. 11, when Jeb had made it clear he intended to run. The first step, LaRouche emphasized, is to get Jeb Bush to step down quickly, because with him comes the entire Bush dynasty. We must also destroy the apparatus in the Republican Party that sanctions their policies, and that has also protected the Obama Presidency from necessary impeachment, he added.
The name Bush has been synonymous with the degradation of the United States, and the two Presidential terms of George W. Bush set the stage for an Obama Administration, which has taken the former’s war and dictatorship policies even further. The London/Wall Street policymakers have defined the direction of both parties ever since their political assassination of Bill Clinton—and, as they rally behind the Jeb candidacy today, they are moving to consolidate power. Granted, the legacies of Jeb’s father and brother are politically toxic to most of the U.S. population. But no matter—London and Wall Street intend to make Jeb, who already is pulling in money from Wall Street hand over fist, appear inevitable to a money-obsessed public.
The only hope for the survival of the American Republic lies in restoring in the minds of Americans the real identity of the nation, as defined by founders such as Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, in their relentless efforts to build a republic based on principles of scientific progress and the advance of human creative powers, enhanced by collaboration with other nations. This is the objective of the LaRouche movement’s Manhattan Project, around which the country must be unified as a force for good once again, a force that will finally overthrow Wall Street power—and the Bushes and Obama with it.
The Bush Dynasty
EIR’s Tony Chaitkin has “written the book” on the Bush dynasty, but the essential point should be summarized here. The Bush politicians—George H.W., George W., Jeb—are part of a family which has been a “network asset of Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), one of the most powerful political forces in the United States during much of the 20th Century, and for many years, the largest private bank in the world.” BBH was part and parcel of the international financial oligarchy centered in London, which had cultivated its junior partners on Wall Street, the better to control the world.
Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. and Jeb, became managing partner of BBH in 1931. From that position he was intimately involved in one of the greatest scandals of the last century, the Wall Street/London support for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. There is ample documentation for the financial support provided by BBH, through the Hapag shipping line, for the early Nazi regime, but it didn’t end there.
In the early 1940s, the Federal government seized Union Bank Corp., a New York investment bank co-managed by Prescott Bush. UBC handled the maintenance and international transfer funds for a single individual, Fritz Thyssen, notorious as the principal fundraiser for Hitler in the 1920s and ’30s. Prescott Bush was one of the seven directors of UBC, which was charged with violating the “Trading with the Enemy Act.”
Thanks to the power of Wall Street, Prescott Bush’s Nazi connection never became an impediment to his career, including his election as U.S. Senator from Connecticut in 1952. He served two terms, and raised a son, George Herbert Walker Bush, who carried on his family’s Anglophile tradition of supporting Wall Street, eugenics, and other imperial policies, into the Congress, and the Presidency. The rest is a tragedy well-known to Americans today.
The Policies that Bind
The “line” from the Establishment press is that Jeb Bush is different from his brother and father, almost a “liberal.” They point to his views on immigration as a case in point. But even a cursory review of Jeb’s history shows the character of the man as indeed in keeping with the Nazi tradition and the danger of a fascist United States under Republican Party control.
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Wall Street: Sixty-two-year-old Jeb started his career in banking in Texas, and followed it up with a highly lucrative run as a real estate developer in Florida in the 1980s. After his two terms as governor of Florida (1999-2007, he went back to his banking roots, working for Lehman Brothers from 2007 to 2009, and then for Barclays Capital, up through 2014.
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Regime-change subversion: Jeb was a founding board member of the IRI (then called the National Republican Institute for International Affairs) in 1985, the Republican wing of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which runs “color revolution” regime-change policies worldwide, including the Contra operations (Iran-Contra operative Ollie North called them “Project Democracy”).
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Neo-con imperialism: Jeb was one of the original signators on the “Statement of Principles” of the neo-con Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in June 1997, along with Dick Cheney, Elliott Abrams, Eliot A. Cohen, Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, and “Mr. Victoria Nuland” Robert Kagan.
Robert Kagan and William Kristol introduced PNAC in a 1997 Foreign Affairs article by attacking John Quincy Adams. John Quincy Adams said that America ‘ “should not go forth in search of monsters to destroy,’ but why not? ... A policy of sitting on a hill and leading by example is a practice of cowardice and dishonor.” America needs to be the benevolent hegemon to the world, the sole superpower, and shape events in its own interest, they wrote.
PNAC called for unilateral preemptive wars, including a first-strike nuclear capability; was outspoken in 1998 for a war on Iraq based on Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction; and in 2000, produced a tome entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, much of which was incorporated into George W. Bush’s 2002 national security plan.
Chillingly, PNAC decided to go out of existence in 2006, with the declaration that it had accomplished its major policy aims!
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Bio-fool swindle: Jeb founded the Inter-American Ethanol Commission (IEC) in December 2006, a sponsor of the First Biofuels Congress of the Americas on May 11, 2007, in Buenos Aires. IEC was also a sponsor of Al Gore’s speeches in South America and the U.S., including at the First Biofuels Congress mentioned above. Jeb accompanied his brother, President G.W. Bush, to Brazil in March 2007 to push the genocidal ethanol scam. Jeb was a member of G.W.’s “Ethanol General Staff,” set up to run the Brazil-ethanol operation. Jeb had been pushing ethanol since 2005 (and may be a big investor), and wrote to G.W. in 2006 to lift the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on Brazilian ethanol.
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Anti-infrastructure: Florida was ready to build America’s first high-speed rail system, until Jeb became governor in 1999 and ended the project on his second day in office, Wikipedia reports. State legislators then put the project on the 2000 ballot as a constitutional amendment, which was passed by voters, and which directed Bush and the legislature to start building the railroad system by 2003. Bush vetoed funding for the project and led a campaign to repeal the constitutional amendment, which was successful, although Wikipedia reports that “many who voted believed they were supporting the train, though in fact a ‘yes’ vote was to approve the repeal.”
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Terrorist supporter: In 1990, Jeb Bush interceded with his father, then the President, to pardon Orlando Bosch, an anti-Castro Cuban CIA asset who had committed multiple terrorist acts, including the 1976 bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner in which all 73 people on board were killed, and who participated in the plot that assassinated Chilean minister and diplomat Orlando Letelier. Papa Bush complied and granted Bosch a resident permit.
Add to these Governor Bush’s policies of anti-unionism, reducing death penalty appeals, and austerity, and you see what “liberal” really means in the Bush family—liberal imperialism.
The Foreign Policy Team
“I’m my own man,” declared Jeb Bush during his Feb. 18 speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, attempting to distance himself from the stench of his father’s and brother’s records. He failed to do so.
Even before the core of his speech, ostensibly devoted to his “principles,” Bush established his pedigree by launching into an attack on Iran. “We definitely no longer inspire fear in our enemies,” he declared—as if that is a goal in foreign policy. (It is for PNAC and the neo-cons.) He then attacked negotiations with Iran, insisting—as if he were Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—that Iran should not have the right, ensured by international treaty, to nuclear enrichment. He called for Congress to enact more sanctions against Iran in advance, to be implemented if negotiations fail, as indeed they would under his conditions.
Bush’s speech in Chicago, a traditional venue for the roll-out of significant initiatives, such as that by Tony Blair against the Treaty of Westphalia in 1999, was accompanied by his announcement of a team of foreign policy advisors. As was immediately pointed out by many, 19 of the 21 people named had been part of the administrations of his father and brother, and who wrote the doctrines underlying the drive for superpower confrontation, which has currently brought us to the edge of world war.
Credit for assembling the team was given to Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) President Richard Haass and former World Bank chief, George W. Bush advisor, and endorser of PNAC, Robert Zoellick.
The senior individual on the list is George P. Shultz, the political godfather of the whole grouping. Shultz, as Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury, played a crucial role in dismantling the Bretton Woods System in 1971-72, ushering in the era of deregulation, and its ensuing financial crises. In foreign policy, after leaving government service, Shultz operated from the Hoover Institution, and crafted the anti-nation-state, pro-interventionist foreign policy of both the Bush and Obama administrations in his leadership, with Obama advisor Anthony Lake, of the Princeton Project on National Security.
The notion of preventive war was a crucial feature of the Final Report of the Princeton Project. It was to be carried out by a “concert of Democracies” outside the framework of the UN Security Council. While presented in 2007 as an “alternative” to the policies of the Bush-Cheney Administration, it was anything but. And, to top it off, it was a bipartisan document, endorsed by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in his 2008 run for the Presidency. (See “British ‘Concert of Democracies’ Backed by Obama and McCain,” EIR, June 13, 2008), and expressing the philosophy behind the policies of two top Obama advisors, Anthony Lake and Ivo Daalder.
Others on the Obama foreign policy team are members of the administrations which carried out these policies.
One of those advisors with a very visible record is Paul Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz was a protégé of Shultz, and actually goes back to his Vulcan Group, the foreign policy “experts” who advised George W. Bush. Wolfowitz, under Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (in the early post-Soviet years under President George H.W. Bush), actually drafted the memorandum that insisted that no nation—especially Russia—be allowed to act as an equal to the United States (hence, in his view, a challenge to U.S. global hegemony). He was a founding member of PNAC, and an unrepentant instigator of the 2003 war on Iraq, carried out under Tony Blair’s lying pretense that Saddam Hussein was about to get, or deploy, nuclear weapons.
The second member of PNAC on the foreign policy team is Paula Dobriansky, who has been at the center of operations against Russia for nearly two decades. She was Undersecretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs during the G.W. Bush Administration, where she supported the Orange Revolution of Viktor Yuschenko in Ukraine.
Other notorious members of the Jeb team include: Cheney National Security Advisor John Hannah; former CIA director Michael Hayden—still supporting the torture policy; and Meghan O’Sullivan, a protégé of the CFR’s Haass and the former top advisor to the U.S. official in charge of “de-Baathification” (read destruction) of Iraq, Paul Bremer.
Out of the Bushes!
The three Bush administrations, including George H.W. Bush’s sabotage, as Vice President, of the Reagan Administration, represented a fateful move toward the destruction of the United States—only to be followed by an Obama Administration bent on the same strategic policies. The British Empire, the only real enemy of the United States, has invested in both political parties. But a Bush resurgence must be prevented; even the candidacy is a destructive force for the nation.
One of the best tools to accomplish that would be the release of the 28 pages of the Congressional Inquiry on 9/11, which would expose the Bush family treachery on that score once and for all. But one way or another, it must be done.
Stuart Rosenblatt contributed research for this article.
