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Bushwhacked

BudLiteGood morning, y’all. I promise I’ve got nothing to do with the hurricane coming! My rainman conjuring is limited to occasional, just in time to save everything from dying, showers. These monsoons we’ve been having are beyond the scope of my mojo. Hurricanes that dump bajillion gallons of water in an hour are way beyond my pay grade. So, if your trailer starts lifting off its blocks, I’m not liable.

Speaking of liability, and drawing a little bit on yesterday’s post about how we pigeonhole people, I thought it might be a good time to discuss America’s royals. The Bush family is tied directly to the royal family of England. In fact, George H. W. Bush picked up an extra link when he married “Barb”, who was also directly related to the rulers for England. In an article in the New York Times, it is related that “W” is a 13th cousin of Queen Elizabeth II. The article also relates that the “royal” blood flowing through “W”‘s veins is six times more regal than the paltry peasant blood running through our veins. The fellow that ran the family tree seems to think that “royal” blood explains the success of the lineage, sort of the “cream rises to the top” theory. I prefer the “them that’s got does everything they can to keep” theory. Children of powerful people are always going to have more advantages than the less fortunate. They in turn will pass those advantages on to the next generation.

A famous wit, and governor of Texas, Ann Richards, once said of  “W”, “Poor George Bush, he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple”. Truer words were never spoken. People who are born to privilege never know how  out of touch they are with the reality of the other 99 percent. To the one percent, the rest of us are just not trying hard enough.

Climbing up two levels in the Bush family tree reveals the progenitor of two presidents, Prescott Bush. Prescott was well connected, married well, and was concerned with American politics. He was so concerned with politics that in 1933, Prescott and a group of other businessmen approached an American general and proposed the use of 500,000 troups to overthrow President Roosevelt. The quote from BBC, “The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell House & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.” Prescott Bush and the other wealthy financier’s names were redacted from the Congressional records. Clearly something was afoot or they wouldn’t have held hearings, right?

The “Business Plot”, as it was called, was swept under the rug and the wealthy were not held accountable. Justice “looking the other way” is an expectation of the Bush family, it must be something in the blood. But, like we say in the South, “blood will out”, and it wasn’t long before Prescott was back to his old ways.

One of the first jobs Prescott Bush had was manager of a banking conglomerate named UBC. UBC was setup by his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker. One of UBC’s largest customers was Fritz Thyssen, a German industrialist. Thyssen funded Hitler’s rise to power and war efforts. In October of 1942 the alien property custodian seized the assets of the UBC, of which Prescott Bush was a director.

Now, we all know war is good business. It was never proved that Prescott had Nazi sympathies per se, but it is proven that he was a big fan of money. The fact that Thyssen’s German steel was being used against American boys didn’t cross any moral boundaries for Prescott, apparently. A charge of aiding and abetting the enemy during the time of war was not a big enough anchor to sink the Bush political future. Bush served in the Congress and later in the Senate, where he had access to the really big money. After all, Prescott Bush was just setting up the new family business.

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