Bush Family Values: War, Wealth, Oil

The intelligence community: Bushes and Walkers have been involved with the intelligence community since World War I. The importance of Sam Bush's wartime munitions-regulating role was obvious. During the 1920s, when George H. Walker was doing a lot of business in Russia and Germany, he became a director of the American International Corporation, formed during the war for purposes of overseas investment and intelligence-gathering. Prescott Bush's pre-1941 corporate and banking contacts with Germany, sensationalized on many Internet sites, appear to have been passed along to officials in government and intelligence circles.

George H.W. Bush may have had CIA connections before the agency's unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. A number of published sources suggest that Zapata Offshore was a CIA front long before he went on to become director of Central Intelligence in 1976. As for George W. Bush, his limited ties are said to have come through investments in, and buyouts of, several of his oil businesses by CIA- and BCCI-connected firms and individuals.

Top 1% economics: Over four generations, the Bush family has been involved with more than 20 securities firms, banks, brokerage houses and investment management firms, ranging from Wall Street giants like Brown Brothers Harriman and E.F. Hutton to small firms like J. Bush & Co. and Riggs Investment Management Corp. This relentless record of handling money for rich people has bred a vocational hauteur. In their eyes, the economic top 1% of Americans are the ones who count. Investors and their inheritors are favored -- a good explanation of why George W. Bush has cut taxes on both dividends and estates, where most of the benefit goes to the top 1%. Over the course of George H.W. Bush's career, he was close to a number of the merger kings and leveraged-buyout specialists of the 1980s who came from Oklahoma and Texas: T. Boone Pickens, Henry Kravis and Hugh Liedtke. "Little guy" economics has almost no niche in the Bush economic worldview.

Debt and deficits: Whenever a Bush is president, private debt and government deficits seem to grow. Middle- and low-income Americans borrow to offset the income squeeze of recessions. The hallmark of Bush economics during both presidencies has been favoritism toward capital over workers. Federal budget deficits have soared because of a combination of upper-bracket tax favors, middle-income job shrinkage, big federal spending to hype election-year economic growth, huge defense outlays and overseas military spending for the wars in Iraq and elsewhere. Imperial hubris costs a lot of money.