OLIVER STONE: Bush, Obama and the Military-Industrial-Corporate Complex (Documentary)

The Bush-Clinton Mafia: Dynasties Merry-Go-Round - How Did It Come About?

From Left: The three Bushes - George, George and Jeb, and Bill and Hillary.

By Gilbert Mercier
If a space or a time traveler would set his time ship’s dial to 2015, with the United States as its destination, one could think that a mandatory preparation for the journey to understand the US’ political system would be an attentive study of the Constitution. After all, the document, drafted in 1787 by the so-called founding fathers and finally ratified three later in 1790 in its original form, is supposed to be the foundation of the US’ political edifice. Two hundred and twenty-five years later, the document has been so thoroughly gutted of its substantial original merits, at least in its spirit if not its letter, that the foundation of the building has become a superfluous architectural ornament. While the US Constitution was far from being revolutionary and granted equal rights only to white male landowners, it marked, in conjunction with the French revolution of 1789, a resolute break from the European kingdoms. No king or queen could ever claim this land again, under any circumstance. A republic, ruled by a meritocracy of well-educated Anglo-Saxon patrician men, was born. Since 190 years after the US Constitution’s ratification, however, which is exactly since 1980, the country has been ruled by two dynasties or their surrogates: the Bushes and the Clintons.

American royal mafia and co: organized crime as political model

To understand the undemocratic and extremely seedy side of US modern-day politics, it would be imperative for our time traveler, de Tocqueville in training, to watch two classics of American cinema: “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II”. Director Francis Ford Coppola, in his fictional, yet extremely well-researched and documented films, invited us inside the US’ underbelly. During the 19th century and up to the early 20th century, massive numbers of poor immigrants, mainly Italians, Irish and Jews from eastern Europe, were lured to the Americas largely to escape economic hardship. Those who landed in the US quickly understood that they were excluded from or at best marginalized in this promised land run by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The more ambitious ones, unencumbered by moral boundaries, developed their own form of government and social code of conduct in the form of a tightly knit family-like structure that usually strictly followed ethnic lines. The birth of organized crime in the US, either Italian, Jewish or Irish, was a direct consequence of the fight for survival of communities that were deliberately excluded from power or even any political discourse.

Mafia families had a strictly enforced code of conduct and precise hierarchy, with a don (boss) at the top; a consiglierie (adviser to the head of the family) directly picked by the don; an under boss who was usually groomed to be the don’s successor; capos (the lieutenants), and “soldiers”. In the 1930s, under the supervision of Lucky Luciano, the don of all dons, not only the five Italian mafia families worked together, but they also collaborated on many occasions with the Jewish and Irish mafia. In this parallel brand of power and economy, mafia families extracted contributions (a primitive form of taxation of usually 10 percent of income) from businesses, ironically to protect them from random criminal activity. By the mid-1930s mafia families controlled large sections of the US economy. The prohibition of alcoholic beverages, which spanned from 1920 to 1933, marked the apogee of the mafia families, either Italian, Jewish or Irish. The mob controlled the flow of liquor, and Americans were thirsty.

During the prohibition era, Joe Kennedy (father of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy), the patriarch of a family that passed for being true US aristocracy although he had been the grandson of a dirt-poor potato-famine Irish immigrant, substantially increased his vast fortune by importing, from the UK and Canada, and selling illicit liquor in association with Italian-American don Frank Costello and Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky. Joe Kennedy had an edge on the competition: he went into the prohibition era in 1920 with large stocks of booze from his father’s own stores. In what cannot be a coincidence, on the day prohibition ended 13 years later, Joe Kennedy had three exclusive deals to import British whiskey and gin, as well as an extensive network of retailers already in place. Kennedy understood that his political ambitions for his sons would require vast amounts of money. Like any mafia bosses, don Joe Kennedy wanted to start a dynasty at any cost and regardless of moral or even legal considerations. In the US, money meant power, and this notion was the motto for both supposed blue-blood patriarch Kennedy and don Lucky Luciano.

Bush mafia vs Clinton mafia: Defining US politics from 1980 to 2016

Arguably, the first term of George H. Bush, founder of the Bush dynasty, started in 1980 when he officially became Vice President or, to use the mafia term, super under boss to Ronald Reagan, an aging actor, perhaps already senile, hired to perform the role of global don: “Leader of the free world” and most powerful man on earth, according to US mainstream media propaganda. Bush Sr. had previously run the Central Intelligence Agency. During the two terms of the Reagan administration (1980 to 1988), it was common knowledge that Bush Sr was the boss who led US policy. He officially became the don in 1988, and ran his own operation with pretty much the same crew until 1992. James Baker was the key consigliere to don Bush Sr, but he also listened closely to the Talleyrand of US politics, consigliere extraordinaire Henry Kissinger. Bush Sr’s under boss was Donald Rumsfeld who picked his capo in the person of Dick Cheney. George W. Bush or Bush Jr, when his turn came, kept most of the old don’s crew with some minor changes and additions. Cheney became the under boss, while Rumsfeld took the vital Pentagon portfolio.

Before George W. Bush’s turn, the Clinton dynasty came along in 1992, courtesy of WallMart, and with the firm intention, as an obligation to their sponsors, to facilitate a global corporate imperialist agenda. With the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), don Bill Clinton went the extra mile for the benefit of his friends in transnational corporations. Bill Clinton became a favorite of Wall Street’s investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs, by being instrumental in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which was voted in 1933 during the Great Depression in the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street crash. The Glass-Steagall Act limited commercial banks securities activities, and it clearly separated commercial banking from investment banking, to curtail speculation. The repeal of this Act allowed Wall Street investment banks to gamble money that was held in commercial banks, and this was arguably one of the lead systemic factors in the 2008 global financial-market crash.

Don Clinton’s consigliere was mainly first-lady Hillary, but he also took the advice of the other super-consigliere besides Kissinger: Polish-born Zbigniew Brzezinski. Consigliere Brzezinski started his career in 1966 when he advised Lyndon B. Johnson.

Read More

Man Who Helped George Bush Steal the 2000 Presidential Election Prepares for Run for President — Jeb Bush

How Jeb Bush Stole the 2000 Election for His Brother: Ex-con game — How Florida's "Felon" Voter-Purge Was Itself Felonious

Jeb Bush - Political Criminal: He helped his brother, George Bush, steal the 2000 presidential election,
thus changing the course of American history for the worse. (Illustration by DonkeyHotey)

By Greg Palast
In November the U.S. media, lost in patriotic reverie, dressed up the Florida recount as a victory for President Bush. But however one reads the ballots, Bush's win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all. Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state--Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protegees of Governor Jeb Bush--ordered 57,700 "exfelons," who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls. (In the thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote Democratic.) A portion of the list, which was compiled for Florida by DBT Online, can be seen for the first time here; DBT, a company now owned by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, was paid $ 4.3 million for its work, replacing a finn that charged $ 5,700 per year for the same service.

Voter Suppression: Greg Palast Explains how Jeb Bush, Kathleen Harris and the Supreme Court Helped George Bush Steal the 2000 Presidential Election

If the hope was that DBT would enable Florida to exclude more voters, then the state appears to have spent its money wisely. Two of these "scrub lists," as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida's electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters. Most of the voters (such as "David Butler," a name that appears 77 times in Florida phone books) were selected because their name, gender, birthdate, and race matched--or nearly matched--one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States.

Neither DBT nor the state conducted any further research to verify the matches. DBT, which frequently is hired by the F.B.I. to conduct manhunts, originally proposed using address histories and financial records to confirm the names, but the state declined,the cross-checks. In Harris's elections-office files, next to DBT's sophisticated verification plan, there is a handwritten note: "DON'T NEED."

Thomas Alvin Cooper, twenty-eight, was flagged because of a crime for which he was convicted in the year 2007. Apparently this time traveler will cover his tracks by moving to Ohio, shedding his middle name, and changing his race. At least 300 "felons" on these lists were convicted in the future, a fact that did not escape state elections workers, who, in June 2000 e-mails headed "Future Conviction Dates," termed the discovery "bad news." Rather than release such perplexing data to the counties, Janet Modrow, the state's liaison to DBT, suggested that "blanks would be preferable in these cases." (The future felonies I found on these lists may simply be those the state neglected to erase; 4,918 other names have blank conviction dates.) The one county that checked each of the 694 names on its local list could verify only thirty-four as former felons. Some counties defied Harris's directive: Madison County elections supervisor Linda Howell refused the purge list after she found her own name on it.

Rev. Willie Dixon, seventy, was convicted of a crime in his youth, but one phone call would have told the state that it had already pardoned Dixon and restored his right to vote. On behalf of Dixon and other excluded voters, the NAACP in January 2001 sued Florida and Harris, after finding that African Americans--who account for 13 percent of Florida's electorate and 44 percent of U.S. felony convictions--were four times as likely as whites to be incorrectly singled out under the state's methodology.

After the election, Harris and her elections chief, Clay Roberts, testified under oath that verifying the lists was the job of county supervisors. But the Florida-DBT contract (marked "Secret" and "Confidential") holds DBT responsible for "manual verification using telephone calls." In fact, with the state's blessing, DBT did not call a single felon. When I asked Roberts about the contract-during an interview for BBC television, Roberts ripped off his microphone, ran into his office, locked the door, and called in state troopers to remove us.

Read More