July 19, 2002
Recommended Reading:
War, Incorporated by Mike Ferner in Counterpunch is a hard-hitting statement of the very dismal fact that -- as Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler wrote -- "War is a Racket."
The Bush Family BusinessButler should know. As he put it: "I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."
For five chapters of Butler's book War is a Racket click here. Also see a speech given by Butler in 1933: Butler on Interventionism.
The Brown Brothers that Butler referred to were the benefactors of the Bush family. They set up the Bush family in the family business: war. The unseemly details are outlined in the excellent Unauthorized Biography of George Bush. See chapter one: The House of Bush: Born in a Bank.
According to authors Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin:
World War I was then raging in Europe. With the prospect that the U.S.A. would soon join the war, two Skull and Bones "Patriarchs" , Averell Harriman (class of 1913) and Percy A. Rockefeller (class of 1900), paid special attention to Prescott's class of 1917. They wanted reliable cadres to help them play the Great Game, in the lucrative new imperial era that the war was opening up for London and New York moneycrats. Prescott Bush, by then a close friend of "Bunny" Harriman, and several other Bonesmen from their class of 1917 would later comprise the core partners in Brown Brothers Harriman, the world's largest private investment bank.
World War I did make an immense amount of money for the clan of stock speculators and British bankers who had just taken over U.S. industry. The Harrimans were stars of this new Anglo-American elite.
War is indeed a racket, the biggest, most murderous racket of all. As Butler said, it dwarfs the rackets of gangsters like Al Capone. While Capone dominated whole sections of Chicago, the Bush crime family's strongarm operations spread across continents.
Young Bush is the heir to more than the family fortune. He also carries on the family tradition of war.
-- By David Cogswell