Wolves in the Fold, Part II

Last week, I began a series exploring how the Bush Administration has actively worked to divert attention away from the true events leading up to 9/11 by creating a series of straw men to vilify and hold responsible for all the ills in the world. First it was Saddam Hussein, who had been rendered almost entirely impotent by the UN embargo, and who was mostly responsible - over the last fifteen years, of just being a really bad guy who happened to be running a country with a lot of oil. Now that the Iraqis have stretched Hussein's neck, the Administration has had to find someone new to pick on, and they have selected Iranian PM Ahmed Ahmadinejad - a man who actually holds almost no real power in Iran.

Now, just in case one of the mullahs in Teheran decides that Ahmadinejad has overstayed his welcome and parks an ounce of lead between his eyes, the Administration is finally warming up Burmese PM Than Shwe in the bullpen. Meanwhile Osama Bin Laden, the only one of these people who has ACTUALLY attacked the United States, lounges in Afghanistan (or perhaps it's Pakistan this week - sometimes it's hard to tell), comfortably hooked to his dialysis machine and writing anti-American diatribes.

President Bush seems to have gotten this finger-pointing thing down. On the other hand, he's been well-trained in the art of diversion, as we will see in this installment of Wolves in the Fold.

Prescott Bush – Yalie, Skull and Bonesman, and the former president of the Yale Glee Club, went to work after graduation from college for a simple hardware company. Six years later, in 1924, he was vice president of Harriman and Company, a major investment and banking firm. He achieved this amazing and meteoric ascent courtesy of his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker. Prescott had met his wife, Dorothy Walker, though fellow Bonesman and Harriman heir, Roland Harriman, and they had married three years before he joined Harriman and Company.

He only lasted one year at Harriman, before departing for the U.S. Rubber Company. He returned triumphant, though, in 1931 as a founding member of Brown Brothers Harriman, formed by the merger of his father-in-law’s company Harriman with the
Philadelphia firm Brown Brothers & Co.

Brown Brothers Harriman was the Wall Street connection for numerous German firms that helped to fund Germany’s rebuilding after WWI, and eventually funded the Nazi Party under Hitler. On December 14, 1941, six days after Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt signed the Trading with the Enemy Act, which enabled federal authorities to seize the assets of US companies who profited from German, Japanese, and Italian customers.

Prescott Bush's assets were seized. Among them were his holdings as a Director at the Hamburg-Amerika shipping lines, which was a front for the American spying operations conducted by the I.G. Farben Company in Germany. In all, Bush's holdings as a Director in no less than five companies were taken by the government, and each and every one of them were in one way or another a Nazi front corporation (Union Banking, The Holland-American Trading Association, The Silesian-American Corporation, the aforementioned Hamburg-Amerika Lines, and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation). In fact, when all was said and done, it appeared that Prescott Bush owed almost all of his accumulated wealth to collaboration with the Nazi Party.

It was a natural combination. Prescott Bush's involvement in munitions and other war-works industry fit like a finely machined sleeve with the emerging fascist movement in Western Europe. In fact, it was the types of business engaged in by Bush and his fellows at BBH that typified the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower would warn us about in his farewell speech in 1960. By then, of course, it was way to late to stop the juggernaut, but in 1941 the US actually took steps to interdict active collaboration with the Nazis, and siezed all of the Bush holdings.

Besides his already existing staunch Republican leanings, this event appears to have cemented Prescott Bush's disregard for FDR, and may have spurred his eventual political career.

Prescott Bush's antipathy toward the President was not new. Bush had so loathed FDR, in fact, that he appears to have cooperated in a seditious attempt in 1933 to overthrow the Democratic president.

Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler had appeared before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee in Congress in 1934, and had testified that he had been approached by a group of wealthy businessmen the year before. According to Butler, this group had attempted to recruit him to participate in a military coup intended to depose Roosevelt. The Committee eventually decided that such a plot had indeed taken place, but - strangely - nobody was ever prosecuted. The attempted putsch, according to the BBC, was funded largely by the American Liberty League, of which Prescott Bush was a major member.

In any case, by 1941 Bush’s assets had been seized, and he had to begin assembling a new fortune. He turned to the emerging energy business and, through Brown Brothers Harriman’s involvement, was on the Board of Dresser Industries for over twenty-two years.

Dresser Industries, founded in the latter part of the 19th century, had been involved in oil and natural gas exploration and production for almost fifty years by the time Bush was placed on its board. In 1950, Dresser moved its base of operations to Dallas in order to take advantage of the burgeoning Texas oil industry, but its involvement with oil and natural gas spread to points all over the world, including the Middle East.

Harriman’s involvement with Middle East oil concerns can be traced back to the 1920’s, when Prescott Bush’s father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, assisted in the post-WWI rebuilding of the Baku oil fields. It was through Brown Brothers Harriman’s involvement with Dresser Industries, and Prescott Bush’s Board membership there, that BBH became a major player in the oil industry.

In 1948, after returning from WWII and completing school at Yale (where he, like his father, was a Skull and Bonesman), George Herbert Walker Bush went to work for Dresser Industries as a treasurer. It is roughly at this point that the intersection of the Bush family and Big Oil begins in earnest, an intersection which, almost forty years later, led to a more than passing relationship with the Saudi Royal Family – a story that we will pick up on in the next installment of Wolves in the Fold.

One other note of interest. Years after Bush41 left Dresser Industries, it was bought out by another company.

That company’s name?

Halliburton.