What did Kevin Phillips say at the “What We Stand For” conference that made him yesterday’s
coming attraction for today’s report from the Land of Is? Pretty much nothing he hasn’t written in AmericanDynasty, his devastating examination of the Bush family dynasty going back four generations.
But there’s nothing like hearing the message from the horse’s mouth. And Phillips’s bracing voice dripped with irony and contempt as he delivered his verdict on the behavior of the Bush family. “Over four generations they have honed a pattern of loyalty to [America’s] wealthiest 0.01 percent, the top 200,000 families,” he said. “How you do that over four generations and not take that loyalty to the White House is not credible. The whole compassion business is clap-trap.”
(In the words of one book critic, “It is hard to tell what offends Phillips the most: the Bushes’ systematic deceit and secrecy, their shady business dealings, their cronyism, or their family philosophy that privileges the very wealthy and utterly dismisses all the rest.”)
“He got the money to buy into the Rangers partnership group by selling about 212,000 shares of Harken Energy Corp., an energy services company where Bush served on the board. Bush acquired the stock after Harken bought the energy exploration company he headed. The stock sale paid Bush $848,560.”)
Perhaps worst of all, the Bush family has exploited public institutions and taxpayers’s money to further its personal interests. The construction of the Rangers’s stadium in Arlington, Texas,”shows how big they are on using government programs for high rollers in the private sector,” Phillips said. He pointed out that Bush and his associates used the power of emiment domain, which is the right of government to seize private property for public use, to obtain the land for the stadium and a public bond issue to finance it.
“It amazes me,” Phillips said, “that Democrats haven’t distilled all of this into [a campaign] with a strong cutting edge.”
