Salon: Conason's Big Lies – Part 4 – Bush, Inc. (Crony Capitalism)

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Understanding the political dynasty that's made crony capitalism a way of life. Part 4 of "Big Lies."

For the Bush dynasty, crony capitalism is rite of passage, way of life, and family business. President Bush, his father, his three brothers, and sundry other relatives all have joined (and sometimes hastily abandoned) enterprises where their chief contribution was the perception of political influence at home and abroad. It would be possible -- although grim and morally exhausting -- to write an entire book about nothing but ethically dingy Bush business deals.

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In 1987 Bush moved his family from Texas to Washington, where he served as "senior adviser" in his father's presidential campaign. Not long before Election Day, he heard from his former Spectrum 7 partner Bill DeWitt that the Texas Rangers were on the market. To make a successful bid, DeWitt would need Texas backers, and the son of the incoming President was perfectly situated to find them. George W. also had a powerful advantage in dealing with the team's owner, an aging oil millionaire named Eddie Chiles, who had been a Bush family friend in Midland, Texas, for more than thirty years.

Baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth was eager to help the son of the new President, but wasn't happy that Bush's two biggest investors were the New York film financiers Roland Betts and Tom Bernstein. The indispensable local money came from Richard Rainwater, formerly the chief financial adviser to the Bass brothers of Fort Worth. Little known to the general public, Rainwater was famous on Wall Street for growing the Bass inheritance from around $50 million in 1970 to more than $4 billion by the time he left in 1986 to manage his own investments.

After Bush and Ueberroth met with him in early 1989, Rainwater took effective control of the deal, bringing along Edward "Rusty" Rose, a well-known Dallas investor, to oversee the franchise. Under an agreement worked out by Betts and Rainwater, the President's son would serve as the new ownership's public face while Rose ran the business.

Bush's stake in the team, just under 2 percent, was among the smallest. He purchased his shares with a $500,000 loan from a Midland bank of which he had been a director and eventually scraped together $106,000 more to buy out two other limited partners. Two months after his father's inauguration, George W. Bush called a press conference in Arlington to announce that the Rangers sale had been successfully completed for a price that was later reported to be $86 million. While Rainwater, Rose, Betts, and all the other partners remained in the background, George W. greeted the public as if he were "the owner" of the Rangers. He attended every home game and even printed baseball cards bearing his own picture to hand out from his box.

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http://salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/08/21/conason_four/index.html