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I would encourage everyone to read this book to have rational talking points when you meet up with any remaining rational conservatives. I'm not all the way through it, but some interesting quotes to note- I'm paraphrasing...life's too short... lots of these will be familiar to many here.
Phillips notes that George Bush lost the election in 2000 and was, yes, it's true, like it or not, appointed. He had no mandate to push through his extremist agenda...and yet he did anyway.
This is not indicative of a man who values democracy.
Three Texans were responsible for three wars based upon dubious rationales (or outright lies...) Johnson-Vietnam-Tonkin. Bush-Iraq-April Gilespie-(Bush's arming of Saddam). Bush Jr.-Iraq-lies about WMD, imminent danger-mushroom cloud.
Two of those wars were central to the machinary which has propped up both Bushes: Oil, Covert Actions, Financial Paybacks, the Military-Industrial Complex.
what's so interesting is that Phillips sees in the Bush's the fruition of Eisenhower's warning about the "military-industrial complex." I once heard Matthews try to say Eisenhower was warning about the Kennedys, which is bogus, since they were not the Standard Oil or Bechtel or Silesium consortium.
The Bushies are absolutely those things.
Here is Phillips' remarks about the Walker/Bush connections to the build up of Nazi Germany. (not all of them...Walker is, in fact, much more of a player than Prescott, his son-in-law, in building an empire on developing the Nazi war machine...
Phillips notes that Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker were both involved with Harriman in various deals with Germany after ww1.
Many patrician young men were involving in financial schemes to make money off the rebuilding of Europe after the war, but some of them avoided Germany because of their role in WW1. (btw, the Dulles brothers also looked to Germany to make money.) This money-making could also be seen as a "Marshall Plan" --privatized and for the profits of a few, fwiw.
Phillips notes that American investments in Germany in the 1920s were controversial for various reasons, including aiding previous or potential enemies. p37
Brown Brothers Harriman was an active investor "in a Germany rapidly rearming under Adolf Hitler." (this at a time when Germany was not supposed to rearm, btw.)
Prescott Bush handled much of the German work at Brown Brothers Harriman p38
The Justice Dept. was probing German-connected investors in '41. In March '42 a special Senate Committee held public hearings on cartel agreements b/t U.S. and German firms.
William S. Farish (whose son is George H.W. Bush's money handler...among other financial services), pleaded no contest to criminal conspiracy b/c of dealings b/t his company, Standard Oil, and I.G. Farben.
(Skull and Bones) Sec. of War Stimson requested that FDR stop the investigations...ostensibly to make sure those companies would not be distracted while dealing with the war effort.
But inquiries went on via the Trading with the Enemy Act of Dec. 1941.
In 1938, Prescott had been collaterally involved in shipping tetraethyl lead needed by the Luftwaffe via the Ethyl Corp., again with Farish as director (and half-owned by Standard).
1941 headline in NY Herald Trib read: "Hitler's Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank." The article noted that Thyssen had channeled the money into the Union Banking Corporation.
UBC was "nominally owned by a Dutch intermediary that Brown Brothers Harriman ran for the German Thyssen steel family. Prescott Bush was a director.
In Aug. 1942, property of the Harriman, Herbert Walker controlled American Ship and Commerce Corporation was seized under the trading with the enemy act.
On Oct 20, the alien property custodian seized the assets of the Union Banking Corporation.
In Nov. the govt seized the assets of the last major entity connected to Harriman, Walker, and Bush--the Silesian-American Corporation." p39
Phillips says that the outcome of these dealings is that no one said anything about them, much.
Phillips says, "it's almost as if these various German embroilments, depsite their potential for scandal, were regarded as unfortunate but in essence business as usual...A surprising number of the descendants of men who had dealt with Germany, William S. Farish III, William Draper III, Joseph Verner Reed Jr. (grandson of Remington chair) turned up as close personal advisors or high-level appointees in the George H.W. Bush administration." p40
Remington is interesting too-- a part of the structure of certain well-heeled financiers in the U.S. who had interlocking links. Remington was part of Thyssen's American "friends" --Samuel Remington was named an original director of the UBC.
The Merchants of Death hearings (special Senate Committee which investigated the Munitions industry) didn't get too far into the "major 1933-34 surge of U.S. military exports to Hitler's Germany." (and the state dept. leaned on the committee to make no reference to secret reports about German rearmament.)
fwiw- U.S. investment (ITT, GM, Ford, Standard Oil, GE) in Germany increased by 48.5% b/t 1929 and 1940, while it declined everywhere else on the continent.
..in other words, Phillips seems to say that Prescott and Herbert Walker were both financially entangled in Nazi Germany--along with lots of other corporations whose manufacturing investments in Germany were bedrock for the German warmongering.
Rather than single out Prescott, it's important to see that globalization in that era had very negative consequences because of the greed of a few wealthy individuals, and at the eventual expense of American lives, not to mention the extermination of the majority of the Jewish people on the European continent.
That's quite a high price to pay for rich people to compete among themselves to amass more money, seems to me.
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