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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: swisstrader who wrote (78026)	11/16/2000 2:35:35 PM
From: moby_dick	Respond to of 769670

"George W. Bush is a conservative though, isn't he? Isn't his whole family? Conservatism typically involves respect for American traditions of liberty and freedom, and given this, the Bush family is hardly conservative. At best, they can be described as mercenary in their political alliances and fund-raising, and at worst, far to the right of mainstream conservatism. Prescott Bush, the father of the former President and the grandfather of the current candidate, spent more than a decade helping his father-in-law George Herbert Walker finance Adolf Hitler from the Wall Street bank, Union Banking Corporation.4 Walker was one of Hitler's most powerful supporters in the United States, and landed Prescott Bush a job as a director at the firm. From 1924 to 1936, Bush's bank invested heavily in Nazi Germany, selling $50 million of German bonds to American investors. In 1934, a congressional investigation believed that Walker's Hamburg-America Line subsidized a wide range of pro-Nazi efforts in both Germany and the United States. One of Walker's employees, Dan Harkins, delivered testimony to Congressional leaders regarding Walker's Nazi sympathies and business transactions.5 According to US Government Vesting Order No. 248, many of Union Banking's assets had been operated on behalf Nazi Germany and had been used to support the German war effort. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian vested the Union Banking Corp.'s stock shares and also issued two other Vesting Orders (nos. 259 and 261) to seize two other Nazi-influenced organizations managed by Bush's bank: Holland American Trading Corporation and Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. Many major firms had dealings with Nazis in the years leading up to World War II, but relatively few engaged in such extended cooperation with Hitler's Germany after Pearl Harbor. It was business as usual for George Walker and Prescott Bush. Business as usual for young George Herbert Walker Bush also involved relationships with Nazi sympathizers, according to a school friend. George Upson Waller grew up with George Bush and in the late 1930's shared a math professor with the future President, Professor Michael Sides. Sides "was a Nazi. He would speak glowingly of Hitler," recalled Waller.6 Although Professor Sides was apparently a Nazi sympathizer, Bush, said Waller, was the teacher's pet. "He seemed to enjoy" Professor Sides and his other teachers "even the most authoritarian. Bush would never defy." Bush thought the Nazi professor "was a great teacher" according to Waller. This may explain an unusual and seemingly context-less joke Bush made to a dismayed Mikhail Gorbachev on Dec. 3 1989 at the sea of Malta, "You know Mikhail, that Berlin Olympics in 1936 was such a great one, I think we ought to do it again."