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

To: bonnuss_in_austin who wrote (260187)	5/31/2002 10:34:32 PM
From: Arthur Radley	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 769670

B in Austin, You don't have to tell me about those college grads....just spent $100,000 of my own money to put my kid through college and of the 400 that graduated with her earlier this month...want to guess how many have jobs? And this from a university that is ranked #1 by the university ranking systems.. But then again we have the Cyberkens telling us that Shrub is here to clean up the mess....If so, then why the following....and remember this article leaves out the real story about Bush and his baseball team and that is the efforts to cheat the owners of the land where the ball park was built... if it had been left up to these landowners there would be no Arlington Stadium...but when you up against the President's #1 son...guess who loses out..the common man. And to think Cyberken thinks Bush is the solution, when we all know he is the problem. "ARLINGTON, TEXAS, July 1-- Baseball made George W. Bush rich. And yet, few media outlets have scrutinized how Bush and his cronies bought the Texas Rangers, convinced Arlington to pay for and build a stadium, told the city how much to pay for the land it condemned, refused to pay their debts to the city, and later, cashed out when media giant Thomas Hicks bought the team for $250 million. The deal allowed Bush to pocket nearly $15 million, a 2,500 percent on his initial investment in just eight years. Every businessman is entitled to make a return on their capital. But what did Bush do in order to make that kind of dough? And how did he get into a position where he could buy the Texas Rangers? The answer: other than being the son of a sitting president, precious little. Before putting together the group that bought the Rangers, Bush had no experience in professional sports. Unlike his father, he didn't play baseball in college. As Bush once told reporters, "I'm all name and no money." That statement was certainly true in the baseball deal. But you have to give Bush credit. He got into a deal where he and his partners were able to convince the city of Arlington to: - pass a half cent sales tax to pay for 70 percent of the stadium; - use government's powers of eminent domain to condemn land the Rangers couldn't or didn't want to buy on the open market; - give the Rangers control over what happens in, and all the profits from, the stadium and the surrounding acreage. But there are major questions about his ethics. The day he was sworn into office in 1995, Bush put his stocks and other assets into a blind trust when he became governor. But he kept his most valuable asset -- his partnership interest in the Rangers under his control. Bush said he didn't put his share of the team into the trust because it would have been a change in ownership. And a change in ownership, he said, "would have required a vote of the baseball owners to do so. And it became unnecessary. We just didn't think it was necessary to get that vote. Secondly, I own it. I mean, there's no question I own it...So it's not necessary." Clearly, Bush didn't want to put his interest into the team into a blind trust because that could have prevented him from selling the team. And in early 1998, that's exactly what he did, selling the team, control of the stadium and the surrounding land to Dallas media mogul, and major Bush campaign contributor, Tom Hicks. "When it is all said and done, I will have made more money than I ever dreamed I would make," Bush told reporters the day after the Hicks deal was announced in January of last year. Like the Harken Energy deal, Bush's baseball dealings reveal a disturbing pattern: Whenever George W. Bush invests his money, he gets the kind of returns that regular, working, people can only dream about. Is it just luck? No. Instead, it's clear that Bush, the son of the President, the child of privilege, has become filthy rich through what can only be called crony capitalism. Don't you just love it! Bush rails against higher taxes and wants government to cut taxes, but he became a millionaire because the citizens of Arlington raised their taxes so he could get rich.