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The Bush family and the S&L Scandal

Neil, George Jr., George Sr., and Jeb Bush

The Savings and Loan industry had been experiencing major problems through the late 60s and 70s due to rising inflation and rising interest rates. Because of this there was a move in the 1970s to replace the role of S&L institutions with banks.

In the early 1980s, under Reagan, regulatory changes took place that gave the S&L industry new powers and for the first time in history measures were taken to increase the profitability of S&Ls at the expense of promoting home ownership.

A history of the S&L situation can be found here:
http://www.fdic.gov/bank/historical/s&l/

What is important to note about the S&L scandal is that it was the largest theft in the history of the world and US tax payers are who was robbed.

The problems occurred in the Savings and Loan industry as they relate to theft because the industry was deregulated under the Reagan/Bush administration and restrictions were eased on the industry so much that abuse and misuse of funds became easy, rampant, and went unchecked.

Additional facts on the Savings and Loan Scandal can be found here:
http://www.inthe80s.com/sandl.shtml

There are several ways in which the Bush family plays into the Savings and Loan scandal, which involves not only many members of the Bush family but also many other politicians that are still in office and still part of the Bush Jr. administration today. Jeb Bush, George Bush Sr., and his son Neil Bush have all been implicated in the Savings and Loan Scandal, which cost American tax payers over $1.4 TRILLION dollars (note that this is about one quarter of our national debt).

Between 1981 and 1989, when George Bush finally announced that there was a Savings and Loan Crisis to the world, the Reagan/Bush administration worked to cover up Savings and Loan problems by reducing the number and depth of examinations required of S&Ls as well as attacking political opponents who were sounding early alarms about the S&L industry. Industry insiders were aware of significant S&L problems as early 1986 that they felt would require a bailout. This information was kept from the media until after Bush had won the 1988 elections.

Jeb Bush defaulted on a $4.56 million loan from Broward Federal Savings in Sunrise, Florida. After federal regulators closed the S&L, the office building that Jeb used the $4.56 million to finance was reappraised by the regulators at $500,000, which Bush and his partners paid. The taxpayers had to pay back the remaining 4 million plus dollars.

Neil Bush was the most widely targeted member of the Bush family by the press in the S&L scandal. Neil became director of Silverado Savings and Loan at the age of 30 in 1985. Three years later the institution was belly up at a cost of $1.6 billion to tax payers to bail out.

The basic actions of Neil Bush in the S&L scandal are as follows:

Neil received a $100,000 "loan" from Ken Good, of Good International, with no obligation to pay any of the money back.

Good was a large shareholder in JNB Explorations, Neil Bush's oil-exploration company.

Neil failed to disclose this conflict-of-interest when loans were given to Good from Silverado, because the money was to be used in joint venture with his own JNB. This was in essence giving himself a loan from Silverado through a third party.

Neil then helped Silverado S&L approve Good International for a $900,000 line of credit.
Good defaulted on a total $32 million in loans from Silverado.

During this time Neil Bush did not disclose that $3 million of the $32 million that Good was defaulting on was actually for investment in JNB, his own company.

Good subsequently raised Bush's JNB salary from $75,000 to $125,000 and granted him a $22,500 bonus.

Neil Bush maintained that he did not see how this constituted a conflict of interest.

Neil approved $106 million in Silverado loans to another JNB investor, Bill Walters.

Neil also never formally disclosed his relationship with Walters and Walters also defaulted on his loans, all $106 million of them.

Neil Bush was charged with criminal wrongdoing in the case and ended up paying $50,000 to settle out of court. The chief of Silverado S&L was sentenced to 3.5 years in jail for pleading guilty to $8.7 million in theft. (Keep in mind that you can get more jail time for holding up a gas station for $50.)

Today Neil Bush is working on closing a deal in Florida, where his brother Jeb is governor, to sell a software package to schools with his startup company Ignite.

Update 11/28/2003: Some of Neil Bush's business deals have been exposed in his recent divorce case. For more on this see:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/112703A.shtml
http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/...ush/index.html

It should also be noted that shortly after news of Neil Bush’s involvement in the S&L scandal hit the press his father, George Bush Sr., announced the Desert Storm campaign in Iraq, which subsequently had the result of making Neil’s name quickly fade from the headlines. In addition, while Neil Bush's divorce proceeding were exposing more backroom Bush dealings, America was once again bombarded with war propaganda for Operation Iraq Freedom.

The S&L scandal is by no means the only incident of questionable, and actually illegal, financial activity that the Bush family has been involved in. The line of questionable, illegal, and unethical businesses practices goes back at least to Prescott Bush Sr., George Bush Sr.’s father. Prescott Bush was a Senator from 1952 – 1963. Previous to his time as a Senator Prescott was a banker and businessman. Prior to the American entry into WWII Prescott Bush was director of Union Banking Corporation. Union Banking Corporation helped to finance Hitler’s regime. The Concentration Camps of Nazi Germany were labor camps that the Nazis used to make products for their regime as well as for sale to raise money. Prescott profited directly from the Auschwitz labor camp.

In 1942, after Hitler declared war on America the United States government seized the Union Banking Corporation under the Trading with the Enemy Act as a front operation that was supporting the Nazis. Much of the profits from the operation were already pocketed by Prescott however, and $1.5 million was put in a trust fund for George Bush SrFor more on Prescott Bush's ties to the Nazis see:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/...312540,00.html
http://www.nhgazette.com/cgi-bin/NHG...NN_Bush_Nazi_2

The issues of WWII will be revisited again later.

This is actually just the tip of the iceberg as far as the Bush family and business dealings are concerned, the topic is a book in itself. In the interest of brevity I invite you to research the Bush family business ties yourself, including those in Saudi Arabia, where George Bush made millions as an oil well developer, and George Bush’s $14 million deal when he sold the Texas Rangers, while leaving tax payers footing the bill.
http://www.realchange.org/bushjr.htm#rangers


For information on Prescott Bush Jr.'s economic ties to China see:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...scott-bush.htm
http://www.rationalrevolution.net/wa..._and_the_s.htm

January 26, 2004, 4:42 PM
Embarrassing Bush Divorce Papers


Neil Bush on April 18, 1991

In the annals of embarrassing presidential relatives, Neil Bush is no Billy Carter or Roger Clinton.

But his messy divorce has produced some eye-opening disclosures.

Among them: He had sex with women who showed up uninvited at his hotel rooms in Asia; he had an affair and may have fathered a child out of wedlock; and he stands to make millions from businesses in which he has little expertise - including a computer-chip company managed in part by the son of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin.

It seems certain opportunities tend to present themselves when your name is Neil Bush.

For his part, Bush defended the fees he has received for consulting jobs. But he gave little insight into whether the women who offered him sex in Hong Kong and Taiwan were perhaps paid by mysterious benefactors.

In a deposition taken last March and reviewed by The Associated Press, Bush told the attorney for his wife of 23 years, Sharon, that the women did not ask him for money and he did not pay them anything.

Asked how he knew what to do when he opened his door and saw a woman standing there, the 48-year-old Bush replied: "Whatever happened, happened."

"It's a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her," said the attorney, Marshall Davis Brown.

"It was very unusual," Bush replied.

Sharon Bush also accused Neil of fathering a child with the woman he now plans to marry. The woman's ex-husband has filed a defamation lawsuit, and DNA testing has been requested.

The titillating details have made barely a splash in Texas, where loyalty to the president runs deep. University of Texas government professor Bruce Buchanan said he doubts Neil Bush's shenanigans will become political fodder in the 2004 election.

"There are lots of examples of presidents with troubled siblings and it never seemed to have that much of an impact," he said.

Jimmy Carter's beer-swilling brother, Billy, wrote a book called "Redneck Power" and accepted money from the government of Libya. Bill Clinton's half-brother, Roger, was jailed for a year for dealing cocaine. Richard Nixon's kid brother Donald took $205,000 from Howard Hughes in the hopes of opening a fast-food chain selling Nixonburgers.

It is not the first time Neil Bush has caused his family some trouble. At the end of his father's presidency, Neil was among a group of defendants who agreed to pay $49.5 million to settle a negligence lawsuit over the $1 billion collapse of the savings and loan he directed in Colorado.

Bush denied wrongdoing and was not charged in the grand jury investigation, but the U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision found Bush's conduct "involved significant conflicts of interest and constituted multiple breaches" of his fiduciary duties.

Bush has gone on to reap profits from other ventures. In the deposition, he said he hoped to receive an estimated $2 million for acting as a consultant to Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., co-founded by Jiang Zemin's eldest son.

"Now, you have absolutely no educational background in semiconductors, do you Mr. Bush?" Brown asked.

"That's correct," said Bush, who holds an MBA from Tulane University.

Bush recently told the AP he has "not received one penny of compensation" from Grace Semiconductor because he never did the consulting. He did not respond to a request for comment on his divorce proceedings.

Bush has focused most of his energy on Ignite Inc., an Austin-based educational software startup. So far, he has raised $23 million from investors, including Winston Wong, the other founder of Grace Semiconductor.

"Let's face the reality," Bush told the AP in 2002. "I probably have access to people who probably wouldn't meet with a development-stage company, but I feel I'm held to a higher standard."

Bush's tax returns, obtained by the AP, showed $357,000 in income from Ignite and at least $798,218 from three transactions involving the stock of Kopin Corp., a small U.S. high-tech company where he had previously been a consultant.

There is no evidence he has tried to enlist help from the president for any of his ventures. Bush spokesman Taylor Gross said the White House had no comment.

Still, said Rice University political science professor Bob Stein, "there is a family pattern here where the Bush sons - Jeb, Neil and George - have benefited tremendously by their connections through their father."

Currying favor with a relative of the president can "start to smell bad," said Steven Weiss, communications director for the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics.

Rex John, who has known Neil Bush since his Denver days, said he has never known Neil Bush to use his family connections to obtain business opportunities.

"I'm sure it has opened many doors for him, but it wasn't Neil out there trying to get them open," John said. "Neil would never do anything like that. That's not his style."

After Neil Bush severed his 23-year marriage to Sharon in May, he proposed last month in France to Maria Andrews, a former volunteer for former first lady Barbara Bush.

Sharon Bush's lawyer in the defamation case, David Berg, allowed the AP to review the deposition but said he did not have a copy of Sharon Bush's testimony. He would not make her available for an interview.

Sharon Bush, 51, alleged her ex-husband could have fathered Andrews' 3-year-old son. That prompted Andrews' former husband to file a defamation lawsuit against Sharon Bush. Neil Bush submitted a tissue sample for analysis.

In the meantime, he has been ordered to pay $1,500 a month in child support for two of his children, Pierce, 17 and Ashley, 14. The couple's oldest child, Lauren, is 19.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/embarras...ivorce-papers/

The Bush dynasty moving to get behind Cruz is a very disturbing sign.

W