I am going to ask my day-job boss if I an go to this totally awesome seminar, but if he turns me down, would you consider making a generous donation to my Tip Jar?
I mean, check it out: Zig Ziglar, Terry Bradshaw, Bob Schuller, Rudy G, and our 43rd President, all under one Big Top, to boost my productivity and improve my business skills! I am so all over this like a cheap suit.
Ya gotta love the ethnic diversity in that line-up, doncha?
For those who've forgotten, let's review this stellar resume:
Arbusto, an oil exploration company, lost money, but it got considerable investments (nearly $5 million) because even losing oil investments were useful as tax shelters.
Spectrum 7 Energy Corp. bought out Arbusto in 1984 and hired Mr. Bush to run the company's oil interests in Midland, Texas. The oil business collapsed as oil prices plummeted by 1986, and Spectrum 7 Energy was near failure.
Harken Energy acquired Mr. Bush's Spectrum 7 Energy shares, and he got Harken shares, a directorship, and a consulting arrangement in return. Harken, under Bush, brought in Saudi real estate tycoon Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh as a board member and a major investor. Over the next few years, Harken would turn out to have links to: Saudi money, CIA-connected Filipinos, the Harvard Endowment, the emir of Bahrain, and the shadowy Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
A 1991 internal SEC document suggested George W. Bush violated federal securities law at least 4 times in the late 1980s and early 1990s in selling Harken stock while serving as a director of Harken. This is essentially the same kind of activity that Martha Stewart is going to prison over. Except at the time of the investigation, Mr. Bush's father was president and the case was quietly dropped.
And let's not forget this example of savvy corporate awesomeness:
The privately held company, called Caterair International Inc., was created in 1989 when Marriott Corp. spun off its airline catering business to investors organized by the Washington investment bank the Carlyle Group. If you haven't heard of it, Carlyle is a sleek financial operation that does its deals with help from a roster of former government big shots such as former defense secretary Frank Carlucci, former secretary of state James A. Baker III and even former president George Herbert Walker Bush. As of 2001, a newspaper article pegged Carlyle's value at about $12 billion.
The Caterair deal was a piece of financial engineering known at the time as a "leveraged buyout." It was financed mostly by high-yielding "junk bonds," of the sort pioneered in the 1980s by Michael Milken, who later served jail time for his financial shenanigans.
Carlyle and its investors paid about $570 million for Marriott's In-Flite Services division, which the hotel wanted to sell so it could concentrate on its core business. The investor group was headed by Frederick V. Malek, a Carlyle senior adviser who had served as director of the 1988 Republican convention -- the one that nominated Vice President George H. W. Bush.
Malek resigned in September 1988 as a high-level adviser in the elder Bush's campaign after disclosure that in 1971, at the insistence of his boss, President Nixon, he had compiled a list of Jews at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who, Nixon suspected, were part of "Jewish cabal" that was distorting his economic achievements. Several on the list were later transferred to different jobs, but Malek said he had no role in personnel decisions and denied he had willingly engaged in anti-Semitic conduct, arguing that he had been coerced by Nixon's repeated requests. The Malek flap didn't hurt his friend the vice president, who was elected as the nation's 41st president in November 1988.
It was Malek who suggested that George W. Bush join the Caterair board in 1990, according to a 1991 article in the New York Times. "I thought George W. Bush could make a contribution to Caterair," the Times quoted Malek as saying. "He would be on the board even if his father weren't President."
A March 2001 profile of Carlyle in the Times noted that the investment bank "gave the Bush family a hand in 1990 by putting George W. Bush, who was then struggling to find a career, on the board of a Carlyle subsidiary, Caterair, an airline-catering company."
Bush remained on the Caterair board until May 1994, according to a Sept. 17, 1994, article in the Dallas Morning News. He said he resigned so he could concentrate on his campaign for governor of Texas. The paper reported that Bush had previously disclosed that he owned between 1,000 and 4,000 shares of "stock appreciation rights." What intrigued the Dallas newspaper was that Bush had dropped the Caterair connection from his official campaign resume in August 1994.
At that time, Caterair was staggering under its huge debt load, and because of unforeseen changes in the airline catering business. The Dallas paper noted at the time that in SEC filings, Caterair had disclosed $263 million in operating losses and writeoffs since its 1989 founding.
Now, believe it or not, I am not going to flame 43 too excessively for leveraging the power of his name to earn a few shekels on the motivational speakers circuit. Bill Clinton worked a few of these kinds of gigs earlier in the decade, though I believe he was hanging with the Tony Robbins-Marianne Williamson crowd rather than the Ziglar-Schuller cabal. But honestly, after the last eight years, who in their right mind would be so fucking stupid to plunk down any money, or invest any time, to listen to President Mission Accomplished prescribe his proven formulas for success and prosperity?
Whatever you do, when you make a donation to my Tip Jar, do it on a credit card that's already maxed out. Then simply don't pay it back when the bank statement comes. Our 43rd President wouldn't have it any other way.
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