House of Bush, House of Saud

Excerpted at Salon.com today are two sections from Craig Unger’s forthcoming book, House of Bush, House of Saud.. Another follows there next week. Non-subscribers can sign in for a free day and read those selections.

Some of you may also have read Walter Karp’s classic, Indispensable Enemies, The Politics of Misrule in America (1973), detailing the corruption of the American Party System over what was then more than a century and a half.

Of course, the Parties are only one part of the American Empire which includes the Judicial System now deciding elections and making law more than ever, the Congress with its battalions of lobbyists representing the various monied interests of the Corporate State, where incumbency is now the rule, and the Administrative State itself, including the huge bureaucracies encompassing the Military, Regulatory of every kind (including creating money), Welfare (in the broadest entitlement sense), and Schooling (having little to do with real education or knowledge). This whole Federal apparat is, naturally, duplicated at the State level, as well as in counties and cities.

What Unger’s book does is offer some insight into the way the Corporate State can help to create dynasties. Whether GeoII/43 wins or loses in 2004, probably Jeb Bush will be the Familia’s presidential candidate in 2008. Momma Bush and others always anticipated he would lead the way, but things turned out a bit differently. If Kerry loses in 2004, the House of Clinton, on the other side in the “indispensable enemies” game, will come forward with the junior Senator from New York. It is getting to be a bit like the dynastic fight in England in the first part of the 18th century. The financial shenanigans of the House of Bush make Cheney/KBR look like the minor leaguers they are in the larger scheme of things in the Empire, now the subject of a whole plethora of books.

It is also interesting to note, not in this book, however, that a considerable portion of the Neocons responsible for the major policies of GeoII/43, were in 2000 recommended to the new President by his brother, Jeb (remember, George was acknowledging he knew little of foreign policy). This writer hopes to cover that as well as the elections of 2000 and 2004 in the forthcoming (2005) 4th edition of A History of Florida.