John Edwards--Malpractice attorney

I must be an idiot. The link worked fine, but I could not find the story in all those featured. could you quote it here possibly? Thank you.

I don't think I can in good faith vote for this pair.

Ok, maybe I am really dense but what is wrong with being a malpractice attorney?

This article is part of an extended series The Charlotte Observer did on Edwards back in 2003 (and is the article quoted briefly in the CNSN article above). It's no surprise that an obviously conservative news outlet like CNSN would publish such a negative, biased article about him.

(http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlot.../john_edwards/)

Soaring success, crushing loss

ANNA GRIFFIN

The Charlotte Observer | August 19, 2003

As far as friends and family recall, the boy known as Johnny Edwards never talked about politics.
That's not to say he lacked a plan for life. At 11, he titled a school paper "Why I Want to Be a Lawyer."
"Probably the most important reason I want to be a lawyer is to help protect innocent people from blind justice the best I can," he wrote in schoolboy cursive. The essay mangled the law's imagery - justice is supposed to be blind to distinctions such as wealth or race - but showed an early passion.
Edwards grew up to be one of the nation's best personal injury lawyers. His legal career gave him everything he had dreamed of as a boy in Robbins. It also provided solace during the most painful period of his life.
Now a man of 50, Edwards wants to be president.
He considers his legal career a public service and fine preparation for the Oval Office. His critics disagree on both counts.
Though he would make his name doing the opposite, Edwards began his career in 1978 defending big businesses in Nashville, Tenn.
He learned the basics of the law - taking depositions, sorting evidence, crafting briefs - but rarely saw the inside of a courtroom.
"I enjoyed what I did, but it was more a professional enjoyment," he said. "There was something missing."
Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth Anania, decided to move back to North Carolina in 1981. Son Wade was a toddler. A daughter, Cate, was on the way.
Everyone he interviewed with in Raleigh came away impressed, sometimes too much so. Bob Clay's partners liked Edwards but did not offer him a job.
"Some of the guys, especially the younger ones, thought he was going to be a very aggressive lawyer who wanted to move up rapidly, maybe too rapidly for their taste," Clay said.
A few lawyers at Tharrington, Smith & Hargrove had similar fears, but the partners still offered him the chance to kick-start their civil litigation division. Edwards also received an offer from the much larger Hunton & Williams, doing the same kind of lucrative work as in Tennessee.
It was a tough choice, the type that defines a career. At Tharrington Smith, he was not guaranteed as much money but thought he would have more fun. At Hunton & Williams, he might be bored, but he would certainly get rich.
"I told him he had to choose. He couldn't have both," said friend David Kirby. "Shows you what I know. Never, ever underestimate that man."
*
An enduring blueprint
At Tharrington Smith, Edwards, not yet 30, led a team of young lawyers in malpractice and negligence cases.
Their blueprint for success was the same then as it would be 15 years later, when Lawyers Weekly declared Edwards and partner Kirby among America's best attorneys: Learn everything about the medicine and science behind a case. Hire doctors and nurses to talk about how painful wounds could be, economists to calculate what a life is worth.
Then step aside and let John Edwards work.
Edwards grew up in a small town where kids spoke as easily to the bank president as the school janitor. He felt instant comfort in front of a jury.
"These people were my family, my neighbors," he said. "I knew them."
He made sure they felt comfortable with him. In court Edwards was a double-barreled shotgun: He knew the science of cases inside and out, better than some doctors. And he could communicate the facts - the facts his side deemed important - in simple, digestible terms. Court transcripts from his cases come dotted with self-effacing asides and few big words: "Does this make sense?" he would ask, looking jurors straight in the eye. "Am I going too fast?"
His team's first major win came in the case of a 58-year-old alcoholic whose doctor prescribed three times the recommended amount of the drug Antabuse. The patient overdosed, suffering permanent brain damage.
The judge seemed skeptical from the outset. When Edwards and a co-counsel refused a $350,000 settlement, the judge accused them of ignoring their client's best interests. He told them Buncombe County jurors - mountain jurors - would not side with an alcoholic.
Most lawyers would likely have steered clear of his client's addiction, but Edwards did not downplay the man's mistakes. Those failings, he figured, made the man seem human.
They wound up getting a $3.7 million settlement.
Soon, seven-figure awards became common: A Greenville, N.C., girl born with brain damage got $6.5 million. The widow of a Guilford County man whose X-rays showing fatal lung cancer were misplaced, and ignored, received $3.25 million.
Like many personal-injury lawyers, Edwards typically took a third or more of the winnings.
"He earned every penny," said client Billy Joe Johnson. His family received $2.9 million in settlements after an ambulance driver ran a stoplight, killing his wife. "He worked hard, and he got me some justice. I don't begrudge him one cent."
*
Played hard but fair
When critics complain about Edwards' legal career they do not, by and large, question his professional ethics. In 20 years of practicing law, he was never cited for ethical violations in North Carolina or Tennessee.
Lawyers who worked against Edwards knew he would research his cases until the last possible moment, never hesitating to introduce new evidence. They believe that his jury picks tended to skew female. They describe him as a master of righteous indignation during cross-examinations, those thick eyebrows dropping to the bridge of his nose and his questions taking an icy tone.
Attorneys who opposed him frequently say they did not always like Edwards but did trust him.
"I never felt like John played unfairly," said Asheville lawyer Mark Kurdys. "I never felt like I had to watch him."
The biggest complaint critics make about Edwards' legal career is that he made his millions in a profession many Americans find distasteful and even damaging to the nation's health-care system.
"He's a highly skilled, well-prepared motivational speaker," said David Bruton, a member of former Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt's cabinet and a Moore County pediatrician. Edwards sued Bruton's partner and his practice on behalf a baby born with brain damage. "He's a skilled user of a very flawed system."
Edwards did not enter law school planning to be a personal-injury lawyer. In that childhood essay, which his parents showed reporters but his campaign would not allow to be copied, he sounds more like a future defense attorney.
"I think of a lawyer as being like a doctor," he wrote. "They both give advice and save lives."
Today, some of the doctors he sued complain that Edwards' approach ignored fundamental facts about their work. He often depicted cases as battles between right and wrong. But medical decisions, doctors say, are complicated and drenched in subtlety.
"Every parent expects an IQ of 140 and a Harvard Law graduate," said Dr. Lorne Hall. "When something less than that happens, they feel they have a legitimate case."
Edwards sued Hall, a Raleigh obstetrician, on behalf of a baby girl who developed cerebral palsy due to a lack of oxygen in the womb. Hall agreed to a confidential settlement just before the trial was to begin.
"He was very polished, very polite, dressed to the T's, smiling at the ladies," Hall said of Edwards. "He would have had a jury with him. That's his business. He knows how to pick cases, and he knows the ones he can win."
Asheville's Dr. Peter Gentling opted for early retirement soon after facing Edwards in court.
In 1992, Gentling treated a woman with a family history of breast cancer. Years earlier, he had removed a cancerous lump from the woman's left breast. A new needle aspiration showed the possibility of a malignancy in her right breast.
Gentling, in practice since 1969, removed both breasts without waiting for a biopsy. He found no cancer.
An arbitrator ordered him to pay Edwards' client $850,000.
"The lawyers and the insurance companies have taken over," Gentling said of his decision to retire early. "John Edwards was part of that."
*
Building the good life
During the 1980s and early '90s, Edwards was a legend in the courtroom and a normal suburban soccer dad at home.
He made partner at Tharrington Smith, usually a five-year process, after two. He joined the Inner Circle of Advocates, open to personal-injury lawyers who have completed at least 50 trials and won at least one $1 million verdict, at 37.
During a case, Edwards would stop sleeping, chain drink Diet Cokes and lose up to 20 pounds. His easy athlete's stroll became a stiff march. He worked 14-, 16-, 18-hour days for weeks at a stretch.
Edwards sometimes got so involved in his work that he seemed to neglect a few of life's basic responsibilities: He voted half the time and on many occasions failed to pay his property taxes on time. He's lost his wedding ring several times, to the point that his wife finally visited a jewelry store and bought every size nine men's band in stock.
In 1992, Edward left Tharrington Smith to start a firm specializing in personal-injury work with friend David Kirby.
"John wanted to be lean and profitable," said former boss J. Harold Tharrington.
The new law firm reflected that attitude: Edwards and Kirby would spend $250,000 preparing a case, hiring experts and staging mock trials. Yet they rented space on the outskirts of Raleigh rather than a skyscraper suite downtown and kept just two other lawyers and three nurses on staff. Kirby says Edwards owned two courtroom suits - one blue, one brown - and got antsy splurging on $150 sneakers.
By his early 40s, Edwards had built a small fortune and a life of remarkable fulfillment.
He ran daily, chatting all the way if he could rope someone else along. He coached Wade's soccer and basketball teams and took Cate to Indian Princesses. His kids attended public schools but aspired to Ivy League colleges. He had good seats at University of North Carolina basketball games, a big house in Raleigh and another on exclusive Figure Eight Island. He was still married to his law school sweetheart.
"John did not have one iota of doubt, not one iota of insecurity," Kirby said. "Everything he touched turned to gold."
Then came April 4, 1996, and a random gust of wind.
*
A son gone in a moment
Wade Edwards was a boy taking long strides toward manhood when he died, a lanky 16-year-old still willing to hug his parents in public and slowly growing out of an endearing shyness.
Yet the boy's impact on his family, his father especially, far outpaced his age. Wade taught his parents to use a computer. He urged them to attend church regularly. He badgered his dad about seeking public office.
In the summer of 1995, Wade pulled an altitude-sick Edwards up Mount Kilimanjaro, taking his arm and leading him to the summit when his headlamp died. In March 1996, Wade was named finalist in a national patriotic essay contest and took his parents to the White House. They met Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Wade spent an hour talking to U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms. He won the trip for an essay about going to vote with his father as a boy.
Three weeks later, Wade was beach-bound in his 1995 Jeep Cherokee when a freak crosswind shoved him off the road. The vehicle flipped, rolled twice and came to rest upside down and aflame.
Wade was sober, driving at a safe speed and wearing his seat belt, according to accident reports.
A highway patrolman delivered the news of his death. Friends who gathered at the house that night found Edwards standing in the driveway. Usually so comfortable in his own body, he paced, shoulders slumped and hands stuffed in his pockets.
Their home fell silent, robbed of teenage good cheer. Cate, 14, had shared the second floor with her brother. Now she began sleeping downstairs near her parents, making a bed out of two armchairs and an ottoman.
Elizabeth quit her job and, after years of holding tight to her maiden name, legally became Mrs. Edwards. She soon started hormone shots in hopes of having more children.
Edwards left work - colleagues thought he might never return - and cocooned himself in grief, emerging reluctantly when friends began showing up on his doorstep with sneakers in hand. They took turns coaxing him out for silent sunset runs along trails he had never seen before.
Wade's room stayed as he left it, an unintended shrine complete with clean clothes on a chair and a book open to the page he'd been reading. His family seemed incapable of doing enough to memorialize him, planting trees at his elementary school and building a learning lab by his high school. They created a nonprofit in his name and hired sculptors to craft monuments at his school and his grave.
The rolling green hills of Raleigh's Oakwood Cemetery host the resting places of governors, U.S. senators and 2,800 Confederate war dead. Few match Wade's for size or impact.
Edwards and his wife originally went to sculptor Robert Mihaly certain only that they wanted the image of an angel at the gravesite, which both visited daily for months after the accident. Mihaly, former artist at the National Cathedral in Washington, came up with a 10-foot-tall marble angel. She rises toward the heavens, cradling a boy in her arms.
The child has Wade's face.
*
Back to work after 6 months
Edwards returned to work six months after his son's death. He was already talking to friends about changing careers, but he had two big cases to finish.
Valerie Lakey, then 5, lost most of her intestines in June 1993 when she sat on top of an improperly installed pool drain near her family's Cary home.
On behalf of her parents, Edwards and Kirby sued the maker of the drain cover, Sta-Rite Inc.
Sta-Rite began stamping warnings on its covers in 1987, but did not tell owners that older devices might be dangerous if installed incorrectly.
In his closing argument, Edwards wrote the names of Valerie and a dozen other children hurt in similar accidents on a blackboard. He drew a blank line next to them and wondered aloud, "What name will be written here?"
At the end of his presentation, Edwards asked jurors if they had seen a recent newspaper editorial detailing the death of a teenage boy in a car wreck. The piece was about Wade, but Edwards didn't mention that. He didn't need to.
"Their loss is our loss; their child is our child," he recited, tears welling in his eyes and his baritone becoming a whisper. "The responsibility we have toward our children That is an awesome responsibility."
The moment was pure John Edwards, highly personal and highly effective. Jurors gave Valerie and her parents $25 million, the largest personal-injury award in N.C. history.
A few months later, Edwards set another record in the case of Christopher and Ashea Griffin, a Union County chicken farmer and his 19-year-old wife. Their daughter, Bailey, was born with brain damage at a Charlotte hospital.
The Griffins sued for malpractice, alleging that doctors responded too slowly to problems in labor. The jury awarded them $23 million, then the largest medical malpractice verdict ever in North Carolina.
Six years later, tort-reform advocates point to the Griffin verdict as exhibit A in their case for caps on malpractice claims. The jury's award was based on the assumption - made by experts hired by Edwards - that Bailey would live for decades. Instead, she died three years later.
Edwards says the Griffins deserved what they got. He says he does not regret anything about his former career. He says he remembers every case he tried and is proud of what he did for a living.
"I could have stayed in the law and been very happy," he said recently. "I could see the effect I was having on people's lives. I could see I was helping."
Yet by the time he entered the courtroom for Bailey Griffin, Edwards was ready for a new challenge. In a sense, her young parents became one of his first political focus groups.
During lunch breaks in their trial, Edwards and the Griffins would go to Green's Lunch in downtown Charlotte. Over his usual - a salad with ranch dressing and pink lemonade, the Griffins say - Edwards talked legal strategy, asked after Bailey and occasionally delved into his nascent political platform.
"He said, `I've done it all. I need something new,' " Ashea Griffin said. "He told us this was his last case. He told us he was running for the U.S. Senate. There wasn't really any hesitation. He'd made up his mind. He was doing it."
*

"Most cases of cerebral palsy are not due to asphyxia,"

The above statement may be true.
I have a friend who was born healthy more than 50 years ago. The day after she was born her mother tells us, "I had been nursing her. Suddenly she stopped breathing and turned blue. I yelled for the nurse. I could tell she was trying to cry.
The nurse held her upside down, stuck two fingers down her throat, and pulled out a long stringy thing. The doctor later told me it was dried mucus.
After that she was stiff and her little knees no longer bent. They stayed extended and crossed. Her hands that had held my finger became splayed."

My friend had surgery as an older child for this 'scissoring' of her spastic legs. I believe her now 85 year old mother that she was normal for her first day.
Is it common? I don't know. BUT my friend and I believe her CP was caused by asphyxic anoxia.

There was no thought of a lawsuit. I am committed to safe staffing so there is a nurse available immediately. She moved to Canada so she can work and still qualify for medicare. She pays taxes there too.

In the interest of fairness... May I present this...

http://www.bushwatch.com/bushmoney.htm

BUSH WATCH... BUSH MONEY
"[Texas] Observer readers are familiar with much of the ground [Charles] Lewis covers in The Buying of the President 2000 [Avon Press], including accounts of how he:

made $15 million off the Texas Rangers deal with the help of $135 million in corporate welfare from Arlington taxpayers;
took $4.5 million from the business interests clamoring for "tort reform" and rewarded them with laws that make it harder to sue irresponsible businesses; and
invited oil industry executives to develop a do-nothing public relations response to the "grandfathered" air pollution problem in Texas.

The Observer has not yet covered the University of Texas Investment Management Company (UTIMCO) scandal, in which huge sums of money flow back and forth between Bush and his top donors. Tom Hicks (of the Dallas corporate takeover firm Hicks Muse Tate & Furst) made Bush a millionaire fifteen times over by buying the Texas Rangers. Hicks and his brother Steven contributed $146,000 to Bush's gubernatorial campaigns; Steven is a Bush fundraising "Pioneer," who has raised at least $100,000 for Bush's presidential race. Tom Hicks long urged U.T. to move part of its $13 billion endowment into riskier investments. In 1990, for example, he tried to get it to invest in his takeover of Healthco, a dental supply company that went bankrupt three years later. In 1995, the Texas Senate confirmed Tom Hicks as a U.T. regent, just as Bush was moving into the Governor's Mansion. Hicks hired lobbyists to push a bill -- signed into law by Bush -- that created UTIMCO. With Hicks as its first chair, UTIMCO began to dole out lucrative contracts to private investment firms to manage portions of the endowment. Many of these firms had ties to Hicks and Bush:

"The Carlyle Group. The elder George Bush reportedly has an equity stake in this firm, which is run by leading members of his presidential administration.
Maverick Capital Fund. Its investors include Bush Pioneer Charles Wyly and his brother Sam, who gave $210,273 to Bush's gubernatorial campaigns.
Bass Brothers Enterprises. Bass family interests funneled $215,000 to Bush and financed a Bahraini drilling contract won by a small oil exploration company where Bush served as a director.
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. This corporate buyout firm would soon join Hicks, Muse in a $1.5 billion takeover of Regal Cinemas.
Evercore Partners. Evercore joined Hicks, Muse in a $900 million buyout of television stations soon after its UTIMCO deal.
American Securities Partners. The company won a UTIMCO contract soon after selling eleven radio stations to Hicks, Muse."

The Bush-Bin Laden Money Connection

"Former President George Bush met with King Fahd, right, on a trip to Saudi Arabia last year as part of his work for the Carlyle Group." (NYT, 3/5/01)

A Second Bush Oil Deal To Come With Murky Ties To Saudi Financiers And Osama Bin Laden
"On September 24, President George W. Bush appeared at a press conference in the White House Rose Garden to announce a crackdown on the financial networks of terrorists and those who support them. “U.S. banks that have assets of these groups or individuals must freeze their accounts,” Bush declared. “And U.S. citizens or businesses are prohibited from doing business with them.”

"But the president, who is now enjoying an astounding 92 percent approval rating, hasn’t always practiced what he is now preaching: Bush’s own businesses were once tied to financial figures in Saudi Arabia who currently support bin Laden.

"In 1979, Bush’s first business, Arbusto Energy, obtained financing from James Bath, a Houstonian and close family friend. One of many investors, Bath gave Bush $50,000 for a 5 percent stake in Arbusto. At the time, Bath was the sole U.S. business representative for Salem bin Laden, head of the wealthy Saudi Arabian family and a brother (one of 17) to Osama bin Laden. It has long been suspected, but never proven, that the Arbusto money came directly from Salem bin Laden. In a statement issued shortly after the September 11 attacks, the White House vehemently denied the connection, insisting that Bath invested his own money, not Salem bin Laden’s, in Arbusto.

"In conflicting statements, Bush at first denied ever knowing Bath, then acknowledged his stake in Arbusto and that he was aware Bath represented Saudi interests. In fact, Bath has extensive ties, both to the bin Laden family and major players in the scandal-ridden Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) who have gone on to fund Osama bin Laden. BCCI defrauded depositors of $10 billion in the ’80s in what has been called the “largest bank fraud in world financial history” by former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. During the ’80s, BCCI also acted as a main conduit for laundering money intended for clandestine CIA activities, ranging from financial support to the Afghan mujahedin to paying intermediaries in the Iran-Contra affair.

"When Salem bin Laden died in 1988, powerful Saudi Arabian banker and BCCI principal Khalid bin Mahfouz inherited his interests in Houston. Bath ran a business for bin Mahfouz in Houston and joined a partnership with bin Mahfouz and Gaith Pharaon, BCCI’s frontman in Houston’s Main Bank.

"The Arbusto deal wasn’t the last time Bush looked to highly questionable sources to invest in his oil dealings. After several incarnations, Arbusto emerged in 1986 as Harken Energy Corporation. When Harken ran into trouble a year later, Saudi Sheik Abdullah Taha Bakhsh purchased a 17.6 percent stake in the company. Bakhsh was a business partner with Pharaon in Saudi Arabia; his banker there just happened to be bin Mahfouz.

"Though Bush told the Wall Street Journal he had “no idea” BCCI was involved in Harken’s financial dealings, the network of connections between Bush and BCCI is so extensive that the Journal concluded their investigation of the matter in 1991 by stating: “The number of BCCI-connected people who had dealings with Harken—all since George W. Bush came on board—raises the question of whether they mask an effort to cozy up to a presidential son.” Or even the president: Bath finally came under investigation by the FBI in 1992 for his Saudi business relationships, accused of funneling Saudi money through Houston in order to influence the foreign policies of the Reagan and first Bush administrations.

"Worst of all, bin Mahfouz allegedly has been financing the bin Laden terrorist network—making Bush a U.S. citizen who has done business with those who finance and support terrorists. According to USA Today, bin Mahfouz and other Saudis attempted to transfer $3 million to various bin Laden front operations in Saudi Arabia in 1999. ABC News reported the same year that Saudi officials stopped bin Mahfouz from contributing money directly to bin Laden. (Bin Mahfouz’s sister is also a wife of Osama bin Laden, a fact that former CIA Director James Woolsey revealed in 1998 Senate testimony.)

"When President Bush announced he is hot on the trail of the money used over the years to finance terrorism, he must realize that trail ultimately leads not only to Saudi Arabia, but to some of the same financiers who originally helped propel him into the oil business and later the White House. The ties between bin Laden and the White House may be much closer than he is willing to acknowledge." --Wayne Madsen, 10/22/01

Wayne Madsen, an investigative journalist based in Washington, is the author of Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999.

Part One: "Hike in US defence spending to benefit Osama's family": Bin Laden-Bush business connection seen through Carlyle Group
"If the United States boosts defence spending in its quest to stop Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden's alleged terrorist activities, his family may be the unexpected beneficiary of that, media reports said. "Among its far-flung business interests, the well-heeled Saudi Arabian clan, which says it is estranged from Laden, is an investor in a fund established by Carlyle Group, a well-connected Washington merchant bank specialising in buyouts of defence and aerospace companies," The Wall Street Journal said in an investigative dispatch. It said "through this investment and its ties to Saudi royalty, the bin Laden family has become acquainted with some of the biggest names in the Republican Party." "In recent years, former president George H W Bush, ex-secretary of state James Baker and ex-secretary of defence Frank Carlucci have made the pilgrimage to the bin Laden family's headquarters in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia). "Ex-president Bush makes speeches on behalf of Carlyle Group and is senior adviser to its Asian Partners Fund, while Baker is its senior counsellor and Carlucci is the group's chairman," the journal said." --Hindustani Times, 9/28/01

Part Two : Inside The Carlyle Group

With former US Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci as its chairman, it's no surprise that The Carlyle Group is drawn to defense. Defense and aerospace firms such as United Defense Industries make up a significant share of the world's largest private equity firm's portfolio. Also represented are information technology (Federal Data), health care, real estate, and bottling companies. Since Carlucci joined in 1989, a host of staffers from the Reagan and first Bush administrations have stinted at the company, including ex-Secretary of State James Baker and ex-budget chief Richard Darman. Former President Bush and former UK Prime Minister John Major have also made appearances. --Hoovers Online

...Traveling with the fanfare of dignitaries, Mr. Bush and Mr. Baker [use] their extensive government contacts to further their business interests as representatives of the Carlyle Group, a $12 billion private equity firm based in Washington that has parlayed a roster of former top-level government officials, largely from the Bush and Reagan administrations, into a moneymaking machine. In a new spin on Washington's revolving door between business and government, where lobbying by former officials is restricted but soliciting investments is not, Carlyle has upped the ante and taken the practice global. Mr. Bush and Mr. Baker were accompanied on their trips by former Prime Minister John Major of Britain, another of Carlyle's political stars. With door-openers of this caliber, along with shrewd investment skills, Carlyle has gone from an unknown in the world of private equity to one of its biggest players. Private equity, which involves buying up companies in private deals and reselling them, is a high-end business open only to the very rich. Over the last decade, the Carlyle empire has grown to span three continents and include investments in most corners of the world. It owns so many companies that it is now in effect one of the nation's biggest defense contractors and a force in global telecommunications. Its blue-chip investors include major banks and insurance companies, billion-dollar pension funds and wealthy investors from Abu Dhabi to Singapore. In getting business for Carlyle, Mr. Bush has been impressive. His meeting with the crown prince was followed by a yacht cruise and private dinners with Saudi businessmen. And Mr. Bush led Carlyle's successful entry into South Korea, the fastest-growing economy in Asia. After his meetings with the prime minister and other government and business leaders, Carlyle won a tough competition for control of KorAm, one of Korea's few healthy banks. The steady flow of politicians to lucrative private-sector jobs based on their government contacts is a familiar Washington tale. But in this case, it is being played out for more dollars, on a global stage, and in the world of private finance, where the minimal government rules prohibiting lobbying by former officials for a given period are not a factor. These rules say nothing about potential conflicts when former government officials use their connections and insights for financial gain, and they may attract more notice now that George W. Bush is president. Many of those involved with Carlyle, which invests largely in companies that do business with the government or are affected by government regulations, have ties to the Oval Office.

For instance, Frank C. Carlucci, a Reagan secretary of defense who as much as anyone is responsible for Carlyle's success, said he met in February with his old college classmate Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, and Vice President Dick Cheney, himself a defense secretary under former President Bush, to talk about military matters — at a time when Carlyle has several billion-dollar defense projects under consideration.... "Carlyle is as deeply wired into the current administration as they can possibly be," said Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit public interest group based in Washington. "George Bush is getting money from private interests that have business before the government, while his son is president. And, in a really peculiar way, George W. Bush could, some day, benefit financially from his own administration's decisions, through his father's investments. The average American doesn't know that and, to me, that's a jaw-dropper."

It is difficult to determine exactly how much money the senior Mr. Bush and Mr. Baker have made. Mr. Baker is a Carlyle partner, and Mr. Bush has the title senior adviser to its Asian activities. With a current market value of about $3.5 billion on Carlyle's equity and with the firm owned by 18 partners and one outside investor, Mr. Baker's Carlyle stake would be worth about $180 million if each partner held an equal stake. It is not known whether he has more or less than the other partners. Unlike Mr. Baker, Mr. Bush has no ownership stake in Carlyle; he is an adviser and an investor and is compensated by obtaining stakes in Carlyle investments. Carlyle executives cited, for example, Mr. Bush's being allowed to put money he earns giving speeches for Carlyle into its investment funds. Mr. Bush generally receives $80,000 to $100,000 for a speech. He sits on no corporate boards other than Carlyle's. Carlyle also 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....

With $12 billion from investors, Carlyle claims to be the nation's largest private equity fund and makes money by investing in undervalued companies and reselling at a profit.... The California state pension fund invested $305 million with Carlyle, and the Texas teachers pension fund — whose board was appointed when George W. Bush was governor — gave Carlyle $100 million to invest in November. Carlyle also works as a financial adviser to the Saudi government....Carlyle has done well for its investors, returning an average of 34 percent a year over the last decade, in line with other private equity funds. It has done this by buying what it knows best — companies that are regulated by the government. Nearly two-thirds of its investments are in defense and telecommunications companies, which are affected by shifts in government spending and policy. ...Carlyle has become the nation's 11th largest defense contractor, owning companies that make tanks, aircraft wings and a broad array of other military equipment. It also owns health care companies, real estate, Internet companies, a bottling company and even Le Figaro, the French newspaper.... And its access extends well beyond American shores. In Europe, Carlyle has assembled an advisory board that besides Mr. Major includes Karl Otto Pöhl, former president of German's Bundesbank, and the past or present chairmen of B.M.W., Hoffman-LaRoche, Nestlé, LVMH-Moët Hennessy, Louis Vuitton and Aerospatiale, the French Airbus partner. Carlyle's Asia advisory board, which helps raise money and finds and reviews deals, includes former President Fidel V. Ramos of the Philippines, the former prime minister of Thailand and the executive director of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. The former South Korean prime minister Park Tae Joon was also an adviser to Carlyle.... In an office adorned with photographs of Mr. Carlucci and the politically mighty — he sits beneath an Oval Office picture of himself and Mr. Reagan — Mr. Carlucci makes it clear that his extensive government and global ties are as fresh as ever. "I know Rumsfeld extremely well," Mr. Carlucci said in an interview. "We've been close friends throughout the years. We were college classmates."...NYT, 3/5/01
***
Part Three : Ex-Prez Bush's Financial Ties With Defense Contractors Leads To Call For Resignation

Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, reacted with disbelief to The Wall Street Journal report of yesterday that George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm. The senior Bush had met with the bin Laden family at least twice. (Other top Republicans are also associated with the Carlyle group, such as former Secretary of State James A. Baker.) The terrorist leader Osama bin Laden had supposedly been “disowned” by his family, which runs a multi-billion dollar business in Saudi Arabia and is a major investor in the senior Bush’s firm. Other reports have questioned, though, whether members of his Saudi family have truly cut off Osama bin Laden. Indeed, the Journal also reported yesterday that the FBI has subpoenaed the bin Laden family business’s bank records. Judicial Watch earlier this year had strongly criticized President Bush’s father’s association with the Carlyle Group, pointing out in a March 5 statement that it was a “conflict of interest (which) could cause problems for America’s foreign policy in Middle East and Asia.” Judicial Watch called for the senior Bush to resign from the firm then. “This conflict of interest has now turned into a scandal. The idea of the President’s father, an ex-president himself, doing business with a company under investigation by the FBI in the terror attacks of September 11 is horrible. President Bush should not ask, but demand, that his father pull out of the Carlyle Group,” stated Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel Larry Klayman.... --Judicial Watch, 9/28/01

Part Four : Why Did Bush Withdraw From Treaty Talks On Cleaning Up Money Laundering?
"Just a few weeks ago, the Bush administration -- another group well-watered by the murky flow of offshore capital -- announced its withdrawal from international treaty talks on cleaning up the money-laundering swamp. Why on earth did they oppose this strike against terrorism and organized crime? Let's ask Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank -- no "left-wing fifth columnist" he: "The answer is, it's in the interests of some of the monied interests to allow this to occur," he told The Nation in June. "It's not an accident; it could have been shut down at any time."

"And this week, the Bush administration finally reversed the long-standing conservative appeasement of wealthy murderers, at least in part, by freezing the financial assets of Bin Laden and his associates and threatening to, er, bar any foreign countries and banks from U.S. financial markets if they didn't cooperate with investigators. Of course, it took them 13 days to get around to blocking the cash flow of their "prime suspect" -- but maybe some of their comfortably entwined High Finance pals needed time to get untangled before the freeze. Oh well, better late than never, right?" --Chris Floyd, 9/28/01

Part Five : Daddy Bush's Campaign Manager (Nixon's "Jew-Counter") Has Carlyle Connections
"Fred Malek received his 15 minutes of fame in the 1970s as deputy director of CREEP (Committee to Re-elect the President), the Nixon White House operation behind Watergate. Unlike many of his former associates, Malek walked--but not out of Washington. After lying low for a time, he made his political comeback as a leader in the Republican Party in the late 1980s, only to resign as deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1988 when an ugly incident from his past came to light: At Nixon's behest, he had drawn up a list of Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where Nixon thought a "Jewish cabal" was out to get him. Nonetheless, Malek rebounded yet again in 1992 as campaign manager for the Bush/Quayle ticket. --MOJO.

A Continuation Of Part Two..."Can it be true that Bush and Major hire themselves out as props, without realizing what Carlyle deals they might be abetting? To schmooze without being aware of the end results? In any event, they did not have to explain their presence in Saudi Arabia, for both had been invited to speak at an economic forum in Jeddah. Bush and Major were also received by King Fahd. "But for part of the time they were just with us," says the Carlyle source. According to two sources familar with the mission, Carlyle executives were focusing on the telephone system deal. In 1998 the Saudi government announced it was privatizing the kingdom's phone service, and the Saudis have been seeking foreign investors. Several companies from around the world have expressed interest. SBC has been looking at this potential deal for about a year and brought in well-wired Carlyle as a partner.

"It might not trouble the (supposedly) unknowing Bush that he is aiding SBC, a Texas-based company run by executives who have contributed nearly $50,000 to George W. Bush's gubernatorial and presidential campaigns. Governor Bush's administration has also been supportive of SBC, which spends more on lobbying in Texas than any other corporation (at least $5 million in 1999). In December the Texas Public Utilities Commission, comprising three Bush appointees, approved SBC's highly controversial request to enter the long-distance market in that state. Critics of SBC complained that the company had not opened up the local market as it had promised, and after the PUC granted its OK, the Justice Department, citing SBC's anticompetitive ways, urged the Federal Communications Commission to reject the company's long-distance application. (By the way, SBC once donated $400,000 to a reading initiative promoted by Govenor Bush.)...

"It's pretty obvious," says one person with knowledge of the trip. "Carlyle wanted to open up doors, and they bring in Bush and Major, who saved the Saudis' *** in the Gulf War. If you got these guys coming in for SBC or any other company, those companies are going to have a pretty good chance." The Carlyle connection runs in the family. In 1990, a year after Carlyle acquired Caterair, a large airline-catering firm, Fred Malek, a longtime Bush associate [and elsewhere described as an advisor to Carlyle], helped place George W. on the board of Caterair. And this past fall the Bush campaign received a scare when one of its lead fundraisers, GOP lobbyist Wayne Berman, was implicated in a scandal involving Carlyle. On September 23 former Connecticut State Treasurer Paul Silvester pleaded guilty to federal racketeering charges regarding his handling of state pension funds. Berman pocketed about $1 million from Carlyle for helping the firm win $100 million in pension investments from Silvester. Shortly before Silvester left office in early 1999, Berman allegedly promised him a job while angling for another $50 million investment in a Carlyle fund. Berman then hired Silvester for a position in the consulting firm he operates with former Senator Alfonse D'Amato. After Berman's role in the affair became public, the Bush campaign announced that Berman, who had worked in the Bush Administration, was no longer fundraising for George W. Carlyle has been good to the Bushes. But if the Berman-Carlyle scandal spreads, it may draw more attention to the back-scratching, deal-making financial-political world in which the Bush family and their friends have flourished. That won't be good for the son of Carlyle's most famous meet-and-greeter." --David Corn, The Nation, 3/27/00

And this...

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION
Corporate Connections
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Charts: (See link below, it doesn't display properly when cut-n-pasted.)

President Bush's Cabinet
President Bush's Advisors
_______________________

Comedian Jon Stewart once joked that watching President George W. Bush pick his White House staff was like watching "the old band get back together." It’s true that many of Bush’s choices for his incoming cabinet and top White House posts come from former Republican administrations, going all the way back to Gerald Ford. But what’s notable about this administration is not only the bona fide government credentials that the staff sports—it’s also the corporate connections they bring into the White House.

George Bush, of course, is a Texas oilman, although not a very successful one. His company, Arbusto, merged with Spectrum 7 in 1984 as it was on the verge of bankruptcy. Spectrum was bought out by Harken Energy in 1986, giving Bush a seat on Harken’s board, some stock options and a $120,000 consulting contract. As the first president to have an MBA, Bush has surrounded himself with people with similar (and more successful) corporate backgrounds. Vice President Dick Cheney was, until last year, the CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil field services company. Halliburton, through its European subsidiaries, sold spare parts to Iraq’s oil industry, despite U.N. sanctions. The Bush administration is already considering whether or not it should alter the sanctions policy against Iraq, hinting that it might allow for more normalized trade with the country.

Of course, everyone knows that the U.S. oil industry has a secure foothold in the White House. But when he handed out cabinet posts and picked his top advisors, Bush left no industry out in the cold. From old school automobile manufacturers to fledgling biotech companies, just about every sector was covered. Below is a list of the corporations represented in the Bush White House. You won’t find every cabinet member or senior adviser listed here. Education Secretary Rod Paige, for example, was a school superintendent in Houston before coming to Washington. Senior adviser Karl Rove and counselor to the president, Karen Hughes, have political backgrounds. Environmental Protection Agency head Christine Todd Whitman, the former New Jersey governor, raised most of her campaign money within the state. But those on Bush’s staff who don’t have extensive corporate connections are the exception, not the rule:

http://www.opensecrets.org/bush/cabinet.asp

* Click on individuals' names for a complete list of their corporate connections. All trademarks in this chart are registered trademarks of their respective owners. The Center for Responsive Politics is in no way affiliated with any of the companies listed in this chart. This chart is not intended to convey that the listed companies in any way endorse the Center for Responsive Politics or its work.

Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics.

Let me spew out one more of dozens.....

from: http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CAV111A.html

The United States of Oil
No administration has ever been more in bed with the energy industry -- but does that mean Big Oil is calling Bush's shots?

by Damien Caveli


Salon.com, 19 November 2001

Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), Montréal, 21 November 2001



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The Bush administration's ties to oil and gas are as deep as an offshore well. President George W. Bush's family has been running oil companies since 1950. Vice President Dick Cheney spent the late '90s as CEO of Halliburton, the world's largest oil services company. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice sat on the board of Chevron, which graced a tanker with her name. Commerce Secretary Donald Evans was the CEO of Tom Brown Inc. -- a natural gas company with fields in Texas, Colorado and Wyoming -- for more than a decade.

The links don't end with personnel. The bin Laden family and other members of Saudi Arabia's oil-wealthy elite have contributed mightily to several Bush family ventures, even as the American energy industry helped put Bush in office. Of the top 10 lifetime contributors to George W.'s war chests, six either come from the oil business or have ties to it, according the Center for Public Integrity.

"There's no denying that this is an oil administration," says Peter Eisner, managing director of the nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog group that conducted the study of Bush's campaign finances. "You can't talk about the career of any George Bush -- father or son -- without talking about oil."

But talking is one thing; determining exactly how the ties to the oil industry affect domestic and foreign policy is another. How much influence does the oil industry have? Is the U.S. bombing Afghanistan in part because -- as antiwar critics have claimed -- the industry wants to clear a path for oil and gas pipelines? Will the Bush administration steadfastly avoid confrontation with Saudi Arabia -- home of 15 of the 19 suspected hijackers -- because it doesn't want to upset ExxonMobil and the other oil companies with a deep Saudi stake? Or, even more intriguingly, could the close ties between Bush and the Saudis lead to increased U.S. pressure on Israel to create a peace settlement?

Or is this too simplistic? Since at least World War II, the oil industry has often been forced by the U.S. government to serve foreign policy objectives, rather than the other way around. Presidents have generally accepted oil's economic significance, its role as the grease that makes capitalism go. But even the most conservative administrations have regularly emphasized geopolitical objectives -- Soviet containment, for example -- at the expense of oil industry interests. Aspects of Bush's energy plan suggest that even this administration will not break the give-and-take pattern.

The problem, however, is that this pattern, the so-called "cheap oil strategy" looks more and more like a failure. Foreign oil dependence has risen over the past decade while now -- with anti-American sentiment growing in the Arab world -- foreign oil supplies are looking increasingly insecure. More than ever, some kind of national policy pushing both conservation and the development of renewable energy resources seems eminently prudent, if not necessary.

And that's where the current makeup of the Bush administration becomes crucial -- not because Bush-Cheney and company plan to invade Iraq to make it safe for ExxonMobil, (although that's not totally beyond the bounds of possibility) but because these are the last men and women in the world to expect radical change from on questions related to energy. Their friends, finances, and worldviews are all oil-drenched.

George W.'s ties to oil don't prove that the industry decides our every foreign policy move. But they do just about guarantee, for all practical purposes, that nothing significant will change in American energy policy. With Bush-Cheney in power, oil addiction is here to stay.

It's a Bush family affair

The fusion of oil and politics is a Bush family tradition. For generations, the Bushes and their friends have been shuttling back and forth between energy industry boardrooms and Washington's hallowed halls.

Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, initiated the pattern. Shortly before winning a Connecticut Senate seat in 1952 he helped his son George raise $350,000 to start what would become Zapata Petroleum.

Sen. Bush also regularly looked out for the oil industry and his son's interests while in Washington. His biggest single favor, according to Herbert Parmet's book "George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee," came a year into his first Senate term, when he opposed legislation that would have federalized offshore resources -- including oil -- to raise money for education. In the name of states' rights and free enterprise, the bill's defeat helped both the oil companies and gave Zapata just what it needed to expand. In fact, soon after the legislation failed, Zapata moved into offshore drilling -- eventually one of Zapata's most lucrative ventures

George Bush made millions during the '50s and '60s Texas oil boom, and he also made many friends, most notably James Baker, who became Bush's company lawyer in 1963 after Zapata merged with Penn to become Pennzoil.

Bush later brought his friends to Washington, first as a representative in the House, then as head of the Republican National Committee and finally as vice president and president. He didn't stock his administration as full of oilmen and women as his son has, but like Prescott Bush, he didn't mind doing the industry's bidding either. His most public act for oil came in 1981. While serving as Ronald Reagan's vice president, he departed from the White House's official stance and visited Saudi Arabia to plead for an end to sliding prices. Bush argued that he was simply trying to protect American security interests by protecting domestic producers, who have higher costs than their Persian Gulf counterparts. But higher prices had another benefit: by protecting domestic oil jobs, they helped shore up support in Texas for what would eventually become his successful 1988 presidential campaign.

Higher prices also directly helped Bush's son, George W. Bush. George W.'s oil career started in 1978 -- 12 years after his father first entered Congress -- when several of his father's friends invested in his firm, Arbusto ("Bush" in Spanish). Unlike his father, George W. spent much of his oil career in the red. As Joe Conason pointed out in Harper's last year before the election, the company's original investors and others bailed out his firm at least three times. But after a final act of corporate CPR -- a merger with Harken Energy in 1986 -- Bush's connections to power really paid off. Two years after the merger, Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, a former director of Saudi Arabia's income tax department, purchased an 11 percent stake in Harken through his company Traco International. That same year, Harken won a contract for oil-drilling in Bahrain.

"Harken had no international experience at the time," says Eisner at the Center for Public Integrity, which published a detailed account of Bush's rise to power titled "The Buying of the President: 2000." "It was their first out of country contract."

Press reports at the time questioned Bahrain's motivations. Even the normally reserved Wall Street Journal reported in 1991 that the contract "raises the question of ... an effort to cozy up to a presidential son."

The Bush family countered that the contract was well deserved. Regardless, the deal in the Persian Gulf gave Bush a direct tie to the Saudi elite and set Bush on a suddenly successful path.

"It's not just the matter of a single contract," Eisner says. "It also has to do with converting Harken into a player that was then converted into a stake in the Texas Rangers and a run for governor. It's not incidental. The Bahrain deal is central to Bush's life."

Some experts suggest that it's not necessarily a bad thing to have a presidential family so steeped in oil knowledge, given the importance of oil to both national security and the domestic economy. But Bush has shown a pervasive willingness to let oil interests define energy and environmental policy. After accepting millions from the industry during his run for governor, he signed into law tax breaks for state energy producers, and in 1997, he gave them a hand in writing their own rules. Upon hearing that Texas' state environmental agency planned to end an exemption that allowed power plants built before 1971 to avoid complying with state pollution laws, Bush tapped two people to come up with an alternative plan: Vic Beghini, an executive with Marathon Oil Inc. and Ansel Condray, an executive with Mobil.

The plan they came up with initiated a voluntary pollution reduction program that didn't punish companies for noncompliance and thus essentially failed. A study by the Environmental Defense Fund published six months after Bush announced the program revealed that only three of the 26 companies had actually cut their emissions. Two years later, under increasing public pressure, Bush signed a bill forcing power plants to cut their emissions in half by 2003 -- but the essential exemption, as the industry wanted, still stands.

The Condoleezza Rice-Chevron-Central Asia connection

The politicos surrounding Bush also have enjoyed warm government/oil-industry connections. While Bush used his elected position to help friends in his former industry, Cheney employed past government connections to improve his own bottom line.

Iraq provides the most dramatic example. Cheney, intentionally or inadvertently, went against his own edicts in order to pad his company's profits. He told Sam Donaldson in August 2000 that, as the head of Halliburton, "I had a firm policy that I wouldn't do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal." And yet, as the Financial Times eventually proved, Cheney oversaw $23.8 million in sales to Iraq in 1998 and 1999. Cheney, who collected a $36 million salary before becoming vice president, essentially profited from the destruction of Iraq that he oversaw as secretary of defense during the Gulf War. And while the oil-rig and equipment sales were legal -- a 1998 U.N. resolution gave Iraq the right to rebuild its oil industry -- Cheney's firm sold through European subsidiaries "to avoid straining relations with Washington and jeopardizing their ties with President Saddam Hussein's government," according to a November 2000 Financial Times report.

Cheney also helped Halliburton obtain a windfall of U.S. government loans. He secured $1.5 billion in taxpayer-backed financing for Halliburton -- a massive increase over the $100 million loan it received during the five-year period before Cheney took over. And while Cheney has claimed that Halliburton's rise to power had nothing to do with his political stature, State Department documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times suggest that U.S. officials assisted Halliburton both in Asia and Africa. Even the domestic defense-contracting arm of Halliburton -- Brown & Root -- saw its fortune change drastically once Cheney took over. The company booked $1.2 billion in contracts between 1990 and 1995; with Cheney at the helm, contract awards spiked to $2.3 billion between 1995 and 2000.

Other Bush administration officials have also profited from past government experience and influence. Bush's father and his then Secretary of State James Baker -- the lawyer who fought for Bush during the Florida election fiasco -- work for the Carlyle Group, an investment firm that until recently collected investments from the bin Laden family and other members of the Saudi elite. Reagan's Secretary of State George Schultz sat on the board of Chevron before the arrival of Condoleezza Rice.

Rice joined the Chevron board in 1991, after serving for a year on Bush Sr.'s National Security Council. There, she earned a $35,000 annual retainer, $1,500 for every meeting she attended and stock options worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to SEC documents. She was reportedly hired for expertise in the former Soviet states, and long before U.S. planes started dropping bombs in nearby Afghanistan, she spent much of her time at Chevron working on prospective deals in the Caspian region. Chevron (with Mobil) already produces 70 percent of the oil coming out of the Tengiz oil field in Kazakhstan, according to Ahmed Rashid's book, "Taliban," and the company has been working hard to secure a pipeline that would allow more oil to be produced. In 1993, with Rice on the board, the company pulled together a pipeline project to carry oil to a Russian port on the Black Sea. Russian opposition eventually postponed the plan indefinitely but Chevron still holds a 45 percent stake in the project -- and given the present state of improved Russian-American relations, many suspect that project will eventually get off the ground.

The slowly improving relations between the U.S. and Iran could also help Chevron. When negotiations over pipelines from Tengiz broke down a few years ago, Chevron turned its focus toward the Islamic theocracy, asking the Clinton State Department for a "swapping" license. Approval would have allowed oil from Tengiz to be shipped across the Caspian to Iran while, in exchange, Chevron would be able to sell an equal amount of Iranian oil that would be shipped from the Persian Gulf. The proposal was never approved, but given Rice's ties, many have suspected that Chevron will soon play a larger role in American foreign policy, whether in Iran or the Caspian.

Critics of the Bush administration point out that a stabilized Caspian region could benefit Rice's friends at Chevron, and if she returns to the board, Rice herself. They also argue that maintaining dependence on Saudi oil could benefit Cheney's old firm and Bush's father, and ultimately, the president himself when an inheritance comes his way.

But there is no clear evidence, right now, of oil company desires affecting current U.S. foreign policy. If anything, the terrorist attacks have reduced the energy industry's influence. Before Sept. 11 Saudi Arabia was reportedly pushing the U.S. to pressure Israel into Palestine peace concessions and, according to a Newsweek story, Bush was beginning to comply. But after Sept. 11, the chance that the U.S. would accede to Saudi requests evaporated, given the numerous Saudi connections to the attacks.

In that sense, the trajectory of oil influence over foreign policy has continued upon its historical path. A review of the evidence suggests that over time, the oil industry has progressively lost power. But that still doesn't mean that the current administration is likely to do anything radical to alter U.S. dependence on foreign oil -- barring the unlikely event of Bush pulling a Nixon-visit-to-China shock, and using his oil ties to force a real commitment to renewable energy and conservation.


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The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CAV111A.html

Copyright, Damien Caveli, Salon.com, 2001. For fair use only.