Neil Bush, the Rev. Moon and Paraguay
April 2nd, 2008As a former freelancer for United Press International, I am always interested in stories related to what has happened to the old wire service since UPI was taken over in the early 1990s by the crazy-rich Korean Rev. Sun Myung Moon. He also owns the Washington Times, and has some interesting connections to the Bush family.
I’m also interested in stories out of Paraguay, since we get a lot of spam from there and wonder if the Bush family is in on the world’s largest spam operation. If so, and we could prove it, we might be able to turn the rest of the country against this festering monarchy. People hate spam almost as much as taxes.
And, we are always interested in seeing so-called conservatives who finally come around to the point of view we’ve had for the past four years about the Bush family’s destructive influence on the U.S. democratic republic.
Since the corporate chain newspaper reporters like to accuse bloggers of being “liberal” and promoting conspiracy theories, it’s nice to point out now and then that there are conservative critics too.
Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column, “Conservative Watch,” documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American Right. He wrote this story for the Dissident Voice. It’s not particularly well written, but passes on some interesting facts, like a lot of blogging – and newspaper reporting. Do I have to make these points explicit again and again?
Over the past several years, Neil Bush, the younger brother of President George W. Bush and the son of former President George H.W. Bush, has made several international trips on behalf of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s assorted enterprises. In late February, Bush called on Paraguay’s president while in the country as a guest of a business federation founded by the Rev. Moon.
A source in the Paraguayan president’s office, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that Neil had met with President Nicanor Duarte “along with a delegation from the Universal Peace Federation,” a group associated with Moon. According to its website, the UPF “is a global alliance of individuals and organizations dedicated to building a world of peace, a world in which everyone can live in freedom, harmony, cooperation, and co-prosperity for all.”
Meanwhile, back home, late last year, a number of news reports confirmed that the U.S. Department of Education’s Inspector General was looking into “allegations that federal money is being spent inappropriately on technology sold to schools” by Ignite! Learning, a company founded by Neil Bush.
Society Transformers?
In a statement issued on February 27, headlined “Call for Increased Collaboration in Paraguay,” Dr. Thomas G. Walsh, the Secretary General of UPF, said that Bush called on people to become “transformers of their societies” during a speech at an International Leadership Conference entitled “Toward a New Paradigm of Leadership and Government in Times of World Crisis,” held in late February at the Excelsior Hotel in Asuncion, Paraguay.
According to Walsh, Bush “spoke of a ‘culture of service’ and a vision of uniting individuals and organizations to promote peace and the common good, calling service ‘an essential component of any complete life’.”
The conference, following on the heels of one in January in Uruguay, “featured presentations from UPF’s peacebuilding curriculum,” Dr. Walsh’s statement read. Topics included God’s Ideal for Peace, presented by Thomas Field, director of UPI for Latin America; Spirituality and Leadership by Jorge Guidenzoph, President of the Uruguayan National Conference on Leadership; the Cause and Origin of Conflicts, by Ricardo de Sena, Director of UPF’s Office of UN Relations; the Principles of Reconciliation, by Dr. Antonio Betancourt, director of UPF’s Office of Government Relations; and Character Education, by Lic. Jesus Gonzalez, President of the International Educational Foundation.
A photo from Getty Images by AFP/Getty Images showed Neil Bush leaving the presidential palace after a meeting with President Duarte on February 28, 2008.
Getty Images captioned the photo: “5 days ago: Neil Bush (C), younger brother of US President George W. Bush, leaves the presidential palace after a meeting with Paraguayan President Nicaron Duarte in Asuncion, on February 28, 2008. Bush is in Paraguay with a delegation of the Federation for Universal Peace, headed by South Korean reverend Sun Myung Moon.”
One veteran Moon watcher filled in the blanks for Talk2Action:
From left to right, the first person is Dr. Thomas G. Walsh, the Secretary General of UPF;
Second from the left is Antonio Betancourt, a “long time Moon follower” who currently is the Director of Government Relations of UPF International and “Character Education,” and who was a major player in “what was formerly called the Summit Council for World Peace or Summit Council, …a group active in Moon’s effort to unite North and South Korea, to save the ‘Fatherland’ and to form Moon’s sovereign nation”;
Third from the left is Chang Shik Yang, the Continental Director of the Unification Church now called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU). Yang “played a lead role in the development of Moon’s black minister snagging unit, the American Clergy Leadership Conference (ACLC), and also is Moon’s top man in the Middle East.”
Fourth is Neil Bush;
On the far right is Larry Moffitt who is the Vice President of editorial operations for United Press International (UPI), a news service owned and operated by Rev. Moon.
The ‘greatest weirdest Bush Conspiracy’
Neil Bush’s trip to Paraguay is all the more interesting when considered against the backdrop of what columnist Ken Layne called the “greatest weirdest Bush Conspiracy.” In a recent piece headlined “The Bushes and the Moons,” Layne wrote:
The story goes like this: George W. Bush and/or George H.W. Bush bought hundreds of thousands of acres in Paraguay, adjoining a similar spread owned by the Unification Church’s Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Both massive parcels are hidden within a remote South American wilderness atop the world’s biggest freshwater aquifer adjoining a secret U.S. military airbase. Oh, and there’s a special non-extradition law to protect the Bush/Moon families as they enjoy their old age and run drug/weapons smuggling rings, safe from American justice. And they’ll own all the drinking water in the world, or something.
Travels with Moon
Two years ago, Neil Bush, along with Rev. Moon, visited the Philippines and Taiwan. While in Manila, Bush was present for the inaugural convocation of the Universal Peace Federation (UPF), and he joined Moon in meeting with Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. The Manila Bulletin reported: “Together with peace leaders that included Neil Bush … Moon arrived yesterday as part of a 100-day tour that is taking him to 100 cities and 67 nations and covering a journey of almost 100,000 miles.”
Ignite’s COW
At home, Neil Bush is best known for his 1980s involvement in the Silverado Savings and Loan debacle, which cost taxpayers more than $1 billion; the lurid details of a messy divorce from Sharon Bush, his wife of 23 years; and his mother Barbara Bush’s shameless demand that her contribution to a Hurricane Katrina relief foundation, working with those who had to be relocated to Texas, be used by local schools to acquire Ignite! products.
Ignite sells what it calls a “Curriculum on Wheels (COW),” a cart-mounted video projector and hard drive loaded with video content to help teach math, social studies, and science, which costs about $3,800, not including yearly costs for licensing the content, eSchool News pointed out.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group, had called for the inquiry. According to eSchool News, “CREW contends school districts are using federal dollars inappropriately to purchase technology from” Bush’s Austin, Texas-based company. CREW also claimed that “there is no proof the company’s products are effective and claim[ed] that schools in at least three states are using the products mainly as a result of political considerations.”
Ignite! Learning’s president, Ken Leonard, issued a statement denying the group’s allegations:
“While Ignite! Learning welcomes accountability for ensuring that public school expenditures are in compliance with appropriation guidelines, Ignite! Learning has no knowledge of any customer that has procured our curriculum solutions through means which are other than completely ethical.
According to a CREW press release, “Ignite also has a program called Adopt-a-Cow in which corporations buy the equipment and donate it to schools or to charities supporting school districts. An Ignite spokesman said seven Cows were donated last year to the Fund for Public Schools in New York City.”
CREW also “obtained documents through a Freedom of Information Act request showing that the Katy Independent School District west of Houston used $250,000 in state and federal Hurricane Katrina relief money last year to buy the Curriculum on Wheels.”
Now where did all those billions go that were supposed to be helping New Orleans recover from Katrina? As with all the federal contracts under Bush in Iraq and elsewhere, half the money disappears into the pockets of some Bush loyalist. These are the biggest thieves in the history of the world, and they do it in broad daylight – as the press looks on without a blink.
Check out this video about the book on Moon: Bad Moon Rising.
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April 3rd, 2008 at 1:01 pm
The odd connections — and Rev. Moon is not only an odd connection but a freaky one — of the Bush family should be instructive to American voters in the process of electing the U.S. president.
My first thought is that the lesson should be, “Don’t do it!” as in, “Let’s not have a president for the next four years and see how that works out.”
But that won’t happen – we will have one egomaniac or another in the Oval Office. And the odds are his or her connections will prove equally bizzare and/or dangerous and/or freaky.
We’ve all heard now about Obama’s “spiritual mentor,” Rev. Wright. Doubtless similarly macabre associations for McCain and Clinton will emerge as well.
What gives? Well, if you conclude, as rationality demands you must, that anyone who would want to be U.S. president is ipso facto demented, there’s a straight line from that to this phenomenon — exotic, nightmarish personal and family connections that most of us ordinary folk would not have on a bet.
My permanent solution for this madness? Rein in executive power with a highly restrictive constitutional amendment, thus making the office unattractive to those among us with serious personality disorders. Or, better yet, the a plural executive a la Switzerland, increasing the chances we’ll have a couple of normal people involved at the top of the federal republic.
Otherwise, we should get used to it. And it’s nothing new. Two words: Billy Carter.
April 4th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Billy Carter. and what does that suppose to mean.
I remember Billy Carter and the only mistake he made other then being a simple minded redneck was to try to market “Billybeer”.
So he drank a little, is there a law against a private U.S. citizen drinking and smoking. At least he never got caught with a hooker, males included like a lot of the Bush buddies did.
April 4th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Billy was into a lot more stuff than drinking a little beer. My point in bringing him up is that almost all recent presidents have some very strange connections in life. We can compare how strange the Bush family is with how strange the Carter family is — and miss the point.
The point — politicians are not normal people as you and I understand normal — and their families aren’t normal.
This is not a spitting contest to figure out “who’s stanger, the Carters or the Bushes.”
They all be strange.
June 5th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
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