·Popular past posts ·

Neilsie's Asian avenues of commerce. Josh Marshall points us to a very rich vein in the deep mine of Neil Bush's venality — namely, New Bridge Strategies (Miami Herald):

Neil Bush, a younger brother of US President George W. Bush, has had a $60,000-a-year employment contract with a top adviser to a Washington-based consulting firm set up this year to help companies secure contracts in Iraq.

Neil Bush disclosed the payments during divorce proceedings in March from his now ex-wife, Sharon. The divorce was finalised in April and the court papers were disclosed by The Houston Chronicle this week.

Mr Bush said he was co-chairman of Crest Investment Corporation, a company based in Houston, Texas, that invests in energy and other ventures. For this he received $15,000 every three months for working three or four hours a week.

The other co-chairman and principal of Crest is Jamal Daniel, a Syrian-American who is an advisory board member of New Bridge Strategies, a company set up this year by a group of businessmen with close links to the Bush family or administrations. Its chairman is Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush's campaign director in the 2000 presidential elections.

Other figures at New Bridge include Ed Rogers, its vice-chairman and a senior official in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, and Lanny Griffith, with whom he works in the lobby firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers. Lord Charles Powell, adviser to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, is listed as an advisory board member.

On its website, New Bridge describes itself as being created to "take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the US-led war in Iraq''.

Note the key words "take advantage." If Cheney's Halliburton is on the Iraqi gravy train, shouldn't Neilsie stand by with his ladle poised and ready? (Here's more on the sleaze behind New Bridge.)

But, wait, there's more. $60,000 is chump change for the sublime uselessness of Neil Bush (Rick Casey, Houston Chronicle, 11/21/03):

Maybe the president of Taiwan did pay presidential younger brother Neil Bush a million bucks for a recent 30-minute meeting in New York.

I expressed skepticism in a recent column, but that was before I saw Exhibit 24 in the files of Bush's contentious divorce.

I didn't realize Bush's advice was so valuable.

The exhibit is a two-page contract between Bush and Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which recently opened a $1.6 billion computer chip production plant in Shanghai.

The co-founder and CEO is Winston Wong, son of a wealthy Taiwanese plastics magnate. The contract bears Wong's and Bush's signatures.

Under the contract Bush has two duties:

· "To provide GSMC from time to time with business strategies and policies; latest information and trends of the related industry, and other expertized advices (sic)."

· "To attend Directors Board Meetings."

For this the contract provides that Bush be paid $400,000 a year in company preferred stock for five years -- a total of $2 million worth of stock.

[...]

The question remains: What does Bush offer Grace that is worth $2 million?

In the deposition, Sharon Bush's attorney, David Brown, put it directly:

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

"That's correct," Bush responded.

Pressed later, Bush said, "But I know a lot about business and I've been working in Asia quite a long time."

[...]

In some parts of the world it is assumed that members of the Royal Family have influence. And in those regions, anyone who has had both a father and a brother as presidents of the United States is a member of a Royal Family.

Membership is good for business. Bush, for example, had raised $23 million for his software firm at the time of the deposition, despite the fact that a series of businesses he started over the years went belly up.

Bush said 60 percent of the $23 million came from overseas --
Am I one of the many
pretty Bangkok girls
Neil Bush had sex with?
Click here to see others.much of it from the Middle East and Asia.

Grace CEO Wong was already one of those investors when he signed Bush to the $2 million contract. His co-founder of Grace was Jiang Mianheng, son of then-Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

[...]

As has been reported, Bush admitted to having sex with several women in Hong Kong and Thailand during an earlier business trip. In the deposition, he said a woman would knock on the door of his hotel room.

Under questioning he said he didn't know them before or see them afterward, and he didn't pay them any money.

"Were they prostitutes?" he was asked.

"I don't know," he said.

Not knowing is one of Neilsie's chief areas of expertise. "The problem with education," says Neil Bush, "is that we create prison-like environments that suppress many students' natural gifts and bore them with useless facts." Neil is much more qualified to provide "expertized advices" than useless facts anyway.

It's quite the family portrait: the uselessness of facts, the boredom inherent in education, the profitability of having relatives in government, his brother's insistence on the sacredness of marriage, his mother's sexy and fertile volunteer Maria Andrews distracting him from his own wife and children, those several unknown Asian girls knocking at his hotel door to copulate with him for free.

What complex boys these Bushes are.

{ 9:55 AM }

.