Bush is a profiteer - or more correctly, an enabler of the profiteers, those who would plunder the federal treasury in the quest for bigger yachts down in the Caymans. He's run with these folks all his life. Even pretended to be one, through the failures of a couple of companies.
William Byrk of the New York Press has written a great article which explodes the myth of BushCo being a conservative operation:
...The Bush Administration can't even pretend to keep an arm's length from Halliburton, the master of the no-bid government contract. Sugar, grain, cotton, oil, gas and coal: These industries enjoy increased subsidies and targeted tax breaks not enjoyed by less-connected industries.It's a bit of a long article, but well worth the time in arming you for discussions with those pesky family members who continue to confuse the terms "plutocrat" and "conservative".
The conservative Heritage Foundation blasts the administration's agricultural subsidies as the nation's most wasteful corporate welfare program. The libertarian Cato Institute called the administration's energy plan "three parts corporate welfare and one part cynical politics...a smorgasbord of handouts and subsidies for virtually every energy lobby in Washington" that "does little but transfer wealth from taxpayers to well-connected energy lobbies." And the Republican Party's Medicare drug benefit, the largest single expansion of the welfare state since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, was designed to appeal to senior citizens who, as any competent politician knows, show up at the polls.
None of this is conservative, although it is in keeping with the Bush family's history. Kevin Phillips, whose 1969 classic The Emerging Republican Majority outlined the policies that would lead to the election of President Reagan, describes in his American Dynasty the Bush family's rise to wealth and power through crony capitalism: the use of contacts obtained in public service for private profit. Phillips argues the Bushes don't disfavor big government as such: merely that part of it that regulates business, maintains the environment or aids the needy. Subsidizing oil-well drilling through tax breaks, which made George H. W. Bush's fortune, or bailing out financial institutions, such as Neil Bush's bankrupt Silverado Savings and Loan, however, is a good thing.
