The documentary Bush Family Fortunes is based on the book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporter Exposes the Truth About Globalization, Corporate Cons, and High-Finance Fraudsters (2004) by Greg Palast, an American who lives in London because he can report the truth about the failure of American democracy to the BBC and elsewhere in the world but cannot penetrate what he calls the "Berlin Wall" of the American media. Some of the facts presented in the film are old, but many of the documents and interviews are new. The film is available as a DVD-ROM, an innovative medium, but not yet in a commercial cinema. The DVD can be played on a television monitor; the ROM consists of documents that can be reviewed on a computer monitor, though my version was not accessible. In any case, the point of the film is to show that money has elected the Bushes, who in turn have made money for themselves and their contributors, resulting in the election of younger Bushes, a political dynasty perhaps on a par with the Rockefellers. Palast narrates the documentary, occasionally displaying and summarizing the texts of hitherto secret documents. The film is organized by chapters. (1) In "The War Hero," the juiciest piece of information is that nobody can join the Air National Guard until they have previously been certified to fly, so Bush could not have joined without family pressure. (2) "The Candidate" provides old information about how Florida disqualified thousands of voters in the 2000 election but new insight into the way in which computerized voting in 2004 without a paper trail has alarmed the head of the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and his fellow computer scientists across the country. (3) "The Money" provides figures on corporate contributions to the Bush campaign and payoffs to the same corporations upon election, including Enron; for example, an executive order signed three days after Bush took office caused California's fuel supply to dry up, such the state had no alternative but to beg Enron, then secretly having cashflow problems, for fuel supplies at inflated prices, thereby creating an enormous deficit for Democratic Governor Gray Davis. (4) "The Oil" reveals that George W's Harken Energy Company, without a cent in capital, got a lucrative contract to drill for oil from the government of Bahrein and subsequently went bankrupt; Palast infers that Bahrein was repaying a favor to George H.W. and that the money from the contract was either funneled to the Bush campaign or to the family coffers. (5) "The Connection" documents the way in which ongoing FBI investigations regarding terrorism stopped when Bush took office, including the effort to interview two of the Bin Laden family who are business associates in Carlyle Partners along with the Bushes. (6) "The Plan" identifies Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) out of the exact words of the president's press secretary and reveals a document dating from 2001 that details how postwar Iraq is to be governed and oil assets sold off as well as an interview with General Jay Garner, who was fired as the head of the occupation because he failed to follow the script. One virtue of the film is that a lot of information is packed into a short time, but that is the principal defect: There is insufficient time to digest so much. The conclusion that some filmviewers will draw from Bush Family Fortunes is that the United States has become transformed from a democracy into a fascist state. MH
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