Great Country Part IV

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Determined to secure passage of this far-reaching plan, Thomas Hicks met with Bush, Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, and legislative leaders. "I paid for a separate lobbyist to make sure that it was done, too," Hicks boasted last December. It was one of the most significant changes to the governance of Texas made during Bush's tenure in the statehouse and among the first important bills that he signed. With Bush's support and the sponsorship of legislators associated with the governor, the UTIMCO bill passed through the capitol in 1995 with very few questions asked.

The UTIMCO plan pleased the university's professional investment staff because it smoothed the way for higher salaries, closer to the huge sums earned by money managers in the private sector. It seemed to offer a more corporate, streamlined, and less cumbersome approach to investing than the old system of regents committees. And privatization would provide the confidentiality required to do deals with venture capitalists and limited partnerships.

What nobody in Austin seemed to realize when Bush signed the UTIMCO bill was that unlike the Board of Regents, this new outfit would not be subject to state laws that mandate open meetings and public records. The regents had always taken advantage of loopholes in those laws to shield their financial decisions behind a veil of privacy, but UTIMCO would be exempt from public scrutiny. The privatized corporation and its board would not even be listed in the official Texas State Directory. Nor would the non-regent appointees to the nine-member UTIMCO board be required to file personal financial disclosure documents like other appointees to state commissions and agencies.

In many respects, UTIMCO had been empowered to write its own rules, which suited Tom Hicks fine. After UTIMCO officially took over from the regents' investment committees in early 1996, with Hicks as its first chairman, all of its business was done behind closed doors. The directors often gathered for their monthly board meetings at the lavish offices of Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst in downtown Dallas rather than at UTIMCO's own more modest quarters in an Austin building named for Lady Bird Johnson. "It was a hell of a lot more convenient for all of us to meet there," Hicks noted. Largely freed from public accountability, UTIMCO embarked on a series of deals that raised serious questions about conflict of interest and political favoritism. Again, there was nothing unlawful about these decisions, all of which were vetted by the powerhous law firm of Vinson & Elkins; they merely reflect the way business is often done behind closed doors--even, or especially, when the public's money is at stake. Friends and long-time associates of Thomas Hicks, and his firm's past and future business partners--as well as major Republican contributors and political supporters of the Bush family--received hundreds of millions of dollars from the University of Texas investment funds.

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In a certain sense, all this apparent favoritism was merely business as usual. It was and is, as they say, the corporate culture of the financial industry. The industry's corrupting influence on public pension funds has been a perennial scandal in state capitols across the country for well over a decade. Investment firms whose executives and lobbyists contribute generously to certain elected officials routinely have been rewarded with profitable contracts. In New York both the current state comptroller, a Democrat, and his Republican predecessor were plausibly accused of favoring major contributors with pension-fund investment deals. In California similar accusations erupted last year over the investment of public employee retirement funds. In Connecticut the former state treasurer pleaded guilty to racketeering and money laundering in a wide-ranging probe of what federal authorities have called "the shady world of bribes, kickbacks, and improper campaign contributions" connected with more than $500 million in state pension fund investments.

So unwholesome are the documented relationships between respectable financial firms and their political benefactors that by 1999 the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed to bar bankers and brokers from collecting fees from government clients for two years after making contributions "to an official of the government entity." The new rules, however, would not have prevented Hicks from enriching George W.'s supporters.

But the University of Texas presented a special case because, unlike most public pension or university funds, the UTIMCO board was chaired by a powerful private investor who was making deals for his own firm at a frantic pace while simultaneously overseeing the investment of public money, often with his firm's putative competitors. It was an arrangement that existed nowhere else in the country, and it provided Tom Hicks with some remarkable advantages.

Nothing could have been more useful to the chairman of Hicks, Muse than continuous access to confidential information concerning the other buyout firms, partnerships, and companies that approached UTIMCO seeking money. The otherwise unavailable details of who was involved in which deals and on what financial terms were provided to him routinely. And with that knowledge came the authority to award hundreds of millions in financing. The only real constraint on his power was the presence of the governor's other appointees to the Board of Regents. He had little reason to worry about them, however. Under his chairmanship of UTIMCO, nearly every vote on policy and asset management carried unanimously and rarely was any dissent heard. He also had considerable leverage over the senior staff that formally recommended investments to the board because, as chair of the board's compensation committee, he had raised their salaries by tens of thousands of dollars when they became employees of UTIMCO.

Joining Hicks as a regent in February 1995--and a year later on the UTIMCO board--was Tom Loeffler, a San Antonio lawyer and former Republican congressman who spent much of his time in Washington as a registered lobbyist for Hicks, Muse, among other clients. (His firm earned well over $280,000 in lobbying fees from the Dallas investment company.) Loeffler has long been a top national GOP fund-raiser and a substantial donor to the party and its candidates. He and his law firm, Arter & Hadden, have contributed more than $100,000 to George W. Bush's political ambitions since 1994.

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Also named as a regent by Bush was perhaps his closest friend from Midland, Texas--oil company executive Donald L. Evans. A comparatively small but faithful donor to Republic an candidates himself, Evans has raised money for all of George W.'s political campaigns, beginning with the fledgling oilman's unsuccessful congressional race in 1978.

In fact, all of Bush's regent appointees were contributors to his own campaign and to the Republican Party. But giving lavishly to the governor and his party was a habit that Tom Hicks and his associates adopted rather suddenly themselves shortly after George W.'s election victory. Until then, as measured by his checkbook, Hicks's political sympathies had been bipartisan and even mildly Democratic, but after that initial $25,000 contribution to George W. in December 1994, Hicks and his brother, Steven (who runs CapStar Broadcasting for Hicks, Muse), eventually gave another $146,000 to the governor's election war chests. His partners have donated tens of thousands more. Together they are among the highest donors to George W. Bush since 1995.

During the same period, the Hicks, Muse firm has given $180,000 in soft money donations to Republican committees, while Hicks and his wife, Cinda, have given about $90,000 to various GOP candidates and committees in Texas and elsewhere. Contributions to the Republicans from him, his partners, his lobbyists, and his relatives total well over half a million dollars since his confirmation as a regent.

Even before UTIMCO officially opened for business, the newly aggressive investment policy spearheaded by Tom Hicks took effect. Within the first few months of Bush's inauguration in January 1995, the University of Texas commenced an ambitious schedule of private investment deals that dwarfed those made the year before. In all of 1994, the university had placed a total of $36 million in three limited partnerships; in February 1995 alone, it invested almost twice that amount. The regents' financial plan restricted new private equity commitments for 1995-96 to $144 million, or one fourth of the funded portfolio for the fiscal year. Yet according to a review by the Texas state auditor's office, the actual commitments made in 1995-96 nearly doubled that amount, reaching $285 million.

On what basis did Hicks and his fellow board members direct those rapidly increasing flows of money? No one outside UTIMCO really knows, because until the summer of 1999 they kept their deliberations secret. The "due diligence" reports prepared by UTIMCO employees to evaluate potential investments have never been available to the press and public, and the board meetings were closed until last fall. This obsession with secrecy mirrored the investment industry, in which the names of limited partners and their financial agreements are traditionally kept confidential and are often hidden behind generic corporate names and opaque offshore registrations. Until very recently, the citizens of Texas had no way to ascertain precisely where their largest public university's money had been invested and with whom. Even though considerably more information about UTIMCO's investments is now available, the identities of its limited partners remain hidden without an exhaustive search of SEC filings--and sometimes are impossible to discover even then

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With most of those transactions and partnerships safely concealed behind thick corporate veils, it was not easy to discover that the regents--and a bit later, the directors of UTIMCO--were funneling millions of dollars from the university endowments to the friends and business associates of Thomas Hicks, and also to major Republican contributors (who were sometimes the same people). But gradually, under pressure from a few newspapers, public-interest organizations, and legislators, a smattering of names and figures were pried out of the UTIMCO files. The most persistent digging was undertaken by R. G. Ratcliffe of the Houston Chronicle; the task of forcing open UTIMCO's meetings was shouldered largely by Suzy Woodford, the executive director of Common Cause Texas, and State Representative Sylvester Turner, a Houston Democrat. And from that piecemeal information, a familiar pattern began to emerge.

Under the guidance of Tom Hicks, a growing portion of the university's investment choices had a decidedly Republican tinge. On March 1, 1995, the regents voted to place what would prove to be a comparatively modest $10 million with The Carlyle Group, a Washington-based merchant bank that is chaired by Frank Carlucci, the former secretary of defense in the Reagan Administration. The specific fund was Carlyle Partners II, described with exquisite delicacy on the firm's Web site as pursuing "an investment strategy focused upon the intersection of government and business." Among Carlyle's partners are numerous former Reagan and Bush administration figures, including Richard Darman, economic adviser to President Bush, and James Baker III, the polished former White House chief of staff, secretary of state, and Bush-Quayle campaign chairman.

That a firm run by his father's associates would be awarded an investment contract only weeks after George W. took office was unseemly at best. But the Texas governor had his own long-standing and lucrative ties to Carlyle that dated[ back almost a decade. Among his more obscure business activities was a corporate directorship at Caterair, one of the nation's largest airline-catering services, which was acquired by Carlyle in 1989. The next year, a seat on the company's board was arranged for George W. by the former Nixon White House aide and longtime Bush associate Fred Malek, who was then an adviser at Carlyle. Although Bush remained on the catering company's board until 1994, his earnings as a Caterair director are not specified on his personal financial forms filed with the Texas Ethics Commission.

These days it is the governor's father who benefits from the Washington investment firm's largesse. Since leaving the White House, George Herbert Walker Bush has been paid by Carlyle for speeches at events sponsored by the merchant bank. His spokesman, Michael Dannenhauer, was uncertain when, exactly, the speechmaking arrangement began. Dannenhauer declined to provide any further details: "We don't talk about his earnings or his investments or anything like that." Carlyle's spokesman did not return calls seeking information about the firm's relationship with the Bushes. It is known, however, that the ex-president joined up with Baker, Carlucci, and Darman on a more formal basis in early 1998 when he became a "senior adviser" to Carlyle Asia Partners (a fund set up to buy distressed businesses in the Far East). His speaking and consulting fees are reportedly reinvested with Carlyle, and a source close to the firm says that Bush Senior also has enjoyed a "carried interest" in one or more Carlyle partnerships--meaning that he was awarded a share of profits without putting up any of his own funds. Over the past two years he has delivered speeches in Asia, where he remains popular among politicians and government officials and where he was inevitably followed by representatives of Carlyle Asia.

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This extraordinary circumstance underscores the question of probity that haunts the career of George W. Bush: his political appointee oversaw the awarding of $10 million in public investment funds to a firm that not only had maintained a long-term business relationship with Bush but later employed and compensated Bush's father as well.

Tom Hicks said that he did not know of the connection between Governor Bush and Carlyle when the March 1995 investment was approved. "I knew Jim Baker was involved with them," he recalled. But, Hicks added, he had informally recommended against investing with Carlyle, although he couldn't remember whether he had voted against the deal. "I had hired two former Carlyle employees and I had insight that there were issues within that organization."(2)

In the following year, 1996, after UTIMCO took over the university's financial portfolio, its directors made an investment of $50 million in the KKR 1996 Fund, a new buyout partnership set up by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. That firm's founding partner is Henry Kravis, the implacably acquisitive corporate raider who has consistently been among the largest Republican contributors in the country during the past decade. Kravis was a financial co-chairman of Bush-Quayle 1992, and he boasted to reporters that he was a personal friend and confidant of President Bush. Both he and his wife, Marie-Josee, are reliable donors of "soft money." In the spring of 1996 they gave $125,000 to the Republican National Committee.

As Republican donors, the Bass clan in Fort Worth rivals that of Kravis and his partners in its generosity. The oil-rich Basses are also old friends of the Bushes, enjoying a particularly close connection to George W. through Richard Rainwater, the billionaire financier behind the Texas Rangers deal, and through Harken Energy, which, it may be remembered, had brought in the Basses to save its unlikely deal in Bahrain. In April 1998, UTIMCO invested $20 million in a deal involving Bass Brothers Enterprises. The limited partnership operated under the generic, unrevealing name of Prime Enterprises II.

Later in 1998 UTIMCO placed the unusually large sum of $96 million with Maverick Capital, a relatively new partnership in Dallas. Among Maverick Capital's main investors and general partners are the Wyly family, the principal stockholders in Sterling Software and, again, long-time friends of the Bushes. Between 1993 and 1998, various Wyly family members gave well over $300,000 to Republican candidates and committees.

The making of so many deals suggests a Republican version of the Lincoln Bedroom sleepovers at the Clinton White House. Henry Kravis and his partner George Roberts; Robert Bass, his wife, Anne, and his brother Lee Bass; and the brothers Sam and Charles Wyly all were members of "Team 100," the elite corps of wealthy Bush backers who each gave at least $100,000 to the GOP in 1988 and 1992 (and who in turn were provided special access to the president, the White House, and Cabinet members). Among several national co-chairs of Team 100 was Tom Loeffler, who as a Texas regent and UTIMCO board member later voted on all of the deals involving the Basses, the Wylys, and Kravis.

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UTIMCO, for its part, maintains that it "does not consider or inquire into the political affiliations of prospective managers or company management: because such matters are not factors in the due diligence process. In fact, management rarely has any knowledge of political connections of the principals involved in a private investment."

While the University of Texas invested hundreds of millions of dollars with Republican-linked partnerships under the guidance of Tom Hicks, it also placed hundreds of millions more with his friends and associates as well as with firms that did business with Hicks, Muse. Although Hicks recused himself from voting on several of those deals, the minutes of the UTIMCO board meetings do not show that he actually left a meeting in which his interests were potentially implicated.

The well-connected Texas law firm of Vinson & Elkins, which advised the regents and UTIMCO on financial and ethical issues, has never found that Hicks misused his position. Yet there was certainly a pattern of remarkable coincidences between Hicks's own interests and large investments of university funds. The $50 million UTIMCO investment in the Kohlberg Kravis Roberts 1996 Fund was followed fifteen months later by the announcement of an unprecedented joint venture between the Kravis firm and Hicks, Muse. The two investment giants, usually perceived as business rivals, had quietly put together a $1.5 billion takeover bid for the Regal Cinemas theater chain. KKR's share of the partnership came from the same KKR fund in which UTIMCO had recently invested. The UTIMCO attorneys decided there was no conflict, however, because Hicks had voted for the KKR deal before the joint venture was put together. "I had mixed feelings about it," Hicks said, noting that KKR is, after all, his own firm's largest competitor. "That's not a conflict, that's a gentlemanly gesture."

In another 1996 decision Hicks actually insisted on increasing UTIMCO's financial commitment to a company in which he would soon have an indirect but substantial interest. On June 10 the UTIMCO board met at the Hicks, Muse offices in Dallas with principals of the Beacon Group, a New York investment company that was then seeking investors for its newest partnership, known as the Focus Value Fund. After the Beacon Group presentation, the UTIMCO staff recommended that the university commit $15 million to the Focus Value Fund. According to the board minutes, Hicks then demanded to know why the recommendation was so small, and "added that ... a $25 million commitment would be more appropriate." The board unanimously agreed to increase the investment with Beacon.

A few months later Stratford Capital Partners--a company controlled by Hicks, Muse, with Hicks as a board member--announced that it would buy Hollywood Theaters, another moviehouse chain, in a $52 million deal with the Beacon Group. But before Beacon received actual funding for this deal from UTIMCO, the UTIMCO staff discovered the apparent conflict of interest with Stratford. As Hicks saw it, "The system worked. The staff saw the potential conflict, and they instructed Beacon that [UTIMCO] needed to opt out of that investment." The Hollywood Theaters deal went forward and closed in October.

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Apparently, other seeming conflicts of interest were deemed moot by UTIMCO's attorneys if a period of several months elapsed between an investment by UTIMCO and a Hicks, Muse deal involving the same company--or vice versa. On January 27, 1997, the university placed $40 million with a New York investment bank called Evercore Partners Inc. (one of whose principals is former assistant treasury secretary Roger Altman). Then the following September Evercore assisted NBC in a joint $900 million takeover of several television stations with Hicks, Muse.

A strikingly similar series of events--except in reverse--also dates back to January 1997. That was when Hicks, Muse and its CapStar Broadcasting subsidiary announced the purchase of eleven radio stations from American Securities Partners for an undisclosed amount. Trade publications reported that "the transaction is expected to close by the fourth quarter of 1997." Several months later, on May 22, 1998, the UTIMCO board invested $30 million with American Securities Partners.

Two former classmates of Hicks' at the University of Texas also were awarded large investments by UTIMCO. One was his old fraternity brother Bruce Schnitzer, a New York insurance man who set up Wand Partners, which received more than $60 million in at least three separate deals with UTIMCO between 1996 and 1998. Schnitzer's record of success was mixed at best; his companies' rates of return lagged behind the Dow average. Nor was it reassuring that he had resigned in 1985 as the president of Marsh & McLennan, then the world's biggest insurance brokerage, after the company lost $165 million in unauthorized trading and was fined by the New York State insurance department.

Despite those problems, Schnitzer maintained close connections not only with Hicks, Muse but with Richard Rainwater and the Bass family. After quitting Marsh & McLennan he had done multimillion-dollar deals with all of them, including one of the first major partnerships put together by Hicks, Muse. Although Hicks later abstained from voting on some of the UTIMCO deals with Schnitzer, it was he who introduced Schnitzer to the UTIMCO staff in 1995. The other old college buddy of Hicks who got a substantial UTIMCO investment was W. McComb Dunwoody, the principal of an outfit known as Inverness Management. In December 1997, Dunwoody's venture received a commitment of $40 million. According to UTIMCO, "the fact that Messrs. Schnitzer and Dunwoody attended The University of Texas ... with Mr. Hicks was not a factor." And Hicks noted, "I disclosed all of that."

Did George W. Bush understand what his appointee Tom Hicks was doing with the Permanent University Fund? The Texas governor has always maintained a discreet silence about the university's controversial investment policies since he signed the original privatization bill. "Neither the governor nor the governor's office has taken any part" in the university's investment decisions, said Scott McClellan, a Bush spokesman. "I swear I didn't get into politics to feather my nest or feather my friends' nest," George W. told the Houston Chronicle in August 1998. "Any insinuation that I have used my office to help my friends is simply not true."

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But how much Bush knew about UTIMCO's investments is not clear. Donald Evans, the governor's best friend and trusted adviser, was appointed to the Board of Regents in 1995, later was elected chairman, and was privy to UTIMCO's activities from the very beginning.

In the meantime, Tom Hicks's approach to the investment of public money came under intense scrutiny not in Texas but in California. CalPERS, the state's employee pension fund, invested $100 million with Hicks, Muse in 1997 after a positive recommendation from an outside consultant, Christopher J. Bower. A furor arose after it was revealed that Hicks had also purchased a yacht for $300,000 from Bower. That price was $45,000 more than Bower had originally paid for the used 47-foot boat, and Hicks had paid the higher price without ever actually seeing the vessel.

Fortunately for Hicks, the giant California pension fund's lawyers took an indulgent view of the matter. They ruled that there was no serious conflict, because the boat sale had taken place nine months after Bower's recommendation and twelve months before a second $100 million investment was approved by the CalPERS board. Federal investigators took a dimmer view, and the FBI briefly examined the circumstances of the transactions. The investigation was inconclusive, however, and no charges were brought. As always, Hicks insisted that he had conducted himself with the utmost integrity.

Hicks's chairmanship of UTIMCO coincided with a period of frenetic growth for his investment firm, and with that growth came expanding ambitions. Although he continued to pursue all sorts of deals, Hicks devoted much of his energy to the creation of an empire of sports franchises and broadcasting outlets in his home state, like those owned by Rupert Murdoch in Los Angeles and Ted Turner in Atlanta. Hicks already controlled dozens of radio and television stations in the Lone Star State, and he had also acquired the Dallas Stars, a National Hockey League team. He had tried and failed to buy the Dallas Mavericks, a struggling NBA franchise--but at least Hicks and the successful bidder, Ross Perot Jr., had subsequently agreed to cooperate in building a new indoor arena for their teams.

One of the minority owners of the Mavericks happened to be Richard Rainwater, George W.'s main partner in the Texas Rangers baseball franchise. Under a contract with Perot Jr., Rainwater's Crescent Real Estate Equities Company would earn a $10 million special commission after construction of a new home for the two teams. Just as the Rangers' baseball park in Arlington had been built almost entirely with public funds, the owners of the Dallas teams expected local taxpayers to put up most of the money for their showplace. In June 1997 Bush promoted their plan by signing legislation that permitted Texas cities to impose new taxes for the financing of sports facilities. Within months, the citizens of Dallas approved construction of a $230 million hockey and basketball arena.

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That deal increased the value of Hicks's hockey team and certainly profited Richard Rainwater's real estate company. But it was Hicks's next acquisition that brought an enormous and unexpected windfall not only for Rainwater but for George W. Bush. Hicks wanted the Texas Rangers, and he was willing to pay a premium price.

A MAN IN FULL

When the Rangers deal was completed in 1998, Bush s fourth year in office, Hicks paid about $250 million for the team, or more than three times the price paid by Bush and his partners in 1989. The other members of the Rangers partnership fattened Bush's payout six times over, by awarding him additional shares in the team at the time of the sale that brought his 1.8 percent share up to 12 percent. Without that extra consideration, his investment would have earned far less. For Bush, the windfall must have been sweetened by a sense of vindication. This time, no one denied that George W.'s contributions to the Rangers had helped to build the franchise. As the team's charming promoter and front-office man, he had played a role in its success, especially in the stadium deal that increased both its revenues and the value of its real estate holdings. In the celebrations of the sale that appeared in newspapers and magazines, his role was universally praised. According to his partners, who notably included some of the richest businessmen in and beyond Texas, their generosity to George W. was motivated solely by fairness. They owed him not only for helping to organize the original Rangers deal but for doing his job as a general partner so admirably. What went unmentioned during the celebration of the governor's sudden good fortune were the public benefits conferred upon some of those same businessmen during Bush's tenure in the capitol. Hicks had enjoyed dominion over some $13 billion of the University of Texas investment portfolio, putting some $1.7 billion in private investments.

Another year would pass before UTIMCO would begin to draw criticism from Texas newspapers, public interest groups, and legislators. Growing concern about UTIMCO's secretive, high-risk strategies forced the board to disclose more information about its investments, including rates of loss and profit. This data is listed by UTIMCO under the heading of "IRR," meaning "internal rate of return," a measure whose accuracy is disputed by some financial analysts. In March 1998 Forbes magazine pointed out that "there is no standard way of calculating IRR, so returns are easily manipulated.... In just about every case, investors must rely on the general partner's say-so in valuing illiquid investments that are not publicly traded."

With that caveat in mind, it should be noted that Carlyle Partners is credited by UTIMCO with having an annual IRR of more than 40 percent. The Kohlberg Kravis Roberts fund did poorly, however, showing an IRR of only 12 percent since 1996, which is far lower than the Standard & Poor's Index. And Prime Enterprises II, the Bass-related fund, has shown a total loss of more than 40 percent on the money actually invested so far since 1998.

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The investments placed with Tom Hicks's friends haven't performed well either. Bruce Schnitzer's Wand Equity Portfolio II shows a small loss since 1996, while his Wand Secondary Interests fund shows an IRR of about 9 percent since 1997, again well under the Standard & Poor's Index. Dunwoody's Inverness fund did still worse, with a total loss of 8 percent since 1997. The Beacon Group's Focus Value Fund has likewise been a failure, losing more than 3 percent in value annually. Theoretically, some of these assets will increase rapidly in value and provide substantial returns, five or ten years after their initial losses. Bat the University of Texas experience with these "alternative equity" plays is not encouraging to date. The annual IRR from nearly $600 million worth of investments committed in 1995 and 1996 averages around 16 percent --nowhere near the gain recorded by the stock market during the same period.

Perhaps not altogether coincidentally, Hicks quit the UTIMCO chairmanship after his term as regent expired last February, even though he had previously mentioned that he might stay on. He didn't seek reappointment. His lobbyist Tom Loeffler left the UTIMCO board around the same time, saying that he planned to focus on raising money for the Bush campaign.

When George W. Bush declared his candidacy for president in 1999, hundreds of his wealthiest supporters pledged to raise at least $100,000 each for his campaign. For a time their names were kept confidential, but eventually the Bush campaign--meaning finance chairman Donald Evans--released the names of the first 115 "Pioneers" to meet its fund-raising quota, even as hundreds more unnamed backers were reportedly trying to do so. Listed among the founding group of successful Pioneers were R. Steven Hicks, the brother of Tom Hicks; Tom Loeffler; three partners in Vinson & Elkins, the law firm that serves as counsel to UTIMCO; and former Texas Rangers partners Mercer Reynolds, William DeWitt, Rusty Rose, and Roland Betts. Also joining the Pioneers were Adele Hall, Charles Wyly, and Lee Bass, whose partnerships had received investments from UTIMCO; and Wayne Berman, the lobbyist and consultant who represents Carlyle Partners.

This vast agglomeration of monied influence is what has made George W. Bush both a rich man and a president. Knowing how he became what he is, it's difficult to imagine Bush cleansing the soiled hem of democracy, as his advertising promises he will do. He professes a compassionate conservatism, but his true ideology, the record suggests, is crony capitalism.

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Yep, that's your boy Super! About the ONLY thing he has changed is the "behavior" from SEX with whitehouse interns-----to SCREWIN THOUSANDS out of $$$$$---and US!!

Well you can have him!