Friday, June 03, 2005

Bush in Waiting: Thuggery Florida Style

Global Eye
Code Red
By Chris Floyd
June 3, 2005




http://context.themoscowtimes.com/
photos/large/2005_06/2005_06_03/floyd_2.jpg




Last month, we reported here about Jeb Bush's courtroom efforts to crush the life of an abused, poverty-stricken 6-year-old girl in his gubernatorial satrapy of Florida. Later, against all odds, a jury of ordinary citizens thwarted the dynast's brutal will. But as befits a scion of the ruling family, Bush is now brushing aside this interference from the rabble and pressing ahead with his plans to strip the little girl of all public assistance.

Bush's minions went to court earlier this year in a bid to cut off medical aid to Marissa Amora, who, at the age of 2, had been abandoned by Jeb's "Department of Children and Families" despite overwhelming evidence of horrific past abuse -- and the imminent danger of more to come. More came. Within weeks, she was beaten almost to death; then Jeb's agents tried to stop her medical treatment and let her die. She survived their malign intervention and is now thriving with a new family -- but still suffers from permanent, catastrophic damage caused by the entirely predictable beating she received after the DCF cast her aside.

But late last month, the jury in the case issued a stern rebuke to these perverted Bush Family values: They awarded Marissa $35 million in damages for institutional neglect and for her future medical care, with the DCF ordered to pay the bulk of the costs. So, a happy ending, right?

Don't be silly -- we're dealing with the Bush-Walker gang here. And for almost 100 years, from their ammo-dealing days in World War I to their heavy investments in Nazi Germany to their profitable hook-ups with Arab oil tyrants to their back-door buttressing of Saddam Hussein to their present-day bonanza of blood money gushing from the slaughter in Iraq, this clan of wingtipped thugs has always built its fortune on the backs -- and the bones -- of the poor. And no self-respecting Bush clansman would ever let some uppity little black girl and her foster mother make him look bad, no matter how egregious his failures.

Jeb had three choices after the verdict. He could have simply accepted responsibility for his agency's horrible neglect and paid the full amount. Or he could have accepted responsibility but asked that the large award be reduced, as often happens in such cases, which would still leave Marissa with enough money to afford the extensive and costly health care she will need for the rest of her life. The first course would have been just and honorable; the second, pragmatic yet not inherently cruel.

But honor, justice and responsibility have no place in the Bush clan's ruthless operations. So Jeb picked the third choice, the "nuclear option." He asked an appeals court to throw out the entire award -- even the damages levied against other, non-state parties in the case -- leaving Marissa with absolutely nothing, The Palm Beach Post reports.

Filing for dismissal, Bush's lawyers blasted the jury for being too stupid to process the complex documentation of the case and acting instead on "prejudice and sympathy." While any "prejudice" in the case would seem to lie with the lily-white governor's attempt to grind a black child under his heel, it's true that the jury probably did have some measure of sympathy for a 6-year-old girl who will have to be kept alive through a feeding tube for the rest of her days because Bush's bureaucrats failed to protect her from well-documented abuse.

But sympathy is for "girlie-men" in the demented moral universe of the Bushist faction. Or as one of the Bush Family's old business partners once said, just before he launched an unprovoked war of aggression against Poland based on lies, propaganda and manipulated intelligence about a bogus threat to the nation: "Close your hearts to pity. The stronger man is right. Be steeled against all signs of compassion." Power is everything, people are nothing, and the weakest go to the wall -- that's the Kennebunkport Code.

But of course you have to dress up your blood-and-iron philosophy with the prevailing pieties of the day if you want to snow the hoi polloi and weasel your way into power. And Jeb is one of the great whited sepulchres of our time, a master of the hypocritical arts, ever eager to hog the nearest camera and blubber teary platitudes about the "culture of life" -- even as he feverishly signs death warrants in an apparent bid to surpass his older brother's record as the most bloodthirsty executioner in modern U.S. history. If Marissa were, say, a nice white woman in a vegetative state whose case had been taken up by powerful interest groups and ballyhooed into a national media carnival, then doubtless Jeb would even now be dabbing his eyes as he knelt for a photo-op at her bedside.

But because Marissa is "nobody" -- one of the poor, the powerless, the "insulted and injured," in Dostoevsky's phrase -- she can be flushed down the toilet and no one will notice. For the aim of Bush's legal maneuvering is clear: He wants to "run out the clock" on Marissa, litigating the case quite literally to death, until her family sinks beneath the overwhelming financial and physical burden of keeping her alive and her makeshift, overstrained support system eventually suffers the inevitable breakdown.

It's a despicable strategy, a wicked strategy, but entirely in keeping with the Ruling Family's ethos, which has given the world a terror-spawning quagmire of murder and atrocity in Iraq -- 10,000 Marissa Amoras, dead, mangled, orphaned, abandoned, abused, forgotten.

And for what? For power. For money. For the Code.



Annotations



DCF Asks Judge to Toss $35 Million Award for Girl
Palm Beach Post, May 28, 2005

DCF Sought to Let Abused Girl Die
Palm Beach Post, May 8, 2005

How Jeb Bush Stole the 2000 Election for His Brother
Harpers, March 2002

ChoicePoint [vote purging corporation]
DKosopedia, June 2, 2004

1 Million Black Votes Didn't Count in 2000 Election
San Francisco Chronicle, June 20, 2004

Justice in Jebworld
Empire Burlesque, May 18, 2005

Willie's Story [Bush Justice, Texas-Style]
Salon.com, May 13, 2005

Gitmo Detainees Say They Were Sold
Associated Press, May 31, 2005

GuantАnamo and beyond:
The Continuing Pursuit of Unchecked Executive Power
Amnesty International, May 13, 2005

Bush Secret Effort Helped Iraq Build Its War Machine
Los Angeles Times, March 23, 1992

Iraqgate: Confession and Coverup
Consortiumnews.com, May/June 1995

Iraqgate
Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 1993

US Was a Key Supplier to Saddam
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Sept. 24, 2002

US Dual-Use Exports to Iraq
US Senate Committee on Banking,, May 25, 1994

US WMD-Related Exports to Iraq
US Senate Banking Committee, Oct. 27, 1992

Liberated Kuwait: Rape, Reprisal and Repression
San Francisco Bay Guardian, Sept. 9, 1992

Bush Family Machinations
SF Indymedia, Nov. 15, 2001

Why the Gulf War was not in the National Interest
The Atlantic Monthly, July 1991,

The Hidden History of America's War on Iraq
Synthesis/Regeneration, Winter 2003

Influence and Bailouts a Business Tradition in Bush Family
St. Petersburg Times, Oct. 29, 2000

From Texas to Abu Ghraib:
The Bush Legacy of Prisoner Abuse
Common Dreams, May 10, 2004

The Bush Dynasty's Dark Magic
Salon.com, Jan. 27, 2004

Heir to the Holocaust:
Prescott Bush, $1.5 Million and Auschwitz
Clamor Magazine, May/June 2002

Bin Laden Money Flow Leads to Midland, Texas
In These Times, October 2001

Lying: A Bush Family Value
Consortiumnews.com, July 19, 2003

Bush and the Nazis
Newsweek Poland, May 29, 2003

Bush-Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951:
Federal Documents
New Hampshire Gazette, Nov. 7, 2003

Sun Myung Moon, North Korea and the Bushes
Consortiumnews.com, Oct. 11, 2000

The Bush Family Oligarchy
Consortiumnews.com, Aug. 14, 2000

George H.W. Bush, the CIA and
a Case of State Terrorism
Consortiumnews.com, Sept. 23, 2000

All in the Profiteering First Family
Prince George's Journal, Feb. 23, 2004

American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune,
and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush
Kevin Phillips, Viking Press, 2004

The Family That Preys Together
Covert Action Quarterly, Summer 1992

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