From the Washington Post, July 30, 1999: "Bush Name Helps Fuel Oil Dealings":
Thanks to his and his family's ties to wealthy investors around the country, including prominent Republicans, Bush was repeatedly able to raise money to invest in oil drilling, especially when prices were booming and tax breaks were inviting in the late 1970s. But connections could not help with the tricky business of picking profitable holes to drill, and Bush never made a big score.In fact, Bush lost money for most of his well-connected investors. At the same time, the management fees and other expenses he collected from them kept him in business and enabled him to buy oil reserves for his company's own account, including the reserves that eventually attracted Harken's attention.
Three times during his years in Midland, Bush was saved from financial trouble or stagnation by the appearance of new partners or financial angels who gave him a fresh start. One was a Princeton classmate and friend of James A. Baker III, who was to serve as his father's secretary of state; another was a fellow Yale man who shared Bush's love for baseball.
The third was Harken, which was to save Bush from humiliating failure but also create a target for later criticism. Reporters would scrutinize the deal as early as 1990. Led by then-Texas Gov. Ann Richards, Bush's opponent in the 1994 gubernatorial election, his political critics have asked whether Harken used Bush's name to obtain oil business. Even now, questions linger about a 1990 sale of Harken stock by Bush that was the subject of a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
So basically, George has always had a knack for 1) raising money, and 2) creating tax breaks for the wealthy. No wonder he expects the U.N. and the American people to bail him out of the mess he and his cronies made in Iraq - to him, it's just business as usual.
Unfortunately for us all, one element of the Bush business model appears to have changed since then:
Bush said he made the move [i.e., sold Harken stock] because he wanted to pay off a $500,000 bank loan he had obtained in 1989 to buy his slice of the Texas Rangers. "I didn't need to pay it off," he said in an interview. "I did it because I just don't like to carry debt."
