Dec. 29th, 2003

sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
You might want to keep this in mind while you're reading about the cost effectiveness of measures to keep our food safe.
Protein Diet Craze, Thin Supply of Cattle Fatten Ranchers' Wallets

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 22, 2003; Page A01

DILLON, Mont. -- After years of having been seldom seen, local ranchers are stomping into the only jewelry store in this cow town. You name the bauble. Men with manure-crusted boots are buying it for their wives this Christmas season.

Ditto down at Dilmart Furniture. Carpets, sofas and large-screen TVs are riding off in pickups that usually haul heifers.

A more sizable stampede of spending is underway at Dillon Implement and the local Chevrolet dealership, where $85,000 tractors and $35,000 pickups are jumping out of the lots.

"There is a buzz in Dillon," said Ryan Gaasch, sales manager at Dillon Implement, where year-to-year tractor sales have doubled. "Business couldn't be better."

The buzz, echoing across cattle country from Montana to Texas, comes from what the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls the highest beef prices on record. Ranchers who have endured decades of declining consumer demand for beef -- as well as five punishing years of drought -- now find that what they are herding is just what the doctor ordered. That is, the late Robert C. Atkins, along with his many imitators in the low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet craze.

Dietary fashion, having long punished ranchers for their supposed role in making Americans fat, is handsomely rewarding them for their supposed role in making Americans skinny. Here on the mountain-ringed rangeland of southwest Montana, in the heart of the state's No. 1 beef-producing county, obesity is not an entirely discouraging word.

"That Atkins diet has really helped demand for beef," said Bill Garrison, 62, who, along with his two sons, raises cattle on 18,000 acres north of Dillon. He is also the immediate past president of the Montana Stockgrowers Association. "Prices are higher now than I thought I would ever see."

Compared with last fall, Garrison and other ranchers around Dillon received about $100 more for each calf they sold in November for delivery to feedlots in Nebraska and Kansas. That spells a $40,000 spike in income for the average local rancher, who sells about 400 calves in the fall. It also means that Dillon, a beef-dependent town of 3,752, is suddenly swimming in cash...
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
gmorning.

&c )
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
it is, the Washington Post tells us, good to be Neil Bush.
In April 1993, shortly after leaving the White House, George H.W. Bush flew to Kuwait, accompanied by his wife, his sons Marvin and Neil, and his former secretary of state, James Baker.

The ex-president received a hero's welcome, a medal from the emir and an honorary degree from the university. After he left, Baker and Neil Bush went to work, attempting to win contracts from the Kuwaiti government. Ultimately, Bush's efforts failed to bear fruit. But over the next decade, he frequently traveled to the Middle East, Europe and Asia to negotiate deals and raise capital for various businesses. In 2000 he made $1.3 million, according to his deposition testimony -- $642,500 of it paid as a commission for introducing an Asian investor to the owners of an American high-tech company.

During his travels, he met with several Arab princes and enjoyed a private dinner with Jiang Zemin, then China's president, who serenaded Bush with a military song.

"I probably have access to people who wouldn't meet with a development-stage company," Bush told an Associated Press reporter in 2002, "but I feel I'm held to a higher standard."

Neil's higher ethical standards
Picking through the wreckage, regulators from the federal Office of Thrift Supervision concluded in 1991 that Bush's deals with Good and Walters while serving on Silverado's board constituted "multiple conflicts of interest." Bush became a public symbol of the $500 billion savings and loan scandal. Protesters picketed his home and pasted mock wanted posters around Washington: "Jail Neil Bush."

Bush proclaimed his innocence, declaring at a news conference that "self-serving regulators" were persecuting him because he was the president's son. But when he appeared before the House Banking Committee in 1990, he admitted that some of his deals looked "a little fishy."

Ultimately, Bush paid $50,000 as his part of a federal lawsuit against Silverado and was reprimanded by the OTS. Good and Walters ended up declaring bankruptcy, and JNB, which had never found oil or made money, quietly perished.

Today, Bush maintains that he did nothing wrong.

"I happened to be one of hundreds of other American businessmen and women who served as an outside director on the board of a savings and loan institution that failed during the 1980s," he writes in an e-mail. "I regret that the institution's failure cost taxpayers so much money."

Neil's higher standard as an entrepreneur
The Silverado scandal killed Neil's dream of a political career. But, thanks to his father's friends, it had little effect on his business career.

Thomas "Lud" Ashley, an ex-congressman and bank lobbyist, "came to the rescue," Barbara Bush wrote in her memoirs, and raised money to pay Neil's legal bills.

"I'm a family friend," Ashley explains today, "and he was in real difficulty."

With Silverado and JNB both belly up, Bush started Apex Energy, a methane gas exploration company. He invested $3,000 of his own money and got $2.3 million from two companies run by his father's friend Louis Marx, heir to the Marx toy fortune.

Neil used Marx's money to pay himself a salary of $160,000, and he sold a Wyoming gas lease that he owned to Apex for $150,000. The lease proved worthless -- no methane there. In fact, Apex, like JNB, never found anything worth pumping.

After two years, Apex went broke. Bush had received more than $300,000 in salary but Marx got zip, and the Small Business Administration, which had backed Marx's investments, was left holding the empty bag.

An investigation by the House Small Business Committee found nothing "illegal or improper" but noted that a $2 million federally guaranteed investment to an applicant who risked only $3,000 of his own money seemed like "a very high leveraging of funds."

A few months after Apex crashed in 1991, Bush was rescued by another of his father's rich friends. Bill Daniels, a multimillionaire cable TV baron who raised $330,000 in 1987 for George H.W. Bush's presidential campaign, hired Neil to a $60,000 job at TransMedia Communications.

"Anyone who hires Neil Bush is going to get some heat," Daniels said at the time, "but somebody had to do it."

Neil's higher standard as applied to the american worker (Ignite! gets most of their money from Florida schools, where he is thought to have some influence)
For the last several years, Bush's main business interest has been Ignite!, the educational software company he co-founded in 1999. To fund Ignite!, Bush has raised $23 million from U.S. investors (including his parents), as well as businessmen from Taiwan, Japan, Kuwait, the British Virgin Islands and the United Arab Emirates, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Last year, Ignite! also entered into a partnership with a Mexican company, Grupo Carso Telecom. The partnership enabled Ignite! to lay off half of its 70 employees and outsource their jobs to Mexico.

"That's turned out to be great," says Ignite! President Ken Leonard.

Neil's higher standards as an educator
However, Ignite! has been attacked by other educators for dumbing down history. Among its controversial aspects is a lesson that depicts the Seminole Wars in a cartoon football game -- "the Jacksons vs. the Seminoles" -- the animated Indians smashing helmets with animated white settlers. The Constitutional Convention is taught in a rap song:

It was 55 delegates from 12 states

Took one hot Philadelphia summer to create

A perfect document for their imperfect times

Franklin, Madison, Washington -- a lot of the cats

Who used to be in the Continental Congress way back.

Ignite! is working well, Bush wrote in an e-mail: "Teachers and students have given anecdotal feedback that confirms the powerful impact our program is having on student achievement, student focus and attitudes, and teacher success in reaching all of their students."

But at Whitney reviews were less laudatory. "The kids felt pretty strongly that what this was about was lowering the bar," says Humes.

Humes wasn't impressed, either. "There was a lot of rhyming and games," he says. "It reminded me of what my son uses -- but he's in kindergarten."

When Bush spoke at Whitney, several students began arguing with him.

"He was very surprised," Humes recalls. "You had to see the look on his face when one young woman got up and said she liked calculus. He said it was useless. This is the branch of mathematics that makes space travel possible, and he said it was useless."

Neil's higher standards as a business consultant
In 2002, for instance, Bush signed a consulting contract with Grace Semiconductor -- a Shanghai-based company managed in part by the son of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin. Bush's contractual duties consist solely of attending board meetings and discussing "business strategies." For this, he is to be paid $2 million in company stock over five years, plus $10,000 for every board meeting he attends.

"Now, you have absolutely no educational background in semiconductors, do you Mr. Bush?" Brown asked.

"That's correct," Bush responded.

Meanwhile, back home in Texas, Bush serves as co-chairman of a company called Crest Investment. Crest, he revealed in the deposition, pays him $60,000 a year to provide "miscellaneous consulting services."

"Such as?" Brown asked.

"Such as answering phone calls when Jamal Daniel, the other co-chairman, called and asked for advice," Bush replied.

Neil's higher standards as an aspiring politician
During his high-rolling days in Denver, Neil had told reporters that he was thinking of running for Congress. At home, he spoke with his brothers about running for governor.

"They'd talk about how GW was going to run for governor of Texas and Jeb would run for governor of Florida and Neil would run for governor of Colorado," recalls Douglas Wead, a Bush family friend who served as a special assistant in the first Bush White House. "The family would have bet on Jeb, but if you just observed their personalities, you'd say Neil."

Neil was the most charming of the Bush brothers, Wead says. "He's relaxed, he's funny, he's a better speaker than anybody in the family. . . . He could easily have been a congressman."

Neil's higher standards as a Bush
"I have never used my family name to 'cash-in,' " Bush wrote by e-mail. "Unfortunately, such ridiculous charges come with the territory of coming from a famous and public family."

Neil's higher standard as a family man ("Seriously," he writes via e-mail, "I'm too busy being a good father and promoting Ignite! to worry about [adultery and shacking up with prostitutes in asian hotel rooms]")
Like: How is Neil Bush holding up under the relentless onslaught of embarrassing publicity? How is the son of one president and the brother of another doing these days?

Just fine, thank you, his friends say.

"He's very optimistic and he's got very thick skin," says Spalding. "He's a very happy guy and he's in a great relationship, and he says, 'This will all blow over.' "

"He has real pluck about him," says Lud Ashley. "He keeps his chin up."

These days Bush divides his time between Texas -- home of his children and Ignite! -- and Paris, where Maria Andrews is living so her children can learn French.

"Neil is very much in love," says Rex John, a Houston PR man who is the godfather of Bush's daughter Lauren. "As his friend, I just really enjoy seeing him so happy because for so many years he was not happy."

And their family friends think he would have made a better public servant than the other two.

Think on that.

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