In
1985, Jeb lobbied the federal government on behalf of Miami HMO owner
Miguel Recarey to increase Recarey?s Medicare business ultimately to a
total of $1 billion. The
following year, Jeb received $75,000 from Recarey.
Recarey, who had longstanding business ties to the late Florida
Mafia boss Santos Trafficante, subsequently fled the U.S. under
indictment, suspected of up to $100 million in Medicare fraud
One of Jeb Bush's crime family connections goes back to 1984 when Jeb Bush began a
close association with Camilo Padreda, a former intelligence officer
with the Batista dictatorship overthrown by Fidel Castro. Jeb Bush was
then the chairman of the Dade county Republican party and Padreda its
finance chairman. Padreda had earlier been indicted on a $500,000 (Ј320,000)
embezzlement charge along with a fellow exile, Hernandez Cartaya, but
the charges were dropped, reportedly after the CIA stated that Cartaya
had worked for them. Padreda later pleaded guilty to defrauding the
housing and urban development department of millions of dollars during
the 1980s. The president's younger brother was also on the payroll in
the 80s of the prominent Cuban exile Miguel Recarey, who had earlier
assisted the CIA in attempts to assassinate President Castro. Recarey,
who ran International Medical Centers (IMC), employed Jeb Bush as a real
estate consultant and paid him a $75,000 fee for finding the company a
new location, although the move never took place, which raised questions
at the time. Jeb Bush did, however, lobby the Reagan/Bush administration
vigorously and successfully on behalf of Recarey and IMC. In 1985, Jeb
Bush acted as a conduit on behalf of supporters of the Nicaraguan
contras with his father, then the vice-president, and helped arrange for
IMC to provide free medical treatment for the contras. Recarey was later
charged with massive medicare fraud but fled the US before his trial and
is now a fugitive.
Jeb is a typical Bush:
Just as Ken Lay hid Enron's fiscal mismanagement from
employees and investors, it seems our Jeb will go to any lengths to
mislead Floridians about how the state's economy has gone from surpluses
to deficits on his watch.
When Jeb Bush took the reigns of power nearly four
years ago he spoke of lofty goals such as creating jobs, more efficient
government and a world-class education system. Now, near the end of his
term, we are back to deficit spending; Florida's school system is
at the bottom of the national pile and government graft has become of
the order of the day.
After promising the most ethical administration in
history, Gov. Bush has overseen corruption and nepotism run amok in his
administration. It is now estimated that nearly 40 percent of Florida's
$48 billion dollar state budget gets kicked back in the form of
contracts with private companies - many of which employ former Bush
staffers.
The "accountability governor" has undercut
the oversight and accountability measures in our state contracts and
bidding process. He has even gone so far as to cut the funding for the
state auditor general and the Office of Program Policy Analysis and
Government Accountability.
Gov. Bush is quick to pass the buck, claiming
terrorists are to blame for our budget woes in spite of the fact that a
revenue estimating conference demonstrated his tax cuts for Florida's
wealthiest residents dug us into a $672 million hole well before 9/11.
Bush recently stuffed his "terrorism budget"
with so many turkeys that even the Republican chair of the Senate Public
Security Committee said people would "laugh in our faces" if
we had approved some of the governor's requests - such as a quarter of a
million dollars for a satellite tracking system for cows and a half a
million dollar kickback to a special interest group to print pamphlets
on family preparedness.
The Chair of the Southeast Florida Security Task Force
probably would have found these requests less than amusing. He has had
to reassign patrols at Florida ports because Gov. Bush also cut National
Guard funding in spite of Florida remaining under a heightened
"state of alert."
I suppose it's somehow fitting that while Florida's
retirement system lost more than any other state in the Enron debacle,
Jeb personally benefited from his Enron stock. In the end, Jeb Bush has
used Florida to turn a profit for his friends at the expense of the
states future, just as Ken Lay used the employees and investors at
Enron. In four short years, Florida has become the Enron of state
governments and Jeb Bush is their very own Ken Lay.
Jeb Bush was in the perfect position to ensure the rise
to prominence of his fellow imperialists.
2000 election: Entire swaths of the scrub lists were
either simple cases of mistaken identity, not felons, or had their
voting rights restored one of several ways. The list included people
whose felonies were committed in 2007. People who had committed
misdemeanors. People who were unfortunate enough to have the same first
four letters of both first and last name and birthdate as a felon.
Florida paid $4M for this list, and instructed DBT to make the felon
matching so fuzzy, casting such a wide net - the results had almost no
statistical value whatsoever. Coincidentally, many FL counties made no
effort whatsoever to contact the purged voters, who subsequently had no
knowledge to contest it until election day, by then too late. Florida
Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State Katherine Harris, created a
phony list of convicted felons--57,700 to be exact--to "scrub"
thousands of innocent people from the state's voter rolls. Of the
thousands who ultimately lost their vote through this scrub of voters,
80% were African-American, mostly Democratic Party voters. Had they
voted, the course of history would have changed. Instead, however,
Harris declared Bush the victor by only 537 votes.
