Who Is Renting Howard Dean?

Published in Executive Intelligence Review, Vol. 30, Number 39, October 10, 2003.

Who Is Renting Howard Dean?

by Anton Chaitkin and Scott Thompson

Multi-billionaire speculator George Soros held a $1,000 per person private fundraiser for Howard Dean's Presidential campaign over the Sept. 27-28 [2003] weekend at Soros's mansion in Katonah, New York. After years of impoverishing Russia and Eastern European economies, looting raw materials, preying on currencies in the name of "philanthropy," Soros is now moving millions of dollars into the U.S. Democratic Party. Soros and his allies hope to control the policy of the potential Democratic replacements for the now-imploding Republican Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld Administration, to keep "open season" for predatory imperial finance. Soros has, for the moment, fixed on Howard Dean for a candidate. But how does Dean fit the bill for Soros's scheme of things?

The most direct answer would be that the former Governor of Vermont is not actually a Democrat. Yes, he has repeatedly run for office under that party's name; but if you ask someone attached to the Dean campaign about his politics, you will be told, not Democrat but "fiscal conservative"--as if that were a distinct party.

This year Dean began stating opposition to some of the war policies of the Bush Administration. But Dean postures to the right of President Bush, in demanding Bush "take a much harder line on Iran and Saudi Arabia." He throws in with the Cheney-Wolfowitz neo-conservatives setting up the Bush Administration's next war, by claiming that Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Libya are fuelling Palestinian and other terrorism worldwide.

- Safe for Wall Street -

Howard Brush Dean III is the wealthy heir of a long line of Wall Street Republicans. Coming out of Yale like his ancestors, Howard himself went to work in finance. But he got bored, became a medical doctor, got bored with that and went into politics. Now a Presidential candidate, Dean has simply rented himself to the available sources of support--with some surprising and disturbing results.

Dean cut Vermont's budget and made saving money for the state's Wall Street creditors his only significant objective. He presided over the disappearance of the state's machine-tool plants, and the decline of its dairy farming and lumbering. The destruction of productive industry and its necessarily high-paid union labor pleased Dean's Wall Street friends, so Vermont got a higher bond rating despite the gutted economy.

That Dean openly supported the mid-1990s Newt Gingrich-led Conservative Revolution is now scandalous within the Democratic Party. Dick Gephardt noted in their televised debate Sept. 23, 2003, that in 1995 when Democrats were fighting to keep Newt Gingrich from shutting down the government, Dean had sided with Gingrich, who wanted to cut Medicare $270 billion. Howard Dean actually told reporters back in 1995, that the way to balance the budget would be to "cut Social Security," raise the Social Security retirement age to 70, cut defense, Medicare, and veterans' pensions, while the states cut almost everything else. "It would be tough," Dean said, "but we could do it." As late as June 2003, Dean said he would "entertain" raising the Social Security eligibility age to 68.

His rivals have increasingly attacked Dean for these brutal prescriptions, and for his recent loud switches back and forth to curry favor from various voting constituencies. Wall Street is worried that it may lose its darling Dean. The Washington Post, reflecting the control of the paper by Lazard Fre@agres and Warren Buffett, in an Oct. 2 editorial warned Democrats not to revolt against austerity, and praised Howard Dean's long-term ugliness against seniors and the poor as expressing the "unhappy reality."

The history of Dean's own family money, and its curious intertwining with the Bush family, helps explain why Dean would be considered "safe" for imperial speculators like Soros.

His grandfather, the first Howard Brush Dean, graduated from Yale in 1918, and got into the Yale clique dominated by Averell Harriman. Grandpa Dean started out at the Guaranty Trust Company, the base for financier George Herbert Walker, who organized the W.A. Harriman & Co. private bank in November 1919 and became the Harriman bank's chief executive. Walker's daughter Nancy was a bridesmaid at the wedding of grandpa Dean on April 10, 1920. The following year, Nancy Walker took part in her sister Dorothy's wedding to Prescott Bush, grandfather of the current President.

Candidate Dean also boasts that President George W. Bush's mother's mother, Pauline Robinson, was a bridesmaid for Howard's mother's mother. This might make Dean a natural successor to Bush--if America had a royal family.

Yale University students, predominantly members of the Harriman/Bush secret Skull & Bones Society, organized Pan American Airways. Grandpa Dean was, though not a "Bonesman," socially close to this set, and a wealthy broker and a stock exchange governor; so he was made vice president and director of Pan Am from 1943-1950, while Prescott Bush was also a director of Pan Am.

Candidate Dean's father, Howard Dean, Jr., left Yale, worked for grandpa's Pan Am, and then expanded the family fortune as a stock broker.

- If Not FDR, Then the Sewer -

Addressing the Vermont state legislature in 1996, Dean acknowledged that "some workers are simply not earning as much as they used to," and that "lower salaries mean less revenue for state programs." His response was not to advocate Franklin Roosevelt's economic recovery policies to reverse the plunge into poverty, but to demand the immediate elimination of "any potential deficit by the end of this fiscal year."

When energy pirates and speculators are allowed to ruin living standards, they offer criminalization as an alternative to a productive existence. Howard Dean's new patron George Soros, for example, is the world's most important individual advocate of the legalization of the full scope of narcotics. Cooperating with the drug money launderers and promoters of narco-terrorist control over South American and Mexico, Soros has financed pro-dope propaganda and referendums in the United States, and paid for pro-dope organs such as the Drug Policy Alliance.

Dean himself is not really from Vermont, but from New York, Wall Street, and the elite Hampton beaches. And the startling nature of who it is that is renting Howard Dean, begins to be clear when considering his campaign apparatus in his home base.

Professional lobbyist Ethan Geto is the chairman of the Dean campaign for New York City and New York State. According to statements from sources to this news service, Geto, while associated with New York Attorney General Robert Abrams, promoted and protected NAMBLA, the North-American Man-Boy Love Association, an organization of pederasts and child abusers. While Geto represents himself as a leading homosexual and Gay Rights advocate, and Howard Dean as a friend of gays, the Gay Rights movement expelled NAMBLA from its ranks and harshly condemns pederasts as criminals.

Geto, who now manages all aspects of the Dean campaign in New York and is Dean's spokesman in the money center, had been the long-time political aide-de-camp to Robert Abrams. When Abrams became New York State Attorney General in 1979, he and Geto began a political witchhunt against psychiatrist Judianne Densen-Gerber, NAMBLA's main enemy and a tireless campaigner against pederasty and Satanic child abuse. Utilizing a media smear campaign together with criminal investigation, Abrams and Geto forced Densen-Gerber to resign from her anti-narcotics program and sought her financial ruin.

In 1987 Abrams, with Geto at his side, also launched civil and criminal actions against Lyndon LaRouche and his associates, activities which Judge Steven Crane, presiding over the resulting case, characterized in a published court decision on Feb. 16, 1995 as implicating a "conspiracy to lay low these defendants at any cost, both here and in Virginia."

At the time, Nathan Riley, Abrams media coordinator, told an investigator for LaRouche that "progressives and gays" in Abrams office were pressing for the prosecutions for purely political reasons--that is, to abort recent political successes by the LaRouche movement, which had won March 1986 Illinois primaries and placed a proposition requiring the application of standard public health measures in the treatment of AIDS on the California ballot. Subsequent investigations demonstrated that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the New York media salon of John Train--featuring Richard Mellon Scaife and other scions of the neo-conservative banking and intelligence establishment--played the major hand in sustaining Abrams' prosecution. Abrams received an award from the ADL for it.

- 'Billionaires' Grass-Roots Organization' -

The present attachment of the Dean campaign to the financiers' political money spigot reflects that same malicious dynamic.

Steven Grossman is national finance chairman for Howard Dean. Grossman is the former chairman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main lobby for the Israeli government. Grossman may be the most important activist for securing Israeli Likud-nik influence inside the Democratic Party, and was chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1997-1999.

Finance chairman Grossman is the linchpin for the whole Dean money outreach. The Northeastern States Finance Director is Emily Wurgaft--formerly an officer under Grossman at his National Jewish Democratic Council. Emily managed the recent affair at the Soros mansion, and her network overlaps heavily with Ethan Geto's. Meanwhile Aaron Holmes, a young staff member of Grossman's own losing 2002 campaign for Massachusetts governor, is now the chairman of the Dean campaign in California.

Grossman's AIPAC and Ethan Geto go way back together. In 1981, contributors to AIPAC formed a political action front group called Roundtable PAC, a money conduit for junk bond scamsters Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, gangster Meshulam Riklis (Ariel Sharon's personal sponsor), and the leaders of United Fruit/United Brands. Both Robert Abrams and Ethan Geto, instead of prosecuting these gentlemen, joined them in giving birth to the Roundtable PAC, which served as a seed crystal for the growth of a right-wing power axis spanning Israel and the United States.

Now George Soros has done a strategic redeployment out of Eastern Europe, and he and his friends are pouring funds into an attempt to control the U.S. Democratic Party. He has pledged an initial $10 million to "Americans Coming Together" (ACT), which aims at running the Democrats' campaign against Bush. Soros has apparently pledged more millions, if needed; while there are reports that he is cutting back on his estimated $300-450 million a year to the former "East Bloc" nations. Also, six plutocrats allied to Soros have already given another $12 million combined, and reports of the group's fund-raising ambition range from $75 million to the NewsMax estimate, $250 million. ACT would seem to be the oxymoron of a billionaire-backed "grassroots" organization.

George Soros's spokesman Michael Vachon told an inquiring journalist that Soros is at the moment "keenest for Dean." But Vachon hinted that other candidates might serve the speculator's purposes, should the odor around Dean's Democratic credentials grow too embarrassing.