And where are George Bush's kids?

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Barbara Putnam, Kwame M.A. Somburu, Sylvia Weinstein.

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The American parents of some 300,000 women and men know where their children will be this Christmas. They will be 6000 miles away in the desert of the Middle East waiting for George to give the go ahead to murder women, men, and children of Iraq and in the process kill thousands of American troops. No one expects this war to be an easy one.

George tells us that Saddam Hussein must be taught a lesson for his invasion of Kuwait. George says he just doesn't like invasions.

But on Dec. 20, 1989, George invaded Panama, killing thousands of innocent civilians in his phony "war on drugs." Previous to that he and Reagan invaded Grenada to "protect American students." For years he armed Contra thugs and caused the death and destruction of tens of thousands of Nicaraguan people-mostly unarmed peasants and children. All in the name of "democracy and the American way of life."

In El Salvador he and his predecessors have armed and supported a military junta which has targeted workers, peasants, and their children, as well as nuns and priests. There is not a country in Latin America which does not bear the imprint of U.S. whips on the backs of the poor and improvished. All for the "American way of life"that is, to preserve the American way of life for the rich of this country, certainly not the life of American working people.

Shifting excuses

George Bush has come up with a lot of excuses for his actions in the Middle East. After he tried "the American way of life" excuse, he shifted to "stop Hussein, the second Hitler." Then he shifted to the "saving our jobs" excuse.

(I'm sure that this one was designed to arouse the hopes of unemployed "hard hats" The president desperately needs a home team to beat up on the antiwar sentiment that is sweeping this country-like they had at the beginning of the ACTION Editor: ALAN BENJAMIN Asst. Editors: MICHAEL SCHREIBER Staff: Alex Chis, Paul Colvin, May May Gong, Malik Business Manager: DAVID KIRSCHNER Second-class postage is paid at San Francisco, Calif.

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By Vietnam war. Not this time Georgie!

In the Nov. 28 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, it was announced that the National Organization for Women (an organization with 300,000 members) has demanded the "immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Persian Gulf!" They know whose children will be dying if a shooting war breaks out.

Along with NOW a broad coalition of Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic leaders have also opposed the use of military force in the Persian Gulf, citing the fact that if a shooting war should develop, "certainly more civilians would be killed than combatants. "9 It will not be the children of the rich who will be dying on some hot and sandy desert. Which takes me to what George and Barbara's sons have been doing to defend "our" way of life. Well, they're doing just fine, according to an article in the Nov. 12 issue of The Nation.

«Silverado Kid"

You remember Neil Bush-the "Silverado Kid" of the Silverado more than $4 million to make good the loan.

Jeb and his partner, Armando Codina, negotiated a settlement with the regulators in which they repaid $505,000 and retained control of their office building, while passing on to the government a $4.6 million second mortgage. Now, maybe that's the "jobs" that "bigdaddy Bush" is talking about fighting for in Iraq.

Texas oil profits

And George Bush, Jr? He really lucked out. He is the eldest son of the president. He is also the director, a large stockholder, and the $120,000-a-year consultant to a Texas oil company whose potentially lucrative drilling rights in the Persian Gulf are being protected by THROUGH.

BY AUTH FOR THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER American troops.

By mere chance, George Jr.'s firm is the Harken Energy Corporation of Dallas, which has been granted the exclusive right to explore, produce, and market almost all of Bahrain's oil and gas by Saudi Arabia's royal family. (Bahrain is a small island nation just off the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia.) But I don't think the Bahrain people got to vote on this.

Among the three top stockholders in Harken is a Swiss company controlled by South African businessman, Anton Rupert, and an unnamed Saudi invester who holds 17 percent of the common stock. The first three wells will be drilled by Bass Enterprise Production Company of Fi. Worth, Texas. They recently received $2 billion in federal assistance to buy out the American Savings and Loan of California.

Mission to Nicaragua

We should take a look at the exploits of another of Bush's sons, Marvin Bush. (Are George's daughters getting equal opportunity in the rip-off business?) Marvin was sent on a mission last May 15 to Nicaragua. He handed a consignment of medicines to Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, spiritual father of the Contras and later of the Chamorro coalition.

It was reported by Ernesto Salmeron, Chamorro's own Minister of Health, that 1300 children had died in the first eight months of this year from preventable diseases. This delivery of medicine to save lives would seem to be a good thing; no?

But according to Alberto Sequeira, who works for Cofarma, the Chamorro government's pharmaceutical agency, fully 75 percent of the medicines were either out of date or second-hand. Sequeira told of opening containers which contained used urine receptacles. When questioned about this, Marvin Bush refused to discuss the matter and gave an untraceable outfit in Hartford, Conn., as the financier of the trip.

This is the real reason U.S. troops are in the Middle East: to preserve the "American way of life" for the likes of Neil, Jeb, George Jr. and Marvin Bush.

THEY ARE NOT WORTH DYING FOR!

Black people are one-and-a-half times more likely to die than whites of the same age, and infant mortality among Blacks is twice that of whites. Last year, for the fourth year in a row, Black life expectancy went down.

What's the answer to America's crisis of disease and death? President

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