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McGraw Family (Owners of S & P) are Longtime Intimates of the Bush Family

COMMENT: Stan­dard and Poor’s is owned by pub­lish­ing giant McGraw-Hill [1]. In the wake of S & P’s down­grade of U.S. bonds’ rat­ing from AAA (for the first time in his­to­ry), it comes as no great sur­prise that the McGraw fam­i­ly are long time asso­ciates of the “Fam­i­ly of Secrets.” [2]

This mul­ti-gen­er­a­tional asso­ci­a­tion goes back to the 1930’s, when Joseph and Per­me­lia Pry­or Reed [3] (daugh­ter of Bush/Walker asso­ciate   Samuel Pry­or [4]), estab­lished Jupiter Island as a play­ground for the North­east­ern pow­er elite.

McGraw-Hill chief Deven Shar­ma [5] worked for Dress­er Indus­tries, now a divi­sion of Hal­libur­ton and a long time jew­el in the Bush/Harriman cor­po­rate tiara. Dress­er was George H.W. Bush’s first real job [6] after his grad­u­a­tion from Yale.

One must won­der, also, who was the “mys­tery investor” [7] who stood to make the bet­ter part of a $bil­lion on the down­grade (at least accord­ing to media pro­jec­tions before the S & P down­grade)?

The SEC is inves­ti­gat­ing [8] the mat­ter.  It remains to be seen if any­thing sub­stan­tive emerges from the inves­ti­ga­tion.

Sim­i­lar prof­i­teer­ing [9] took place upon the occa­sions of the JFK assas­si­na­tion and 9/11 [10]. The Bush milieu was deeply involved in the events of 11/22/1963 [11] and 9/11/2001 [12].

“Read­ing Between the Lines” by Stephen Met­calf; The Nation; 1/10/2002. [13]

EXCERPT: . . . . While crit­ics of the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion’s ener­gy poli­cies have point­ed repeat­ed­ly to its inti­ma­cy with the oil and gas industry–specifically the now-implod­ing Enron–few edu­ca­tion crit­ics have not­ed the Admin­is­tra­tion’s cozy rela­tion­ship with McGraw-Hill. At its heart lies the three-gen­er­a­tion social min­gling between the McGraw and Bush fam­i­lies. The McGraws are old Bush friends, dat­ing back to the 1930s, when Joseph and Per­me­lia Pry­or Reed began to estab­lish Jupiter Island, a bar­ri­er island off the coast of Flori­da, as a haven for the North­east wealthy. The island’s orig­i­nal ros­ter of socialite vaca­tion­ers reads like a who’s who of Amer­i­can indus­try, finance and gov­ern­ment: the Meads, the Mel­lons, the Paysons, the Whit­neys, the Lovetts, the Harrimans–and Prescott Bush and James McGraw Jr. The gen­er­a­tions of the two fam­i­lies par­al­lel each oth­er close­ly in age: the patri­archs Prescott and James Jr., son George and nephew Harold Jr., and grand­son George W. and grand­nephew Harold III, who now runs the fam­i­ly pub­lish­ing empire.

The amount of cross-pol­li­na­tion and mutu­al admi­ra­tion between the Admin­is­tra­tion and that empire is strik­ing: Harold McGraw Jr. sits on the nation­al grant advi­so­ry and found­ing board of the Bar­bara Bush Foun­da­tion for Fam­i­ly Lit­er­a­cy. McGraw in turn received the high­est lit­er­a­cy award from Pres­i­dent Bush in the ear­ly 1990s, for his con­tri­bu­tions to the cause of lit­er­a­cy. The McGraw Foun­da­tion award­ed cur­rent Bush Edu­ca­tion Sec­re­tary Rod Paige its high­est edu­ca­tor’s award while Paige was Hous­ton’s school chief; Paige, in turn, was the keynote speak­er at McGraw-Hill’s “gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tives” con­fer­ence last spring. Harold McGraw III was select­ed as a mem­ber of Pres­i­dent George W. Bush’s tran­si­tion advi­so­ry team, along with McGraw-Hill board mem­ber Edward Rust Jr., the CEO of State Farm and an active mem­ber of the Busi­ness Round­table on edu­ca­tion­al issues. An ex-chief of staff for Bar­bara Bush is return­ing to work for Lau­ra Bush in the White House–after a stint with McGraw-Hill as a media rela­tions exec­u­tive. John Negro­ponte left his posi­tion as McGraw-Hill’s exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent for glob­al mar­kets to become Bush’s ambas­sador to the Unit­ed Nations.  . . .