Bush Family Fortunes: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

Reporter Greg Palast on the trail of the Bush family, from Florida election finagling, to the Saudi connection, to the Bush team’s spiking the FBI investigation of the bin Laden family and the secret State Department plans for post-war Iraq.

The film examines various aspects of the Presidency of George W. Bush, including the 2000 US Presidential election and the Iraq War, is adapted from the 2003 BBC production Bush Family Fortunes and based on the 2002 book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Palast.

Palast’s investigation into the Bush family fortunes for his column in The Observer led him to uncover a connection to a company called ChoicePoint. In an October 2008 interview Palast said that before the 2000 Election ChoicePoint “was purging the voter rolls of Florida under a contract with a lady named Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State. They won a contract, a bid contract with the state, with the highest bid.”

After subsequently noticing a large proportion of African-American voters were claiming their names had disappeared from voter rolls in Florida in the 2000 election, Palast launched a full-scale investigation into election fraud.

The Bush family is a prominent American family. Along with many members who have been successful bankers and businessmen, across three generations the family includes two U.S. Senators, one Supreme Court Justice, two Governors and two Presidents (one of the two presidents also served as Vice President). George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara Pierce Bush have been married for 66 years, holding the record for the longest-married presidential couple. Peter Schweizer, author of a biography of the family, has described the Bushes as “the most successful political dynasty in American history”.