Neil claims to have 30 years in the energy industry, though at least 10 people from the Texas oil patch I spoke with said they had never heard of him playing any notable role in the energy business. Of the former first sibling, one international oil executive and consultant said, “I can’t imagine anything he could bring to the table.”

Yet Bush, who declined comment for this story, seems to have no trouble staying busy and prosperous. Chinese firms hire him to try to open doors in Africa, and U.S. companies retain him to do the same in Central Asia. Neil is also the founder and CEO of a number of small energy companies — it’s not clear exactly what they do or if he has financial backers — and lives a life of ease and comfort in Houston, where he resides with his second wife in a luxury condo and regularly graces the social pages.

He travels far in search of deals. As the chairman of Houston-based TX Oil, Neil met with Turkmenistan’s crackpot Stalinist dictator, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, in an effort to gain offshore oil concessions in the Caspian Sea. The tightly controlled state media claimed that he brought a letter from former President George H.W. Bush wishing “sound health and successes” to Berdymukhammedov, and thanking him for inviting Neil “to your beautiful country and for receiving him personally despite your heavy work load.”

In November 2010, Neil returned to the country for the Turkmenistan International Oil and Gas Conference, and TX Oil hosted the event’s closing cocktail party. “The oil business is in the Bush family bloodline,” he declared, according to an account in an energy industry publication, Nefte Compass.

TX Oil is still reportedly in the running for Turkmen concessions, alongside brand name competitors like Chevron and ConocoPhillips. Not everyone seems happy about Bush’s potential involvement. “It is the eastern tradition to receive all guests with open arms,” said a story in News Central Asia. “However, as independent observers we would recommend that the government of Turkmenistan should consider carefully before committing to any proposals brought by Neil Bush. For one thing, [his company] is a virtually unknown entity … On top of that, he has a history of questionable business practices.”

Indeed, he does. Neil first distinguished himself when the Silverado Savings and Loan of Denver went belly up in 1988 at a time when his father was finishing a second term as Ronald Reagan’s vice president. While serving on the S & L’s board of directors, Neil voted to approve $100 million in loans to two of his business partners — he somehow neglected to mention the relationships to fellow board members — who both subsequently went bankrupt. This adventure in socialized capitalism cost U.S. taxpayers $1.3 billion.

One of the loan recipients was JNB International, an energy exploration company Neil founded with $100 out of his own pocket, and somewhat larger sums from two Denver real estate moguls. “Tell him Neil Bush called,” he reportedly told a secretary when leaving a message for a Denver oilman during this period. “You know, the vice president’s son.”

The family safety net spared Neil from the full consequences of his misdeeds. In regard to Silverado, federal investigators found “breaches of his fiduciary duties involving multiple conflicts of interest.” The younger Bush was banned from banking and ordered to pay a $50,000 fine at a civil trial, but a Republican fundraiser held on his behalf helped ease the sting of settling that debt.

Neil went on to found a gas-exploration company called Apex Energy with $2.3 million from Bush-family friend Louis Marx Jr. Neil, who put up $3,000 of his money, received $300,000 in salary over the next two years, at which point Apex went broke. Little gas was ever found.

Next up came a brief stint at TransMedia Communications, owned by a cable TV baron who had raised more than $300,000 for George H.W. Bush. Neil’s annual pay was $60,000 and his job description was daunting: “learn the business.” In 1993, two years after the conclusion of the first Gulf War, the emir of Kuwait flew Bush Sr. over on his private plane for a ceremony honoring him for leading the coalition that evicted Saddam Hussein. Neil and former Secretary of State James Baker traveled along to try to arrange a power plant deal for Enron, which never happened.

The post-Silverado years proved dark for Neil, so it was fortunate that another family friend, Jamal Daniel, stepped in to help out. A Syrian-American fixer with substantial interests in the international energy business and beyond, Daniel has close ties to the ruling families in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

Daniel, who lives in Houston, was a major donor to the presidential campaigns of both Bush Sr. and Bush Jr., and to the latter’s 1994 Texas gubernatorial campaign. In 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, he and other Bush administration cronies set up New Bridge Strategies LLC to advise companies seeking business in post-Saddam Iraq. The consulting firm didn’t work out so well — probably because few businesses cared to invest in war-torn Iraq — though the Paris-based newsletter Intelligence Online reported in June that Daniel had invested in an oil deal in Iraqi Kurdistan, so the invasion wasn’t a total loss for him. (There is no indication that Neil had any role in the investment.)

Daniel treats Neil like next of kin. Over the years, he has paid for Neil’s family to take a trip to Disneyland Paris and bought Neil and his wife, Sharon, a $380,000 cottage in Maine. Neil also married his second wife, Maria, at Daniel’s Houston mansion.

In return, Neil has occasionally exerted himself. Back in the late-1990s, Daniel made Neil co-chairman of Crest Investment Corporation and paid him $60,000 annually for a few hours of work per week. Separately, Daniel and other Bush Family Friends financially backed Neil’s education company, Ignite! Much of the firm’s business was obtained through sole-source contracts from school districts in Texas. In 2006, his mother donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund with specific instructions that it be earmarked to buy Ignite! products for local schools that took in hurricane evacuees.

Yet for all the handouts from the Bush family network, Neil’s ventures still failed to generate much profit. His famously nasty 2003 divorce proceedings with Sharon revealed that he was essentially broke. At the time, a well-placed source told me, he drove a minivan owned by his mother. The proceedings also revealed that on at least three business trips to Asia, women Neil didn’t know came into his hotel room unbidden and had sex with him. The practice, he acknowledged, seemed “very unusual.”

“You don’t think he was picked to be part of all of those business deals because he was so brilliant, do you?” Marshall Davis Brown, Sharon Bush’s attorney, asked when I met him at his Houston office. “He had a big hat but no horse.”

Neil has received relatively little press attention since his divorce, though he has been living well. In February 2005, Mexican magnate Jaime Camil hosted a 50th birthday party for Neil at his estate in Acapulco. The Houston Chronicle reported that two dozen Houstonians flew down for the festivities. “Saturday night, the host-with-the-most pulled out the stops at his expansive villa,” wrote the newspaper’s society columnist. “A lavish fireworks display topped off a night that included a 16-piece mariachi band, dancers from Mexico City’s Ballet Folklorico and gourmet fare.”

The truth is, failure has been very good to Neil. He currently resides in a $1.6 million, six-bedroom, five-bathroom condominium located near Houston’s upscale West Oaks Mall. He has in recent years set up at least 10 firms in Houston and Austin, according to incorporation records filed with the Texas secretary of state’s office. His companies have generic names like GCC Source Point, Global XS2, BTZ Holdings and ATX Oil, and it’s hard to find out much about them since they are registered as limited liability companies (and hence little public disclosure is required), mostly don’t have websites and almost never turn up in news accounts. If he has consummated any deals through these firms, they were probably not big.

One of Neil’s firms is registered at an address that doesn’t exist and several are registered at his condo, including a firm called Nexus Energy, which actually operates from (or at least has an office at) an oil firm headed by his current wife’s ex-husband, Robert Andrews. Neil established Nexus in late 2008 “to pursue business opportunities both overseas and in the United States,” according to a corporate profile it has distributed. “[Neil has] cultivated many relationships among private business people and large energy related enterprises in Asia and the Middle East. Nexus seeks to leverage these relationships to act on behalf of a client or partner company.” In November 2009, Neil represented Nexus at an energy conference in New Orleans, at which Karl Rove tagged along.

Firms from China regularly retain Neil, which isn’t surprising given the deep ties his family has there. Bush Sr. was appointed as U.S. liaison in Beijing under President Gerald Ford, and during his presidency sought greatly expanded trade with Beijing while downplaying human rights concerns. George W. Bush also forged a close relationship with China, and Neil’s deceased uncle, Prescott Bush Jr., was a close friend of former premier Jiang Zemin and did a good deal of business there.

In March of this year, Bush Sr., wife Barbara and Neil had dinner at the residence of the Chinese consul general in Houston. The Chinese government expressed hope in a written statement that the Bushes would “continue playing an important role in making contributions to … the friendship between the two peoples.” For their part the Bush family said the visit felt “like home,” and expressed special pleasure at being served “their favorite Beijing Roasted Duck.” The consul general and the Bushes also “exchanged views on China-U.S. relations … and other issues of their common interest.”

These sorts of ties have surely contributed to Neil’s list of Chinese clients, mainly companies seeking natural resource deals in Africa, including Shougang Holdings, a state-owned steel giant. In 2009, Neil led a delegation of the company’s officials to Liberia, where Shougang was seeking an iron ore mining concession. The Neil connection didn’t help: An Israeli firm ultimately won out.

The same year Neil traveled to Ghana with executives from oil giant Sinopec, the world’s seventh largest firm and a major competitor of U.S. companies. Neil managed to get meetings with top local political leaders. A source familiar with Bush’s efforts said that he opened doors in Ghana with the help of his friend Chris Wilmot, a businessman originally from Ghana who now lives in Houston. “Chris has the ties in Ghana that go all the way to the top,” this person told me. “Neil was riding on his coattails over there.” To no avail. Neil’s clients didn’t get the deal they were angling for.

On a weekday morning, I stopped by TX Oil’s headquarters in a bland office building on Westheimer Road in Houston. New Age music played from a Bose system in the reception area, which was decorated with a cowboy painting, an aquarium and a leather sofa. The office wasn’t bristling with activity, and the secretary told me no one would be available to talk to me about TX Oil.

“Is there a brochure or any information you can give me?” I asked.

“Not yet,” she replied with a cool smile.

Why do companies keep hiring Neil? It can’t be for his business acumen. More likely, his employers write checks out of friendship, loyalty and interest in currying favor with his family’s business and political network. In a reflection of the declining value of the Bush family name in the age of Obama, Neil does not seem to command the fees he once did.

In 2002, he received payments of $2 million in stock and $10,000 per board meeting from Grace Semiconductor — a firm backed by the son of Jiang Zemin — even though he knew nothing at all about semiconductors. Last December he was named a director of China Timber Resources Group, which has forest resources in Guyana and China. Neil’s director’s fee is a mere $1,200 a month, which the company said “was determined with reference to his experience, scope of work, level of involvement, seniority as well as the prevailing market conditions.” Ouch.

It’s getting tougher to be a fixer who can’t fix much.

Ken Silverstein is an Open Society Institute fellow and contributing editor to Harper’s magazine.

The impetus for such laws is obvious: After a series of damning videos of factory farms abusing animals, Big Ag faced a consumer backlash. But rather than make its facilities more humane, it has opted to spend its cash on lobbyists and court cases aimed at preventing the public from ever seeing the atrocities in the first place. Accomplishing that means pioneering new legal theories that threaten to set dangerous new precedents curtailing some of the most basic First Amendment freedoms we take for granted.

Over in the world of energy, it’s much the same thing. Last month in Pennsylvania, the oil and gas industry successfully lobbied state legislators to ban physicians from telling patients what toxic fracking chemicals they may have been exposed to. As Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard reports, “While companies must disclose the identity and amount of any chemicals used in fracking fluids to any health professional that requests that information … the new bill requires those health professionals to sign a confidentiality agreement stating that they will not disclose that information to anyone else — not even the person they’re trying to treat.”

At least doctors in Pennsylvania get to see some basic information about the industry’s toxic brew, which is more than health professionals in other states have been able to say in recent years. Indeed, in 2008, an emergency room nurse nearly died after being exposed to a company’s fracking chemicals and, according to High Country News, the company cited a trade secrets law in “refus(ing) to provide more specific information (about the chemicals) to the hospital once she fell ill.” That left her “intensive-care doctor to guess what to do as he tried to keep her alive.” This possibility still exists in states that still do not fully mandate disclosure of fracking chemicals.

In the housing sector, you probably assume you at least have a right to see relevant documents related to your imminent home foreclosure. After all, with that basic information, you might stand a chance of going to court and preventing a bank from illegally throwing you out of your home. Yet, if you live in Colorado, your assumption about being able to see such information would be wrong.

With details of the financial industry’s document shredding and robo-signing scandals still leaking out, the Denver Post reports that Republicans in the Legislature there voted down a bill simply “requiring that lenders prove their right to foreclose on a home.” That means Colorado remains the only state to “allow for a foreclosure without the lender first proving” it has the legal right to repossess a person’s domicile. With the GOP so successfully defeating the reform proposal in the face of public outrage at bank fraud, look for the financial industry to try to get state governments to set the same “no doc foreclosure” precedent all over the country.

Then there are corporate taxes, perhaps the most egregious area in which the government uses its power to shield politically significant information. As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reports, “neither the SEC nor most state governments require corporations to release detailed information on their state corporate tax payments” — which deliberately makes it “hard to identify which corporations are not paying their fair share at the state level.” At the federal level, after corporate tax disclosure laws made it onto the books in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they were removed. Bloomberg News notes that the Financial Accounting Standards Board has the power to “make the income-tax returns of all companies with shares traded on U.S. stock markets available to the public,” but that it has refused — even in the wake of reports proving that many of the most profitable corporations are now paying no tax at all in America’s loophole-ridden tax system. The result is that the government empowers corporate management to prevent both companies’ shareholder-owners and the public at large from ever evaluating a firm’s tax compliance — or lack thereof.

Each of these examples — and the many others like them — are closely related to the concurrent corporate efforts to prevent labeling mandates. And as disparate as such examples may seem, they each prove that 21st-century capitalism and old-school Orwellian control are not polar opposites, as they are often portrayed. On the contrary, those two political forces now often coexist in a symbiotic relationship — one that uses state power to keep politically charged information hidden. The theory beneath the calculation is simple: Public ignorance equals corporate bliss.

With protest movements rising and the possibility of widespread social unrest a real possibility, we should expect that calculation to be more prevalent in our politics than ever.

It called on the government to quickly approve its purchase of unused spectrum from Qualcomm Inc. and come up with legislation to meet the nation’s long-term needs.

AT&T, the nation’s second-largest wireless carrier behind Verizon Wireless, faces paying Deutsche Telekom $3 billion in cash and may have to enter into a roaming agreement with Deutsche Telekom, while transferring it the rights to spectrum it doesn’t need for the rollout of its planned, next-generation “4G” network.

AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom of Germany would have made it the largest cellphone company in the U.S. T-Mobile is currently the fourth-largest.

The Justice Department sued to block the merger on Aug. 31, saying it would reduce competition and lead to higher prices.

Last month, the companies withdrew their application to the Federal Communications Commission after its chairman also opposed the deal.

She also puffed herself up constantly — “I was mistaken for a model yesterday!” and made digs at me and other people at work, “Well, that’s not MY taste. But, interesting!”

I was trying to figure out how to fire her when she took another, more lucrative job in another field. The guy at my office dumped her shortly before this happened. But sadly, even though it’s been a year, I’m still haunted by the experience. I feel like I let myself be steamrolled by an “All About Eve” clone, and I dread running into her at events in my relatively small professional circle.

I honestly believe she’s a pretty lousy person, and I wish her ill. But I check her Twitter feed, and, honestly, am a little obsessed with hating her. How can I move beyond this, or, better yet, make sure other people in my industry know she is evil?

The Bad Boss

Dear Bad Boss,

I know how hard these things can be. I am a champion grudge-carrier myself.

I could go into business carrying grudges. I could get a truck with a magnetic sign: No Grudge Too Small. Bulk Rates. Tired of carrying that grudge? Call 1-800-GRUDGE-KING.

Would it make you the most miserable man on earth, carrying all those grudges for others? Or would it be liberating, knowing that not one of them is yours?

Anyway, some of us are champion grudge-carriers and we need a way to let go of a grudge. If we don’t deal with it, it can last for years.

So what we do in the 12 steps, we do inventories. You could look that up. We work with a sponsor. We’ll say, I can’t stop thinking about this person who screwed me over. And the sponsor will say, Well, let’s do the steps on this. Or, have you done the steps on this? Or, what step are you on?

Doing the steps gets you focused on you, not the person you’re obsessing about.

In doing the steps, we write things down. We answer questions like, what happened, and who was involved, and what sort of injury or threat did we perceive? What area of life was affected? Was it our sex relations, our self-esteem, our status?

We just more or less dispassionately look at what happened. We break it down. We also ask what role we played. This is not done in a blaming way. We just, for instance, say, well, the role we played was, we made the decision to hire her. OK. The great part about that is it puts us in the mix and gives us a sense of agency. We’re not a victim, we’re a participant. We see, OK, we did have a decision and we did play a part. We might have made a different decision. Likewise with the other events, we just identify what part we played. It may be that all we did was choose to go to a party. But we realize then, though it may have seemed like we  had to do what we did, we see  that maybe we could have avoided the upset. Not that it’s our fault, but that we were present and played a part in it.

It reminds me a little bit of how one proceeds in cognitive therapy. What I like about cognitive therapy and the 12 steps is that they lead us increasingly toward reality. We are always asking what is real, what is concrete, what can we see?

Then we often find that our response had something to do with fear. We see that we were trying to prevent something from harming us.

As we continue in this way, dissecting the event, we begin to see that in an existential sense we can’t protect ourselves anyway. We are vulnerable. We may be disliked or disrespected by co-workers or family members. We may be cheated on or deceived. There are no guarantees. We cannot control other people. Meditating on this returns us to the real world; it restores a correct relationship to the awesome powers of life and death that surround us; it fills us with appropriate awe for nature and fate; it unites us with other creatures living and dead; it humbles us and returns us to the bosom of humanity.

This notion of letting go of control is a sticky one, because it involves beginning to trust in something outside ourselves, and often we have been adamantly self-sufficient. But to get out of our awful predicament we focus on something beyond ourselves. We place trust in something larger than us.

It’s not like we get converted or saved or ascend to a higher state of consciousness. It’s more subtle. We entertain the notion of something bigger than us, and it shifts our focus away from ourselves, away from our vexing, all-consuming fear. We see that the world is awesomely powerful and if it wanted to strike us down it would have done so already. So we relax a little. If it’s coming, it’s coming. Don’t sweat the small stuff.

Once you entertain that notion that maybe you are not the one in control, then you do not need to respond to every possible threat with a flanking maneuver and a public relations campaign. Some things you can just let go of.

You are able to entertain the notion that maybe it’s not about the other person. Maybe it’s about you.

So you work with a sponsor and the sponsor suggests you do a fourth step, or a tenth step, or maybe the sponsor just talks with you about this obsession you have. But somehow you work through it by working through it. You have a method. That’s the point. The 12 steps offer a method, a simple, concrete method of purging ourselves of worry, doubt and fear.

If you’re not an alcoholic or drug addict and don’t have an eating disorder or a sex addiction you can always go to Al-Anon.

It’s just helpful to have a group. The Al-Anon group is all about how we deal with problems associated with other people — how the behavior of other people affects us, and how we learn to separate our problems from other people’s problems.

Really, I suggest you check out Al-Anon. You can get some grounding in the 12 steps, and you can hear personal stories from people who are coping with similar situations.

Plus it’s sort of fun. Really. Once you get over the initial novelty of it it becomes fun.

If you don’t want to do the steps, you can certainly get into therapy. I’m all for therapy. But therapy costs money and its efficacy depends on the intelligence and talent of the therapist. The 12 steps are pretty much free, and they work.

So that’s my approach to dealing with grudges.

But I still like the idea of the grudge-carrying truck.

I bet I could make some money.

“I’ve been asked to remind you all again that they are separate channels and the more we make FBN look like FNC the more of a disservice we do to ourselves,” Magee said in the memo dated October 5, carrying the subject line “Fox News and Fox Business.”

“I understand the temptation to imitate our sibling network in hopes of imitating its success, but we cannot,” Magee went on to say in the memo. “If we give the audience a choice between FNC and the almost-FNC, they will choose FNC every time. Earnings, taxes, jobs etc give us PLENTY to chew on.”

As Media Matters ably documents here, Fox Business is right now just a sort of weird alternate-Fox News, with slightly different personalities who are still fixated on the exact same right-wing causes and phony outrages. (Plus cantankerous Connecticut cowboy Don Imus in the mornings, which is an odd choice for a “business” channel.) It’s Fox’s ESPN 2, except without extreme sports.

Why would an investor or trader want to watch Eric Bolling interview Pam Geller about the “ground zero mosque”? Who turns on a “business news” channel hoping to see former Wall Street Journal editorial writer David Asman promote birtherism and interview an ex-NFLer about the dangers of gay marriage?

The problem with Fox Business is baked right into the channel’s founding: It serves a market that is totally satisfied with preexisting offerings. People who want conservative-slanted market news all day already had a channel: CNBC. Just about everything Fox Business has ever done is either a retread (sexy ladies talk about stocks, just like on CNBC!) or just stupid (a five p.m. show set in a weird fake Irish pub!). While CNBC flatters its viewers’ senses of sophistication and superiority, Fox Business assumes its audience would rather watch an interview with Tila Tequila than hear about the SEC’s decision to charge Goldman Sachs with fraud.

The Fox model doesn’t work with business news, where the pro-corporatist mind-set is already baked into the majority of “objective” coverage and there isn’t a need to spice up the mundane business of promoting the interests of the wealthy with culture war material. Fox Business should be targeting the conservative elites who find Muslim-bashing and birtherism a bit distasteful (if necessary). But those elites may never find a reason to tune in. News Corp’s own Wall Street Journal has an exclusive deal with CNBC, and WSJ reporters are just as turned off by the Fox Business brand as everyone else.

To which I say: No way! First of all, I have two jobs and am often so busy I feel breathless. Second, I write about books; I’m not a literary agent or an acquisitions editor at a major publishing house. I haven’t even published a book of my own (though I hope to, someday).

But, even if I had the knowledge they seek, why should I use it to benefit them? Reading and editing a manuscript would take a helluva long time. What’s more, it’s work, work that other people get paid for.

All these requests have come from men. None of these men are professional writers. I am not in regular contact with any of them; they are once-removed from my daily life: the brother of a friend, the husband of a friend, and  the father of a friend. They don’t ask how I am. They don’t stop to consider if I’m busy. They don’t seem to read my (published!) writing, since their manuscripts are in genres I don’t write about.

When I get these requests, I feel incredibly stingy. I get angry and anxious and think uncharitable thoughts about them.  It seems to me that they are all entitled jerks who have no respect for me or my career. Sure, they might think I can steer them on a path toward publication, but also seem to think I have nothing better than sit around and read their stupid manuscripts. They’re so out of line I can hardly think straight.

I blew off the first request. I flat-out refused the second two. I still haven’t responded to the fourth one, which I received this morning. This last request seems very problematic, since it comes from someone I’ve known since childhood and who’s sick.

So, Cary, what do I do? Am I right in refusing these people? If so, what’s the best way to tell them that I can’t do it? And how do channel some generosity of spirit toward them? How do I stop getting so upset? Right now, I feel like a mean-spirited jerk.

Sincerely,

Angry Books Writer

Dear Angry Books Writer,

You are absolutely right that such work is not to be expected casually or for free. It is very demanding work.

So here is what I suggest: Think of an hourly rate that would make you happy. Don’t think of the “correct” rate or the “going” rate. Think of a number that makes you smile. Think of a number that is high enough to discourage most casual requests.

This is what a person — whom I was paying to advise me — advised me to do when I received such requests. It seemed weird at first. I thought, well, I should just charge what is the correct rate. She said no, forget correct. How much do you want? What would make you happy? And what would discourage casual requests? You don’t really want to do this work all that much anyway, right? So, OK, a number came to me. It seemed high. It seemed almost silly it was so high. But it felt good to me! So I said it out loud. And the person advising me said, OK, when people ask you for this kind of work, quote that number. And I did.

I ended up accepting some work at that price. Surprisingly, I enjoyed doing the work. The person desiring my services was happy to pay that rate. Neither one of us felt cheated. We were both pleased.

It turns out that stuff is worth exactly what someone is willing to pay for it. It turns out — surprise, surprise! — that you can make an agreement with one individual based on what each of you wants and it will work out fine. Amazing.

That one piece of advice was worth all the money I paid this person for her advice, and more. It solved the problem. It made me happy. I’m grateful to the person who gave me that advice. And now I am giving that advice to you. It makes me happy to be able to give it to you. Really, it does. Because I have benefited greatly from it.

As to your desire to respond with empathy, how can you not have empathy for someone who wants to publish a manuscript? Poor bastard. How can you not have empathy for the person? That doesn’t mean you have to become their servant.

When somebody asks you if you would do this kind of work for them, tell the person that you do occasionally take on such projects, in a selective way, and here is your hourly rate. And see what happens.