Dark heart of the American dream
It's the most polluted state in the planet's most powerful country. Ed Vulliamy goes into George Bush's backyard to reveal how big oil got in bed with big politics and the price paid by the little people

There is a perverse beauty to the landscape arraigned below the iron bridge where Highway 255 strides the Houston Ship Channel: great towers of light and fire as far as the eye can behold; sinewy steel piping, plumes of smoke and flame twinkling into a Texas twilight coloured by a shroud of pollution hanging from the sky. The awesome prepotency of this smokescape is no illusion, for this is an epicentre of power, oil capital of the Western world and the most industrialised corner of the United States. It is also the capital of a power machine perfected in Texas, elevated to rule the nation and now unchallenged across the planet. A machine that operates in perpetual motion - an equilibrium of interests - between industry and politics. LaNell Anderson, former Republican voter, businesswoman and real-estate broker who lived many years in this land of smokestacks and smog, calls it 'vending-machine politics: you puts your money in and you gets your product out'.
'We don't see ourselves as a dynasty,' said George Bush Sr as his son launched the election campaign that won him the current presidency, raiding father's Rolodex to do so. 'We don't feel entitled to anything.' And yet at no point in the past 50 years - the half-century since 1952 which defines the modern age - has there not been a Bush in a governor's mansion (in Texas or Florida), on Capitol Hill or in the White House - and usually more than one of those at a time. The 'vending machine' is a single family whose tango with the powers which illuminate this endless horizon of light and flame is a dance around every corner in the labyrinth of Texan and now national - indeed global - politics. 'Everything they learned when they started out in west Texas,' says Dr Neil Carman, once a regulator of pollution in the state, 'they applied to the governor's mansion, the nation and the world... Power in America is not so much about George W Bush, it's about the people from Texas who put him there.'