I'll see your $10 and raise you $10 (3 bn, next bid)
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=309&row=0Guest Blog: Charles Lewis,
"The Buying of the President"Tuesday, January 20, 2004
(snip)
But all of that campaign money, of course, comes at a very steep price.
Call it "the price of power" in our commercial, pay-to-play democracy,
but each of the leading presidential candidates for the 2004 election
has done public policy favors for his major campaign contributors. They
don't exactly put it that way, or want to acknowledge at all how they
service their major donors. The simple aim of The Buying of the
President 2004 is to get at the unvarnished truth, underneath the layers
of obfuscation, rhetorical excess and just plain lies. Enron Corp., the
Houston-based energy firm that touched off a financial, legal and
political scandal when it declared bankruptcy in December 2001, remains
George Bush's top career patron. Enron's employees and political action
committee have given more than $600,000 to Bush over the course of his
political career. By the way, in 2003, executives of the reorganized,
bankrupt, disgraced Enron -- including Joseph W. Sutton, the company's
chairman -- continued to contribute to the Bush campaign. In 1997, while
he was CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney wrote a letter to Vice President
Al Gore, opposing more stringent air standards. "Implementation of these
standards," he wrote to Gore, "would cause great harm to consumers, my
own industry, and the U.S. economy and will still not deliver the
promised significant enhancement of health protection to the American
public." As Vice President, Cheney has played a lead role in shaping the
administration's energy policies, which critics charge will lead to
greater pollution and lower air quality. Ironically, at the end of his
letter, Cheney asked that any change in the environmental standards "be
addressed in full and open debate." That is not exactly how critics have
described the secret, off-the-record, exclusive meetings the Vice
President has had with energy executives the past three years.
(snip)
Time to follow the money (again)