Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [84]
It doesn’t make sense, does it? What kind of campaign would purposely destroy its own voting base? You don’t see Republicans sitting around trying to plot ways to incarcerate corporate executives and NRA members. Trust me, you won’t see Karl Rove convening a White House meeting to figure out a way to lock up and strip the voting rights from a million members of the Christian Coalition.
In fact, just the opposite. The Bush people are committed to seeing that none of their supporters ever enjoys the hospitality of a prison shower room. Much was made after Clinton left office of the pardons he granted to dubious fat cats like Marc Rich. The entire country was up in arms over the absolution given to a fugitive who got away without paying his taxes. A rich person who got away without paying taxes! We were shocked SHOCKED!
And yet no attention at all was paid to the “pardons” of David Lamp, Vincent Mietlicki, John Wadsworth, or James Weathers Jr. And no one called for a congressional investigation of why criminal charges were dropped against Koch Industries, the largest privately held oil company in America, whose CEO and vice president are the brothers Charles and David Koch. Why was this?
Because those “pardons” came during the reign of George W. Bush.
In September 2000, the federal government brought a 97 count indictment against Koch Industries and its four employees—Lamp, Mietlicki, Wadsworth, and Weathers, who were Koch’s environmental and plant managers—for knowingly releasing 91 metric tons of benzene, a cancer-causing agent, into the air and water, and for covering up the deadly release from federal regulators.
This wasn’t Koch’s first run-in with the law; it wasn’t even their first that year. Earlier in 2000, Koch had been fined $35 million for illegal pollution in six states.
But with the GeorgeW. Bush’s election “decided,” Koch’s fortunes suddenly changed. Koch executives had just contributed some $800,000 to Bush’s presidential campaign and other Republican candidates and causes. In January, as John Ashcroft waited in the wings, the government dropped the charges first from 97 to 11 and then to a mere nine.
Koch Industries, however, still faced fines totaling $352 million. Bush’s new administration, now firmly in place, quickly fixed that. In March, they dropped two more charges. Then, two days before the case was to go to court, Ashcroft’s Justice Department settled the case.
Koch Industries pled guilty to a new charge of falsifying documents, and the government dropped all environmental charges against the company, including all felony counts against their four employees.
Following hard on the heels of their generosity, the Koch executives facing possible prison terms were freed from any prosecution. The company itself had all 90 of the serious counts against it dismissed and in the end paid a fine that wiped out the 7 remaining counts. According to the Houston Chronicle, “Koch executives celebrated the conclusion of the case,” company spokesman Jay Rosser crowing about how the dropping of charges was proof of Koch’s “vindication.”
I won’t defend the actions of Marc Rich, but correct me if I’m wrong: I believe the willful spewing into the air and water of a deadly chemical that causes cancer (and will surely contribute to who knows how many people’s deaths) is a little more serious than skipping out on Rudy Giuliani to go on an eighteen-year ski trip to Switzerland. Yet I’m sure none of you have heard of the pardons granted to Charles and David Koch and their oil company and its executives. Why should you? It was just business as usual, under a national press that’s thoroughly asleep at the wheel.
It’s too bad that Anthony Lemar Taylor forgot to send in his contribution to the Bush campaign. Taylor was another repeat offender—a petty thief who decided one day in 1999 to pretend he was golf superstar