"U.S. business leaders paid Bush over $75 million...he's paid dividends"

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

Presidential Pipeline: Bush's top fund-raisers see spoils of victory
Sunday, December 18, 2005

By Jim Tankersley, Joshua Boak and Christopher D. Kirkpatrick, The Toledo Blade

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05352/624259.stm

President Bush's corporate champions see the spoils of his administration in coal. And timber. And credit-card payments, Afghan electric lines, Japanese bank transfers and fake crab. America's business leaders supplied more than $75 million to return Mr. Bush to the White House last year -- and he has paid dividends.

Bush administration policies, grand and obscure, have financially benefited companies or lobbying clients tied to at least 200 of the president's largest campaign fund-raisers, a Toledo Blade investigation has found. Dozens more stand to gain from Bush-backed initiatives that recently passed or await congressional approval.



"Former MBNA CEO Charles is a Ranger, raising at least $200,000 for the president's re-election. His company benefited from Bush-backed bankruptcy reform."

The beneficiaries span industries and the nation. Examples include:

- Timber barons who pay lower tax rates on logging sales and face fewer barriers to harvesting trees in national forests because of administrative changes and laws Mr. Bush signed.

- Energy producers who dodged potential legal fees and cleanup costs after federal officials revised clean-air standards.

- Heads of stock brokerages and other multinational firms, which, under a special tax incentive in the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, are bringing hundreds of millions of dollars they earned or stored abroad back into the United States this year at reduced rates.

- Executives of defense contractors United Technologies and The Washington Group, which won contracts potentially totaling more than $6 billion to supply American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and rebuild both countries' infrastructure. The same contractors won far less government work under President Bill Clinton.

- Mining executives who tapped new veins of coal, thanks to administrative rule changes that opened swaths of hills and forests to their backhoes and left once-protected streams vulnerable to pollution.



"Among Mr. Bush's top fund-raisers is Nicholas Taubman, CEO of Advance Auto Parts Inc. and the recently appointed U.S. ambassador to Romania. He supports controversial legislation -- the "Right to Repair Act" -- that would bolster his $4.65 billion company. It would force automakers to share information on car parts and technology."

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1. now if that don't sound like bribery, i don't know what does.

our campaign finance system is F*CKED UP.