According to a new report published in The Seattle Times, the Bush administration is rewarding its corporate donors with an extensive list of pro-business legislation. Corporations such as MBNA, Exxon-Mobil, and Wal-Mart are all among the companies that have received or are soon to receive substantial rewards for their monetary contributions to the Bush reelection campaign and other Republican electoral races in 2004.
The recent passage of class action lawsuit legislation is a gift to large corporations who may be held monetary liable for problems with their products or as consequences of their production. The legislation is designed to steer lawsuits into Federal Courts where the courts are less likely to award multi-million dollar settlements. The US Chamber of Commerce made passing this legislation its top priority for the 109th Congress and spent some $16 million in lobbying the federal government in 2003. This legislation is likely to benefit corporations such as Wal-Mart, who contributed several million dollars to both the US Chamber of Commerce and the Republican Party after realizing, along with technology and pharmaceutical companies such as Intel and GlaxoSmithKline, that the class action legislation will protect them from potential lawsuits.
MBNA, Bush's fifth largest campaign contributor and one of the major credit card companies in the United States, was joined by other banking institutions such as Credit Suisse First Boston, Bank of America, and Wachovia in donating to the Republican Party in an effort to drastically alter bankruptcy law in their favor. The proposed legislation (which is almost certain to pass) will require people to pay back more of their debt while making it harder to file for bankruptcy in the first place, in addition to including provisions that reward specific industries for their contributions. Some of these industries, like the auto industry via Ford Credit Co., donated large amounts of money to secure industry-specific legislation, which in the case of the auto industry, requires people to pay back the full value of automobile loans or have their vehicle repossessed.
Proposed legislation that would allow drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) has also made significant gains in the early days of Bush's second term. Drilling in ANWR would provide significant benefit to companies such as Exxon-Mobil, who have given $5.2 billion to Republicans over the past decade, while the oil and gas industries contributed $2.6 billion to the Bush re-election effort in 2004. The oil and gas industries have spent a considerable amount of money to gain access to ANWR, using billions of dollars to influence politicians on the state-level in Alaska as well as at the national level.
The corporate lobby is again looking towards their Republican and Democratic party allies to pass the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), another piece of legislation that will primarily benefit US-based corporations at the expense of workers in the United States and elsewhere in Central America. Business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have been pushing hard for CAFTA, and sensing that there is strong opposition to the agreement both within and outside of the United States, have resorted to distorting the record of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in order to hide potential costs of CAFTA. With the difficulty facing CAFTA and the growing movement against it, a defeat for CAFTA could make it harder for the Bush administration and their corporate backers to continue passing pro-corporate legislation.
It is also worth noting that many of these issues have depended on the support of the numerous pro-business Democrats in the House of Representatives and the Senate, demonstrating that rather than being an exceptional case of a pro-business party being elected and using its power to institute unpopular legislation, the problem is of a more systemic nature and that the entire system of financing elections in this country must be examined and reformed.
