Congress renewed the sugar industry’s subsidy once more this year. One with the greatest beneficiaries will be the family members that own Flo-Sun, Inc. Every year the subsidy nets the big sugar producer an extra $65 million, based on the Common Accounting Workplace. Getting the subsidy renewed wasn’t so hard. All it took was a total of $2.8 million of sugar industry money, strategically dispensed to members of Congress. Nicely Ñ that and a $10,000 junket for 15 Home staffers to travel to Florida to find out much more about the sugar industry.
It is been a bumper year for corporate tax breaks favors and subsidies. A big deal of goodies was sent to corporations and also the wealthy over the summer, when Congress passed its so-called balanced spending budget bill (see the last issue with the Labor Party Press).
Well, now the numbers are in, and we can say with certainty that all those favors had been bought and paid for by record corporate contributions. Based on Typical Cause, a Washington-based grassroots lobby, the Democratic and Republican party committees took in much more than $260 million in soft cash donations, mainly from corporations, throughout the 1995-96 election cycle. That’s much more than three times the amount raised within the last presidential campaign. (Soft money contributions go to party coffers rather than to individual candidates.) And also the cash continues to flow: Between January and June 1997, the parties collected an additional $34 million Ñ twice what they raised throughout the comparable period in 1993. The spigot is open.
A congressional committee headed by Sen. Fred Thompson spent months skewering the Clinton administration for its nearly comical tries to collect doubtful campaign benefits. However whilst the committee was enthusiastic about tracking Clinton’s ties to foreign contributors, the folks who truly control the political procedure, American corporations and also the wealthy people around them, stayed mostly within the shadows.
Congress and also the corporate-sponsored media also went on the hunt for union contributors, and thundered about the threat that “big labor” might influence the political process. Unions did improve their contributions to politicians this year. Nevertheless, labor’s dollars had been a small trickle compared with corporations’: Unions got outspent about 7-1 in this election cycle. Recognizing that unions can’t beat corporations at this game, the AFL-CIO called for campaign finance reform at its October convention.
Even within the midst of all of the embarrassing revelations, Congress cannot bring itself to pass a flimsy campaign finance reform bill.
The oil and gas industry significantly increased its “soft money” contributions towards the two parties in the last election cycle, to about $10 million. Metal and mining interests passed out 11 times more than they did during the 1991-92 election cycle.
Merrill Lynch knows how to invest. Between 1991 and 1997, the company donated $1.4 million in soft cash contributions to Democrats and Republicans. Lazard Freres gave $1.2 million. The Security Business Association gave $17.5 million.
But ooo, the return! Congress passed the capitol gains tax cut, which will mean a almost $8,000 annual windfall for each of America’s richest one percent of families (based on Citizens for Tax Justice). Sadly, operating individuals will need to make up for the resulting $21 billion in lost tax revenue over the next 10 years (by a Congressional Spending budget Office estimate).
Capitol Cities/ABC/Disney gave $569,000 to the Democrats and $491,450 to the Republicans between 1991 and 1997. Viacom gave $418,400 towards the Dems and $122,700 to the GOP. Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox, gave $750,000 to the California Republican Party in October 1996 alone.
No big mystery here. The nation’s big broadcasters got up to $70 billion worth of digital Tv licenses from Congress in 1996. (Digital Television is the new technology expected to replace the current analog format.) In 1997, it was Christmas-time once more: Congress passed three new laws to benefit large broadcasters. Amongst them: Legislators agreed to permit broadcasters to hold onto their old analog TV licenses Ñ rather than having the Federal Communications Commission auction the licenses off, which may have brought up billions for the Federal Treasury.