As Congress mulls ban of a DowDuPont pesticide, the company's campaign donations loom large

It is legal for American corporations to bribe our state and federal lawmakers so long as they do it via contributions to that lawmaker's campaign, rather than their personal account. This is the plain truth of the system. It works very well for the corporations involved, and spectacularly well for the lawmakers themselves, and those that would try to muck up the system are continually stymied by both benefactors and beneficiaries, by pundits insisting that the free market needs such payments in order to ensure each industry gets listened to in accordance to its fiscal means, and by Supreme Court rulings legitimizing every one of those transactions so long as the quid and the quo leave room for Jesus between them when the dance music strikes up.

A new Maplight study puts numbers to one current iteration of the not-bribes. In 2017 the Trump administration, or rather Trump's new egregiously sleazy Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt, overruled an EPA plan to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos. The Dow-manufactured pesticide had been deemed by agency scientists to pose an extreme danger to both children and farmworkers, causing brain damage to young children at even low levels of exposure. So alarming was the administration's reversal that Congress threatened to ban the chemical itself, and we now find ourselves in the same pitched battle that we so often do, when a profitable industrial or consumer product turns out to be killing or maiming people: Will we ban it, or won't we?

Maplight's data puts hard figures on the fight. In January the latest iteration of a bill to ban the chemical drew 107 sponsors; 330 House members did not sign on. How does that decision match up to donations from DowDuPont (the result of a recent merger) since 2017, when Pruitt's reversal put the chemical's fate in congressional hands?

Ten of the 107 cosponsors of the Ban Toxic Pesticides Act of 2019 reported receiving $14,000 in campaign contributions since 2017 from the Midland, Mich.-based DowDuPont Inc. Federal Election Commission records show 118 of the 330 congressmen who haven’t sponsored the measure received $379,651 from Dow during the same period.

It's not surprising. A corporation is going to seek to assist lawmakers who act in ways beneficial to their bottom line, and is scarcely motivated to do the same for those that are not such reliable allies. More than the raw cash involved, that DowDuPont made contributions to over one-third of the non-interventionists while shunning nearly all those now signing on to a bill banning a profitable but dangerous product makes the point. Allies get campaign help. Non-allies do not. Allies get re-elected; non-allies get well-funded opponents.

from Daily Kos http://bit.ly/2EEuiDQ