The Siegelman Saga: Alabama G.O.P. Wrestles with Retraction (!!)

The Opelika-Auburn News first reported that several Republicans campaigning for Alabama legislative seats in 2010 were using Craftmaster Printers of Auburn for literature, and that then-state GOP Chairman Mike Hubbard was a partial owner of the business.

We did not say whether this practice was ethical or not ethical.

Monday, financial records from the Alabama Republican Party revealed that more than $800,000 of GOP money was paid to Craftmaster for its service. Does this mean the party chair directed the business to his business for profit? We don’t know that.

Back in 1904, Ida Tarbell published what ultimately was to be seen as the seminal work of the muckrakers, The History of Standard Oil. It appeared first in nineteen installments in McClure’s Magazine, a rather less successful competitor of Harper’s, and shortly after the last installment appeared, Tarbell published the work in book form as well. In her work, Tarbell exposed the dark underside of corporate deal-making, the series of interlocking directorates and manipulations which had allowed John D. Rockefeller to build the oil leviathan and dominate the American market. Tarbell demonstrated that Rockefeller’s success came not so much from business acumen (though she never contested that he had plenty of that) as through a thorough understanding of how to game the system. John D. Rockefeller was a power unto himself. Politicians around the country were made and broken to suit him.

But Tarbell’s disclosures fueled the drive for antitrust legislation and a fairer and more competitive business environment—a drive which was, in its time, championed by progressive politicians of both parties, but particularly by Theodore Roosevelt. By 1911, Standard Oil was broken into thirty companies.

But over time, like the liquid-metal monster in the “Terminator” series, Standard Oil pulled itself back together again. It was aided in this process by a change in attitudes across the political spectrum, but most particularly it was aided by America’s campaign finance system in which politicians standing for election require increasingly larger sums of money to pursue their campaigns, and support from the corporate till is essential. The final act of rebirth occurred when the two principal surviving pieces of the company, Exxon and Mobil, merged at the close of 1999. The resulting behemoth, ExxonMobil, is the largest publicly traded integrated petroleum and natural gas company in the world. It is also the world’s largest petroleum and natural gas company by revenue, with revenues of $377.6 billion in fiscal year 2006.

The State of Alabama believes that it was victimized by ExxonMobil. According to the state’s complaint launched by the Administration of Governor Don Siegelman, ExxonMobil committed fraud and underpaid the state in a contract dispute over natural gas pumped from Mobile Bay. Alabama won that litigation, and a jury awarded the state a judgment against ExxonMobil of roughly $3.6 billion. Not chump change ............

Don Siegelman should be a star in the Democratic Party. Instead, he's a former elected official sentenced to prison by a right-wing judge in Alabama.

Siegelman had the temerity to be a popular Alabama Democrat who'd won every statewide office by 1998, when he first became governor. With Jewish and Catholic roots, and empathic appeal to minorities, he threatened the GOP "southern strategy" for a dominant one-party Republican nation. To the GOP, Siegelman was potentially Another Clinton -- as repellent to them as Another Cuba.

U.S. Attorney Leura Canary, a friend of Karl Rove's, incited Siegelman's prosecution for bribery, destroying his political career and hurting his family. Read this letter signed by 113 former attorneys general and other national leaders, both Democrat and Republican. They assert that the prosecuted "bribe" wasn't one, and that, if this conviction stands, it threatens every public official and contributor at every level of government. Such routine transactions, if prosecuted, would choke our courts.

FROM THE TOP .... The story broke in early June 2007, popping up on my daily news search for "Karl Rove." .....