That simple! Under Bush, Big Oil was always in control. Here is the scoop as it appeared on DU long ago:
Gov. Don Siegelman, the Roughly $3.6 Billion, ExxonMobil, and Pissing Off BIG OIL.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3070446There is a story little told, from before the 2006 prosecution,
before the illegal campaign contributions to Riley from Abramoff and his felonious pals,
before the 2002 AL election theft stole victory from Dems in the middle of the night.
Siegelman's administration sued BIG OIL. ExxonMobil committed fraud and underpaid Alabama
in a contract for 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!
Is that where it starts? This incident is certainly a BIG possible!
Or was this gambling corruption? Or just felonious politics?
How about defense contractors corrupting politics? Possible.
Or, it it another case of "ALL OF THE ABOVE"? Your opinions?
============================
ExxonMobil’s Alabama Paydirt
Scott Horton - Nov 4, 2007 -
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/11/hbc-90001584Back 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 .....
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Add White House staff like Michael Scanlan, plus Ralph Reed, DoJ Abramoff case's Noel Hillman, Grover Norquist, Alberto Gonzales, Michael Chertoff, ......
Chertoff and the Politics of Prosecution
Team Chertoff and the Art of Political Prosecution
by Scott Horton - 07 Sept. 2007 (now dead link)
Current and former Justice Department officials I have interviewed have consistently identified Michael Chertoff, his successor Alice Fisher and his protégé Noel Hillman, as figures with a strong interest in political prosecutions. Each apparently took an interest in the Siegelman case for all the wrong reasons, I am told, and each had regular communications with the White House throughout this period.
But the Siegelman case was only one of many cases with political overtones which were closely dogged by loyal Republican Party activists at the top of the criminal process at Justice. Today the Los Angeles Times is offering more evidence linking Chertoff to political vendettas using the prosecutorial resources of the Department of Justice.
David Savage and Tom Hamburger report (
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-ch ... ):
Shortly after President Bush took office in 2001, Michael Chertoff, then head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, met with the conservative group Judicial Watch. It wanted criminal charges brought against Hillary Rodham Clinton ....
The Los Angeles Times report concerning the highly political vendetta prosecution of Rosen greatly strengthens the accusations made by a Michigan attorney, Geoffrey Fieger, in a case with strong parallels and similar political circumstances. It also casts a strong light on the mindset and working relationships within Justice at the time the chase after Alabama Governor Siegelman began.
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