Hogs at the Public Trough
Oklahoma City October 26, 2002
Thank you very much.
I am a New Englander from New Hampshire and we New Englanders are, by tradition, fairly good business people. For example, there is a fellow who lives about an hour and a half south of me who buys-up state legislatures for profit, including yours here in Oklahoma.
His name is Harry Bresky and he lives in the suburbs of Boston in a very nice home indeed.
His name might ring a bell with you, or perhaps not. In any case, you should know about him because he is what you have instead of a true representative democracy.
Mr. Bresky has set himself up as a poster boy of corporate welfare. That is to say, you all pay him millions of Oklahoma dollars for the privilege of smelling his factory hog farms.
The Federal Government, four years ago, was paying out about $125 billion a year in corporate welfare nationally, Now, special corporate tax breaks have more than doubled it. They get that landslide of our tax dollars &endash;billions more than is paid to alleviate poverty in this country-- in exchange for their campaign support of key legislators in Congress and in statehouses. The conservative Cato Institute has estimated that campaign contributions from fatcat donors are returned ten-to-one in corporate welfare payoffs.
Mr. Bresky has a little company called Seaboard, which includes flour mills in Ecuador, Guyana, Haiti, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has feed mills in Ecuador, Nigeria and the Congo. He has 3,000 acres of shrimp ponds in Ecuador and Honduras; 37,000 acres of sugarcane, 4,200 acres of citrus. A sugar mill in Argentina; a winery in Bulgaria. Agricultural interests in Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Venezuela. He owns electric-power-generating facilities in the Dominican Republic; shipping companies in Liberia, and has containerized cargo vessels running between Miami and Central and South America. He also, as you may know, has hog farms in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and Colorado, and poultry-processing plants, feed mills, hatcheries and 700 contract chicken growers in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee.
Now why would this busy, busy man take time to write checks to members of the Oklahoma Legislature? Why does he pepper the members of the environmental regulation committees with generous donations? I suspect that he is just a good government booster, don't you?
It could be that he feels a little guilty for sqeezing millions out of a tiny Minnesota town and &endash;after cutting wages, importing illegal aliens, and refusing to properly dispose of massive wastes, eventually leaving the town with an environmental and social disaster. Maybe he is trying to do better here.
He abandoned Minnesotta to come to Guymon in Texas County, Oklahoma. The town and the state put together an economic incentive package worth $21 million for Mr. Bresky's benefit. The county raised taxes on its people, many of whom were already hurting, to front $8 million to Mr. Bresky. The state granted a $4 million, 10-year income tax credit. The state spent $600,000 to train Seaboard's workers. The company received grants and low-interest loans to finance a waste-pretreatment plant. The company was excused from paying $2.9 million in real estate taxes. The package was $21 million altogether.
When it was time for the public to get some of that back, no dice. The company protested every tax bill, finally whittling it down to about 17% of what was due.
Oklahoma taxpayers picked up the unpaid portion. And the social costs of a large, low-paid workforce are piling up, as is the stink and goo, driving long-time residents to despair.
Now. How on earth does that happen? How does it go on and on?
Well, here are a few people you might ask to explain that.
Ask your candidate for governor, Steve Largent, why he took Harry Bresky's thousands and how those dollars might influence his policies if he wins.
Ask Kelly Haney, who serves on an important environmental committee in the legislature, if those thousands he received from Harry will affect his decisions.
Ask Fred Morgan in the House about the thousands he took from Harry in 2000.
Ask Brooks Douglas, Johnnie Crutchfield, Bernest Cain, Gilmer Capps, Billy Mickle and Kevin Easley. Ask Cal Hobson, Danny Hilliard, Jim Covey and Terry Matlock why they took Harry's money.
Are they bad for doing so? No. Is it harder now for them to do the right thing? You bet it is, and they know it.
Every day people are paying off your politicians for the privilege of picking your pockets.
Every day that passes without the passage of a clean elections program in Oklahoma is a very expensive day for taxpayers. It is simply much, much cheaper to publicly finance our political campaigns than to let special interest fatcats buy our representative out from under us. We must be our own fatcats. We the people must own the hearts and souls of our elected representatives.
I urge you to forge ahead. It is the right thing for Democrats, Republicans, independents, Greens, Reforms, you name it. Get the big money men out of your politics and breathe the fresh air of freedom again.
The rows and rows of gravestones in our military cemeteries do not mark lives given for the defense of special interest politics. They mark the sacrifices made for our freedoms as a self-governing people. From time to time we must chase the moneychangers out of the temples of our democracy. This time has come in Oklahoma.
Thank you and good luck.