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pointed major contributor Joseph P. Kennedy to be ambassador to Britain. Lyndon B. Johnson funneled contracts to Texas firms.
Direct quid pro quos -- specific benefits in exchange for cash -- are illegal. There is nothing illegal, however, about the adoption of broad legislation or regulations benefiting sectors of the business community -- such as laundries disposing of wastewater containing toxic chemicals -- that happen be a source of major fundraisers and donors.
For example, securities and investment banking firms have benefited enormously from reduced capital gains and dividend taxes initiated by the Bush White House. Six produced 17 Pioneers and Rangers this year, and employees in those firms have raised $2.53 million. Altogether, finance industry employees have raised $19.68 million for the 2004 election campaign, according to an analysis produced for The Washington Post by Dwight L. Morris & Associates.
Twenty-four Rangers and Pioneers are either drug industry executives or lobbyists whose companies stand to get more business from the administration's Medicare drug benefit bill passed last year.
Twenty-five energy company executives, along with 15 energy industry lobbyists, are either Pioneers or Rangers. Many have been deeply involved in developing the administration's energy policy. Seven of those Pioneers served on the Bush energy transition team. The administration's energy bill, which remains stalled by a largely Democratic filibuster in the Senate, would provide billions of dollars in benefits to the energy industry.
Industry: $400 Million Cost
The proposed shop towel rule shows how the process can play out to the advantage of a Pioneer.
For more than two decades, the EPA has grappled with how to regulate the cloth towels used to wipe up chemicals in printing plants, factories and industrial shops. Each year, 3 billion of them sop up more than 100,000 tons of hazardous solvents such as benzene, xylene, toluene and methyl ethyl ketone.
"Why should these materials be regulated as a hazardous waste?" the EPA said in a document given to the laundry industry in 2000. "Because they have the potential to cause fires, or to be the source of fugitive air emissions, and ground water contamination."
In 1997, the Clinton administration proposed a clean-water rule requiring industrial laundries to pretreat their wastewater to remove chemical solvents. The Uniform & Textile Service Association (UTSA) and Textile Rental Services Association of America (TRSA) mounted a $1.2 million lobbying campaign against the proposed rule, arguing that toxic pollutants are removed at the laundries or by municipal wastewater treatment plants. The trade groups said the proposal would have cost them more than $400 million.
In 1999, the Clinton EPA withdrew the rule. The next year, with Clinton still in the White House, the EPA floated a new draft rule that proposed to exempt shop towels from hazardous-waste requirements only if factories squeezed the towels "dry" -- defined as containing no more than five grams of solvents -- before placing them in sealed containers and sending them to laundries.
Calling this "an extremist view in the EPA," the laundry industry forcefully opposed the new proposal as overregulation.
But environmental activists, labor groups and paper towel makers said the laundries and local treatment plants frequently exceed their mandated pollution limits. Sixty-five Cintas laundries in 15 states and Canada have exceeded pollution limits on more than 1,100 occasions in the past several years, according to public records gathered by the Sierra Club and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE).
For the EPA and the laundry industry, things changed when Bush took office in 2001. The industry pushed hard to derail the Clinton proposed rule in favor of a more lenient one that gives shop towels a hazardous-waste exemption without the need to wring them dry or store them in special containers.
Laundry trade groups appealed directly to EPA Administrator Whitman in February 2001: "The draft regulation in its current form . . . increases the regulatory burden."
In May, Whitman sent a conciliatory response: "Partnerships with our stakeholders will be an important part of how we will do business at EPA."
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