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John Spragens, Jr. ADM money, and were its agents for retaliating against the man who dealt it the worst blow in its history. Everything about ADM is big, big, big, measured either by its annual sales$19 billionor by its mate rial holdings, which include 355 processing plants, 500 grain elevators, 2,250 barges, 33,000 railroad cars, and more than 100 ocean-going ships. ADM’s home base in Decatur, Illinois, is the largest agricultural plant complex in the world. When it comes to processing corn, America’s biggest cash crop, ADM is the world’s leader, as it also is in producing ethanol or grain alcohol. And it is an international contender in handling other grains. Over the past three decades it achieved unmatched success in its field through brilliant planning, close family control of operations, and \(what can’t be repeated too the family’s patriarch, Dwayne Andreas, whom our author describes as “a political as well as sales genius enormously skilled at listening, speaking, stroking, partying, and paying in the corridors of power. Probably no one since the trust chieftains of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has drawn more on the connection between business and politics or done as much to cultivate government officials.” The operative phrase is “paying in the corridors of power.” ADM and Andreas personally have shoveled out the cash with nonpartisan generosity. It’s called “slopping both hogs.” Andreas loves liberals and conservatives alike, as long as they do his bidding. This book is about a corporate crime that could have resulted in crippling fines for ADM and long prison sentences for a host of men right at the top of the corporate hierarchybut didn’t. So let us pursue further some of the money trail that perhaps explains why no such punishments were handed out. Lieber tells us that, “from 1980 through 1995, ADM and Andreas family interests gave almost four million dollars to Democrats and Republicans with the balance tipping slightly towards the latter. “During the 1996 presidential election, ADM gave $295,000 in soft money to Democratic party committees and $405,000 to Republican party committees. However, this didn’t tell the whole story. In 1994, a $100,000 ADM check supported a Clinton presidential dinner. In 1992, ADM wrote a check for $400,000 for a Bush dinner. Dwayne Andreas and his wife gave $10,000 to Clinton’s transition team after the 1992 election and $70,000 to Newt Gingrich’s political action committee, which mobilized for the 1994 midterm election,” in which the Republicans regained control of the House. “Andreas built a statue of Ronald Reagan in Decatur, Illinois, ADM’s corporate home; he organized Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s retirement dinner, donated $1 million to the Nixon library, NOVEMBER 3, 2000 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 17