To the Editor:

In the campaign financial reports from 2012, Rep. Michelle Presnell, R-Yancey, spent $107,039 with $3,611 from individuals and Sen. Jim Davis, R-Franklin, spent $920,258 with $62,666 from individuals. (Contrast Joe Sam Queen spending $128,871 with $88,632 from individuals.) Given who paid for our politicians’ campaigns, it is not surprising that in the last two years of legislation big business got everything they wanted.

So it is important to ask: What kind of people are these masters of our elected representatives? They dumped more pollutants into the nation’s waterways than General Electric and International Paper combined. They generated 24 million metric tons of greenhouse gases a year. They developed chemicals and helped craft the legislation that protects the fracking cocktails, which are exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act. They promote the burning of a denser, dirtier and cheaper coal. They used thousands of miles of unsafe pipelines causing millions of gallons of spills, resulting in at least two deaths. 

Not to be caught, they used the churn of a tugboat’s engine to break up waterborne spills, or on land just buried them. They drove the prices of oil above $147 a barrel in July 2008, battering a global economy about to enter a free fall. They’ve taken large amounts of materials (oil, pine) off the market, betting on price disruptions the company itself creates. 

Is water next? They profited from trade with the state sponsor of terror and reckless would-be nuclear power, supplying Iran with the largest methanol plant in the world. 

They trade in unregulated derivatives, dubbed “financial weapons of mass destruction,” that banks are banned from. Their very essence is to exploit breakdowns in the free market.

They get richer as the costs of what they destroy are foisted on the rest of us — ill health, foul water and a climate crisis. To voters they hide by selling fear of abortion, gun control, entitlements and government. What voters should fear is big business becoming our government through the election of their puppet politicians.

John Geers

Haywood County