Dole racked up the most frequent-flier miles-29 flights since 1993-on a jet owned by Archer-Daniels-Midland. The agribusiness giant is headed by his old friend Dwayne Andreas. As required by campaign-finance law, Dole’s political committee reimbursed ADM the equivalent of first-class air fare (less than 25 percent of the cost of operating a private jet). Dole for years has been among the Senate’s most ardent backers of ADM’s pet product, ethanol, sponsoring tax breaks worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Dole -also took 26 flights aboard jets provided by UST Inc., the nation’s biggest producer of smokeless tobacco. UST has contributed $40,000 to Dole’s political committees since 1987, and its senior vice president is a board member of and fund raiser for the Dole Foundation, a charity for the disabled. At the same time, Dole has worked to hold down taxes on smokeless tobacco; a Dole amendment in 1985 set the tax on smokeless tobacco at only one fifth of the levy on cigarettes. In 1992 the Department of Health and Human Services warned of “an impending oral-cancer epidemic” as a result of soaring sales of UST’s cherry-flavored Skoal and other smokeless products. “It’s ludicrous to suggest that Senator Dole’s position on any of these issues has been influenced by campaign contributions or entirely legal and fully disclosed rides on corporate planes,” said Dole spokesman Nelson Warfield.
On three occasions, Dole flew on a plane provided by the American Financial Corp., whose chairman is financier Carl Lindner. Last year Lindner and his family gave $20,000 to Dole’s political committee, Campaign America, and his firm contributed $200,000 to the Republican National Committee. Lindner also gave $375,000 to the Democratic National Committee and $55,000 to Newt Gingrich’s GOPAC. Last November, Dole and several other lawmakers successfully pressed the administration to attack European quotas on banana imports. The prime beneficiary? A Lindner company, Chiquita Banana. Typically, trade fights are about protecting American jobs. But the few U.S. jobs this one would save are at Lindner’s corporate headquarters in Cincinnati; most of Chiquita’s employees work in Latin America, where the bananas grow.
