The reason rich families and giant corpos buy politicians. The Koch family specifically bought up every Republican they could for the express purpose of making more money- because buying politicians up was less costly than not polluting.
And before some pubbie dumbass gets up in here with “they were just not maintaining records chill out bro!”:
Their bad record keeping was by design.
The us regulatory frame work relies on self-reporting- in this case benzene leaks and releases. By simply not reporting it or keeping those records, they covered up the crime of polluting Corpus Christie for years. That’s why it’s not just some bad record keeping.