cavalier attitude towards safety precautions. At the same time the Occupational Safety
and Health Administration sharply reduced inspections, often arriving only after
disabling or lethal accidents had already occured. In 1980 there were 280 OSHA
inspections in meat packing plants, but in 1988 there were only 176. This, in an industry
in which the rate of personal injury is 173 persons per working day, three times the
average of all remaining US factories. [fn 8]
Bush used his Regulatory Relief Task Force as a way to curry favor with various business
groups whose support he wanted for his future plans to assume the presidency in his own
right. According to one study made midway through the Reagan years, Bush converted
his own office "into a convenient back door for corporate lobbyists" and "a hidden court
of last resort for special interest groups that have lost their arguments in Congress, in the
federal courts, or in the regulatory process." "Case by case, the vice president's office got
involved in some mean and petty issues that directly affect people's health and lives, from
the dumping of toxic pollutants to government warnings concerning potentially harmful
drugs." [fn 9]
There were also reports of serious abuses by Bush, especially in the area of conflicts of
interest. In one case, Bush intervened in March, 1981 in favor of Eli Lilly & Co., a
company of which he had been a director in 1977-79. Bush had owned $145,000 of stock
in Eli Lilly until January, 1981, after which it was placed in a blind trust, meaning that
Bush allegedly had no way of knowing whether his trust still owned shares in the firm or
not. The Treasury Department had wanted to make the terms of a tax break for US
pharmaceutical firms operating in Puerto Rico more stringent, but Vice President Bush
had contacted the Treasury to urge that "technical" changes be made in the planned
restriction of the tax break. By April 14 Bush was feeling some heat, and he wrote a
second letter to Treasury Secretary Don Regan asking that his first request be withdrawn
because Bush was now "uncomfortable about the appearance of my active personal
involvement in the details of a tax matter directly affecting a company with which I once
had a close association." [fn 10] Bush's continuing interest in Eli Lilly is underlined by
the fact that the Pulliam family of Indiana, the family clan of Bush's later running mate
Dan Quayle, owned a very large portion of the Eli Lilly shares. Bush's choice of Quayle
was but a re-affirmation of a pre-exisiting financial and political alliance with the Pulliam
interests, which also include a newspaper chain.
The long-term results of the deregulation campaign that Bush used to burnish his image
are suggested by the September, 1991 fire in a chicken-processing plant operated by
Imperial Food Products in Hamlet, North Carolina, in which 25 persons died. One
obvious cause of this tragedy was an almost total lack of adequate state and federal
inspection, which might have identified the fire hazards that had built up over a period of
years. This fire led during October, 1991 to the bankruptcy of the Imperial Food Products
Company, which could not obtain financing to roll over its short-term and long-term debt
obligations. 225 workers at the Hamlet plant lost their jobs, as did 200 workers at the
company's other plant in Cumming, Georgia.