Armand Hammer, who developed a reputation as “the Godfather of American corporate corruption” when he ran Occidental Petroleum, used to brag that he had the late Senator Al Gore, Sr. “in my back pocket.” To this day, the Gore family collects $20,000 each year from Occidental for a mineral lease. The company’s chemical subsidiary, however, is on excellent terms with Bush’s administration; its PAC contributed $5,000 to his latest gubernatorial race. Occidental Chemical in one of the world’s leading producers of chlorine and caustic soda chemicals. It is a member of the Texas Chemical Council. Members of this trade group account for 74 percent of the toxic emissions in Texas—which leads the nation in such pollution. Occidental’s Texas facilities dump more than 1 million pounds of toxic emissions into Texas skies each year. Every major city in the state either flunks—or is on the verge of flunking—federal air standards. Rather than tackling air pollution, the Bush administration has pressured the federal government to relax its air-quality standards.