Gore’s Dilemma: Drill Oil & Shed Blood
NewsMax.com
Thursday, July 6, 2000
Al Gore’s ties to giant Occidental Petroleum – his stake in the company is now worth at least $500,000 and as much as $1 million, thanks to the hike in crude oil prices – has him facing the prospect of bearing some of the responsibility for any blood shed by an Indian tribe fighting to save their ancestral lands from being taken by Occidental.
And it emphasizes, Republican critics say, Gore’s duplicity in trying to label Gov. George W. Bush a tool of big oil interests when his own ties to Occidental go back years.
Moreover, they say that Gore, who advertises himself as an ardent environmentalist, has turned a deaf ear to pleas from members of the beleaguered U’wa tribe to help them in their fight to prevent Occidental from drilling that they say will drive them from their homeland.
The Colombian government will have to kill them all, the U’wa say, before they will give up their land and allow Occidental to drill for oil in their homeland.
"There is nothing to negotiate," U'wa leader Roberto Cobaria told the Washington Times. "The government will have to come and bomb us, then it will be over. Then the government can have all the territory and all the oil."
U'wa backers in the United States, and critics of Mr. Gore's involvement with Occidental, have urged Gore either to get rid of his stock in the company or exert his influence to get Occidental to alter its plans to drill on the tribal lands.
To quote from Lowell Ponte: "I hereby urge Vice President Gore to give away his family's $1 million in Occidental Petroleum stock. Give it all to the poor you pretend to love, Mr. Vice President, and take no tax write-off for your own benefit when you do so. And give away, too, the $20,000 Occidental gives you for a lease on Gore property. Your association with President Clinton has made you oily enough in your own right."
Gore has for the most part ignored those pleas.
His tilt toward the company to which he and his family have long-standing close ties isn’t confined to the Colombian controversy. According to columnist Robert Novak, his vaunted energy program contains a "proposed continuation of an exemption, soon scheduled to expire, for payments of royalties to the government to permit deep oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.”
"Only one company has called for this break," Novak revealed, "Occidental Petroleum Corp., which happens to be the major source of Gore's wealth."
Noting that Gore has attacked Bush as "the candidate of Big Oil," who got $1.5 million in campaign contributions from the oil industry compared with the $99,600 Gore received from big oil (including $8,000 from Occidental) Novak writes that "... no company enjoys the intimacy with Bush that Occidental does with Gore."
According to the Washington Times, Gore used his influence to promote the privatization of a government-owned oil field to make it possible for Occidental to buy it. As a result of the deal, the value of the Occidental stock he controls, and will inherit at his mother’s death, jumped 10 percent.
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