Here's a typical "..limpo-lefty media's.." view on the matter..........
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A Crude Likeness - oil tanker named for National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice - Brief Article
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How the oil tanker Condoleezza Rice lived up to its name, by Ken Silverstein
"We can't live without oil"--nearly any member of George W. Bush's administration might be given to such a declaration, which seeks to place our favorite fossil fuel in the rarefied company of food, water, and air. The speaker in this case was National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, responding matter-of-factly to the revelation last summer that Chevron, on whose board of directors she served for nine years, had named an oil tanker in her honor. Capable of carrying 130,000 tons of cargo, the Condoleezza Rice, whose certificate of survey is pictured here, is one of more than 3,400 oil tankers operating worldwide; these tankers generally run from the Third World, where most oil is located, to the First World--presumably the "we" in Rice's formulation where most oil is consumed. Seen from the stem of the Condoleezza Rice, the world would doubtless seem more distressed by its life with oil than by the thought of a life without it.
Just months after its 1993 certification, the Condoleezza Rice was sold to CalPetro Tankers, a third-party shipping firm, and immediately chartered back to Chevron. Since the Exxon Valdez disaster, this arrangement has become standard among large oil companies, which are desperate to distance themselves from major spills. A shortage of seaworthy tankers, combined with a surge in Western demand for oil, has contributed to a 250 percent jump in oil-shipping prices since last year--adding, by one estimate, 4 [cts.] per gallon to the price of gasoline. Since 1998 this ship has been owned by Frontline Ltd., a Norwegian firm whose CEO, John Fredriksen, controls shipping properties estimated to be worth a billion dollars (a fortune built, in part, on his oil dealings with the Ayatollah during the Iran-Iraq war). Frontline's revenues nearly doubled last year, to $697 million; Lloyd's List calls Fredriksen "pretty well unstoppable" and compares him to a "10th century Viking voyager, snapping up plump prey wherever his dragon ship heaves over the horizon."
As mandated by a 1990 U.S. law, the Condoleezza Rice was built with a "double hull," wherein an extra sheet of steel protects the sea from the tanker's toxic cargo. Double hulls, though by no means a fail-safe measure for preventing spills, do represent a major improvement; but two thirds of oil tankers sailing into U.S. waters--and nearly that portion of tankers worldwide--still have only a single hull. Meanwhile, significant spills still occur almost monthly and remain largely out of the public eye. Last November, for example, when the Westchester ran aground near New Orleans, spilling over 500,000 gallons of crude into the Mississippi River, the story merited only a brief mention in most national newspapers, none of which bothered to report the American company on behalf of which the tanker carried its oil. (It was Capline, a pipeline co-operated by Shell and Texaco.)
Like the Westchester, this ship is registered in the Bahamas--third, after Panama and Liberia, among nations whose flags are most commonly flown by oil tankers. All three are considered "flags of convenience" (FOCs), a term for nations that open their registries to all comers; these nations tend to offer cut-rate fees and taxes, not to mention alluringly lax labor and inspection policies. Panama's licensing process is so slipshod that a union activist recently obtained, entirely through the mail (and with under-the-table payments), a certificate authorizing him to navigate a Panamanian-registered ship. The Bahamas have no minimum wage requirements for crews and no laws requiring recognition of trade unions; even unionized seafarers on its ships (who in this case hail from Russia, India, or the Philippines) are usually not paid more than $1,200 a month, a third of the wage aboard a U.S.-flagged ship. Frequently unaware of their rights, or too afraid to speak out, crews of FOC-registered ships often work up to sixteen hours each day and lack decent medical care.
The Condoleezza Rice is classified as a "Suezmax" tanker--a name derived from its breadth, the maximum permitted to pass through the Suez Canal. Suezmaxes are typically used to ferry crude oil out of resource-rich West Africa, where Chevron has invested $4.4 billion since 1990. The Condoleezza Rice stops frequently in the region: in Nigeria's Niger Delta, where continual oil spills have left the groundwater poisoned (and where a Chevron-hired "kill-and-go" security squad gunned down two protesters in 1998); in Angola, where Western oil money, often in the form of signing bonuses to the government, continues to finance a 25-year-long civil war; and in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which for three years has been embroiled in its own brutal war. Indeed, were Condoleezza Rice herself to retrace the path of her namesake, she might find the trip instructive as to the effects of the oil trade on "national security."
"I'm very proud of my association with Chevron, and I think we should be very proud of the job that American oil companies are doing in ... making certain that we have a safe energy supply," Rice continued last summer, in her (and Chevron's) defense. Perhaps she did not care to contemplate her namesake's pernicious wake, as it were--the oil spills, labor exploitation, and political destabilization endemic to the global oil trade, not to mention the smog, global warming, and other consequences of the West's reliance on hydrocarbon fuels. At any rate, the mutual pride in Rice's association with Chevron appears to have dimmed; in late April, Chevron quietly renamed the ship, gracing it with the pleasingly generic moniker Altair Voyager. Henceforth, it seems, Condoleezza Rice's good name will have to serve the interests of Big Oil in person.
Ken Silverstein is a contributing editor of Hater's Magazine. His last piece for the magazine, "The Church of Morris Dees," appeared in the November 2000 issue.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Harper's Magazine Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group
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