Barbara Boxer and Al Gore's Oil Connections Cover-up
By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty (www.bannerofliberty.com)
June 19, 2001
On Saturday, two stories were published about government officials who own stocks in companies they were in a position to help or hurt. One article, published in the Washington Post said in part:
"Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) launched the effort yesterday by requesting a congressional hearing into the propriety of a meeting by Karl Rove, Bush's senior adviser, with the chief executive of Intel Corp. at a time when Rove owned more than $100,000 in stock in the company.
"This is exactly the type of situation that you would have investigated had it occurred in the Clinton administration," Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the Government Reform Committee, wrote in a letter to the chairman, Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.).
The other article, published in the Sacramento Bee said in part:
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., holds stock in two energy companies that she has accused of gouging California consumers, according to personal financial disclosure statements released Thursday
Boxer owns between $65,000 and $150,000 in El Paso stock and between $16,000 and $65,000 in a subsidiary of Southern Co. Both are companies that Boxer has criticized for overcharging on natural gas and electricity. El Paso pipes natural gas into California while Southern Energy Co., Southern Co.'s subsidiary, sells wholesale electricity in California.
...Boxer also owns between $65,000 and $150,000 of Diamond Offshore Drilling shares and between $30,000 an $100,000 in stock of Halliburton Co., an oil services company that had been headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., reports between $12.3 million an $57.7 million in stocks.
Also, on June 16, the Democratic National Committee reported on its website House leader Dick Gephardt's radio response to President Bush in which talked about how it was important to "give people relief from rising energy prices and limit the role of money in our politics."
The Democrats' website also has a link to one of their special issue websites which they call "grandoldpetroleum.com" in which they urge their supporters to
"Send a message straight to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Tell them you're tired of spending your money on higher fuel bills when Big Oil is making millions.
Another special Democrat website targets Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'Neill, accusing him of questionable ethics for not promptly dumping his $90 million in Alco stock. To prevent affecting the value of the stock, O'Neill sold it gradually over a period of time.
This sudden concern about the presidential staff owning stock appears to only be a problem for Democrats when the president is a Republican. During the Clinton Administration, somehow we never heard a peep out of the Democrats about the petroleum stock holdings of top Democrats, including Vice President Al Gore who used his position to develop a plan to give oil companies access to thousands of acres of oil rich, publicly owned land that the U.S. Navy had held as emergency reserves since 1912.
In fact, the Oil companies had tried for decades to pry the land loose with little success, until Al Gore, in his "reinventing government" role, recommended that the Elk Hills oil reserves in California be sold. The Clinton White House then pushed to have language authorizing the sale inserted in the 1996 defense authorization bill, which Congress approved. On October 6, 1997 the Energy Department announced that the Federal Government would sell its interest in the 47,000 acre Elk Hills reserve to Occidental Petroleum for $3.65 bill. It was the largest privatization of federal property in American history, far larger than the sale of the Teapot Dome oil reserves during the Warren Harding administration in the 1920s.
The Energy Department was required to assess the likely environmental consequences of the sale, but it hired a private company, ICF Kaiser International, Inc. to make the assessment. Tony Coelho, chairman of ICF Kaiser, who earned $1.7 million the year he made the assessment on the sale of the Elk Hills oil reserves, was general chairman of Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000. Occidental Petroleum not only contributed heavily to Al Gore's various Senatorial and vice-presidential and presidential campaigns, but also to his father's campaigns. In fact, Armand Hammer, who built Occidental Petroleum into the huge company it is today, liked to say that he had Gore's father, Sen. Albert Gore, Sr., 'in my back pocket.' When the elder Gore left the Senate in 1970, Hammer gave him a $500,000-a-year job as the chairman of Island Coal Creek Co., an Occidental subsidiary, and a seat on Occidental's board of directors. By 1992, Gore owned Occidental stock valued at $680,000.
It was Occidental Petroleum that loaned $100,000 to the Presidential Inaugural Committee to help pay for the ceremony and the celebrations surrounding it. Occidental gave $50,000 in response to one of Gore's "no -controlling -legal authority" telephone calls from his office in the White House. Indeed, after Gore became part of the Democratic ticket in the summer of 1992, Occidental has given more than $470,000 in soft money to various Democratic committees and causes.
Just hours after the announcement of the Elk Hills sale, Gore stood across town on the campus of Georgetown University and delivered a speech to the White House Conference on Climate Change on the "terrifying prospect" of global warming, a problem he attributed to the unchecked use of fossil fuels such as oil.
Where was Rep. Waxman and his concern about presidential staff members owning too much stock in companies the Government had business dealings when Elk Hills, under his very nose in California, was being sold under Al Gore's stewardship to a company in which he and his family owned a half-million dollars in stock? And, where is his concern about the millions of dollars worth of stock owned by Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein and other Democrats, much of it stock in the very same company Dick Cheney headed?
Isn't there something just a tad hypocritical about the Democrats pretended outrage over the "oil" connection of President Bush and Dick Cheney? We all know about Cheney and Bush's connection with oil stocks. Why is it that Al Gore, Barbara Boxer and other Democrats are keeping THEIR oil connections such a big secreat? |
