tompaine.com
MEDIA SILENCE ON AL GORE: Why Haven't Reporters Questioned Him About His Ties to Oxy?
The Sound of Silence Is Deafening
by David Case
For decades, Vice President Gore has been receiving $20,000 annual payments from Occidental Petroleum, ostensibly for the mineral rights on land. But the company has never used the land, and the Gores currently rent it out to a competing firm.
So what does the firm get for its money? The answer is not clear. But Occidental won a bid last year for the prized Elk Hills oil reserve, tripling the company's U.S oil reserves. The sale, which was the largest privatization of a national asset ever, was advocated by the vice president in his drive to "re-invent government."
The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) published these revelations in its book The Buying of the President 2000 in early January, 2000. Hardly a hip-shooting advocacy outfit, CPI is the same group, led by former 60 Minutes producer Charles Lewis, that broke the Lincoln bedroom story in 1996.
Maybe patronage from a major oil company - which may whiff of conflict of interest, if not outright corruption - isn't as sexy as the White-House-as-Motel 6. Nonetheless, at least for readers of the major dailies, CPI's revelations may well have never been made.
The cozy relationship received some ink in local newspapers, and it was briefly covered on both the Wall Street Journal and New York Times editorial pages. But so far, according to CPI and a Lexis-Nexis search, Gore hasn't fielded a single question from the majors' phalanx of campaign trail journalists.
Granted, these reporters have treated conscientious voters to up-to-the-minute stories on Gore's penchant for drab suits, and his alpha-male complex. It's understandable, therefore, that there's been no time to probe a matter as boring as possible high-level corruption.
Nonetheless, at least some people think it should be front-page news. "It seems to be the type of thing that voters ought to know about," says Tom Wicker, a veteran New York Times columnist (and TomPaine.com contributor).
CPI admits that there's no smoking gun, no document linking Gore to a corrupt decision. "Politics are more nuanced than that," says CPI's Peter Eisner. There is, he points out, an intriguing trend:
For decades, Occidental has patronized the Gore family (in the 1970s the vice president inherited the Oxy payments from his father, who was given a $500,000 per year job when he retired from the Senate). (( ** Ron's Note: How's that for "pigging out on a sweet-heart, revolving door job package, Dude??" $500,000 back in the '70s is easily equal to over a cool $1 million today...*** ))
Then, in his effort to "re-invent government" Gore recommended the sale of Elk Hills, a strategic oil reserve which the government has guardedly held since the early twentieth century.
Finally, the Department of Energy, in an unusual closed bid, sold the reserve to Occidental. "The bids are still sealed to this hour," despite CPI's attempts to review them, according to Eisner. Moreover, he points out, "the environmental review for the Elk Hills sale was conducted by ICF Kaiser, on whose board Gore's campaign manager Tony Coehlo sits."..... <---- Whoa!!!! No wonder Tony Coehlo left the campaign...
When CPI's investigators asked the campaign about the payments and the appearance of corruption, Gore's lawyers stonewalled them. Gore's office didn't return TomPaine.com's requests for comment.
At least one investigative reporter from a major daily is looking into the issue. But in the meantime, the primary season is forging ahead. Voters may find out too late that their candidate is soiled.
CPI has done extensive media interviews about the allegations, yet the revelations haven't become a campaign issue. "The correspondents certainly could be asking the Vice President about this." The newspapers "are investing a lot of money chasing after the politicians on the campaign trail," but they're not stepping back to see the bigger picture, he says.
William Greider, of the Nation magazine, is less miffed by the press corps' oversight. "I could give you a list of a thousand things that they should do but they don't," he says. "The herd is pretty mindless, it's been for a long time."
The media "like to beat up on people who are down, and boost them when they're up," Greider points out. "They beat up on Gore for picky, illegitimate reasons last summer; now he's up and there's an irrational sense of guilt." about what they reported in the past. "Now they think they need to explain why he's up. Asking Gore about this sticky issue of his financial history doesn't fit in with the simplistic plot line they've created for themselves."
One correspondent from the Los Angeles Times responded that Oxy's patronage of Gore was a matter for the investigative journalists, not for the campaign team. Another, who declined to be identified, and who was "vaguely familiar with the allegations about Gore and Occidental," explained that the correspondents are more focused on the day-to-day machinations of the campaign at this time. Moreover, the correspondent complained that access to the candidate is difficult, "even if you travel on Air Force 2."
Access, as CPI's executive director Charles Lewis points out, is a big hurdle. In the competitive media environment, news outlets need access to the candidate; to get the exclusive scoop journalists have to ride on the campaign bus and fly with the vice president. Those who cause a dust-up don't get on the A-list.
No doubt, the public deserves an explanation, especially considering that the patronage involves an oil company, whose profits can be so closely linked with decisions the government makes on defense, foreign affairs, natural resource policy, taxation and the like. "Of the many decisions Vice President Gore makes, how can we know how his relationship with Oxy influences him?" Eisner asks.
It seems implausible that a corporation would dish out hundreds of thousands of dollars and get nothing in return; indeed, it violates the company's pact with its shareholders.
This isn't to say that the vice president is big oil's stooge; indeed, Governor George W. Bush has pocketed the bulk of the sector's campaign largesse. "Gore didn't exactly endear himself to the oil industry," when he pandered to the California vote by proposing to halt offshore drilling, points out George Lobsman, Editor-in-Chief of the Energy Daily. And Lobsman notes that Chevron, which has long owned a minority interest in the reserve, not Oxy, led the lobbying for the Elk Hills sale.
Chevron spokesman Dan Sager explains that the company was eager to have a private partner at Elk Hills. In defense of Occidental, which Chevron bid against, he says "I've never heard anyone say that there were any problems whatsoever with the way this sale was handled."
Regardless of how the idea arose, Gore pushed for the sale of the Elk Hills reserve, and we may never know if he nudged the Department of Energy toward accepting his patron's bid. In the end, Oxy paid about twice as much as Congress had estimated the sale would bring. Nonetheless, as long as the bid documents remain sealed taxpayers will never know if they got the best price - or if Gore cut a back-room deal.
Just this week, the administration pushed through a major aid package for the Colombian military, though many lawmakers have protested America's persistent and seemingly pointless involvement in that country's decades-old conflict. Oxy, by coincidence, is exploiting a controversial new oil field in the jungles of Colombia. Coincidence? Oil infrastructure has long been a target of Colombia's rebels. Was the administration influenced by Oxy's relationship with Gore? Is Colombia just another banana republic? Is the government going to bat for Oxy the same way Eisenhower did for the diamond traders in the Congo and the United Fruit Company in Guatemala?
Well, thanks to the campaign press corps at least we can be confident that we'll have a manly, well-dressed president. |
