Re: Like you, I am disgusted with Bush's energy and environmental policies.
Here's a new report by the Observer on Texas
Dark heart of the American dream
It's the most polluted state in the planet's most powerful country. Ed Vulliamy goes into George Bush's backyard to reveal how big oil got in bed with big politics and the price paid by the little people
Sunday June 16, 2002
The Observer
There is a perverse beauty to the landscape arraigned below the iron bridge where Highway 255 strides the Houston Ship Channel: great towers of light and fire as far as the eye can behold; sinewy steel piping, plumes of smoke and flame twinkling into a Texas twilight coloured by a shroud of pollution hanging from the sky. The awesome prepotency of this smokescape is no illusion, for this is an epicentre of power, oil capital of the Western world and the most industrialised corner of the United States. It is also the capital of a power machine perfected in Texas, elevated to rule the nation and now unchallenged across the planet. A machine that operates in perpetual motion - an equilibrium of interests - between industry and politics. LaNell Anderson, former Republican voter, businesswoman and real-estate broker who lived many years in this land of smokestacks and smog, calls it 'vending-machine politics: you puts your money in and you gets your product out'.
'We don't see ourselves as a dynasty,' said George Bush Sr as his son launched the election campaign that won him the current presidency, raiding father's Rolodex to do so. 'We don't feel entitled to anything.' And yet at no point in the past 50 years - the half-century since 1952 which defines the modern age - has there not been a Bush in a governor's mansion (in Texas or Florida), on Capitol Hill or in the White House - and usually more than one of those at a time. The 'vending machine' is a single family whose tango with the powers which illuminate this endless horizon of light and flame is a dance around every corner in the labyrinth of Texan and now national - indeed global - politics. 'Everything they learned when they started out in west Texas,' says Dr Neil Carman, once a regulator of pollution in the state, 'they applied to the governor's mansion, the nation and the world... Power in America is not so much about George W Bush, it's about the people from Texas who put him there.'
This is the dynasty's throne, the state whose highways are lined with the spirited advice 'Don't Mess With Texas' (originally the slogan of an anti-litter campaign). As if litter would make much difference: Texas counts the worst pollution record in the US, top in the belching of toxic chemicals and carcinogens into the air, top in chemical spills, top in ozone pollution, top in carbon-dioxide emissions, top for mercury emission, top in clean-water violations, top in the production of hazardous waste. Houston overtook Los Angeles for the coveted title of 'most polluted city' in the early 90s.
'You are looking at the biggest oil refinery in the world,' indicates LaNell Anderson. She refers to the edifice that is the 3,000-acre Exxon Mobil plant at Baytown, near Houston, producer of 507,800 barrels a day. Here begins a story of both dynasty and destiny, for it was on this spot in 1917 that the Bush family's oil connection was forged - where the Humble Oil company, which struck black gold in the Houston suburb of that name, took root, later to be- come the Exxon behemoth. Humble's founder, William Stamps Farish, went on to become president of Standard Oil. His daughter became a friend of George Bush Sr and his grandson William Jr was taken in 'almost like family' (said Barbara Bush) while campaigning for George Sr's entrée into Washington Senatorial politics in 1964. Farish Jr claims to have been the first man to whom Bush Sr confided his ambition to be president one day, and was last year named US Ambassador to London.
At first, Anderson welcomed the benefits to a community of the 200 oil-related industries relocated to the Houston area by the time she and her second husband set up home in a suburb wedged between Exxon and the Lyondell chemical plant. Neither she nor he had any history of disease in their families. But in 1985, her husband's daughter gave birth to a girl, Alyssa, with a rare liver disease - she died aged six months. In 1986, Anderson's mother became ill and died of bone cancer a year later. The following year, Anderson and her sister were diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, as was a granddaughter in 1992, and an older sister with Crohn's disease. In 1991, her father died from emphysema; a year later the mother of Alyssa gave birth to a son immediately diagnosed with severe asthma. Anderson connects the litany of disease with mishaps by her industrial neighbours. She paraphrases their attitude thus: 'If someone doesn't like it, they can sue us if they can - and since we have more money than God, we will win.'
A thumbnail sketch of politics and the environment in the United States today depicts oil as the lifeblood running through every vein of an administration forging ahead with its energy policy. The White House has just been forced to disclose (after being faced with a Congressional subpoena) that it drew up a national energy plan based on increased production without regard to the environment or conservation, having failed to consult with anyone other than its friends among the producers themselves, notably the disgraced Enron. This despite the fact that an energy crisis in California last summer caused most analysts to draw the opposite conclusion, stressing the need to curb a gas-guzzling America.
At the hub of this turning wheel of influence is Vice President Dick Cheney, fresh into office from his post as chief executive of Halliburton, the world's second-largest oil-drilling services company, where he netted a personal fortune of $36m in the year before leaving, with help from contacts accumulated while serving under George Bush Sr. Just last week, however, Halliburton joined Enron in coming under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for the same system of publishing inflated revenues - 'aggressive accounting' - for which Enron has become a synonym for shame. These alleged misdeeds took place during Cheney's directorship. The company also faces a floodtide of civil lawsuits over asbestosis_ unless a model can be found (as has been established in Texas) to make such resort to the law nigh impossible for anyone without money.
More at the link below:
observer.co.uk
One more extract:
"Then, in 1994, Texas went to the polls to elect a new governor - 'And when Bush took over,' says Carman, 'everything changed.'
Two groups based in Austin - Texans for Public Justice (TPJ) and Public Research Works (PRW) - crunched the statistics on the wave of money on which George W Bush sailed into the governor's mansion. It was what Andrew Wheat of the TPJ calls 'something unheard of in Texas or anywhere else: $42m on two campaigns'. Grandfathered polluters poured $10.2m into the campaign coffers between 1993 and 1998, led by what PRW calls the 'dirty 30', including Exxon, Shell, Amoco, Enron and the Alcoa aluminium giant. Bush himself received $1.5m from 55 grandfathered companies, led by Enron, with a handsome $348,500 top-up from the man he calls Kenny Boy - Kenneth Lay, the company's chief executive, currently under criminal investigation. "
The polluters make the rules now. Prepare for much higher levels of disgust. |
