"On 11 September, while Al-Qaeda's planes slammed into the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, the Carlyle Group hosted a conference at a Washington hotel.
Among the guests of honour was a valued investor: Shafig bin Laden, brother to
Osama."
Dette er bare siste setning i en interessant reportasje fra
Guardian/Observer(se nedenfor), som bl.a. opplyser om miljøtilstanden i Bushs
bakgård.
Karsten Johansen
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.
The entwinement of the Bush dynasty with the energy barons of Texas has
apparently humble beginnings, in the Lone Star State's wild west, on the
plains around Midland and Odessa. This is barren land across which dust devils
fly and trains rumble like iron snakes. This is where George Bush Sr was sent
by his father, Senator Prescott Bush, to a trainee job with the International
Derrick and Equipment Company, a subsidiary of Dresser Industries, controlled
by the Bush family and selling more oil rigs than anyone in the world.
(Dresser later became absorbed by Halliburton.)
The world first heard of Odessa on that fateful day in December 1998 when Bush
Jr was governor of Texas and the sky turned black after an 'upset' at the
Huntsman chemical plant literally on the wrong side of the railroad tracks it
shares with poor housing, where Mexicans and blacks live. (An 'upset' is an
unplanned accident releasing pollution, not part of the plant's normal running
procedure, and which does not count in its regulatory tally.) Lucia Llanez,
who lives in this tightly knit community of bungalows between plant and
railroad, will never forget this one: 'It was dark all over; cars on the
Interstate slowing down and putting their lights on because they couldn't see,
though it was day. There was a rumbling like trains that rattled the windows,
and people were going to hospital for watering eyes, allergies and problems
breathing. The cloud stayed two weeks.'
The story of Huntsman goes back to the days of Bush Sr's arrival, when Odessa
was a town of what retired fireman Don Dangerfield calls 'wildcatters'. In the
40s, the US Air Force bombed deep holes in the giant Permian oil basin in a
search for oil which then attracted a stampede of speculators (including those
from Humble) who would, recalls Dangerfield, 'spend the nights in a hotel, the
End of the Golden West, and gamble their lots in rooms so thick with cigar
smoke you could hardly see'. Among them was a man he remembers well: John Sam
Shepherd, a former attorney general of Texas and member of the White Citizens
Council - a political wing of the Ku Klux Klan - disgraced by a land scandal
and come to seek his fortune out West by setting up the El Paso Products
company, later Huntsman.
George Bush landed in this mayhem but quickly decamped 20 miles north to
Midland, where new millionaires like him established a country club, a Harvard
and a Yale club, met at the Petroleum Club and played golf on irrigated lawns.
Midland was, recalls Gene Collins, a member of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People in Odessam 'one of two towns in America with
a Rolls-Royce dealership and more millionaires per head than anywhere'. This
was where Bush Sr built his oil fortune, launched a political career on its
shoulders and raised his son George W Bush in the art and language of power he
now feigns not to speak. The story of how Bush Sr constructed his empire is
well known, as is that of how his son George W was groomed to follow in his
footsteps. Less widely broadcast, however, are the depths and intricacies of a
system the Bush family built in bonding with the energy industry, as the
dynastic machine elevated its methods from Odessa to the Senate, the
governor's mansion in Austin, the oil centres of Houston and Dallas, the White
House and thereafter the globe.
Neil Carman has a professorial air to him that belies the sharpness of the
surgical blade with which he tries to operate on 'Toxic Texas'. Originally a
plant biologist, he was an investigator for the Texas Natural Resources
Conservation Commission (TNRCC), responsible for issuing permits for agreed
levels of pollution and enforcing environmental law. In 1989, he took on the
General Tire and Rubber Company for 'systematic violations'.
The firm hired a lobbyist, Larry Feldcamp, from the Baker Botts law firm whose
senior partner, James Baker III, was secretary of state to then president
George Bush Sr and who later, as an attorney, secured the delivery of the
state of Florida for Bush Jr during last year's election recounts. Baker Botts
advertises itself as a 'full service firm', counting Shell, Mobil, Union
Carbide, Huntsman, Amoco on its books. The other law firm indivisible from the
energy lobby and the Bush fiefdom is Vinson & Elkins, which acts for both
Enron and the Alcoa aluminium giant, whose former chief executive Paul O'Neill
is now US Treasury Secretary. Between these law firms and the regulatory body
supposed to face them down, says Dr Carman, 'there's a revolving door.
Feldcamp's place was taken recently by the most active attorney on the oil
scene, Pamela Giblin - one of the TNRCC's first appointees.'
Carman resigned because 'all they had to do was hire people like Feldcamp and
you were off the case. They did not deny permits - they must have issued
50,000 permits for air pollution during my time and refused only two, on
occasions when the public raised hell. And they don't revoke them - it's not
like drunk driving: if you get caught, they just keep reissuing. They used to
refer to these places as "industrial areas", as if that meant they were
outside the law. I called them "sacrifice zones".'
There is another problem, unique to Texas: the 'grandfathering' rule.
Grandfathering dates back to the Texas Clean Air Act of 1971, exempting
existing installations from compliance with new regulations. The idea was that
they would be modernised or become obsolete and close. In the event, firms
found that not being obliged to spend on pollution control gave them a
competitive edge, and nearly three decades later, grandfathering accounted for
more than 1,000 plants and 35 per cent of all pollution in Texas.
Nevertheless, in the early 90s, the TNRCC began to toughen its stance in
accordance with a more aggressive federal approach to pollution by the new
Clinton administration. 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.
Wheat's analysis of the new governor's 'personal time' shows a revolving door
for campaign donors and the energy industry. Andrew Barrett, Bush's in-house
environmental policy advisor, began daily visits to the TNRCC in preparation
for the appointment of new commissioners: Ralph Marquez, lobbyist for the
Texas Chemical Council and former executive of the Monsanto chemical firm, and
Barry McBee, attorney with the law firm Thompson & Knight, a major contributor
to Bush funds with a host of oil-industry clients.
Legislation based on the notion of 'self-regulation' followed: a law enabling
companies to audit their own pollution records provided they reported them, in
exchange for which there would be absolute protection from public disclosure.
Big oil was delighted, as a memo obtained by an environmentalist group, the
Texas SEED Coalition, illustrated: a record of a gathering in June 1977 at
Exxon in Houston by 40 representatives of the Texas oil and gas industries -
written by one of their number - said 'the "insiders" from oil and gas believe
that the governor's office will persuade the TNRCC to accept whatever program
is developed between the industry group and the governor's office'.
It was not until Bush became president that, in its 2001 state legislature,
Texas finally decided to rein in the 'grandfathered' plants. A bill gave them
until 2007 to come into line with federal law or shut down. Even then, there
was a legal challenge to the TNRCC's science from the Houston Business
Partnership, recently entrusted with millions in federal money to clean up the
Gulf coastline. The partnership is a high-octane chamber of commerce, throwing
up a few familiar names: Exxon, Conoco, Enron, James Baker's law firm Baker
Botts - and George Bush Sr.
Most important of all - and best hidden - was Bush's programme for Tort
Reform. It was this that his father's advisor Karl Rove (dispatched to steer
Bush's presidential campaign and now the White House itself) insisted the new
governor make his hallmark, and this is potentially the dynasty's greatest
gift to big oil. Put simply, Tort Reform means making it harder for citizens
to sue corporations. TPJ calculated that business interests specifically
isolating Tort Reform on their political agenda poured money into Bush's
gubernatorial campaigns. Soon after being elected governor, says Andrew Wheat,
Bush declared Tort Reform an 'emergency issue'.
This meant appointing a judge to the Texas supreme court whom President Bush
is tipped to bring aboard the Supreme Court in Washington (to which, some say,
he owes his presidency). Alberto Gonzalez wrote a decision soon after his
appointment to the Texas court which made it all but impossible for citizens
to bring class actions. 'The result,' says Shawn Isbell, a lawyer working on
environmental cases, 'is that it will simply be too expensive to bring cases
against the corporations.'
Another ruling, says Sandra McKenzie, the lawyer who fought a long and bitter
battle against the Formosa Plastics firm, stipulates that 'anyone trying to
prove a personal chemical injury had to show that other people in a similar
situation had suffered the same reaction, according to a study in a published
journal'. The new precedents, says McKenzie, 'changed the laws to establish a
no-compromise, "take no prisoners" approach by the Bushes'.
In 1989, George Bush presented the Governor's Award for Environ mental
Excellence to the Valero chemical refining company. Foremost in the minds of
the proud executives at the ceremony in Austin's luxury Four Seasons Hotel was
their 'refinery of the future' at Corpus Christi, on the Gulf, at the far end
of the coastal strip that runs through Houston to the Louisiana border.
Alfred Williams gets a better view of the refinery of the future across the
freeway from the garden of his mobile home than Governor Bush did from the
Four Seasons. He can smell it better too - the inimitable stench on the muggy
delta air that signifies the cooking up of cheap crude-oil 'feed stock' to
produce its chemical by-product and treating the neighbourhood to a dose of
sulphur dioxide.
When Williams, an ex-Vietnam Marine, moved here in 1972, 'this was all
farmland'. He now delivers an impassioned requiem for his garden, with its
peach trees dead or buckling over. The light of a quicksilver moon catches the
plume of sulphur along what they call Refinery Row.
'I'm in my golden years,' he reflects. 'But I can't sell my house because no
bank will give a loan without 40 per cent down. And they won't relocate me, as
I'd do if they offered.
'It started with having to wipe residue from off of my car. Then the iron on
my rooftop here started to get corroded, and the trees were dying. Sometimes I
have to come inside because my eyes are burning.'
Williams filed a civil suit against Valero, steered by attorney Shawn Isbell.
The court in Corpus denied Williams class action status in accordance with the
zeitgeist, but Isbell managed to discover how the refinery of the future was
so poorly crafted that Valero had (unsuccessfully) sued the companies which
had built it. She also found out how the Texas system of overlooking 'upsets'
works. Since 1994, Valero had suffered more than 480 'upsets', but the TNRCC
records each set of emissions separately - for example, Valero's
sulphur-dioxide emissions for 1977 show up on the commission's website as
166.4 tons, while the reality including 'upsets' is closer to 700 tons.
Nevertheless, says Isbell, 'I've seen the TNRCC go harder after a pig farmer
than I have after these kinds of companies.'
Williams keeps a notebook by his phone to record the 'upsets' over the road.
He reports them to the TNRCC. But, he says, 'I call them rainbows: they are
shut at night and on the weekend when the sulphur is released, and they only
come when the storm has come and gone.'
Cornelius Harmon is a cab driver in Corpus, and takes a drive along Refinery
Row, down a road he calls the 'buffer zone'. It divides a wasteland of former
housing - where those relocated because of pollution by another plant, Koch,
once lived - from the mostly black and Hispanic community of Hillcrest. 'Are
you gonna tell me,' posits Harmon, 'that the hand of God Almighty drew a line
down this road and He says: "Over yonder side is contaminated and this side is
fit for folks to live ?" And what have we got here? Well, I'll be doggone if
it's not a school, with children playing in the smell. The people who run
these things, they give our kids a new pair of sneakers and go to church and
think they're going to heaven. But at the pearly gates, they're going to find
St Peter in his Afro saying: "Whassup cuz? Seems like you're trying to get
into the wrong place."'
Time came for destiny to fulfil itself, for the son to stand for the high
office in Washington which the Bush dynasty and its backers saw as having been
usurped by Bill Clinton. The story of what carried George W Bush to the White
House is well known: the most ruthlessly efficient campaigning machine ever
assembled - by Karl Rove - with all the family's best connections filling a
treasure chest that broke all records. As they returned to number-crunching in
Austin, Texans for Public Justice and Public Research Works found little to
surprise them save the machine's speed and efficacy. Within a month, Bush had
raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, with Enron leading the field and two
law firms giving $146,900 - most prominently Vinson and Elkins, attorneys to
Enron and the Alcoa aluminium giant, and James Baker's company, lawyers to the
oil industry.
When Bush came to pick his cabinet, almost all pivotal positions went to Bush
Sr's inner sanctum, apart from the posts of commerce secretary (Don Evans,
longtime buddy of Bush Jr's and a fellow Midland oil man) and treasury
secretary (Paul O'Neill, currently touring the globe with Bono of U2, and
former chief executive of Alcoa, the world's biggest producer of aluminium).
Alcoa held a stockholders meeting to send O'Neill off with a torrent of
eulogies and an annual pay packet worth $36m, but three speakers spoiled the
party. Two were trade unionists from O'Neill's troubled plant at Ciudad Acuna
in Mexico, challenging the chief executive's claim that conditions at their
factory were so good 'they can eat off the floor'. The third was the
soft-spoken Texan Ron Giles, drawing attention to the biggest of the state's
'grandfathered' polluters - the Alcoa smelting plant at Rockdale. If the
Rockdale plant were a single state, it would count 40th for pollution among
the 50 in the union, belching more than 100,000 tons of toxins in 1997.
The smokestacks of the largest aluminium smelter in North America fit
incongruously into the pastoral ranch land northeast of Austin. And they seem
especially odd as backdrop to the 300-acre ranch where Wayne Brinkley's family
has raised cattle since the late 1800s, but over which hangs a stench wafting
across the moonscape of Alcoa's lignite mine.
Brinkley looks as much the Texan as President Bush in his boots and Stetson -
'Only difference is,' he says, 'I am one, and Bush is not.' In his office is a
hog, stuffed and mounted, and an awesome collection of vintage knives and
firearms. On his desk is a survey by the independent Research Analysis
Consultations group showing that concentrations of magnesium, calcium and
aluminium register 'very high' around Brinkley's barn, and sodium and titanium
over his fields. 'My son had cancer when he was just a young kid,' he says in
a voice like sandpaper. 'They tried to buy us out. They keep offering various
deals saying I can't talk to anyone about this for 35 years, and then they
changed it to forever. But why should I leave? My family's been here 100
years; they've been here 50. They should do it by the book, and keep it clean
for the rest of us.'
Alcoa continues regardless, feted by Wall Street for 'dazzling' returns. But
in the last light of a warm evening, quiet rebellion stirs in the community
room of a little town called Elgin. A group of local people, Neighbors for
Neighbors, have obtained records that show Alcoa to be cheating, making
improvements to its production plant worth some $45m without parallel
investments in pollution control. As a direct result of the Neighbors' exposé,
the company was investigated by a TNRCC with no place to hide this time.
Neighbors for Neighbors, enjoying statewide coverage and acclaim for its
pluck, is itself suing the company. Billie Woods, Neighbors' president, says
that Alcoa has responded by pressing ahead with its plans for a new lignite
mine that would carve up 15,000 acres of farmland. The company has also made
court applications to enter and search the homes of Neighbors activists. The
request was denied, but the matter moved the usually conservative Daily Texan
newspaper to demand: 'Stop the Alcoa Gestapo!'
Yesterday Texas, today Washington, tomorrow the world. With Bush family
business back home in the US presidency, it now moves, in the form of the
father, to the apex of global finance. The Carlyle Group defines the next
phase of power: a Washington-based private equity fund with a difference. It
is headed by Frank Carlucci, former CIA director and defense secretary under
Ronald Reagan and lifelong friend of George Bush Sr. Bush (also once director
of the CIA) sits next to Carlucci on the board with a portfolio specialising
in Asia and does not hesitate to communicate with his son on concerns of
regional relevance to Carlyle such as Afghanistan or the Pacific Rim. Bush Jr
was once chairman of a Carlyle subsidiary making in-flight food.
On Carlucci's other flank is the ubiquitous James Baker III. Chairman of
Carlyle Europe is John Major. The group's new asset management is headed by
Afsaneh Beschloss, former treasurer of the World Bank. Carlyle has grown
quickly to be worth some $12bn, specialising in energy and defence, with
particular attention to the oil-producing Gulf states. Among its most eager
investors is Prince Bandar, Saudi ambassador to Washington and his father
Prince Sultan, the kingdom's defence minister. The group's most spectacular
recent coup was to reap $400m in a stock sale of its subsidiary United Defence
Industries, maker of the Crusader artillery system which most military experts
argued was redundant, but which won $470m in development money from the
Pentagon and whose future in the US arsenal still hangs in the balance after a
series of recent meetings between Carlucci and Defence Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld. Within a month of 11 September last year, Carlucci was meeting with
Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and 10 days later offered an
assessment which exactly predicted the endless-war scenario: 'We as
Americans,' he said, 'have to recognise that terrorism is more or less a
permanent situation.'
'What's the secret?' chided William Conway, a co-founder of the group. 'I
don't think we have any secrets. We are a group of businessmen who have made a
huge amount of money for our investors.' 'I never bought into this conspiracy
theory about the Bush family, the energy companies or the Carlyle Group,' says
Michael King, seasoned political editor of the Austin Chronicle , who has
observed the phenomenon for decades. 'It is perfectly clear what they're
aiming at from what they do in public: managing the global economy to their
own advantage, and doing a pretty good job of it.'
On 11 September, while Al-Qaeda's planes slammed into the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, the Carlyle Group hosted a conference at a Washington hotel.
Among the guests of honour was a valued investor: Shafig bin Laden, brother to
Osama.
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