Bush administration OKs drilling on Native lands

Crow tribe member Burdick Two Leggins looks at the
site in Montana where businessman Philip Anschutz
plans to drill for oil.

By Geoffrey Mohan

Weatherman Draw, Montana, May 21-- The artists never signed their names, and for centuries their sandstone gallery remained hidden from all but their tribal descendants who wandered these windy sagebrush steppes.

That obscurity is about to end, as one of the nation’s richest oilmen, who also is a major contributor to the Republican Party, has been given permission to search for what he believes could be a pool of 10 million barrels of oil buried here.

These bluffs 70 miles southwest of Billings, where enigmatic images of animals and men have weathered as much as 1,000 years of prairie wind, are quickly becoming the backdrop for the first battle over the Bush-Cheney energy strategy.

Emboldened by the federal plan’s emphasis on easing access to domestic reserves on millions of acres of public land, the oil and gas industry is eyeing areas like Weatherman Draw in hopes that protracted battles over wildlife and archaeology will be a thing of the past.

Just 12 days after the inauguration of President Bush, federal authorities here granted an oil exploration permit to billionaire Philip F. Anschutz, whose empire ranges from telecommunications and railroads to part ownership of the Los Angeles Lakers and Staples Center, and who donated more than $300,000 to Republican causes in the past four years.

Affecting an obscure and largely unpopulated 4,268 acres of south-central Montana, the decision by the Bureau of Land Management turned few heads.

But 10 Native American tribes, the Sierra Club and the National Trust for Historic Preservation are launching a nationwide campaign to stop the drilling within a half-mile of indigenous art that qualifies for the National Register of Historic Places.

They fear that easier access to Weatherman Draw will attract vandalism and abuse. And losing this battle, they contend, could mark the beginning of a wholesale rollback of gains achieved in the Clinton administration, which removed vast stretches of public land from commercial exploitation and human intrusion.

The opponents of drilling have appealed the decision by the BLM, which is scheduled to issue a ruling today. Both sides have threatened to continue the battle in the courts, where the case will be closely watched by the industry and environmental movement.

“I think it really represents what Bush wants to do in the West,” said Kirk Koepsel, northern Plains regional representative for the Sierra Club. “These are the things the [Vice President Dick] Cheney energy plan has in mind to do. They both worked for oil companies, and oil companies want to have access to every acre of federal land in the West.”

Oil and gas interests in Montana and the rest of the West now openly talk of persuading the administration to reverse decisions such as a 1997 Forest Service ruling that set thousands of acres of the northern Rocky Mountains off-limits to exploration.

“I think it will help as far as bringing a more balanced approach,” Gail Abercrombie, executive director of the Montana Petroleum Assn., said of the Bush plan. “It’s not going to be tomorrow. I wouldn’t even say it would be a year or two.”

For Anschutz Exploration Corp., the BLM permit for Weatherman Draw represents little more than long overdue relief. “We went through about four years of permitting, which is about 3.9 years more than a permit takes,” said the company’s land manager, Todd Kalstrom.

“We understood this was a sensitive area, and we wanted to work with the people in the area.” But, Kalstrom added, he found the Native American response “vague and without any clarity.”

Kalstrom, in fact, warned the BLM that “Anschutz’s patience has ended” in a letter he sent to the agency in August 1999. Calls to Anschutz Exploration Corp.’s parent company for comment on the issue were not returned last week.

Application kept in limbo

The BLM kept Anschutz’s drilling application in limbo because of new, tighter regulations.

In the end, the BLM drilling permit imposed only minor conditions, including a ban on disturbing Native American rituals still held in the area and the protection of mating sage grouses, a prairie species whose population is rapidly declining as a result of human disturbances.

But the BLM will allow drillers to reopen a long abandoned access road. Motorized access is the bane of sacred sites and wilderness areas because it opens them up to thieves, vandals and poachers.

Under the permit, the road could be open and drilling underway as early as mid-June. The Native Americans whose oral histories refer to the valley as a place of peace are enraged.

At first reluctant to attract attention to an area they consider sacred, they have joined a national campaign to save Weatherman Draw.

Drilling here, they say, is like sinking a well in front of the Vatican or in the midst of religious sites in Jerusalem.

“I was told a story by Yellowface,” said Howard Boggess, a Crow oral historian who showed the site to a reporter. “He said go up the Yellowstone [River] and follow the Clark [Fork]. There’s a valley there that’s the valley of peace. We have no war there.”

Boggess is convinced Weatherman Draw is that valley.

It is not an easy place to find on a map, and once located, Weatherman Draw does not give up its secrets readily. A small change in the light angle can hide images—of shields, animals and human figures—that stand out boldly in other conditions.

Some images lie in the shadowed under face of sandstone slabs that lean like scattered dominoes in the sandy soil.

Archeologists — as well as Native American leaders themselves — are largely baffled at the meaning of the symbols, which they count as some of the best examples of indigenous rock art on the high Plains, and the only polychromatic ones in Montana.

“We don’t know exactly what it was for, but it was a special place,” said Crow tribe member Burdick Two Leggins, who saw the site for the first time with a reporter last week.

When the pioneer Weatherman family first passed through in the late 1800s, they scrawled their family name in several places close to pictographs that were not revealed to the public until 1992.

But other emblems closer to a paved road have been more widely familiar since the 1930s, and have suffered extensive damage from gunshots and graffiti. As a result, enigmatic circles and wedges lie hard by more prosaic scrawls that say “Bob,” “Kikki” or “Lonnie Schwend, May 1963.”

Crow and Comanche leaders who trekked to the site recently fumed that the Anschutz project would open the more hidden sites to similar vandalism.

Anschutz agreed to keep workers from the art sites, but bristled at BLM’s suggestion to post a 24-hour guard during drilling, suggesting that the cost be shared among the company, tribes and Sierra Club.

‘This is a living spiritual center’

Tribal representatives, meanwhile, cringe at the image of guards and fences around a sacred site. They say the obscurity afforded by wilderness has protected the area better than any modern sentinel could.

“This isn’t just some place on a hill; this is a living spiritual center. The church is alive here,” said Jimmy Arterberry, a Comanche preservation leader who traveled to the site from Oklahoma. His tribe, which branched off from local Shoshone groups, traces its heritage through the valley as well.

For their part, environmentalists view the BLM permit restrictions as weak concessions from a bureau eager to satisfy the new Washington philosophy on public land.

“I think what was happening is the BLM sensed a shift in policy and decided to move forward on this,” Koepsel charged.

Tom Lonnie, the BLM’s deputy state manager for Montana, who will issue the appeal decision today, denied any such shift.

“It’s a decision that takes a lot of review and a lot of consideration,” Lonnie said. “It wasn’t being stalled by anyone as far as I know. The change in administration had nothing to do with approval of this well.”

Still, the record on the Weatherman Draw case reveals a BLM divided over its duty to promote profitable use of federal land while protecting its cultural and wildlife heritage.

For instance, Kalstrom and others close to the decision acknowledged that his company “worked closely with BLM officials” and “mutually decided” to tailor the company’s original proposal for exploration and production in a way that would avoid a costly and time-consuming environmental impact review.

As a result, the bureau undertook a less stringent environmental assessment on a proposal that deliberately avoids the issue of what happens if oil is found.

That segmentation of the long-term plan for Weatherman Draw means that if Anschutz finds oil, the real battle may be just beginning.

At best, Anschutz geologists foresee pumping about 10 million barrels over 20 years—an amount equal to about half a day of US consumption, according to the Department of Energy. If no oil is found, Kalstrom said, “We walk away.”

Opponents don’t like the odds. “Once they get going, you can’t stop them,” said Crow activist Two Leggins. “When you’re dealing with the sixth richest man in the country, the amount of influence and power he has is enormous.”

Two Leggins and others find it particularly ironic that Philip Anschutz is an avid collector of Western paintings, currently exhibiting his private collection of Western art on a nationwide tour.

They have appealed to him to recognize the value of their simple rock images and walk away from Weatherman Draw. In the meantime, they plan to bring the issue to the attention of people viewing the exhibits in Chicago, Omaha and Washington, DC.

“This is like a gallery out here, a natural museum,” said Two Leggins. “Michelangelo, they put his art in museums and put a price on it. These things are priceless.”

Source: Los Angeles Times

Oklahoma closes race riot probe, no reparations

By Ben Fenwick

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, May 25— Supporters of restitution for one of the worst race riots in US history were angry on Friday over the Oklahoma Legislature’s decision not to compensate 100 known survivors of a 1921 Tulsa riot that left up to 300 people dead.

A Legislature-funded commission report, based on an investigation begun in 1997, asked for reparations for the elderly riot survivors. But state lawmakers did not support that recommendation in a bill passed earlier this week.

State Sen. Maxine Horner, who sponsored the bill in the Oklahoma Senate, said strong language in the legislation acknowledging and condemning the bloodshed nearly 80 years ago compensated for its lack of reparations.

“For the first time, this is written down. I think that what I can say is the state has taken the first step to full recognition. We can move to closure and healing,” Horner said.

But one commission member disagreed and called the decision not to compensate survivors an “Oklahoma cop-out.”

“I’m very disappointed ... Oklahoma allowed the trampling of the rights of these black people. They did not fulfill their (reparations) duty,” said Eddie Faye Gates, a member of the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, who headed efforts to find scattered survivors and get their testimony on what happened on May 31 and June 1, 1921 in the Greenwood district of Tulsa.

“We’ve had 20 removed from the living riot list. I am tired of those people dying with nothing settled that happened 80 years ago,” Gates told Reuters.

Riot began over lynching

The commission report, released in February, was the first full accounting of the riot, which began with fighting between whites and a group of black men who had gathered outside the courthouse to prevent the lynching of a young black man accused of assaulting a white woman.

The result was one of the deadliest race riots of an era when white mob violence against blacks and their property was all too common, according to historians on the commission.

Through the night and into the next day, carloads of whites, some with machine guns, fired on blacks and burned buildings in the thriving 35-square block neighborhood known at the time as the “Negro Wall Street.”

By the time the National Guard imposed martial law, Greenwood was in ruins. It never recovered from the destruction of more than 1,000 homes, 35 grocery stores, eight doctors’ offices and five hotels.

Based on accounts from the time, as well as survivor testimony and exploration of local cemeteries, the commission put the death toll at between 100 and 300 — far more than a semi-official tally of two or three dozen by Tulsa officials.

Legislature calls for memorial

Instead of reparations, the bill passed in the House on Tuesday and the Senate on Wednesday, called for the creation of a Greenwood area redevelopment authority, and granted seed money for a riot memorial and a scholarship account that must be funded by private donations.

Lawmakers in recent weeks said they did not believe the state bore any direct legal responsibility for what happened or that today’s taxpayers should pay for historical wrongs.

The bill used strong language, saying the causes of the riot “reside deep in the history of race relations of Oklahoma and Tulsa, which included the enactment of Jim Crow (segregation) laws, acts of racial violence ... and other actions that had the effect of ‘putting African-Americans in their place.’”

“What the Legislature has done is end the conspiracy of silence about the riot. This is government reaching back into history and saying ‘I’m sorry,’” said State Rep. Don Ross, a Tulsa Democrat who helped launch the commission.

Ross said the effort was still worthwhile even without reparations.

Source: Reuters

Poll shows half of Americans doubt Bush’s trustworthiness

By Jane Martinson

New York, New York, May 28— Half of all Americans doubt whether they can trust President George Bush four months after he took office, according to a nationwide poll, commissioned by Time magazine and CNN. The poll follows in the wake of Senator Jim Jeffords’ defection from the ruling Republican party last week.

The crisis, which tips the balance of power in favor of the Democratic party in the Senate, has raised questions about the Bush administration’s decision to push ahead with a strongly conservative agenda in spite of its weak mandate. Mr. Jeffords renounced his party membership in protest at what he saw as the government’s hardline approach on education and the environment.

In the poll carried out just after this decision was announced on Thursday, 53% of Americans said they had doubts and reservations about whether or not Mr. Bush was a leader they could trust.

The survey of more than 1,000 Americans also revealed a worrying lack of support for some of the president’s favorite policy initiatives. Only 38% approved of his plans to deal with the country’s energy problems, for example.

Under plans drawn up by Vice-President Dick Cheney, the US is to encourage more fuel supplies from controversial sources such as nuclear energy and fossil fuel. Mr. Jeffords, who represents Vermont, joined the Senate in the mid-1960s on a pro-environment platform.

After supporting the Bush candidacy during last year’s campaign, Mr. Jeffords was horrified by the apparent about-face on several key policy initiatives, including energy and special needs education.

The Time/CNN poll, which is subject to a 3% margin of error, also found that Bush’s approval rating had slipped from 55% in March to 52%.

Even after the fall, however, Bush is enjoying higher approval ratings than Bill Clinton did at this point in his first term, but significantly lower than that of his father George Bush Sr.

If Mr. Bush were to run in 2004, half of all Americans said it was “somewhat unlikely” or “very unlikely” they would vote for him.

Source: The Guardian (UK)

Lawsuit challenges EPA air pollution rule

Washington, DC, May 24 (ENS)— A coalition of environmental organizations and states today filed a lawsuit against the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stating that the agency’s mobile source air toxics rule falls far short of fulfilling legal requirements of the Clean Air Act.

Spearheading the litigation are Sierra Club, Earthjustice, US Public Interest Research Group, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Attorneys General of New York and Connecticut. Groups supporting today’s actions include the Association of Local Air Pollution Control Officials (ALAPCO), the State and Territorial Air Pollution Program Administrators (STAPPA), and the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management (NESCAUM).

The Clean Air Act required EPA to reduce by 1995 the threat of toxic air pollutants from mobile sources, such as cars, trucks, buses, boats, snowmobiles, construction equipment, aircraft and lawn equipment, and motor vehicle fuels. The final rule, adopted in December 2000 and released by EPA in March 2001, adopts no new controls on toxic emissions from motor vehicles or motor vehicle fuels, the groups charge.

“It is crucial to public health that EPA set effective standards to reduce these toxic pollutants,” said Jim Pew, an attorney with Earthjustice, which is representing the environmental groups in court. “But EPA’s regulations do nothing. In fact, they allow emissions of the worst pollutants to increase.”

EPA estimates that motor vehicles, construction equipment, lawn and garden equipment and other mobile sources emitted 1.6 million tons of toxins in 1996. According to an EPA study, more than 250 million people Americans are subject to an unacceptable cancer risk due to mobile source toxic pollutants.

StarLink GM corn has contaminated 25% of US supply

By Anthony Shadid

Washington, DC, May 17— StarLink, a genetically engineered corn not approved for human consumption, has turned up in nearly one out of four grain samples undergoing the government’s most stringent tests, a far higher number than previously reported and another sign of the chaos the corn’s presence has caused. The

Department of Agriculture has tested 118,000 samples since November. Overall, about 9 percent have tested positive for StarLink. But since February, the USDA has carried out more accurate tests that can determine one kernel of StarLink in a batch of 2,400 — the standard used by some export markets and the Food and Drug Administration. Of those 6,000 samples, 22 percent have tested positive for the corn, which the federal government barred for human use because of concerns it might cause allergic reactions, said John C. Giler, chief of the Grain Inspection Service’s policies and procedures branch.

Traces of the corn — first discovered in a sample of Taco Bell taco shells — have led to the voluntary recall of nearly 300 products, including more than 150 brands of corn chips and taco shells. It has recently also turned up in corn dogs, corn bread, polenta and hush puppies. Its health danger remains a matter of fierce debate. Dozens of people have reported getting sick from eating taco shells and other food made with the corn, and the government is awaiting an investigation of their complaints. Critics also cite a report by a panel of independent scientists in December to the Environmental Protection Agency that StarLink shows a “medium likelihood” of causing an allergic reaction in some people. That report, however, said the low levels of the protein likely present in US food probably would not make people sick.

Aventis CropScience, which sold the seed before it was removed from the market in the fall, dismisses any health risk posed by the corn. A company official said the amounts of StarLink are so negligible that “the risk of allergic reaction approaches zero.” In the end, the more tangible danger may be to the country’s system for handling grain shipments. The corn’s presence has already caused major disruptions in domestic and export markets and the USDA has described the task in removing it from the grain supply as “an unprecedented challenge.” While the corn was grown on less than 1 percent of total US corn acreage in 2000, it has become diffused through the system.

Source: Boston Globe

Cincinnati cops allowed to shoot “beanbag” rounds at protesters

By John Nolan

Cincinnati, Ohio, May 24— Police officers can fire beanbags or sponge-tipped rounds if necessary to control crowds at a rally next month, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

The request to ban such crowd control measures followed an April incident in which police fired the projectiles into a crowd of demonstrators gathered for the funeral of a black man who was fatally shot by police.

Rally organizers say the June 2 event is intended to peacefully promote racial justice in the wake of rioting prompted by the shooting of Timothy Thomas, 19, on April 7. During the three nights of riots, stores were looted and burned and more than 800 people were arrested.

Activists’ attorney Robert Newman argued that Cincinnati police policy allows officers to fire beanbag and foam rounds to stop or prevent crime and when someone is resisting arrest. US Supreme Court rulings have permitted police to use deadly force only to prevent escape or potential harm to a police officer or other person, he said.

City lawyer Richard Ganulin argued that Ohio law and court rulings have not defined beanbag or foam rounds as deadly weapons.

Source: Associated Press

“Youth Culture Against the Police State” benefit show to be held in Greensboro

Organizers say the recent killing of a young black man by a Greensboro deputy and developments in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal make this concert especially urgent. The benefit show will take place on Saturday, June 2, at the Freeman Mill Square shopping center at the corner of Florida St. and Freeman Mill Rd. in Greensboro.

The show has local Rock, Punk, Hip-Hop, and Acoustic performers lined up so far.

People who want to perform, participate, or help in any way should contact Nego at shorty6string@juno.com. The event is co-sponsored by Copwatch, the local October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Being A Positive Influence, Real Son Productions, and the Greensboro Coalition for Justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Source: pamela t crosson shorty6string@juno.com