Alaska -- betrayed by an oil giant
15 years after Exxon Valdez disaster,
coast
remains polluted and compensation unpaid
By Andrew Gumbel
Mar. 25 — Shortly after the Exxon Valdez oil spill
in 1989, a senior Exxon representative visited the devastated
fishing communities of southern Alaska and promised them the company
would do everything in its power to restore their livelihoods
and “make them whole.”
“We’re Exxon, we do it right,” is the slogan that
has stuck in the mind of Dune Lankard, a local Native American
activist.
But 15 years to the day since a drunken sea captain drove his
oil tanker onto a reef in Prince William Sound, covering one of
the world’s most pristine stretches of coastline with at
least 11 million gallons of crude, the feeling among fishermen,
environmentalist activists, and the lawyers representing them
is that Exxon has not only broken its original promise but has
gone out of its way to betray them in pursuit of broader corporate
interests.
Exxon, whose net income for 2003 is expected to top $21 billion,
has not paid out a penny of the $5 billion in damages originally
awarded to the fishing communities a decade ago, meanwhile launching
appeal after appeal and deluging the courts with paperwork. Despite
intensive clean-up efforts, Prince William Sound remains polluted
by large oil deposits that have destroyed its herring fisheries
and wreaked havoc with the once-flourishing wildlife.
The town of Cordova, whose fishermen could once count on earning
$100,000 a season, has become an outpost of despair, where debt
and destitution have given rise to alcoholism, drug abuse, broken
marriages, and numerous suicides. About 1,000 of the original
32,000 plaintiffs in the class-action suit against Exxon have
died, many of them succumbing to respiratory illnesses, brain
tumors and cancers that a growing body of scientific evidence
has linked to the spill and the subsequent clean-up.
Of the survivors, many hang on, ever more despondently, for the
Exxon settlement money to arrive. Others have been forced to sell
and move away, returning in the summer months to fish what they
can from the Snake River as the debt on their boats and their
once highly valuable fishing permits continues to accumulate.
“Exxon has dodged its responsibility every step of the way,”
Lankard said. “The company had every opportunity to go beyond
the call of duty. Instead, they’ve understood that their
hand gets stronger the longer they wait. And in the meantime,
people are dying.”
Yesterday, a large delegation of Cordovans and their supporters
were in Washington to lobby the Bush administration to reopen
the federal government’s own suit against Exxon and force
the company to pay out an extra $100 million in environmental
damages. That extra money was written into the original 1991 settlement
for environmental damages -- worth $900million -- in the event
that oil damage proved more extensive than foreseen.
The fear of environmental activists, however, is that both the
Bush administration and Alaska’s leading elected officials
would prefer to defer to the oil industry and let Exxon off the
hook. Alaska’s attorney general, Craig Tillery, has said
it may be “premature” to present a case for the extra
$100 million, which must be claimed by 2006.
Among those in Washington was Kory Blake, a third-generation Cordovan
known before the spill as a “highliner” because he was
one of the most productive commercial fishermen pulling herring
and salmon out of the Sound. He had about $500,000 invested in
his boat and in three commercial licenses when the disaster struck.
At first, he was kept busy with the clean-up, on which Exxon spent
an initial $2 billion. Exxon also voluntarily paid an initial
$300 million in compensation to 11,000 individuals. But then in
the early 1990s, just when everyone expected to start fishing
again, it became clear that the herring stocks had not returned
and the price of salmon -- also slow to recover -- started to
go through the floor as canneries turned to sources in Chile and
Norway. Blake had to sell his home to meet the annual $50,000
payments on his boat, and moved his family to a suburb of Anchorage,
where his wife got a job as a school administrator.
Exxon’s stonewalling -- or what one expert, Steve Picou,
professor of sociology at the University of South Alabama, calls
“adversarial legalism” -- goes back to the earliest
days of the legal battles in 1990, when a company lawyer argued
that the crude oil was not a pollutant under the Clean Water Act
since it was a valuable commodity, not a waste product. In the
class-action suit, Exxon threw up so many obstacles after the
initial $5 billion judgment that the case generated more than
7,700 docket entries. In a letter written to the company in 1999
by the National Association of Attorneys General, the company
was accused of actually profiting from the delay in payment because
of the difference between the interest rate being charged by the
courts and the much higher rate it enjoyed through its own internal
financing systems. “Each year Exxon delays payment of its
obligation,” the letter said, “it earns an estimated
$400 million.”
In 2001, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the damages
award, prompting Cordova’s mayor to kill himself. The award
was largely reinstated a year later, but remains tied up in the
appeals process for the foreseeable future.
Exxon’s critics say the government missed several opportunities
to pressure the company into settling, especially in 1999 when
the Federal Trade Commission was considering Exxon’s proposed
merger with Mobil. The merger was approved without reference to
the Exxon Valdez.
Exxon’s attitude is that it has already done its duty. It
strongly disputes suggestions that the spill involved significantly
more than the acknowledged 11 million gallons, and has rebutted
scientific evidence of continuing damage to marine and bird life
with its own scientific studies demonstrating the opposite. “The
environment in Prince William Sound is healthy, robust and thriving,”
a recent company statement said. “That’s evident to
anyone who’s been there, and it is also the conclusion of
many scientists who have done extensive studies of the Prince
William Sound ecosystem.”
Not only do the environmentalists strongly disagree, they see
the events of the past 15 years as an ominous sign of how corporations
will feel entitled to behave in future.
“They are making all these promises about treading with a
light footprint and respecting the environment if they open up
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration,
yet they refuse to settle up on a mess they’ve already made,”
Dune Lankard said.
Source: Independent (UK)
New Starbucks opens in Asheville,
residents react
By Liz Allen
Asheville, North Carolina, Mar. 29 (AGR)— Free coffee
was served at Starbucks, as the multinational coffee company opened
it’s second store in Asheville, located on Charlotte St. Around
noon Monday, a group of about 20 demonstrators served free organic
fair trade coffee outside the store. Some held signs with messages
like “Starbucks Kills,” and Starbucks brand coffee grounds
were poured onto the sidewalk. After an hour of competing with the
demonstrators’ coffee, Starbucks reportedly begun serving free
coffee inside the store.
“Starbucks is taking money away from the local economy, making
prices go up, and rents raise. It causes inhuman conditions for
indigenous peoples – unfair trade,” said Asheville resident
Mandy Shupe, a participant in the demonstration. Coffee was served
to both pedestrians and car passengers waiting at the nearby traffic
light. Organic cream, soymilk, and sweetener were also available,
free of charge. Throughout the event, people engaged in conversations
about fair trade, gentrification, and the local community and economy.
Many passers-by made it apparent they supported the anti-Starbucks
cause. However, a few Starbucks customers were adamant about their
loyalty to the store and accused demonstrators of not having jobs
or paying taxes.
Coffee is second only to petroleum as the world’s most valuable
market commodity, according to the San Francisco-based international
human rights organization Global Exchange. Coffee prices are at
an all time low, around $.50 per pound; meaning farmers may become
more impoverished, go into debt and lose their land. The organization
criticizes Starbucks for not regularly offering brewed fair trade
coffee in addition to selling fair trade beans. Fair trade is an
agreement between buys and producers, in the case of coffee means
a minimum of $1.26 a pound is paid, farmers are provided with credit,
and technical assistance in transitioning to organic growing is
provided.
Also at Monday’s demonstration, Willy Erickson, an Asheville
resident and local musician, said he was out because, “Starbucks
supports child labor in various countries. I don’t like the
fact that people are drinking coffee when children sometimes die
because of the hard work they do harvesting it. Also, I like Asheville,
and the community that has grown here over the years. Starbucks
is strategically designed to exploit local business, economy, and
culture.”
The Asheville Police Department (APD) with around five cars, including
a forensic van with an officer videotaping the scene, showed up
around 12:30 pm, reportedly based on a complaint. They told demonstrators
to stay off of the property and in a straight line on the sidewalk,
not blocking traffic. After negotiating with the police, demonstrators
complied and lined up their materials, folded their table and appeared
to stay off the company’s property. Press also was banned from
the property. The APD left prior to the group packing up around
2:30pm.
A man with the construction company working on the new building
housing the Starbucks, who refused to give his name, said that he,
like Starbucks, is a corporation. “We live in America and people
have the right of freedom of speech, but not to get in the way of
letting others buy what they want to buy.”
Watching the parade a from across the street Linda Crane, a Charlotte
St. employee, said, “If they were going to protest, they should
have protested before they built the building and opened it. It’s
silly; they need to go home. Everybody is protesting something,
they are just out for attention.” Crane said she did not have
a problem with Starbucks and did not think it would harm the local
economy.
A Starbucks employee said that no one with the company could speak
with the media. An employee did hand out informational corporate
pamphlets and engaged in conversations with some of the demonstrators.
The brochures were about Silk Soy Milk, and Starbucks Earth Month
2004, — a regional, one-day event in various cities in the
“mid-Atlantic area” cleanup and tree planting.
Another brochure that concerns the Starbucks Foundation, “At
Starbucks we aspire to be recognized as much for our commitment
to social responsibly as we are for the quality of our coffee.”
It goes on to say that, “We feel that nobody understands the
needs of a community like the people who live and work there. That’s
why we encourage Starbucks partners (employees) [sic] to get involved
with local youth organizations and apply for grants on behalf of
their neighborhood programs.”
The focus of the programs is primarily youth leadership and literacy
for “underprivileged children.” The foundation was started
by Starbucks company chairman Howard Shultz with the half million
advance he received for his book Pour Your Heart Into It; How Starbucks
Built A Company One Cup At A Time.
Starbucks has several thousand stores in different parts of the
world. Currently, 1 percent of their total coffee is fair trade.
A Starbucks campaign by Global Exchange, begun in 2000, demanded
that the company up that percentage to 5 percent and feature fair
trade coffee at least once a week rather than once a month, and
they have yet to implement the demands, although they agreed to
do so.
Melissa Schweisguth, fair trade coordinator at Global Exchange,
reported that the organization is discovering that the fair trade
coffee is not served in all their shops nationwide. In a multi-organizational
meeting with the company the issue was raised and the CEO was surprised
that not all stores offered fair trade coffee, and asked the human
rights organization if they would help locate where the fair trade
coffee isn’t available. Schweisguth responded, “The company
needs to watch their bottom line; if their house blend weren’t
available, he would know. It’s kind of questionable why they
don’t know where fair trade coffee is not available. In terms
of fair trade, they haven’t shown a commitment. They’re
the largest coffee company in the world and they’re less than
1 percent.”
Schweisguth reported Starbucks generates huge revenue; “Piece
for piece everything is cheaper for them. They can beat out in price
and cost any mom and pop business operation.” Schweisguth said
Starbucks opens near a local coffee shop, and out-sources them because
they have more buying power and nationwide recognition. “Out-of-towners
come in and familiarity comforts them, so they go to Burger King,
they go to Red Lobster, they go to Starbucks and the mom and pop
company loses out, because multi-nationals are trying to convince
people that the familiar is safer, is better for them, why take
a chance with the mom and pop? Then the mom and pop shops go out
of business.”
Schweisguth pointed out that big stores do not pay taxes into the
local economy. Also, local businesses support other local business,
like local coffee shops buying coffee from local coffee roasters.
“Every town you go into you see the strip malls,” she
said, “and every town looks the same. You see all these towns,
they have a Starbucks, they have a Wal-greens; what reason do you
have to really learn about the people, about the town? Really, it’s
homogenizing America.”
Schweisguth also pointed out larger corporations also tend to be
the ones with the worst social values, and multinational corporations
moving into an area expands the reach of harmful business practices.
However, some companies like Larry’s Beans are 100 percent
organic and fair trade, yet still make a profit. Schweisguth also
mentioned one action communities are taking: introducing anti-big
box and chain store legislation.
According to Richard Bass, the City of Asheville’s Economic
Development Director, permits to operate are issued without regard
to type of business and decisions approving permits are generally
made by staff members. “From an economic development incentive
policy, which the city does have, we don’t differentiate between
chain stores and local stores. We don’t provide incentives
to retail operations in any form. Whether they be big boxes or small
mom and pops, we don’t incentive retail operations,” Bass
said.
One block up from the Charlotte St. Starbucks is local coffee shop
City Bakery. Megan Dennehy, whose family began and runs the company,
was working in the store while the protest was going on. Dennehy
said her and her family appreciated what the demonstrators were
doing, “I think it’s cool that locals of Asheville stick
up for our local places.” Dennehy also said she felt that although
many customers may just as easily go to Starbucks, for the most
part, a good local business has loyal community support.
Danado Bastedo, standing on the sidewalk drinking coffee, said he
believed it was important that local businesses be supported; “Quite
frankly, Starbucks is for wankers. Several blocks from here there
are local coffee shops that sell better coffee for cheaper.”
Bastedo said he lives a few blocks up the street from the new Starbucks,
but “They’re not my neighbors. They might have a building
here, but they have an address in Seattle.”
White House ignored warnings
of al-Qaida
Compiled by Josh Ferguson
Mar. 30 (AGR) -- As the independent commission’s
investigation of the Sept. 11 hijackings begins the process of
uncovering more information on the White House’s pre-Sept.
11 stance on terrorism, questions continue to arise regarding
administration claims of ignorance regarding the possibility of
a large-scale terrorist attack. These questions, coupled with
the increasingly glaring media accusations from former counterterrorism
expert Richard Clarke, have been putting the White House in an
uncomfortable position of answering for its actions before and
after Sept. 11, 2001.
The major question being addressed by the investigating commission
is that of what information and other resources were available
to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks, and how these resources were
used, or in some cases, ignored.
According to witnesses interviewed by the commission, President
George W. Bush was told repeatedly of terror warnings pouring
into American intelligence agencies, mostly about threats overseas.
The director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, who briefed
Bush on threats almost daily, “was around town literally
pounding on desks saying that something is happening, this is
an unprecedented level of threat information,” said Richard
Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State, who was quoted in a Congressional
report last year.
On Jan. 25, 2001, Richard Clarke sent an urgent memo to National
Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice asking for a Cabinet-level meeting
to deal with an impending al Qaida attack. The White House acknowledged
the possibility of attack, but claimed that there was no need
for a formal meeting.
Even as the warnings spiked in June and July of 2001, there appeared
to be little sense of alarm at the White House, according to CIA
statements made to the investigating committee. On Aug. 6, 2001,
the president personally received a one-and-a-half page briefing
advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike
against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking
of an American airplane, perhaps intended for an attack on the
Pentagon. This information stemmed from a British intelligence
report that was released in 1999, initially considered to be unreliable
at the time of its release. However, by the end of July 2001,
the information was significantly more credible, with more and
more intelligence reports warning that al-Qaida terrorists had
been exploring the possibility of using airplanes as missiles.
This level of foreknowledge, as it is slowly being revealed through
the independent commission and through other media sources, proves
troubling to the American public, and perhaps even more so to
the Bush administration. As information arises on the level of
awareness of al-Qaida attacks, attention is turning more to the
questions of why the administration took so little action to prevent
an event like the September hijackings from ever occurring.
Despite the reports that the administration had regarding the
elevated risk of terrorist attack, administration officials seem
to have not increased security measures proportionately. Documents
indicate that before Sept. 11, Attorney General John Ashcroft
placed no priority on antiterrorism efforts in his strategic plans
for the Justice Department, which includes plans for FBI action.
A draft of Ashcroft’s “Strategic Plan” from Aug.
9, 2001, does not put fighting terrorism as one of the department’s
seven goals, ranking it as a sub-goal beneath gun violence and
drugs, even though in 2000, his predecessor Janet Reno called
terrorism “the most challenging threat in the criminal justice
area.” A senior State Department official even told CNN earlier
that year that the Clinton administration had “made a mistake
in focusing so much energy on bin Laden.”
Meanwhile, the Bush administration decided to terminate a highly
classified program to monitor al-Qaida suspects in the United
States, and the president’s counterterrorism task force,
which was created in May 2001, never convened one single meeting.
Bush himself has said that he “didn’t feel the sense
of urgency” to discuss the threat of terrorist attack, and
therefore no formal presidential meeting on the topic of combating
al-Qaida occurred until Sept. 4, 2001.
Questions have also been raised over the administrations response
to the attacks, specifically questioning the energy focused on
Iraq when, seemingly, there was little or no evidence linking
Iraq with the attacks.
According to the Washington Post, “six days after the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed
a two-and-a-half-page document marked ‘TOP SECRET’”
that “directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options
for an invasion of Iraq.” This is corroborated by a CBS News
report aired on Sept. 4, 2002, in which it was stated that that
five hours after the 9/11 attacks, “Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking
Iraq.”
Despite current White House denial of any insinuation of connecting
Iraq with the attacks, both the president and vice president repeatedly
claimed that Saddam Hussein was directly connected to Sept. 11.
President Bush sent a letter to Congress in March 2003, one day
before the official invasion, justifying his call for war by explaining
that the Iraq war was permitted specifically under legislation
that authorized force against “nations, organizations, or
persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist
attacks that occurred on September 11.”
Critics accuse this attention placed on Iraq of drawing resources
away from the apprehension of al-Qaida members actually responsible
for the attacks, specifically Osama bin Laden.
In March 2002, the Pentagon pulled the fighting force most equipped
for hunting down Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan in order to
pre-position it for an attack on Iraq.
The Fifth Group Special Forces were a rare breed in the US military:
they spoke Arabic, Pastun, and Dari. They had been in Afghanistan
for half a year, had developed a network of local sources and
alliances, and believed that they were closing in on bin Laden.
However, in March, they were without warning relocated and given
the task of tracking down Saddam.
“We were going nuts on the ground about that decision,”
one of them recalls. “In spite of the fact that it had taken
five months to establish trust, suddenly there were two days to
hand over to people who spoke no Dari, Pastun, or Arabic, and
had no rapport.”
Along with the redeployment of human assets came a reallocation
of sophisticated hardware. The US air force has only two specially-equipped
RC135 U spy planes. They had successfully vectored in on al-Qaida
leadership radio transmissions and cell phone calls, but they
would no longer circle over the mountains of the Pakistan/Afghanistan
border, having been redeployed to Iraq to locate Hussein.
Among growing bipartisan government and media criticism, however,
the most empassioned critics of administration anti-terror actions
have been the families of those killed in the attacks.
What most Sept. 11 families want to hear out of the independent
commission’s hearings is simple: Why did it happen? And what
can be done so the symphony of errors, misjudgments and ignorance
that preceded the attacks won’t happen again?
“Not one person has come out and admitted there was a mistake
made,” said Carole O’Hare, after watching the commission
hearing on the Mar. 23. O’Hare is a Danville resident whose
mother, Hilda Marcin, was on San Francisco-bound United Airlines
Flight 93 when it crashed into the countryside in Shanksville,
PA.
“When you have people covering their butts, they’re
not owning up to being human,” O’Hare said. “People
make mistakes.”
“They asked them easy questions, and they let them get off
with baloney answers,” said Bruce DeCell, whose son-in-law,
Mark Petrocelli, died in the attacks, said Tuesday, after listening
to the panel question Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his
predecessor, Madeleine K. Albright. “I was not impressed,”
he added.
Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said that
when he was writing legislation to create the 9/11 commission
a widow told him, “You’re the kind of person we hope
will kick the doors down, ask the tough questions.” The woman,
he said, then showed him her husband’s wedding ring, saying
it had been found, along with his finger, at ground zero.
Asked if he thought about that as he questioned witnesses on Wednesday,
he replied, “I’ve never stopped thinking about it.”
Sources: NY Times, LA Times, lndependent
UK, Guardian UK, NY Daily News, BBC, San Francisco Chronicle,
Washington Post
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