| contents | No. 314, Jan. 20 - 26, 2005 | |||||||||||||
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WINNER OF NINE PROJECT CENSORED AWARDSCOMMENTARYBush’s Choice for Energy Secretary Was One of Texas’ Top Five Worst PollutersIn the bizarro world that President Bush lives in, it pays—literally—to be a miserable failure, a criminal and a corporate con man. Those are just some of the characteristics of the dastardly men and women who were tapped recently to fill the vacancies in Bush’s second-term cabinet. But one of the President’s most outrageous decisions (besides naming Alberto Gonzales, who concocted a legal case for torturing foreign prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Attorney General) has got to be choosing 66 year-old Sam Bodman to serve as Secretary of Energy. This is a guy who for a dozen years ran a Texas-based chemical company that spent years on the top five lists of the country’s worst polluters. It’s not just a few clouds of smoke emanating from an oil refinery or a power plant that got Bodman’s old company, Boston-based Cabot Corporation, those accolades. It was the 54,000 tons of toxic emissions that his company’s refineries released into the air in the Lone Star state in 1997 alone that made Cabot the fourth largest source of toxic emissions in Texas. Cabot is the world’s largest producer of industrial carbon black, a byproduct of the oil refinery process. The dictatorship of debt: The World Bank and HaitiLast Thursday the World Bank announced it would release $73 million in cash to Haiti's government of Gerard Latortue that was installed by foreign powers after elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide was forced from office. For Haiti to get the World Bank cash it had to pay $52 million in outstanding arrears. Canada helped out by giving the regime a $12.7 million grant. What's going on? The Canadian government, like the US and the European Union, stopped providing aid to the Haitian government after accusations that the May 2000 elections were unfair. The basis for this claim was that in 10 multi-candidate contests where Lavalas gained a plurality rather than a majority of votes, according to the constitution they should have faced a second round election. Instead Lavalas' "plurality winners" simply took their seats. Objections were raised even though the same method was used in previous elections and it was public knowledge prior to the vote that this would happen again. So, while more than 3500 other positions were judged to have been filled fairly in the same election, the Organization of American States and the US claimed electoral fraud. The opposition used this claim to justify their boycott of presidential elections later that year and to say Aristide's victory was tainted, even though no one claimed the opposition had any chance of beating the popular former priest. The "tainted" election became the excuse to divert aid money from the government to opposition "civil society" groups. |
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