From Biltmore Hardware to Super Wal-mart

By Rusty Sivils

The upcoming closing of Biltmore Hardware is an appalling cultural tragedy for our community. This is the last of the old-time hardware stores in Asheville. With their wooden floors, unpackaged merchandise and personal service from knowledgeable men who have been serving the same customers for many decades, these stores had a human scale and a warmth that is lacking in the big, sterile chains. We’ve seen them go down one-by-one as the public flocks to the big-box chain stores like Lowes and Walmart to save a few pennies. These same shoppers now flock back like vultures to pick the bones of Biltmore Hardware during its closing sales.

This one incident is symptomatic of a much larger tragedy, a cultural erosion that has eaten away at our communities for the last fifty years, devastating them to the point that they would be hardly recognizable to some pre-World War II Rip Van Winkle. German cities were flattened by saturation bombing from Allied planes during World War II, but by the 60s and 70s they had been rebuilt and today preserve the stately beauty of their prewar selves much more than American cities that have undergone decades of attack by unrestrained development to accommodate the car: super highways, housing developments, malls, parking lots, strip malls, etc. that have not only devastated the countryside around our cities and towns but have ruined our downtown economies as well.

Some have complained that this could have been prevented by good urban planning, but actually we have had very careful planning in the last half century by state departments of transportation. Their destructive road building projects have set the future course of our local economies and communities to a greater extent than we could ever have imagined any planner could. This kind of “stealth” planning is very accommodating to corporate and development interests but has little regard for our communities or our cultural heritage. This “stealth” planning is invisible to those who object to zoning.

The next threat on Asheville’s horizon is the proposed Walmart “superstore” at the old Sayles Bleachery site on Swannanoa River Road. This project would accomplish several things at once: it would ruin a beautiful tract of river bottom land that could be the centerpiece of a park system along the river; it would create acres of parking lot and buildings that would pour more polluted runoff into the river; it would drain more shoppers from our locally owned businesses and siphon profits to an out-of-state corporation; and it would create severe traffic problems for that area, inviting more road building by the DOT.

Farley Mowat has described the effect of the introduction of firearms to the Eskimo peoples of the Canadian arctic. They had always killed as many caribou as they could during the fall migration, spearing them from kayaks at river crossings, and this usually supplied just enough meat to get them through the winter. With rifles they still followed the same impulse to kill as many as they could, but now it was thousands more, sometimes thinning the herds so much that there would be no migration in succeeding years, causing whole villages to starve. Apparently there was no mechanism to make them stop and ask what would be the consequences of killing so many animals.

Similarly, there seems to be no mechanism to make us stop and consider the consequences of shopping at the big chains out on the highway. Is our impulse to grab a bargain so overwhelming that we can’t see what shopping at Walmart does to our community? Are we so weak as a community that our fate is completely in the hands of wealthy corporations that want to turn our neighborhoods into commercial parks for their own profit? Are we so irresponsible that saving pennies is more important to us than supporting locally owned businesses, like Biltmore Hardware, that are part of the fabric and heritage of this community, that are cultural institutions in themselves?

A citizens’ group has formed to try to save the Sayles Bleachery property for uses that would not be destructive to its unique beauty. The group, Community Supported Development, can be reached at 274-8350.

Demonstration against Super Wal-mart Mon., May 15, 1:30pm Asheville City Hall

Why is the US still bombing Iraq?

By Diane Secor

US air raids against Iraq continue to this day. Why does the Clinton administration risk the lives of American pilots and yet another gulf war?

The explanations put forth by the administration —that this is being done to get the UN arms inspectors back into Iraq and to protect the Kurdish and Shiite minorities in Iraq’s northern and southern “no fly” zones— have been discredited. Now its public relations strategy is to keep the raids as quiet as possible but, when the media occasionally takes notice, to claim that the bombing raids are only aimed at “Iraq’s air-defense system.” According to a Feb. 29 report from the Associated Press (AP), however, at times the Iraqis have fired back and insisted that civilian targets were bombed. The US media have generally cooperated with the administration with a virtual blackout of any news coverage of the bombing. The only notable investigative reporting on this subject in the (corporate) media has been by Colum Lynch of The Washington Post (Feb. 20).
Lynch found that US corporations are making under-the-table commercial agreements with Saddam Hussein’s regime to help partially reconstruct Iraq’s oil infrastructure, which has been demolished by years of economic sanctions and “almost daily” US and British bombing. This is “legal” under the UN “oil for food” program, an ostensibly “humanitarian exemption from the UN trade embargo imposed on Iraq after [its] 1990 invasion of Kuwait.” But the US government does not want to advertise this trade with a “rogue” state, and apparently the UN has agreed to cover for them. Thus, according to Lynch, the UN “oil for food” Web site was taken offline when the UN found that The Washington Post was using it to track down American firms that buy Iraqi oil through foreign subsidiaries.
Lynch identified and described several of these US corporations, including “such petroleum industry giants as Halliburton, the world’s largest oil field service company; Schlumberger, the second largest oil field servicer; the Fisher Rosemount unit of Emerson Electric Co. in St. Louis; the Hamilton Sundstrand unit of United Technologies in Windsor Locks, Conn.; and Baker Hughes Inc. of Houston.”
It is interesting to note that John M. Deutch, who was CIA director during the Gulf War, is now on the board of directors of Schlumberger. Halliburton’s CEO is none other than Richard B. Cheney, who was secretary of defense during the Bush administration! It seems that this type of duplicity is not limited to the Clinton administration, but part of a larger trend within America’s (ruling) class of capitalists.
Using State Department figures, Lynch also found that US corporations are officially on record as exporting “about $15 million of oil-related spare parts and $400 million of food, medicine and water treatment equipment to Iraq....” But the actual amount of oil production equipment and spare parts American companies sell to Iraq is substantially higher when adding in what is sold via foreign subsidiaries under the auspices of the UN “oil for food” program. A Fisher-Rosemount spokesperson claimed that both “the Treasury Department and a UN Security Council sanctions committee” authorized this arrangement.
Nevertheless, the US government has officially blocked an estimated $1.5 billion in such contracts, according to Lynch. Some of these US corporations would prefer the convenience of directly dealing with Iraq, as opposed to channeling these transactions through their foreign subsidiaries. Thus it was not too surprising when the AP reported that the Clinton administration had vehemently opposed any easing of the sanctions, but recently relented and decided on “easing restrictions on sending Iraq industrial equipment to improve its dilapidated oil industry and other facilities.” (March 1)
Moreover, Lynch reported that American capitalists have used foreign intermediaries to purchase Iraqi crude oil and that an estimated “700,000 of the 2 million barrels of oil exported daily by Iraq” ends up in the United States.
This entire scenario seems to be totally bizarre, without rhyme or reason. However, a statement by Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz helps solve the puzzle. According to the AP, he concluded that “the United States will try hard not to let Iraq have free access to its oil riches. ‘The industrial-military complex in the United States will not leave alone an independent country like Iraq with such huge reserves.’”
How is the United States government trying to keep Iraq from controlling its oil resources and from exporting as much oil to wherever it chooses?
First, the “no fly” zones in northern and southern Iraq, which US and British military forces have prevented Iraq from controlling, just happen to be where the oil deposits are located. This is also where US bombs are falling. The targets have frequently been oil pipelines, pipeline control stations, pumping stations, and related facilities. This has cut oil exports, even those specifically authorized by the UN “oil for food” program, as reported by the Iraq Action Coalition. (Iraqaction.org/nofly.html)
Second, the United States has admitted that US naval forces are stationed in the Persian Gulf to prevent Iraq from exporting oil in violation of the embargo. But such enforcement is selective. For example, on Feb. 10, the AP reported that recently the US Navy interdicted a Russian tanker smuggling oil out of Iraq. However, Iraq claims that the United States allows oil smuggling to Turkey through northern Iraq’s northern “no fly” zone. This permits Iraqi oil to reach Turkey, a US client state, whenever it happens to serve US purposes. And, of course, the US Navy will not stop oil shipments from Iraq by US firms through their foreign subsidiaries.
Saddam Hussein has reportedly made billions of dollars from oil smuggling operations which slip through the cracks. As long as he is relegated to the position of black market dealer and uses the profits to enrich himself, as opposed to making an all-out effort to develop his country’s infrastructure, and as long as his regime is weakened and destabilized with constant air assaults and sanctions, he is no grave threat to the United States. In other words, he is in no position to control international oil markets or even to exercise control over much of the oil resources, production, and transport within his own country.
If the Clinton administration or its successor does decide to stop blocking an end to the embargo, the United States will be in a strong bargaining position. Lynch also reported that Iraq is largely dependent on US firms for oil spare parts, since “the equipment...was originally made in America.” Lynch also quoted the president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation as saying, “‘The US spare parts industry is too dominant to ignore.’” Thus, as US bombs smash much of Iraq’s oil infrastructure, Iraq will be forced to seek further US assistance to rebuild it and to eventually settle on terms which are favorable to American capitalists.
Putting all the pieces together, it is clear why the Clinton administration wants to hide the truth about the US air war against Iraq. Control of international markets and raw materials does not sound as noble as “humanitarian intervention,” “fighting for democracy in the New World Order,” or “keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of a rogue state.” And when all else fails, cover up, stonewall, and repeat, “We hit air defenses and other military targets only.”

Source: IGC: <www.igc.org>

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