Xomicron <xomic
...@wp.pl> wrote in message <
news:Xns94C2586A64164xomicron@0.0.0.1>...
> Poster Boy <Poster
...@localhost.com> wrote in
>
news:v2fs60tpftslbk3uhimim3ddp1thaqtp6i@4ax.com: > > On Sat, 03 Apr 2004 04:08:08 GMT, rfisc...@bolt.sonic.net
> > (Ray Fischer) wrote:
> >> Xomicron <xomic...@wp.pl> wrote:
> >>> I wonder how the Saudi prince ragheads would feel if an "unknown"
> >>> explosion suddenly took out 1 or 2 of their biggest oil refineries in
> >>> the middle of the night? Of course, the "unknown" would be an American
> >>> Cruise missile.
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
...
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