Friday, November 24, 2017

Gore’s Oil Money

"Occidental’s investment in Gore has paid rich dividends. In late 1997 the Vice President championed the Administration’s $3.65 billion sale to the company of the government’s interest in the Elk Hills oilfield in Bakersfield, California, the largest privatization of federal property in US history. On the very day the deal was sealed Gore gave a speech lamenting the growing threat of global warming. Gore also maintains a close friendship with Occidental CEO Ray Irani. In 1996 the latter spent the night in the Lincoln Bedroom. Two days later his company donated $100,000 to the DNC. In 1994 Irani traveled with Commerce Secretary Ron Brown on a trade junket to Russia. Four years later, Irani was invited to a state dinner at the White House for Colombian President Pastrana."
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"Occidental and the Administration are also cooperating in promoting President Clinton’s controversial $1.6 billion package in military aid for Bogotá. (Occidental already pays the Colombian military to keep an army base next to a refinery it runs in the country.) The aid request came in the wake of three reports–from the US State Department, the United Nations and Human Rights Watch–that slammed Pastrana’s government for human rights abuses and for failing to cut ties between the army and paramilitary death squads. According to the Human Rights Watch report, at least seven senior military officials in Colombia who have links to paramilitary units are graduates of the US Army’s School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia.

On February 15 an Occidental vice president, Lawrence Meriage, testified before a House subcommittee in favor of the package, saying that Colombia’s military “lack mobility, equipment and, perhaps most serious, they lack the intelligence-gathering capabilities afforded to their better-funded adversaries.” Meriage took the opportunity to denounce opposition to his company’s Samore project, which he said is limited to “extremists” in Colombia and “several fringe nongovernmental organizations in the US.” The latter–which Meriage didn’t name but which include the Rainforest Action Network and Project Underground–are “de facto allies of the subversive forces that are attacking oil installations, electric power stations and other legitimate business enterprises,” the Occidental executive said.
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Gore has also rebuffed members of his own party who have asked him to support the tribe. On February 22 Representative Cynthia McKinney wrote to Gore and urged him to meet with U’wa leader Perez and to support an immediate suspension of the Samore project. “I am concerned that the operations of oil companies, and in particular Occidental Petroleum, are exacerbating an already explosive situation, with disastrous consequences for the local indigenous people,” she said. “I am contacting you because you have remained silent on this issue despite your strong financial interests and family ties with Occidental.” "

3 comments:

  1. Vice President Gore recommended that Elk Hills be sold as part of his “Reinventing Government” National Performance Review program. Tony Coelho, his confident, Democrat super-fundraiser, and later, campaign manager, served on the board of directors of ICF Kaiser International, the private company hired to assess the sale’s environmental consequences. As Peter Eisner, director of the Center for Public Integrity, observed: “I can’t say that I’ve ever seen an environmental assessment prepared so quickly.” And, perhaps not entirely surprisingly, it worked out in Occidental’s favor. They purchased the 47,000 acres of land from the federal government for $3.7 billion, tripling the company’s oil reserves.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/05/21/the-greening-of-gores-bank-account/#33bc554b39d6

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  2. Tribal member Dee Dominquez lamented: “They are going to take last memories of our people, the last evidence that we once inhabited this land and put it in a box and ship it to a museum.” She described the executives as “cold” and “insensitive”, unwilling to even consider slant drilling that could save pieces of the tribe’s history for future generations. “We’ve never denied them taking the oil. We are not asking for land. We are not asking for royalties. We are just asking them to leave something to show that we were here.”

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  3. It was Skoll’s Participant Media company that produced Gore’s feverishly frightening science fiction 2006 film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Following an investigation, Sir Michael Burton, a judge in London’s High Court, ruled in 2007 that the film can be shown in secondary schools only if accompanied by guidance notes for teachers to balance Mr. Gore’s “one-sided” views. In comments regarding that ruling, he pointed out that the “apocalyptical vision” presented in the movie was politically partisan, and not an impartial analysis of the science of climate change: “It is built around the charismatic presence of the ex-vice president Al Gore, whose crusade is to persuade the world of the dangers of climate change caused by global warming…It is now common ground that this is not simply a science film- although it is based substantially on science research and opinion, but it is [clearly] a political film.”

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