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SEVENTY-FOUR, AUGUST 1, 2002
(Copyright © 2002 The Blacklisted Journalist)
FROM PORTSIDE
Portside
(the left side in nautical parlance) is a
news, discussion and debate service of the Committees
of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It
says it aims to provide varied material of interest to people
on the Left.
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BRIEFS
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EXPORTING POLLUTION TO MEXICO
Subject:
Exporting pollution
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2002 20:12:06 -0700 (PDT)
From: portsideMod <portsidemod@yahoo.com>
To: ps <portside@yahoogroups.com>
Sempra:
Exporting Pollution
U.S.-Mexico
Border Region to Pay the Price for
By
J.P. Ross, Greenpeace Special to CorpWatch
May
27,2002
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=2588
If
San Diego-based Sempra Energy had decided to build its new natural gas-fired
power plant in southern California, state and local authorities would have
required the company to comply with stringent air quality regulations. Company
officials would also have had to complete detailed environmental impact
statements. So Sempra decided to build the plant just over the border in Mexico
instead.
The
plant, currently under construction in Mexicali, Mexico, will serve consumers in
San Diego and Los Angeles. Critics say Sempra, the parent company of San Diego
Gas & Electric (SDG&E) is locating its plant three miles inside of
Mexico to avoid US environmental laws. In March, environmental groups filed a
lawsuit challenging US government permits for transmission lines from the Sempra
plant into California.
"Approving
transmission lines for power plants under construction in Mexicali, without
ensuring that these plants are built to minimize air and water quality impacts,
will cause unnecessary harm to local US and Mexican communities," said Bill
Powers of Border Power Plant Working Group, a coalition of environmental and
community groups on both sides of the border and a plaintiff in the suit. ##
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U.S. WINKS AT NUCLEAR WAR
Subject:
Winking at nuclear terror
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2002 20:13:53 -0700 (PDT)
From: portsideMod <portsidemod@yahoo.com>
Reply-To: portside@yahoogroups.com
To: ps <portside@yahoogroups.com>
"War
on Terrorism" Winking at Nuclear Terror
By
Norman Solomon
June
01, 2002 by FAIR's Media Beat
http://www.fair.org/media-beat/index.html
Two
countries -- each with dozens of atomic bombs -- are threatening to make war on
each other. Large numbers of troops have mobilized. Deadly cross-border clashes
are intense. And people in charge of both governments have become more bellicose
by the day.
Maybe
you think this situation calls for U.S. officials and American media outlets to
focus on ways of preventing the outbreak of a war that could quickly turn into a
nuclear conflagration. If so, your mode of thinking is distinctly out of step
with the "war on terrorism."
You
see, as the summer of 2002 begins, what matters most is the Pentagon's
determination to kill as many Al Qaeda fighters as possible. Some of them are
located in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and perhaps also Kashmir, the
region that's under bitter dispute by India and Pakistan.
Since
the leaders in New Delhi and Islamabad have their fingers on nuclear buttons,
their escalating threats ought to concentrate our minds on the very real perils
of the situation. An attack with a single 10-kiloton atomic warhead could cause
immediate deaths numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
For
starters. "American intelligence estimates put the toll in the event of a
full exchange of the two nuclear arsenals at 12 million dead with maybe 7
million wounded " an instant slaughter unprecedented in the history of
mankind," Henry Porter wrote in the London-based Guardian.
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BUSHIES WERE WARNED THAT ENRON WAS GOING KAPUT
Subject:
Bush knew early that Enron was kaput
Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2002 18:36:24 -0700 (PDT)
From: portsideMod portsidemod@yahoo.com
Reply-To: portside@yahoogroups.com
To: ps portside@yahoogroups.com
Enron-ex
says Bush knew early the company was kaput
What
did Bush know? An anonymous ex-Enron official says the White House knew about
the company's impending demise as far back as August.
By
Jason Leopold
June
8, 2002, www.salon.com<
According
to a former Enron Corp. executive under congressional investigation in relation
to the company's collapse last fall, an Enron
lobbyist tipped off the Bush administration last August about the
company's impending financial problems.
Enron
lobbyist Pat Shortridge met with White House economic advisor Robert McNally
Aug. 15, the day after Enron president Jeff Skilling resigned, to alert the
White House that Enron could face a financial meltdown that could possibly
cripple the country's energy markets, the former Enron executive told Salon this
week.
"It
was very well known that Enron faced a financial meltdown," the former
executive said. "The day that Jeff resigned our stock plummeted. We knew it
wouldn't rally. What we didn't know was how the financial problems at Enron
would impact the energy markets in the U.S. That's why Pat met with Mr. McNally.
To find out."
When
contacted for a response, a White House spokeswoman, Anne Womack, would only
point out that the meeting was acknowledged by the White House on May
If
McNally was tipped off to Enron's troubles it would mean that White House had
been warned several months earlier than it has previously acknowledged of
Enron's failing fortunes, which caused thousands of employees to lose tens of
millions of dollars in retirement benefits. It would also mean the White House
received such a warning even before Sherron Watkins delivered her famous memo to
then Enron chairman Kenneth Lay, warning that the company's byzantine
partnerships could destroy the company.
It
also fuels the most common question plaguing the administration these days: What
did President Bush know, and when did he know it?
On
Tuesday, the White House turned over more than 2,000 pages of documents to
Lieberman, complying in part with subpoenas from his committee seeking White
In
the meantime, Lieberman has agreed to provide the White House 24 hours notice
before making public any of the documents, which will be highly guarded. Under
an agreement with the White House, only a limited number of staffers from the
committee will have access to the documents, and must first sign a
confidentiality agreement.
When
asked about the Aug. 15 meeting, Leslie Phillips, a committee spokeswoman, said
it "should definitely have raised a red flag," Phillips said.
"We'll have to investigate that."
So
far, all that is known of the documents released Tuesday is that they reveal
communications between the administration and Enron relating to Vice President
The
August meeting raises further questions about the administration's interactions
with Enron, a company with especially close ties to the Bush White House, which
has been notably inconsistent on its spin about Enron since the company filed
for bankruptcy on Dec. 2, 2001.
On
Tuesday, Bush's chief counsel, Alberto Gonzales, would not comment on the
substance of the meeting between Shortridge and McNally. He said that there is
no known instance of Enron officials asking White House officials for help
before the company filed for bankruptcy in December.
But
Enron did seek help from the Bush administration prior to the company's
bankruptcy filing in December, according to documents released by the White
House earlier this year. According to those documents, Lay called Treasury
Secretary Paul O'Neill on Oct. 28, to advise him that Enron was heading toward
bankruptcy. The following day, Lay asked Commerce Secretary Don Evans for help
in heading off a downgrading of Enron's credit rating by Wall Street credit
rating agencies, which would push the company into bankruptcy. A week later,
Enron president Greg Whalley called Treasury Undersecretary Peter Fisher six to
eight times, seeking help in getting banks to lend more money to Enron.
The
White House also announced in January that Lawrence B. Lindsey, who heads Bush's
National Economic Council, had directed a review in October -- before the calls
received by O'Neill and Evans " to see whether an Enron collapse could have a
strong impact on the American economy. That admission prompted critics to sound
several alarms.
As
Jennifer Palmieri, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, said at
the time, "it shows once again that the administration did a lot of
thinking about the fact that the company was going to collapse but they did
absolutely nothing to make sure that 50,000 Enron employees would not lose their
life savings."
It
also drew closer attention to the intensely close ties between Enron and the
Bush administration. Lindsey had been a paid consultant for Enron, receiving
$50,000 in 2000. And he is just one of other top White House and Republican
Party official with close Enron ties, including Robert Zoellick, the United
States trade representative, who sat on an Enron advisory board in 2000; Karl
Rove, the senior White House political strategist, who held more than 1,000
Enron shares before selling them in June 2001; and Marc Racicot, chairman of the
Republican National Committee, who worked as an Enron lobbyist last year.
Then
there's Enron's close financial ties to the Bush campaign. Enron and its
employees gave more than $1 million to Bush's 2000 election campaign, the
Republican
Party and the Bush Inaugural, and Bush aides used the Enron corporate jet during
the post-election fracas in Florida.
White
House press secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters this week that he hopes
Lieberman does not use the documents turned over to his committee as a
"fishing expedition."
"I hope the question from the committee is focused on any prior knowledge about Enron's bankruptcy, and communications with Enron where information about bankruptcy could have been conveyed, and not an open-ended fishing expedition about any contact with anybody at Enron for any reason," Fleischer said. ##
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