CRAZY
COYOTE'S HIDES
Oil and Indians Don't Mix
by Greg Palast, June 12, 2009, For Air America Radio's Ring of Fire
There's an easy way to find oil. Go to some remote and gorgeous natural sanctuary, say Alaska or the Amazon, find some Indians, then drill down under them.
If the indigenous folk complain, well, just shoo-them away. Shoo-ing methods include: bulldozers, bullets, crooked politicians and fake land sales.
But be aware. Lately the Natives are shoo-ing back. Last week, indigenous Peruvians seized an oil pumping station, grabbed the nine policemen guarding it and, say reports, executed them. This followed the government's murder of more than a dozen rainforest residents who had protested the seizure of their property for oil drilling.
Again and again I see it in my line of work of investigating fraud. Here are a few pit-stops on the oily trail of tears:
In the 1980s, Charles Koch was found to have pilfered about $3 worth of crude from Stanlee Ann Mattingly's oil tank in Oklahoma. Here's the weird part.
Koch was (and remains) the 14th richest man on the planet, worth about $14 billion. Stanlee Ann was a dirt-poor Osage Indian.
UCS
led other groups in a successful effort urging the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA) to resurrect a program for tracking pesticide use on U.S.
food crops, which had been halted by the Bush administration. The pesticide use
surveys, conducted by the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS),
provide the only free, publicly available data on the agricultural chemicals
applied to crops. Government agencies, environmental groups, academic
scientists, and others use the data to evaluate the human health and
environmental risks posed by pesticides and compare the amount of pesticides
applied to genetically engineered (GE) versus conventional crops, among other
purposes. As the first step in restoring the program, NASS will gather data on
pesticide applications to fruit and nut crops this fall. If Congress approves
the full funding specified in the president's 2010 budget, the agency will
resume data collection for vegetables, major row crops, and pesticides applied
to crops after harvest.
We
seek to control our lives when we do not trust, when we do not love.
HANDCRAFTS
