The producers at “Koch Brothers Exposed” have another documentary piece on the environmental and health impact of operations run by Koch Industries. This piece examines the toxic waste water pouring out of a Koch-owned Georgia Pacific plant near Crossett, Arkansas — which residents say is boosting cancer rates and killing people in the community.
Watch on and consider the implications of a “wholesale rollback” of environmental regulations that leading Presidential candidates are proposing — with the backing of the Kochs and the Koch-fueled Tea Party.
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Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Georgia Pacific was always a perfect fit for the Koch brothers. They were even more hated than Weyerhauser in the Northwest, because they moved their HQ to the Pacific Coast a few decades ago, cut everything in sight, and then returned to Atlanta. Particularly horrifying was their inclination to liquidate scarce remaining coastal redwood stands in Northern California and old growth coastal fir in Oregon. Better roads and equipment enabled this final destruction of the primary Northwest forests, outside a few remaining moth eaten postage stamps.
Their business plan in the Southeast is all about monoculture pine plantations, sprayed to kill any competing species, making the forests barren shells of their former selves.
This was accompanied by extensive greenwashing- I attended an NAHB show in Houston in the 90′s where the GP booth handed out baby trees in pots to the homebuilders- many of whom were ignorant enough to go for it.
Now, GP specializes in chemically treated wood, and this is where the real atrocity is. Most countries, including even China, ban the use of formaldeyhde, a carcinogen with no known safe level. It’s legal in the US, due to NAHB and timber company influence. China sends us formaldehyde plywood that they won’t even sell to their own people.
The Guardian has a story linking the Tea Party, the UK Conservatives and yes the Koch brothers. You have to give these guys credit for thinking big, even if big for them means destroying the planet.
Here is the link to the Guardian story.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/oct/15/liam-fox-atlantic-bridge
I floated the idea of boycotting Georgia Pacific to top people at Greenpeace, RAN, and Sierra Club. It would be a good way to hurt the Kochs, as well as return to their forgotten roots of doing something for our forests.
They all declined. I’ts easy to go after the oil companies, since everybody knows what they are all about. “Green” NGO’s are scared of the timber companies, though, since their political influence and greenwashing are so well developed- including on their own donor lists.
This will have to be a people’s movement, spearheaded by one of the remaining forest protection NGO’s with clean hands. Hint: that’s a small pool.
Everyone in favor of killing the EPA needs to travel back in time to 1940′s Donora PA. http://www.donorasmog.com/newsarticles_files/articledeadlysmog.htm
Oct. 26, 1948: Death Cloud Envelops Pennsylvania Mill Town
The companies connived with the U.S. Public Health Service to cover up the facts of the incident and succeeded in doing so for half a century. Whistle-blowers were silenced; records disappeared. It wasn’t until 1994 that a full accounting of what happened in Donora was finally published.
To Philip Sadtler, an industry consultant sent to evaluate the disaster and who tried without success to expose the corporate cover-up, U.S. Steel was guilty of murder:
“The directors of U.S. Steel should have gone to jail for killing people,” Sadtler said shortly before his death in 1996.
In the end, 40 percent of Donora’s population of 14,000 became ill as a result of the “death fog,” and the town joined a growing list of other places hit hard — and harder — by industrial pollution. http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/10/1026donora-pennsylvania-killer-smog/
Koch Industries Gave Thousands To Mike Ross While Poisoning His Constituents http://bluearkansasblog.com/?p=7169
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and Koch Industries
Koch Industries Supporting Global Terrorism
According to a Bloomberg Markets Investigation, Koch Industries Inc., as well as being involved in making improper payments to secure business in India, the Middle East and Africa, has also sold petrochemical equipment worth millions of dollars to Iran, a country which is viewed by the U.S. State Department as a supporter of global terrorism.
Internal company documents show that Koch Industries are thwarting the U.S trade ban by making the sale of the petrochemical equipment to Iran through foreign subsidies.
Since 1999, Koch Industries has had five criminal convictions in the U.S. and Canada. These convictions include lying to regulators, frequently flouting environmental regulations and rigging prices with competitors.
An Example of Corporate Foreign Bribery
A recent example of such a company abusing its position for gain in a poorer country and therefore flouting the FCPA legislation is Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies.
In 2008, Koch Industries sent its newly employed ethics manager and compliance officer, LudmilaEgorova-Farines, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in the south of France.
The ethics manager uncovered malpractices almost immediately, and contacted her supervisors in the U.S. who launched a larger investigation.
Almost five months later the investigators had found evidence of improper payments made by Koch Industries Inc. to secure contracts in six different countries dating back to 2002. Those payments had been authorised by the business director of the company’s Koch-Glitsch affiliate in France.
In 2008, Koch Industries wrote a letter stating, “Those activities constitute violations of criminal law.” Oddly enough, although the letter was made public in a court hearing in France in 2010, it was never reported by the mainstream media.
Breaches of the FCPA are regarded as a serious offense.
Breaking the Act can result in businesses being banned from tendering for U.S. government contracts, having to pay hefty fines, and even, in the most serious cases, jail sentences.
http://www.topsecretwriters.com/2011/10/foreign-corrupt-practices-act-koch-industries/
ABC Report: ‘Secret Sins’ of Koch Industries
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/koch-industries-report-reveals-secret-sins/story?id=14676652
Truth of Corporatist/Capitalist/Government collusion – Coming soon to Harper’s Canada? With the Super-prisons, Super-cops? Harper keeps Quebec asbestos mines open – asbestosis – you Google it. This is very wrong – Harper’s Canada? Some of us, as teenagers, earned spare cash – “beer money” delivering medical oxygen for the large number of silicosis sufferers living outside town. As children in my home-town of Noranda, we watched the “town-men” sweep the streets, in all innocence. We had no idea they had damaged health from the Smelter, the mines. Three families like this lived at the near by Rouyn city dump. I know, I delivered their medical oxygen, I saw the wrecked lives, first hand. They all had humble dwellings, little material goods. Silicosis is a “Hard Rock” miners disease, smelter workers died of cancer. Like my Dad, my neighbors, they rarely reached retirement age. Harper gives huge tax concessions to corporations, only maintenance fees to Canada’s Socialist Health Care system. Pray now, for our American brothers and sisters, suffering this repression, this oncoming depression.
Back when I was growing up in Crossett, the wind would come in from just the right direction every week or so, and you’d get a good strong whiff of eau de paper mill. If anyone started to complain, somebody was sure to shake their head and say, “Just smell that money!”
That having been said, what I am seeing here is a good bit more than a whiff. Count on me to circulate this link far and wide on Arkansas lists.
It is a terrible shame that it has come to this. At one time Crossett was a world leader in sustainable forest management, if you care to hear more, read on.
Once upon a time….
Woodsmen cut down great swaths of old-growth forest throughout the south. Sawmill towns sprung up, served by rail spurs. They flourished for a few years and died, like gold rush ghost towns in the west. It seems the secondary growth forests just couldn’t provide the same quality lumber. So the sawmills packed up and moved on.
But in southern Arkansas Edward Crossett and his partners owned a bunch of land, and they tried to find ways to keep the land productive instead of just using it all up in a flash. He tried a number of things, but ultimately, with the founding of the Southern Experimental Forest Station by the Yale School of Forestry & the USDA just south of the town of Crossett, his company helped develop a method of selective cutting. Instead of destroying the forest in a great harvest, trees were selectively marked and harvested. The habitat was kept intact, more or less- the townsfolk wanted to keep their deer hunting grounds going, for one thing. The great thing for the company was that they got a steady supply of good quality sawmill-grade pine lumber from the same land, over and over.
The town was run for many years as a benevolent dictatorship- it was an old-style company town, where the houses of the employees were all owned by the company up until shortly after World War II. The company made sure the public schools were well funded, and there was a great atmosphere of community and cooperation. The company was in the habit of allowing construction equipment to be used on the weekend by employees for private projects. They had an active community theater and the company funded visiting recitalists in the city auditorium. Most famously, the company houses were all painted green, so when people were actually allowed buy their houses, the local Sherwin-Williams store instantly sold out of everything but green.
I’ll never forget when I was a child that one time one of the boilers exploded at the paper mill and word went around that the whole town was going to be laid off for a month or more while the mill was down. Everyone was worried, not sure if they were going to have groceries in a couple of weeks. Then we found out that they were going to dig a huge clay-lined pit, and if they could finish it they would be able to exhaust the “black liquor” from the mill, which was normally separated and burned, and keep things running while repairs were in progress. It would mean burning a lot more natural gas, since the lignin they normally burned would be going in the hole, but the company was willing to do it to keep everyone on the job.
The whole town turned out to watch- earthmovers excavated and lined the hole, which was longer than a football field, and welders worked nonstop to get a huge pipe in place from the papermill to the hole. The work went on into the night, great lights were set up, brighter than the ones at the high school football field. Finally, everything was in place and the pipe began to spew a great flow of black liquor which slowly began filling the hole. The townsfolk cheered and celebrated. After all, just to the west, down the creek from the plant, is the confluence of the Saline and Ouachita Rivers, and it wouldn’t do to mess up all the fishing!
The family business was sold in 1963 to Georgia-Pacific, which was at that time a publicly traded company. The town was still in good shape for many years after that, but the sawmill was eventually closed. The remaining paper mill, tissue mill, plywood mill, and particle board mill did not require the same sort of tree that the sawmill needed, so I believe the selective cutting technique fell out of use.
Then, when Koch took over, I started to hear that things had really changed. As far as I can tell, the concept of the company as benevolent caretaker of the town and of the land was long gone by this time. People got laid off. People couldn’t sell their houses if they left to find work elsewhere. Houses were set ablaze, presumably by desperate former employees. And the Crossett Zoo, the zoo my uncle built, has fallen into rack and ruin.
This latest report is, I am afraid, very distressing but not exactly surprising.