(BEING FROM OHIO, THIS ESPECIALLY IRKS ME:
Ask Hillary About This Tonight. I Dare You.
by Zwoof
Thu Jan 31, 2008 at 03:40:46 AM PST
Several days ago I posted a diary about the WTI and Von Roll Toxic Waste Incinerator. Because I posted it the same day as the South Carolina Primary, several Kossacks have asked me to repost.
Instead of duplicating the diary, I have added some new developments, and data.
While I was writing the original piece on the history of this foul project, a new ruling from the Ohio EPAallowed this incinerator, located 1,100 feet from an elementary school, to accept even more hazardous waste (anthrax, radioactive waste, infectious medical waste and mixed hazardous waste from Hurricane Katrina) than the original permit that was shrouded in corruption and approved by the Clinton Administration
Clinton and Al Gore promised the residents of East Liverpool, Ohio that they would not allow this incinerator originally approved by Bush '41 to operate. However, a Clinton EPA appointee, recommended by his classmate Hillary Clinton, approved the permit.
This is a tangled tale of corporatism, broken promises and an environmental disaster waiting to happen.
It's long, so hang with me below the fold.
.
Zwoof's diary :: ::
Background on East Liverpool, Ohio:
East Liverpool is a small town on the Ohio River in an economically depressed area. The incinerator was first proposed in 1979 and marketed to the community as a way to bring jobs to East Liverpool.
The WTI facility is one of the world's largest capacity hazardous waste incinerators. It sits on the banks of the Ohio River where Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia converge. It is in a flood plain and over a high-yielding aquifer, and was built on an already-polluted site owned by the Columbiana County Port Authority. There are homes within 320 feet of the facility and a 400-pupil elementary school on a hill just 1100 feet from, and slightly below, the stack.
The facility is in a valley that experiences air inversions, which trap the air and inhibit the normal rise of fog and pollution, as often as two of every three days. In short, it is about the worst place you could imagine siting a giant hazardous waste facility.
Ohiocitizen.org
THE PLAYERS
Background on Jackson Stephans and Von Roll America:
By the most conservative estimates, the four partner companies that signed the incinerator's original permit application changed their names some nine times between 1981 and 1990. According to other estimates, the changes number more than forty... Mother Jones
Stephens Inc. and WTI
According to the Ohio Attorney General's report on WTI in 1993: "It was 'Waste Technologies, Incorporated' in the late seventies, a group of companies owned by Jackson Stephens of Little Rock, Arkansas that became interested in the possibility of developing industrial waste incinerators which could be used to generate power.
Note: No power has been generated from this facility to date.
Von Roll America
There have been criminal investigations of Von Roll management, including the conviction of three company executives in Switzerland related to the company’s 1991 sales of weapons parts to Iraq.
The Politicians,Contributers and Conflicts
Jackson Stephans seems to have had a knack for picking winners.
Stephens staked Sam Walton when he started Wal-Mart in 1970, financed Tyson Food'stakeover of Holly Farms in 1988 and bankrolled Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the television producer and Former First Friend.
Jackson Stephens hired the Rose Law Firm where Hillary Rodham Clinton was a partner.
In 1979, she became the first woman to be made a full partner of Rose Law Firm, hired by managing partner C. Joseph Goroir, Jr,.
Stephens later hired Goroir as director of his Worthen Bank in Little Rock.
In 1991, Jackson Stephens contributed $100,000 to the Republican Party for George Herbert Walker Bush's presidential campaign, and Stephens Inc. "kicked in another $100,000." Stephen’s wife was the Arkansas co-chairman of the Bush for President campaign. (Wall Street Journal, December 6, 1991.)
Not big news, just another Billionaire for The Bush Family.
But when it appeared that George Bush's presidency was doomed Stephens changed horses..
Jackson Stephens raised at least $100,000 for Bill Clinton's first Presidential campaign (Source: Seattle Times, November 6, 1993)
Stephens "extended a $3.5 million line of credit to
campaign through the Worthen Bank, which is partly owned by the Stephens family. The Clinton campaign deposited up to $55 million in federal election funds in this bank." (Source: The Nation)
-snip
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/1/31/21045/9822/688/446786
Here is a portion of activist/mother, Terri Swearingen's acceptance speech for the Goldman Environmental Prize, given April 14, 1997:
I am not a scientist or a Ph.D. I am a nurse and a housewife, but my most important credential is that I am a mother. In 1982, I was pregnant with our one and only child. That's when I first learned of plans to build one of the world's largest toxic waste incinerators in my community. When they began site preparation to begin building the incinerator in 1990, my life changed forever. I'd like to share with you some of the lessons I have learned from my experiences over the past seven years.
One of the main lessons I have learned from the WTI experience is that we are losing our democracy. How have I come to this sad realization? Democracy is defined by Merriam Webster as "government by the people, especially rule of the majority," and "the common people constituting the source of political authority." The definition of democracy no longer fits with the reality of what is happening in East Liverpool, Ohio. For one thing, it is on the record that the majority of people in the Ohio Valley do not want the WTI hazardous waste incinerator in their area, and they have been opposed to the project from its inception. Some of our elected officials have tried to help us, but the forces arrayed against us have been stronger than we or they had imagined. Public concerns and protests have been smothered with meaningless public hearings, voodoo risk assessment and slick legal maneuvering.
Government agencies that were set up to protect public health and the environment only do their job if it does not conflict with corporate interests. Our current reality is that we live in a "wealthocracy" big money simply gets what it wants. In this wealthocracy, we see three dynamics at play: corporations versus the planet, the government versus the people, and corporate consultants or "experts" versus common sense. In the case of WTI, we have seen all three.
The second lesson I have learned ties directly to the first, and that is that corporations can control the highest office in the land. When Bill Clinton and Al Gore came to the Ohio Valley, they called the siting of the WTI hazardous waste incinerator next door to a 400 student elementary school, in the middle of an impoverished Appalachian neighborhood, immediately on the bank of the Ohio River in a flood plain an "UNBELIEVABLE IDEA." They said we ought to have control over where these things are located. They even went so far as to say they would stop it. But then they didn't! What has been revealed in all this is that there are forces running this country that are far more powerful than the President and the Vice President. This country trumpets to the world how democratic it is, but it's funny that I come from a community that our President dare not visit because he cannot witness first hand the injustice which he has allowed in the interest of a multinational corporation, Von Roll of Switzerland. And the Union Bank of Switzerland. And Jackson Stephens, a private investment banker from Arkansas. These forces are far more relevant to our little town than the President of the United States! And he is the one who made it that way. He has chosen that path. We didn't choose it for him. We begged him to come to East Liverpool, but he refused. We begged the head of EPA to come, but she refused. She hides behind the clever maneuvering of lawyers and consultants who obscure the dangers of the reckless siting of this facility with theoretical risk assessments.
-snip
http://www.ohiocitizen.org/campaigns/wti/et0897s17.html
There has always been something incongruous about Stephens Inc. Despite the Little rock firm's attempts to portray itself as a small- city operation that closes for the duck season and got fabulously lucky on a couple of down-home deals like Wal-Mart, it was, at the incinerator's inception, the ninth-largest investment bank in the country. Since it is not headquartered in New York, its dealings are local news, little noticed by the national press, even when they have national implications. And, as a source close to the company once remarked, "The farther you get from Arkansas, the better it looks."
Stephens Inc. was founded by Witt Stephens, a state legislator's son who parlayed a Depression-era belt-buckle, Bible, and municipal-bond business into an immense personal fortune. After his retirement in 1973, the company was run by his shy younger brother, Jackson (a classmate of Jimmy Carter's at the Naval Academy). Witt Stephens and Stephens Inc. did much to create the economic paradox that is modern Arkansas: a desperately poor state with a scant 2.3 million inhabitants that is nonetheless home to a number of wealthy companies. Without the financial assistance of the Stephens brothers, Sam Walton might have ended his days as the most innovative merchant in Bentonville. Stephens money was also important to the fortunes of enterprises as various as Tyson Foods and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the television producer and reigning First Friend. Stephens Inc. is an important client of the Rose law firm, whose chairman, C. Joseph Giroir, made Hillary Rodham Clinton a partner. And back in 1977, Stephens assisted BCCI's infiltration of the American banking system by brokering the latter's purchase of National Bank of Georgia stock held by Bert Lance, former President Jimmy Carter's friend and disgraced budget director.
Jackson Stephens (who turned over the reins to his son, Warren, in the late eighties) and his firm were both substantial contributors to the campaigns of Presidents Reagan and Bush (to the tune of at least $100,000 in 1980 and 1989), but they have been closer still to Bill Clinton (whom Witt Stephens had been known to call "that boy").
On two occasions, once when Clinton was running for reelection in Arkansas in 1990 and again in March 1992, when his battered presidential campaign was broke, the Stephens family saved Clinton's bacon with an infusion of money. Indeed, it may not be too much to say that their Worthen Bank's emergency $3.5 million line of credit saved the presidential campaign from extinction. --L.J.D.
-snip
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1993/11/davis.html
Who is the octopussy that might be lurking in the Ohio River Valley? Perhaps we should start by asking shy Arkansas billionaire Jackson T. Stephens. After all, Stephens introduced BCCI from Pakistan to the United States and the WTI waste incinerator to East Liverpool, Ohio. Stephens would be a good sketch artist because he's seen some monstrous scandals in his day. Stephens' family firm is the largest privately owned investment bank outside Wall Street. In September 1977, President Jimmy Carter's Budget Director Burt Lance was forced to resign amid allegations about his bank dealings with Stephens (Stephens and Carter were classmates at the Naval Academy). In 1978, Stephens, Lance and BCCI were charged with violating U.S. security laws. The charges were dropped after the defendants promised not to violate security laws in the future, even though they admitted no guilt.
The New York Post reported in February 1992 that it was Stephens who enabled BCCI to gain a foothold in the U.S. and helped the fraud-plagued bank secretly acquire U.S. banks. In Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin's book, False Profits, perhaps the best account of the BCCI scandal, the authors outlined how opium revenue from Afghanistan Mujahedin fighting the Soviets ended up in the accounts of BCCI, founded by Agha Hasan Abedi. The Post reported that Stephens allegedly introduced Abedi to Lance shortly after Lance resigned.
In 1991, Lance testified that he urged Abedi to acquire a Washington bank holding company, but he denied any knowledge of BCCI's subsequent secret ownership of First American Bankshares. The Post reported that Securities and Exchange Commission documents from 1977 substantiate that the idea originated with Stephens.
During Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential run, Stephens and his son Warren boasted of raising more than $100,000 for the campaign. The Stephens family also owned a 38 percent share in Worthen National Bank that extended a crucial $2 million line of credit to Clinton in January 1992.
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http://www.ohiocitizen.org/campaigns/wti/bob.html
Waste Technologies Industry, Inc. (WTI)
WTI has also gained significant political support, as one of the original partners in the corporation was Jackson Stephens. Stephens, an Arkansas investor, was known as a significant contributor to Reagan, Bush, and Clinton campaigns.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
The EPA has been accused of having bias in favor of WTI and carrying out decision-making activities without required public participation. The agency also violated rules established in RCRA during the WTI permit application process. EPA admitted such wrong-doing at a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee's subcommitteeon Administrative Law and Government Relations, as well as the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
http://www.umich.edu/~snre492/mcormick.html#Key%20Actors
Washington, D.C. - The League of Conservation Voters (LCV), the self-described political arm of the environmental movement, has given President Clinton a middling grade of "C-plus" overall for "not working up to potential" during his first year in office.
In particular, the League criticized the Clinton Administration for failing to halt Waste Technologies Industries' controversial hazardous waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio.
-snip
http://wasteage.com/mag/waste_fewer_onsite_hazwaste/
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