 Californi's Senator Barbara Boxer gets it
In May, Senator Boxer and six other Democrats on the
Senate environment committee, along with Independent
Bernie Sanders of Vermont, sent a letter demanding
that the Department of Justice launch a criminal and
civil investigation into the Gulf spill. Senator Boxer,
who chairs the committee, argued that operators of the
Deepwater Horizon oil rig did not appear to |
have either the required equipment or the technology to respond
to such a spill. She further accused BP officials of “mis-stating” the company’s ability to respond
to an “accident” of this type.
Of particular relevance to coastal communities, California Senators Boxer and Feinstein, along with Senators Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Ron Wyden (DOre.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) are seeking to restore a permanent ban on offshore drilling along the entire Northwest coastal region. Their legislation is supported by North Coast Representatives Lynn Woolsey of Petaluma and Mike Thompson of St. Helena, as well as 14 California congressional Democrats. It would preclude the Secretary of the Interior from issuing any new leases “for the exploration, development or production of oil or natural gas in any area of the continental shelf off the coast of the state of California, Oregon or Washington.” We best keep in mind that the 20-year moratorium on offshore drilling in the area expired in 2008 during the Bush administration, and has yet to be renewed. The proposed amendment, in part, seeks to restore the ban on drilling. |
Boxer’s legislative history - still relevant today
Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, whose political career began in 1976 with her election to the Marin County Board of Supervisors, won a seat in the US House of Representatives in 1982 from California’s District 6. She served in the House until 1992, winning four re-election campaigns, during which time, she fiercely advocated for womens’ rights, the environment and social justice. When Alan Cranston retired from the Senate in 1992, Boxer was elected to fill his seat. She was re-elected to the Senate in 1998 and 2004, where she has been a leader in the effort to prevent new oil drilling off the California coast for the past three decades. Boxer fought to renew annual prohibitions on drilling and pushed the Clinton Administration to declare a longer-term moratorium. Boxer introduced legislation to establish a permanent ban on new offshore oil drilling – and has called for prohibiting any development of the 36 undeveloped leases off the coast of California. Senator Boxer has been a leader in the effort to block oil drilling in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska and has supported legislation to permanently protect ANWR as wilderness. But times have changed, and now Boxer is scrambling to win a fourth term in what Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, has called “her toughest election ever.” Senator Boxer’s opponent, former Hewlett-Packard executive Carly Fiorina, is considered “formidable,” and Boxer is widely believed to be vulnerable to the Republican challenge this November. It’s not just conservatives, but a growing number of progressives who see Boxer as “disconnected” from the issues impacting voters in 2010. She seems to be “playing it safe,” and, as journalist Deborah White wrote back in April, Boxer spends too much of her time in the insular world of Washington DC, “mired in national policy power-plays and bogged down in Senate intrigues, protocols, and social circles.” White and others believe Boxer doesn’t spend nearly enough time at home, and has lost her personal connection with her constituents in the Bay Area. As the Cook Political Report writes, “Given the overall political environment and California voters’ discontent over the direction of the state and its battered economy, polling indicates that there might be an opening for Republicans even in a state as blue as California.” Most legislators reach a time when his or her constituents feel they have “outlived their usefulness,” and that time will most certainly come for Senator Boxer. Progressives are already pushing hard from within the liberal establishment for more aggressive anti-corporate policies, closer attention to local environmental and economic justice concerns and in general, something resembling a more democratic system of governance. But even those among us who are fed up with the status quo understand that now is not the time to oust Boxer. Right now, we need the gravitas and political heft that Boxer lends to the legislative process. She has served the district well in the past and, in the aftermath of the oil spill, Senator Boxer is doing “all the right stuff.” With a slew of progressive legislation in the pipeline, right now Senator Barbara Boxer – and especially her new legislation -- needs and deserves our support.
Senator Barbara Boxer can be reached at:
senator@boxer.senate.gov Sen. Diane Feinstein: senator@feinstein.senate.gov Rep. Lynn Woolsey: lynn.woolsey@mail.house.gov
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 Hands Across Humanity: From Stinsom Beach to the Niger Delta
At the “Hands Across the Sand” protest
along beautiful Stinson Beach in late June,
the ongoing oil catastrophe in the Gulf of
Mexico was uppermost in our minds. Like
thousands of other people up and down the Pacific
coast, we gathered at that moment to say that such
a crime against nature is unaccep
We have one Earth. One world. To protect or to lose. I went to Stinson Beach that day mindful not only of the horrific oil disaster in the Gulf, but also thinking about a far less well-known oil disaster -- going on for decades in Nigeria. “Big oil spills are no longer news in this vast, tropical land,” the New York Times reported on June 16, 2010. “The Niger Delta, where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates. The oil pours out nearly every week, and some swamps are long since lifeless.” The reality of the Niger Delta is stunning: “Perhaps no place on earth has been as battered by oil, experts say, leaving residents here astonished at the nonstop attention paid to the gusher half a world away in the Gulf of Mexico. It was only a few weeks ago, they say, that a burst pipe belonging to Royal Dutch Shell in the mangroves was finally shut after flowing for two months: now nothing living moves in a black-andbrown world once teeming with shrimp and crab.” The true story is an endless tale of ecocide. “Not far away, there is still black crude on Gio Creek from an April spill, and just across the state line in Akwa Ibom the fishermen curse their oil-blackened nets, doubly useless in a barren sea buffeted by a spill from an offshore Exxon Mobil pipe in May that lasted for weeks. “The oil spews from rusted and aging pipes, unchecked by what analysts say is ineffectual or collusive regulation, and abetted by deficient maintenance and sabotage. In the face of this black tide is an infrequent protest -- soldiers guarding an Exxon Mobil site beat women who were demonstrating last month, according to witnesses -- but mostly resentful resignation. “Small children swim in the polluted estuary here, fisherman take their skiffs out even further -- &rquou;There’s nothing we can catch here,’ said Pius Doron, perched anxiously over his boat -- and market women trudge through oily streams. ‘There is Shell oil on my body&rquo;, said Hannah Baage, emerging from Gio Creek with a machete to cut the cassava stalks balanced on her head.” |
For many years, we’ve
been deluged with the public relations
greenwashing
efforts of BP, Shell, Exxon
Mobil and other oil giants.
We should always be mindful
of what their operations are
doing to the environment and
human rights.
Speaking last year about
brutal attacks on Ogoni activists and the executions of Saro-Wiwa and other activists, his son Ken Wiwa said: ”We feel that Shell’s fingerprints are all over. Clearly Shell financed and provided logistical support.” “As many as 546 million gallons of oil spilled into the Niger Delta over the last five decades, or nearly 11 million gallons a year, a team of experts for the Nigerian government and international and local environmental groups concluded in a 2006 report,” according to the New York Times. “By comparison, the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 dumped an estimated 10.8 million gallons of oil into the waters off Alaska.” How can the oil industry get away with continuing to inflict such terrible destruction? The mission of gaining profits above everything else involves raping nature -- and also violating human rights to crush opposition. That explains the killing of activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. “Saro-Wiwa, a popular author who helped create a peaceful mass movement on behalf of the Ogoni people, was executed in November 1995 along with eight other environmental and human rights activists on what many contended were trumped-up murder charges,” the New York Times has reported (5-5-09). “His body was burned with acid and thrown in an unmarked grave.” Speaking last year about brutal attacks on Ogoni activists and the executions of Saro-Wiwa and other activists, his son Ken Wiwa said: “We feel that Shell’s fingerprints are all over. Clearly Shell financed and provided logistical support.” I was thinking of all this at Stinson Beach as we held hands across the sand. The struggles to protect the natural environment and human rights are truly one and the same. |
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| Norman Solomon is an activist and author who lives in the North Bay. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” also adapted into a documentary film. He is co-chair of the Commission on a Green New Deal for the North Bay. | ||
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