Mayer writes: "In June, Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by the
billionaires Charles and David Koch, launched a new corporate
public-relations campaign called 'End the Divide,' to advance the notion
that Koch Industries is deeply concerned by growing inequality in America."
The Koch brothers. (photo: The Young Turks)
A Whistle-Blower Accuses the Kochs of 'Poisoning' an Arkansas Town
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
16 September 10
In June, Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by the billionaires
Charles and David Koch, launched a new corporate public-relations campaign
called End the Divide, to advance the notion that Koch Industries is
deeply concerned by growing inequality in America. An ad for the campaign
urges viewers to look around, as an image of an imposing white mansion is
replaced by one of blighted urban streets. America is divided, an
announcer intones, with government and corporations picking winners and
losers, rigging the system against people, creating a two-tiered society
with policies that fail our most vulnerable.
The message was surprising, coming from a company owned by two of the
richest men in the world, who have spent millions of dollars pushing
political candidates and programs that favor unfettered markets and oppose
government intervention on behalf of the poor. But no trouble appeared to
have been spared in the commercials creation. It features a cast of
downtrodden Americans of all colors and creeds. To portray corporate greed,
it includes a shot of a Wall Street sign, followed by a smug businessman
looking down at the camera, dressed in a flashy suit and tie. But, according
to Dickie Guice, who worked as a safety coördinator at a large Koch-owned
paper plant in Arkansas, the company need not have gone to such lengths.
Instead of scouting America for examples of social neglect, the Kochs could
have turned the cameras on their own factory.
This summer, Guice decided to speak out about the paper mill in Crossett, a
working-class town of some fifty-two hundred residents ten miles north of
the Louisiana border.* The mill is run by the paper giant Georgia-Pacific,
which has been owned by Koch Industries since 2005. According to E.P.A.
records, it emits more than 1.5 million pounds of toxic chemicals each year,
including numerous known carcinogens. Georgia-Pacific says that it has
permits to operate the mill as it does, and disputes that it is harming
local health and safety. But as far back as the nineteen-nineties, people
living near the plant have described noxious odors and corrosive effluents
that have forced them to stay indoors, as well as what seems to them
unusually high rates of illness and death. Speaking by phone from his home,
in Sterlington, Louisiana, Guice pointed the finger directly at the mills
owners, and described a corporate coverup of air and water pollution that he
says is poisoning the predominantly African-American community.
Guice made his début as a whistle-blower in a new documentary film, Company
Town, about the pollution of Crossett, which premièred in June at the L.A.
Film Festival. Natalie Kottke-Masocco, the films director, and Erica
Sardarian, its co-director, spent some five years in Crossett, and over time
they coaxed Guice to go on camera. I was warned that Id never get hired
again, he told me, when I asked why he was coming forward. But I thought,
What the heck, what are they going to do, kill me? It had to be done.
As Guice tells it, he started working at the Crossett plant in February,
2011, when Larco Inc., a local heavy-equipment and construction firm, where
he worked, was contracted by Georgia-Pacific to handle disposal of the paper
plants waste. According to Guice, the contract called for his company to
spread two hundred thousand cubic yards of ash dredged from the
Georgia-Pacific paper mills sediment ponds across four hundred acres of
property that it owned in the town. He says that Georgia-Pacific supervisors
told him to spread the waste in layers in pits that were sometimes forty
feet deep, and then to cover it with six inches of dirt, so that it looked
like a regular piece of land. The land often flooded, Guice told me, and
runoff would flow into trenches that fed into a local creek, which ran
behind a residential area. He said that Georgia-Pacific would also dump big
plastic tanks of untreated liquid waste. It looks like brown liquor, he
said. And steam comes up from it, sometimes all day. Within a few months
of starting at the paper plant, Guice said that he fell ill from exposure to
the waste, developing respiratory problems. My doctor told me to get out of
there, he said. But I needed that job.
After a year, Guice, who has a certification from the Occupational Safety &
Health Administration in environmental safety, was promoted to the position
of safety coördinator, again as a Larco contractor to Georgia-Pacific. In
his new post, he was given air-quality monitoring equipment, which he told
me showed deadly levels of hydrogen sulfide, a foul-smelling, colorless
gas that has proven carcinogenic to rats and mice. Guice took measurements
in the morning, midday, and evening, and documented them all. When he told
the Georgia-Pacific supervisors that he was getting readings so high that
they indicated a potential for immediate illness and death, he says the
company blamed his equipment. After he protested this, they offered to build
a roof over the fields where the waste was being spread, but he told them
that this would be like building a toxic gas chamber. They told me it was
my problem. They knew it was dangerous, but their attitude was: keep your
mouth shut, do the job, and dont get in anyones business, according to
Guice. Eventually, a company official took her own readings, which he says
confirmed his own. At this point, the company decided to build a huge
stainless-steel chain-link fence around the perimeter of its property, so
you cant see where the work is, he told me. Once he was able to get
employment elsewhere, Guice, who had been contacted by the filmmakers behind
Company Town, decided to blow the whistle.
Reached for comment, Kelly Ferguson, the director of public affairs for
Georgia-Pacific, said that the company has not seen the documentary, but,
from what it has heard about Guices statements, we disagree with his
claims and misrepresentations. Ferguson wrote in an e-mail, Mr. Guice was
never an employee of Georgia-Pacific. He only worked for the contractor that
hauled and spread the wood ash and paper fiber sludge. Ferguson also
stressed that the companys disposal of its waste is permitted and has been
inspected by state and federal regulatory agencies. I dont know where Mr.
Guices information comes from, he said.
To dispute the claim that the mill was harming the health of residents,
Ferguson cited a report released in June by the Arkansas Department of
Health, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services, that found no evidence that the drinking water in Crossett posed a
public-health hazard. An accompanying study of the air is pending. A state
study showed that the county in which Crossett is located did not have a
higher cancer rate than the rest of Arkansas. But Kottke-Masocco says that
the water study tested only the public water system, not wells used by
families on streets closest to the mill, where clusters of illness have
caused local alarm. On one short street, South Penn Road, eleven of the
fifteen houses have been stricken with fatal cases of cancer, as I reported
in my book Dark Money.
Guice may be the first eyewitness to speak out and on the record, but he is
not the first to raise concerns about the Koch-owned factory in Crossett. In
2014, the left-leaning documentary maker Robert Greenwald released the
muckraking film Koch Brothers Exposed, which showed the human toll of the
pollution in Crossett. Greenwald interviewed David Bouie, a black pastor who
lives on Penn Road, and who has organized community action, who asked, Why
is the cancer rate so high? Does the paper plant have anything to do with
it? (Kottke-Masocco, the Company Town co-director, worked with Greenwald
on this segment of his film, and decided to stay on in Crossett to dig
deeper.) Last April, Newsweek published an article titled, How a Paper
Plant in Arkansas Is Allegedly Poisoning the People of Crossett, which
included an interview with a local man named Leroy Patton, who had seen
almost his entire family die of cancer. A Georgia-Pacific spokesman assured
the magazine that the plant was operating legally, and in compliance with a
permit issued to it by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality, but
Newsweek noted that an E.P.A. inspection last year found thirty-three areas
in which Georgia-Pacific was noncompliant with federal laws and dozens of
other areas of concern. Jennifer King, a public-affairs manager with
Georgia-Pacific, told Newsweek that the company was working to address these
issues.
Guice says that another paper mill owned by Georgia-Pacific that he worked
for, in Port Hudson, Louisiana, met high environmental standards. It can be
done, he said. But Guice noted that Crossett residents have limited
political and economic leverage. Georgia-Pacific accounts for much of the
towns employment. If Georgia-Pacific were to die, Crossett would die.
Georgia-Pacific is a big taxpayer in Arkansas, too. Thats why everybody
turns their back on this, he told me.
Slowly, however, with pressure building from Bouie and others, Crossetts
plight has begun to attract more attention. In May, with legal assistance
from the Environmental Law Clinic at Tulane University, two environmental
groups, the Ouachita Riverkeeper and Louisiana Environmental Action Network,
filed petitions with the E.P.A. under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act
demanding that it take action against the plant; they argue that its waste
disposal disproportionately affects nearby African-American neighborhoods.
The images of Crossetts African-American residents wheezing as they
struggle with industrial pollution in their own back yards, as captured in
Company Town, could have aptly illustrated the Kochs End the Divide
campaign. But, of course, these particular disadvantaged Americans were
omitted from the commercial. It really disturbed me, Kottke-Masocco said,
recalling how she felt when she first saw the new Koch ad. The two-tiered,
winner-take-all, divided system that the Kochs say they want to end has been
directly created by the financial influence of corporations like theirs on
politics.
Crossett, Arkansas, she said, is the perfect example.
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The Koch brothers. (photo: The Young Turks)
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-whistle-blower-accuses-the-kochs-o
f-poisoning-an-arkansas-townhttp://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-whistl
e-blower-accuses-the-kochs-of-poisoning-an-arkansas-town
A Whistle-Blower Accuses the Kochs of 'Poisoning' an Arkansas Town
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
16 September 10
n June, Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by the billionaires Charles
and David Koch, launched a new corporate public-relations campaign called
End the Divide, to advance the notion that Koch Industries is deeply
concerned by growing inequality in America. An ad for the campaign urges
viewers to look around, as an image of an imposing white mansion is
replaced by one of blighted urban streets. America is divided, an
announcer intones, with government and corporations picking winners and
losers, rigging the system against people, creating a two-tiered society
with policies that fail our most vulnerable.
The message was surprising, coming from a company owned by two of the
richest men in the world, who have spent millions of dollars pushing
political candidates and programs that favor unfettered markets and oppose
government intervention on behalf of the poor. But no trouble appeared to
have been spared in the commercials creation. It features a cast of
downtrodden Americans of all colors and creeds. To portray corporate greed,
it includes a shot of a Wall Street sign, followed by a smug businessman
looking down at the camera, dressed in a flashy suit and tie. But, according
to Dickie Guice, who worked as a safety coördinator at a large Koch-owned
paper plant in Arkansas, the company need not have gone to such lengths.
Instead of scouting America for examples of social neglect, the Kochs could
have turned the cameras on their own factory.
This summer, Guice decided to speak out about the paper mill in Crossett, a
working-class town of some fifty-two hundred residents ten miles north of
the Louisiana border.* The mill is run by the paper giant Georgia-Pacific,
which has been owned by Koch Industries since 2005. According to E.P.A.
records, it emits more than 1.5 million pounds of toxic chemicals each year,
including numerous known carcinogens. Georgia-Pacific says that it has
permits to operate the mill as it does, and disputes that it is harming
local health and safety. But as far back as the nineteen-nineties, people
living near the plant have described noxious odors and corrosive effluents
that have forced them to stay indoors, as well as what seems to them
unusually high rates of illness and death. Speaking by phone from his home,
in Sterlington, Louisiana, Guice pointed the finger directly at the mills
owners, and described a corporate coverup of air and water pollution that he
says is poisoning the predominantly African-American community.
Guice made his début as a whistle-blower in a new documentary film, Company
Town, about the pollution of Crossett, which premièred in June at the L.A.
Film Festival. Natalie Kottke-Masocco, the films director, and Erica
Sardarian, its co-director, spent some five years in Crossett, and over time
they coaxed Guice to go on camera. I was warned that Id never get hired
again, he told me, when I asked why he was coming forward. But I thought,
What the heck, what are they going to do, kill me? It had to be done.
As Guice tells it, he started working at the Crossett plant in February,
2011, when Larco Inc., a local heavy-equipment and construction firm, where
he worked, was contracted by Georgia-Pacific to handle disposal of the paper
plants waste. According to Guice, the contract called for his company to
spread two hundred thousand cubic yards of ash dredged from the
Georgia-Pacific paper mills sediment ponds across four hundred acres of
property that it owned in the town. He says that Georgia-Pacific supervisors
told him to spread the waste in layers in pits that were sometimes forty
feet deep, and then to cover it with six inches of dirt, so that it looked
like a regular piece of land. The land often flooded, Guice told me, and
runoff would flow into trenches that fed into a local creek, which ran
behind a residential area. He said that Georgia-Pacific would also dump big
plastic tanks of untreated liquid waste. It looks like brown liquor, he
said. And steam comes up from it, sometimes all day. Within a few months
of starting at the paper plant, Guice said that he fell ill from exposure to
the waste, developing respiratory problems. My doctor told me to get out of
there, he said. But I needed that job.
After a year, Guice, who has a certification from the Occupational Safety &
Health Administration in environmental safety, was promoted to the position
of safety coördinator, again as a Larco contractor to Georgia-Pacific. In
his new post, he was given air-quality monitoring equipment, which he told
me showed deadly levels of hydrogen sulfide, a foul-smelling, colorless
gas that has proven carcinogenic to rats and mice. Guice took measurements
in the morning, midday, and evening, and documented them all. When he told
the Georgia-Pacific supervisors that he was getting readings so high that
they indicated a potential for immediate illness and death, he says the
company blamed his equipment. After he protested this, they offered to build
a roof over the fields where the waste was being spread, but he told them
that this would be like building a toxic gas chamber. They told me it was
my problem. They knew it was dangerous, but their attitude was: keep your
mouth shut, do the job, and dont get in anyones business, according to
Guice. Eventually, a company official took her own readings, which he says
confirmed his own. At this point, the company decided to build a huge
stainless-steel chain-link fence around the perimeter of its property, so
you cant see where the work is, he told me. Once he was able to get
employment elsewhere, Guice, who had been contacted by the filmmakers behind
Company Town, decided to blow the whistle.
Reached for comment, Kelly Ferguson, the director of public affairs for
Georgia-Pacific, said that the company has not seen the documentary, but,
from what it has heard about Guices statements, we disagree with his
claims and misrepresentations. Ferguson wrote in an e-mail, Mr. Guice was
never an employee of Georgia-Pacific. He only worked for the contractor that
hauled and spread the wood ash and paper fiber sludge. Ferguson also
stressed that the companys disposal of its waste is permitted and has been
inspected by state and federal regulatory agencies. I dont know where Mr.
Guices information comes from, he said.
To dispute the claim that the mill was harming the health of residents,
Ferguson cited a report released in June by the Arkansas Department of
Health, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services, that found no evidence that the drinking water in Crossett posed a
public-health hazard. An accompanying study of the air is pending. A state
study showed that the county in which Crossett is located did not have a
higher cancer rate than the rest of Arkansas. But Kottke-Masocco says that
the water study tested only the public water system, not wells used by
families on streets closest to the mill, where clusters of illness have
caused local alarm. On one short street, South Penn Road, eleven of the
fifteen houses have been stricken with fatal cases of cancer, as I reported
in my book Dark Money.
Guice may be the first eyewitness to speak out and on the record, but he is
not the first to raise concerns about the Koch-owned factory in Crossett. In
2014, the left-leaning documentary maker Robert Greenwald released the
muckraking film Koch Brothers Exposed, which showed the human toll of the
pollution in Crossett. Greenwald interviewed David Bouie, a black pastor who
lives on Penn Road, and who has organized community action, who asked, Why
is the cancer rate so high? Does the paper plant have anything to do with
it? (Kottke-Masocco, the Company Town co-director, worked with Greenwald
on this segment of his film, and decided to stay on in Crossett to dig
deeper.) Last April, Newsweek published an article titled, How a Paper
Plant in Arkansas Is Allegedly Poisoning the People of Crossett, which
included an interview with a local man named Leroy Patton, who had seen
almost his entire family die of cancer. A Georgia-Pacific spokesman assured
the magazine that the plant was operating legally, and in compliance with a
permit issued to it by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality, but
Newsweek noted that an E.P.A. inspection last year found thirty-three areas
in which Georgia-Pacific was noncompliant with federal laws and dozens of
other areas of concern. Jennifer King, a public-affairs manager with
Georgia-Pacific, told Newsweek that the company was working to address these
issues.
Guice says that another paper mill owned by Georgia-Pacific that he worked
for, in Port Hudson, Louisiana, met high environmental standards. It can be
done, he said. But Guice noted that Crossett residents have limited
political and economic leverage. Georgia-Pacific accounts for much of the
towns employment. If Georgia-Pacific were to die, Crossett would die.
Georgia-Pacific is a big taxpayer in Arkansas, too. Thats why everybody
turns their back on this, he told me.
Slowly, however, with pressure building from Bouie and others, Crossetts
plight has begun to attract more attention. In May, with legal assistance
from the Environmental Law Clinic at Tulane University, two environmental
groups, the Ouachita Riverkeeper and Louisiana Environmental Action Network,
filed petitions with the E.P.A. under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act
demanding that it take action against the plant; they argue that its waste
disposal disproportionately affects nearby African-American neighborhoods.
The images of Crossetts African-American residents wheezing as they
struggle with industrial pollution in their own back yards, as captured in
Company Town, could have aptly illustrated the Kochs End the Divide
campaign. But, of course, these particular disadvantaged Americans were
omitted from the commercial. It really disturbed me, Kottke-Masocco said,
recalling how she felt when she first saw the new Koch ad. The two-tiered,
winner-take-all, divided system that the Kochs say they want to end has been
directly created by the financial influence of corporations like theirs on
politics.
Crossett, Arkansas, she said, is the perfect example.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
