Friday, Aug 29, 2008
"He doesn't own stock in that company, and he doesn't have any connection to that issue in Colombia," said Gore spokesman Doug Hattaway to the Associated Press in January. "It's a matter that involves the internal policies of another country," spokeswoman Laura Quinn told the Nation. "We just don't have any control over what the entities are trying to do in other countries," spokesman Mark Fabiani told "Fox News Sunday" in July.
"It's ludicrous to say, 'We can't interfere,'" Soltani says.
And indeed, the deferrals and denials offered by Gore spokesmen contradict the previous actions of Gore, who sells himself as both a committed environmentalist and an internationalist.
As a senator, for instance, Gore introduced two senate resolutions calling upon the Japanese government to look into the havoc lumber companies were wreaking in Malaysia and Papua, New Guinea. Additionally, one of Gore's last actions as a senator, in April 1992, was almost directly comparable: He spoke out in support of the Penan Indians in Malaysia, whose lands were being threatened by loggers. (Occidental Petroleum was involved in neither of those two controversies.)
The GOP ticket contains two Texas oil men -- Bush ran Arbusto Oil into the ground, while running mate Dick Cheney was president and CEO of Halliburton Company, in Dallas, which provides oil industry equipment. But the Occidental issue is enough to convince Soltani and her crew that "when it comes to 'big oil,' there's no difference between Bush and Gore." She says she will probably end up voting for consumer advocate Ralph Nader.
But surely Gore -- who's been resoundingly endorsed by the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations -- is better than Bush, whose environmental record in Texas is a disaster. Surely Gore, warts and all, is the natural pick for anyone on the political left.
"We always vote for the lesser of the two evils," Sultani says. "But if we keep doing that, we will always have evil, and we will always have less."
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