It only seems fair that if Hillary wants to dig through Obama’s trash that her early years should come under scrutiny as well.
It’s well know that she was involved with WalMart. How many people know about the Clinton connections to another Arkansas corporatist that is far dirtier than WalMart?
Let’s take a look at Waste Technologies Incorporated (WTI), Jackson Stephens and Hillary/Bill Clinton.
“The farther you get from Arkansas, the better it looks.” Someone describing Stephens Inc. once said.
“The farther you get from East Liverpool, Ohio, the better it smells.”
I said that.
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.Company headquarters can be found in Little Rock, Arkansas.
.
.East Liverpool, Ohio is a small town (14,000) on the Ohio River near the borders of Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. It is the home of Jackson Stephen’s Waste Technologies Industries (WTI) toxic waste incinerator, the largest such facility in the United States.
.
.
.
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’s takeover 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.
Stephens could spot talent. He saw what a whiz kid George W. Bush was and helped bail out his failing Texas oil company in 1991.
He donated money to political campaigns. Lots of it.
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 then Stephens changes 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 [Clinton’s] 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)
Meanwhile back in East Liverpool…
“I must be crazy,” said Alonzo Spencer, 74, marveling at the decades he has battled the incinerator, first trying to block its construction and now trying to shut it down.
Activists argued in 1991 that emissions would poison the neighbors. They pointed out that the nearest home is one block from the incinerator and an elementary school is four blocks away. Actor Martin Sheen and dozens of others were arrested in protests organized by the environmental organization Greenpeace.
During the 1992 election campaign, vice presidential candidate Al Gore suggested the incinerator should be shut down. But once elected, the Clinton administration said there were no legal grounds to block it.
President Clinton and Vice President Gore visited East Liverpool while campaigning for election in 1992; at that time, Mr. Clinton said that, if he were elected, WTI would never be allowed to operate. But the huge incinerator began burning hazardous waste in 1993, 1,100 feet from an elementary school. Mr. Clinton has not returned to East Liverpool since he became President in 1992.
snip~
WTI failed part of its test burn in 1993, releasing four times more mercury than allowed. Children at the elementary school were tested for mercury in their urine prior to WTI operation and again six months after the facility started burning as part of a state health study. In the first test, 69 percent of the children tested negative; the follow-up test found that nearly the same number tested positive.
U.S. EPA’s own risk assessment of the facility found at least 27 possible accident scenarios that could threaten the lives of the children in the nearby elementary school.
Despite these and other problems, the U.S. EPA issued WTI a full commercial operating license in 1997. The agency has also allowed the facility to nearly double the types of wastes it can burn.
Don’t worry folks, there are Emergency Plans for East Liverpool…
Tin Foil and Duct Tape“The emergency ‘plan’ calls for a strategy of ‘sheltering in place.’ An examination of the details of this plan reveals in the starkest fashion the underlying futility of truly protecting these small children. The plan assumes that all four hundred children can be herded safely and efficiently into the school cafeteria within three minutes, the room sealed by stuffing wax paper and tinfoil in the cracks and taping with duct tape, and the air conditioning, heating, and ventilating systems turned off so that outside air would not be entering the building. If an explosion were to shatter even one of the windows, sealing the room would be impossible. Even without a broken window, however, it is unlikely that toxic gases could be kept out of the room . . . making it more a tomb than a safe haven.”
The author of the above letter is David Ozonoff, M.D., MPH, professor of public health and chair, Department of Environmental Health, Boston University. It is addressed to William Jefferson Clinton, president of the United States. The date of the letter is June 21, 1993.
Oh, but that was Bill Clinton you say…
Let’s see what Hillary was doing at the time.
Hillary was a board member of Standard Lafarge that was permitted to dredge the Ohio River near the incinerator site for sand and gravel to make cement. The dredging benefited Lafarge’s cement-making operation and the deepening of the Ohio River allowed waterway access to the WTI incinerator. WTI had run into opposition due to its use of roadways to haul hazardous waste, opening the Ohio River to WTI would solved a number of its problems.Note: George Herbert Walker Bush is reported to be substantial owner of LaFarge.
The EPA approved WTI’s application. The decision maker was EPA Deputy Administrator Robert Sussman, a law school classmate of Bill and Hillary Clinton.Sussman previously acted as legal counsel to the Chemical Manufacturing Association, at a time when two of its biggest clients, Du Pont and BASF, were negotiating contracts to supply two-thirds of the waste to WTI.” The Nation Magazine …more here
The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that plant opponents “cited Sussman’s appointment to the EPA through the influence of first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose former law firm represented the original founder of Waste Technologies.”
This image was the official company photo of one of the world’s largest hazardous waste incinerators, until recently in the photo section of the Von Roll WTI website. It appears to be out in the middle of nowhere.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Note: This has got to be one of the worst Photoshop treatments I’ve ever seen!
A different photo of the same facility, by Steve Holiday, shows you the truth. The incinerator is burning hazardous waste in the middle of East Liverpool, Ohio, surrounded by hundreds of homes, and 1,100 feet from East Elementary School.
.
.
.
.
.
.
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, filling a chart only slightly smaller than the average bathroom floor. Source: MotherJones
In the 1980s, hazardous-waste disposal by incinerators was a growth industry, a hot stock, a Wall Street concept. Corporations were paying $1,000 a ton to dispose of their toxics – 200 million tons a year. Profit figures projected for burning the deadly muck were astronomical.
When hazardous-waste incinerators were being touted to suspicious or accepting local communities, said Alonzo Spencer, president of Save Our County, “one of the flagrant lies was that this would be a |waste/energy facility’ selling steam and electric power to bring in all kinds of new industry.”
WTI generates no commercial steam or electricity, just a steady stream of traffic, trucking in hazardous waste.
This was a dirty deal from the get-go and it appears that Lawyer/First Lady Hillary got her hands dirty in the process.
Sources and additional reading:
Toxic-waste incinerator in the backyard: White House and church steer clear in Ohio. (East Liverpool, Ohio)
MotherJones ND93: Where are you Al?
Waste Technologies Industries
East Liverpool
Opposition to Ohio incinerator fades
7 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
that the mother jones article which is your main source is mainly an attack on al gore?
VP to the Clinton’s. As Zwoof states he was probably screwed over and was not as VP in a place to fight back. He’s stated himself that he is not a good pol. At this point he hadn’t like the rest of us realized the extent of the Clinton’s, still intact, corporate agenda.
This essay is exactly why Hillary is the last Democrat we should elect. To paint a picture in hindsight of an administration that while Democratic in name, actually was the corporate Democratic answer to the failing popularity of Bush the elders obvious insanity, is a cruel joke. Greed is good and you can vote for it and still be a Democrat.
The endless ties that bind HRC, the DLC, and the corporations still live, in fact she has accumulated new ones most disturbing this one:
http://www.alternet.org/story/…
The Clinton administration looked good in comparison to what followed. They managed to appear socially liberal and yet kept the doors open for the totality of corporate rule. My personal unforgivable and apparently inevitable ‘change’ they wrought was Big Ag’s stealth implementation of GMO’s. I had to fight like hell to keep this Monsanto nightmare from being declared Organic.
So try as I might to adjust to the ‘two legs better’ campaign which is relying on all the tricks I was warned about in Civics, I simply cannot. Who slams this or that hero from Gore to MLK is just smoke. Of who’s left standing on the stage of candidates we’ve been presented with, Hillary represents to me the hope of the actual enemy we have in common, those whose only goal is to screw us all globally. But hell the first man will feel our pain.