A real inconvenient truth?

Al Gore's Real Love Canal Connection

News/Current Events News
Source: NewsMax.com
Published: 12/07/99 Author: Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff
Posted on 12/06/1999 22:58:41 PST by kattracks
Vice President Al Gore sufffered a well deserved media thrashing last week after he falsely tried to claim credit for 1978's Love Canal clean-up. Now it turns out, Gore's family may have had more to do with creating that environmental nightmare than actually fixing it.
"I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue," Gore told a New Hampshire high school audience last Tuesday. "That was the one that started it all."
True enough, Gore did have the first Congressional hearing on Hooker Chemical Plant's toxic landfill, adjacent to the now infamous residential area. But Gore didn't get into the act until two months after President Jimmy Carter declared Love Canal a disaster area, complete with a federal evacuation the neighborhood's inhabitants.
Still, perhaps Gore deserves credit of another sort. At the time Love Canal was in the headlines daily, Hooker Chemical was actually owned by Occidental Chemical Corp. Oxy Chem was forced to cough up nearly $130 million to cover the fed's clean-up of the acreage Hooker had turned into wasteland. Oxy Chem's parent company is, of course, Occidental Petroleum -- owned at the time by the late Armand Hammer.
After the mainstream press gets finished toasting Gore's entry onto the presidential field at exclusive soirees such as the one hosted by ABC's John Cochran last weekend, a journalist or two might just recall that Hammer had a protege in the U.S. Senate.
He was none other than the Vice President's father, Tennessee Senator Al Gore, Sr.
In fact, the VP's dad actually served for a time as chairman of the board for Hammer's company. It is said that much of the Gore family's wealth derived from its Hammer connection. The Gore-Hammer link was once so widely recognized that some even referred to Gore Sr. as the "distinguished senator from Occidental."
And so while the Vice President may not deserve credit for Love Canal's clean-up, he does have very real ties to the company responsible for that most notorious of all environmental disasters.


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a voice from the past!!! how is it in 1999?

Gore also claimed to have invented the internet. Go figure.