thebigp

EVEN AS OCCIDENTAL was moving forward with plans to boost oil production at Elk Hills, Gore told his audience: “If we ignore the scientific warnings and continue stubbornly on our current course, we’d better begin to prepare what we would like to say to our children and grandchildren, because if they encounter the terrible consequences the scientific community is saying now come as a result of global climate disruption, and then look back at the evidence which was clearly laid out for us in our generation, they might fairly ask, If you knew all that, why didn’t you do something about it?’”
If there is one oil company that Gore might ask “our children and grandchildren” to forgive, it is Occidental Petroleum. The company has been a steady supplier of campaign funds to Gore and to the Democratic Party, though its relationship with Gore goes far deeper. Armand Hammer, who built Occidental Petroleum into the behemoth it is today and who’s been described as “the Godfather of American corporate corruption,” liked to say that he had Gore’s father, Sen. Albert Gore, Sr., “in my back pocket.” When the elder Gore left the Senate in 1970, Hammer gave him a $500,000-a-year job as the chairman of Island Coal Creek Co., an Occidental subsidiary, and a seat on Occidental’s board of directors. By 1992, Gore owned Occidental stock valued at $680,000.
FOR PART OF HIS CAREER, Albert Gore Sr., received two paychecks: one from the taxpayers and another from Hammer. Hammer, who raised prize bulls, met the elder Gore at a Tennessee cattle auction in the 1940s. He put Gore, who was then a member of the House, on the payroll of his New Jersey cattle business. Thus began a cozy relationship between the two men that would last until Hammer’s death in 1990.
Hammer personified the worst excesses of both capitalism and C*******m. In his biography of Hammer (Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer), Edward Jay Epstein notes that Hammer built a pencil factory outside Moscow in 1926 and returned to the United States soon after to launder funds for the C*******t Party. In the 1930s, Hammer marketed something he called the “Romanoff Treasure,” a collection of f**e Russian art that he passed off as genuine. Much of the proceeds of the sales went to Josef Stalin’s government. Hammer helped recruit Soviet spies and position them in the U.S. government. At one time he even had a contract to train dogs for the Soviet police.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wanted to prosecute Hammer for his activities on behalf of the Soviet government. But Hammer had friends in Congress whom Hoover believed would attempt to protect him from prosecution; among them was Gore, who took to the floor of the Senate once to defend Hammer against allegations of bribery (later proved to be true) in obtaining government contracts.
Gore’s job as a senator was even more useful to Hammer the capitalist. In January 1961 the most sought-after ticket in Washington was to John F. Kennedy’s inaugural ball; Gore made sure that Hammer got one. A few months later, Gore successfully lobbied the Commerce Department to allow Hammer to visit the Soviet Union. The Kennedy administration had banned the importation of Soviet crabmeat on the ground that it was produced with s***e labor; Hammer reported that he had found no evidence to support the ban, which was soon lifted. Gore even suggested to President Kennedy that Hammer, whom the FBI had long known was an agent for the Soviet Union, act as an envoy to Nikita Khrushchev should any crisis erupt between the two superpowers.
In April 1968, Senator Gore stood by Hammer’s side when the industrialist officially opened his Libyan oil fields. Occidental was not a player in world crude-oil markets until Hammer bribed King Idris and some of his officials to gain a concession to the huge reserves there. Two years after Gore left the Senate, Hammer placed him on Occidental’s board of directors, where he earned a much higher salary than he had as a U.S. senator.
BY THE TIME the younger Gore was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, the Gore relationship with Hammer had already begun to t***sfer from father to son. In the 1960s, Gore informed Hammer that zinc ore had been discovered near the Gore farm in Smith County, Tenn. Hammer, who owned Occidental Minerals (a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum), bought the land for $160,000, twice the only other offer. But after buying the land, Hammer made a strange decision at least from a business standpoint. Rather than mine the zinc-rich land, he offered instead to let Gore buy it from him. Then, once ownership t***sferred to Gore, Occidental starting paying Gore $20,000 per year for the mineral rights to mine it. After the first payment, Gore Sr. sold the land to his son for $140,000. Gore has received a $20,000 check in the mail almost every year since.
Perhaps even more astounding than Hammer’s decision to sell the land and pay royalties is that Occidental never actually mined the land. In 1985, Gore began leasing the land to Union Zinc, Inc., a competitor of Occidental. Gore still receives $20,000 a year in royalties. In all, the Hammer-engineered sweetheart deal has put hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits in Gore’s pocket.
The relationship between Hammer and Al Gore, Jr., continued. Gore and his wife once caught a ride across the Atlantic Ocean on Hammer’s private jet; they hosted Hammer at Reagan’s 1984 inauguration and President Bush’s in 1988; and they attended Hammer’s 90th birthday extravaganza in Washington on May 21, 1988. When Hammer came to Washington for business, he and Gore frequently lunched together in the company of Occidental’s lobbyists.In return, Hammer and members of his family bent over backward to get money into Gore’s campaigns.
The Center for Public IntegrityJanuary 10, 2000