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"THE ONLY THING NECESSARY FOR THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL IS FOR GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING"
--Burke

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Auction of Asarco likely

My Business Writings: Stalemate over Asarco bid; auction likely ...  (blog post by Dipesh Dipu in Hyderabad, Andhrapradesh, India)

“There does not seem to be an easy end to this and the deal seems to be heading to an auction-like situation,”said PwC principal consultant Dipesh Dipu. .....US-based Harbinger Capital, which was also in the race to acquire Asarco, has already withdrawn its $500-million offer and is reported to be supporting Sterlite's bid. Meanwhile, Vedanta has already claimed that its bid for Asarco is being backed by the US government and the trade union...."

Harbinger is the company that threw 1/2 billion dollars at the New York Times to try to win control of its board months after the NYTimes broke a front-page story releasing a formerly secret EPA-DOJ Asarco confidential-for-settlement-purposes-only document in which the EPA stated ASARCO El Paso (and E. Helena MT) had secretly burned toxic wastes for profit for years.     The Bankruptcy court and the DOJ Trustee have not brought this now public document to the table to discuss the liabilities for this toxic waste incineration.    The EPA ignores the toxic waste and has not reported what has been left here in the communities from the years of secret military/industrial waste burning.  Yet this document is NOW PUBLIC and we know what happened.   Grupo Mexico sat on Asarco's board during the years this occurred.

This is a fraud on a massive scale.

No one wants to discuss the toxic wastes, yet there is an arsenic plume moving beneath the ASARCO El Paso smelter with levels 32,000 times and 6200 times the legal limit for groundwater right toward the Rio Grande --- and God only knows what else is in that water from the years of the illegal activities.

The Federal State Department (3/05) wrote that its workers at American Dam next to Asarco El Paso can't get independent medical review IN THE ENTIRE REGION.

So, we know that the wastes were secretly burned.  We know that federal workers at the epicenter of the incineration can't get independent medical review.  And, we know that this is all being ignored and covered up so that even the Asarco Bankruptcy court is not required to talk about it.

And we know that the first (of many) planned international city of San Jeronimo-Santa Teresa (and the connecting international rail, and keystone maquiladoras like Foxconn (maker of the iPhone)) could not easily-move-forward without ignoring the illegal secret toxic wastes in the 15-mile zone around this 110 year old Smelter.....

This is the Environmental Justice sacrifice zone from Hell. 

This "zone" is the most competitive zone anywhere in North and South America and this region routes products to the most active-consumers on the planet --- the 300 mile-wide "zone" along the USA eastern seaboard.

All we want to know (and the La Paz Accord Joint Advisory Committee's international Resolution agrees) are what chemicals have been left in our community from the illegal activities of the ASARCO El Paso smelter??



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