CORE – more about oil and gas than poor people

CORE – more about oil and gas than poor people

The Billings Gazette recently printed an article about the appearance of Niger Innis, the spokesman for Congress of Racial Equality, at the Montana Petroleum Association annual meeting.  He told the energy producers that the country's energy policy will harm the poor and threaten their industry and the economy. He blasted environmental groups and called the cap and trade bill an assault on the nation’s energy industry. 

Why would CORE, a supposed civil rights organization, disdain clean energy and ignore the benefits for the country’s poor from moving to cleaner energy? Not that we would expect the Montana Petroleum Assocaition to listen if CORE had a DIFFERENT message…

It turns out that CORE recently received $275,000 from ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company and, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the funder of more than two dozen climate change denial groups in 2004 alone.  Exxon, remember, is the company that made more money than ever last year -  $45 billion, which is more than what the Congressional Budget Office estimated was the total cost of implemeting the climate change bill that just passed the US House earlier this summer.  An ExxonMobil official is also Vice President of the Montana Petroleum Association.

One company, more profits in one year than the total cost of implementing cap and trade.  And certainly, incentive for CORE to promote more oil. 

A 2005 Mother Jones article, Black Gold?, describes the takeover of CORE by Roy Innis (Niger’s father) and its push to the right, noting that CORE’s founder, James Farmer, and other leaders accused Innis of “renting out CORE’s historic reputation to corporations like Monsanto and ExxonMobil.”

In fact, analyses of the House-passed bill suggest that investments in a clean energy economy could result in significant job growth for Montana and the rest of the country,creating three times as many jobs for the same amount of spending as fossil fuels.  Many of those jobs would be in the same areas people work in today – or did before the economic downturn – with greater opportunities for people with lower education levels. 

What really hurts Montanans is having fuel prices triple because of speculation and spectacular pporfit-making, while  doing nothing to move us away from the strangling grip of oil companies. 

CORE’s real message?  Go for oil.  CORE may have started out as a group legitimately interested in racial equality, but it has long since abandoned that priority for the interests of big oil.