Polluters and their puppets behind new wave of McCarthyism at CU By ADRIENNE ANDERSON Instructor, CU Environmental Studies Program
The Colorado Daily's April 7, 2005 story "CU, Lockheed Rebut Anderson's Claims", reports denials by CU and Lockheed Martin officials, though in response to some statements I'd not actually made during an April 5th lecture on campus (April 6th "Anderson Speaks Out"). While I'd asked the Daily to correct it errors, instead it opted to publish "Anderson clarifications" in tiny print. As the errors were not mine, but the Daily's (as a tape recording of the lecture made by another media outlet confirms), I'm requesting that the Colorado Daily fully acknowledge and publish corrections of its reporting errors in both print and on-line versions, and notify CU and Lockheed Martin that they'd been asked to comment on statements incorrectly quoted.
The facts of this are very important, as corporate polluters including major CU donors and their right-wing protectors in Governor Owens' administration are indeed launching an unprecedented attack against academic freedom on the CU Boulder campus, as is clearly evident in actions to eliminate my courses and teaching position after 11 years of high student rankings and CU's own evaluations. These efforts are being aided and abetted by the corporate media conglomerate (jointly owned by Scripps and MediaNews Group), which publishes the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post.
All have collective interest in shutting me up over the facts of their pollution liabilities not only at their own sites, but joint pollution liabilities at the highly toxic and radioactive Lowry Landfill Superfund Site, where Lockheed Martin's predecessor, Coors, Rocky Flats and other polluters, including the University of Colorado at Boulder and UCHSC, dumped their poisonous wastes for years. These facts were brought forward in a federal whistleblower case I won in 2001, now before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Though thousands of CU students, workers, and environmentally-concerned citizens demanded investigations and sought to stop the secretly concocted plan, the dangerous poisons are being flushed back into the public domain through sewer lines, spread on farmland and public parks or discharged down the South Platte River, where deformed fish are turning up.
Further, Coors and Lockheed Martin - both major CU donors - are attempting to re-write Colorado's toxic history, as if some of their worst environmental crimes - including illegally dumping their toxic wastes for decades toward public water supply sources, chronicled by my own research and further evidence in reams of students reports shelved in CU's Environmental Center - never even happened.
While Lockheed Martin issues its usual denials, how it wields its power though various agencies and institutions - from the corridors of CU to the Colorado's Health Department, under the Capitol dome, in the Courthouse and Bush's White House, is a marvel in power structure analysis for researchers to unravel, as some of my students have attempted, especially as the law-breaking corporation has risen to unprecedented levels of power in the current Bush administration.
The polluters and their apologists in Colorado have CU administrators right where they want them. Controlling both the carrot and the stick, polluters offer payola while politicians they put into power protect them from effective public oversight and prosecution, while wielding the stick, holding purse strings for CU's already abysmal public financing. It's not surprising CU's caving to corporate and political pressure, only a sad sign of troubled times CU's best and brightest must craft a viable plan to solve.
As I'm to head for the unemployment line and CU's academic integrity is further compromised, it's up to CU's primary customers - the students - to decide what sort of education they want for the rising tuition dollars they pay. But as long as Lockheed Martin's former CEO Peter Teets' picture hangs in the "Hall of Excellence" - though his corporation polluted water supplies threatening public health here and elsewhere in our nation, engaged in racial discrimination, while our African American students threaten mass exodus, and exonerated those who failed to act after numerous women Air Force Academy cadets were raped, as young CU women allegedly raped by football recruits sought justice, CU's ivory tower will have huge blemishes. And as long as Peter Coors sits on a CU Board and his mother sits on the board of the Heritage Foundation - the right-wing think tank sponsoring attacks against Academic Freedom across the nation - CU's faculty and students will know the limits of free speech, and where rights to a balanced and diverse education on this campus have gone.
Down the toilet. For Petes' sake.