Waste firms sold toxic proposals to impoverished Tribes as green job schemes

Evidence

It sounded like a great idea to Tribal officials on the Navajo reservation: a 40 million recycling plant that would bring 200 desperately needed jobs to the isolated Navajo community of Dilkon, Arizona, where unemployment hovered around 75 percent. Waste-Tech Services promised the community of Dilkon 200,000 a year, with an additional $600,000 a year to be paid to the Navajo Nation in rent and lease funds. Company officials pledged that 95 percent of the jobs would go to Navajo workers and that they would set up a scholarship fund for Navajo students interested in coming back to work as chemists or technicians at the plant. On the basis of these representations by the company, the Tribal chair (similar to a state governor of the reservation) approved the plant in August 1988, and Waste-Tech began plans to set up shop in the remote town. — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 599

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the Cerrell Report logic (ch8) of targeting low-opposition impoverished communities with jobs rhetoric. — connects to: A state-funded consulting report instructed waste companies to target poor, uneducated communities; US tribal lands are prime targets for nuclear and toxic waste disposal. — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 53; Federal agencies funded tribal organizations to market nuclear waste siting. — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 512 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Corporations apply laxer environmental standards where victims are dark-skinned and poor #corroborates (0.85) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 318
• Diverse waste proposals surfaced as a shared single pattern of Indian land targeting #expands (0.80) — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 616
• Blame displacement lets polluters prescribe victim-focused remedies instead of removing hazards #corroborates (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1775
• Federal-state jurisdictional gaps exposed Native lands to toxic waste siting #expands (0.78)
• Multinational corporations export products and wastes banned in their home countries to poor nations #corroborates (0.75)
• Chemical industry figures consciously planned benefit-framing propaganda to defuse hazard concerns #responds-to (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1779
• Legally confined Tribes cannot relocate away from environmental hazards #complicates (0.75) — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 613