Friends in High Places

In 1995, Freeport McMoRan managed to spin off it's Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. subsidiary into a separate entity. The Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) wrote Freeport McMoRan Copper and Gold that they planned to cancel their investment insurance based on their poor environmental record at their Irian project, stating Freeport has "posed an unreasonable or major environmental, health, or safety hazard in Irian Jaya."

Freeport didn't sit still over this cancellation. Kissinger executed a major lobbying effort (for which he is paid $400,000 a year), meeting with officials at the State Department and working the halls of Capitol Hill. Sources close to the matter, according to Robert Bryce in a recent issue of the Texas Observer, say Freeport hired former CIA director James Woolsey in the fight against OPIC.

Freeport, now headquartered in New Orleans, manages to keep friends in high places. In 1993, the head of the pro-Suharto congressional lobby was the Senator from Louisiana, Bennett Johnson. Representative Robert Livingston, of Louisiana, invested in Freeport Copper and Gold while the House debated and voted on H.R. 322-the Mineral Exploration and Development Act. And when Jeffery Shafer, one of the directors of OPIC, recently was nominated for an appointment to Undersecretary of National Affairs, it was another Louisiana pol, this time Senator John Breaux, who voted to block the appointment until Shafer provided an explanation of OPIC's cancellation of Freeport's insurance. Jim Bob Moffett, head of Freeport McMoRan, is listed in Mother Jones' online "MoJo Wire Coin-Op Congress" survey of the top 400 people who gave the most money in campaign contributions.

Freeport's actions abroad are not the only one's worth tracking. In Louisiana itself, Freeport and three other companies (two of which Freeport later acquired) petitioned for a special exemption to the Clean Water Act in order to legally dump 25 billion pounds of toxic waste into the Mississippi river. Citizens protested, and Freeport's petition was denied. Freeport then lobbied for the weakening of Clean Water Act restrictions.

The citizens of Austin, Texas, have fought to block a Freeport plan for a real estate development that will foul Barton Springs, a popular outdoor water park there.
According to a recent article in The Nation (July 31/August 7, 1995), Freeport is part of the National Wetlands Coalition, a group which wrote much of the language of a bill designed to eliminate E.P.A. oversight of wetlands areas, freeing them for exploitation. The same coalition has also lobbied to weaken the Endangered Species Act. The Nation revealed that Freeport's political action committee since 1983 has paid members of congress over $730,000.