Reparations from the briny deep? Kevin Clarke writes in U.S. Catholic (February), “It is estimated that as many as 600 Spanish ships sank in the coastal waters of the Caribbean and America’s Southeast during Spain’s colonial era…. Last summer, a Virginia courthouse turned the world of offshore salvage upside down by declaring Spain the rightful owner of two wrecks that lie just off the U.S. coast near Virginia,” rather than the salvagers who found them. “Spain was joined in this court battle by Britain and the United States. All three nations may be eager to recover thousands of ships that lie, owing to new technology, no longer irretrievably in the ocean depths…. Considering the suffering of the indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans who extracted the gold and silver that made its way to Spain…a Spanish claim to any recovered wealth may prove both legally and morally difficult to justify. And if the treasure is someday awarded to the ‘survivors’ of colonial Spain, who would receive it and in what form?”
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BP Amoco–saint or sinner? That’s a no-brainer, according to anticorporate journalists Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, who include the Chicago-based oil giant on their list of the “ten worst corporations of 2000” published in the December issue of Multinational Monitor (www.essential.org/ monitor/mm2000/00december/ enemies.html). Most notably, they write, the company had to shell out $32 million in April for underpaying royalties on oil produced on federal and Indian lands since 1988. And in July it agreed to pay $10 million to settle violations of the Clean Air Act and to spend $500 million more to improve pollution controls on nine refineries. Not mentioned in the story: BP Amoco has broken with the fossil-fuel industry and has stopped denying that global warming is a problem; it has joined the Midwest Global Warming Leadership Council, under the auspices of Chicago’s Environmental Law and Policy Center.
