by Steve Early
In fact, nothing symbolized the greening of Richmond more than the success of her privately funded but city hall–encouraged project. A graduate of Hampshire College in Massachusetts, Robinson had returned home to develop an urban agriculture venture that has trained and employed young people, conducted public education about the importance of healthy food, and provided greater access to it via its vegetable distribution. Founded when Richmond was fast becoming a “food desert,” due to chain supermarket closures, Urban Tilth is now a widely acclaimed model for creating “a more sustainable, healthy, and just food system.”
While considering the RPA’s overture, Robinson sought advice from Butt. He suggested that she run for city council first, since no one had ever been elected mayor of Richmond without prior council experience. Ultimately, Robinson decided against running for any office, swayed by family considerations and some of the factors that initially deterred Butt from entering the mayor’s race: the inevitability of facing a costly, grueling, and time-consuming campaign.
After Robinson demurred, a key member of the RPA’s own candidate search committee, Mike Parker, decided to run for mayor himself, ultimately proving that the RPA bench was deeper than some people thought. During his six years in Richmond, Parker had become well known among local activists as a smart and articulate speaker at city council meetings. But his role in the RPA had mainly been behind the scenes, as an organizer and campaign coordinator. Parker had retired to Richmond after thirty-two years in Detroit, where he had been a skilled tradesman in the auto industry, a shop-floor socialist, and an advocate of union reform in the pages of Labor Notes, a national rank-and-file newsletter.
Before getting a job at Chrysler, Parker had studied political science at UC-Berkeley. Earlier in the 1960s he had belonged to the Young People’s Socialist League at the University of Chicago, where he first met a fellow undergraduate named Bernie Sanders, who was also involved in the civil rights movement. Sanders went on to run for mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in 1981, when he was forty. Parker waited another thirty-three years to make his electoral debut at age seventy-three. Despite his background in the rough-and-tumble world of union politics, Mike was not a natural politician. The experience of being red-baited within the United Auto Workers, as a union dissident, would pale in comparison to what he would face after Chevron propagandists got hold of his radical resume.
So Parker reintroduced himself to the community with a substantive mayoral campaign website. It showcased his impressive grasp of local public policy details and his service as a McLaughlin appointee to Richmond’s Workforce Investment Board. Parker also stressed his post-Chrysler work experience as a community college instructor, helping young people in Contra Costa County become industrial electricians and technicians. As mayor, he pledged, he would expand opportunities for similar job training so more of Richmond young people could qualify for better-paying private sector jobs. Parker’s framing of the mayoral race stakes was simple and stark: “Chevron wants to retake the city council,” he warned. “They want to sit down and negotiate with people they have already bought and paid for. That will be the main issue in this election.”
Parker began his personal canvassing effort long before the normal election-year time frame for knocking on voters’ doors. All spring and summer in 2014 he went door-to-door in various Richmond neighborhoods, while the RPA recruited an expanding pool of volunteers to do the same. Parker argued that “what we do in March and April is more important than September and October,” and he was proven right, for several reasons. One was the increased use of mail ballots, which ended up being the way 50 percent of Richmond voters voted in 2014. Under California law, ballots can now be cast a month before an election, making traditional, last-minute turnout appeals less effective.
Parker developed the small donor based necessary for his campaign to seek local public matching funds (capped at $25,000). He also racked up helpful labor endorsements from Service Employees Local 1021 (which represents city hall employees), the California Nurses Association, National Union of Healthcare Workers, Amalgamated Transit Union, Communications Workers Local 9119, and others with members in Richmond. When a foreign labor organization, the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), sought US allies for a global campaign against Chevron, Parker helped organize local solidarity. MUA’s dispute with Chevron involved a $54 billion project to construct and maintain platforms for natural gas production. In an echo of its Richmond past, the oil company wanted to import contract laborers for this offshore work rather than employ MUA members known to make workplace safety demands.
Parker’s labor activism, past or present, did not impress Big Oil’s usual union allies in Richmond, who couldn’t have been more unlike the militant MUA. In 2014, building trades leaders favored their old friend Nat Bates for mayor. When the Contra Costa County Central Labor Council met to endorse municipal candidates, Jim Payne, the financial secretary of USW Local 5 spoke on Parker’s behalf. Payne reminded his fellow delegates that “Bates may have a building trades bug on his ass but his Chevron logo is bigger.” The labor council ended up making no endorsement in the Richmond mayoral race, a partial victory for Parker supporters.
Parker’s mayoral campaign overlapped fortuitously with Chevron’s push to win city approval for a $1 billion refinery modernization plan, the major reason for its Richmond Proud campaign. At every stage of the permit approval process the RPA mayoral candidate was a forceful and persuasive critic of the company’s blueprint for making its 112-year-old facility safer and cleaner. During the protracted local debate about refinery modernization, he spoke frequently at public hearings attended by hundreds of Chevron employees, building trades workers mobilized by their unions, local environmental activists, and concerned members of the community.
“The proposed way that Chevron wants to run its plant is unacceptable,” Parker told the Richmond Planning Commission on one such occasion. He called for changes in refinery operating methods that would reduce “both local toxic emissions that damage our health and greenhouse gas emissions that damage our planet.”
Modernization at Chevron had its own backstory. In 2005, the company had initiated a three-year push for city approval on a huge expansion project. There was strong community opposition then, based on fears that Chevron’s not-so-hidden agenda was retooling so that it could process heavier and more environmentally hazardous crude oil. Nevertheless, a majority of Richmond city councilors voted to approve the state-required environmental impact report (EIR) necessary for the project to proceed. Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, and others successfully challenged the project in court, based on shortcomings in the environmental impact study. Instead of filing a revised EIR, Chevron abruptly halted construction work, leading to twelve hundred layoffs. That management decision was no doubt influenced by the 2008 economic crash, which rendered refinery capacity sufficient for the time being. Per usual, the building trades blamed the resulting job loss on environmentalists linked to the RPA.
In 2013–14, Chevron revived its modernization plan, in scaled-back form, and initiated a new EIR review process. As details of its revised plan became clear, CBE, RPA, and others began organizing against it again. In their view, Chevron was still trying to reengineer the refinery so it could process dirtier and cheaper oil, boosting its profits but adding to local toxic emissions and greenhouse gas releases. With a promised one thousand jobs at stake, building trades unions favored quick approval by the city, with few questions asked and no conditions attached. Only about 10 percent of Chevron’s several thousand workers actually live in Richmond. Yet the company’s most visible lobbying arm was hundreds of building trades workers, employed by Chevron contractors or even non–oil industry employers. They were mobilized repeatedly by their union business agents to attend Richmond community meetings and hearings about the refinery upgrade.
Refinery neighbors were a primary audience for Chevron’s multimillion-dollar sales pitch. As
part of its “commitment to transparency and accountability,” and because “talking to our neighbors is important to us,” the company conducted a series of “telephone town halls.” These “open dialogues” drew up to four thousand participants. Chevron managers and safety engineers, air quality monitoring team members, and public affairs staff fielded questions on all aspects of refinery operations, employment opportunities, and product innovations (such as the invention of Techron, a fuel cleansing additive developed in Richmond).
After suspending its annual public tour of the refinery in 2012, due to fire-related damage repair, Chevron invited the neighbors over again the following year and just prior to the 2014 election. The event I attended had the air of family day at a factory anywhere. Many visitors were employees and their relatives. In white tents set up like a small farmers’ market, kids could pick up a goody bag with a plastic “Chevron Fire Department” hat or a coloring book titled “See How Our Refinery Works!” Actual firefighters displayed their equipment and answered questions about on-site firefighting readiness. The requirements of plant security dictated that all our viewing of Chevron’s 5,200 miles of pipe, threaded like strands of industrial spaghetti over 2,900 acres, be done through the windows of sleek, black, air-conditioned buses.
On my bus, our affable, well-informed tour guide was a Chevron environmental engineer who just wanted to “demystify what goes on in the plant” and assure us that the Bay Area has tough restrictions on “refinery flaring.” He patiently explained the highly automated functioning of furnaces, reactors, exchangers, cracking and cooling towers, and storage tanks and spheres we passed on the tour. We learned about lubricant operations, distillation and reforming, “hydroprocessing,” blending and shipping, and water recycling. As we passed the company’s on-site Technology Center, the birthplace of Techron, our guide proudly noted that this was the first patented fuel additive ever developed for engines operating with unleaded gas. (With a staff that now includes 170 PhD scientists, Chevron in Richmond now files for about 125 new patents every year.) We also saw where “control center” crews spend twelve-hour shifts in bunker-like structures and where “outside operators” search for leaks and problems “to insure safe and reliable operation.” We discovered that the refinery has its own “shelter in place building” if anything goes wrong.
Chevron neighbors who missed the tour got a knock on the door from a paid canvasser. Dozens fanned out to enlist ten thousand Richmond residents to sign a public statement of support for the company. When one of these signature gatherers came to our house, he simply asked: “Do you favor modernizing the refinery to make it safer?” Who was going to say no to that? The names collected were added to a giant list of modernization backers shown at public meetings. Positioning himself for his mayoral run, Nat Bates applauded this display of common sense. He accused Mayor McLaughlin and her environmental movement allies of thwarting much-needed job creation. Their demands for EIR changes and related financial commitments were “irresponsible” and “ridiculous,” in his view. “They treat Chevron like a sugar daddy ATM machine with unlimited withdrawals,” he grumbled.
Bates made his run for mayor official in May 2014. In an e-mail blast announcing his intentions, he urged voters to watch a short video so they could personally “witness the discord and lack of leadership in a dysfunctional city council.” For six years, the parties responsible had milked the city’s “welfare gift of taxpayer funds to all candidates,” he said—a practice he would end. This characterization misrepresented how Richmond’s public matching fund system actually works, since local office-seekers, with little support, frequently fail to raise enough private donations to qualify.15 And, of course, when Bates held his own campaign kickoff at Salute, an upscale Italian restaurant on Richmond’s waterfront, there was no pitch for personal donations at all, because he had relatively little need for them.
Bates’s “People United for a Better Richmond” event was packed with representatives of his campaign’s institutional investors—Chevron, the local business community, and building trades and public safety unions. They were joined by members of the business-backed Black Men and Women (BMW) of Richmond and our local branch of the Black American Political Action Committee (BAPAC). Nattily dressed as always, Bates looked out at his admiring multiracial crowd and disclosed that his first order of business as Richmond’s new mayor would be to impose a city council dress code. “Appearance is paramount,” he declared, promising that his colleagues would soon be turning up in “decent attire.” News of this important policy initiative was greeted with enthusiastic applause. The candidate then responded to the rumor, spread by his enemies in Richmond, that “Nat Bates is Chevron’s boy.”
Bates rightly objected to the racial connotation of this accusation, which I had never heard expressed in this fashion by any of his left-wing critics. “If I’m going to jump for anyone,” he told the crowd, “it will be you!” (Given who was in the crowd, this was hardly a declaration of political independence.) Bates then noted how much Chevron contributed to the city’s treasury as its largest taxpayer. “Any elected official who does not respect a large business corporation in your city doesn’t deserve to be in office,” he said. “Any candidate running for public office who would refuse Chevron’s support is a damn fool!”
By the time of this event, Chevron’s independent expenditure committee, called Moving Forward, had already lined up de facto running mates for Bates—three city council candidates who were not “damn fools” either. Whitehurst/Mosher, Chevron’s trusted political consulting firm and winner of Richmond’s soda wars in 2012, was already busy packaging them all as saviors of the city. In addition to planning huge media buys on Bates’s behalf, Whitehurst/Mosher worked in tandem with Singer Associates, a San Francisco PR firm, to create two online vehicles for Chevron-friendly messaging.
One outlet was dubbed the Richmond Standard, while the other proclaimed itself to be Radio Free Richmond (RFR). Before RFR’s unveiling, few residents realized that Richmond had become such a one-party state that we, like eastern Europeans during the Cold War, needed our own local version of Radio Free Europe to pierce the fog of official propaganda. Both the Standard and RFR were designed to look like independent sources of information about municipal affairs. They mixed coverage of controversial political topics with helpful community service announcements, profiles of local people, sports and crime reports, and publicity about worthwhile volunteer projects.
The Standard was, in fact, a clever modern-day successor to the Hollywood newsreels that discredited Upton Sinclair’s campaign for governor in 1934. Those “California Election News” reports eighty years earlier were similarly “anchored by a supposedly objective ‘inquiring reporter.’”16 Playing that role locally in 2014 was Standard editor Mike Aldax. Like the anti-Sinclair PR consultants Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, Aldax had prior daily journalism experience. In his case, that included reporting stints at the San Francisco Examiner and other newspapers from Hawaii to New York City.
The Standard’s credibility as a real news organization was immediately challenged by media watchdogs. As Joe Strupp from Media Matters reported, Aldax is a senior account manager at Singer Associates. His boss, Sam Singer, is a legendary San Francisco flack and corporate damage control expert. The Standard was also panned in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and even the Guardian and Financial Times in the United Kingdom. Critics, including local journalism professors, described the site as “an audacious attempt to disguise propaganda as news and manipulate public opinion.”17 Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Michael Hiltzik denounced Aldax for disseminating “bogus” news and making “readers doubt that any news site exists without ulterior motives.”18
Despite its poor reception in professional journalism circles, the Standard at least acknowledged its company backing, via a posted caveat: “This news website is brought to you by Chevron. We aim to provide Richmond residents with important information about what’s going o
n in the community, and to provide a voice for Chevron Richmond on civic issues.” The same candor was not initially forthcoming from Radio Free Richmond. RFR cofounders Don Gosney and Felix Hunziker announced that its “citizen journalists” would “help tell Richmond’s story without fear or favor.” Their website would be “middle of the road” and focused “more on facts and less on political ideology.” Contradicting that claim right out of the box was RFR’s choice of leading op-ed contributors. During its first few months of publication, Nat Bates, Chevron-backed candidate for mayor, and Bea Roberson, who lost her Chevron-financed run for city council in 2012, published nearly twenty times on the site.
An enterprising young UC-Berkeley journalism student, Jimmy Tobias, questioned the independence of RFR in the Richmond Confidential. He found that Chevron consultants John Whitehurst, Mark Mosher, and their associates who own Barnes Mosher Whitehurst Lauter & Partners (BMWL) were acting as the website’s administrators. Plus BMWL supplied ghostwritten content for RFR. One sample of that was an article criticizing Mayor McLaughlin—a piece posted under the name of Antwon Cloird, a Nat Bates supporter and founder of a local nonprofit called Men and Women of Purpose.19
Both RFR and the Standard were strong defenders of Chevron’s modernization plan. After attending a public hearing on that matter, Standard contributor Marilynne Mellander wrote to complain about an “abusive Richmond bureaucracy” that was engaged in “nothing more than a shakedown of Chevron—Pay to Play!” According to Mellander, RPA members on the city council and the Richmond Planning Commission would not be “be satisfied until Chevron is shut down completely.”20 Identified only as “Richmond resident,” this particular citizen journalist spent twenty years as a research scientist for Chevron.21
