Chevron’s Situation in Ecuador Won’t Be Easily Dismissed
It looks like Chevron’s situation in Ecuador is coming to a head. In a couple of weeks, the oil giant will face a watershed event in the court case in which it’s been ordered to pay $9.5 billion to repair the damage it did (operating as Texaco) to the people and environment of this formerly pristine part of the Amazon jungle. Here’s a video made by Amazon Watch, a small but fierce non-profit that’s been working hard to focus world attention — and bring justice — to this horrific matter.
In my mind, what makes this all the more disgusting is where it happened, and why it happened there. We’re talking about a company whose leaders premeditated to commit an atrocity in a part of the world populated with men, women and children in whom “civilization” simply has no interest. The people of the entire region are invisible; they hold no currency; they do not matter. If they had perpetrated the same thing in the US, the executives responsible would have been making license plates for the next 15 – 20 years — and they knew it. We have clear laws in place — and a judicial system that does manage to lock up an occasional CEO or two for gross violations. So the folks in charge thought they would make some money by destroying a remote part of the world, and its forgotten people — all with total impunity.
And even though decades of jurisprudence finally produced a crystal-clear guilty verdict, they just might pull it off. Chevron has deployed many hundreds of the world’s finest and best-paid litigators to the case, and have vowed to fight this to the bitter end. Besides, they must be heartened by the success that ExxonMobil enjoyed in dragging out its payments on the Valdez oil spill in Alaska for more than 25 years before agreeing to pay a small portion — over a quarter of a century later. No fewer than 8000 beneficiaries of the ExxonMobil restitution died while they were waiting for their money to come in. I have to imagine that Chevron finds this travesty most encouraging.
Sorry to have to bring you news like this. And it’s not all that good for me either, as I routinely take considerable flack when I present stuff of this kind.
But I do it anyway.
This is yet another mind-assaulting example — which would be infamous if it were widely reported in the (very un-)liberal media — of exactly the sort of soul-less viciousness that has for generations been so very endemic among that inhuman tribe of corporate “persons”. You know, like Beechnut selling mothers colored sugar-water labeled as apple juice for their babies – not kidding, I wish I were… or like Ocean Spray, where the practice of “cross-hauling” was deemed a fine idea — this is where you hire a tanker truck that’s just carried a tank full of miscellaneous toxic chemicals across the country, and then merely rinsed the tank with warm soap and water, to haul your nice healthful juice back across the country… or those ravenously murderous death panels — not the fake ones the pundits spewed about in ObamaCare that never existed, but the real and deadly serious ones that have nestled for decades within every “health insurer” specifically tasked with finding a typo in Mrs. Jones’ application, so they can deny her heart transplant, or an innocent omission in her daughter’s so she can be allowed to die of leukemia.
These cruel paper tigers are that species of “persons” that our Supreme Court Injustices have just unleashed upon the flayed remains of our “democratic republic”. Under that fateful ruling, such companies can even tell their employees how to vote.
God Help America!
The really sad epilogue to this commentary is that no amount of monetary punishment will stop this from happening again, no matter how long they put it off. The current business model for all of the top fuel/energy companies in the world factor ecological disasters such as this as just ‘part of doing business’. It won’t stop until they run out of fuel to sell. I’m afraid it will too late then (but I guess I’m fortunate in that I won’t live to see that.) I wonder [at what point] we (as a species) start emulating the whales, but instead we walk into the ocean?
Thanks for writing, Tech Editor. I agree. It’s why the money people I speak with daily (the private equity and VC firms) say, when they invest in oil, “We go into the ‘dark side.'” I’m happy to say that I’m glad I don’t work on the “dark side.” I like money, but I don’t like it that much.
I think that’s why we get along so well…