Chevron cries Foul over its environmental damage

Chevron and Texaco (which is owned by Chevron) are dumping toxic oil wastes into Ecuador’s Amazon rain forest’s rivers and streams and are upset because the indigenous people are taking them to court over it.

For the past five years, a group of U.S. trial lawyers, on behalf of thousands of indigenous Indian peasants, have been trying to get Chevron to clean up the mess and admit its responsibility for the many resulting cases of cancer and physical deformities that local Indian tribes are suffering from.

After a court appointed expert recommended Chevron be required to pay between $8 billion and $16 billion to clean up the rain forest, Chevron executives finally decided it was time to disclose the issue to its shareholders. After the initial shock at the prospect of losing their investment money, an army of Chevron lobbyists and trial lawyers descended on Washington DC to try to get the federal government to force Ecuador to drop the case. Isn’t it remarkable that the very people who would sue anyone for dumping toxic sludge on their own lawns are going off screaming and crying to the federal government to prevent having to pay for their part in doing the same thing to someone else?

Chevron, who has profited greatly from being given the rights to extract millions of dollars in oil from Ecuador, has the audacity to ask the U.S. government to yank special trade preferences for Ecuador if that country doesn’t drop the case.

This is the same corporation who recently pushed a new global ‘Human Energy’ advertising campaign. This ad was devised, created and broadcast all during the time that Chevron’s treachery was taking place in Ecuador. This ad campaign, boasting ‘conservation and responsible exploration’ is aimed at engaging people in today’s energy issues and highlighting the steps Chevron is taking to bring more energy supplies to the global marketplace. Funny, but I remember that ad highlight how their extraction practices are poisoning acres of rainforest, polluting miles of river beds, killing countless fish and wildlife and giving cancer to hundreds of Ecuadorian people. All in the name of bringing energy to Americans.

I guess they did not count on their campaign to raise awareness about the major issues to actually raise awareness about their careless and harmful practices.

They have spent millions on trying to convince the public that they are working together with consumers in areas of vital importance, such as supply and demand, energy efficiency and climate change while at the same time spending millions to gag the Ecuadorian government for uncovering its environmental irresponsibility.

Oil companies are only about finding more oil and pulling it out of the ground and moving it using the cheapest method possible, and maximizing their investments in drilling rights and refinery capacity. If the environment gets in the way of either goal, the environment pretty much loses. In this case a country and its citizens are slated to lose because under this current administration oil is king and oil corporations hold the keys to the kingdom. With their high-priced lawyers and such powerhouse lobbyists as former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, former Democratic senator John Breaux and Wayne Berman, a top fund-raiser for John McCain—all with access to Washington's top decision makers the odds are stacked against the lowly native Indian tribes of a third world country, no matter how much wealth Chevron has plundered from them.

Chevron has the low class to argue that it has been victimized by a "corrupt" Ecuadoran court system while the plaintiffs received active support from Ecuador's leftist president, Rafael Correa—an ally of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. It is odd that the fact of this relationship between Ecuador and Chavez did not matter to Chevron as long as they were making a profit. No matter who the Ecudoran people have sided with, basic morality dictates that no corporation or shareholders should profit from the harm they bring to bear on indigenous peoples.

Corporations think that just because they have invested millions in their country, even for the purpose of making many more millions in profit from it without sharing it with the host nation, that they should be free of any harm they bring to that country. Since Chevron and the U.S. government tout globalization, this case should be tried in a world court.

Now, to add a twist to this story, trial lawyers in the case have retained their own high-profile D.C. super lobbyist, Ben Barnes, a major Democratic fund-raiser. And they have tapped a capital connection that may pay off even more. Roughly two years ago, when Attorney Steven Donziger who is coordinating the D.C. opposition to Chevron, first got wind that Chevron might take its case to Washington, he went to see Barack Obama who just happens to have been a schoolmate at Harvard Law School. During the course of several meetings, Donziger showed his old friend graphic photos of toxic oil pits and runoffs. He also argued strongly that Chevron was trying to subvert the "rule of law" by doing an end run on an Ecuadoran legal case. Obama was "offended by that," said Donziger. Obama vetted the issue with Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy (who has long worked on Latin American human-rights issues), and in February 2006 the two wrote a letter to the then U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman urging the administration to permit the Ecuadoran peasants to have "their day in court."

In light of this, Chevron’s plea for help in Washington has taken on a new urgency because if Obama becomes president this case could remain in Ecuador. But we are no longer naïve enough to believe that you can count on what a President of the United States says he will do and what he actually does.

It is going to come down to whether an American company commands bigger clout than a Central American country with a long standing U.S. bilateral relationship.

The fact that Chevron withheld information from its shareholders concerning an ongoing lawsuit with a foreign country who helps provide profits says very little about the relationship Chevron’s corporate board holds with its shareholders. What else are they hiding?

Chevron and Texaco mow share space on the list of the world’s worst corporations for human and global responsibility along with Citgo which is owned by Venezuela.


Source: Newsweek
Newsweek