Another Chevron Scandal

Few Companies have such a dismal record for human rights abuses as this corporate monster.  They have done it again, this time in Ecuador.

What is a lost culture? Is it just some intangible time before? Is it an economy? Can you inventory a lost culture in the number of lives lost or rivers polluted?

Those questions haunt the lawsuit brought by Ecuadorian indigenous groups against the U.S. oil giant, Chevron, for environmental destruction it allegedly wrought as Texaco in the Amazon rainforest of eastern Ecuador. On paper, the suit asks Chevron (which acquired Texaco in 2001) to pay for the environmental cleanup of an area three times the size of Manhattan, pocked with open oil pits and steeped in 18 billion gallons of dumped industrial wastewater. The damages in the case — calculated by a court-appointed expert at a record $27 billion — would also establish a health fund to pay for the estimated 1,400 cases of cancer caused by the pollution — a number that will likely continue to grow until the site is cleaned up. The rest of the damages fall into the catchall category, "compensation."

Emergildo Criollo is president of the Cofan people, who have been among the hardest hit and are one of the plaintiffs in the case. For Criollo, 52, the case isn’t just about what Texaco workers did or didn’t do starting in the 1960s. It’s about the dissolution of his traditional culture into the modern world as a result of oil workers simply being there and building roads to get there. And no one company can be held accountable for that. But Chevron has used the same prevailing wind of cultural dominance to confuse the facts of the case enough potentially to avoid being stuck with the monstrous bill. The company points to an agreement under which Texaco shared its operations in Ecuador with the state-owned oil company, Petroecuador. It also claims that Texaco cleaned up its work sites before leaving Ecuador in 1992. But the company’s legal hedges don’t line up with residents’ first-hand accounts… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Alternet>

Chevron has certainly cut a swath of human rights abuses.  They now own Unocal, the company behind the plan to build a gas pipeline through Afghanistan.  Bush and the GOP appointed a Unocal employee as our Ambassador at the same time that they installed another Unocal employee as that nation’s puppet President.  Furthermore, Chevron is the chief source of revenue for the brutal Myanmar regime.  Bush and the GOP gave Chevron an exemption from the sanctions imposed against Myanmar.  Chevron was also involved in killing nonviolent protestors in Nigeria.  They received such favorable treatment from the GOP because the Bush family is heavily invested in Unocal.  Condoleezza Rice was on their corporate board, before going to work for the Bush regime.

I call on the Obama administration to end all exemptions and subsidies for that company.  US taxpayers should not be paying for this criminal enterprise.