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[A-List] [21stcenturysocialism] GREG PALAST ON SCAM OF SCAMS Court Rewards Exxon for Valdez Spill

From: "grok" <grok@xxxxxxxxx>
From: Roland Sheppard <Rolandgarret@xxxxxxx>
Subject: [LABOR-L] FYI:  Court Rewards Exxon for Valdez Spill

This decision amounts to a death sentence for humanity. The oil companies
will go now unfettered in their quest for profits at the expense of the
envirionment/humanity.

In a message dated 6/25/08 4:40:43 PM, palast@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

Court Rewards Exxon for Valdez Spill

by Greg Palast
Chicago Tribune (revised)

[Thursday, June 26, 2008] Twenty years after Exxon Valdez slimed over one
thousand miles of Alaskan beaches, the company has yet to pay the $5 billion in
punitive damages awarded by the jury. And now they won't have to. The Supreme
Court today cut Exxon's liability by 90% to half a billion. It's so cheap,
it's like a permit to spill.

Exxon knew this would happen. Right after the spill, I was brought to Alaska
by the Natives whose Prince William Sound islands, livelihoods, and their
food source was contaminated by Exxon crude. My assignment: to investigate oil
company frauds that led to to the disaster. There were plenty.

But before we brought charges, the Natives hoped to settle with the oil
company, to receive just enough compensation to buy some boats and rebuild their
island villages to withstand what would be a decade of trying to survive in a
polluted ecological death zone. 

In San Diego, I met with Exxon's US production chief, Otto Harrison, who
said, "Admit it; the oil spill's the best thing to happen" to the Natives.


His company offered the Natives pennies on the dollar. The oil men added a
cruel threat: take it or leave it and wait twenty years to get even the
pennies. Exxon is immortal - but Natives die.

And they did. A third of the Native fishermen and seal hunters I worked with
are dead. Now their families will collect one tenth of their award, two
decades too late.

In today's ruling, Supreme Court Justice David Souter wrote that Exxon's
recklessness was ''profitless'' - so the company shouldn't have to pay punitive
damages. Profitless, Mr. Souter? Exxon and it's oil shipping partners saved
billions - BILLIONS - by operating for sixteen years without the oil spill safety
equipment they promised, in writing, under oath and by contract.

The official story is, "Drunken Skipper Hits Reef." But don't believe it,
Mr. Souter. Alaska's Native lands and coastline were destroyed by a systematic
fraud motivated by profit-crazed penny-pinching. Here's the unreported story,
the one you won't get tonight on the Petroleum Broadcast System:

It begins in 1969 when big shots from Humble Oil and ARCO (now known as
Exxon and British Petroleum) met with the Chugach Natives, owners of the most
valuable parcel of land on the planet: Valdez Port, the only conceivable terminus
for a pipeline that would handle a trillion dollars in crude oil.

These Alaskan natives ultimately agreed to sell the Exxon consortium this
astronomically valuable patch of land -- for a single dollar. The Natives
refused cash. Rather, in 1969, they asked only that the oil companies promise to
protect their Prince William Sound fishing and seal hunting grounds from oil.

In 1971, Exxon and partners agreed to place the Natives' specific list of
safeguards into federal law. These commitment to safety reassured enough
Congressmen for the oil group to win, by one vote, the right to ship oil from
Valdez.

The oil companies repeated their promises under oath to the US Congress.

The spill disaster was the result of Exxon and partners breaking every one
of those promises - cynically, systematically, disastrously, in the fifteen
years leading up to the spill.

Forget the drunken skipper fable. As to Captain Joe Hazelwood, he was below
decks, sleeping off his bender. At the helm, the third mate would never have
collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his Raycas radar. But the radar was
not turned on. In fact, the tanker's radar was left broken and disasbled for
more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was just
too expensive to fix and operate. 

For the Chugach, this discovery was poignantly ironic. On their list of
safety demands in return for Valdez was "state-of-the-art" on-ship radar.


We discovered more, but because of the labyrinthine ways of litigation,
little became public, especially about the reckless acts of the industry
consortium, Alyeska, which controls the Alaska Pipeline.

Several smaller oil spills before the Exxon Valdez could have
warned of a system breakdown. But a former Senior Lab Technician with Alyeska,
Erlene Blake, told our investigators that management routinely ordered her to
toss out test samples of water evidencing spilled oil. She was ordered to refill
the test tubes with a bucket of clean sea water called, "The Miracle Barrel."

In a secret meeting in April 1988, Alyeska Vice-President T.L.
Polasek confidentially warned the oil group executives that, because Alyeska had
never purchased promised safety equipment, it was simply "not possible" to
contain an oil spill past the Valdez Narrows -- exactly where the Exxon Valdez
ran aground 10 months later.

The Natives demanded (and law requires) that the shippers
maintain round- the-clock oil spill response teams. Alyeska hired the Natives,
especiallly qualified by their generations-old knowledge of the Sound, for this
emergency work. They trained to drop from helicopters into the water with special
equipment to contain an oil slick at a moments notice. But in 1979, quietly,
Alyeska fired them all. To deflect inquisitive state inspectors, the oil
consortium created sham teams, listing names of oil terminal workers who had not the
foggiest idea how to use spill equipment which, in any event, was missing,
broken or existed only on paper.

In 1989, when the oil poured from the tanker, there was no Native response
team, only chaos.


Today, twenty years after the oil washed over the Chugach beaches, you can
kick over a rock and it will smell like an old gas station.

The cover story of the Drunken Captain serves the oil industry well. It
falsely presents America's greatest environmental disaster as a tale of human
frailty, a one-time accident. But broken radar, missing equipment, phantom spill
teams, faked tests -- the profit-driven disregard of the law -- made the spill
an inevitability, not an accident.

Yet Big Oil tells us, as they plead to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife
Reserve, as Senator John McCain calls for drilling off the shores of the
Lower 48, it can't happen again. They promise.

*****************
Greg Palast is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for Investigative Reporting
at the Nation Institute, New York. Read and view his investigations for BBC
Television at http://www.GregPalast.com. An earlier version of this report
originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune. Photos by James Macalpine (1993).
Support the Palast Investigative Fund and find out more about this "well-designed
disaster" by picking up Palast's NY Times best-selling book The Best Democracy
Money Can Buy at http://www.palastinvestigativefund.org/



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