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| by Greg Palast Chicago Tribune (revised from 2003 article) June 25, 2008 Twenty years after Exxon Valdez slimed over one thousand miles of Alaskan beaches, the oily 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 in by Natives of Alaska to investigate oil company frauds that led to to the disaster. In San Diego, I met with Exxon's US production chief, Otto Harrison, whose company offered the Alaskan 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 ten cents on the dollar of their award, two decades too late. Between 1989 and 2008, the company worked hard to buy themselves a White House and the Supreme Court to go with it. They succeeded - beyond our wildest nightmares. Now read the story you won't get on the Petroleum Broadcasting System. Don't Buy Exxon's Fable Of The Drunken Captain Thirty years ago this month, Alaskan natives sold Exxon and its partners an astronomically valuable patch of land -- the oil terminal at Valdez -- for a single dollar. The Chugach Natives of the Prince William Sound refused cash. Rather, in 1969, they asked only that the oil companies promise to protect their 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. On Wednesday, March 24, the Tenth Anniversary of the Exxon Valdez disaster was commemorated with the re-telling of lies. The official story is, "Drunken Skipper Hits Reef." Don't believe it. This story remains untold: the true cause of the Exxon Valdez catastrophe was the oil giants' breaking their promises to the Natives and Congress, cynically and disastrously, in the fifteen years leading up to the spill. 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. |
Speechless.
