While Bloomberg News was boasting that Chevron might be able to muscle its way out of paying a cent for the environmental damage that Texaco wrought upon Ecuador, Democracy Now! was reporting on the hypocrisy of Chevron’s legal maneuvers, led for years by our own Deval Patrick. Which side are you on, Governor Patrick?
Continue reading Chevron ordered to pay $17 billion for Ecuador pollutionEcuador
Despicable stances of our elected leaders, in crisis after crisis and policy after policy, is becoming nauseatingly dependable. The voters who elect people like Deval Patrick, a corporate lawyer for Texaco who relentlessly fought the people of Ecuador who were struggling for justice and relief (see the trailer for Crude, a documentary about this legal battle, below), play a role in making these abuses an accepted part of our system. Likewise, voters who got lost in the hype of Barack Obama’s heavily funded grassroots campaign chose to ignore the corporate agenda he was mobilizing them for, and failed to hold their favored candidate to any sort of truly progressive standards. Both corporate parties have demonstrated nothing but the desire to put corporate profits ahead of the public interest, yet delusions of something otherwise continue to dominate the day.
The latest travesty, in a long, steady stream of them, is the little-reported fact that Obama’s administration granted 27 exemptions from environmental review to oil companies in the Gulf of Mexico — the very same categorical exclusions from environmental review granted to BP’s disastrous Deepwater Horizon project. Once again, McClatchy newspapers find themselves at the vanguard of real journalism, with the mainstream media ignoring the story:
Since Spill, Feds Have Given 27 Waivers to Oil Companies in Gulf
Published on Saturday, May 8, 2010 by McClatchy Newspapers
by Marisa Taylor