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Toxic black ooze is still bubbling up from the ground polluting streams and rivers and poisoning people, animals and fisheries in an area the size of Rhode Island. The lawsuit representing about 30,000 mostly Indigenous people was initially brought by one, self-taught, Indigenous attorney who took correspondence courses and went to night school, and began the lawsuit, while holding other jobs to support his brothers and sisters. It was one of those impossible things that heroic people sometimes do. He faced armies of highly-paid Chevron law firms--not to mention P.R. firms--all alone. He didn't even have a copy machine. He and his brothers and sisters had grown up drinking toxic water and taking toxic showers, and seeing the local fishing and hunting culture destroyed. Various environmental groups have since joined the Indigenous effort. The suit for clean-up, health costs and damages was initiated more than a decade ago. This on-going pollution of the Ecuadoran Amazon rainforest has resulted in high rates of cancer and spontaneous abortions among local people and devastation of both the environment and the local economy.
In a typical multinational corporate board room shuffle, when Texaco's liability for this vast oil spill became apparent, Chevron bought out Texaco and tried to shed the liability. It reminds me of the rightwing-connected ES&S voting machine corp here recently buying out Diebold, and in that case successfully shedding Diebold's toxic reputation as well as acquiring an 80% monopoly of U.S. voting machines. The policies remain the same--'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code tabulating all our votes, with virtually no audit-recount controls--and ES&S is actually worse than Diebold as to far rightwing connections, secrecy and anti-democratic policies, but the public remains almost totally ignorant of it all, by means of the corporate shuffle.
I'm glad to see Antonia Juhasz--one of the greatest grass roots activists of our era--helping take this fight right into the shareholders' meeting. Democracy needs to reassert itself in the investment as well as the political spheres. How many small investors will be screwed over by these monster corporations before we do something about their untoward power? How many workers have been damaged? How many pensions have been lost? How many trillions of dollars have been skimmed off the top? Their drastic impacts on Planet Earth and on local economies parallel their stripping shareholders of their rights with unaccountable, monolithic corporate structures.
Democracy is the best governmental system ever devised by human beings because, when it is working right, it creates a convergence of ideas and leadership for the common good--whether in the public sphere, in government, or in a chartered business corporation. The best ideas and the best people rise to the top. It doesn't always work perfectly but it is the ONLY system that fosters this convergence. This is why corpo-fascist control of the press is so bad. True free speech--in which everyone has a say--is essential to democracy. And this is of course why 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting is so bad, and is, indeed, the worst assault on democracy ever mounted. PRIVATE control of vote counting stabs directly at the heart of democracy--taking over the very mechanism by which the SOVEREIGN people transfer power to their representatives. It is the ultimate in corporate tyranny and the final blockade that has been put up, to prevent the people from correcting the bad ideas and bad leadership in government. (And if you think Obama being elected solves this problem, think again about the subtleties of this absolute power over the vote count--a count that YOU are no longer permitted to SEE. The power is A FACT. How is it being used?)
The leftist democracy movement that is sweeping Latin America is based first of all on HONEST ELECTIONS--in Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela and other countries. Honest elections were not achieved overnight. It took a lot of work by a lot of people. Honest election results in better and more honest judges. Chevron readily agreed to let this lawsuit be remanded to Ecuador at a time when honest elections had not yet been achieved, and the government and the court system were extremely corrupt. They thought they could easily intimidate or buy whoever they needed to intimidate or buy, to make the lawsuit go away. Meanwhile, over the last decade, a democracy revolution occurred in Ecuador and the lawsuit ended up before an honest judge. They had to get rid of him, which they did with a CIA-style dirty tricks sting (so typical of the CIA that you wonder if it wasn't devised in Langley), but it appears that the justice system in Ecuador is now strong enough to resist such tactics, and the new judge is likely to rule against them and award billions in damages to the Indigenous plaintiffs.
It is the BP spill and the Exxon Valdez spill all over again. Who will pay? The monster corporation or the people? Only with transparent elections can the outcome ever be right and just and for the common good. Only when true representatives of the people make laws, appoint judges, create and enforce regulations, and answer to the people can the common good prevail.
The OTHER critical factor in the leftist democracy revolution in Latin American has been grass roots organizing--for instance by the Indigenous attorney who organized and filed this lawsuit against Chevron-Texaco, or by indigenous groups in Bolivia who threw Bechtel out of the country (and elected Evo Morales as president). These activists at this Chevron-Texaco shareholders meeting are showing us the way. We need both--transparent elections and grass roots organizing. We also need a third element to restore democracy here. We need to THINK BIG. These corporations CAN be brought to heel--and even de-chartered, dismantled and their assets seized for the common good. We HAVE that power as a sovereign people--latent though it is. We are now as demoralized and disempowered as any "third world" people have ever been. We need to overcome that deliberately induced feeling of apathy and seize back our power as a people, as the Latin Americans are doing.
It is not 100% certain that the Indigenous will win this lawsuit. There is no final ruling as yet. And there is a whole lot of money and a whole lot of corporate power at stake. Ecuador may now be a democracy, but the U.S. is not really a democracy any more and our multinational corporate rulers are egregiously anti-democratic. They will go to any lengths to control oil and other resources, and to protect their tyrannical powers, including hijacking our military to slaughter a million innocent people in Iraq. But these Indigenous plaintiffs, win or lose, are examples of the courage and persistent effort needed to throw off the corporate rulers and they are certainly examples of thinking the BIG THOUGHT that Chevron-Texaco has NO RIGHT to pollute them and must be held accountable when they do. Let that BIG THOUGHT ripple through your consciousness, to counter the propaganda that we are subjected to. Corporations have NO RIGHT to pollute us! And here's an even bigger thought: they have no rights at all! They are not "sovereign." WE are. We, the People.
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