Chevron Loses Major Lobbying Battle In Congress Over Ecuador Trade Benefits, Says Amazon Defense Coa

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Business Wire

October 03, 2008 11:12 AM Eastern Daylight Time
Chevron Loses Major Lobbying Battle In Congress Over Ecuador Trade Benefits, Says Amazon Defense Coalition
McCain Finance Chair Had Led Campaign

Effort to Quash Claims of Indigenous Tribes Fails

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chevron has lost a critical lobbying battle in Congress in its effort to escape a $16.3 billion liability in Ecuador stemming from a landmark environmental case, according to Amazonian residents and their lawyers engaged in a court battle with the company.

Despite hiring a team of A-list Washington insiders – including Wayne Berman, John McCain’s national finance chairman and former Senator Trent Lott -- Chevron’s plan to enlist Congress to help it abort the class-action case in Ecuador has failed with the renewal of trade benefits to the South American company.

“This is a major setback to Chevron’s effort to undermine the rule of law in Ecuador to avoid cleaning up an environmental disaster,” said Steven Donziger, an American legal advisor to the plaintiffs.

A bill extending the trade benefits to Ecuador, Peru, Columbia and Bolivia passed the Senate on Thursday after clearing the House earlier in the week. A large team of Chevron lobbyists headed by Berman had worked for months to attach a rider that would have excluded benefits for Ecuador, where Chevron stands accused of having caused what experts believe could be the largest oil-related disaster on the planet.



Read more: http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20081003005459&newsLang=en

[Peace Patriot]

1. Hallelujah! Those incredibly brave Ecuadoran poor folks and their local lawyer

(who has eschewed any benefit from this suit, other than a very small salary while he prosecutes it) WIN AGAIN!

And our Democratic Congress (10% approval rating) gets at least this and one other thing right (denying Bush and his fascist pals in Colombia a "free trade" deal).

These indigenous tribes are such heroes!

And so are the voters of Ecuador, who last week passed a Constitution, with almost 70% of the votes, that gives legal standing to Mother Nature--a first in the world. Thus, if the constant death threats against those who sued Chevron-Texaco, or their extreme poverty, had prevented them from pursuing the lawsuit, the government or other parties could have stepped up and sued on behalf of Nature itself and its inherent right to live long and prosper.

Viva la revolución!

[tama]

2. Let's not call them "poor"

people living in harmony with nature, Pachamama, are not living in debt but wealthy in ways unimaginable to us.

[Peace Patriot]

3. I meant poor in money to pay lawyers and pay for scientific studies and all

the heavy costs of litigation. The young local lawyer who took the case--his very first case; he had just gotten his law degree--had to work two jobs for support 4 or 5 siblings, and studied at night, while also running a community organization, and finally taking on the lawsuit, when it needed a lawyer, and has been facing squadrons of the highest paid lawyers in the world--people who have office-fulls of assistant lawyers, paralegals and secretaries and who make major bucks. What if he had gotten ill? What if the death threats against him had been carried through?

Yes, I realize that our "standard of living" index leaves out a lot of qualities of life that those who are merely money-poor may have in abundance. But when you read about the massive toxicity of the environment they are trying to get Chevron Texaco to clean up--this young lawyer whose story I just read knew the water that he and his brothers and sisters were drinking and bathing in was toxic, but they were too poor to move elsewhere--and when you read about the squalor and environmental degradation of the oil "boom towns" that poor families were forced to live in, you know that extreme poverty could well have stopped this lawsuit--the simple inability to go on, or a broken down truck and missed lawsuit deadline, no fax machine, illness in the families of key litigants, lost jobs, intimidation with no protection, etc. etc. There are so many ways it could have failed--and poverty is certainly one of the biggest ones.

Also, it is one thing to have nature's riches as the riches that you enjoy--which can give you a life that is far superior to that of most urbanites, though it may look poor to others. But when that natural environment is massively despoiled, as was this vast area of the Ecuadoran rainforest, or, say, the Alaskan fisheries that native tribes were dependent on, that were utterly decimated by the Exxon Valdez spill, you are deprived of those natural riches, and then have nothing. The Ecuadoran tribes who were impacted by the Chevron Texaco spill (which included deadly toxins in addition to oil) can't drink the water in their rainforest--and the stream of pollution runs all the way to Peru; they can't fish; there are miles and miles of toxic pools; many are dying of cancer. So they have extreme poverty, by our standards, and extreme poverty by their own standards, with no mitigations from nature. Nature has been totally trashed and poisoned all around them. And that is the kind of thing that could send you into despair, and defeat anything so ambitious as suing one of the biggest corporations in the world.

They were not defeated. That makes them extraordinary heroes. But if they had been--and this is all I'm saying--then the new provision of the Constitution that gives legal standing to Nature itself could have been used by OTHERS, to sue Chevron Texaco on Nature's behalf.

This is a critical point of law, which has been entirely human-centered until now. Humans can sue for damages. Nature cannot. Trees cannot. Fish cannot. Polar bears cannot. It is very difficult to prove the claim that you have been damaged, when it's not direct and personal damage. You have to fall back on legalisms--did they follow the law in writing their environmental impact report? etc. Laws written by humans, for humans. This provision of the new Ecuadoran Constitution sweeps all of that aside, and says that Nature has a right to exist and prosper, in and of itself. Humans don't have to prove human damages; nor failures of bureaucratic procedure. All they have to do is prove the standard written into the Constitution, and as it will be interpreted over the years, that Nature's right to exist and prosper cannot impaired. A fish species has a right to exist. A stream has a right to flow free of human-inflicted toxins. An ecology--involving fish, birds, trees, shrubs, streams, rain, fog, and so many intimately related components--has a right to exist and function, in and of itself.

It reminds me of the end of slavery, when slavery was outlawed around the world. A fundamental concept has been changed. No human can be owned by another, because "slaves" are human, and have human rights by dint of being human. Nature cannot be impaired, because Nature itself has inherent rights. This is a revolutionary idea, as startling and earth-shaking as was the anti-slavery movement. A paradigm is overturned. It will certainly take huge effort and struggle to implement this revolutionary idea, but it has now been articulated by an entire country (by a vote of nearly 70% of its people), and written out as the fundamental law of the land.

[Judi Lynn]

4. Can't thank you enough for your posts. This one is especially helpful, considering

how much time it would take us to locate and absorb the information you have shared in just this post.

How much one must respect, admire and hope the best for these brave people in South and Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico so much who are fighting the good and necessary fight to bring real freedom to their countries.





Ecuador's President Rafael Correa

From last year:

“Justicia Now” Documents “Rainforest Chernobyl”

Written by Shirley Siluk Gregory

Published on November 26th, 2007
Posted in Action & Activism

“Small but mighty” is a phrase that comes to mind when watching the short film, “Justicia Now,” and the people it profiles.

The 30-minute documentary, produced by the social justice-minded media organization Mofilms, follows the powerful movement of indigenous peoples in eastern Ecuador who have taken on ChevronTexaco in what could be one of the biggest legal environmental battles ever.

The confrontation centers on a class-action lawsuit first filed in U.S. federal court in New York in 1993. Launched on behalf of 30,000 indigenous peoples in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest, the suit charges that Texaco (since acquired by Chevron) poisoned the region and spilled 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater while drilling for oil between the 1960s and 1990s. Since shifted to trial in Ecuador (at Chevron’s request), the lawsuit (Aguinda vs. ChevronTexaco) is seeking an environmental cleanup whose estimated cost is $10 billion.

The suit is expected to come to a conclusion sometime next year.

Directed by Martin O’Brien and Robbie Proctor, “Justicia Now” documents the street protests and activism of the local people. They claim the legacy of Texaco’s oil drilling is a landscape fouled by oil-slicked streams and rivers, poisoned wildlife and lethal doses of carcinogens. The filmmakers, occasionally accompanied by actress Daryl Hannah, travel with indigenous activists to view the environmental damage first-hand, and to meet and speak with locals who describe miscarriages, cancer and other impacts.

Investigators tracking the case say communities close to old Texaco wells suffer from childhood leukemia rates four times the national average. The amount of oil spilled in the region, they add, is 30 times that released in the Exxon Valdez accident. Ecuadorian locals have dubbed the situation the “Rainforest Chernobyl.”

Mofilms has made “Justicia Now” available for free download, and it’s not only worth viewing but passing along to others on your mailing list. The film packs powerful visuals, haunting music and an inspirational punch from seeing poor and disadvantaged people engaged in a true David vs. Goliath battle.

http://planetsave.com/blog/2007/11/26/justicia-now-documents-rainforest-chernobyl/

[Peace Patriot]

5. Pix = a thousand words. Thank you! 30 x worse than the Exxon Valdez!

And what is most amazing of all is the unstoppable activism of the poor native people who have fought the battle against this environmental horror for several decades, both to alert the world and to force the perpetrators to clean it up.

It is a classic of oppression and global corporate predator power, countered by the bravest of people--those who have no say in anything--the extremely poor, the utterly excluded--who make their stand anyway, despite the apparent hopelessness of the power situation. They were the poisoned and the dead, the displaced and the murdered. Texaco inflicts a "Chernobyl" on their rainforest, and then gets swallowed up by a bigger barracuda, Chevron, by which the global corporate predator oil barons think they can evade responsibility. From the corrupt rightwing governments in their own country to the Corpo/fascist judges here, Chevron Texaco felt confident that they would not be caught for their "drive-by" assassination of Mother Nature in Ecuador.

They were wrong.

[nodehopper]

6. that is a really naive and exoticizing way of thinking about it

the people in question aren't "primitive" nor do they live "in harmony with nature" in the way that such that phrase is usually used to romanticize indigenous people. They don't exclusively, or even predominantly off the land, and haven't for decades. Even before this ecodisaster, petroexploitation in the region interfered with their ability to freely hunt game. Since about the 1950s a lot of the fishing that happens in the region is dynamite fishing--not sustainable or safe. Plenty of men with hands or legs blown off. Indigenous residents of the Amazon basin in Ecuador have been doing wage labor since the early colonial years. They make their living by doing seasonal labor on large plantations, or by tourissm. They actually are very, very poor.

[Judi Lynn]

7. Good to know John McCain's national finance chairman tried to help Chevron-Texaco pull off this

murderous assault on the completely helpless people of Ecuador, the animals, their water supply, their natural world.

More from the original article:

Representatives of the plaintiffs – who include five indigenous tribes and residents in 80 rainforest communities -- had accused Berman of misrepresenting the case to several members of Congress and to the office of the United States Trade Representative. One such misrepresentation was that Chevron claimed to Congress it had been “released” by Ecuador’s government after a small environmental remediation but in fact that release specifically excluded private claims of the type being brought in the lawsuit.

How Chevron obtained even that limited release is now the subject of an official corruption investigation in Ecuador. The court-appointed expert, for example, found that more than 80% of the sites Chevron claimed had been remediated to secure the release have levels of deadly toxins in violation of legal norms.

Ecuador’s national prosecutor recently indicted two Chevron lawyers and seven former Ecuadorian government officials for fraud after they signed documents certifying the clean-up.

Aside from the political jockeying in Washington, Chevron has admitted in court that Texaco dumped 18.5 billion gallons of toxic waste into Amazon waterways and abandoned over 900 waste pits while it operated the concession. Tens of thousands of people now live in the middle of the contamination, some directly on top of waste pits Chevron covered with dirt without cleaning out contaminants.

Health problems and cancer rates in the region have skyrocketed in recent years, according to scientific evidence presented by the plaintiffs. Neither Texaco nor Chevron has ever conducted a single health study of the area nor published a map for local residents detailing the sites of its covered waste pits.

Pablo Fajardo, the Ecuadorian lawyer for the plaintiffs, said he was pleased Congress did not accept “misinformation” put forth by Chevron’s lobbying team.

“Chevron is trying to peddle misinformation to the U.S. Congress just like Texaco told the indigenous people of Ecuador that oil was as healthy as vitamins,” Fajardo said.

The real currency Republicans use on a constant basis IS misinformation. If they didn't lie and cheat they could not enlist the support of any of the Americans they have gulled, through their own ignorance, and instability to wildly view Republicans as their only hope against a sea of terrifying "others."

[Robbien]

8. What worries me about this case

Is that unless the DoJ is purged of the majority of Federalist Judges, any award that Ecuador may win will be delayed and finally cut down to almost nothing similar to what happened in the Exxon case.