Shocking: 18 Years on and Exxon Still Won't Pay $2.5 Billion for Valdez Oil Spill

[marmar]

from AlterNet:



Shocking: 18 Years on and Exxon Still Won't Pay $2.5 Billion for Valdez Oil Spill

By Riki Ott, AlterNet. Posted November 5, 2007.


And now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear Exxon try to explain why it shouldn't pay.



The Supreme Court's recent decision to hear ExxonMobil's reasons to void the $2.5 billion punitive award in the Exxon Valdez case hit the town of Cordova, Alaska, hard. This small coastal fishing community -- my hometown -- along with the Alaska Native villages in Prince William Sound have borne the brunt of the largest crude oil spill in America's waters; a spill that took place more than 18 years ago, but one that continues to hold the region hostage.

The second painful blow was the high court's decision to not even hear our reasons why the award should be restored to the full $5 billion that a jury of peers decided was necessary to punish the corporate giant back in 1994.

While media pundits, lawyers, and scholars play the Supreme Court's decisions back and forth like a ping-pong ball, people in Cordova share a completely different perspective of this story. It's not about whether the Supreme Court should hear the case. To us, it's about justice and reparation -- making us whole, a promise Exxon made to the community five days after the spill. A promise that Exxon broke before the trial even started five years after the spill.

To us, it's about more than an oil spill, the world's largest oil corporation, and a small fishing community in Alaska. It's about America's failed legal system that inherently cannot dispense justice in the face of corporate globalization.

U.S. corporations have outgrown America's justice system. The system won't work for any community in America that is traumatized by disaster that triggers class action lawsuits -- hurricanes like Katrina, terrorist acts like 9/11, or oil spills like the Exxon Valdez. Yet sociologists warn such disasters will be a hallmark of the 21st century. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/66647/

[soothsayer]

1. That's such a drop in the bucket compared to their record profits. Pigs.

[Uben]

2. I haven't bought gas at an Exxon since

...and I never will again!

[nradisic]

3. Neither have I....

My family and employees are not allowed to buy gas from any of the major oil companies. We buy gas from Citgo, Getty, Hess and the likes...

[brazos121200]

4. Exxon should have been made to pay eighteen years ago.

Justice delayed is justice denied. They have been able to earn interest on this money all these years.

[NC_Nurse]

5. Can I skip my taxes for 18 years and tie up the courts

with lawsuits because I don't agree with the tax code?

:sarcasm:

What a complete crock of shit.

[yurbud]

6. I got a job as a commercial fisherman up there that summer. We fished one day and cleaned rocks the

rest of the time.

We bagged up tons of oil soaked rocks, sand, and wildlife, including one fox.

And this was way out on the backside of Kodiak Island.

This was one of the things that kicked me to the left, especially since it wasn't the Coast Guard who got to decide when any particular beach was clean but an Exxon suit.

[MasonJar]

7. I will never buy gas from them. I also tell everyone I can why.