The latest example of Barrett's pro-business "reporting" comes from a Bloomberg article last week about the latest attempt by a major corporation with environmental problems to use the RICO (or "racketeering") statute to try to intimidate and silence its activist adversaries. The article details how Resolute, a Canadian timber company, has accused Greenpeace of being a "global fraud" after the organization claimed the company was trying to destroy the Boreal forests in Canada.
Let's get this straight: Greenpeace appears to be in the right (see this great video for its version) to take on Resolute over poor environmental practices. But even it was wrong, does that give a corporation like Resolute the right to use RICO and the civil justice system to try to bankrupt Greenpeace and undermine its First Amendment right to engage in legitimate advocacy?
Barrett seems to think so.
What Barrett should be writing about is how an increasing number of corporate counter-attacks against activists and human rights lawyers are becoming a threat to our democracy. For background on this dangerous trend, see this compelling blog by Otto Saki of the Ford Foundation and this analysis by Katie Redford of Earth Rights International. These important perspectives are absent from Barrett's reporting.
Now, to Barrett's bias in favor of Chevron in its battle to evade paying the Ecuador pollution judgment. In the latest article, Barrett tries to impart credibility to the shaky Resolute lawsuit by comparing it to the RICO judgment Chevron obtained against American lawyer Steven Donziger and his Ecuadorian clients who won a historic $12 billion judgment against the company. But Chevron's RICO case was a fraud in and of itself -- engineered by a pro-business judge and hundreds of company lawyers. Since the judgment came out in 2014, that case has completely fallen apart.
(If you want to understand the utter depravity of Chevron's RICO case and why it has completely collapsed since trial, see this press release and this 33-page response to the erroneous findings of the trial judge. See here for a summary of the overwhelming evidence against Chevron in the Ecuador case and here for the peer-reviewed studies showing high cancer rates in the affected area.)
In the RICO case, Chevron fabricated evidence of a judicial bribe by illegally paying its star witness, Alberto Guerra, a $2 million bribe in exchange for his false testimony. The case collapsed after trial after Guerra admitted he lied repeatedly on the stand and a forensic analysis of the Ecuador trial judge's computers proved he wrote the judgment, contrary to Guerra's testimony that it had been ghostwritten by lawyers for the plaintiffs.
Chevron used hundreds of lawyers to target Donziger, a solo practitioner and human rights attorney. The company admitted its long-term strategy was to "demonize" him. But Chevron's lawyers, in an act of utter cowardice, dropped all damages claims against Donziger on the eve of the RICO trial to avoid a jury of impartial fact finders. Yet none of this an be found in Barrett's reporting on the Chevron RICO case. That's just deceptive.
In his article on the Resolute lawsuit, Barret writes about the Chevron case as follows:
Chevron proved that its activist foes had transformed their suit against the company into an extortion plot featuring bribery, fabrication of evidence, and the ghostwriting of judicial opinions.As the above reports prove, this type of analysis is just flat-out wrong and deceptive. The totality of the evidence proves there was no bribe or ghostwriting and the only party to fabricate evidence in the RICO case was Chevron. Yet Barrett has completely ignored these critical developments. He does not even give a nod to the idea of a competing narrative.
While Barrett used his Bloomberg platform to repeatedly shill for Chevron during the RICO trial in 2013, he has never reported on the collapse of Chevron's RICO evidence and still acts as if the flawed judgment in that case is End of Story. Yet that RICO judgment is now virtually worthless to Chevron in courts around the world that are threatening to seize company assets. Chevron's RICO strategy has failed; the campaign of the villagers has been successful. Barrett has it backwards.
Chevron now faces a veritable mountain of liability ($12 billion) in Canada in a judgment enforcement action that already won the unanimous backing of the country's Supreme Court.
Barrett's flawed reporting comes on top of the dozens of factual errors, use of outright plagiarism, and the fictionalized scenes in his supposedly non-fiction book on the Ecuador case that was rushed out in 2014 to celebrate Chevron's supposed "victory" over Donziger that never was. The credibility of that book -- most of which could have been written by Chevron's public relations team -- was utterly destroyed in a point-by-point takedown by Donziger himself.
Barrett's errors in his Ecuador reporting curiously always point in one direction -- Chevron's. He has denied the truth about what really happened to the indigenous people of Ecuador, whitewashed the company's environmental crimes, and tried to celebrate the "genius" of corporations that use the profits they suck out of the earth to violate the constitutional rights of their adversaries.
The fact Barrett is part of a troika of business reporters who for years have shamelessly carried Chevron's water for its disastrous behavior in Ecuador is a real stain on Bloomberg's reputation.
To maintain her own credibility, Bloomberg editor Megan Murphy should show Barrett the door. Bloomberg needs to assign a reporter to the Chevron legal beat who can write about these critically important matters with a more balanced perspective.