Chevron Gets Scared, Moves to Avoid Jury Trial

Chevron has launched yet another front on its endless legal shenanigans. In a desperate attempt to avoid a jury trial, the oil giant has filed papers in Judge Lewis Kaplan’s court seeking to remove Steven Donziger and his highly-respected counsel John Keker out of the first phase of a racketeering case in New York that the oil giant filed in February to try to escape paying an $18 billion judgment in Ecuador for causing massive pollution to the Amazon rainforest.

The Amazon Defense Coalition blasted the oil giant's latest attempt to bully Ecuadorian plaintiffs seeking justice in Amazon:

Chevron is clearly "petrified" of a jury trial against Keker, who is based in San Francisco near the oil giant's headquarters and is widely considered one of America's leading trial lawyers, said Karen Hinton, the spokesperson for the Ecuadorian plaintiffs suing the oil giant. On behalf of Donziger, Keker has locked horns with New York judge Lewis Kaplan, who is presiding over Chevron's racketeering case in federal court, accusing him of trampling Donziger's due process rights and asking that he reassign the case to another judge.

"With its latest court filing, Chevron is admitting that it does not think its lawyers can win a trial before a jury of impartial American citizens who would likely review evidence of the company's reckless and potentially criminal misconduct in Ecuador," said Hinton.

"This is an extraordinary capitulation prompted by Chevron's desire to avoid having to prove its spurious allegations before an impartial jury," she added.

Donziger has repeatedly demanded to the New York court that he wants to exercise his constitutional right to a jury trial to respond to Chevron's "outrageous" allegations in the racketeering case that the environmental lawsuit in Ecuador, on which he has worked for the better part of two decades, is based on sham evidence. In response, Chevron filed papers late Wednesday seeking to drop Donziger from the first phase of the RICO trial that Kaplan scheduled for November of this year.

"Chevron's lawyers make all sorts of defamatory charges against Steven Donziger, and then they run for the hills when it comes time to put up or shut up," said Juan Pablo Saenz, an Ecuadorian lawyer who represents the plaintiffs. In February, after an eight-year trial that generated more than 200,000 pages of evidence, an Ecuador trial court found Chevron liable for dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon, causing an outbreak of cancer and decimating indigenous groups. Damages were found to be up to $18 billion.

You can read the full release here.

Once again if you read between the lines it should become clear by now that now clear that the RICO charges are a ruse. Chevron’s real agenda is to obtain a ruling from U.S. Judge Lewis Kaplan that the recent $9.5 billion Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron is unenforceable. Such a ruling could be used as a litigation tool in what will likely be future court disputes about the judgment’s enforcement. Judge Kaplan has not hidden his bias in Chevron’s favor and his utter distaste for the Ecuadorians and their country.

You can bet that the plaintiffs seeking justice against the corrupt oil giant will not be intimidated by this. We hope you and others reading our blog will speak the truth and join our efforts to seek justice today.

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Chevron in the Gulf

Ever since BP’s disastrous oil spill, there have been no new drilling permits in the Gulf. Well, that’s changed and the first company to get a permit…drum roll please… Chevron. Never mind that they have destroyed the Ecuadorian Amazon. Never mind that they have been sued by indigenous tribes for the death and disease they have caused. Never mind that they refuse to take responsibility for their actions. They now get to try the same thing in the Gulf. Because the environment and livelihood of the region haven’t already taken enough of a hit.

The folks over at Rainforest Action Network say it pretty well:

Why is this so appalling? Mainly because Chevron has never met a community it wasn’t willing to pollute if there were profits to be made, which could be seriously bad news for the Gulf Coast residents still reeling from last year’s spill. Chevron doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to protecting the environment, and the company will do whatever it takes to avoid cleaning up its messes. Just ask the people of Ecuador, or the people of Nigeria and Kazakhstan, or even the people right here in Richmond, California — all of whom live every day with pollution from Chevron operations that the company refuses to take responsibility for.

They also recap some of the lessons from last years report The Lasting Stain of Oil.

It’s clear to corporate polluters cover up evidence, don’t take precautions to protect the environment and communities, and use extensive PR to get away with environmental genocide. Chevron has been very effective with this, using their Human Rights Hitmen to avoid all responsibility for what they have done in Ecuador.

With all that has happened to the Gulf in the past year, it is incredibly disappointing that any drilling is happening, much less by Chevron. The region or our world simply doesn’t need to have another ecological disaster at the hands of Big Oil.

Be sure to read the RAN post on Chevron in the Gulf.

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Chevron: Don’t believe your eyes…believe our lies!

Chevron's bloggers, who continue to deny the truth about the company's involvement in oil contamination in Ecuador, are upset with a New York Times photo of a waste pit in Ecuador that ran last Saturday.

Chevron apologists such as Carter Wood – who blogs for the National Associat

ion of Manufacturers, which counts Chevron as a major donor – have said the photo is of a waste pit by Ecuador's state-owned oil company, Petroecuador, because the oil is fresh and Chevron left the country in 1992. But in his hurry to carry Chevron's water, Carter again misses the boat with his analysis.

Evidence at the trial demonstrates that Chevron's predecessor company, Texaco, constructed 916 unlined waste pits in Ecuador's Amazon in the 1970s and 1980s. All were gouged out of the jungle floor without lining, in violation of U.S. and industry standards dating to the 1920s. Almost all of the pits had pipes that ran the toxic contents into nearby streams relied on by the local population for drinking water; in most cases, the toxic contents have migrated through the bottom of the pits to contaminate groundwater used for wells by local residents. If you want to see for yourself, check out the 60 Minutes report on the case.

This is clear evidence of the reckless indifference to human life that characterized Texaco's operations and Chevron's defense. Texaco had so little regard for the locals that Chevron had to admit that Texaco never even kept a list of the existence or locations of the pits, each of one of which is a hazardous waste site. The use of these reckless operational practices might explain why several independent health evaluations show skyrocketing rates of cancer in the region, and why the court Special Master found 1,401 excess cancer deaths. If this had happened in the U.S. it would probably be considered negligent homicide – and those that designed and built this system would probably be in jail.

Not that Wood cares. According to him – in a line he lifted directly from Chevron's talking points - if the oil in the pit is liquid then it must have been put there recently, which means the NYT photo could not be of contamination in a pit that Chevron left Ecuador in 1992. That's simply not true, according to evidence at trial. Dozens of Texaco waste pits in Ecuador's Amazon that were never touched by Petroecuador look exactly like the one in the NYT photo – even pits closed down by Texaco in the 1970s and 1980s. Check out this picture (taken in 2005), which is of Texaco site "Lago Agrio 5" which was closed in 1972 – and which hasn't been touched by anyone since it was closed by the company that year. Oil in old pits does not weather in Ecuador because it rains constantly in the Amazon, keeping the sludge in the old waste pits in the exact form one sees in the NYT photo. Even if the pit is now owned by Petroecuador, it does not absolve Chevron of its responsibility for building it, operating it, and abandoning it – and for the continued damage caused by using the same methods by the subsequent operator.

Chevron and bloggers like Carter Wood have consistently lied and misled the public, shareholders, and the media about Chevron's role in Ecuador. Chevron has tried every trick in the book – from creating its own news reports designed to look like CNN reports (including hiring disgraced former CNN correspondent Gene Randall to give the recordings an "authentic" appearance), to its latest Nixon-style dirty tricks operation to undermine the Ecuador trial where Chevron faces a substantial liability. Now, Carter Wood, on behalf of his organization's client Chevron, is asking people to not believe what is evident in a photo.

As Chevron's game of smoke and mirrors unravels, look for more misleading postings by Carter Wood and Chevron's cohort of bloggers. After all, Wood readily admits that he took an all-expense paid trip to Ecuador - paid for by Chevron of course - to get educated (read indoctrinated) on the issue. What he doesn't admit is that he failed to speak to any of the people who are trying to hold Chevron responsible for ruining their land and their lives. As a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, Wood should know better than to write about an issue without talking to both sides or disclosing that he is paid to support one party to a dispute.

So please Carter, stop trying to fool people with misleading arguments about oil liquidity and photos - people are not that stupid in the reality-based world.

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Chevron’s New Shills

In a sign of frustration over their inability to convince any journalists with a semblance of independence or journalistic integrity to publish their talking points, Chevron has turned to paying faux journalists and bloggers to parrot the company's talking points and to do the company's dirty work in lobbing baseless accusations against the people bringing a landmark environmental lawsuit against the company.

In yet another instance of the company treating it's $27 billion legal liability in Ecuador as an image problem to be managed, rather than as an environmental and human rights crisis to be dealt with, Chevron has taken extreme measures over the recent past: hiring disgraced former-CNN anchor Gene Randall to put together a high-priced faux-news story that tries to fool viewers into thinking it's an independent news video, and paying for an all-expense paid trip for bloggers (including Carter Wood of Shopfloor.com, Bob McCarty of BobMcCartyWrites.com, Gail Tverberg of theoildrum.com, and Roger Alford of opinojuris.com) to Ecuador to participate in the company's propaganda tour.

[Update/Editor's Note: In the interest of clarity and fairness, while Roger Alford attended a trip paid for by Chevron, he has not written anything about this lawsuit, or otherwise opined on the issue.]

The result of Chevron's efforts? A number of posts that purport to be "news" that simply parrot Chevron's P.R. messages at the expense of any journalistic integrity that the "reporters" may have had.

Already Gene Randall, who traded on his familiarity as a former CNN anchor to create a fraudulent report for Chevron, has been publicly reprimanded in the New York Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, and On The Media, among other prestigious journalism publications. From interviews published in On The Media it appears that Randall has already resigned himself to counting his silver pieces to justify his loss of any public credibility that he may have had: "I didn't choose to leave CNN," Randall said, "and now that I have, I have to make a living somehow. So I offer my ability to use 'journalistic techniques' to clients who need to present their messages."

But perhaps more egregious than Randall's willingness to trade on his former association with CNN as part of Chevron's effort to manipulate public opinion, is the wholesale sale of their credibility that has occurred in the blogs over the past few weeks. The company has admitted to taking several bloggers on an all-expense paid trip to Ecuador to indoctrinate them in the company's messaging on the Ecuadorian lawsuit. The bloggers returned from the propaganda trip armed with a wealth of baseless accusations that they have lobbed at the indigenous people of Ecuador and the lawyers working with them. In true blogger fashion, almost none of these internet "journalists" bothered to consult with anyone other than Chevron before they started making their allegations. Instead, they simply sold whatever credibility and integrity they may have had to Chevron in return for a nice trip to Ecuador (or in McCarty's case – since he didn't actually go when he had to cancel, just the promise of a trip).

It will be interesting to see if the loss of integrity and credibility is worth the free flight that Chevron provided (hey – it might have even been first class…after all, the company did make $23.8 billion in profit last year).

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