Christina Sarich, Staff Writer
Waking Times
A court debacle labelled the ‘biggest environmental case in the world’ just sided with Big Oil. A New York Federal Appeals Court has ruled that Ecuadoreans who were concerned over the health of their rainforest after a 23-year battle with the Chevron subsidiary, Texaco, for polluting vast swaths of Lago Agrio in the Ecuadorian jungle, cannot hold the company financially culpable.
Texaco is accused of dumping contaminated water into pits used by locals in the area while operating there for over a decade. Sadly, the US Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s finding, which determined that the Ecuadorean court judgment was obtained by corrupt means, according to the Associated Press. A $9 billion-dollar judgment for the plaintiffs was at stake, but the US court has ruled that Big Oil is not responsible for polluting the area, and their assets cannot be seized.
Chevron (Texaco) says that the plaintiffs’ lawyers who obtained the original judgment were corrupt, and that they are “happy to see justice prevail.”
Other environmental activists have pointed out Chevron’s egregious acts in the Amazon, calling it Chevron’s Chernobyl of the rainforest. Streams and rivers have been contaminated with crude oil for decades in a devastating disregard for the forest and its ecosystems.
Despite years of activists calling attention to this travesty, the corrupt media and mafia-owned justice system has sided with Big Oil yet again. Incidentally, Reuters, who reported on this story originally, is owned by the Rothschild family.
Chevron attests that a 1998 agreement between Texaco and the Ecuadorian government absolves it of liability. A US spokeswoman for the Ecuadorians, Karen Hinton, told Associated Press that the plaintiffs were shocked by the ruling and called it a “sad day for the US justice system.”
“As disappointed as we are, this ruling will not deter the Ecuadoreans, their lawyers and their supporters from aggressively seeking justice in Canada and in other countries where litigation is under way to seize Chevron assets,” Hinton said.
Hinton, once the press secretary for NYC Mayor, Bill de Blasio, and a former employee of Governor, Andrew Cuomo when he was a cabinet-level official in the Clinton administration, left her position to fight for indigenous farmers and communities in Ecuador. She gave more than seven years of her career to try to right the wrongs of Chevron/Texaco, but it seems the political pay-off was bigger for those supporting the rigged Big Oil market.
As Michael Eisner, once CEO of Walt Disney has said, “We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.”
Read more articles by Christina Sarich.
About the Author
Christina Sarich is a staff writer for Waking Times. She is a writer, musician, yogi, and humanitarian with an expansive repertoire. Her thousands of articles can be found all over the Internet, and her insights also appear in magazines as diverse as Weston A. Price, Nexus, Atlantis Rising, and the Cuyamungue Institute, among others. She was recently a featured author in the Journal, “Wise Traditions in Food, Farming, and Healing Arts,” and her commentary on healing, ascension, and human potential inform a large body of the alternative news lexicon. She has been invited to appear on numerous radio shows, including Health Conspiracy Radio, Dr. Gregory Smith’s Show, and dozens more. The second edition of her book, Pharma Sutra, will be released soon.
This article (Indigenous Tribes Just Lost the ‘Biggest Environmental Case in the World’) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Christina Sarich and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement. Please contact WakingTimes@gmail.com for more info.
Comments
Fox in the Hen house
What ever in the world was this case being tried in the US for? How does the faux court overrule the Equadoreans court ruling? The fox with a court of fellow fox has a grin with chickenfeathers in their mouths. An impartial court, this is not.
I agree with Fox in the Hen
I agree with Fox in the Hen House. I'm not sure some Canadian judges would be any less in the pocket of these companies, given our reliance on our gas/oil sectors. I hope the Ecuadorians can appeal this unjust ruling and win this time. If these companies are not held accountable for their actions that harm others through environmental neglect and abuse, they will just continue doing the same thing in the name of profit. I hope the company executives and shareholders wake up soon. And I hope it would wake up those profiteers in our own oil sector. Anyway, it's time the world moved away from oil and coal!
Chickadee