Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Chevron Creating Fake News To Hide Environmental Crimes in Ecuador's Amazon

Chevron is again trying to spread fake news to try to distract attention from its environmental crimes and sham remediation in Ecuador, where the company is on the hook for a $9.5 billion liability and faces potential criminal prosecution for presenting fabricated evidence to a U.S. court.

Last week, we reported how dismissed Fortune reporter Roger Parloff resurfaced at Yahoo Finance with a completely unbalanced article on the case to help absolve Chevron of responsibility for the billions of gallons of toxic oil waste it admitted to dumping into the waterways and lands of indigenous people in Ecuador. (Here is a summary of the overwhelming evidence against Chevron as found by three layers of courts in Ecuador, where the company insisted the trial be held.)

Now we see the right-wing blog Hot Air is also blowing major hot air of its own in service of the Chevron propaganda machine.

Hot Air, which is connected to the Koch Brothers funding network outlined brilliantly by Jane Mayer in her book Dark Money, claimed in a recent blog that Chevron is the subject of a "shakedown" by the villagers and their lawyers. The blog then quotes none other than Parloff's unbalanced article published by Yahoo Finance in support.

Both Parloff and Hot Air used the occasion to promote Chevron's opposition brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in an appeal of a bogus "racketeering" decision that the company obtained from controversial New York trial judge Lewis A. Kaplan. That judgment resulted from a one-sided proceeding termed a "Dickensian farce" by one of the nation's leading lawyers.

Kaplan, who repeatedly bent over backwards to help Chevron, failed to disclose that he held investments in the oil company during the trial.

Chevron's latest court brief in the U.S. has little relevance to the company's ongoing liability in the case given that the judgment is being enforced against company assets in Canada and Brazil.

Both Parloff in his Yahoo Finance article and Hot Air downplayed the Canada enforcement action, where the affected communities recently won a unanimous decision from the country's Supreme Court. Canada is where Chevron is likely to be held accountable for its toxic dumping in Ecuador after two decades of forum shopping in courts spanning three continents.

(For a comprehensive history of Chevron's subterfuge in the case, see this appellate brief submitted by Steven Donziger, the longtime lawyer for the Ecuadorians and a primary target of the company's attacks. Here is a blog from a  lawyer at Earth Rights International explaining Chevron's fabricated evidence and illegal witness payments. Here is an explosive new report and press release that outlines Chevron's attempts to manipulate U.S. courts with false evidence.)

Both Parloff and the blog also ignore critical new evidence that shows Chevron "won" its decision from Kaplan after it illegally bribed a witness with at least $2 million in cash and benefits. The admittedly corrupt Chevron witness, Alberto Guerra, later admitted under oath that he lied about several critical issues in Kaplan's court while a forensic examination proved the falsity of Chevron's fake news that the judgment against it in Ecuador was "ghostwritten".

The world knows that Chevron produces and refines lots of oil. But few know the extent of its investments to manipulate public opinion to hide its wrongdoing in Ecuador and elsewhere. Parloff and Hot Air are vehicles for this strategy.

In the Ecuador case, Chevron has a long history of orchestrating payments to bloggers and using small right-wing websites to try to launder its propaganda. A few years ago, a pro-Chevron blogger named Alex Thorne tried to pass himself off as a legitimate journalist when he sent intimidating emails to funders of the environmental group Amazon Watch, which supports the Ecuadorian villagers.

Thorne also ran a website designed to attack Karen Hinton, the highly effective U.S. spokesperson for the Ecuadorian villagers. It turned out that while Thorne was targeting the Ecuadorians as a "journalist" he actually was married to a Chevron employee and being paid by the company.

For years Chevron has used the notorious public relations operative Sam Singer, who hails from the Roger Stone school of political mischief, to funnel money to bloggers to parrot its fake talking points. See here for background on the Chevron dirty tricks operation.

When Chevron couldn't impose its will on the small California town of Richmond -- where a catastrophic fire at a Chevron refinery in 2012 forced 15,000 residents to seek medical attention -- the company started its own local on-line website and called it The Richmond Times to make it look like a legitimate news outlet.

The hot air coming from the Hot Air blog on Chevron's growing problems in Ecuador is just more of the same.