HACKERS
________
Ok Alaska Joe. I'm back :-) [It was nice to know you missed me!]
My absence had nothing to do with politicians suddenly starting to behave. It was a personal issue. Just about the time of my last post I was rather viciously attacked by a hacker. He had pulled my email out of the ether (or more likely out of his own membership list ... he has several sites on the 'Net and I was, no: I AM, a member. I'll have to drop by one of these days. But by luck of the draw as far as I know, he pulled my email address, hacked the machine and stole the most recent couple months of email. That was critical professional correspondence (that was mixed in with the jokes and the anecdotes people used to send me before I stopped emailing them back). Then a message popped up on my computer telling me I should go here. (Only that time it was a live link to where I'm fairly sure was one of his sites and I think I know which one. He had to grab something there apparently because when we left it was like an antelope on speed. We shot and boomeranged around the 'Net so fast it would ... well, in fact it did, make my head spin! And then we ended back up on his site anyway (I don't think he realized that I realized that I knew where we were even with the dizzying trip to disorient me). We went from the site to what "felt" like an empty field with a very minimal Paypal station at one end and the company that the Hacker used to sell me "verbal books"! Just try to convince someone you didn't receive the product when the Paypal receipt ways "oral ebooks" or whatever! :-D He said he'd sell it to me for $70 and I could go home.
It was worth vastly more than that in many ways, so I said ok. But then instead of getting the product (I didn't really figure this guy was going to read me a book :-) ... I got another bill for $70. We continued this game, he raised it to bigger chunks than $70. When we got to $1,350 I quit. I couldn't possibly afford that ... but there was irreplaceable professional communications in there that I simply HAD to protect. But through a process of scribbling in margins I connected with the "night watchman" who was handling the process for the hacker ... as soon as he realized he asked me if this was one of those ["insert name of hacker here if he ever touches this blog"] deals. I said yes and he made an unremembered comment in disgust. They seemed like an ok outfit if one good person can be extrapolated that far, and he assured me they'd retain all the materials, etc. The next day I found little cracks in Paypal's armor ... it used to be a lot harder to get them to step into the middle of any such disagreement. But I finally got through and they opened an investigation and I got back my money and my emails! And I'd like to think I helped make the Paypal system a little easier to be willing to investigate in a case like that.
Unfortunately. The hacker was furious. And he attacked with major firepower. He is an excellent programmer and if I understand correctly, a "big name" in the hacker world as well. Plus in the little entreprenurial corner of the 'Net he is quite well known ... right on the periphery of the big time players. A guru wannabee. Claims to be an Internet millionaire. And he had some very effective "inventions" that truly may be game changers. Right when I.D. theft and the less enticing parts of Internet shopping are starting to overtake that initial enthusiasm is not when we need a reputation of being full of crooks and hackers. It is the frontier ... that little section of the 'Net ... and I'm a believer in humanity's need for a frontier. Scammers and spammers and Soapy Smith flim-flammers I can handle fine. But this man is a flat out crook. He claims to be a sociopath and accepts "sadistic sociopath" without any suggestion otherwise.
The kind of guy who would build a fire on the back of a turtle and get a huge rush out of watching the turtle bake in his own shell.
He is still here. A year and a half later and he was here virtually any time that I was. And I live on them. He killed off several ... I think we decided 5, but some of them required multiple trips to the shop. I have three hard drives that we had to pull out along the way in case the F.B.I. would like to take them into the clean room and see what all the hacker deleted and destroyed.
He has (despite every possible thing that anyone can think of to do to mine to prevent remote access ... he has it working. My desktop is his desktop. I just sat back last night and watched him move the cursor around and open and close files (and I think delete another batch but I'm not yet certain). Then I found out that he had a group of hackers wandering through all my computers where all of the family's dirty laundry is stored. Then I figured out that they were using my machine(s) for some sort of file sharing ... probably music. Probably the feds will finally show up ... and they'll arrest me for having an illegal music sharing station! :-) But I'm guessing 20 people had access to the depths of my soul (I keep it hidden in my hard drive). And I couldn't service clients with him there. Plus destroyed my time and billing programs. We had and office LAN which he destroyed and replaced with their own which they had the gall to call "Jailbirds R Us". There have been lots of much worse ramifications ... he's gotten his revenge for me messing up his (well -oiled process, I wasn't a unique case! I just have enough mouth to do something about it). Of course that turned out poorly as I lost not 2 months of emails, but 5 YEARS of "can't lose" emails. When he first showed up I tried to back up the system quickly before I had any idea he was "always on" (they have alarms of some sort that alerts them when a victim logs on ... or so I have hypothesized ... and I think I got agreement on that from him). So he wiped out my backup too. Then he destroyed access to the entire company data base (small company, but cranks lots of critical paper) and has probably averaged four of us over that time (not counting staffs). No only were the archive files critical, but all of our current "live" files were destroyed as well (actually I think they are still "there" somewhere. The hacker just destroyed any way to access them.)
So I dropped my blog, I dropped other stuff I was doing on the 'Net. I'm going to have to mend fences with all those friends I used to have but figured they'd never be friends again if the hacker got them ... I was highly contagious!
He ran my out of business. 22 years of a successful professional business and he destroyed it. He cost me nearly TWO (2) YEARS of income. Long story with lots of side paths, but essentially, he wouldn't let me get any work done and would make everything I did do take forever. I can work 4 hours on writing a report ... that he can destroy in 4 seconds. And he did that a lot. I did a lot of my work in the libraries. But he made everything take so long I couldn't charge for it ... I was just hoping that when I finally did get a project finished and to a client that I hadn't ruined a wonderful 20 year relationship because my stuff didn't get to him until three weeks after he absolutely had to have it. It was tough. But I have a small packet that proves much of the stuff I say, and I have lots more (screen shots, etc.) whenever they want it. I had to close it down. I couldn't afford to run it (and it was harder work than ever before because of the hacker).
I've been in touch with the "local" F.B.I. (~120 miles away) and the national folks (the hacker and I are on opposite sides of the country ... local law enforcement won't, probably can't, do anything.) But I hadn't seen much sign of him for awhile (although stuff was done that I was just sure I didn't do!) until last night when he decided to put on a show. My but I hope the federal men were watching! :-)
I do think it is safe now. Or I wouldn't be back here. Besides, I'd be Blogger would be about as good a co-plaintiff as one could have if he really did infect them.
So ... that's why I haven't been on for a year and a half or so. But now, I'm unemployed and broke ... so I can go back to blogging!
PRODIGALS AND SONS AND THINGS
_______________________________
Which brings me to the "other" part of this post. Here we've got two brothers; a good brother who stayed at home to help his mother and father run the modest little farm and never got a chance to "go out and see the world".
But the BAD brother ... the one who took his half of the inheritance and squandered it while traveling and adventuring. He got to see the world! He had the opportunity to do a lot of things that kids that age seem to need to do to get it out of their system. Things that it will be too late to do when one is older. The older brother was ticked off and I was always on his side. Every bit of "fairness" in me screams that the wrong kid got the feast and the calf.
But I got to thinking about it one day. I remember that was Jesus himself who spun that parable. And he was trying pretty hard to convince people that "fair" didn't mean "an eye for an eye". He was trying to bring humanity an entirely new paradigm. In the driest description I can think of ... Jesus was attempting to replace justice with love. It took me a lot of years before I understood why Jesus would sound like an idiot who rewarded bad behavior. It was a dangerous thing to say considering that he was someone who has been looked up to more and used as an example than any other person before or since.
People followed his actions, he set the example that countless people have tried to follow; to "be like Jesus" and to make all decisions the way Jesus would make them. But he probably knew it wasn't really dangerous ... because people wouldn't understand and those few that did wouldn't do anything about it. And those very few that understood and tried to do something about it, would fail miserably.
Upon contemplation, I can see how devoted Christians would have a hard time imagining Jesus being furious with the return of someone very important to him, but that he had expected never to see again. So there must be some other message he is trying to convey.
As I kept getting older (it keeps happening too! :-) I had my own kids and thought about how I would react if my son, the younger of my two kids ...
[All who guessed without even being asked .... you are correct ... the prodigal son that Jesus made famous was the younger son!]
... took his "college savings" out of the bank and disappeared and years had passed and I had no idea whether he was even alive or dead ... and then, as I was knocking on old age's door I see him walking down the road towards home ...
I get it. I understand what Jesus was trying to do. Justice. Equality. Even fairness. Those we think of as the goals. The things to strive toward. The things to do to be a "good person' and even a "good Christian".
And they are wrong.
At least if they purport or wish to "follow Jesus". Nor are they inherently wrong. They might coincidentally be right. But stopped clocks are a couple times a day also. He was much more radical than trying to bring about a fair, just world.
Justice, equality, fairness ... that is what he was trying to get us to understand was not the goal. All those preachers who stand up and talk about how we have to strive for equality, and fairness ... and ultimately this will create "justice" ... which is the "god" of this "missed the boat" Christianity. Plato took Aristotle's hierarchy of good and evil and all the schools in the neighborhood where the Christians were hiding in those days were Platonic schools ... and we ended up with Plato's philosophical world view of simply moving "the Good" to the top of the pyramid and we suddenly have a hierarchical model of good and evil. The Socratic and pre-Platonic Greeks fought this "binding of god into a hierachy (because in Plato's system the hierarchy is what is really God). It was a giant philosophical debate and it set the path of Western history. But the "God is Everywhere" philosophy lost to one where God is a structure that "the Good" is the highest point on the structure. We went from a philosophy that said that a chair that you can sit in is far more perfect than one that exists only in some heaven of ideas. Plato (and picked up by the Christians) thought people were originally defective ... Original Sin. The early Greeks that that was nuts. A new-born infant is absolutely without sin! (Just a good thing they can't throw rocks :-) But Plato won and the Christian kids were taught Platonic philosophy and Christianity caught a couple of great historical breaks and became the dominant Western religion and that is why we are a Platonically based society today still guided primarily by Mosaic law.
Today's Christians pushing democracy and fairness and equality and, ultimately, Justice ... are teaching Mosaic law. The law of symmetry. Of the need for the karmic balance of Yin and Yang. Justice. An eye for an eye.
Jesus came to bring a sword. He was so radical he made the '60s protesters look like Sunday School teachers. He wanted to turn society upside down and shake it like it was a money changers' table in a temple.
We can't dispense justice. Our court systems have proven that even when they really try. Only a perfect, "sinless", person can stone a prostitute ... which was another example of Jesus saying "You will never know all the details and won't even come close to knowing enough of them to know which decision is just ... whatever the decision. If we had only "sinless" people ... we wouldn't have the problem. But we don't and we won't so we do.
"Only your father in heaven can judge people." Come on folks, get this through your heads! I would guess Jesus was often very frustrated :-)
Fairness. Such a positive goal. And it might be. It might be that if you took everything that happened to all the players in a situation starting at least with their birth and understood everything that had happened to each of them since ... then in a dispute between them one might possibly come close on getting "fair" right. Of course the punishment has to exactly match the net wrong that the badder guy did ...
I see why Jesus said that really ... if it needed to be done, only a god could do it.
No. I think what the Barefoot Prophet was trying to tell us was that we have to think beyond the concepts of fairness and justice. They may be important ... or at least nice ... but they may just be totally irrelevant. I'm not advanced enough to understand all he was trying to tell us by any means. In the Stygian darkness with my white tipped cane the best I can do was to think I see that he came to throw out the law of Moses. The Law of Moses was an earth changing event of its own and in its own time. Essentially, the Law of Moses replaced the Law of Might Makes Right. It was a giant evolutionary step from the Law of Power. A step that had guided us for Millenia and had served its purpose wonderfully .... for the incremental step it needed to be.
But my white tipped cane says that Jesus was just trying to get it through our "symmetry rules all" heads that Love trumps Justice. And if he isn't coming back until we are able to understand that ... he's not coming back for awhile.
It trumps fairness too. After thinking a lot about it recently (I have an 18 year old youngest son :-) ... I know!
And this is what I know: my son had done so many bad things and wasted so much of my money and left his brother to do the work of two ... and that I'm getting older and my days are even more precious ...
I know that when I see my son walking down the road to the house after not having even heard of him for years and believing that I would die without ever seeing him again ...
I will run out to greet him joyfully, yelling at anyone handy to kill the fatted calf as I go.
Showing posts with label oil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oil. Show all posts
21.12.08
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Trouble Waters -- Part 5
December 19, 2008
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters -- Part 5
-AKA -
"Billions for Defense; Not One Penny to Pay Our Just Debts"
"The day" finally came.
The day we were going to find out if the Supreme Court was going to hammer Exxon and "correct" the 9th Circuit for halving the jury's award of damages or if, somehow, they were going to find a way to ratify that decision. Or ... some folks who had learned pessimism by being a part (the "victim" part) of this 20 year fiasco, actually believed that the Supremes might reduce it further. Our attorneys, the best in the business, however, had assured us that couldn't happen. That there was no legitimate way for the Supreme Court to lower the award further. That was one option we were not to worry about.
We had several days of anticipation as Supreme Court decisions were handed out over a few day period and ours didn't happen on the first day. Or the second. In fact, it didn't happen until the day the Court was ready to leave [get out of Dodge] for the season.
It wasn't until July of 2008 that the Supreme Court handed down its decision. It made its determination and sent it back to the 9th Circuit for implementation.
[To the tune of American Pie, please:] "That was the day that justice died."
The United States Supreme Court ignored everyone the 9th Circuit had ignored ... jurors, a long-term highly respected judge, the Constitution and common law that it provides we are to follow, the State of Alaska, the earth's environment ... and all of the people who live below the waterline. And then it ignored the 9th Circuit also.
In an announcement that left the hardest of hard-bitten attorneys in numbed shock ... the court chopped the remaining $2.5 billion award down to $507.5 million.
There are no words. It is as manifestly unjust as anything I have ever witnessed the court system doing. It was not only legally wrong, but it was morally wrong. Indeed, it was the first time I have truly believed that the Courts have been so politically packed that they are now simply part of the corpocracy. They are not a check and balance. They are not an independent judiciary. They are bought and paid for politicians. And they have committed an act of overt evil.
Then, just because it could, Exxon took the plaintiffs and rubbed their faces in it one last time. They argued to the 9th Circuit that because the Supremes said that $507.5 million was all that could be awarded ... that meant they didn't have to pay the 20 years of interest on it either.
Plaintiffs and their attorneys were so defeated and destroyed that there was no fight left. We filed pro forma motions with the 9th Circuit explaining that, once again, Exxon was simply flatly wrong legally. But no one's heart is in it. And no one even seems to be able to care how the 9th rules. We are arguing over the pennies to place on our closed eyes after having lost fortunes. It really makes no difference.
For the tiny amounts that the Supremes said we could have; we settled with Exxon for 75% of them. I have no clue what leverage Exxon had left to deny paying the entire amount the Supremes said they had to. But they proved that the courts would do pretty much whatever the Big and Powerful asked for and there was no fight left in any of us. When the elephants play, the grass gets trampled. And we were all, ultimately, the grass.
So the checks are starting to arrive. Little tiny checks. People's lives and livelihoods had been ruined by Exxon beyond hope of repair or salvation. All they were left was the knowledge that at least Exxon was going to have to pay ... and pay enough that they could afford to retire (after 20 years of waiting and scraping and scrimping and taking new jobs at middle age for which they weren't trained, some still trying to eke out a living catching what fish they were allowed by Fish and Game as the Department tried to manage PWS to revive the fish stocks). Many people have been clinging with their fingernails so long to keep from the total financial collapse that just letting go and crashing and burning is better than continuing to try to hold on.
And now, the Courts have stolen their retirement also.
I used strong language above. I speak of the courts committing true evil and stealing from people. I believe that to be true. But I wish to make one point extremely clear here. Although I do believe what the courts did was wrong ... horribly, terribly, immorally wrong, and that the Exxons of the world have "bought" our courts and did prove that they can "buy" [what one might still euphemistically refer to as] "justice"... I do not believe that the individual justices were directly bribed nor do I have any suspicions or accusations about any particular justice or justices who personally "sold" their decision. I don't know what all other criteria the individual justices considered; or indeed, the courts in joint session considered. One may not want to know such things. If you wish to enjoy your meal, stay out of the kitchen! But, largely, although I think they were horrendously, clearly, and demonstratively wrong ... I believe it most likely that the justices believed their votes were "right" and that their decisions were made without substantive improper motivations.
I do not wish, with this series of articles, to accuse either the justices of the 9th Circuit or of the U.S. Supreme court of malfeasance or improper abuse of office.
It is conceivable that a justice was bribed. Exxon certainly had the money and we've seen a lot of outright bribery by oil companies in Alaska. And justices don't make enough money to be above financial temptation. But I have no evidence nor even real suspicions that such happened.
I believe what happened is that the insurance companies finally purchased the judges they want on the bench (judges and justices do not believe in the concept of punitive damages or if they do, they believe they should be severely limited). But they did this ... well ... I am not alleging that they did it in any way that was not legal. There are ways within the system to "purchase judges" without committing a crime.
Continued:
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters -- Part 5
-AKA -
"Billions for Defense; Not One Penny to Pay Our Just Debts"
"The day" finally came.
The day we were going to find out if the Supreme Court was going to hammer Exxon and "correct" the 9th Circuit for halving the jury's award of damages or if, somehow, they were going to find a way to ratify that decision. Or ... some folks who had learned pessimism by being a part (the "victim" part) of this 20 year fiasco, actually believed that the Supremes might reduce it further. Our attorneys, the best in the business, however, had assured us that couldn't happen. That there was no legitimate way for the Supreme Court to lower the award further. That was one option we were not to worry about.
We had several days of anticipation as Supreme Court decisions were handed out over a few day period and ours didn't happen on the first day. Or the second. In fact, it didn't happen until the day the Court was ready to leave [get out of Dodge] for the season.
It wasn't until July of 2008 that the Supreme Court handed down its decision. It made its determination and sent it back to the 9th Circuit for implementation.
[To the tune of American Pie, please:] "That was the day that justice died."
The United States Supreme Court ignored everyone the 9th Circuit had ignored ... jurors, a long-term highly respected judge, the Constitution and common law that it provides we are to follow, the State of Alaska, the earth's environment ... and all of the people who live below the waterline. And then it ignored the 9th Circuit also.
In an announcement that left the hardest of hard-bitten attorneys in numbed shock ... the court chopped the remaining $2.5 billion award down to $507.5 million.
There are no words. It is as manifestly unjust as anything I have ever witnessed the court system doing. It was not only legally wrong, but it was morally wrong. Indeed, it was the first time I have truly believed that the Courts have been so politically packed that they are now simply part of the corpocracy. They are not a check and balance. They are not an independent judiciary. They are bought and paid for politicians. And they have committed an act of overt evil.
Then, just because it could, Exxon took the plaintiffs and rubbed their faces in it one last time. They argued to the 9th Circuit that because the Supremes said that $507.5 million was all that could be awarded ... that meant they didn't have to pay the 20 years of interest on it either.
Plaintiffs and their attorneys were so defeated and destroyed that there was no fight left. We filed pro forma motions with the 9th Circuit explaining that, once again, Exxon was simply flatly wrong legally. But no one's heart is in it. And no one even seems to be able to care how the 9th rules. We are arguing over the pennies to place on our closed eyes after having lost fortunes. It really makes no difference.
For the tiny amounts that the Supremes said we could have; we settled with Exxon for 75% of them. I have no clue what leverage Exxon had left to deny paying the entire amount the Supremes said they had to. But they proved that the courts would do pretty much whatever the Big and Powerful asked for and there was no fight left in any of us. When the elephants play, the grass gets trampled. And we were all, ultimately, the grass.
So the checks are starting to arrive. Little tiny checks. People's lives and livelihoods had been ruined by Exxon beyond hope of repair or salvation. All they were left was the knowledge that at least Exxon was going to have to pay ... and pay enough that they could afford to retire (after 20 years of waiting and scraping and scrimping and taking new jobs at middle age for which they weren't trained, some still trying to eke out a living catching what fish they were allowed by Fish and Game as the Department tried to manage PWS to revive the fish stocks). Many people have been clinging with their fingernails so long to keep from the total financial collapse that just letting go and crashing and burning is better than continuing to try to hold on.
And now, the Courts have stolen their retirement also.
I used strong language above. I speak of the courts committing true evil and stealing from people. I believe that to be true. But I wish to make one point extremely clear here. Although I do believe what the courts did was wrong ... horribly, terribly, immorally wrong, and that the Exxons of the world have "bought" our courts and did prove that they can "buy" [what one might still euphemistically refer to as] "justice"... I do not believe that the individual justices were directly bribed nor do I have any suspicions or accusations about any particular justice or justices who personally "sold" their decision. I don't know what all other criteria the individual justices considered; or indeed, the courts in joint session considered. One may not want to know such things. If you wish to enjoy your meal, stay out of the kitchen! But, largely, although I think they were horrendously, clearly, and demonstratively wrong ... I believe it most likely that the justices believed their votes were "right" and that their decisions were made without substantive improper motivations.
I do not wish, with this series of articles, to accuse either the justices of the 9th Circuit or of the U.S. Supreme court of malfeasance or improper abuse of office.
The Supremes do suffer from institutionalized arrogance. Because they have "the last word" ... ie: there is no where to appeal their decisions. They are very proud of the quote that:
"We are not final because we are infallible; we are infallible because we are final".
These checks won't hurt. Some folks may manage to pay down a credit card bill or even buy a truck. But we ended up, after 20 years, with less than $500 million of the $5 billion that the judge and jury had said was legally ours. Justice delayed is justice denied. Especially when after two decades of injustice, the courts put the decimal point in the wrong place and overtly deny it as well.
The plaintiff attorneys are brilliant people who are at the top of their game. They had secured one of the greatest of all time verdicts for one of the most deserving groups of victims. This isn't tobacco legislation where people got sick and died because they decided to smoke. This isn't a McDonalds case where the plaintiff put a cup of scalding hot coffee between her legs and then squeezed.
The fishermen and other plaintiffs had done absolutely nothing wrong.
In this situation we had totally innocent plaintiffs, unlike almost all mega-award cases (which somehow seemed to survive this appeal process ... the tobacco companies for example virtually all decided to settle; they didn't have Exxon's "make war not peace; win at all costs and hurt the other side as much as is humanly or, more precisely, corporately possible" mentality).
The plaintiff attorneys had put their political lives and careers (as well as their reputations and financial futures) into this case and had defended it through the most violent of legal storms that could be unleashed by a behemoth that had vastly more money to throw at this than almost anyone in the world. If one could buy "justice", Exxon was going to do it.
In a con job worthy of anything Alice believed before breakfast Exxon tried to convince the world that they had done nothing wrong either! Although many (most?) news outlets were not easily flim-flammed, Exxon clearly has the power and influence even with the media to get its story out.
Exxon argued (argues) that Hazelwood, Captain; or God, An Act of; were the only reckless culpable parties. In English ... the only ones who did anything wrong. So that, therefore, only Hazelwood and God deserved any blame. And if Exxon didn't deserve any blame, they certainly didn't deserve any punishment.
It is important to understand that for legal purposes a corporation is an entity that is legally construed (for essentially all purposes) as a "person". I personally am not convinced of the wisdom of such exalted treatment to an entity that one can create on a piece of paper and the stamp of the appropriate state office in a few minutes, but it is a concept with much history and is well-settled law.
So Exxon, although a corporation, is legally capable of wrongdoing and being punished for such wrongdoing. To carry an analogy much farther than it should go, the Board of Directors, officers and executives are the "brain" of the corporation which sometimes cause it to do things that it shouldn't; much like our brains do with us. So it is the corporation itself, not its officers nor directors, that was found liable for causing damages by its negligent behavior and was assessed punitive damages for its reckless behavior. [Captain Hazelwood was also found liable of these things, but a judgment against him is not worth the paper it is printed on as he has nowhere near sufficient assets to satisfy such a judgment. But Hazelwood and Exxon were found jointly and severably liable which means that each is liable for the entirety of the damages awarded by the jury.]
And it is the corporation which [who? :-)] was trying to make the case to the public (and hiring marketing firms to do so), that the entities at fault were simply God and Hazelwood; not the corporation. But if the corporation was negligent (!), it was not reckless (which is the critical issue regarding punitive damages and such a determination was necessary in order for punitive damages to attach).
Let me be crystal clear here. This is a critical point. We can debate whether we think Exxon was reckless for putting a known drunk at the wheel of an oil tanker. But our decisions are (and should be) irrelevant, because the jury; those whose duty it was to decide and who were in the best position to decide, did decide. Exxon, itself, was reckless. This is no longer solely an opinion, it is a determined matter of law that even the Supreme Court has no legal ability to change.
It was reckless for an additive plethora of reasons, the primary one of which was that they knowingly placed a fully loaded ~1000 foot, 212 ton, tanker filled with 56 million gallons of the worlds ugliest (tarry, high sulphur content, etc.) crude oil under the control of Captain Hazelwood while it traversed some of the most pristine environmentally sensitive areas of the world; at night (it was almost exactly midnight when they missed the gap and hit the reef) ... knowing that he had a substantial drinking problem and a history of incredibly poor judgment. Exxon had paid for Hazelwood's alcohol rehab treatment in 1985, but made no follow-ups of any sort: no post-treatment evaluations or counseling, no monitoring of any sort.
Instead Exxon immediately put him back in command knowing as they admitted at trial that "a captain with a substance abuse problem was a recipe for disaster".
Hazelwood's driver's license (for automobiles, not supertankers ... although one would think if he wasn't considered capable of entrusting an automobile to, it is difficult to imagine that handing him the keys to a crude oil carrying supertanker would be fine) had been revoked or suspended three times between 1984 and 1989 by the State of New York for alcohol violations. In fact, at the time of the spill, his driving license was in suspension because of an arrest in New York for driving under the influence in September of 1988. This information is routinely reported to employers and is generally a requirement that it also be reported to the employer by the drunken driver himself. It is virtually inconceivable that Exxon did not know that at the time they told him to drive one of the largest and potentially most destructive vehicles in the world ... he could not legally drive to the docks to board the vessel.
Exxon senior management was proven to have received multiple and continuing reports between 1985 and 1989 that Hazelwood was continuing to drink to excess openly; indeed publicly. Exxon took no actions of any sort in response to these reports, except that his superiors would drink with him!.
In 1989 (five years before the trial and before Exxon's lawyers and P.R. people got everyone in the company's management "under control", the Chairman of Exxon specifically said that putting Hazelwood in charge of a supertanker was a "gross error"). Not just a negligent mistake, mind you, but he specifically admitted that Exxon had made a "gross error". There are many ways of saying "reckless" for purpose of punitive damages and other legal issues. "Gross error" is one of those equivalent terms. An "error" equates to "reckless" which might make them liable for compensatory damages, but does not make them liable for punitive damages. But "gross error" is the same as "gross negligence" which is the equivalent of "reckless". Therefore, by the admission of Exxon's own chairman ... Exxon fit the criteria for punitive damage liability.
Further, at trial five years later, after having been heavily coached, an Exxon manager testified that Exxon's policies, despite their knowledge of the risk to the public of the "catastrophic" results of a supertanker accident, allowed a relapsed alcoholic to command an oil tanker which left him (the manager), given "Exxon's attitude towards alcohol", with "no policy to protect the safety of the public".
There was other testimony regarding that and other aspects of Exxon's general recklessness in shipping out of PWS (breaking federal fatigue laws, departing into heavy ice conditions at night to save money, etc.).
But I don't need to try to prove that Exxon was reckless. I noted at the beginning of his section that it was reckless as a matter of law that not even the Supreme Court has the power to change. That is because the jury so determined. And once a jury makes a factual determination (which this is construed to be), that issue is not appealable.
The way our system works is often misunderstood. But since the right to trial by jury is paramount, only the jury is allowed to determine facts. [Which makes practical sense as well ... it is only to a jury that factual disputes are presented. Only the jury (and trial judge) hear the testimony and watch the body language of those speaking and are privy to so many things that can't be captured in an electronic record, that it would make no sense to have an appellate court attempt to redetermine the facts of the case.] Additionally, in this case, there was no question but what there were highly competent lawyers and experts on both sides making sure the evidence was properly presented and done so in as favorable a light to their side as possible. And the jury determined that Exxon was reckless.
What is appealable is the "law". That is what the lawyers argue to the judge about and what the judge ultimately includes in his written (and spoken) jury instructions. If the judge was incorrect on the law ... if he made a ruling (regarding an objection to the admission of certain evidence, for instance) that was wrong legally, or if an instruction regarding the law given to the jurors was wrong ... that may be appealed.
But whether Exxon was reckless or not, may not be appealed unless the judge gave incorrect instructions regarding his jury instructions regarding how they are to determine whether conduct qualifies as reckless. No one has seriously argued that the judge got the law wrong on this issue. (I say "seriously" instead of just saying that no one argued it ... because it is possible that Exxon did argue it at some point. But no one took it seriously and no appellate court ever suggested that there was a problem with the formulation of the law.)
Presumably, in fact, that is why the Supreme Court had to leave in the award some amount of punitive damages. They too were bound by the jury's finding of recklessness. (That said, even though they couldn't legally touch the fact that punitive damages were appropriate, in their consideration of "how much?" they effectively did by the back door what they could not by the front.)
The general public, however, was not so bound. Exxon argued vociferously to the media and anyone else outside the courtroom who would listen, that it was not reckless.
There is an old theory that if you can obsfucate an issue sufficiently, then no one really understands what is right and what is wrong and assumes everything is gray and that whatever the courts ultimately decide is probably right. Because we as a nation, perhaps more than any other on earth, respect and honor our judicial system.
Indeed we believe in it in a way that we seldom even think about but that folks from other countries really don't ever seem to understand. Other countries have legislatures to pass laws and an executive branch: presidents or other administrations to carry them out ... but in perhaps no other country is the court system relied upon so strongly, and believed in so fiercely, as the third leg of out government and the one most important for preserving out freedoms and protections from oppression. In the words of the Australian commedian/singer Fred Dagg: "You don't know how lucky you are, mate, you don't know how lucky you are."
Sadly, despite the intellect and apparent nitty-gritty willingness to claw and scratch and give their best fight no matter what the arena, the plaintiff attorneys proved to be idealistic optimists after all. They believed in the system. Even after so many, many years of delay, they too, honestly believed that although the wheels grind slowly, that they grind exceedingly fine and that justice would ultimately prevail. They believed that we were a country of laws and an honorable court system and that raw money and power could not buy justice away from those to whom it belongs if the forces of good gave it their all. I would not be surprised to see the major law firms that have gone so far out on a limb for those below the waterline in this case to be shuttering their offices. Some will stop in the bankruptcy courts that they had practiced in. Others will simply go away.
Because they were wrong.
Exxon proved, gloatingly, to the world, that we no longer live in a country of justice and law. Instead, we live in a corpocracy and the Exxons of the world run it. And they glory in proving that they do.
Sadly, despite the intellect and apparent nitty-gritty willingness to claw and scratch and give their best fight no matter what the arena, the plaintiff attorneys proved to be idealistic optimists after all. They believed in the system. Even after so many, many years of delay, they too, honestly believed that although the wheels grind slowly, that they grind exceedingly fine and that justice would ultimately prevail. They believed that we were a country of laws and an honorable court system and that raw money and power could not buy justice away from those to whom it belongs if the forces of good gave it their all. I would not be surprised to see the major law firms that have gone so far out on a limb for those below the waterline in this case to be shuttering their offices. Some will stop in the bankruptcy courts that they had practiced in. Others will simply go away.
Because they were wrong.
Exxon proved, gloatingly, to the world, that we no longer live in a country of justice and law. Instead, we live in a corpocracy and the Exxons of the world run it. And they glory in proving that they do.
It is conceivable that a justice was bribed. Exxon certainly had the money and we've seen a lot of outright bribery by oil companies in Alaska. And justices don't make enough money to be above financial temptation. But I have no evidence nor even real suspicions that such happened.
I believe what happened is that the insurance companies finally purchased the judges they want on the bench (judges and justices do not believe in the concept of punitive damages or if they do, they believe they should be severely limited). But they did this ... well ... I am not alleging that they did it in any way that was not legal. There are ways within the system to "purchase judges" without committing a crime.
Continued:
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Trouble Waters -- Part 4
December 17, 2008
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters -- Part 4
-AKA-
"We Don't Care. We Don't Have To Care. We're Exxon!"
During nearly 20 years of waiting (sometimes somewhat desperately) with several "we're going to be cutting checks in the next few weeks" over-optimisms along the way, the fishermen and other plaintiffs in the oil spill litigation never lost hope. I spoke to a great number of them during this time. Many "refused to think about it" because they didn't want to get their hopes up that they would soon be seeing money. Many thought the appeals process would result in a somewhat smaller award. But even the most hard-bitten and cynical of these independent, largely "have no use for government" weather-worn men and women of the world's most dangerous profession [commercial fishing in Alaska held that distinction for many years although modern safety mandates may now have dropped us below logging] still believed. We all believed that, although the wheels may grind slowly they would grind fairly and we would receive the bulk of our money. Particularly for those who died, and even those who went broke and bankrupt or faced other horrendous problems because of the delay in the interim, the phrase "justice delayed is justice denied" was often used.
But I don't believe in the entire 20 years speaking with hundreds of fishermen, claimants and lawyers, did I ever hear anyone suggest that they thought the jury award would ultimately be thrown out. Battered, bruised, a bit leaner ... yeah, we knew the jury verdict/award was in for a rough trip through the appellate process just from Exxon's arrogant pronouncements after the trial when the essentially flatly announced that it simply wasn't going to happen and they'd do whatever it takes to make sure of that. But for a group of people who you would think would be natural cynics and who would have the least faith in "the system" of any group outside of armed fortresses in Montana, the fishermen were remarkably confident that the system would, eventually, bring them justice (in the form of a substantial check!)
In June of 2008, in the case captioned Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, Supreme Court Case Number 07-219, the United States Supreme Court utterly destroyed that faith. They also utterly destroyed the entire concept of punitive damages as they had been understood for hundreds of years; and which were thus protections granted to the citizenry by the common law which protections were specifically enshrined in the U. S. Constitution. Although the award was only a pittance to Exxon [equal to ~three weeks of profit in 2006], it was a fortune to the largely ... "economically challenged" ... plaintiff class. The Court destroyed the fortunes of many in order to hand a pittance to a giant corporation. To do so they had to ignore the Constitution, the concepts of common law and the entire concept of punitive damages as it had always been known.
The money meant nothing in itself to a behemoth the size of Exxon, but the law that the case created succeeded beyond the wildest hopes of corporate boardrooms and insurance companies to behead the "punitive damage monster" which was one of the last protections against the malevolent acts of the corpocracy left to the people.
It is conservative chic now to be against punitive damages awards because the insurance companies have spend untold amounts of money to convince people (especially people in legislatures, government executive branches and those who sit on court benches, but the citizenry as well) that punitive damages caused the horrendous increases in insurance premiums. There is not a scintilla of truth to that and many studies have proven that there is no causal connection (other than by convincing people of it, the companies can get away with raising rates and have something to blame it on), or that punitive damage awards had (or have) any statistically substantive effect on either the percentage or actual amounts of money paid as damages. Even insurance companies don't really care about punitive damages. In fact, I would bet a bundle that they like having them in the states where they remain. Because the most profound connection between insurance companies and punitive damages is not in relation to how much insurance companies pay out in jury awards ... but rather as the "fall guy" for how large a premium they can get away with charging for their policies.
Yes ... I believe in the market. But insurance companies are so big and so collusive, and so tied into government, that they have, to a large extent, removed themselves from the actions of the market. That, again, is such a large topic there isn't room to deal with it adequately here. But conservatives ... Constitutional "strict constructionists" ... should be the last people in the world to want the government to intervene and yank yet one more set of protections that "the people" have and that were guaranteed by the Constitution. Those insurance company patsies are simply being used ... and unwittingly, used against their own core philosophies without being aware of it.
As noted earlier in this series, the jury awarded $5 billion dollars in punitive damages against Exxon to be paid [by mind-numbingly complex formulations] to the members of the plaintiff class ... in 1994. Exxon, true to its promise (hmm ... that is almost an oxy-moronic sentence, but it is accurate), appealed the case to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The trial court had ordered interest on the award at 6.9% until it was paid, so the fishermen and their lawyers weren't too bothered by Exxon's appeal to the 9th Circuit. Of course, that was because they expected to win it.
But that was just the beginning of the whittling and the incredible delays. Well, the delays didn't begin, they "continued". It had already taken five years after the spill to get a verdict in 1994. It took another seven (!) years (although no one seems to understand why) for the 9th Circuit to rule on it; throwing the verdict out as "excessive" in 2001 in the 9th Circuit Appellate decision 490 F.3d 1066.
The 9th Circuit sent it back ("remanded it") to trial court judge Holland for "reevaluation". Holland did a masterful job defending the initial verdict, but presumably to avoid directly contradicting the higher court and hoping that he would be able to end it once and for all, in December of 2002 he reinstated the punitives at four billion. Again ... we were expecting that it would get whittled at a bit. No one was greatly surprise nor greatly distressed. Indeed, we were proud of Judge Holland for sticking to his guns and not knocking it down much more substantially. The checks would soon be in the mail ... not.
Exxon marched it back to the 9th Circuit. The 9th Circuit sent it back to Holland saying, in effect "try again". Holland, to whom the fishermen should build a monument (if they had any money to build with which they don't), was close enough to retirement that he simply refused to be bullied. He knew that it was a fair verdict and that $4 billion was, if anything given Exxon's size, too small of an award! Thus he flatly refused to kow-tow to the judicial overlords and after drafting another masterful decision demonstrating the appropriateness of the existing award, in January of 2004 he reinstated it at $4 billion (plus the $2.25 billion in compensatories plus interest). When it comes time to build statues in Alaska he deserves one. Unfortunately, because his magnificent work was trashed by the appellate courts he won't get one. But he did exactly what the law and judges are supposed to do and he had the nerve to not back down to the power of the Appellate Justices when they "strongly suggested" that he change his mind (so that he would take much of the heat for a judgment that the Justices will, hopefully, be ashamed of for the rest of their lives). He refused to compromise his principles, beliefs or The Law, which the good judges of his generation truly believed to be an honorable thing. He believed in the concept of stare decisis upon which our entire legal foundation rests. He is the sort of judge that should have been promoted to the appellate courts.
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters -- Part 4
-AKA-
"We Don't Care. We Don't Have To Care. We're Exxon!"
During nearly 20 years of waiting (sometimes somewhat desperately) with several "we're going to be cutting checks in the next few weeks" over-optimisms along the way, the fishermen and other plaintiffs in the oil spill litigation never lost hope. I spoke to a great number of them during this time. Many "refused to think about it" because they didn't want to get their hopes up that they would soon be seeing money. Many thought the appeals process would result in a somewhat smaller award. But even the most hard-bitten and cynical of these independent, largely "have no use for government" weather-worn men and women of the world's most dangerous profession [commercial fishing in Alaska held that distinction for many years although modern safety mandates may now have dropped us below logging] still believed. We all believed that, although the wheels may grind slowly they would grind fairly and we would receive the bulk of our money. Particularly for those who died, and even those who went broke and bankrupt or faced other horrendous problems because of the delay in the interim, the phrase "justice delayed is justice denied" was often used.
But I don't believe in the entire 20 years speaking with hundreds of fishermen, claimants and lawyers, did I ever hear anyone suggest that they thought the jury award would ultimately be thrown out. Battered, bruised, a bit leaner ... yeah, we knew the jury verdict/award was in for a rough trip through the appellate process just from Exxon's arrogant pronouncements after the trial when the essentially flatly announced that it simply wasn't going to happen and they'd do whatever it takes to make sure of that. But for a group of people who you would think would be natural cynics and who would have the least faith in "the system" of any group outside of armed fortresses in Montana, the fishermen were remarkably confident that the system would, eventually, bring them justice (in the form of a substantial check!)
In June of 2008, in the case captioned Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, Supreme Court Case Number 07-219, the United States Supreme Court utterly destroyed that faith. They also utterly destroyed the entire concept of punitive damages as they had been understood for hundreds of years; and which were thus protections granted to the citizenry by the common law which protections were specifically enshrined in the U. S. Constitution. Although the award was only a pittance to Exxon [equal to ~three weeks of profit in 2006], it was a fortune to the largely ... "economically challenged" ... plaintiff class. The Court destroyed the fortunes of many in order to hand a pittance to a giant corporation. To do so they had to ignore the Constitution, the concepts of common law and the entire concept of punitive damages as it had always been known.
The money meant nothing in itself to a behemoth the size of Exxon, but the law that the case created succeeded beyond the wildest hopes of corporate boardrooms and insurance companies to behead the "punitive damage monster" which was one of the last protections against the malevolent acts of the corpocracy left to the people.
It is conservative chic now to be against punitive damages awards because the insurance companies have spend untold amounts of money to convince people (especially people in legislatures, government executive branches and those who sit on court benches, but the citizenry as well) that punitive damages caused the horrendous increases in insurance premiums. There is not a scintilla of truth to that and many studies have proven that there is no causal connection (other than by convincing people of it, the companies can get away with raising rates and have something to blame it on), or that punitive damage awards had (or have) any statistically substantive effect on either the percentage or actual amounts of money paid as damages. Even insurance companies don't really care about punitive damages. In fact, I would bet a bundle that they like having them in the states where they remain. Because the most profound connection between insurance companies and punitive damages is not in relation to how much insurance companies pay out in jury awards ... but rather as the "fall guy" for how large a premium they can get away with charging for their policies.
Yes ... I believe in the market. But insurance companies are so big and so collusive, and so tied into government, that they have, to a large extent, removed themselves from the actions of the market. That, again, is such a large topic there isn't room to deal with it adequately here. But conservatives ... Constitutional "strict constructionists" ... should be the last people in the world to want the government to intervene and yank yet one more set of protections that "the people" have and that were guaranteed by the Constitution. Those insurance company patsies are simply being used ... and unwittingly, used against their own core philosophies without being aware of it.
As noted earlier in this series, the jury awarded $5 billion dollars in punitive damages against Exxon to be paid [by mind-numbingly complex formulations] to the members of the plaintiff class ... in 1994. Exxon, true to its promise (hmm ... that is almost an oxy-moronic sentence, but it is accurate), appealed the case to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The trial court had ordered interest on the award at 6.9% until it was paid, so the fishermen and their lawyers weren't too bothered by Exxon's appeal to the 9th Circuit. Of course, that was because they expected to win it.
But that was just the beginning of the whittling and the incredible delays. Well, the delays didn't begin, they "continued". It had already taken five years after the spill to get a verdict in 1994. It took another seven (!) years (although no one seems to understand why) for the 9th Circuit to rule on it; throwing the verdict out as "excessive" in 2001 in the 9th Circuit Appellate decision 490 F.3d 1066.
The 9th Circuit sent it back ("remanded it") to trial court judge Holland for "reevaluation". Holland did a masterful job defending the initial verdict, but presumably to avoid directly contradicting the higher court and hoping that he would be able to end it once and for all, in December of 2002 he reinstated the punitives at four billion. Again ... we were expecting that it would get whittled at a bit. No one was greatly surprise nor greatly distressed. Indeed, we were proud of Judge Holland for sticking to his guns and not knocking it down much more substantially. The checks would soon be in the mail ... not.
Exxon marched it back to the 9th Circuit. The 9th Circuit sent it back to Holland saying, in effect "try again". Holland, to whom the fishermen should build a monument (if they had any money to build with which they don't), was close enough to retirement that he simply refused to be bullied. He knew that it was a fair verdict and that $4 billion was, if anything given Exxon's size, too small of an award! Thus he flatly refused to kow-tow to the judicial overlords and after drafting another masterful decision demonstrating the appropriateness of the existing award, in January of 2004 he reinstated it at $4 billion (plus the $2.25 billion in compensatories plus interest). When it comes time to build statues in Alaska he deserves one. Unfortunately, because his magnificent work was trashed by the appellate courts he won't get one. But he did exactly what the law and judges are supposed to do and he had the nerve to not back down to the power of the Appellate Justices when they "strongly suggested" that he change his mind (so that he would take much of the heat for a judgment that the Justices will, hopefully, be ashamed of for the rest of their lives). He refused to compromise his principles, beliefs or The Law, which the good judges of his generation truly believed to be an honorable thing. He believed in the concept of stare decisis upon which our entire legal foundation rests. He is the sort of judge that should have been promoted to the appellate courts.
He wasn't.
Why it took so long it seems impossible, in retrospect, to understand. But Exxon marched it back to the 9th Circuit and in January of 2006 claimed to the court that the award should be cut to $25 million! The plaintiff counsel and legal experts across the country were aghast, but reassuring. Virtually no one believed that it would get hammered further.
By this point, the IRS had special offices set up in Anchorage to make sure they got their cut of the substantial payments that even the IRS and other branches of the federal government believed would soon be forthcoming. In fact ... those special IRS offices had been set up for years. I don't know when they finally disbanded them. The law firm of Keller-Rohrback that had been appointed to handle the disbursing of the funds had their humongous data base system set up. Percentages for individual claimants had been argued about, fought about, hammered out and finally finalized. The arguments now were that Exxon should not be allowed to continually pointlessly delay the day of reckoning. So many of the original plaintiffs had died that it had become an abuse of process to continue to allow the delays.
But delay was the name of the game. Certainly Exxon in the oily blackness of its heart seemed to believe so. But, unbelievably, the 9th Circuit, after yet another set of mind-numbing procedural morasses, in December of 2006 essentially told the very Honorable Judge Holland (and the jury who devoted months of their lives to the case, the State of Alaska itself, and, most of all, those fishermen and others who had lost their livelihoods, their cultures and their ways of life) ... in the most polite terms descriptively plausible ... to "stuff it". On its own, the 9th Circuit simply bypassed Judge Holland and slashed the punitive damage award from $4 billion to $2.5 billion.
It was a mindlessly vicious thing to do and amounted to no less than outright theft.
Even though it was simple politically motivated theft that the "strict constructionists" of the Constitution have to make illogical exceptions for ... at least it was over. At least the checks would be in the mail soon. Keller-Rohrback did a test run of the plant sending the tiny compensatory damage checks to those who still "had some coming". With a sort of communal resigned sigh, the plaintiff class, litigants and attorneys both, accepted that half a loaf was better than nothing and that for the sake of closure, we needed to just accept it and get on with our lives. Exxon had already proven that justice delayed is justice denied (especially for the substantial percentage of claimants who had died over the intervening 17 years) and ... that Exxon had enough muscle that it could flex it and cause this delay and by doing so thereby making their point and proving it.
And then, in a move that shocked even the battle hardened veterans of this war; the attorneys who had fought and battled this fight for most of their careers and whose (substantial) law firms would barely break even if that after all they had gone through (and the public has a low opinion of lawyers? Well, now that I mention it I'm not very fond of the Exxon 3-piece suit goons, but the plaintiff lawyers went above and beyond) ... Exxon appealed the award to the U.S. Supreme Court. The reaction was mostly that everyone was infuriated. Plaintiffs' lead attorney, the awesome Brian O'Neill was literally "shocked". We all knew beyond any doubt that the United States of America's Supreme Court ... was not going to hear a drunk driving case.
It was just yet another delay tactic. But ... we reminded ourselves that we were at least getting 6.9% interest which at that time wasn't bad at all, and resigned to wait a few more months until the Supremes turned down the case. [Unlike many appeals, there is no appeal of right to the U.S. Supreme Court. They have absolute discretion on what cases to hear.]
Then there was a sound, a rustle in the wind, and oven doors opened wide and flames of the underworld leaped out. The Grinch stole Christmas once again. The Supremes actually decided to hear the case! It was absurd. It was beyond absurd. And every legal professor and scholar of note agreed. There was obviously no way that they were going to reduce the award further. Ahh. Perhaps this was a backhanded way of scolding the 9th Circuit for cheating the poor, the fisherfolk, the Native cultures, those who lived below the waterline [when the Titanic sank, the people in the expensive berths above the waterline almost all survived; those in the cheap berths below the waterline largely perished]. The 9th Circuit had wrongly ignored the jury, the judge and the law and had tossed those who lived below the waterline into the oiled ocean at the behest of one of the richest, most powerful corporations. Maybe we had it wrong. Maybe the Supremes were going to slap down the Grinch and we'd have Christmas after all.
We could wait another year. We'd waited this long.
17.12.08
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Trouble Waters -- Part 3
December 15, 2008
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters -- Part 3
-AKA-
Being Exxon Means You Never Have To Say You're Sorry
Oil ... $$$$$$$ ... Black Gold!
The centerpiece of international politics, wars and economics. A sizable portion of the world's population believes we are at war in Iraq because of it. A song that I quite enjoyed when there was a small handful of us loudly proclaiming that we would be nuts to go to war with Iraq; one that I copied and passed out freely before George W's "shock and awe", was entitled "How Did Our Oil Get Under Their Sand?".
We have it (oil ... we're a little light on the sand). Indeed, we have so much of it we can apparently afford to dump it in the ocean.
In the minds of most people when they think of oil, they envision the stuff they pour into their car engines. And, of course they are correct. That is refined motor oil. But crude oil, the unrefined hydrocarbon gunk that is pumped out of the ground and, at one time was attributed to decayed dinosaurs, is not something you'd want in your car. Nor in your boat. Nor in your fishing pots or nets. And most certainly not in the seafood meal at the fancy restaurant.
Nor is all oil the same; not even all crude oil. The oil that Captain Hazelwood and Exxon decided to return to nature had made a remarkable journey even before it so abruptly ended.
The oil had arrived in the port of Valdez after being pumped from deep, deep wells nearly a thousand miles to the north in Alaska's North Slope Prudhoe Bay fields and travelling completely across the state (which is the most difficult, by far, of all states to travel across) via one of the world's engineering and construction marvels: the Alaska pipeline. The Port of Valdez is a deep water port, ice free (by Alaskan terms) year round, and able to handle the giant oil tankers that transported the Black Gold to the energy starved world.
Alaskan oil [somehow appropriately] is heavy, tarry stuff that requires [like many Alaskans :-)] a lot more "refining" than most. It is not the clean "sweet" oil found in backyard wells in Texas. Nor is it the stuff that Jed Clampett could find bubbling up in his backyard woodlot. Our oil is thousands of feet below the surface and for whatever reason, largely decided to locate itself in some of the most inhospitable places on earth.
Alaska's North Slope holds vast reserves of oil. As anyone who has followed the news at any time in the last few decades knows, there is a terrific and ongoing battle regarding extraction from the ANWR portion of the North Slope between the Luddites who hide behind the much cooler sounding title "environmentalists" on one side and Sarah's "drill, baby, drill" contingent on the other. This topic deserves vastly more in-depth treatment than I can give it here, but may well be a follow-on column since oil is such a "hot" topic these days in any event.
I personally am in no hurry. Even if alternative energy forms were found and oil was essentially replaced as a fuel, it has sufficient other uses that it will always remain of high value. I'd just as soon leave it in the ground as a bank account for my grandchildren. My objections however have nothing to do with environmental concerns. There are none remaining of note. That is simply a phony excuse by the Luddites. The existing oil operations in the North Slope have had no negative environmental impact. The caribou and other wildlife seems quite attracted to the spectacle (face it ... they are bored with thousands of miles of featureless tundra as their lifetime view) and it has not had any negative effects on the environment whatsoever.
No ... the only time our Alaskan crude oil has harmed the environment was when a drunk sea captain decided to see if his boat was tougher than the rocks of Bligh Reef [it wasn't].
And that harm to the environment was real. It wasn't the "pretend harm" that the greenies use to scare people into opposing drilling. This was real harm. And it not only harmed the environment dramatically (twenty years later and it still hasn't recovered ... biological processes operate much more slowly in this cold climate), but it harmed, even more dramatically, the people who made their living off that environment. And those who made their living off the people who made their living off of the environment.
For those of you just joining us, the brief synopsis is that a drunken Captain (who Exxon had put through alcoholic rehab previously and absolutely knew that he had relapsed badly; indeed he couldn't legally drive even a car - his license was suspended for his third DUI since the rehab only a few years before the accident) was given command of a massive oil tanker and, without bothering to tell anyone, apparently tried to slip through a channel where no oil tanker belonged. And then, he and his bottle went down to his stateroom to do "paperwork" while leaving control of the vessel in the hands of a third mate who was not certified to run the tanker in Prince William Sound (PWS), although he was in the open ocean. For reasons that will never be known, it didn't make it. It appears that when they first scraped the reef a drunken Hazelwood staggered into the wheelhouse and screamed "hard right". Unfortunately he was drunk (and perhaps dyslexic?). If he'd yelled "hard left" we may never have heard of the Exxon Valdez.
As it was, it (in the Captain's inimitable slurred radio report) "fetched up" on the reef and was apparently leaking some ... cargo. That "hard right" caused unfathomable destruction of wildlife and pristine habitat. The spill killed an estimated 350,000 to 390,000 seabirds, in addition to 3,500 to 5,500 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, 22 killer whales and billions of salmon and herring eggs (along with countless other flora and fauna).
It also caused unfathomable loss and damage to those who lived there and were "married" to the land, the sea, and its abundant resources.
This happened in 1989.
No, I didn't mistype. My fingers didn't slip. I didn't get confused. It truly has taken nearly 20 years to pry any money out of them.
Let me give you a move visceral feeling for how long ago Exxon oiled us and then postponed the day of reckoning. In 1989, we had the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. On June 3 of that year, we also had the Tiananmen Square Massacure. Seems we've had several Chinese governments and entire major philosophy changes since then! :-)
The world moves right along unless you are Exxon with your foot on the brake.
Indeed, Alaska has only been a State for 50 years! For 20 of those we've been living with the never-ending saga of the Exxon Valdez.
In 1989, on November 9 ... the Berlin Wall fell. "No", you say, "that couldn't be! That was more like half a century ago." Well, the Exxon spill was 1/5 of a century ago. But yes ... before such major changes in the world ... the Exxon Valdez had already attempted to cut a new channel through Bligh reef.
In 1989, gasoline was $1.29 a gallon. The mimimum wage was $3.35. A dozen eggs were 96 cents; a loaf of bread, 69 cents! Oh and before serious competion with the internet which should have lowered it's price (!), the cost of a first class stamp was $.25!
It seems like it was a different age, a different era. And it was! Exxon managed to delay through the passing of years, decades, a century and a millenium. It is difficult to believe that the Supreme Court of 1989 (or 1994) would have sliced and diced the exemplary damages award so viciously. [Truefully, even though I understand that this Court is the most conservative in a very long time ... I still find it difficult to believe that even they would do ... what they did!]
Exxon is so big and so powerful and so unbelievably arrogant that they were able to "leverage" that power to keep the money out of the hands of the fishermen for all this time ... and Exxon has now succeeded in keeping most of the money out of the hands of the fishermen forever.
"The check's in the mail."
Exxon claimants [as all the prevailing plaintiffs in the Exxon-Valdez lawsuit are called] have been waiting nearly 20 years to hear those words; nearly 15 years since the jury verdict awarding us, in addition to modest compensatory damages, a $5 billion punitive damage award.
But, the checks aren't for anything close to that. Actually, ignoring interest [as Exxon still hopes to be able to do] and many other variables, we are roughly a decimal point off. In other words, if your share, according to the only people legally qualified to know and therefore to decide; the jurors, was say $100,000, then your "check" would be for ~$10,000. If the jury [and convoluted formulas that were subsequently applied] said your claim was worth $10,000, then your check is for ~$1,000.
And for this we waited 20 years?
Actually, the checks aren't in the mail yet. Presumably they will be soon.
The folks that will be receiving money in this first "round" are those claimants who had no issues of any sorts attached to their claims [eg: judgments against them, IRS liens, child support liens, probate issues (since so many of our original claimants have died), assignments (so many people were so broke they were forced to sell part or all of their Exxon claim to speculators for a small percentage of its worth. Of course, they may look like geniuses now ... , or other]; and had gone through all the stacks of paperwork properly and along the way filled out the proper forms to have the Claims Administrator [the law firm of Keller Rohrback] directly deposit the funds to their bank accounts.
But given the history of this situation, that's really close to "the check's are in the mail".
In 1994 a major trial was held in federal court with approximately 32,000 plaintiffs and a jury, who by all accounts took their job very seriously. After four weeks of testimony and argument and four days of significant deliberation and balancing Exxon's claim that they didn't deserve to be punished any further, primarily because of all the money they had already spent cleaning up their mess, against the reality of what happened, the jury concluded that Exxon needed to both finish reimbursing the actual "out of pocket or never in pocket" type losses (compensatory damages) which was never much at issue. It also made the finding of primary importance that Hazelwood AND Exxon were reckless (ie: "grossly negligent"). Although this point seemed unassailable and crystal clear to everyone but Exxon, it was so dear and the attorneys had fought so long and so hard to get to that point that the lead plaintiff attorney actually had tears when the announcement was made. He had done it.
The finding meant that Exxon was liable for punitive damages and, given the size of the company it was expected that they would be "significant" [the relevant standard being focused on company size and income since the purpose is "punishment" and an award of $10,000 might punish a small mom and pop, but wouldn't be noticeable to Exxon]. Generic formulations yielded nearly absurd results because Exxon was SO huge and profitable that in order for it to "feel" the punitive damages award, the number would have to be staggering.
If one wishes to swat a two year old child for doing something he shouldn't have, it doesn't take much to accomplish that goal. If you swat an elephant with the same force and power ... it would notice you no more than it would a mosquito. In fact, it would probably be more bothered by a mosquito.
Exxon was, and Exxon-Mobil is, an elephant compared even to other elephants.
Instead of shooting for an absurd number that would actually be fitting under the circumstances, plaintiff counsel determined to ask for something that, given Exxon's size, was clearly reasonable and, therefore, presumably appeal-proof. They asked for fifteen billion. The jury gave them five. This was far less than the purpose of punitive damages would dictate as it was but a small percentage of Exxon's annual profits and a pittance compared to Exxon's overall value. It may not have been something that Exxon could pay out of the petty cash annual party fund, but neither would it have a substantive negative effect on the company. This discrepancy (between the value of the award and the value and profits of Exxon) has only increased with time.
As Brian O'Neill, the plaintiff lead attorney said shortly after the initial verdict::
"With a company as large as Exxon that thinks it is above the law, you need to take a substantial bite out of their butt before they will change their behavior. We want to change Exxon. We want to make the Exxons of the world aware that they are responsible the same way that you and I are responsible. It is really a great day. It took five years to bring it about, but we got there."
Indeed, all that was true and for the first time in five years in some of the economically devastated towns and villages, it was the first day of sunshine in half a decade. Despite all the suffering, the loss of culture, the loss of livelihood, the psychic pain that could never be healed ... it was a large enough verdict that there was sunshine and some smiles again. Even though the award was fairly small in terms of the size of award compared to size of company that would be required for "punishment", Exxon was so huge that, in absolute terms, this was a tremendous award; it would arguably be the second highest sustained jury award on record.
There was only one little problem. The award was not sustained.
In a display of corporate arrogance unmatched in modern times (well, perhaps, other than Enron giving top management huge bonuses just before closing their doors), Exxon vowed that as a matter of principle, and because it thought that people should be grateful to it (for all the work it did cleaning up the spill) instead of suing it, it would make sure the fishermen and other plaintiffs never received anything anywhere close to an award of that magnitude.
Exxon succeeded beyond its wildest dreams and beyond the wildest nightmares of the plaintiffs and their attorneys. They made certain that the lesson for all to see was NOT that "the Exxons of the world were made aware that they are responsible the same way that you and I are responsible". Instead, Exxon set out to prove, and ultimately did so with resounding success that the Exxons of the world are NOT responsible the same way that you and I are responsible. They boldly and "in your face" demonstrated that O'Neill was absolutely correct in saying that Exxon believed that were above the law ... and they successfully proved that, indeed, they were.
There is an old African proverb that says: "When elephants play, the grass gets trampled." You have to give O'Neill and his firm credit though. They stuck with us the whole time and fought tooth and nail every inch of the way. It is a tragically sad commentary on our system that even with powerful law firms on our side, that we didn't manage to rise much above the level of the grass. The elephants in the world have gotten so big that there is almost nothing able to control them. They've been paying lobbyists for so long (and as we have been discovering in Alaska, the Big Oil boys have been cutting out the middle man when convenient and paying the legislators directly) that they managed, by the back door, to pack the courts as well.
At most ... we got up off the ground by sheer brute force and transformed ourselves from grass to mosquitoes.
We buzzed around them. We even bit them. But ultimately we had about as much effect as one would expect a mosquito to have in dealings with an elephant. We were naive. All of us, including the Federal District Court Judge Holland who maintained his honor by telling the 9th circuit to shove it when they ordered him to knock the punitives down. Our hot-shot lawyers were naive. The fishermen were naive. "Oh, come on ... the United States Supreme Court is not goin
g to take a drunk driving case!" Unless, that is, you have a Court that has been picked as they rose through the system by litmus test on such things as "tort reform", which is phony lingo for "taking away rights guaranteed by the U.S. Consitution but not admitting to it". 20 years of naivete. Even more than the money (and that is saying a fair bit), I think all of us on the side of right, truth and justice are more upset by a 20 year spanking than anything else. We are embarrassed that we actually believed our "judicial system" was in the business of dispensing justice. Even I fell for it and I had a Superior Court judge tell me once to always remember that the courts are in the business of judgments; not justice.
And that there was a huge difference between the two.
Which is something we have all now (even the most stubborn of us) finally learned.
Harken back to Brian O'Neills' statement following the verdict, above. This is what he said after the Supremes gutted it:
"I feel bad for all the claimants, that they're not going to get enough money to put together their lives again. I feel bad for all the claimants because they're not going to get the satisfaction knowing that there was a just punishment administered to Exxon. And I feel bad for all of the claimants because the judicial system has let them down. It just isn't fair."
Part 4 of This Series May be Viewed Here:
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters -- Part 3
-AKA-
Being Exxon Means You Never Have To Say You're Sorry
Oil ... $$$$$$$ ... Black Gold!
The centerpiece of international politics, wars and economics. A sizable portion of the world's population believes we are at war in Iraq because of it. A song that I quite enjoyed when there was a small handful of us loudly proclaiming that we would be nuts to go to war with Iraq; one that I copied and passed out freely before George W's "shock and awe", was entitled "How Did Our Oil Get Under Their Sand?".
We have it (oil ... we're a little light on the sand). Indeed, we have so much of it we can apparently afford to dump it in the ocean.
In the minds of most people when they think of oil, they envision the stuff they pour into their car engines. And, of course they are correct. That is refined motor oil. But crude oil, the unrefined hydrocarbon gunk that is pumped out of the ground and, at one time was attributed to decayed dinosaurs, is not something you'd want in your car. Nor in your boat. Nor in your fishing pots or nets. And most certainly not in the seafood meal at the fancy restaurant.
Nor is all oil the same; not even all crude oil. The oil that Captain Hazelwood and Exxon decided to return to nature had made a remarkable journey even before it so abruptly ended.
The oil had arrived in the port of Valdez after being pumped from deep, deep wells nearly a thousand miles to the north in Alaska's North Slope Prudhoe Bay fields and travelling completely across the state (which is the most difficult, by far, of all states to travel across) via one of the world's engineering and construction marvels: the Alaska pipeline. The Port of Valdez is a deep water port, ice free (by Alaskan terms) year round, and able to handle the giant oil tankers that transported the Black Gold to the energy starved world.
Alaskan oil [somehow appropriately] is heavy, tarry stuff that requires [like many Alaskans :-)] a lot more "refining" than most. It is not the clean "sweet" oil found in backyard wells in Texas. Nor is it the stuff that Jed Clampett could find bubbling up in his backyard woodlot. Our oil is thousands of feet below the surface and for whatever reason, largely decided to locate itself in some of the most inhospitable places on earth.
Alaska's North Slope holds vast reserves of oil. As anyone who has followed the news at any time in the last few decades knows, there is a terrific and ongoing battle regarding extraction from the ANWR portion of the North Slope between the Luddites who hide behind the much cooler sounding title "environmentalists" on one side and Sarah's "drill, baby, drill" contingent on the other. This topic deserves vastly more in-depth treatment than I can give it here, but may well be a follow-on column since oil is such a "hot" topic these days in any event.
I personally am in no hurry. Even if alternative energy forms were found and oil was essentially replaced as a fuel, it has sufficient other uses that it will always remain of high value. I'd just as soon leave it in the ground as a bank account for my grandchildren. My objections however have nothing to do with environmental concerns. There are none remaining of note. That is simply a phony excuse by the Luddites. The existing oil operations in the North Slope have had no negative environmental impact. The caribou and other wildlife seems quite attracted to the spectacle (face it ... they are bored with thousands of miles of featureless tundra as their lifetime view) and it has not had any negative effects on the environment whatsoever.
No ... the only time our Alaskan crude oil has harmed the environment was when a drunk sea captain decided to see if his boat was tougher than the rocks of Bligh Reef [it wasn't].
And that harm to the environment was real. It wasn't the "pretend harm" that the greenies use to scare people into opposing drilling. This was real harm. And it not only harmed the environment dramatically (twenty years later and it still hasn't recovered ... biological processes operate much more slowly in this cold climate), but it harmed, even more dramatically, the people who made their living off that environment. And those who made their living off the people who made their living off of the environment.
For those of you just joining us, the brief synopsis is that a drunken Captain (who Exxon had put through alcoholic rehab previously and absolutely knew that he had relapsed badly; indeed he couldn't legally drive even a car - his license was suspended for his third DUI since the rehab only a few years before the accident) was given command of a massive oil tanker and, without bothering to tell anyone, apparently tried to slip through a channel where no oil tanker belonged. And then, he and his bottle went down to his stateroom to do "paperwork" while leaving control of the vessel in the hands of a third mate who was not certified to run the tanker in Prince William Sound (PWS), although he was in the open ocean. For reasons that will never be known, it didn't make it. It appears that when they first scraped the reef a drunken Hazelwood staggered into the wheelhouse and screamed "hard right". Unfortunately he was drunk (and perhaps dyslexic?). If he'd yelled "hard left" we may never have heard of the Exxon Valdez.
As it was, it (in the Captain's inimitable slurred radio report) "fetched up" on the reef and was apparently leaking some ... cargo. That "hard right" caused unfathomable destruction of wildlife and pristine habitat. The spill killed an estimated 350,000 to 390,000 seabirds, in addition to 3,500 to 5,500 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, 22 killer whales and billions of salmon and herring eggs (along with countless other flora and fauna).
It also caused unfathomable loss and damage to those who lived there and were "married" to the land, the sea, and its abundant resources.
This happened in 1989.
No, I didn't mistype. My fingers didn't slip. I didn't get confused. It truly has taken nearly 20 years to pry any money out of them.
Let me give you a move visceral feeling for how long ago Exxon oiled us and then postponed the day of reckoning. In 1989, we had the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. On June 3 of that year, we also had the Tiananmen Square Massacure. Seems we've had several Chinese governments and entire major philosophy changes since then! :-)
The world moves right along unless you are Exxon with your foot on the brake.
Indeed, Alaska has only been a State for 50 years! For 20 of those we've been living with the never-ending saga of the Exxon Valdez.
In 1989, on November 9 ... the Berlin Wall fell. "No", you say, "that couldn't be! That was more like half a century ago." Well, the Exxon spill was 1/5 of a century ago. But yes ... before such major changes in the world ... the Exxon Valdez had already attempted to cut a new channel through Bligh reef.
In 1989, gasoline was $1.29 a gallon. The mimimum wage was $3.35. A dozen eggs were 96 cents; a loaf of bread, 69 cents! Oh and before serious competion with the internet which should have lowered it's price (!), the cost of a first class stamp was $.25!
It seems like it was a different age, a different era. And it was! Exxon managed to delay through the passing of years, decades, a century and a millenium. It is difficult to believe that the Supreme Court of 1989 (or 1994) would have sliced and diced the exemplary damages award so viciously. [Truefully, even though I understand that this Court is the most conservative in a very long time ... I still find it difficult to believe that even they would do ... what they did!]
Exxon is so big and so powerful and so unbelievably arrogant that they were able to "leverage" that power to keep the money out of the hands of the fishermen for all this time ... and Exxon has now succeeded in keeping most of the money out of the hands of the fishermen forever.
"The check's in the mail."
Exxon claimants [as all the prevailing plaintiffs in the Exxon-Valdez lawsuit are called] have been waiting nearly 20 years to hear those words; nearly 15 years since the jury verdict awarding us, in addition to modest compensatory damages, a $5 billion punitive damage award.
But, the checks aren't for anything close to that. Actually, ignoring interest [as Exxon still hopes to be able to do] and many other variables, we are roughly a decimal point off. In other words, if your share, according to the only people legally qualified to know and therefore to decide; the jurors, was say $100,000, then your "check" would be for ~$10,000. If the jury [and convoluted formulas that were subsequently applied] said your claim was worth $10,000, then your check is for ~$1,000.
And for this we waited 20 years?
Actually, the checks aren't in the mail yet. Presumably they will be soon.
The folks that will be receiving money in this first "round" are those claimants who had no issues of any sorts attached to their claims [eg: judgments against them, IRS liens, child support liens, probate issues (since so many of our original claimants have died), assignments (so many people were so broke they were forced to sell part or all of their Exxon claim to speculators for a small percentage of its worth. Of course, they may look like geniuses now ... , or other]; and had gone through all the stacks of paperwork properly and along the way filled out the proper forms to have the Claims Administrator [the law firm of Keller Rohrback] directly deposit the funds to their bank accounts.
But given the history of this situation, that's really close to "the check's are in the mail".
In 1994 a major trial was held in federal court with approximately 32,000 plaintiffs and a jury, who by all accounts took their job very seriously. After four weeks of testimony and argument and four days of significant deliberation and balancing Exxon's claim that they didn't deserve to be punished any further, primarily because of all the money they had already spent cleaning up their mess, against the reality of what happened, the jury concluded that Exxon needed to both finish reimbursing the actual "out of pocket or never in pocket" type losses (compensatory damages) which was never much at issue. It also made the finding of primary importance that Hazelwood AND Exxon were reckless (ie: "grossly negligent"). Although this point seemed unassailable and crystal clear to everyone but Exxon, it was so dear and the attorneys had fought so long and so hard to get to that point that the lead plaintiff attorney actually had tears when the announcement was made. He had done it.
The finding meant that Exxon was liable for punitive damages and, given the size of the company it was expected that they would be "significant" [the relevant standard being focused on company size and income since the purpose is "punishment" and an award of $10,000 might punish a small mom and pop, but wouldn't be noticeable to Exxon]. Generic formulations yielded nearly absurd results because Exxon was SO huge and profitable that in order for it to "feel" the punitive damages award, the number would have to be staggering.
If one wishes to swat a two year old child for doing something he shouldn't have, it doesn't take much to accomplish that goal. If you swat an elephant with the same force and power ... it would notice you no more than it would a mosquito. In fact, it would probably be more bothered by a mosquito.
Exxon was, and Exxon-Mobil is, an elephant compared even to other elephants.
Instead of shooting for an absurd number that would actually be fitting under the circumstances, plaintiff counsel determined to ask for something that, given Exxon's size, was clearly reasonable and, therefore, presumably appeal-proof. They asked for fifteen billion. The jury gave them five. This was far less than the purpose of punitive damages would dictate as it was but a small percentage of Exxon's annual profits and a pittance compared to Exxon's overall value. It may not have been something that Exxon could pay out of the petty cash annual party fund, but neither would it have a substantive negative effect on the company. This discrepancy (between the value of the award and the value and profits of Exxon) has only increased with time.
As Brian O'Neill, the plaintiff lead attorney said shortly after the initial verdict::
"With a company as large as Exxon that thinks it is above the law, you need to take a substantial bite out of their butt before they will change their behavior. We want to change Exxon. We want to make the Exxons of the world aware that they are responsible the same way that you and I are responsible. It is really a great day. It took five years to bring it about, but we got there."
Indeed, all that was true and for the first time in five years in some of the economically devastated towns and villages, it was the first day of sunshine in half a decade. Despite all the suffering, the loss of culture, the loss of livelihood, the psychic pain that could never be healed ... it was a large enough verdict that there was sunshine and some smiles again. Even though the award was fairly small in terms of the size of award compared to size of company that would be required for "punishment", Exxon was so huge that, in absolute terms, this was a tremendous award; it would arguably be the second highest sustained jury award on record.
There was only one little problem. The award was not sustained.
In a display of corporate arrogance unmatched in modern times (well, perhaps, other than Enron giving top management huge bonuses just before closing their doors), Exxon vowed that as a matter of principle, and because it thought that people should be grateful to it (for all the work it did cleaning up the spill) instead of suing it, it would make sure the fishermen and other plaintiffs never received anything anywhere close to an award of that magnitude.
Exxon succeeded beyond its wildest dreams and beyond the wildest nightmares of the plaintiffs and their attorneys. They made certain that the lesson for all to see was NOT that "the Exxons of the world were made aware that they are responsible the same way that you and I are responsible". Instead, Exxon set out to prove, and ultimately did so with resounding success that the Exxons of the world are NOT responsible the same way that you and I are responsible. They boldly and "in your face" demonstrated that O'Neill was absolutely correct in saying that Exxon believed that were above the law ... and they successfully proved that, indeed, they were.
There is an old African proverb that says: "When elephants play, the grass gets trampled." You have to give O'Neill and his firm credit though. They stuck with us the whole time and fought tooth and nail every inch of the way. It is a tragically sad commentary on our system that even with powerful law firms on our side, that we didn't manage to rise much above the level of the grass. The elephants in the world have gotten so big that there is almost nothing able to control them. They've been paying lobbyists for so long (and as we have been discovering in Alaska, the Big Oil boys have been cutting out the middle man when convenient and paying the legislators directly) that they managed, by the back door, to pack the courts as well.
At most ... we got up off the ground by sheer brute force and transformed ourselves from grass to mosquitoes.
We buzzed around them. We even bit them. But ultimately we had about as much effect as one would expect a mosquito to have in dealings with an elephant. We were naive. All of us, including the Federal District Court Judge Holland who maintained his honor by telling the 9th circuit to shove it when they ordered him to knock the punitives down. Our hot-shot lawyers were naive. The fishermen were naive. "Oh, come on ... the United States Supreme Court is not goin
g to take a drunk driving case!" Unless, that is, you have a Court that has been picked as they rose through the system by litmus test on such things as "tort reform", which is phony lingo for "taking away rights guaranteed by the U.S. Consitution but not admitting to it". 20 years of naivete. Even more than the money (and that is saying a fair bit), I think all of us on the side of right, truth and justice are more upset by a 20 year spanking than anything else. We are embarrassed that we actually believed our "judicial system" was in the business of dispensing justice. Even I fell for it and I had a Superior Court judge tell me once to always remember that the courts are in the business of judgments; not justice. And that there was a huge difference between the two.
Which is something we have all now (even the most stubborn of us) finally learned.
Harken back to Brian O'Neills' statement following the verdict, above. This is what he said after the Supremes gutted it:
"I feel bad for all the claimants, that they're not going to get enough money to put together their lives again. I feel bad for all the claimants because they're not going to get the satisfaction knowing that there was a just punishment administered to Exxon. And I feel bad for all of the claimants because the judicial system has let them down. It just isn't fair."
Part 4 of This Series May be Viewed Here:
16.12.08
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Trouble Waters -- Part 2
December 13, 2008
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters -- Part 2
-AKA-
"The Wreck of the Exxon Valdez"
By: Captain Heavyfoot
[With apologies to Gordon Lightfoot :-)]
The legend lives on from the fishers on down,
Of the Big Sound 'twas made in Prince William.
The ocean, it's said, was their butter and bread,
But oil tar on the sandwich just killed 'em.
Tanks topped with black crude, and with vodka home-brewed,
The famed Exxon-Valdez was quite loaded.
The Captain was too, yet silent his crew,
When they poured both the Captain and cargo aboard her.
Captain Hazelwood had been drinking at two separate bars or more prior to their scheduled departure. There
was sworn testimony that he had consumed at least five double-vodkas (enough to knock out anyone who wasn't an alcoholic). He didn't get even a breathalzyer test until 11 hours after the accident, but working backwards from the booze in his blood at that time they calculated that at the time of the accident he was three times the legal limit for driving a car.
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters -- Part 2
-AKA-
"The Wreck of the Exxon Valdez"
By: Captain Heavyfoot
[With apologies to Gordon Lightfoot :-)]
The legend lives on from the fishers on down,
Of the Big Sound 'twas made in Prince William.
The ocean, it's said, was their butter and bread,
But oil tar on the sandwich just killed 'em.
Tanks topped with black crude, and with vodka home-brewed,
The famed Exxon-Valdez was quite loaded.
The Captain was too, yet silent his crew,
When they poured both the Captain and cargo aboard her.
Captain Hazelwood had been drinking at two separate bars or more prior to their scheduled departure. There
was sworn testimony that he had consumed at least five double-vodkas (enough to knock out anyone who wasn't an alcoholic). He didn't get even a breathalzyer test until 11 hours after the accident, but working backwards from the booze in his blood at that time they calculated that at the time of the accident he was three times the legal limit for driving a car.Indeed, he wasn't licensed to drive a car ... his license had been suspended for (yet another) DUI. He had completed a rehab program three or four years before the accident and had wracked up three or four DUIs in that period of time! Not only were his superiors aware that he had badly relapsed, but they had actually been drinking with him not long before the accident!
In any event, shortly after the Exxon Valdez pulled away from the dock at 9:12 p.m. and having successfully passed through the Valdez Narrows, the master pilot who was specially hired for such tasks, left the ship. It was a beautiful evening on the water. The seas were calm, visibility was good and the ship had all the latest and most sophisticated of navigation equipment. The official story was that there were icebergs in the normal shipping lanes, so Captain Hazelwood instructed the man at the wheel to take the ship slightly outside the shipping lanes and around the ice. Experts agreed however that such story simply didn't hold together -- they were too far off course with too many ways, both through equipment and visual observation, to not be able to tell.
In fact, it was apparent that they weren't just skirting an iceberg or two, but indeed, whether to avoid icebergs or to make up lost time, or just to shorten the voyage, they almost certainly attempted to follow the old steamship passage and "shoot the gap" between Bligh Reef and Reef Island. This is an incredibly dangerous maneuver for a ship the size of an oil tanker. Authorities at the time likened it to flying under the Golden Gate Bridge. Yes, it can be done. Yes, it has been done before. But it is dangerous and absolutely not recommended nor approved. (There were rumors that for years tankers had snuck through there on occasion but no one had ever actually caught them at it. It was universally agreed, however, that such would be a stupid and dangerous maneuver.) Even so, at that point, Hazelwood then left the bridge in the control of a third mate and was down in his cabin "doing paperwork" through this trickiest part of the passage.
Neither Exxon nor Hazelwood ever admitted that was what they were attempting. The normal shipping lanes out there are extremely wide, deep and forgiving. Anyone could drive a tanker through that part of the journey. But they were over a mile and a half outside the shipping lanes and just barely missed the shortcut gap. Either they were horrendously screwed up (to be a mile and a half off course) which makes no sense, or that is exactly what they were trying.
The poor crewman left at the wheel didn't know what to do. Indeed Third Mate Gregory Cousins was not even certified to operate a ship in PWS and, indeed, it was flatly illegal for him to be at the wheel. (Of course it was also illegal for Hazelwood to be drunk!) It was widely reported at the time although such reports dropped out of sight quickly, that Hazelwood had put the ship on autopilot and instructed Cousins to contact him when they reached a certain point. Despite the fact that this was known as a treacherous area for large vessels; and that they were operating outside the normal shipping lanes, there were no guide boats or tugs and purportedly no one but a rudimentary computer was directing the massive ship. No one who wasn't there knows for sure what actually happened that night. There were also reports that a drunk Hazelwood had made his way back to the bridge and ordered a "hard right" when he should have ordered a "hard left". That isn't the official story either, but the micro-computer in the auto pilot was at least sober and probably would have been the preferred option to the drunk captain. Even so, "computer" is too fancy of a concept for it. The computer you are using to read this article is hundreds of times more intelligent.
If true, one of the largest a 211,500 ton, 988 foot long, fully loaded oil tanker was being controlled by a machine with the approximate I.Q. of a fancy toaster.
And it went crunch.
It shuddered to a halt, engines still running full bore driving it further into the "sandbar" as Exxon likes to call the rocks of the well-charted Bligh Reef that ripped the thin single hull like a sardine can. In the version of the story where he hadn't already made it to the bridge yelling "hard right", Hazelwood stumbled to the bridge, uttered a few choice words, and then tried "rocking" the huge vessel off the rocks by jamming it full throttle forward, full throttle reverse, as you might try to drive you car out of a mudhole. Unlike your car and the mudhole, however, these manuevers acted to rip the holes in the hull much wider and allow much more oil to escape than would have otherwise. Finally, after failing to dislodge it and after the crew inspected things, he slurred into the radio that they had "fetched up" on a reef and were "evidently leaking" some of their cargo.
Truer understatements were seldom more understated.
The "little bit" of "cargo" that leaked was nearly 11 million gallons of tarry black Alaskan crude oil. It fouled 1300 miles of mostly pristine Alaska shoreline and covered 11,000 square feet of ocean.
Although there is a minor error or two, this is an excellent dynamic one-page pictoral "overview" of PWS and the spill.
Part 3 of This Series May be Viewed Here:
14.12.08
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters
December 11, 2008
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters
-AKA-
Why Exactly Is It That They Call It "Good" Friday?
Alaskans are a bit leery of Good Friday. First of all, the Christians have never exactly explained what is so good about the day that Jesus was killed and buried. But more particularly in this State, we've come to be distrustful of the date of that occasion! Possibly the two most major disasters in recorded Alaskan history were the "Good Friday earthquake" of 1964 and the "Good Friday grounding of the Exxon Valdez" in 1989.
Which brings us to the "Big News" of the last few days for many folks around these parts. The first "micro-checks" started showing up from that semi-mythical creature known as the "Exxon claims". This is the first money fishermen have seen from the 1994 jury determination to punish Exxon for deciding to let a known-to-the-company drunk command a massive ship full of oil through tight narrows, ship-lane clogging icebergs, reefs, shoals and rocks, at night.
Unfortunately there are two problems with the funds (not actually checks yet) that are finally arriving. Well, three if you count the cause.
Problem 1: They are at least 15 years late in arriving;
Problem 2: They are at least a decimal place too small; and
Problem 3: They demonstrate that our system of justice has been sold to the highest bidder. And the American citizenry didn't win the bid.
This "market effect" of the news of the spill did substantial economic damage to many fishermen far away from the oiled fishing areas; but they had no apparent "standing" to bring a claim against Exxon even though the effects of Exxon's actions harmed them greatly. Again, many of these folks lost their livelihoods --their businesses -- because of Exxon.
Fishing is always a a gamble; sometimes a great single day can bring substantial revenue (my Mom always claimed that commercial fishing ruined more good men than drink did :-), but mostly the margins are very tight and a single major event (such as the Exxon caused price crash) can "sink" the business. It is of note that Alaska salmon prices have never again approached the prices that they fetched before Exxon took the mystique out of "from Alaska's pristine waters". The state has even tried setting up its own marketing department to attempt to bring back the "image" of the "brand". But now, when people hear "Alaska wild salmon" the picture they conjure is as likely to be of black, oiled waters as it is of pristine nature.] Oh ... I must get in a plug for the fisherfolks' product! Many recent studies have shown that Alaska caught salmon are indeed clean and as toxin-free as any in the world and, overall, perhaps the healthiest fish you can eat (salmon oil is nearly a miracle drug).
It is possible to calculate some of those direct damages and make educated guesses as to how much money the fishermen lost that summer. But it was not, and still is not, possible to accurately determine the long-term effects of the destruction of habitat . Entire eco-systems crashed with unknowable results. One example out of hundreds; perhaps thousands:
Murres are noisy, dirty, raucous birds that have never found a market value. There were, at the most optimistic, up to 350,000 in the area of PWS at the time of the spill. 16,600 were reported dead. "Reported dead" means that the bodies were actually recovered. Although the experts certainly all took their shots ... it is anyone's guess what percentage of the birds that died had bodies that were actually recovered. Some say the actual death rate should be calculated to be six times larger than the number of bodies recovered. Others said at least ten times. But no one knows. And no one knows how many died later because their food was killed, destroyed, removed ... or, in the spring when they fed their babies, poisoned.
What is the value of that devastation of the murre population? Exxon's lawyers say that in terms of financial damages ... the number is zero; and that therefore Exxon should not have to pay anything for having caused such widespread destruction.
Exxon did dump money into the (probably more harm than good) "cleanup" and in extremely modest "negotiated fines" from the State (not much in comparison to the damages they did, according
to the jury and essentially everyone who wasn't on the payroll of Exxon or some other multinational corporation). Even their insurance companies sued them claiming it was just a P.R. ploy! To this day the argument continues as to whether the cleanup did any good (beyond its obvious P.R. value which did Exxon potentially billions of dollars of good). Oiled rocks were laboriously washed by hand ... and then set back down on the beach beneath which .............~~~~~Scrubbing Rocks By Hand Foolishness~~~~~............. lurked huge piles of oil which surfaced randomly over the next couple of decades and is still doing so today. They used harsh chemicals which killed more of the life at the bottom of the food chain [which ultimately killed, and continues to kill, the life at the top of the food chain as well which included the "life of a fisherman in PWS"]. They used scalding hot water which killed corals and shellfish. No one knew what to do, or even who was "in charge", so no one knew who was to tell them what to tell them to do and what not to do ... the answers to which no one seemed to know in any event.
There are now salmon fisheries in the Sound although they can't be described as "recovered". The herring largely disappeared.
They may as well have put models in swimsuits out there it was so obviously for P.R. show!
It has never been easy to live the life of a fisherman in a small Alaskan fishing village. The hardships are tremendous. But the rewards of the lifestyle were of such a value that most people would never be able to experience or even understand. It is very difficult for, say, Supreme Court Justices who live in gated, gardened and guarded subdivisions and work in fancy air conditioned offices in the urban East to have any understanding of the value of this lifestyle for the people who (sometimes overcoming tremendous obstacles) have chosen it.
To be an Alaskan fisherman has such magnetic [it attracts men and women made of steel :-)] romance! It is a true dearly held dream of so very many people in the world. To be one of the last "free people" answerable to no one but your God if you have one and dependent upon no one and no thing except Nature, is such a rarity (and like so many dreams, not entirely accurate). But there is something magical about a life spent living off what nature provides; being among the last of the hunter/gatherers. Kids in cities watch the "Perfect Storm" and read about green, untrained deck hands on the boats of crab fishermen who, because they have to risk that sort of thrilling danger (and because the King Crab is such an expensive delicacy) can make $30,000 or more in a college summer vacation ... and look out the window at the soot-stained dirty gray of the city and dream the age-old dream. Few of course succeed at making their dream live. It is a long trip from New York desk jockey to Kodiak fisherman and I'm not referring to miles. Those that make it are the ones to whom its value is incalculable.
Pinned to my wall I have a small yellowed newspaper clipping. I don't know who wrote it. I do remember that the article was about the unique possiblities of the Last Frontier:
"The trapper, the miner, the commercial fishermen -- are free agents -- they dictate their own hours, direct their own labors, and when it suits them, tell people to go to hell."
To be part of that ... probably very close to the last generation for whom such is even possible means the difference between a life lived and an existence endured for many more than achieve it. It is not an easy lifestyle! Besides the backbreaking hard physical work, one must pay a substantial amount of money to get into the business. You must buy a boat or beach-site, fishing gear including nets, skiffs (on the beach, the boats they use to pick fish from are called "dories"), a fisheries permit for the fishery you wish to participate in [some permits for some fisheries sold for nearly $1 million before the spill!]. And on a bad year ... when the fish don't show or the weather was too bad to fish during the very short "height" of the run or the Fish and Game closes the fishery at the wrong time based on poor data or the boat didn't start on the "big day" (sometimes an entire season comes down to a single one-day "period" where you might make half of your income for the entire summer) or you ran it onto a sand bar through stupidity and lack of sleep when leaving the harbor at 3 a.m. or any number of other possible "things that can go wrong"... you don't make any money. It was a major struggle to "make it" in that life before the spill. Afterwards, in many parts of the state, it largely became impossible.
With no income, many fisherfolk who valued their rugged independent lifestyle had to move to the city, to Anchorage, and take desk jobs to survive. Some left the State where they were born and/or planned on living out the remainder of their lives. Some, in a personal shame that will haunt them all their lives and that the beggers of Telegraph Avenue would be incapable of comprehending, accepted handouts. First from churches and charities, later ... foodstamps and welfare. And they broke inside. And their children watch them break inside. Something far more valuable than money was lost that summer.
Yet money was the only thing the courts or anyone else could offer in exchange for what had been so rudely and stupidly taken by the foul recklessness of an oil company that simply didn't care enough to take the most basic precautions; and a captain who found the contents of a pint bottle far more important than 200,000 tons of oil.
It took Exxon nearly 20 years. Two decades of constant effort. But they succeeded at ensuring that not only did they not replace the irreplaceable. But they ensured that they wouldn't have to pay the people whose livelihood ... whose pristine thousands of miles of "front yard" had been destroyed ... any substantive amounts of money as punishment for their actions. Could a giant international globalist corporation that earned net profits of over $5 billion a year [now, 20 years later, closer to $5 billion a month] buy "justice" ... or would America and its wonderful long history of an independent court system that treats the rich and poor alike prevail?
It took 20 years. But at last, we now have the answer.
Part 2 of This Series May be Viewed Here:
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters
-AKA-
Why Exactly Is It That They Call It "Good" Friday?
Alaskans are a bit leery of Good Friday. First of all, the Christians have never exactly explained what is so good about the day that Jesus was killed and buried. But more particularly in this State, we've come to be distrustful of the date of that occasion! Possibly the two most major disasters in recorded Alaskan history were the "Good Friday earthquake" of 1964 and the "Good Friday grounding of the Exxon Valdez" in 1989.
Which brings us to the "Big News" of the last few days for many folks around these parts. The first "micro-checks" started showing up from that semi-mythical creature known as the "Exxon claims". This is the first money fishermen have seen from the 1994 jury determination to punish Exxon for deciding to let a known-to-the-company drunk command a massive ship full of oil through tight narrows, ship-lane clogging icebergs, reefs, shoals and rocks, at night.
Unfortunately there are two problems with the funds (not actually checks yet) that are finally arriving. Well, three if you count the cause.
Problem 1: They are at least 15 years late in arriving;
Problem 2: They are at least a decimal place too small; and
Problem 3: They demonstrate that our system of justice has been sold to the highest bidder. And the American citizenry didn't win the bid.
The "Wreck of the Exxon Valdez" has been written about enough to begin to wonder if all the trees cut to make paper for the books, newspapers and magazines are adding substantively to the environmental damage caused by the "accident". That said:
"Critics ranked in serried rows,
Fill the enormous plaza full.
But there is only one who knows,
And that's the man who fights the bull."
Not many of the accounts are written by individuals who were [or would have been (!)] commercial fishermen in 1989 who were beached for the summer due to the oil spill.
I, however, am one of those fishermen.
Indeed, I'm fairly well connected with the fishing community. My father was an Alaskan commercial fisherman. My grandfather was an Alaskan commercial fisherman! [I'm one of very few people who has no Native blood that can make that claim; and one of a tiny handful of folks over the age of 50 that can! :-)] I was fishing (captaining) a "cannery boat" before I was of legal age to work most of the jobs in the cannery (and making vastly more money than my high school classmates who were working the brutally exhausting and wretchedly slimy cannery jobs and hating me! :-) My brothers, uncles, cousins ... and every other legal and illegal relationship possible, including my wife ... were (and/or are) commercial fisherfolk. I know a great number of the Exxon claimants. I know many of the lawyers who represented them. I am very well acquainted with the law. I have followed this fascinating debacle for two decades and been intimately involved in parts of it. I believe that I can shed light in places and on issues in ways it hasn't previously been shed. I can't think of anyone more qualified to write about it from my particular unique perspective than myself! :-)
And so I shall.
The Exxon-Valdez, a single-hulled [ie: cheaper] oil tanker, didn't make it
that night (actually, slightly after midnight on the morning of) March 24, 1989. The so appropriately named tanker run and owned by Exxon was attempting to leave Valdez, a little town in Prince William Sound ("PWS") which was, the day before, one of the most beautiful, scenic and pristine bays in the world. It was not only an unfortunate place, but also an unfortunate date as it was only shortly before the commercial, sport and "guided sport" fishing seasons started in the Sound in earnest.
Captain "Slam Drunk" Hazelwood wasn't even on the bridge. He was already inebriated before the ship ever left harbor; having ("reasonably" if you are an Exxon lawyer) spent the time while it was being loaded doing the same to himself at two local bars. The report that he had ordered a double shot of "exxon on the rocks" has been widely discredited.
His crew and other Exxon employees finished loading the sloshing oil and the sloshed Captain on board without finding any problems worth reporting regarding either.
Yeah, yeah, they just wanted to keep their jobs and he was the Captain after all. As employees of the ultimate corporate bureaucratic behemoth no one wanted to, shall we say, "rock the boat". Exxon liked to keep problems quiet, follow the "chain of command", demand and reward "loyalty" as defined by the company, and already knew Hazelwood was a drunk. Why risk your job going over the lolling head of your Captain to report that he had to be poured aboard once again?
"Just following orders", the phrase and concept made famous in the Nuremberg trials, is as robust as ever. It seems to me that a "responsible corporate citizen", yet another multiply self-contradictory phrase, indeed in competition for oxymoronic fame, that Alice can add to her pre-breakfast belief menu, would perhaps terminate (aka: "fire") crew persons who failed report that the Captain was drunk, especially given the potential for horrendous damage if the vessel was not intelligently, even wisely, captained through the Sound. But that isn't the way Exxon works. I have little doubt that the "just keep our mouths shut and hope to hold onto the job until retirement" employees were absolutely correct that it was in their personal best interests to "look the other way" (and not listen or smell either) when the Captain was ... loaded, in several meanings of the word.
It destroyed ecosystems and habitat. It played destructive havoc with important renewable commercial fishing and harvesting resources. [In Alaska a huge percentage of our revenue comes from oil and we are not raising and killing any new dinosaurs; it is a critical value of the fishing industries that they are renewable. Properly managed ... and absent massive oil spills, the salmon and herring and other should continue returning and reproducing in vast quantities for the foreseeable future.]
Fisheries were closed as giant sheets of black oil spread like ink across the waters. For nearly three calm and peaceful days Exxon's [and soon the State's and anyone else's that could be found] cleanup crews, equipment and operations put floating booms around the ship to try to contain the oil while they held meetings. There were ideas and suggestions. "Burn it! Just toss a match over board!" ... "Bacteria are the answer. They can be designed and 'trained' to 'eat' oil!" ... "Chemicals are the only answer. Neutralize it, break it down, destroy it." and on and on until the seas stopped taking a holiday. Many "experts" from out-of-state didn't truly understand the wilds of the Alaskan ocean. The wind arose mightily pushing the floating oil through, over and under the booms like they were child's toys. It drove the oil to the sands and rocks of the shore.
"And that it was buried, and the waves rose again on the third day according to the scriptures."
Ok. So maybe the scriptures weren't involved. But it was becoming a disaster of Biblical proportions. Fishermen pulled crab pots full of black oily tar; and crabs that were covered in it. They pulled shrimp pots so tarred that the fishing boats that they carried them back to shore on were condemned ... the boats were too badly oiled to ever carry "foodstuffs" again. The salmon and herring fishermen looked at the waters where they would have, in so much the same way that Jesus's disciples did 2,000 years earlier, cast their nets ... and saw the waters covered with black oozing goo. The fisheries in the Sound were closed costing the communities that had little else in the way of income, their entire year's earnings. It would have been pointless to let them fish. The market for Alaska seafoods had disappeared overnight.
This "market effect" of the news of the spill did substantial economic damage to many fishermen far away from the oiled fishing areas; but they had no apparent "standing" to bring a claim against Exxon even though the effects of Exxon's actions harmed them greatly. Again, many of these folks lost their livelihoods --their businesses -- because of Exxon.
Fishing is always a a gamble; sometimes a great single day can bring substantial revenue (my Mom always claimed that commercial fishing ruined more good men than drink did :-), but mostly the margins are very tight and a single major event (such as the Exxon caused price crash) can "sink" the business. It is of note that Alaska salmon prices have never again approached the prices that they fetched before Exxon took the mystique out of "from Alaska's pristine waters". The state has even tried setting up its own marketing department to attempt to bring back the "image" of the "brand". But now, when people hear "Alaska wild salmon" the picture they conjure is as likely to be of black, oiled waters as it is of pristine nature.] Oh ... I must get in a plug for the fisherfolks' product! Many recent studies have shown that Alaska caught salmon are indeed clean and as toxin-free as any in the world and, overall, perhaps the healthiest fish you can eat (salmon oil is nearly a miracle drug).
It is possible to calculate some of those direct damages and make educated guesses as to how much money the fishermen lost that summer. But it was not, and still is not, possible to accurately determine the long-term effects of the destruction of habitat . Entire eco-systems crashed with unknowable results. One example out of hundreds; perhaps thousands:
Murres are noisy, dirty, raucous birds that have never found a market value. There were, at the most optimistic, up to 350,000 in the area of PWS at the time of the spill. 16,600 were reported dead. "Reported dead" means that the bodies were actually recovered. Although the experts certainly all took their shots ... it is anyone's guess what percentage of the birds that died had bodies that were actually recovered. Some say the actual death rate should be calculated to be six times larger than the number of bodies recovered. Others said at least ten times. But no one knows. And no one knows how many died later because their food was killed, destroyed, removed ... or, in the spring when they fed their babies, poisoned.What is the value of that devastation of the murre population? Exxon's lawyers say that in terms of financial damages ... the number is zero; and that therefore Exxon should not have to pay anything for having caused such widespread destruction.
Exxon did dump money into the (probably more harm than good) "cleanup" and in extremely modest "negotiated fines" from the State (not much in comparison to the damages they did, according
to the jury and essentially everyone who wasn't on the payroll of Exxon or some other multinational corporation). Even their insurance companies sued them claiming it was just a P.R. ploy! To this day the argument continues as to whether the cleanup did any good (beyond its obvious P.R. value which did Exxon potentially billions of dollars of good). Oiled rocks were laboriously washed by hand ... and then set back down on the beach beneath which .............~~~~~Scrubbing Rocks By Hand Foolishness~~~~~............. lurked huge piles of oil which surfaced randomly over the next couple of decades and is still doing so today. They used harsh chemicals which killed more of the life at the bottom of the food chain [which ultimately killed, and continues to kill, the life at the top of the food chain as well which included the "life of a fisherman in PWS"]. They used scalding hot water which killed corals and shellfish. No one knew what to do, or even who was "in charge", so no one knew who was to tell them what to tell them to do and what not to do ... the answers to which no one seemed to know in any event.
There are now salmon fisheries in the Sound although they can't be described as "recovered". The herring largely disappeared.There has not been a shrimp season since the spill.
Nor does it seem, imho, that washing the oil back into the Sound with high pressure hoses would do the shrimp (or any other marine populations any good). And washing rocks by hand? Please! We didn't appreciate the insult to our intelligence. There were 1300 miles of oiled coastline! Let's see ... hire 1300 people, hand them a rag and some industrial strength cleaners and tell them to clean a mile of beach each. Well, at least the court case would have been resolved before the beach was cleaned! Oil, as any home mechanic is aware, is tough stuff to clean off! And Alaska crude ... the crudest, tarriest, ugliest of them all is a lot tougher than a spilled can of engine oil.They may as well have put models in swimsuits out there it was so obviously for P.R. show!
It has never been easy to live the life of a fisherman in a small Alaskan fishing village. The hardships are tremendous. But the rewards of the lifestyle were of such a value that most people would never be able to experience or even understand. It is very difficult for, say, Supreme Court Justices who live in gated, gardened and guarded subdivisions and work in fancy air conditioned offices in the urban East to have any understanding of the value of this lifestyle for the people who (sometimes overcoming tremendous obstacles) have chosen it.
To be an Alaskan fisherman has such magnetic [it attracts men and women made of steel :-)] romance! It is a true dearly held dream of so very many people in the world. To be one of the last "free people" answerable to no one but your God if you have one and dependent upon no one and no thing except Nature, is such a rarity (and like so many dreams, not entirely accurate). But there is something magical about a life spent living off what nature provides; being among the last of the hunter/gatherers. Kids in cities watch the "Perfect Storm" and read about green, untrained deck hands on the boats of crab fishermen who, because they have to risk that sort of thrilling danger (and because the King Crab is such an expensive delicacy) can make $30,000 or more in a college summer vacation ... and look out the window at the soot-stained dirty gray of the city and dream the age-old dream. Few of course succeed at making their dream live. It is a long trip from New York desk jockey to Kodiak fisherman and I'm not referring to miles. Those that make it are the ones to whom its value is incalculable.
Pinned to my wall I have a small yellowed newspaper clipping. I don't know who wrote it. I do remember that the article was about the unique possiblities of the Last Frontier:
"The trapper, the miner, the commercial fishermen -- are free agents -- they dictate their own hours, direct their own labors, and when it suits them, tell people to go to hell."
To be part of that ... probably very close to the last generation for whom such is even possible means the difference between a life lived and an existence endured for many more than achieve it. It is not an easy lifestyle! Besides the backbreaking hard physical work, one must pay a substantial amount of money to get into the business. You must buy a boat or beach-site, fishing gear including nets, skiffs (on the beach, the boats they use to pick fish from are called "dories"), a fisheries permit for the fishery you wish to participate in [some permits for some fisheries sold for nearly $1 million before the spill!]. And on a bad year ... when the fish don't show or the weather was too bad to fish during the very short "height" of the run or the Fish and Game closes the fishery at the wrong time based on poor data or the boat didn't start on the "big day" (sometimes an entire season comes down to a single one-day "period" where you might make half of your income for the entire summer) or you ran it onto a sand bar through stupidity and lack of sleep when leaving the harbor at 3 a.m. or any number of other possible "things that can go wrong"... you don't make any money. It was a major struggle to "make it" in that life before the spill. Afterwards, in many parts of the state, it largely became impossible.
With no income, many fisherfolk who valued their rugged independent lifestyle had to move to the city, to Anchorage, and take desk jobs to survive. Some left the State where they were born and/or planned on living out the remainder of their lives. Some, in a personal shame that will haunt them all their lives and that the beggers of Telegraph Avenue would be incapable of comprehending, accepted handouts. First from churches and charities, later ... foodstamps and welfare. And they broke inside. And their children watch them break inside. Something far more valuable than money was lost that summer.
Yet money was the only thing the courts or anyone else could offer in exchange for what had been so rudely and stupidly taken by the foul recklessness of an oil company that simply didn't care enough to take the most basic precautions; and a captain who found the contents of a pint bottle far more important than 200,000 tons of oil.
It took Exxon nearly 20 years. Two decades of constant effort. But they succeeded at ensuring that not only did they not replace the irreplaceable. But they ensured that they wouldn't have to pay the people whose livelihood ... whose pristine thousands of miles of "front yard" had been destroyed ... any substantive amounts of money as punishment for their actions. Could a giant international globalist corporation that earned net profits of over $5 billion a year [now, 20 years later, closer to $5 billion a month] buy "justice" ... or would America and its wonderful long history of an independent court system that treats the rich and poor alike prevail?
It took 20 years. But at last, we now have the answer.
Part 2 of This Series May be Viewed Here:
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