The Devil's Excrement

A famous Venezuelan, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, referred to oil as "the devil's excrement." Today we Americans, guilty of greed and corruption, feel the devil's excrement running all down our legs and filling up our shoes.

The largest oil spill in U.S. history, which is filling up the Gulf Coast like a shoe-load of shit, is teaching our country a very valuable lesson. If nothing else we should learn that regulation in businesses that potentially pose disastrous threats to our country, whether it be economic, ecologic, medically or militarily, must be monitored and held accountable by our government.

Anyone found taking bribes or giving preferential treatment to assist a corporation in bypassing set regulations should be heavily penalized and jailed for treason against the U.S..

The threat to our country from this latest disaster will hopefully wake us up to the realities of the cost of doing business with corporations that put profit over protection of people and environment. Countries in South America such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Columbia know the fatal cost of "dancing with the devil" in having corporations drill for oil in their backyards. Some of those greedy corporations drilling without conscience in South America call these liberty-filled shores of North America their home.

So maybe this Gulf oil spill is just another recent example of the "Chickens Coming Home To Roost."

What I find so hard to believe is that our country would allow foreigners and/or multi-national corporations to perform potentially disastrous operations on our soil without us having a back-up plan should things go wrong and the foreigner find themselves incompetent to right the wrong. Talk about being at the mercy of an outsider.

Here's a quote from a newspaper editorial that raised my eyebrow:

Americans should be shocked by all of this. And then they should pressure Congress to do something about it. The government's startling helplessness in the face of unprecedented disaster is the direct result of our decades of deregulation. We can't take over responsibility for this spill from BP because we have allowed the company to own all the technology that's responsible for it.

Yes my fellow citizens, when our government is left "helpless" to resolve a problem on our own shores, something is terribly broken in our way of governing our country. And if we don't fix it soon the world will stand by and watch the scavenging hyenas and vultures picking over the stripped carcass of this once great nation that was America.

A skeleton of a dog lies next to an oil pump in the Susha oil fields in the Sucumbios region of Ecuador. Many animal have died do to the pollution of the water from the oil. Picture taken Saturday, October 25, 2003.

Until now, few people outside of South America have never heard of Lago Agrio, a crime-ridden oil boomtown in Ecuador's Amazon rain forest, near the Colombia border. A trial began that's pits California-base ChevronTexaco against 30,000 rain forest residents who allege that from 1971 to 1992 a subsidiary of Texaco dumped massive amounts of oily wastes in the region. Those wastes, they claim caused illnesses ranging from skin rashes to cancer and contributed to the destruction of land inhabited by indigenous cultures. It is a drama that some say has the potential to recalibrate how major corporations do business throughout the region and world.

Get Rich Slick - OIL

CHEVRON Corporation and the South American indigenous peoples of Ecuador are in the final rounds of their fistfight, a fight that never should have taken place.

Why? Because an Ecuadoran court has already ruled against Chevron and in favor of the Ecuadoreans. The judgment was for $9.6 billion dollars. The court could have imposed $28 billion.

But when you're a big bullying oil corporation with multinational business contacts and loads of money for buying international justice, GUILTY verdicts are technicalities to be ridiculed, downplayed, ignored then finally twisted into a shyster's legal term: Shakedown.

Here's the skinny:

30,000 Ecuadoreans sued Chevron for extensive environmental damage caused by 20 years (1972-1992) of oil drilling operations, which have sickened thousands of Ecuadorians and polluted the Amazon rainforest. Since 1993, lawyers representing local residents have sought to force former well operator Texaco and its now parent company Chevron Corporation to clean the area known as the Lago Agrio oil field and to provide for the care of those allegedly affected.

Texaco claimed that in 1995 the Ecuadorean government, a oil drilling partner with a 25% interest in the partnership, released them from further liability after Texaco agreed to clean a number of waste pits in proportion to its interest in the partnership, at a cost of $40 million. Numerous sources show the remediation efforts to have been largely cosmetic.


We could say that this is just the unfortunate repercussion of a poor country getting in bed with a shysty Oil drilling business. The old biblical term "you reap what you sow" prophetically comes to mind.

The really scary part of it all is the P-O-W-E-R the oil companies have and their influence over international litigating parties. Any person, government or formed group such as a corporation should be made accountable for their actions in a court of law, or else what good is law other than to serve the powerful in oppression and control of the powerless.

Is it possible the legal courts worldwide are on the take?

American U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman in New Orleans ordered federal regulators to act on seven drilling permit applications this past week, overturning a presidential moratorium on deepwater drilling after BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. President Obama's administration has appealed Feldman's order and filed court documents paving the way for regulators to deny such applications.

From Judgepedia.org:
After the ruling by Feldman, his investments and stocks were analyzed, showing that in 2009 he held stocks of companies that would be affected by his ruling. Judge Feldman insists that he found out about these holdings on June 21, and contacted his broker to sell them on the morning of June 22. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Under federal law, federal judges are prohibited from deciding cases in which they have financial interests in the parties or the outcome of the case. They are also prohibited from deciding cases in which there is the appearance of a conflict." [6] Because of the questions surrounding the status of his financial holdings, environmental groups have asked that Feldman recuse himself from the case and suspend his ruling. [7]

Feldman announced that he will not recuse himself from the case, saying, "The motion for disqualification is without merit." [8]

In the infamous words of Malcolm X: "Chickens Coming Home To Roost"

Huffington Post: Ecuador Another Victory

Raiderlegend: The Devil's Excrement

Chevron Guilty

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