A week after Chevron CEO John "Hell Freezer" Watson received a "Distinguished Citizen" award from the Commonwealth Club, the gods of irony must have felt compelled to present the public with documentation of just how distinguished this man's work is when it comes to running one of the most ruthlessly irresponsible corporations in the world.
They did it in the form of The Chevron Tapes, a treasure trove of Chevron misdeeds and corporate malfeasance shot by the oil giant's own technicians and consultants and sent by a whistleblower to rainforest watchdog group Amazon Watch.
Revealing in their own words to what length this oil giant has gone to cover up its dirty tracks that have caused so much death and misery for indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the company's consultants are caught on tape frustrated by their inability to find soil samples without oil, and then mocking the contamination, in an obvious attempt to pre-game the judicial inspections to defraud the court.
Here, have a look at how it's done The Chevron Way™ if you're a well-paid shill and you're finding extensive contamination in areas your sponsor has claimed to have cleaned up years ago. Wink wink!
"Good news," Dave says with apparent sarcasm. "Petroleum.""No! No!" responds Rene. "Check it again."
"Well, do you want to smell it? I think it is," Dave says to Rene, as the two men examine a soil core sample.
Rene sniffs the sample and demurs playfully for a moment before conceding, "Okay, it is — it is, it is."
"Because I don't know what this fungus… this is," says Dave.
"Well, you might as well stop them now," puts in Rene. "Stop them. Just, uh — yeah, we're done here… We're trying to find a clean core, and we obviously we didn't go out far enough."
"Nice job, Dave," he continues. "Give you one simple task: Don't find petroleum."
"Who picked the spot, Rene?" Dave replies.
"I'm the customer," says Rene. "I'm always right."
Wow, Dave and Rene, so much for ever finding a legit science job. Then again, you're probably in the Bahamas, sipping Pina Coladas on Chevron's tab for the rest of your lives.The second part of the video includes interviews with local residents -- ostensibly conducted by Chevrons reps -- about water contamination and health problems that they attribute to oil pollution.
In one of them, a 30-year resident named Merla talks about her cows:
"We've had our cows die there," she says. "Why did the cows die? Because they drank the water where the oil had spilled. Back then, that whole area was full of crude oil. The water there was filthy. They came and covered it up and they just left all of the crude there and it became a swamp. It's pure crude there. In the middle it's a thick ooze and you'd sink right down into it.""When was this oil spill," asks the interviewer.
"More than 20 years ago," she responds. "But I still remember it, how there was oil over everything. The cows still die there. They came, threw some dirt on top of the crude oil, and there it stayed."
Well, I guess they just kept interviewing until they found some folks that haven't lived there long enough to be directly affected by the environmental havoc wreaked decades ago. Difficult though it would be for anyone who drinks water.More background on this below the toppled orange oil derrick...