The next few days I’m going to engage in one of my favorite hobbies: hitting the road with the phenomenal young labor leader Chris Smalls. We are heading to Texas oil country – the very place where Texaco, the company that pooped its cancer-causing oil waste all over Indigenous ancestral lands in Ecuador, was born over a century ago.
Chris and I have two events in the city of Austin. If you are able, please join us in person today (March 9) at the Austin Convention Center or March 13 at The Far Out Lounge and Stage.
You might remember that I have been fighting for three decades alongside Indigenous peoples to remediate massive pollution originally caused by Texaco in the Amazon between 1964 and 1992. It literally was and is the world’s worst oil contamination.
Unlike the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska or the Deepwater Horizon spill off the coast of New Orleans, both of which were spectacular accidents, what Texaco did in Ecuador was a slow and deliberate drip-drip of cancer chemicals into the environment for more than 50 years.
And it was done out of pure greed.
Texaco-Chevron’s business model was simple: let’s inflate our robust profits to obscene levels because these “poor” and “uneducated” folks out there in the jungle will never have the means to find their way into a courthouse.
Chevron pulled out around $25 billion in profit from its Ecuador operations. When I say “pulled out,” I mean they took oil from under ancestral lands that they did not actually own without getting permission from those who lived there.
Those profits went to Texaco shareholders. Call it capitalism or call it theft, but that massive transfer of wealth was essentially robbed from the true owners of the forest.
Locals in Ecaudor's Amazon consider that blood money.
What’s left is 1,000 waste pits leeching benzene and other chemicals into soils and waterways. People all over the place are dying of cancer. Poverty is rampant. Unique cultures are decimated and are struggling to survive.
Think about this: before Texaco showed up, the Indigenous peoples did not even have a word in their languages for cancer.
Not a single documented case of cancer in Ecuador’s Amazon until Texaco showed up.
Since Chevron purchased Texaco in 2001, they now own the problem. Chevron is the company that has used 2,000 lawyers to fight me and the Indigenous peoples who took them on.
It is also the company that had me privately prosecuted and locked up for almost three years in our nation’s first corporate prosecution.
While I’m still hobbled by that vicious attack in that I can’t travel or work as a lawyer, I love the fact we were successful enough to force Chevron to engage in sordid and blatant corruption to avoid compensating the people it poisoned.
Engaging in corrupt acts was the only way the company could evade (at least so far) the $10 billion courts have ordered it to pay to the Amazon communities in Ecuador. The money is needed to clean up their despoiled lands and waterways –– and in the process try to revitalize their cultures.
Infuriating an oil company that is destroying Indigenous peoples is how I have spent a good portion of my career. While I’ve definitely experienced my share of pain as a result of this choice –– as has my family –– there is something really liberating about being free enough to speak truth to corporate power.
That’s one of the many things I love about Chris Smalls.
Chris and I are calling our trip the Tale of Two Amazons. We hope to hit a bunch of cities around the country (and world if I can get my passport) in the coming year or two. Our first stop is the South by Southwest Festival in Austin on Saturday.
From Chevron in the Amazon to the Amazon Corporation, we are going to put it out there with all the fervor we can muster. We are going to try to use our story to motivate people to think about how we can make our country right.
One of our goals is to more deeply connect the labor movement and climate justice movements and turn them into a powerful force that has the chance to reshape the way people do politics in this country.
We want to help create a more fair society where workers actually can earn a decent living, where the planet is protected, and where there’s a more equitable distribution of wealth.
I first met Chris (see picture below) when he came to visit me at home when I was wearing an ankle bracelet. It was March of 2022 and I had been on detention at the time for over 950 days on a baseless misdemeanor contempt of court charge initiated by Chevron.
We immediately realized we had much in common in our respective battles against corporate greed. Chris was in the middle of organizing the first union ever of Amazon warehouse workers – one of the most important labor battles of our generation.
Jeff Bezos and his goon squad were trying to defame Chris just like Chevron and its good squad had spent millions to defame me – and both companies were using the same corporate law firm (Gibson Dunn & Crutcher) to do it. It was a classic corporate hit job designed to win a labor battle or lawsuit by driving out the leader.
It was unethical in the extreme. Cowardly as well. And we were both targets of this new high-tech corporate playbook.
I knew that night I needed to do some work with Chris. I realized he is a man of great intelligence, savvy, and tenacity. I’ll add he has totally outwitted Bezos and the architects of the demonization campaign sent his way. I feel inspired by Chris.
Other than our speaking events in Austin, please also consider joining us in taking the campaign against Chevron to the next level – both for my freedom and to hold the fossil fuel industry fully accountable for its destruction of the planet. We must end fossil fuel impunity and we must work to ensure no private corporation ever again has the power to prosecute and lock up its critics.
Will you help us by contributing $25, $50, $100, $250, $500, $1000, $2500, $5000, or whatever you can now? →
I’ll be back next week with a big announcement about how I am going to engage President Biden directly on this issue. Hang in there – we are moving. And thanks to everyone for your support.
And if you can, please spread the word to your friends and colleagues.
Onward,
Steven
P.S. As a reminder, if you are able, please join myself and Chris in person today (March 9) at the Austin Convention Center or March 13 at The Far Out Lounge and Stage.
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.