(April 2015)
Thieves come in all shapes and sizes. From the gutless thug who mugs an old lady for her pension, the night-time burglar who steals a family’s irreplaceable personal possessions, right up to the worst type of all – the three-piece-suited boardroom jackals who feather their own nests and enjoy lavish lifestyles at the expense of hard-working everyday people.
They can all be lumped into the same category – the scum of society – but the so-called "white collar criminals" never seem to attract the same amount of public disgust as their lesser associates on the streets, and yet they cause immense damage, overall, to far more people because of their crimes.
You see it all the time – ENRON, the American energy company who falsified their books to hide their losses, sending many thousands of their investors broke, HIH INSURANCE, here in Australia, who did the same thing, causing thousands of people to lose their life savings when the company collapsed, and there are many more instances that could be quoted if space allowed.
It’s different if companies such as these fail because of, say, the economic climate or because of events outside their control, but the vast majority of these instances are caused by criminal activities and/or greed, and the damage is always far more widespread and long-lasting than a simple mugging or burglary, as traumatic as those things are to the individual victims involved.
But there’s one category that’s even WORSE than those above. It's a company that may not have acted illegally (in the strict sense of the word) but whose total greed, and whose attitude of having no thought or concern for the victims involved, and then their ON-GOING actions of making those victims continue to suffer long after the event, is just as despicable – if not more so - than the street thug or bag snatcher.
And such a company is EXXONMOBIL
This global oil company was the owner of a merchant ship called SeaRiver Mediterranean, which has now ended its sea-going life. It was an infamous vessel, responsible for the destruction of thousands of livelihoods, thanks to the incompetence of its crew and the subsequent greed of its owners, but the ship was probably far better known by its original name of Exxon Valdez.
The story of the Exxon Valdez, and how it came to spill nearly 50 million litres of crude oil into Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1989, is well documented and there’s no need for me to go into great detail here (the full information can be found on Wikipedia) but I’ll just put the disaster into perspective with a few facts, taken from the official report.
Amidst claims that the ship’s captain – Joseph Hazelwood - failed to provide an adequate navigation watch "possibly due to impairment under the influence of alcohol" (which was a finding of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board) the Valdez grounded on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, at 9.12pm on March 23rd, 1989, ripping open 8 of the ship’s 11 oil storage tanks and releasing the crude into the water.
It had left the correct shipping lane to avoid icebergs, but it never returned to that lane, perhaps because the captain was too drunk and incompetent to give the order – and so a recipe for disaster was in the making.
The official report also says that as a consequence of the oil spill, as many as 500,000 seabirds died almost immediately, along with at least 1,000 sea otters, 300 harbour seals and 250 bald eagles … and that was almost IMMEDIATELY. The long-term effects can only be imagined, and in 2004 – 15 years after the event – a team of scientists at the University of North Carolina estimated that it could take up to 30 years for the area to fully recover.
But the effect upon the local people was perhaps even more devastating, and their position was made infinitely worse by the indefensibly greedy and heartless attitude of the people who caused their plight – ExxonMobil.
There were originally 33,000 plaintiffs in the legal class-action pursued against ExxonMobil. Virtually the entire fishing industry in the area was destroyed, but because the legal procedure was dragged out by ExxonMobil for over 14 years, more than 3,000 of those plaintiffs have died – some of them by suicide - caused by the personal stress that they had suffered in trying to gain some sort of compensation.
Instead of accepting responsibility for this ecological disaster, and compensating the victims appropriately, ExxonMobil spent year after year challenging court decisions on how much they should pay to those who had lost their livelihoods. But instead of showing corporate and moral responsibility, they put the victims through many years of hardship and were rewarded for their greed by being given an almighty gift from the US Supreme Court.
At first (in 1994), ExxonMobil was ordered, by an Anchorage, Alaska jury, to pay $5 billion in damages, which was equal to a single year’s profit for Exxon at that time. ExxonMobil appealed the ruling.
In 2002 the order for damages was reduced to $4 billion. Then, in 2006, after another appeal by ExxonMobil, the damages order was cut again to $2.5 billion – half the original order. But ExxonMobil didn’t give up. Amidst the suicides and bankruptcies that continued amongst the Alaskan victims, they carried on appealing, and then – finally – they succeeded in getting the compensation order cut once again to just half a billion dollars - $507.5 million – which, almost unbelievably, equates to just TWO DAY’S earnings for ExxonMobil, which regularly posts annual profits in the billions of dollars.
Have you ever heard of a more sleazy, low act than that from a corporation – no matter from where in the world it operates? That company should hang its head in shame, but it won’t, because it’s sole purpose in life is to make money, and companies such as ExxonMobil don’t care how they make it … as long as they do. Now, instead of those Alaskan victims of ExxonMobil receiving anything like the amount they need in order to get on with their lives – personal and business – each one of them only received a small fraction of what they deserved ... and the US justice system calls that ‘compensation’.
ExxonMobil executives must have slapped each other on the backs and gave each other ‘high-fives’ in the boardroom. Two day’s earnings! They would have just had to to wait until the end of that week before they were able to re-stock the bar fridge again.
And, as they gleefully glugged down the celebratory plonk, they probably avoided glancing up at their corporate mission statement at that time, hanging there on the wall of their boardroom, which contained the phrase: "Wherever we operate, we meet local regulations for environmental performance, and where there are no local regulations, we operate to standards that we believe are protective of the environment".
The Exxon Valdez – or SeaRiver Mediterranean as it was later called - was sold for scrap in March 2012 and some of that scrap metal … perhaps, who knows? … might get recycled into paper clips. And, although it’s a long shot, some of those paper clips could quite easily end up on the desks of the ExxonMobil management scumbags in Irving, Texas.
And whilst those people will never know, nor care, whether or not such a thing happens (and nor will anyone else) the fishermen of Alaska, and their struggling families, could conceivably end up paying an untold amount in personal tragedy for the stationery requisites of that corporate jackal ExxonMobil and its soulless executives.