EXXON

“Exxon reported today record profits again of 10.2 BILLION dollars for the 4th qtr.

Just incase anyone was wondering that comes down to $1,342 of PROFIT per second over the quarter.”

“I wish I would have invested in them. That would be sweet.”

“One of my favorite songs is Hexonxonx”

“WTF?”

“LOL! same dude:

”

“Just incase anyone was wondering that comes down to $1,342 of PROFIT per second over the quarter.

Wow, good for them!”

“is that GWAR?”

“Bite Your Tongue!

it's Skinny Puppy, dammit!”

“i thought it was mucky pup”

“I thought it might be Augie Doggy.”

“Is that from some joint on Dupont Circle?”

“never much of a skinny puupy fan.”

“never much of a skinny puupy fan.”

“never much of a skinny puupy fan”

“never heard skinny puppy”

“Shame on y'all!”

“back to Exxon. it made our news. Had some angry customers complaining about paying $2.60-2.80/gal for gas. One was filling his SUV.

Boo-Freakin-Hoo.”

“Uncle Sam should collect a penny in tax for every penny in profit. The money collected should go to mass transit projects and alternate energy research. I would gladly pay penny for penny tax/profit if it would result in cleaner technology and freedom from the Middle East nutjobs. If it is done penny for penny the other great thing would be all the arguments we could get into here on Fuego. All the righties would complain about the pennies in tax and all the lefties would complain about the pennies in profit.”

“SAN FRANCISCO -- Exxon Mobil Corp. urged a federal appeals court Friday to erase the $5 billion in damages an Alaska jury ordered the oil giant to pay for the 1989 Valdez oil spill.
[...]
Exxon, which reported third-quarter earnings of $10 billion, said it has spent more than $3 billion on cleanup work and to settle other federal and state lawsuits stemming from the spill.

"Deterrence has been so satisfied by that amount," Dellinger said, adding that because of the money Exxon already has paid out over the last 16 years, "the harm was largely avoided."

The comment prompted chuckles from a packed courtroom that included fishermen whose livelihoods were damaged when the Valdez hit a charted reef and dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound.

"Our lives were trashed," said Max McCarty, a former Prince William Sound fisherman who said he now works as a substitute teacher in Arizona and hawks fish at local markets.

Friday's arguments were based on Exxon's appeal of an Anchorage jury's 1994 punitive damages award to 34,000 fishermen and other Alaskans whose property and jobs were harmed by the black goo the ship left smeared on roughly 1,500 miles of coastline.

During questioning, Judge Andrew Kleinfeld suggested to Dellinger that the $5 billion should be reduced to about $1.2 billion. "You're saying we should basically erase the punitive damages award," Kleinfeld said to Dellinger.
[...]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/257410_valdez28.html?source=rss”

““Uncle Sam should collect a penny in tax for every penny in profit."

50 cents out of every dollar? Are you nuckin' futs? Since when is it the governments job to,

a) force change
b) take our money for purposes outside it's responsability
c) be responsable for mass transit and alternate energy sources

So if a company makes money you say tax them at 50%? OK, how much did you make last year? Profit! So what's saying the government doesn't come for 50 cents of every dollar you made last year?”

“nuckin futs!!!!!!!!

LOL!!!!!”

“Are you nuckin' futs?

Never heard that before. LOL! That's pretty cucking fool.”

“Nigal, I'm not asking the oil companies to pay the tax, I want you to pay the tax. I personally think that the prices people are paying at the pump are hilarious, and they are going to go much higher in the future. I don't care if the oil companys make 5 dollars a gallon of profit, just add an additional 5 dollars in tax at the pump. I want all nonrenewable fuels taxed much higher. We need to quit sleeping with the enemy and invest in our freedom from oil.
last edited: 2/01/06 3:03:22 PM”

“Um...so we tax people who use the service more? Bat, are you infavor of making people who go to the hospital more pay a higher rate?”

““Um...so we tax people who use the service more? Bat, are you infavor of making people who go to the hospital more pay a higher rate?”
xl400236
3:04:42 PM

I'm all for pay as you go and not borrwoing from our childrens future. Those that go to the hospital more should pay the same rate that a person that goes once does. The person that goes more often will just pay that rate more often. I'm all for government provided healthcare with a personal copayment.”

“The top rate in 1965 was 70%.But that was stupid, because the US had the top living standard in the world. It also at that time had the most evenly distributed wealth. You can thank Arthur B. Laffer for his silly 'trickle down' that in part was a main stay of supply blindside economics.”

“"I'm not asking the oil companies to pay the tax, I want you to pay the tax."

Yep, nuckin' futs. We already pay some 35-45 cents a gallon tax.”

“Screw the tax, I want the companies to make huge profits off my arse, and, lol(TM), at MY expense! Paying money to billionaries is much more preferable than paying some silly tax that creates a job of a person that regulates the jerk-off that is making huge profits, so, ultimately, I end up paying less becase they make less profits.”

“Yep, nuckin' futs. We already pay some 35-45 cents a gallon tax.”
Nigal

The current federal tax is 18.4 cents per gallon. It is currently too low to change the habits of those "Addicted to oil".

Here is what you pay in each state.

http://www.gaspricewatch.com/usgastaxes.asp”

“I love it when people with a company car and gas card preach about oil addictions.”

“
Court Rewards Exxon for Valdez Spill
by Greg Palast
Chicago Tribune (revised from 2003 article)
[Thursday, June 26, 2008]

Twenty years after Exxon Valdez slimed over one thousand miles of Alaskan beaches, the company has yet to pay the $5 billion in punitive damages awarded by the jury. And now they won't have to. The Supreme Court today cut Exxon's liability by 90% to half a billion. It's so cheap, it's like a permit to spill.

Exxon knew this would happen. Right after the spill, I was brought to Alaska by the Natives whose Prince William Sound islands, livelihoods, and their food source was contaminated by Exxon crude. My assignment: to investigate oil company frauds that led to to the disaster. There were plenty.

But before we brought charges, the Natives hoped to settle with the oil company, to receive just enough compensation to buy some boats and rebuild their island villages to withstand what would be a decade of trying to survive in a polluted ecological death zone.

In San Diego, I met with Exxon's US production chief, Otto Harrison, who said, "Admit it; the oil spill's the best thing to happen" to the Natives.

His company offered the Natives pennies on the dollar. The oil men added a cruel threat: take it or leave it and wait twenty years to get even the pennies. Exxon is immortal - but Natives die.

And they did. A third of the Native fishermen and seal hunters I worked with are dead. Now their families will collect one tenth of their award, two decades too late.

In today's ruling, Supreme Court Justice David Souter wrote that Exxon's recklessness was ''profitless'' - so the company shouldn't have to pay punitive damages. Profitless, Mr. Souter? Exxon and it's oil shipping partners saved billions - BILLIONS - by operating for sixteen years without the oil spill safety equipment they promised, in writing, under oath and by contract.

The official story is, "Drunken Skipper Hits Reef." But don't believe it, Mr. Souter. Alaska's Native lands and coastline were destroyed by a systematic fraud motivated by profit-crazed penny-pinching. Here's the unreported story, the one you won't get tonight on the Petroleum Broadcast System:

It begins in 1969 when big shots from Humble Oil and ARCO (now known as Exxon and British Petroleum) met with the Chugach Natives, owners of the most valuable parcel of land on the planet: Valdez Port, the only conceivable terminus for a pipeline that would handle a trillion dollars in crude oil.

These Alaskan natives ultimately agreed to sell the Exxon consortium this astronomically valuable patch of land -- for a single dollar. The Natives refused cash. Rather, in 1969, they asked only that the oil companies promise to protect their Prince William Sound fishing and seal hunting grounds from oil.

In 1971, Exxon and partners agreed to place the Natives' specific list of safeguards into federal law. These commitment to safety reassured enough Congressmen for the oil group to win, by one vote, the right to ship oil from Valdez.

The oil companies repeated their promises under oath to the US Congress.

The spill disaster was the result of Exxon and partners breaking every one of those promises - cynically, systematically, disastrously, in the fifteen years leading up to the spill.

Forget the drunken skipper fable. As to Captain Joe Hazelwood, he was below decks, sleeping off his bender. At the helm, the third mate would never have collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his Raycas radar. But the radar was not turned on. In fact, the tanker's radar was left broken and disasbled for more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was just too expensive to fix and operate.

For the Chugach, this discovery was poignantly ironic. On their list of safety demands in return for Valdez was "state-of-the-art" on-ship radar.

We discovered more, but because of the labyrinthine ways of litigation, little became public, especially about the reckless acts of the industry consortium, Alyeska, which controls the Alaska Pipeline.
Several smaller oil spills before the Exxon Valdez could have warned of a system breakdown. But a former Senior Lab Technician with Alyeska, Erlene Blake, told our investigators that management routinely ordered her to toss out test samples of water evidencing spilled oil. She was ordered to refill the test tubes with a bucket of clean sea water called, "The Miracle Barrel."

In a secret meeting in April 1988, Alyeska Vice-President T.L. Polasek confidentially warned the oil group executives that, because Alyeska had never purchased promised safety equipment, it was simply "not possible" to contain an oil spill past the Valdez Narrows -- exactly where the Exxon Valdez ran aground 10 months later.

The Natives demanded (and law requires) that the shippers maintain round- the-clock oil spill response teams. Alyeska hired the Natives, especiallly qualified by their generations-old knowledge of the Sound, for this emergency work. They trained to drop from helicopters into the water with special equipment to contain an oil slick at a moments notice. But in 1979, quietly, Alyeska fired them all. To deflect inquisitive state inspectors, the oil consortium created sham teams, listing names of oil terminal workers who had not the foggiest idea how to use spill equipment which, in any event, was missing, broken or existed only on paper.
In 1989, when the oil poured from the tanker, there was no Native response team, only chaos.

Today, twenty years after the oil washed over the Chugach beaches, you can kick over a rock and it will smell like an old gas station.

The cover story of the Drunken Captain serves the oil industry well. It falsely presents America's greatest environmental disaster as a tale of human frailty, a one-time accident. But broken radar, missing equipment, phantom spill teams, faked tests -- the profit-driven disregard of the law -- made the spill an inevitability, not an accident.

Yet Big Oil tells us, as they plead to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, as Senator John McCain calls for drilling off the shores of the Lower 48, it can't happen again. They promise.

”

“.
last edited: 6/25/08 6:30:12 PM”

“It looks like David Souter paid off for the family business after all.”

“Biased, slanted and political as well. Nice Tilt. You have managed to use an article that encapsulate the non-credibility trifecta.”

“The Supreme Court just followed the law previously passed by Congress.

If you don't like the law, just ask Nancy Pelosi to change it to your liking. If you don't like the oil industry, just stop using mechanized transportation that uses gasoline, diesel fuel, or jet fuel, and don't buy anything that uses mechanized transportation, and don't buy anything that has plastic in it. And if you don't like the way the U.S. government treats businesses, move to Cuba, Venezuela, of North Korea, all self proclaimed workers paradises.”

“Freedom = love it or leave Tilt. You are, you know, either with Exxon or with the terrorist.”

“Actually, Prosecutor, there is a third option, throw the bums out and change the law.”

“Nice Tilt. -nigle

Don't worry, when the SCOTUS rules on Heller today, Tilt's head will explode with angst - lol.”

“Heller is a Rent-A-Cop............with a weapon.”

“My daddy has a euphemistic machine gun named Weapon. The joys of kicking rocks onto the trail.
last edited: 6/26/08 7:18:19 AM”

“The S&P500 OIL Co. is drilling in the same deep area as the March lows-will they ,this time, hit the black chit or lose their bit to Davey Jones for good?”

“Perhaps they need a bit of Peter Torque on that bit.”

“"......., move to Cuba, Venezuela, of North Korea, all self proclaimed workers paradises."

Those would be Right To Work States.............no organized labor need apply.”

“Wow.   Some people really are more comfortable being subservient.  Kiss the Ring of your Master ----”

“
20th Birthday of the Exxon Valdez Lie
by Greg Palast
March 23, 2009


"Gail, Please! Stick your hand in it!"

The petite Eskimo-Chugach woman gave me that you-dumb-ass-white-boy look.

"Gail, Gail. STICK YOUR DAMN HAND IN IT!"

She stuck it in, under the gravel of the beach at Sleepy Bay, her village's fishing ground. Gail's hand came up dripping with black, sickening goo. It could make you vomit. Oil from the Exxon Valdez.

It was already two years after the spill and Exxon had crowed that Mother Nature had happily cleaned up their stinking oil mess for them. It was a lie. But the media wouldn't question the bald-faced bull#&%!$. And who the hell was going to investigate Exxon's claim way out in some godforsaken Native village in the Prince William Sound?

So I convinced the Natives to fly the lazy-ass reporters out to Sleepy Bay on rented float planes to see the oil that Exxon said wasn't there.

The reporters looked, but didn't see it, because it was three inches under their feet, under the shingle rock of the icy beach. Gail pulled out her hand and now the whole place smelled like a gas station. The network crews wanted to puke.

And now, with their eyes open, they saw the oil, the vile feces-colored smear across the glaciated ridge faces, the poisonous "bathtub ring" that ran for miles and miles at the high tide level. And it's still there. Less for sure. But twenty years later, IT'S STILL THERE, GODDAMNIT. And I want YOU, dear reader, to stick your hand in it. I want YOU, President Obama, to stick your hand in it before you blithely fulfill your Palin-esque campaign promise for a little more offshore drilling.

***

Tuesday marks the 20th Anniversary of the Exxon Valdez grounding and the smearing of 1,200 miles of Alaska's coastline with its oil.

It also marks the 20th Anniversary of a lie. Lots of lies: catalogued in a four-volume investigation of the disaster; four volumes you'll never see. I wrote that report, with my team of investigators working with the Natives preparing fraud and racketeering charges against Exxon. You'll never see the report because Exxon lawyers threatened the Natives, "Mention the f-word [fraud] and you'll never get a dime" of compensation to clean up the villages. The Natives agreed to drop the fraud charge -- and Exxon stiffed them on the money. You're surprised, right?

***

Doubtless, for the 20th Anniversary of the Great Spill, the media will schlep out that old story that the tanker ran aground because its captain was drunk at the wheel. Bull#&%!$. Yes, the captain was "three sheets to the wind" -- but sleeping it off below-decks. The ship was in the hands of the third mate who was driving blind. That is, the Exxon Valdez' Raycas radar system was turned off; turned off because it was busted and had been busted since its maiden voyage. Exxon didn't want to spend the cash to fix it. So the man at the helm, electronically blindfolded, drove it up onto the reef.

So why the story of the drunken skipper? Because it lets Exxon off the hook: Calling it a case of "drunk driving" turns the disaster into a case of human error, not corporate penny-pinching

Indeed, the "human error" tale was the hook used by the Bush-stacked Supreme Court to slash the punitive damages awarded against Exxon by 90%, from $5 billion, to half a billion for 30,000 Natives and fishermen. Chief Justice John Roberts erased almost all of the payment due with the la-dee-dah comment, "What more can a corporation do?"

Well, here's what they could have done: Besides fix the radar, Exxon could have set out equipment to contain the spill. Containing a spill is actually quite simple. Stick a rubber skirt around the oil slick and suck it back up. The law requires it and Exxon promised it.

So, when the tanker hit, where was the rubber skirt and where was the sucker? Answer: The rubber skirt, called "boom" — was a fiction. Exxon promised to have it sitting right there near the Native village at Bligh Reef. The oil company fulfilled that promised the cheap way: they lied.

And the lie was engineered at the very top. After the spill, we got our hands on a series of memos describing a secret meeting of chief executives of Exxon and its oil company partners, including ARCO, a unit of British Petroleum. In a meeting of these oil chieftains held in April 1988, ten months before the spill, Exxon rejected a plea from T.L. Polasek, the Vice-President of its Alaska shipping operations, to provide the oil spill containment equipment required by law. Polasek warned the CEOs it was "not possible" to contain a spill in the mid-Sound without the emergency set-up.

Exxon angrily vetoed ARCO's suggestion that the oil companies supply the rubber skirts and other materiel that would have prevented the spill from spreading, virtually eliminating the spill's damage.

Regulations state that no tanker may leave the Alaska port of Valdez without the "sucker" equipment, called a "containment barge," at the ready. Exxon signed off on the barge's readiness. But, that night twenty years ago, the barge was in dry-dock with its pumps locked up under arctic ice. By the time it arrived at the tanker, half a day after the spill, the oil was well along its thousand-mile killing path.

Natives watched as the now-unstoppable oil overwhelmed their islands. Eyak Native elder Henry Makarka saw an otter rip out its own eyes burning from oil residue. Henry, pointing down a waterside dead-zone, told me, in a mix of Alutiiq and English, "If I had a machine gun, I'd shoot every one of those white sons-of-#&%!$es."

***

Exxon promised — promised — to pay the Natives and other fisherman for all their losses. The Chief of the Natives at Nanwalek lost his boat to bankruptcy. His village, like other villages, Native and non-Native, decayed into alcoholism. The Mayor of fishing port Cordova killed himself, citing Exxon in his suicide note.

On the island village of Chenega, Gail Evanoff's uncle Paul Kompkoff was hungry. Until the spill, he had lived on seal meat, razor clams and salmon Chenegans would catch, and on deer they hunted. The clams and salmon were declared deadly and the deer, not able to read the government warning signs, ate the poisoned vegetation and died.

The President of Exxon, Lee Raymond, helicoptered into Chenega for a photo op. He promised to compensate the Natives and all fishermen for their losses, and Exxon would thoroughly clean the beaches.

Uncle Paul told the Exxon chief of his hunger. The oil company, sensing PR disaster, shipped in seal meat to the isolated village. The cans were marked, "NOT FIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION." Uncle Paul said, "Zoo food."

Paul didn't want a seal in a can. He wanted a boat to go fishing, to bring the village back to life.

Two years after the spill, Otto Harrison, General Manager of Exxon USA, told Evanoff and me to forget about a fishing boat for Uncle Paul. Exxon was immortal and Natives were not. The company would litigate for 20 years.

They did. Only now, two decades on, Exxon has finally begun its payout of the court award -- but only ten cents on the dollar. And Uncle Paul's boat? No matter. Paul's dead. So are a third of the fishermen owed the money.

***

Lee Raymond, President of Exxon at the time of the spill -- and its President when the company made the secret decision to do without oil spill equipment, retired in April 2006. The company awarded him a $400 million retirement bonus, more than double the bonuses received by all AIG executives combined.

***

Gail's oily hand never made it to national television. The networks were distracted with another oil story.

After sailing back to Chenega from Sleepy Bay, I sat with Uncle Paul, watching the smart bombs explode over Baghdad. Gulf War I had begun.

Uncle Paul was silent a long time. The generals on CNN pointed to the burning oil fields near Basra. Paul said, "I guess were all some kind of Native now."

”

“Capitalism bad...capitalism bad...capitalism bad...

What a propaganda piece.”

“People wonder why I don't post where I go backpacking.   One reason is I don't want a mob of Exxon fans knowing where any of my favorite places are.   They'd probably take a #&%!$ in the water supply then set the place on fire.”

“Oh yeah......I'm sure that's why. (rolls eyes)”