Injustice at the Court highlights power of Exxon

JON HOLLAND

July 03, 2008 at 11:55AM AKST

It seemed bitterly ironic that the same day the Supreme Court gutted what was left of the Exxon Valdez damages judgment, it also took the death penalty off the table in cases of child rapes as long as they don’t include murder.

Apparently the court’s solid conservative voting bloc thinks that irresponsible corporations and child molesters invading your home aren’t all that culpable. I wonder what they would say, if it were their homes or their children?

If this court, stuffed with four Bush family appointees (Souter, Thomas, Alito and Roberts) and two Reagan appointments (Scalia and Kennedy), is conservative, then I think I’ll switch my party affiliation to socialist, right now. Personally, I think Exxon should get the death sentence for what it did to Alaska’s coastline.

Of course that naturally raises the question of, who would you execute?

That bumbling buffoon Joe Hazelwood? The Exxon board of directors, who obviously were delinquent when they let Hazelwood take the helm? The stockholders who let the directors sink into slovenly oversight?

Aye, there’s the rub. Counting institutional investors, such as pension funds, mutual funds, 401(k)s and municipalities, probably one in five Americans can count themselves as an Exxon stockholder. Beyond that point, the responsibility is so diffused that every consumer in America shares a small slice of the culpability.

The oil industry, under the auspices of organizations such as EnergyTomorrow.org, is carpet-bombing the American public with ads portraying it as individual, reasonable, caring employees.

Not a fat-cat manager with a multi-hundred-million dollar golden parachute in the bunch. They don’t make compelling TV.

But the ads do have a point. One of the ads opens with a woman asking, “Do you own an oil company?”

In his 1976 book “The Unseen Revolution,” Austrian-born management/economics writer Peter Drucker said the United States was becoming the world’s first truly socialist economy. American teachers, teamsters, corporate full-timers and city employees were, in aggregate, squirreling away billions in more than 50,000 pension and retirement funds. The funds, in turn, invested that money in the stock market.

As Drucker subsequently pointed out in the Harvard Business Review, pension funds had $2.5 trillion in assets in 1995, are enormous industrial lenders and own 40 percent of American common stock — enough for a controlling interest in most companies, including Exxon.

Exxon is the world’s biggest, richest corporation. Bigger and richer than many countries. So big, that when Exxon speaks, our elected representatives sit up and beg like lap dogs. And because no one is the focus of responsibility in this sprawling empire, no one can ever be held accountable for its misdeeds, in Prince William Sound, in the Middle East or Africa.

A few days ago, ExxonMobil, Shell, Total and BP announced they are getting back into the oil industry in Iraq, after 36 years.

That’s what G.W. Bush spent 4,000 American lives on — a thousand more than Osama bin Laden took on 9/11, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died for the Bush administration’s failures.

Was it worth it? I doubt the families of any one of those American KIAs would think so. That’s an even higher price than most of the residents of Prince William Sound were asked to pay. I hope and pray that few, if any, PWS residents were forced to pay both penalties.

This probably is the best argument yet for a nationalized oil industry. If everyone in the nation benefits from the oil, then every one of those beneficiaries should bear a more-or-less equal share of the responsibility for what happens with that oil.

Of course that’s not going to happen in this old-fashioned, narcissistic economy, where everybody secretly hopes they are getting over on their neighbors.

Exxon’s stockholders got over on you. How does it feel? If the decision had gone the other way —not likely with this court — you would have gotten over on them, and the howls of protest from the Lower 48 would be deafening.

One of the legitimate functions of government is to protect its citizens from big, oppressive bullies, whether they are wearing body armor or business suits. This government has failed miserably to meet that standard. What we need now is another trustbuster, as Teddy Roosevelt used to be known.

Come to think of it, Roosevelt was a Republican when he earned that handle, wasn’t he?

Jon Holland, a former managing editor of The Cordova Times, now lives outside Seattle, Wash. He can be contacted at wolfhounds1@mac.com.