The Raging Grannies deliver the "Corporate Hall of Shame" certificate to Chevron CEO John Watson's house while holding a banner reading "Las Abuelitas Enojadas" - Spanish for "Raging Grannies." Click on the photo to see more pics from the event.
Hundreds of folks made the call, only to discover that the phone number for Watson’s office was quickly diverted to a pre-recorded message asking them to call a different number. I guess too many calls came in even despite the bait and switch, because when people called that new number, they were told Chevron was no longer accepting comments from the public by phone, and they’d have to send an email to the company.
Incredibly, the folks who sent an email to the address supplied received an auto-response from Chevron telling them that that mailbox would no longer be monitored by anyone at the company, and they’d have to use a webform.
I guess Watson couldn’t take the heat, and decided to hide behind a never-ending labyrinth of bureaucracy. But that’s okay, we’re pretty sure he got our message all the same. Yesterday we teamed up with the Raging Grannies — an amazing group of activists – and headed down to Lafayette, CA to deliver a “Corporate Hall of Shame” certificate to Watson at his home.
The Raging Grannies came up with a great little ditty to sing to Watson. Of course no one would come to the gate of Watson’s home, so they had to sing it to him through the call box. You can see a photo montage and hear the Grannies singing in this video put together by the “embedded reporter” who rolled along with the Grannies yesterday:
Thanks to everyone who made calls, and extra special thanks to the Raging Grannies for being so awesome! We managed to shut down two phone lines and an email address down at Chevron HQ. Maybe that’s a sign that the folks at Chevron are starting to realize how ashamed of themselves they should be for refusing to clean up the company’s oil pollution in Ecuador… but I doubt it.
Guess who just got inducted into the Corporate Hall of Shame? Well, yeah, Monsanto and BP, obviously. No one likes those guys. But Chevron is pretty darn unpopular too, what with all those billions of gallons of oil pollution that the company won’t take responsibility for still lying in the Ecuadorean Amazon and poisoning thousands of people.
The announcement that Chevron will be immortalized in the Corporate Hall of Shame comes just as Chevron CEO John Watson celebrates his one-year anniversary as head of the company. We had high hopes when Watson first took over — it was a chance for the company to start anew, to start working to redress the human rights and environmental abuses for which it is responsible. Alas, Watson has instead continued business as usual, steering his company directly into a vortex of corporate shame.
Take a couple of minutes to call John Watson and “congratulate” him. Here’s how you do that:
1. Call 925-842-9232. Your call will be answered by a secretary. Ask to speak with John Watson. If you’re asked if you want to leave a message, say yes.
2. Here’s a sample call script you can use for your message:
I’m calling to tell Mr. Watson that it is shameful that he’s been around for a year, and yet has done nothing to accept responsibility for Chevron’s 18 billion gallons of oil waste pollution in the Ecuadorean Amazon.
Thousands of Indigenous and campesino Ecuadoreans are still suffering from the effects of Chevron’s pollution, but instead of cleaning up its mess, Chevron spends millions on high-priced lawyers and a fancy ad campaign designed to convince us all that the company is really concerned about human rights and the environment.
Until Chevron does the right thing and cleans up Ecuador, John Watson and Chevron should be ashamed of themselves.
3. Let us know how it went after you call by filling out this form.
Slick PR campaigns like the one Chevron launched last year to convince us all that the company is socially and environmentally responsible can only change perception, not reality. But in this case, Chevron’s PR didn’t change anything — just like Watson hasn’t changed anything at Chevron. Luckily, thousands of us saw through the carefully cultivated PR image, and Chevron is now in the Corporate Hall of Shame.
This post was sent to us by Flora Bernard, who works with Peaceful Uprising. A fellow activist from Salt Lake City, UT recently sent Flora this report about their “message correction” mission, and Flora passed it on to us. Salt Lake City, you might recall, was the site of not one but TWO recent Chevron oil spills.
Spending all day at a desk — even if you’re doing your damndest to corner climate villains, save the planet, and build a better society with clipboard, keyboard and mouse — can be bone-wearily discouraging. Meeting and networking to put pressure on elected officials; penning earnest media entreaties to expose Chevron’s blatant callousness, and the damage they have done to my community; trying to incite sad or complacent citizens to action — all add to the distance between me and the actual problem itself. That’s why I have to let off some steam and reconnect with a little light message correction.
Nothing can compete with the self-affirming feeling of gathering sneakers and a black track suit, posters and a flask of wheat paste, and hitting the streets at the witching hour.
Liberty Park is a cop haunt in a cop-heavy part of Salt Lake City, but it’s the place where the posters were needed most. Yards and yards of orange CAUTION tape still ring Liberty’s centerpiece: the tiny lake into which Chevron dumped hundreds of gallons of oil from a sprung pipe months ago, now fenced off and garnished with garish signs stating: “For your own health and safety, please keep the hell out of here.” Hard-hatted workers mill about all day, doing God-knows-what beyond failing to effectively clean the pond.
The little lake used to be frequented by children and couples, pedaling paddle boats, picnicking and tossing bread to lure families of ducks. Months later, it sits sad and stagnant, a telltale Chevron sheen still staining its surface.
My strategy was simple: I rolled the posters up in my yoga mat, wrapped the flask and a paintbrush in a towel, and packed them into my gym bag. I arrived at the park at 4:30 AM on a weekday with my backstory — meeting a friend for some one-on-one yoga instruction before work.
I pasted up six posters before a cop rolled in and started eyeballing me. My proudest placement: smack in the middle of a huge sign right at the south entrance, urging folks to stay away from the poisoned pond, and to be patient with ongoing efforts to mop up Chevron’s filth. The poster with which I adorned that eyesore featured Polaroids of some of Chevron’s most onerous crimes, right next to a snapshot of our own Salt Lake City, with the caption: “BEEN THERE, DONE THAT.“
I returned to Liberty Park that afternoon, and when I arrived a handful of folks — a young couple and their toddler, a 30-something jogger and an older gentleman — were admiring my handiwork. I declared victory then and there. If I remind just a few people where the culpability lies — if I can make it briefly clear that a resistance exists and is paying close attention — I have accomplished more in two hours of darkness than I typically do in an entire eight-hour shift of desk-bound daytime effort.
Borja, a Chevron contractor, was recorded talking about his efforts to corrupt the trial in Ecuador by entrapping and bribing the judge, tampering with evidence, and other dirty tricks. Now, Borja is on the run to avoid questioning, though two US Federal courts ruled that he should be compelled to testify.
By contrast, when Chevron’s lawyers sought to compel Crude director Joe Berlinger to turn over outtakes from the film, he fought back on the grounds that he needed to protect his journalistic sources — an argument supported by the International Documentary Association as well as documentarians like Michael Moore, D.A. Pennebaker, Louie Psihoyos, and Morgan Spurlock. But ultimately Berlinger complied when the court ordered that he turn his footage over.
Consider also the fact that lead US lawyer for the Ecuadorean plaintiffs Steven Donziger is currently facing not one but multiple depositions as Chevron’s lawyers are trying to compel him to divulge everything and anything they can, on a fishing expedition for information they hope they can use to portray the entire lawsuit as fraudulent. Donziger surely isn’t happy about Chevron wasting his time and grossly misrepresenting his actions, but he’s complying.
And why are Berlinger and Donziger complying? Because while they may not like it, they have nothing to hide.
On the other hand, when the tables were turned on Chevron and Borja was about to be served with a subpoena, what happened? Borja up and fled his posh California home in the shadow of Chevron’s headquarters. Why would he flee, unless it was imperative to him and the company that he not be compelled to divulge what he knows about his and Chevron’s attempts to corrupt the trial in Ecuador so that the company can evade its responsibility to clean up its toxic oil pollution in the Ecuadorean Amazon?
Of course, I have no evidence that Chevron helped Borja, his wife (who has also been implicated in evidence tampering), or his American partner in crime, Wayne Hansen, flee California. Nor can I prove that the company told them to flee before being subpoenaed. But we do know that Chevron was paying Borja’s $6,000-per-month rent for his fancy California digs, and we also know that Borja has claimed in the past that he has evidence so damning that it would prove Chevron’s guilt and win the case for the plaintiffs. I’m just connecting the dots here.
Chevron and its lawyers have spent a lot of time and energy lately trying to make allegations that it is in fact the Indigenous and campesino plaintiffs and the Ecuadorean courts who are guilty of fraud. But you have to ask yourself: Why is Chevron’s dirty tricks guy acting so guilty? What does Borja have to hide? And how likely is it that Chevron is trying to keep Borja and whatever he knows hidden? To my mind, Borja fleeing the subpoena shows who has the guilty conscience — and it ain’t the plaintiffs.
Imagine, for a moment, if Berlinger and Donziger had gone into hiding rather than face the music. What would Chevron’s lawyers be saying about that?
If Chevron really believed itself to be the innocent party in this whole affair, why wouldn’t the company force Borja to comply with the subpoena and set the record straight? The plaintiffs’ lawyers and related parties are complying with court orders to divulge what they know, because ultimately anything revealed may be embarrassing, but not damning.
The answer is simple, and obvious: Chevron is guilty as hell, Borja can prove it, and all of them are desperate to avoid being compelled to divulge that fact.
Cofán community member Donald investigates one of the many unlined, open-air oil waste pits Chevron left in his rainforest home in Ecuador.
In what has become something of a pattern, the Obama administration recently took a bold new step to protect our planet at the same time that it was taking a giant step backwards.
Let’s see, Chevron polluting a community, pretending to work to remediate the pollution and impacts on the local community but actually trying to downplay the extent of the problem and having no real desire to clean anything up because that might adversely impact the company’s bottom line… Where have we seen that before?
Oh right! That’s pretty much the same story as down in Ecuador. It almost seems like everywhere Chevron goes, there is pollution caused by its operations that the company refuses to take responsibility for. Just ask the people of Salt Lake City, UT or Richmond, CA or Pascagoula, MS.
It bears mentioning, therefore, that Chevron is among the 13 oil companies that have just been given the green light to resume drilling without performing a thorough assessment of the environmental impacts of a spill — even though the Obama administration vowed that it would not allow drilling to resume until it was guaranteed to be safer and less likely to catastrophically pollute our planet, and Obama’s own National Commission just released a report finding that without fundamentally reworking the regulatory framework, a catastrophe like the BP oil spill could happen again.
Putting aside the obvious fact that the oil business can never guarantee it won’t poison our planet because the oil business is just inherently dirty through and through, it seems like the least the administration could have done would have been to demand a thorough environmental review before the likes of Chevron gets the green light to resume its reckless operations. It’s not a matter of if there’s another oil spill, but when — and why shouldn’t we expect the responsible party to have a legitimate plan in place for dealing with the next spill?
But hey, it’s another pattern: American politicians caving to powerful corporate interests who put profits over the planet.
This post originally appeared on Amazon Watch’s Chevron In Ecuador blog.
Change Chevron campaigner Ginger Cassady examines toxic waste in Aguarico 4, one of the 356 well sites formerly operated by Chevron (then Texaco). Photo by Maria Lya Ramos.
Friday, December 17th was a momentous day in the long struggle of the people of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest region ravaged by oil giant Chevron, formerly Texaco.
On Friday — more than 17 years since Ecuadoreans filed a lawsuit demanding cleanup of Texaco’s oil contamination — the judge declared a close to the evidentiary phase of the trial, paving the way for a judgment in the historic case. Sucumbios Provincial Court Judge Nicolas Zambrano declared autos para sentencia — the end of the evidence phase of the trial and the beginning of his deliberations over the massive case record, some 215,000 pages of relevant documents.
The judge told Reuters on Friday: “The proof phase has been concluded. I have to read what there is in these proceedings and, based on this criteria, issue the corresponding decision.”
A Wall Street Journal article reported what many observers believe, that a ruling from the judge is “expected to be ready in the first quarter of next year.” Of course, many predictions have been made over the years, and others close to the case say that a judgment could come anytime between February and next fall. Regardless, it means a judgment is finally coming in the case, despite Chevron’s myriad, creative, and cynical attempts to delay a ruling indefinitely.
Karen Hinton, a spokeswoman for the Amazon Defense Coalition, which represents the Ecuadorian communities suing Chevron, released a simple statement:
“This decision should put an end to Chevron’s continued abusive litigation tactics intended to perpetually delay the resolution of claims that affect the lives of thousands of innocent people.”
Thousands of Texaco's oil barrels still litter Ecuador's Oriente region. Photo by Caroline Bennett
Pablo Fajardo, lead lawyer for some 30,000 Indigenous and campesino plaintiffs in Ecuador, told Pleiteando.com, “These 17 years of trial have shown sustained damage to those who have seen their water supplies, land and air polluted by Chevron-Texaco. Many of them have already died of cancer and those who survive live in inhumane conditions. At last I see a light at the end of this dark tunnel.”
Pablo spoke to Amazon Watch’s Mitch Anderson in Quito on Friday, just minutes after the judge gave his order. See the video below (sorry about the vertical alignment and black bars on the side — it was shot, inexpertly, on an iPhone):
So now, as Pablo explains, even with the evidentiary phase in the trial over, it’s important to continue to keep a spotlight on this case, as Chevron has deployed extraordinary resources to delay and disrupt the trial. With a new scorched earth legal strategy designed by its attack dog lawyers from corporate behemoth law firm Gibson Dunn, they have been successful at creating chaos and forcing the plaintiffs lawyers to defend themselves against all kinds of accusations. But with a judgment on the horizon, the plaintiffs have also brought on a major new ally in the form of their own corporate law behemoth, Washington DC-based firm Patton Boggs.
Responding to Chevron’s well-worn accusations about the case, James Tyrell at Patton Boggs told American lawyer magazine’s Michael Goldhaber, “I’m certainly not here to join in any fraudulent effort. We cannot be exposed to liability when we have been hired to do the opposite: to make sure that the final judgment is free of fraud. My mission is to see that a judgment on the merits, warranting international respect, is entered in Ecuador, and, if we win, to enforce it.”
Enforce it? Yes, this is critical.
It’s important to remember that Chevron left Ecuador in 1992, and no longer has assets there. So, even if all goes well for the Ecuadorians, and a judge awards them billions from Chevron to remediate the company’s widespread pollution, and provide clean water and health care infrastructure to affected communities, the plaintiffs will have to take that judgment to the courts in places where Chevron does have assets and lay claim to them there.
That’s where big guns like Patton Boggs come in. Unfortunately, that also takes time, while people continue to suffer. Watching this saga unfold over the years, it’s hard to imagine Chevron shifting gears. I expect that the company will continue to try to shift the blame, attack the plaintiffs lawyers, try to evade a judgment through arbitration and other “end-runs” around the legal process, and whatever other tricks may still be up their sleeve.
For the sake of the communities living around the company’s former oil sites, I hope I’m wrong, and that Chevron’s honchos will decide it’s time for them to stop fighting this losing and dishonorable battle, and finally do the right thing.
It’s too bad our contest is over, because this new video, created by Trouble and Maker in association with Smart Bubble Society, would have been a strong contender.
Unfortunately, much of the humor falls in the “it’s funny because it’s true” category.
Chevron loves to tout its investments in renewable energies, but conveniently leaves out the fact that those investments are seriously small potatoes compared to the $26 BILLION the company plans to invest in its oil business next year. Nor does the company usually mention that the energy produced by its Project Brightfield solar plants is used to power its Kern River Heavy Oil Extraction Facility one — in other words, Chevron is using solar energy to power one of the most expensive, polluting, and energy-intensive types of oil extraction around.
Just as the fake Chevron PR hack says in the video, Chevron is leading the deepwater drilling charge in our post-BP oil spill world. It was recently announced that Chevron will spend $7.5 billion on one of the largest deepwater drilling projects in U.S. history. The Houston Chronicle described the project as “a massive floating city” of drilling rigs, all located about 280 miles southwest of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico. This is especially troubling because we’re talking about Chevron, a company that was recently responsible for three oil spills in the space of one week.
All of which points out just why this new video — so aptly titled “Chevron is lame” — is such brilliant satire. It’s up on FunnyOrDie.com right now, and has a 100% funny rating so far. Why not click on over and help keep it that way?
Spoofed Chevron posters on a fence in San Francisco
Rather than take responsibility for its toxic mess in the Ecuadorean Amazon, Chevron launched a fancy new $90 million ad campaign to convince us all that the company really cares about the environment. And it might have worked, too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling activists.
As you have probably seen, Chevron’s ad campaign completely backfired thanks to all of the activists and artists out there who decided enough was enough with the corporate greenwash.
And now it’s official: Chevron’s ridiculous new “We Agree” ad campaign has just been named one of the top 10 “Biggest Branding and Marketing Fiascoes” of 2010!
That places them in the gloriously ill-conceived company of Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell and her run for Senate; the whole Jay Leno/NBC debacle; and the Apple employee who left his iPhone 4 prototype in a bar. Not an illustrious cadre of PR champs, if you know what I mean.
AdAge magazine gives out this dubious distinction, and had this to say about Chevron’s ad campaign:
CHEVRON HIJACKED BY THE YES MEN
When Ad Age received a call from a Chevron spokesman miffed about our coverage of its new campaign, we were puzzled — we hadn’t covered the campaign. After some digging, it turned out that activist group The Yes Men, along with Rainforest Action Network and Amazon Watch, had hijacked Chevron’s brand, its ads and its PR push. Not only did the group send out convincing fake press releases, it set up very convincing fake Chevron sites and even a fake Ad Age site with fake coverage. Much to the consternation of Chevron, a number of real news outlets fell for the ruse.
Thanks for being such good sports about that fake AdAge.com article, guys.
And thanks for recognizing a truly colossal PR blunder when you see it.
If you want to do even more, we’re looking for folks to help us take our Chevron-spoofing to new heights by putting up spoof Chevron posters in your town, sign up for our street teams now.
Crude oil contaminates an open toxic pool in the Ecuadorean Amazon rainforest. It was abandoned by Texaco (now Chevron) after oil drilling operations ended in 1990 and was never remediated.
Oil is a dirty business. There’s just no way around it. Drilling for oil, transporting it across the globe, refining it into fuel – every step of the process is as dirty and destructive as can be. And that’s even when things go right.
Of course, as we’ve all witnessed far too often, things don’t always go right, and oil spills are as inevitable as the rest of the pollution caused by the oil business.
(It’s not just oil, either. Chevron’s Pascagoula, Mississippi refinery reported a release of Benzene, a known carcinogen, earlier this week.)
What has also become abundantly obvious is that Chevron just seems to regard oil spills as a normal course of doing business. The company’s chief concern when a spill occurs is to minimize the impact to its bottom line, not to people or the environment — just as we’ve seen in Ecuador, where the company refuses to take responsibility for its 18 billion gallons of toxic oil waste in the Ecuadorean Amazon.
There are many more cases to illustrate this point. The pipeline spill in Salt Lake City was the second in the past six months, for example. The first spill occurred back in June and resulted in some 33,000 gallons of crude oil being dumped into Red Butte Creek. Thankfully, this second spill has prompted federal regulators to finally step in and do what Chevron should have done back in June: shut down the 60-year-old pipeline, which travels through sensitive watersheds, until a thorough investigation has been done and the integrity of the pipeline is assured.
When Chevron does pretend to take environmental safety seriously, you can feel the insincerity radiating from every official statement. A recent forecast by Chevron showed that a spill off the coast of the Shetland Islands, where it is operating a deepwater well, could reach the coasts of England, Norway, and Greenland within two weeks of the spill. That’s as far ahead as the company could project the impacts of a spill, however, because the computer spill modeling software the company uses constantly crashes when set to make projections further out. But hey, what can they do? According to Chevron, this is the same software the whole industry uses. Feel safer?
This is why the trial to hold Chevron accountable for its oil pollution in Ecuador is not just about Ecuador. It’s not even just about Chevron. For far too long, Big Oil, Big Coal, and other extractive industries have been poisoning our planet and making a killing in the process. Ecuador needs to be the line in the sand. Companies like Chevron cannot continue to poison our planet with impunity — they must be held accountable for every bit of environmental destruction, every human rights violation, every impacted community.
Congratulations to Jamie Way, of Denver, CO for creating this 1st place design:
Jamie will be receiving a framed copy of the poster signed by the Yes Men.
Along with the winning design, the second and third place designs will be mass-produced and sent out to our street team members, who will be putting these posters up everywhere and anywhere they can.
And of course there’s our winning video, made by Joseph Thayer, which will be featured on the home page of FunnyOrDie.com!
Congratulations to all of our winners!
Plus, just wanted to give an honorable mention shout out to Farrell McLaughlin for his Chevron website-spoofing entry.
All of the entries were absolutely amazing. Thanks to everyone who devoted their creative energies to spoofing Chevron’s campaign, or their time to vote and spread the word! We couldn’t have done it without you all.
A judge in Ecuador just found Chevron guilty of polluting the Amazon rainforest, ordering the company to pay $8 billion to clean it up. Chevron is vowing to appeal.
Tell Chevron that enough is enough, Chevron should clean up Ecuador now.
How can you protect your investment in Chevron – while protecting the environment and human rights? Chevron’s actions expose the company (and its investors) to great financial and environmental risks.
We don’t pretend to know everything about working at Chevron. We do know many communities are suffering because of the way Chevron does business around the world. As an employee of Chevron you can literally save peoples’ lives by working inside the company to change it.
We want to hear from you. The call’s confidential and on us: 1-877-844-4114
The award winning documentary CRUDE, from filmmaker Joe Berlinger, tells the epic story of one of the largest and most controversial legal cases on the planet: the infamous $27 billion lawsuit pitting 30,000 rainforest dwellers in Ecuador against the U.S. oil giant Chevron.
Perhaps you saw the news last week that 
