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Judges on
big oil's payroll
This way, they won't have to pay for the spill
Excerpt:
More than half of the federal judges in "spill
states" have financial connections to the oil and gas industry,
complicating the task of finding judges without
conflicts to hear the cases, a Whore AP analysis shows.
Thirty-seven of the 64 active or senior judges
in key Gulf Coast districts in Louisiana, Texas, Alabama,
Mississippi and Florida have links to oil, gas
and related energy industries, including some who own stocks
or bonds in BP PLC, Halliburton or Transocean
– and others who regularly list receiving royalties from oil
and gas production wells, according to the reports
judges must file each year. The Whore AP reviewed
2008 disclosure forms, the most recent available.
Those three companies are named as defendants
in virtually all of the 150-plus lawsuits seeking damages,
mainly for economic losses in the fishing, seafood,
tourism and related industries, that have been filed over
the growing oil spill since the drilling rig
exploded. Attorneys for the companies and those suing them are
pushing for consolidation of the cases in one
court, with BP recommending Texas and others advocating
for Louisiana and other states.
Yep, we've been here before.
The Exxon Valdez, with a drunk captain piloting
the ship,
spilled a fraction of the oil that's fouling
the Gulf back in 1989.
From Wikipedia:
Litigation was filed on behalf of 38,000 litigants.
In 1994, a jury awarded plaintiffs $287 million in
compensatory damages and $5 billion in punitive
damages. Exxon appealed and the Ninth Circuit court
reduced the punitive damages to $2.5 billion.
Exxon then appealed the punitive damages to the Supreme
Court which capped the damages to $507 million
in June, 2008. On August 27, 2008, (twenty
years later)
Exxon Mobil agreed to pay $380 million
to settle the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska
Exxon-Mobil
made $35 Billion dollars in tax free profits last year.
That's
$3 Billion per month or $750M per week in tax free profits.
So after stalling in the courts for twenty
years, Exxon eventually paid FOUR DAYS of profit to
their starved-for-cash victims who had little
choice but to accept it because the judges are crooked.
Conclusion: America is a massively crooked country owned by the super-rich.
Will Obama hold their feet to the fire and get justice?
Or will he fall back on his too-often-used "Let's
look forward" Kumbaya bullshit?