After Gutenberg

Speaking of the overwhelming influence of polluting corporations on the political process, Chevron is employing an increasingly aggressive kitchen sink strategy, posts HuffPo contributor Han Shan.

No, this is other than Big Oil keeping the pressure on lawmakers to protect industry interests to insure their tax subsidies continue. Rather it is because Chevron faces “the possibility of a $27 billion judgment in an Ecuadorean court.”

“Chevron is piling on the lobbyists and PR firms in an extraordinary effort to evade responsibility for its massive toxic contamination of the Ecuadorian Amazon: “18 billion gallons of toxic oil sludge left throughout an area spanning hundreds of miles of Ecuadoran rain forest.”

Chevron has undertaken “a major lobbying effort in Washington, and a multifaceted PR campaign in the U.S. and Ecuador that produced a phony news report and promoted a contrived bribery scandal to smear the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.”

In DC, Chevron has been lobbying Congress and the U.S. Trade Representative to threaten Ecuador’s trade preferences under the Andean Trade Preferences Act in order to pressure Ecuador into intervening in the private lawsuit. In a shocking admission, Chevron spokesman Kent Robertson explained, “If we were able to call a timeout and make the lawsuit disappear, then this entire issue disappears.”

“30,000 Ecuadoreans filed a class action suit with Texaco, now owned by Chevron, over the poisoning of an expanse of rain forest with millions of gallons of oil and billions more of toxic wastewater.”

In a recent article for Politico, Kenneth Vogel, who tracks the confluence of money, politics and influence for the influential Washington news outlet, writes that the oil company’s increasingly combative approach is backfiring, “drawing fire from environmentalists, media ethicists, state pension funds, New York’s attorney general, members of Congress and even Barack Obama when he was a senator.”