In today’s Wall Street Journal, Mary Anastasia O’Grady has an excellent report on a U.S.-lefty-bankrolled attempt to shake down Chevron for over $18 billion for bogus unremediated, environment-destroying drilling in Ecuador (our Kevin Williamson wrote a great 2009 NRODT piece on this mess, and how President Obama has lent a helping hand to Chevron’s foes in Quito and Washington). Go ahead and hate Big Oil if that floats your tanker, but the level of media bias (this 60 Minutes report by Scott Pelley is a textbook example of the MSM’s willful distortion) and fraud in this case, Aguinda v. Chevron, is staggering. Chevron fights back here. This video is a great primer of just what the Left is up to when it concocts these types of cases:
By the way, a few weeks back I wrote a Corner post on how bureaucrat thugs in Brazil were trying to squeeze billions out of Chevron (and slap criminal charges against several employees who are U.S. citizens) over a small (remediated) oil spill, while Petrobras, the state’s klutzy oil-spilling champ and a partner in the project that placed Chevron is the crosshairs, went untouched. That same selective justice plays out in Ecuador, where the state-owned Petroecuador, which has caused more than 1,400 oil spills in the region since 2000, draws no notice or angst from the alleged friends of the Amazon environment. Their preferred green has Ben Franklin’s picture on it.