I am a big fan of Chevron, and not only because it’s an NR advertiser: In a world where corporations get weak-kneed and pay ransom when threatened by a liberal / leftist shakedown, the oil giant has taken the different road. As we have reported many times, a concocted and well-funded legal attack spanning the Western Hemisphere — accusing Chevron of not remediating old drilling sites in Ecuador, and causing cancer, pollution, and other alleged and bogus calamities — would have gone away with some major tribute bucks. But risking (and getting, and obviously still getting) bad PR, Chevron refused to pay off the flim-flammers, and counterattacked. Last year it beat the tar out of its foes in a federal RICO case in New York. That expensive process exposed the Left’s schemes, tactics, allies, and lies, and beat their sorry behinds in court. That should endear Chevron to conservatives. It does to this one.
The RICO case, and other related judgments, were not victories of slick lawyering. They were victories of fact. Namely, that Chevron (via its predecessor, Texaco) did what it was supposed to do while drilling for oil in the 1990s in Ecuador — when it was finished, it cleaned up the sites, an outcome then approved by the government. The current thuggish regime tried to undo that in order to claim a piece of the leftist litigants’ expected bonanza, and rigged the down-there legal proceedings to produce an initial judgment against Chevron to the tune of $9 billion (two books, Law of the Jungle and Crude Awakening, do a marvelous job of explaining the extent of the regime’s immense abuses).
Anyway . . .
Last week, an O’Reilly Factor segment took up the case, backwards. In October, B.O. had called the case against Chevron a “bunco scheme.” But now that it has been revealed that the company had made noteworthy donations to the Clinton Foundation, and that its CEO had face time with Hillary Clinton, the storyline has switched to favor-currying and the impression that Chevron was indeed guilty of pollution and was trying to get out of paying up.
Geesh. Besides that not being the case (there was no pollution, for starters), there’s nothing wrong with a U.S. corporation — its stock owned by thousands of Americans, retirees, and pension funds — seeking assistance and relief from a foreign regime’s bald complicity in what the Wall Street Journal has called the “legal fraud of the century.” O’Reilly, get out of the spin and see this entire enchilada for what it was, and is: an epic battle between a major corporation and the Left in which the suits fought the good fight, did the right thing, for the right reasons, and prevailed over a huge swath of the liberal shakedown community.