There’s a definite whack-a-mole sense to the never-ending, globe-spanning leftist effort to defraud Chevron (a National Review advertiser, God love it) over a bogus claim that in the early 90s, Texaco (the oil giant now owned by Chevron) polluted and failed to remediate the rainforests of Ecuador and sickened many natives.
Widely recognized in the business press as the “legal fraud of the century,” the shakedown scheme has been drubbed in U.S. federal courts, which have upheld civil RICO charges against Steven Donziger, the leftist trial attorney — a cross between Saul Alinsky and Ponzi — who masterminded the plot to turn Chevron into an ATM for Greenies. What he didn’t plan for was a determined fight by his mark.
Beaten and bloodied, and maybe wondering why the U.S. Attorney in New York has yet to file criminal RICO charges against him, Donzinger has taken his scheme to Canada, in the hopes of finding that the courts there — where Chevron has assets — will fall for his charade. Initial hearings were held last week. A smart rundown of this latest phase of The Left v. Chevron is found in this Forbes report by Michael Krauss. No ruling on Donziger’s claim has been issued yet. Stay tuned.
I’ve written about this case on many an occasion, and am glad to repeat what has been said before: that tiring though the fight may be, conservatives should take comfort from the fact that, in an era where corporations genuflect and pay tribute to multicultural demagogues and hucksters, there is at least one corporation that won’t. No matter the hemisphere.