Chevron Complicit in Abuses in Burma - Rights Lobby
BANGKOK - An environmental group is warning U.S. energy giant Chevron to clean up its act in Burma or face legal proceedings where the multinational’s links to gross human rights violations in the military-ruled country could be exposed.
There has been little relief for villagers living in the Yadana pipeline region in southern Burma since the Chevron Corporation became a partner to this natural gas venture in 2005, states the Washington D.C.-based EarthRights International (EI) in a report released here Tuesday.
‘’Chevron and its consortium partners continue to rely on the Burmese army for pipeline security and those forces continue to conscript thousands of villagers for forced labour, and to commit torture, rape, murder and other serious abuses in the course of their operations,” revealed the 76-page report, ‘The Human Cost of Energy’.
Chevron should act on ‘’its moral and legal obligations to human rights rather than profit from human rights abuses,” the report added of this project that earned the Burma’s junta about 1.1 billion US dollars in 2006, over half of its total earnings from the sale of gas to neighbouring Thailand, which was 2.16 billion dollars that year.
‘’Chevron can be sued by villagers from Burma if it does not stop the human rights violations,” Naing Htoo, EI’s Burma Project coordinator, said during a press conference at the launch of the report. ‘’The violations are happening every day.”
‘’Chevron is aiding and abetting the pattern of abuse that is going on,” added Katie Redford, U.S. director of EI. ‘’Chevron is liable for the forced labour. They are liable for the torture and rape the (Burmese) security forces are committing in the furtherance of the contract.”
EI’s report comes at a time when Chevron has been trying to give itself a positive twist as a responsible corporate citizen, committed to helping the world achieve its energy needs in a cleaner manner. This slick campaign on television and in newspapers was launched last September in the U.S. One report put Chevron’s ‘’green marketing campaign” at 15 million dollars.
In addition, Chevron has been trying to distance itself from the reports of human rights violations in the pipeline region of Burma, which the junta has renamed Myanmar, says Redford. ‘’Regardless of the slick marketing campaigns, if you have a contract with the Burmese junta, you are its business partner. They cannot try to distance themselves from the accusations, which they are doing.”
Total, Chevron’s French partner in the Yadana project, is facing similar criticism, but it has opted to admit to some of the accusations reported in southern Burma. ‘’Total has noted on its website that forced labour is going on,” Joelle Brohier, editor of a French website on corporate social responsibility in developing countries, told IPS. ‘’They have learnt from past criticism that they need to provide some transparency.”
But France’s only extractive company involved in natural gas projects cannot side-step reports of human rights abuse, she added. ‘’It cannot ignore these kinds of reports. It has to try and offer answers to deal with these problems that are still going on.”
The main abusers are the Burmese military battalions assigned to protect the pipeline,” Naing Htoo said in an interview. ‘’The soldiers confiscate the lands owned by the villagers and force them to grow rice. They also force the villagers to carry military supplies for the camp and have other forms of forced labour. Then there is rape and torture.”
Two battalions, the light infantry battalion 282 and 273, have been given the duty ‘’to handle security for the pipeline,” he revealed. Each of these military units has a strength of 300 soldiers. But in all, 14 battalions operate in the area, making it one of the more heavily militarised parts of the South-east Asian country.
The Yadana pipeline has been dogged by controversy since its inception in 1991. This venture, to extract offshore natural gas in the Andaman Sea and have it flow along an overland pipe to Thailand, was backed by a consortium that included the U.S. company Unocal, French company Total and a subsidiary of Thailand’s state-owned gas and oil company. The local partner was the Myanmar Gas and Oil Enterprise, an affiliate of Burma’s energy ministry.
The mounting human rights violations at the time was documented by EI, resulting in the latter’s first report, ‘Total Denial’, in 1996. Subsequently, several victims of the Yadana project, assisted by EI and a team of lawyers, filed a lawsuit in an U.S. federal court against Unocal, accusing it of ‘’complicity in their injuries.”
Nine years later, in March 2005, the Burmese victims emerged victorious, when Unocal decided to settle this lengthy legal battle and compensate the villagers. Shortly thereafter, Chevron bought Unocal’s stake in the Yadana pipeline.
That legal outcome was a major milestone in international human rights law. ‘’The case came to be the big test case in terms of corporate responsibility, because till then there was uncertainty over how the courts will handle cases of companies linked to human rights violations in a foreign country,” says Doug Sanders, a retired Canadian law professor who is on the visiting faculty at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. ‘’Traditionally, international human right law applied to only countries and not individuals or companies.”
That result has ‘’opened the way for big companies who fail to meet their corporate social responsibilities in foreign countries to feel the heat in court,” Sanders said in an interview. ‘’It affirmed that corporations have to bear certain responsibilities under human rights law that can be enforced in local courts.”
The legal victory in the Unocal case was not lost on Redford this week. ‘’We have done it before, even if it took us nearly 10 years,” she said of the potential lawsuit against Chevron.
© 2008 Inter Press Service
Sorry, folks. I guess you haven’t heard. International law does not apply to US-based “corporate persons”. Just like the “supreme law” of the US Constitution itself, its status has been reduced to nothing more than “a goddamn scrap of paper” subject to being overridden by presidential “signing statements” and executive decrees.
You can be certain beyond any doubt whatever that any attempt to enforce upon Chevron (or any other member of USA Incorporated) your concepts and presumptions about “international human rights” will get your entire enforcement apparatus classified immediately as a terrorist organaization. And you’ll be “liberated” forthwith with napalm, “depleted” uranium, “whiskey pete” and cluster bombs. Futhermore, any resistance to said “liberation” will only earn you a couple of “bunker busters” to demolish your incipient nuclear program, regardless of whether you actually have one or not.
“REPORT: The Devil is Evil!”
[And, fish-swim, bees fly, and bears convert-to-Catholicism in the woods…whilst arming-themselves, as-per the 2nd-Amendment…]
“Sorry, folks. I guess you haven’t heard. International law does not apply to US-based “corporate persons”. Just like the “supreme law” of the US Constitution itself, its status has been reduced to nothing more than “a goddamn scrap of paper” subject to being overridden by presidential “signing statements” and executive decrees.”
That Constitution became ‘null and void’ after either 1861 and/or 1871 (take your pick), and Corporations got that illegal-status solely due to some improperly-Cited margin-notes — written by a court-Clerk…
[Learn the Law … then, ‘do what they do’ (bend-it to your Will/interest).]
Chevron doesn’t “abuse people” — it’s subcontractors do…
[And, “Guns don’t kill-people…”, either!]
[Paul, in Corinthians, said “The letter of the Law, killeth”, and Mr. Bumble said “The Law is an ass” — both were Right…!]
The Spirit of our Law is dead-and-buried…learn the ‘letters’, if you want to Survive.
With Americans bitching about the price of gas they’re not going to concern themselves with taking any action which could potentially reduce world supply and drive the prices up even farther. This isn’t any thing new really; it sounds like the next chapter in John Perkins, “The Secret History of the American Empire”. What each of us could do is make a small contribution to the reduction in demand and in the market for the stuff.
Chevron is just one of many corporations that have questionable business practices. Shell in Nigeria, Exxon in Brazil, etc… Corporations as “persons” are completely psychopathic and anti-social.
Without disputing the essential truth of your comment, I would nevetheless maintain that the degradation of the US Constitution was and is an ongoing and cumulative process. In particular, it is increasingly being supplanted by a body of “secret law” that overrides even the most basic societal tenets such as the commonly preceived right to know what the law itself provides and requires.
Senator Russ Feingold’s commentary that was published today by CounterPunch elaborates on that point much better than I could. Brief excerpt:
In other words, the “legal interpretations” and court rulings that you know about are only one part of the continual degradation of the “rule of law” within the United States and in the global interactions of USA Incorporated. The growing body of “secret law” is, in all probability, far worse and operates entirely outside any of the constraints that one would expect in any post-Magna Carta society.
Government “of the people, by the people, for the people” does indeed seem to have perished completely, notwithstanding Abe’s contrary efforts, if they were contrary.
The ‘court clerk’ was a retired railroad president. Suprise?
This is the text of the 1886 Supreme Court decision granting corporations the same rights as living persons under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Quoting from David Korten’s The Post-Corporate World, Life After Capitalism (pp.185-6):
In 1886, . . . in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a private corporation is a person and entitled to the legal rights and protections the Constitutions affords to any person. Because the Constitution makes no mention of corporations, it is a fairly clear case of the Court’s taking it upon itself to rewrite the Constitution.
Far more remarkable, however, is that the doctrine of corporate personhood, which subsequently became a cornerstone of corporate law, was introduced into this 1886 decision without argument. According to the official case record, Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite simply pronounced before the beginning of arguement in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that
The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.
The court reporter duly entered into the summary record of the Court’s findings that
The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Thus it was that a two-sentence assertion by a single judge elevated corporations to the status of persons under the law, prepared the way for the rise of global corporate rule, and thereby changed the course of history.
The doctrine of corporate personhood creates an interesting legal contradiction. The corporation is owned by its shareholders and is therefore their property. If it is also a legal person, then it is a person owned by others and thus exists in a condition of slavery — a status explicitly forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. So is a corporation a person illegally held in servitude by its shareholders? Or is it a person who enjoys the rights of personhood that take precedence over the presumed ownership rights of its shareholders? So far as I have been able to determine, this contradiction has not been directly addressed by the courts.
Want to know the essential difference between “Corporate Persons” and Human Persons?
Unlike most humans, most corporations have tons of money, which they use to ram their odious corporate personhood down all of our throats.
Big Oil corporate crimes are alive and well all over the planet.
We still do not know exactly which oil giants were represented in the 2001 secret energy meetings involving plans to invade Iraq and divide the oil among trans-national oil corporations.
If Big Oil was complicit in the plan to invade Iraq they could easily fit into the legal category of war criminals.
In the circumstances, it seems remarkable that so many prefer and support the corporate system’s forms of taxation for private profit over any forms of taxation that are, at least potentially, beneficial to the common good. In both cases, it’s your money that’s being spent by others to advance their own agendas. The only differences are in the areas of representation and accountability, and those dubious distinctions are fast disappearing as well.
The US Campaign for Burma is all over this issue. Chevron was mentioned by Burma Campaign UK to be boycotted for their collusion with the Burmese dictators. See the list at www.burmacampaign.org.uk/dirty_list/dirty_list_details.html
Recent Congressional Gold Medal recipient Aung San Suu Kyi has begged foreigners to avoid visiting Burma because much of the tourist infrastructure has been constructed using slave labor.
Collaboration between multinationals and oppressive regimes is nothing new. The outside capital, technology, and qualified workers (dictatorships tend to destroy their professional classes) sustains the regime. Oppressive tactics suppress dissent that could be in part the product of environmental destruction and exploitation of indigenous rights.
Owning Chevron stock or purchasing their products is tantamount to enabling this cruelty. Chevron’s profits flow to the regime in an unholy matrimony between colonial-style raw resource plunder and a gangster state.
AND for Chief among enablers, DON’T FORGET “TANKER GIRL”
“For Faithful and Loyal Service:
Chevron named oil tanker the “Condoleezza Rice”
[Note: SORRY, I COULDN’T GET THE PHOTO TO PASTE HERE. GAVE UP AFTER NUMEROUS ATTEMPTS.]
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was a Chevron Director from 1991 until January 15, 2001 when she was transferred by President George Bush Jr. to National Security Adviser. Previously she was Senior Director, Soviet Affairs, National Security Council, and Special Assistant to President George Bush Sr. from 1989 to 1991.
Another Chevron Corporation giant in the Bush administration is Vice President Dick Cheney. Vice President Cheney was Chairman and Chief Executive of Dallas based Halliburton Corporation, the world’s largest oil field services company with multi-billion dollar contracts with oil corporations including Chevron. Lawrence Eagleburger, a seasoned Bush counselor who held top State Department posts under George Bush Sr., is a director of Halliburton Corporation.”
…from JudicialWatch.org
TO WHICH DICK WOULD ANSWER, “SO?”
You know the Nike shoes everybody seems to be so fond of.
Do you know where they’re made? In any number of foreign
counties under damn near slave labor conditions. The Chevron, Exon, Mobile, Shell debacle is only the tip of the
iceberg.
At the end of the day it is we, the consumers, who are responsible for this. Our addiction to wasteful, energy intensive lifestyles and our willingness, albeit with incessant griping, to pay lots of money to sustain it gives impetus to corporate criminals and rewards them.
“Chevron and its consortium partners continue to rely on any army for pipeline security and population domination”
I e-mailed these folks about their misbehavior in Nigeria years ago - they changed their e-mail address…
Now I collect Bushbucks in an envelope and when it is far too big to mail then I know I can fill my car - with Citgo.
“BANGKOK - An environmental group is warning U.S. energy giant Chevron to clean up its act in Burma or face legal proceedings where the multinational’s links to gross human rights violations in the military-ruled country could be exposed.”
I appreciate the environmental group’s call or demand, but, or except, why is the group offering Chevron to help it with keeping its crimes covered up?
Maybe the group’s right about this approach, but I wonder about that.
Take the guilty into custody! Start the trial!
Stock market
A new book written by a leading globalist luminary provides a blueprint for how 6,000 elitists plan to completely end national sovereignty, impose a system of global governance, and how they will deal with an international network of people that resist their agenda.
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making is a manifesto for how the elite plan to shape the course of the planet and impose a new world order while combating the inevitable “global network of antiglobalists” who will rise up against it.
The author of the book, David J. Rothkopf, is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and has previously served as the Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade during the administration of Bill Clinton before he became managing director of Kissinger and Associates in January 1996.
A Salon.com review alarmingly details the brazen premise of Rothkopf’s book - a global elite now run the planet and have usurped the power of national governments while ensuring laws constrained by borders are all but obsolete.
“Each one of them is one in a million. They number six thousand on a planet of six billion. They run our governments, our largest corporations, the powerhouses of international finance, the media, world religions, and, from the shadows, the world’s most dangerous criminal and terrorist organizations. They are the global superclass, and they are shaping the history of our time,” states the promo for the book.
The threadbare notion that Rothkopf’s book is a critical and impartial investigation of the global elite can be rejected out of hand just by looking at the author’s biography - in reality he is a cherished insider.
Throughout the book Rothkopf fawns over the global elite of which he too is a member. The Salon review notes his “palpable thrill” at “recognizing CEOs, oil company executives and Harvard professors on his way to a fondue restaurant,” in the globalist enclave of Davos, Switzerland and his obsession with listing every banal “achievement” of each elitist he speaks with.
According to the article, the kind of elitist celebrated in Rothkopf’s book “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations.”
Rothkopf himself concurs that laws and regulations defined by borders and nation states are obsolete and need to be replaced not by a global government but by “global governance”. The fact that the ultimate goals of the two - the total elimination of national sovereignty - are essentially identical is not lost on globalists who know that a more subtle imposition of centralized control needs to be enacted in order to con the serfs into sacrificing their identity. A sharply defined “world government” is too visceral a concept and would attract fierce opposition, therefore a method of forcing countries to adopt harmonized policies of “global governance” is the new approach that globalists have embarked on.
Rothkopf ominously expresses the plan to mandate the “Registration and management of Internet domain names (via a collection of organizations)” under a global umbrella, which the informed will recognize as a bastardized version of Internet 2, where individuals require government permits to operate a website under tight regulation.
The article concedes that, “Rational as it may sound to set up such systems, they just aren’t directly answerable to the populace at large — they’re undemocratic,” which Rothkopf admits will give rise to rebellions and pave the way for more people like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who he labels as being part of “the global network of antiglobalists,” and a man who has “made political theater out of taunting and thwarting the global elite.”
Rothkopf’s answer to the inevitable antagonism that will be directed towards the globalists as their agenda unfolds is to hoodwink the commoners into thinking they have influence in the new world order that is being built around them - a method otherwise known as the Delphi Technique, which is universally recognized as an underhanded and unethical ploy of achieving consensus through deception.
According to Rothkopf the, “Superclass ought to be smart enough to foresee any such crisis and head it off by doing more to make the currently disenfranchised feel like “stakeholders” in the new global order.”
The fact that the same elitists Rothkopf affords such sycophantic adulation are also personally responsible for the policies that result in the slaughter of untold millions and the misery of countless others across the globe matters little to Rothkopf, who also has no qualms about including Osama Bin Laden in a group of 6,000 “global elite” who now control the world and “whose connections to each other have become more significant than their ties to their home nations and governments.”
Superclass maintains that the elite, who mainly comprise “older males of European descent who graduated from prestigious Western colleges,” are “an improvement on those of the past,” but this rings hollow when we consider the state of the planet that they have crafted.
A million-plus dead Iraqis since 2003, a global economy in chaos and individual freedom under attack in every corner of the world suggests the much-vaunted global elite - worshipped in Rothkopf’s book as saviors of the Earth - are more accurately parasites and a cancer upon humanity.
Watch Rothkopf give a lecture on the power of the global elite. He identifies Bohemian Grove as a key meeting venue for the globalists. Decide for yourself whether he is a fawning sycophant or an objective critic.
Rothkopf’s approach is to blame the world’s problems on free-market capitalism and and imply that global elitists are a new phenomenon and therefore part of the solution, when in reality the elite created monopoly capitalism and have been a hidden-hand manipulating world events and offering solutions to problems they created for centuries.
Clinton once again show her irresponsible thinking at any price to gain the American nomination to continue to lead the world to oblivion. I read with interest the comments of Americans. I consider myself a humanist and not one that has the USA tattooed to my backside although I gave three years to the military and so have a right to speak. Nationalism, is always based in me-firstism, let the rest of the world be damned mentality. Clinton has now teamed up with the Fox network and the rabid so-called journalists who have helped diminish the america I once new and fought for.
The economic system that determines all peoples survival regardless of where they exist, also determines what a country will become, much of it the result of chance. In that regard the USA has been lucky, with well-worn imperialist ideas brought over with the Pilgrims. America has taken this country from the people who were here, the European model, without paying them. Some of us here know the story. The so called, “free market market system”, formerly American capitalism, and now globalization into which it has now morphed. the US with its European allies has created the current means of controlling everything for the few. The G 8 has developed ever-greater means to develop these ideas and to take what it wants from the rest of the world and its own population.
The African Americans, the Africans, the Hispanics, Asians and Indians have been the slave classes that have built the white European and American wealth. The historic exploitation of the working classes of America brought from the world into its “melting pot” with the so-called freedoms and democratic ideals built from the blood spilled to form, compared to the European monarchies and divine kingship, so called Democracy unique in the world. The freedoms bought so dearly, were the first “Divine Kingship” of the “Robber Baron” and now, corporate power elitism.
To keep the masses quiet and to build the lives of Americans, consumer ideology supplanted education, the study human purpose, as a goal in itself. The economic forces, which have built their power, care little for human development and survival. They care largely for their continued power as an end in itself and for the few who have the most based on its protection with a huge military force, hence the oil wars in Iraq, this to support an auto centered disposable consumer society.
The expense of privilege in the community of nations may become the death of the globe and its entire people as a result of the American and European economic system, now out of control. Many American economists, Jeffrey Sachs, Joe Stiglitz, and others view these historical developments as a threat to global harmony and survival.
American wealth once had an altruistic quality about it. The post-World War II USA, developed the Marshal Plan and cared about the condition of the world. Now the top one percent, those who have taken so much, continue to be supported by the thirty percent of Americans who still believe George Bush, and his myth of global superiority at the expense of the rest of the world. It is clare that to many of Clinton’s opinions continue the Bush doctrine, of unilateralism.
We sit on the edge of an environmental and economic disaster. This American system is out of control and the economic meltdown will continue regardless of who occupies the Oval office. The only difference is that Obama is intelligent enough to know that there are fundamental change needed in the way America and the so-called “free world” do business.
Rev Wright, simply addresses continued black slavery in a world of exploitation of all people led by the US and now the power elite in collusion with the government to continue the “American Dream” mentality, represented now by corporate multilateralism and their wealth and power. Corporate elitism cares for itself alone at the expense of all people, the environment, the human experiment, its freedoms, and so called democratic ideals which has become nothing more than an oligarchy.
We should not be too pejorative about Rev Wright who simply rails against the exploitive aspects of the Western mentality and points out the deficiency in the USA of evolved thinking toward the slave classes and the human species. He, having been able to experience directly because of his skin color these abuses is perhaps too angry which limits his effectiveness. His experience in seeing the wreckage of black America and his intelligence, has caused him to take up the defense of the disenfranchised.
America has a history of caring about others, once a genuine American direction, led by people, despite their failings like: The Kennedy’s, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and so many others who died for their belief in a better America and a better world, caring about humanity.
The media who carries their continued assault against those, who would in any way, attempt to include different thinking to bear on the so called “American Dream” which has become the world’s nightmare must be seen by the masses for what it has become. The media must begin to understand its roll as an objective commentator to the necessary changes that must be made to the USA and the world if humanity is to survive.
The media above all must be changed once again to give democratic exposure to all important ideas. It must present an understanding of the complex thought needed to be brought to bear on global complex issues of survival. A departure from the simplistic superficial treatment ad-nauseam we witness each day which passes for news presented by the Barby-Doll class of newsreader called journalist.