Riki Ott, author, community activist, marine toxicologist and former fisherma'am. [Riki Ott was active in the early Exxon Cleanup attempts, and Community advocate.]
...
AMY GOODMAN: The mayor committed suicide?
RIKI OTT: One of our mayors, right after the spill, he did, and it was 1993, when the fish runs were collapsing. And I literally-- call that year as bad as it gets. Up to that point, we had been victims. We had been waiting for Exxon to pay us. Exxon promised to make us whole. You know, "You're lucky you have Exxon." We hadn't even gone to court by 1993. We had fish run collapses, bankruptcies, divorces, suicides, you know, domestic violence spikes, substance abuse spikes. The town was just unraveling. And we were waiting for somebody to help us: the State of Alaska, the federal government, the court system, Exxon. Nobody. And--
AMY GOODMAN: There were 33,000 plaintiffs.
RIKI OTT: There are 32,000 claims, 22,000 plaintiffs.
...
AMY GOODMAN: You've said that is not just an environmental disaster, but a crisis in democracy.
RIKI OTT: It is a democracy crisis. The question we started asking as our lawsuit went on and on and on, and we didn't get paid, was how did corporations get this big, where they can manipulate the legal system, the political system? What happened here? And I thought that was a really good question, so I went to answer it. And that became the final chapter of Not One Drop.
And I learned from other people's work that there's actually two ways to amend the Constitution. One is formally, through people-made law, which we've done twenty-seven times. And one is informally, through what Thomas Jefferson called the engine of consolidation, the federal judiciary, the Supreme Court.
And in 1886, the Supreme Court made sort of a seminal decision, where it granted a railroad corporation equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, which is, of course, a civil rights amendment for due process and equal protection for African American men. For the first forty years after that passed, there were 307 lawsuits brought, nineteen by African American men, the rest by corporations.
And at that point, when the Fourteenth Amendment passed to corporations, this thing called a corporate person arose. And that corporate person, in the eyes of the law, is able to access our rights, human rights, the Bill of Rights, constitutional protections. This is wrong. The word "corporation" never appears in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. This is how we've lost freedom of speech. We still--we, as people, still have the First Amendment, but so do corporations. Free speech equals money. Those with more money have more speech. Pretty simple. So I began to understand that the legal system is broken. The election process is broken, all because of the same reason, this corporate personhood. (emphasis added)
http://www.democracynow.org/20...
A jury ruled that Exxon had punitive damages to pay the local communities in Alaska;
BUT after working the Appeals courts the penalty went from
$5.0 Billion ... to $2.5 Billion ... to $0.5 Billion
-- and they still haven't been Paid, by Exxon! WTF?
20 Years and Nothing?!?
Corporate personhood MUST be dismantled!
AMY GOODMAN: How many animals died?
RIKI OTT: There was up to half a million seabirds, up to 5,000 sea otters, 300 or so harbor seals, billions of young salmon and herring fish eggs and young juvenile fish. And this was a problem, because it created a delayed impact. I mean, when you take out eggs, you don't really see the impact until those eggs should have become adults and joined the adult population. That's what we saw with herring. The crash didn't happen until 1993, four years later, when the young of the in '89 failed to materialize. (emphasis added)
http://www.democracynow.org/20...
Words leave me speechless ...
I guess WE, as mere mortals, DON'T have as much of a Voice, as Exxon, a legal abstraction, has ...
Where is the Justice? Where is the Accountability?
Where is the moral conscious?
(I guess, Corporate "Persons", like Exxon, have forgotten to "invest" in those things ... Some Human Qualities can't be bought it seems.)
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