Nearly 20 years later Exxon Valdez heads to Supreme Court

After 19 years of bureaucratic finagling, one of the largest environmental disasters in modern history will finally get it's day in the highest court. I'm of course referring to Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, the Exxon Valdez oil spill case which happened all the way back in 1989, when I was in first grade. To date Exxon Mobil has pulled in hundreds of billions of dollars in profit since that time, roughly $40 billion alone in 2007, yet they have been successful avoiding payment of the $5 billion in punitive damages levied against them in 1994. Since that time the fine has been cut in half to 2.5 billion after bouncing back and forth between court systems. The disaster created irreparable damage to both industry and the environment alike. The operator of the tanker was intoxicated at the time.

I'm at a point now where I'm less troubled by the actual act than I am by the bureaucratic and fascist institutions which have allowed it to go this long unpunished. If we lived in any type of a just society, negligent companies like Exxon Mobil would atone for their mistakes, and if the economic costs were too high, they would simply be put out of business, their assets sold to cover the damages, like we do to the poor in this country who default on loans. But instead in our backwards, pro-business society, such companies use the legal system and their manipulative know-how to circumvent such justice, and we are left with for-profit institutions who do as they please without any serious legal ramifications hanging overhead, for their precious capital is protected by a like minded government. And even if Exxon ends up paying out here, the fine will not take into account the 19 years of lost interest the victims in Alaska have experienced, 19 years of interest Exxon Mobil managed to turn into hundreds of billions of dollars. America, this is fascism, and it's our economy which has led us to here.