This made my day! Ahhhhhh ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaa…woooo hooooo! Oh sweet Jesus! (sniff!--anyone got a Kleenex?)
It's great to see that the rightwing of this country can think of no better way to spend its time than to attack a 23-year-old college student who was killed by Israeli bulldozers (and, oh yes, also her grieving parents. Solid, guys, very upstanding!). I also immensely enjoyed their sober reporting on the menacing threat posed by the apparently left-leaning Chevron-Texaco foundation (?!):
On its website, ChevronTexaco pledges its support for “programs and non-profit organizations that exemplify and explore the traditions and heritage of diverse cultures in our communities.” Environmental issues also rank high on the foundation’s list of priorities.
Moreover, ChevronTexaco extols the virtues of diversity in the workplace, devoting an entire page of its website to this topic. The foundation proudly states that it “has been a major sponsor of the Mosaic Project that provides K-12 educators and community-based organizations with resources for teaching students how different cultures shape our community.” In addition, the Chevron and Texaco minority vendor programs resulted (from 1996 - 2002) in the purchase of $8.6 billion in products and services with women or minority-owned suppliers.
MOREOVER! Can you believe it?! Chevron devotes "an entire page" of its website to extolling the virtues of diversity in the workplace?!! Don't these oil execs realize it's only a short step from "diversity in the workplace" to universal health care and a leftist-anarcho bonfire-orgy on the Capitol steps with Noam Chomsky leading the heathens in godless chants and the heads of the Senate Intelligence Committee bobbing on pointed sticks? Yea, 'tis a slippery slope! Thank heavens we have Horowitz to keep an eye on Texaco for us!
But you know what, David? You really should relax. Don't be so credulous as to take ChevronTexaco's word on their commitment to "environmental issues." They're still ruthlessly poisoning the environment and exploiting the indigenous of the Third World. Just ask Guillermo Maldonado. And who is he?
Maldonado, a 47-going-on-60-year-old day-worker for Petroecuador, walks us over to a toxic water pool dug by Texaco to be used as part of its petroleum separation process. The pool lies just 100 meters behind the wooden shack he shares with 12 members of his family. Inside the station's perimeter fence, a gas flare burns with an intense heat, releasing invisible fumes that send my head spinning and leave me feeling physically sick. The pool is filled with black slimy water, and is lined with a single layer of black plastic--standard Texaco and Petroecuador operating procedure. It has ruptured and the water has leaked through the soil and into a nearby stream--the only local source of drinking water. ''We have bad headaches, stomach pains, and our skin looks like this,'' says Maldonado. His body, like that of every member of his family, is covered in white pustulated boils. It could be a hereditary disease, except that nearly everyone around here has a similar affliction.
So you see, David, relax, it's cool. Chevron may throw some rhetorical bones to the liberals, but when push comes to shove, they don't shy away from inflicting whole villages with "white pustulated boils." They've got…whatdoyacallit? Oh yeah, that's right. "Steely resolve." Cold as fucking metal.
Brian Cook was an editor at In These Times from 2003 to 2009. He now works on the editorial staff of Playboy magazine.
