6.1.2021

In today's class, we discussed the latest issues revolving around Stephen Dolzigher and its uncanny similarities with the past Bhopa incident. From here, I was able to learn about the house arrest situation in which Stephen's challenge at accusing a multinational American oil industry company Chevron for its non-environmental oil leakage in Ecuador, had lead to the enterprise shutting down its Ecuador base. Moreover, the allegations that Dolzigher had pushed for, were completely overruled in court due to Chevron's close ties with the judges. This incident was then compared with a historical episode in India in which a sneaky American company in the name of Union Carbide had caused a detrimental gas leak by breaking India's safety regulations and over-assuming that they, as a country with lower standards will accept their amends. To no surprise, these two episodes were very similar in the ways of the alleged elusively evading severe consequences, whether it be not paying for the compensations, as well as protecting executives from arrest and imprisonment. Moreover, we looked at how both have blamed a latter part of their merged shareholder, whether it be Texaco for Chevron and Indian Limited for Union Carbide. From the above, we became aware of the powerful role that political and personal relationships play in major cases against multinational companies.

Seeing as there are many cases where companies with huge capital and connections take advantage of their assets to evade such realities, it made me wonder more about why it keeps it repeating. If such history can be dug up in one google search, I don't think taking the same route would leave a good impression on them. As some of my discussion peers talked about the newspaper specifically for judges which have neutralized and stirred criticism towards the Chevron case, I know that this has indeed left a damaging impact on their reputation. However, despite all this information, media companies still dominate the information demand, which has buried the truth with twisting words and just straight up no coverage about the opposing side whatsoever. Something I didn't grasp at first is why the judges of the majority who have criticized Chevron's dirty trial had not opened up about this issue. Then again, these judges may have used Chevron's products, in which case it is hard to condemn them fully. Moreover, Chevron could still be powerful enough to invalidate their word. Perhaps then, since the oil industry has competitors other than Chevron, they could use the reputation of that company to their advantage to sell out their products. I thought that no matter how much information one deceits from readers, the fact of Chevron's non-environmental friendly decisions, can be viewed as a harmful act. Utilizing this information and convincing Chevron users about its current situation may help bring other competitors to succeed. And seeing these successes, Chevron may just well want to stop their messy trial before the reality of that gets leaked by other market sharers. Nevertheless, a lesson was learned that ownership and access are truly manipulative in exploiting and hiding the truth.