Activist court slashes judgment against Exxon (a blast from the past)

If you were around in 1989 you may remember the Valdez oil tanker spill that spread millions of gallons of crude oil along 1,500 miles of Alaska's coastline, killed wildlife, and ruined the livelihoods of many locals.

In 1994 a jury in Anchorage said Exxon had to pay $5,000,000,000 in punitive damages to thousands of fishers and other Alaska residents for destroying their jobs and property. But no fair ruling is safe from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has been known for many miserable moments in conservafoolery.

Rightist critics of the 9th Circus like to blast the court as being too liberal, but that's far from the truth. That court has been responsible for some of the most wacky right-wing case law in recent history. For instance, it voided a city's civil rights law that protected prospective tenants from being discriminated against on the basis of marital status, saying the law violated the First Amendment. (Seriously. A court actually said that.) The court also ruled in favor of a school that forced a 13-year-old girl to disrobe for a drug search. (More on that later.) And the 9th Circus also sided with makers of Ritalin in a class-action suit over the drug makers' predatory promotion of this toxin. The court has never met a greedy corporation it didn't like.

So few should be surprised that the 9th Circus has also consistently sided with Exxon in its attempts to avoid paying the judgment against it. In late 2006, the court cut the $5,000,000,000 judgment squarely in half - even though a jury had decided on it. It was the third time this court had intervened on behalf of Exxon in this case.

The 9th Circus's action was bolstered by a 2003 Supreme Court decision that arbitrarily limited punitive damages against corporations, saying it was unconstitutional for a corporation to have to pay that much. Unconstitutional how? Constitutionally, the only right corporations have is to go gag on their own piss. They have no constitutional rights, because our organisms-only constitutional rights club is just that. The Constitution is here to protect people, not corporations. And even if it did protect corporations, there's nothing in the Constitution to place such an arbitrary limit on court awards.

Back in 2002, when the lower court reluctantly lowered the judgment to $4,000,000,000 following a previous Exxon-friendly 9th Circus decision, Exxon thought the award was still too high and appealed like the big babies they are. Exxon claimed it should have to pay no more than $25,000,000 (though the original award was 200 times that), even though the company's $36,100,000,000 earnings in 2005 were the highest ever by any American corporation.

Isn't it nice to know that if you're a corporation, you can stamp your feet until a court gives you at least half of what you want?

(Source: http://www.latimes.com/business/investing/wire/sns-ap-exxon-valdez,1,3250847.story?coll=sns-ap-investing-headlines)