Spin Dry

News Item #1:

SAN FRANCISCO - It’s been nearly 17 years since the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil along the Alaska coast in one of the country’s worst environmental disasters, and a jury’s $5 billion judgment against the company is still tied up in the courts.

Exxon Mobil Corp.’s appeal of that punishment was scheduled to be heard for the third time Friday afternoon in a federal appeals court in San Francisco.

News Item #2:

Exxon Mobil Corp.'s earnings probably rose for the seventh straight quarter because of soaring energy prices, capping Chairman Lee Raymond's career with the most profitable year for any company in U.S. history.

The world's largest publicly traded oil company is expected to report Jan. 30 that fourth-quarter earnings per share increased 11 percent to $1.44, the average estimate from 20 analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial. That would bring net income for all of 2005 to more than $34 billion, topping the U.S. record of $26.3 billion set by MediaOne Group Inc. in 1998.

News analysis: Fuck Exxon. They say they're willing to pay no more than $25 million in punitive damages. I say the courts should wring that $34 billion out of them and give it to the people in Alaska, who are still dealing with Exxon's gunk up there. Oh. Didn't I mention that part? Nearly seventeen years after Exxon Valdez ran aground:

In the region itself, pockets of relatively fresh Exxon Valdez oil remain on shorelines as distant as Katmai National Park, about 300 miles from the site where the supertanker disgorged 11 million gallons of crude oil, according to government scientists who presented their studies at a conference this week in Anchorage.

“This stuff isn’t changing at all. It’s just the same kind of goo that got deposited there in 1989,” said Jeff Short, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric researcher.

Yeah. Must be nice to cause an ecological disaster, not clean it up, then bitch and whine to the courts that a wrist slap is too painful.

Like I said, fuck Exxon. Company should have been put out of business back in 1989.