Chevron grant for Kiva

[Guest]

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[Diane R]

What, is Chevron trying not to have nightmares when they put their head on their pillow at night, and Kiva is supposed to make them feel better maybe?

I think that's just about the size of it, yes.

I've signed up at Ethos Alliance and will report anything of interest I receive from them.


--Diane.

[David2051]

An organization that has human rights issues, donating to a group trying to empower humans.  Isn't there something wrong with this picture?  What, is Chevron trying not to have nightmares when they put their head on their pillow at night, and Kiva is supposed to make them feel better maybe?  A good name for this partnership might be 'sleeping with the enemy' . . .

This made me think of a song by Sweet Honey in the Rock.

http://new.music.yahoo.com/sweet-honey-in-the-rock/tracks/are-my-hands-clean--840319

There a play button on this page to listen through Rhapsody. 

Lyrics and music by Bernice Johnson Reagon. Songtalk Publishing Co. 1985
Performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock. Sweet Honey in the Rock, Live at Carnegie Hall

Are My Hands Clean?

I wear garments touched by hands from all over the world
35% cotton, 65% polyester, the journey begins in Central America
In the cotton fields of El Salvador
In a province soaked in blood,
Pesticide-sprayed workers toil in a broiling sun
Pulling cotton for two dollars a day.

Then we move on up to another rung—Cargill
A top-forty trading conglomerate, takes the cotton through the Panama Canal
Up the Eastern seaboard, coming to the US of A for the first time
In South Carolina
At the Burlington mills
Joins a shipment of polyester filament courtesy of the New Jersey petro-chemical mills of
Dupont

Dupont strands of filament begin in the South American country of Venezuela Where oil
riggers bring up oil from the earth for six dollars a day
Then Exxon, largest oil company in the world,
Upgrades the product in the country of Trinidad and Tobago
Then back into the Caribbean and Atlantic Seas
To the factories of Dupont
On the way to the Burlington mills
In South Carolina
To meet the cotton from the blood-soaked fields of El Salvador

In South Carolina
Burlington factories hum with the business of weaving oil and cotton into miles of fabric
for Sears
Who takes this bounty back into the Caribbean Sea
Headed for Haiti this time—May she be one day soon free—
Far from the Port-au-Prince palace
Third world women toil doing piece work to Sears specifications
For three dollars a day my sisters make my blouse

It leaves the third world for the last time
Coming back into the sea to be sealed in plastic for me
This third world sister
And I go to the Sears department store where I buy my blouse
On sale for 20% discount

Are my hands clean?

The details are different, but the theme is the same.  It makes you think...

[Sengbe Pieh]

Last week RAINFOREST ACTION NETWORK (RAN) launched our newest campaign to Change Chevron. We created a petition addressed to Chevron's new CEO John Watson asking him to clean up the environmental disaster his company abandoned in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

If you haven't yet signed the petition, please do that now and pass it on to your friends.



The Human Costs of Chevron
posted by Brianna in RAN General on February 2nd, 2010

As many of you know, there is lawsuit that has been going on for over 16 years to get Chevron to own up and clean up its toxic legacy in Ecuador. The lawsuit is on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorean people who are suffering and dying because of Chevron’s refusal to the do the right thing.

The legal team working on behalf of the impacted people in Ecuador has a great blog called The Chevron Pit which is a great source of information about the case, Chevron, and the people seeking justice.

They’ve just launched a powerful new series featuring the first of many personal stories about how the oil contamination left behind by Texaco has impacted the people living near the oil company’s former oil sites. Chevron purchased Texaco in 2001.

The first story is about Modesta Briones, who passed away not long after she and her husband, Segundo Salinas, gave an interview to author Lou DeMatteis for his book Crude Reflections.

The story and images are powerful, and as they say, speak so much louder than words. Every year that Chevron does not clean up Ecuador more people will get sick and die. We can, and we must, Change Chevron.

A Rainforest Chernobyl

In 1964, Texaco (now Chevron), discovered oil in the remote northern region of the Ecuadorian Amazon, known as the "Oriente." The indigenous inhabitants of this pristine rainforest, including the Cofán, Siona, Secoya, Kichwa and Huaorani, lived traditional lifestyles largely untouched by modern civilization. The forests and rivers provided the physical and cultural subsistence base for their daily survival. They had little idea what to expect or how to prepare when oil workers moved into their backyard and founded the town of Lago Agrio, named for Texaco's birthplace of Sour Lake, Texas. The Ecuadorian government had similarly little idea what to expect; no one had ever successfully drilled for oil in the Amazon rainforest before. The government entrusted Texaco, a well-known U.S. company with more than a half-century's worth of experience, with employing modern oil practices and technology in the country's emerging oil patch.  However, despite existing environmental laws, Texaco made deliberate, cost-cutting operational decisions that, for 28 years, resulted in an environmental catastrophe that experts have dubbed the "Rainforest Chernobyl."

Unlike the Exxon Valdez disaster that spilled over a billion gallons of crude during a one time cataclysmic event, Texaco's oil extraction system in Ecuador was designed, built, and operated on the cheap using substandard technology from the outset. This led to extreme, systematic pollution and exposure to toxins from multiple sources on a daily basis for almost three decades.

Texaco Activity

In a rainforest area roughly three times the size of Manhattan, Texaco carved out 350 oil wells, and upon leaving the country in 1992, left behind some 1,000 open toxic waste pits. Many of these pits leak into the water table or overflow in heavy rains, polluting rivers and streams that 30,000 people depend on for drinking, cooking, bathing and fishing. Texaco also dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic and highly saline "formation waters," a byproduct of the drilling process, into the rivers of the Oriente. At the height of Texaco's operations, the company was dumping an estimated 4 million gallons of formation waters per day, a practice outlawed in major US oil producing states like Louisiana, Texas, and California decades before the company began operations in Ecuador in 1967. By handling its toxic waste in Ecuador in ways that were illegal in its home country, Texaco saved an estimated $3 per barrel of oil produced.

Ongoing Devastation
Affected Communities Fight for Justice


http://chevrontoxico.com/take-action/send-chevron-a-message.html

Here are a couple of links to the 60 Minutes piece ("Amazon Crude") from earlier this year on this matter (Chevron's refusal to do any more clean-up in the Amazon and the resulting lawsuit).
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4988079n
http://chevrontoxico.com/news-and-multimedia/2009/0503-60-minutes-amazon-crude.html

[wind5001]

Kiva taking money from them is so gross...it makes me want to throw up. But why do I wonder that Kiva seems to have no problem with where its money comes from?

[Henry]

Chevrons got a certain amount of money to give each year - if KIVA doesn't take it someone else will.... I think taking the money and using it is a good thing, they are giving it away regardless.   
2 cents wasted here !  LOL  --- I will do anything to avoid packing up my costume for the bal this weekend even if it means posting my 2 cents everywhere! 

[wind5001]

I see your point, Henry, but I guess it is just the same objection I have to Rhodes scholarships. Cecil Rhodes was a brutal capitalist who made his fortune in Africa. Now his endowment money goes mainly to people from the Western world. I do not think I would want to be a part of that...but that is just me, I guess...let others have the money and use it.

[wind5001]

And now go pack that darn costume!

[Henry]

ends do not justify the means

crack dealer drops his stash of cash and drugs....  lady with starving children finds the cash flushes the drugs... feeds family, they live happy ever after

difference?

[Peter S]

I can see entirely where Oli and Judith are coming from, but I tend to agree with Henry, that the half a million bucks is better in Kiva's bank account than in Chevron's, and I've expressed that view in this thread before.  I am able to think that at the same time as helping to draw attention here to Chevron's reprehensible conduct in Ecuador and Nigeria, their inexcusable presence in Burma, and their abysmal environmental and human rights record generally.

But - and this is quite a big "but" - what's really starting to worry me from the point of view of transparency about Kiva's funding sources is that Kiva seems very unwilling to acknowledge the grant from Chevron, other than one brief post in the Kiva blog which remained on the front page for about 2 hours.  That familiar blue and red logo is *still* missing from Kiva's corporate partner page, months after the grant was made.  Perhaps part of the agreement (about which Gerard was quite guarded earlier in this thread) between Kiva and Chevron was that Kiva has permission to keep quiet about it?

Is it possible that for Kiva, Chevron is the funding source that dares not speak its name?

It's not as if there's no space on that rather cluttered corporate supporters page.  Advanta is no longer in business, it no longer provides credit cards, and is in bankruptcy.  And it isn't the kind of bankruptcy from which corporations sometimes recover, because the Advanta name was irrevocably tainted last year when for a brief time in its death throes it offered toxic bonds direct to the public.  There's nobody left at Advanta to complain if they are no longer named as a Kiva supporter.

Perhaps we'll be hearing from Kiva's spokesperson that it is entirely coincidental that Chevron isn't listed as a supporter.  Some PR whitewash or other, no doubt.  I tell you what, Kiva.  Just don't bother to own Chevron as a supporter.  Keep it quiet, that's really much simpler.  Hey, if you keep quiet about it, maybe those troublesome human rights and environmental activists won't be beating a path to your door when they find out about it. 

Transparency, who needs it...

[Diane R]

But - and this is quite a big "but" - what's really starting to worry me from the point of view of transparency about Kiva's funding sources is that Kiva seems very unwilling to acknowledge the grant from Chevron, other than one brief post in the Kiva blog which remained on the front page for about 2 hours.

And further, while Kiva blog posts just before and just after the Chevron announcement were mirrored to the Kiva Facebook page, the Chevron funding announcement never appeared there, while other far, far smaller grants have been highlighted in that space.  I thought it odd, and I keep wondering why Kiva hasn't said more about it.  This is a heck of a lot more money than some of the grants which have received far more publicity.  What's up with that, Kiva?

--Diane.