The Exxon Valdez spill: 20 years later it's still all the lies

20 years ago the Exxon Valdez oil tanker trashed much of the Alaskan coastline. The cause? Not a drunk captain, but a broken radar that Exxon refused to fix. It would have been an easy fix, but Exxon failed to carry legally required damage control systems. Exxon lied about it. The livelihoods of perhaps 30,000 people were destroyed, and Exxon has been fighting this entire time to avoid paying them. It looks like they'll finally be paying up... about $16,000 to each victim. Your entire way of life destroyed? Surely $16,000 will cover that. Of course, it won't help the victims who have died since then.

Of course, Exxon is a poor, impoverished company. If they had been forced to pay more in damages, or to actually clean the damaged land, they wouldn't have been able to pay a $400,000,000 retirement bonus to the man who was President of Exxon when the disaster happened.

Read the full story about Exxon's abuse here.

Via Mark Evanier's news from me)