11-19-07 by dugan
When a big story happens away from the eye of Big Media, the bare bones that get told often omit the really interesting political realities and motivations.
Earlier this month, a brief Associated Press story noted that the Alabama Supreme Court had overturned a state jury’s $3.5 billion damage award against Exxon Mobil for intentional underpayment of natural gas royalties to the state. The story was dry and minimal: The 9-member court threw out punitive damages in the case, which had already been cut from the original award of $11.8 billion.
Yet the actual underpayment of $51.9 million was upheld without dispute. That was what caught my eye.
Exxon tried to spin the decision as "validating the company’s assertion that the state had improperly turned a contract dispute into a fraud action." The ExxonMobil news release never even mentions the actual, undisputed underpayment.
Finally, with some digging into the back lots of Google, comes paydirt. It’s an online article for Harpers Magazine by Scott Horton, a New York attorney and international human rights expert. "Alabama’s courts … have become a cesspool" of corporate political influence, says Horton, and the ExxonMobil case stinks to heaven.
Guess who funds judicial elections in Alabama? And how are they connected to Karl Rove? Here’s the whole article .
Below is the heart of Horton’s analysis:
"Over the last fifteen years, judicial elections in Alabama have been increasingly politicized, with enormous sums of money entering the state from the national business community in an effort to seize control of the state’s courts. This money was largely channeled by the Chamber of Commerce and entities controlled by it and by the Business Council of Alabama, run by William Canary—the key figure in the scandal surrounding the politically manipulated prosecution of former Governor Siegelman.
"William Canary is a campaign partner of Karl Rove’s and worked with Rove in Alabama Court politics starting with 1992; Toby Roth, the former chief of staff to Governor Bill Riley was a third member of their team. The Rove-Canary-Roth team scored a series of quite astonishing successes, and in the end it totally transformed the Alabama court landscape, starting with the state’s Supreme Court. I have no reason to link Rove, Canary and Roth to the specific litigation between ExxonMobil and the State of Alabama in particular. But in broader terms, the ExxonMobil decision should be counted the ultimate triumph of the Rove-Canary-Roth game plan. It got the oil and gas community exactly what it was aiming for from the beginning: the elimination of punitive damage awards in commercial cases.
"The eight Republican judges on Alabama’s high court who backed ExxonMobil were put in office with the money of the business community, and the money of the oil and gas community. No matter what these eight judges say and do, they have laid themselves open to the charge that they hold the interests of their corporate donors very dear, but not the interests of the people of the state of Alabama. And it’s unlikely that their electors intended that result.
"Alabama’s courts and prosecutors have become a cesspool. The unjust prosecution of former Governor Siegelman is only one of the more obvious reflections of this inequity; the decision in the ExxonMobil case is just as blatant and reflects no less the stench of corruption."