Caught in the Devil's Bargain: Chevron stabs workers in the back

Have you seen the latest story coming out about Chevron and their troubles in Richmond, CA around their attempt to ram though a giant expansion of their oil refinery?  Seems since they didn't get their way, the Oil Giant wants to close up shop, dismantle the 300 acre facility and sell the parts at the world's largest garage sale over in China.  Huh?  Get rid of your largest refinery in the most profitable market in the Pacific?  What's really going on?

A strange thing happened when Chevron made their latest move to expand their huge  refinery operations in Richmond California, a town mostly known for crime, drugs, failing schools and pollution.  Chevron's 2 billion dollar expansion won approval from the City and the local Air agency despite some serious legal issues that were immediately appealed in Court.  Knowing full well that these issues would likely end in the approval documents being declared illegal and work on the project halted until they were fixed, Chevron played an unbelievably cruel trick on the families of more than a thousand construction workers.  They hired them and began work on the doomed project knowing that if the court rejected the questionable environmental estimates, the workers would have to be laid off, possibly for more than a year.

Why would an local employer and alleged good corporate citizen do such a thing?  Simple.  They wanted to silence their critics and in fact bury them for good.  In recent years the local City Council, the Mayor and local watchdog groups have grown weary of Chevron's threats and bullying tactics to skirt taxes, regulations and just plain being a good neighbor. 

Chevron executives knew all too well, the legal challenge to their sketchy environmental reports about the expansion could succeed, resulting in an injunction to stop work and throw the fate of the 1,000 workers and their families into ditch.  This would effectively not only nullify any victory that Chevron critics could claim from the ruling, but in fact make the community health advocates into seemingly heartless villains caring nothing about the workers.  And as Chevron's appeal of the ruling proceeds, it gives them the opportunity to use the workers as pawns in their longer term scheme to silence their critics once and for all.

And so far it's working.  Chevron has fostered dozens of stories in the mainstream media about:

• The hopes of working families being dashed by treehuggers and radicals.
• Non profits like local solar companies losing their Chevron community benefit dollars tied to the project
• Union leaders crying like Chicken Little that the sky is falling
• Chevron closing the refinery and selling the parts to China (my personal favorite!)
• Richmond withering away and dieing after having killed its goose and golden egg

The real story doesn't seem to have gotten out yet about the cold calculating scheme Chevron hatched.  This is due in part to their million dollar PR machine and the heart wrenching stories of laid off workers.   But you have to give them credit, as Chevron's ad campaign touts the power of their "Human Energy".

Or is it just another example how the Oil Giant uses its brute force to crush people who demand accountability, like the indigenous folks in Equador and the dozens of other regions they have exploited and left behind polluted and poor?