Dear Exxon,

Last year you made $40.6 billion in profit. I made $24,600. (Mine wasn’t all profit though.) Clearly, we move in different circles. Your ways are not my ways. Your kung fu is greater than my kung fu. Your gross receipts for 2007 alone topped out at over $404 billion, which is bigger than the gross domestic product of no fewer than 120 nations.

Wow.

My writing profits for 2007 totaled about $78, (which is what the US is currently shooting for in terms of gross domestic product. We’ll get there, I’ve no doubt.)

I have a question to ask you, if you have just a minute.

I am doing much better this year, and I see that so are you, with over $10 billion in profits in the first 2008 quarter alone, and the price of gasoline now pushing $4.50 or higher in lots of parts of the US, and diesel even higher, so high, truck drivers in Spain are acting up. Good for you. That’s what capitalism is all about, right? Profit, profit, profit. And you are leading the pack, holding the torch as it were (don’t hold it too close to all that oil though…you know what happened at that BP refinery). I commend you for your initiative and success.

Here’s my question:

Why did you find it necessary to fight the $2.5 billion in punitive damages for the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, a spill that released 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay and covered 11,000 square miles of ocean, a spill you admit was your fault and no one else’s. I mean, you have the money, right? We’re talking 1989 here. Since 1989, you’ve made so much profit that all the zeros won’t even fit into this blog, so let’s not even go there.

Perhaps you have forgotten that the Exxon Valdez oil spill instantly killed somewhere between 250 and 500 thousand sea birds, 250 bald eagles (an American icon which at that time I believe was actually an endangered species to boot), and 22 Orca whales, not to mention sea creatures of all kinds too numerous to list much less count.

Thousands of volunteers saved you most of the painful and hopeless work of trying to save these rare, suffering animals so you could instead take way too long finding a subcontractor to spray deadly chemical dispersants, surfactants, and solvents (which, damn the bad luck, didn’t work very well) all over the already poisoned Bay. So it’s not like you didn’t try at all, and to be perfectly fair, cleaning up oily messes is not really your thing. You are in the business of finding and selling oily messes.

Still, what did it cost you to fight this thing legally for 19 years running?

Corporate lawyers don’t work cheap. Even the ambulance chasers around here get $100 an hour, so I know you had to spend far more than the penalty just arguing the penalty in court after court after court.

What’s up with that?

Were you afraid that if you were held to some basic, minimal standard of corporate responsibility it would end up cutting into your impressive profits? If so, I wish you’d have called me first. You don’t have sic a squad of corporate attorneys on people and birds and fish already drenched in oil to preserve your right to be irresponsible. All you really have to do is get one of your pals elected President (oh, I forgot, you did that already), and then hire a big, glossy advertising firm to make beautiful commercials with lots of politically correct ‘green’ imagery and multinational persons wandering around on sand dunes and seashores and stuff like that, all to show how sensitive and environmental you are. That’s what BP and Dow Chemical do, and it works great.

People will believe anything if it’s on TV.

I know you won’t answer my letter. I know you are busy. It’s just that, for the life of me, I can’t understand why you would spend more than the original $2.5 billion, just to get it reduced to $500 million 19 years later. Maybe you aren’t aware of this, but right now, people in this country don’t like you very much. People think you are greedy and uncaring and tyrannical. People think you are gouging them and doing whatever you please and damn the consequences. When you don’t bother to even respond to those kinds of feelings, we start to feel like you don’t really care about us very much.

At the beginning of 2007 NOAA determined that you still have 26,000 gallons of crude oil poisoning the sandy soil of Pruhoe Bay Alaska. I just want to ask you this one favor:

Please don’t charge them for that oil.

Thanks for listening. Your little capitalist fan,

Pam, PFA