Category: Coyote Hills

I’ll keep this simple.  Chevron is a lowlife among corporate miscreants.  A dark oilstain on the free market; a corrupted, taxpayer-subsidized payoff and extortion specialist with expertise in despoiling the globe and bullying anyone who challenges them.  They are responsible for disastrous oils spills and damages to Ecuador, Brazil, Nigeria and elsewhere, resulting in loss of life and mind-boggling environmental devastation.  They have also been implicated for human rights abuses in despotic states such as Burma. Even by oil company standards, they kinda suck.

Now, you might say, sure, they’re the bottom-feeders of transnational corporate-oil-trash, and probable warmongers (with a tanker named “The Condoleeza Rice”) but still, what about their property rights?  Good question. Let’s look at Ecuador, where Chevron fouled other people’s property so much that they lost an $18 billion judgment in court.  You violate others’ property rights, you pay.  Unless you’re Chevron. Refusing to pay, they instead filed suit against the indigenous people of Ecuador and their lawyer for racketeering.  Pollute, deny, avoid, bully.  That’s Chevron’s way of handling your demand for the fair treatment of YOUR property rights.

So here’s a company with NO respect for property rights, including ours in the US.  In Richmond CA they were recently placed under criminal investigation for intentionally routing pollution around sensors. Pollution that travels into people’s homes and makes them sick. But even psychopaths are guaranteed property rights.  Well fine, they can have their property rights. After all, nobody is trying to seize their property and they can keep drilling for oil and gas as long as they want.  But their property rights to land zoned for oil and gas drilling do not give them the right to build 700 homes on it and call it a park, any more than I have a right to say … open a public Gin-bar on my porch and call it a rehab center.

Speaking of everybody’s favorite cocktail base, guess who among our fine crop of candidates supports Yes on W? None other than purported “liberal” and breastfeeding advocate Jan Flory. Evidently police union support and vapid Facebook posts are insufficient resources to counter her well-deserved shortage of voter appeal. So might as well hit up Chevron.

If Chevron’s plan was really in the public interest, would it be necessary to spend $1.3 million dollars in cash on trying to secure the vote? Some befuddled citizens and politicians are agog with the prospect of the oil-soaked carrots being dangled by the plunderous petroleum-peddling plutocrats. Fullerton teachers are particularly ginned up by the prospect of a “Nature Center” they can plan worthless field trips to, where students can learn all about what caving in to special interests looks like as they try to locate the scant vegetation popping up between the expensive and potentially PCB-laced tract homes. The bribe offered to the Fullerton School District (“free money! Gimme!”), as well as the greed of the non-profit moneygrabbing sector shows special interests only too willing to trade their “green” integrity for a little bit of the other green Chevron bilks from the US taxpayer. The fact is however, that city analyses indicate no major new revenue coming in from this development. The schools get some cash, greatly offset in the long-term by having to serve even more students. Nobody else basically gets a dime.

Greenwashed Yes on W ads are all over the place – on Youtube, Facebook, email, via phone call – everywhere but in most people’s yards since the average citizen has an instinctive sense not to trust professional grifters. They realize that Measure W is a joke. No real park compared to what is possible, just a few lonely ditches surrounding the concreting of North Orange County’s last open space, an already existing park, and a “Nature Center.” Unneeded houses on contaminated oil-lands. Traffic. Dangerous and toxic air pollution (a Chevron specialty) and infrastructural, water, and education costs to a city that can ill afford them. “But think about the children! Doesn’t anybody care about the children?”

Yes, we care about the damn children. Some of us even have some and would like to leave them a bit of undeveloped nature as a legacy. We’ll be saying no to the oil plutocracy’s local con job. No on W!

Now sue me, Chevron.

A reader sent in this image taken last week on a hillside somewhere in Fullerton.

Check out the deftly-named Open Coyote Hills website that was listed on the sign.  The website was put up by a group of residents who support the proposed Coyote Hills project, it’s associated parks and the opening of the 72-acre Robert E. Ward Nature Preserve that would come with it.

The “About” page lists an interesting cross-section of Fullerton’s politically inclined.

Last night the Fullerton City Council voted 4-1 to settle its lawsuit with Chevron in a deal that essentially man-dates approval of the development plan for West Coyote Hills that includes 760 houses, and that was denied 3-2. Last year Shawn Nelson, Pam Keller, and Sharon Quirk-Silva voted no. With Nelson and Keller having moved on, only Quirk-Silva remained to opposed the settlement.

As always, share your thoughts in the comments thread.