For Immediate Release
Contact: Pat Clark
Let's Beat Chevron Campaign/Corporate Campaign, Inc.
718-852-2808
Ruthless Policies of Harvard's Chevron Board Member Enrique Hernandez Seek to Destroy Iconic Harvard Law School Alumnus Steven Donziger While Ravaging People and the Planet
The brochure makes a strong case that Mr. Hernandez should not serve another day as a member of both Harvard College's Visiting Committee and Harvard University's Resources Committee, which Chevron boasts about on its website, unless he immediately resigns from the oil giant's board of directors. After repeated requests, Harvard has refused to confirm or deny his presence on those committees.
The brochure and website LetsBeatChevron.org document Chevron's worldwide crimes and environmental devastation. Chevron's board is blamed for the festering toxic pollution and thousands of cancer related deaths, miscarriages, birth defects and other maladies in Ecuador's Amazon Rainforest affecting 30,000 Indigenous people.
"In his role as a top policymaker of Chevron, Enrique Hernandez is responsible for the brutal policies harming people and the planet for which Chevron is notorious. In essence, Harvard's Hernandez represents a blight on Harvard and a plague on society," said Ray Rogers. "He is devoid of any real sense of morality, ethics, compassion, empathy or justice which makes him a terrible role model for students," Rogers added.
Along with a series of explosive films documenting Chevron's reprehensible conduct and environmental devastation, LetsBeatChevron.org highlights Dr. Nan Greer's report, "Chevron's Global Destruction: Ecocide, Genocide, and Destruction" released in September 2021. The report states, "As a multinational corporation, Chevron is expected to adhere to international business regulations and human rights laws and regulations. However, the company tends to behave as if it can act with impunity, failing to obey national and international laws...rather than addressing human rights and environmental incidents, the company has consistently chosen to bribe officials, hire thugs to intimidate people, or litigate against its victims."
In 2018, following one of the costliest corruption scandals in U.S. banking history, Harvard's Hernandez had to quickly exit Wells Fargo's board of directors. Yet he has remained as McDonald's board chairman raking in $797,398 in compensation in 2020 even with the mess he has allowed to worsen there under his leadership, including massive outcries over systematic sexual harassment, surveillance of workers protesting long shifts, pitiful wages and unhealthy and unsafe working conditions. "But that all pales in comparison to his direct involvement in policymaking for scofflaw Chevron," said Rogers. The brochure reports that Mr. Hernandez has served on Chevron's 12-member board of directors since 2008 and described his pay of $323,154 from Chevron in 2020 as "a nice sum for a side job."
In contrast, the website and brochure spotlight Harvard Law School graduate Steven Donziger as a heroic human rights icon that Chevron's Hernandez, another Harvard Law School alumnus, is trying to destroy for winning a $9.5 billion judgement against Chevron over its devastation of the Amazonian Rainforest in Ecuador, referred to as the Amazonian Chernobyl. In the UK, Chevron board member and president of Imperial College London, Alice Gast, has also come under fire over her role as a Chevron board member and is reportedly leaving the university earlier than planned in May.
Photos and statements of numerous celebrities including Erin Brockovich, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, Sting and wife Trudie Styler, Cher, Susan Sarandon, Daryl Hannah, Lucy Lawless, Danny Glover, Michael Moore, U.S. presidential candidate Marianne Williamson and other notables condemning Chevron are highlighted on the website.
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