How time flies. For example, think back to 1989. Hillary Clinton was the obscure first lady of Arkansas. Roger Clemens was pitching for the Boston Red Sox and had never even heard of steroids. And the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound, causing the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

Nineteen years later, Exxon has merged into ExxonMobil, and it has prospered enormously, banking $40 billion in profits last year alone — the richest year for any corporation in history. Back at Prince William Sound, however, the picture is not so rosy, for Exxon's malfeasance devastated the ecology, the economy and thousands of lives there.

In an area that's dependent on fishing, the waters are still polluted with some 85 tons of Exxon's crude. Herring — which was the main catch for local fishing families, accounting for half of the yearly income for many of them — has essentially been wiped out by the spill. The economic stress has led to bankruptcies, divorces and suicides.

Meanwhile, ExxonMobil has deployed a battalion of $600-an-hour lawyers to stiff the locals, keeping the people's lawsuit stalled in America's corporate-biased court system.

Nearly two decades ago, a jury awarded $5 billion in punitive damages to some 33,000 victims of Exxon's spill, yet the oil giant has not paid a penny of it. In various appeals courts, the corporation got the sum cut in half — and its lawyers are now asking the Supreme Court to reduce the penalty to absolute zero.

So, 19 years after its tanker dumped 11 million gallons of crude into the lives of thousands of people, ExxonMobil is pulling every legal trick to avoid a punishment that would amount to only three week's worth of its 2007 profits. And Exxon's top executives, living in luxury 3,000 miles away, wonder why people despise Big Oil.

BUSH FREES IRAQ TO EMBRACE IRAN

At last, the president has been greeted in Iraq by an outpouring of hugs, kisses and rose petals — just as the Bushites predicted would happen when they invaded that country in 2003.

Unfortunately, though, it is not George W.

getting the love treatment from the Iraqis — it's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. O, bitter fate! O, the bile and gall of political irony! The very man whom Bush considers the devil incarnate, the one he accuses of promoting terrorism in Iraq — that man is being lauded by Iraq's leaders, who were supposed to be grateful to Bush, not Iran.

Has Bush not sacrificed the lives of nearly 4,000 American troops to try to impose a Western-style democracy in Iraq? Has he not committed trillions of dollars from our public treasury to war and nation-building in Iraq? Has he not sacrificed America's good name and his own political standing in his hell-bent effort to make Iraq a bulwark against Iranian dominance in the Mideast? Yes, yes and yes.

Yet, Ahmadinejad is the one getting hosannas from the very government that Bush put into power. Indeed, the Iranian is the only foreign leader to be given a full-dress state reception by the Iraqi government — including red-carpet treatment at the president's palace. Contrast his loving reception to George W.'s own furtive trips to Iraq, where he has to be rushed in under total secrecy and fearful security, then rushed out again before the people even know he's been there.

And while the Bushites frantically scramble to get even the weakest concessions from the Iraqi government that our troops are so valiantly defending, Iraq's prime minister threw himself at Ahmadinejad, declaring, "There are no limits to the cooperation that we are going to open up with our neighbor Iran."

So, all of America's sacrifice in Iraq comes down to a victory for Iran. Way to go, George.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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