by Greg Palast • Zach D. Roberts for BuzzFlash
Famed indigenous human rights lawyer Steven Donziger had already been under house arrest for over 800 days when he reported to prison on October 27 to begin a six-month sentence. His crime: winning the largest single pollution judgment in history, $9.5 billion, for the Cofan people of the Amazon rain-forest in Ecuador.
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY (Scheerpost) — Judge Loretta Preska, an advisor to the conservative Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major donor, sentenced human rights attorney and Chevron nemesis Steven Donziger to six months in prison Friday for misdemeanor contempt of court after he had already spent 787 days under house arrest in New York.
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by Greg Palast
Look at his face. Emergildo Criollo, Chief of the Cofan people of the Amazon in Ecuador. Determined, dignified, in war paint, bare-chested.
Cofan Chief Emergildo Criollo, Ecuador
It was back in 2007, when I found him in his thatched stilt home in the rainforest. Criollo told me his 5-year-old son had jumped into a swimming hole, covered with an enticing shine. The shine was oil sludge, illegally dumped. His son came up vomiting blood, then dropped dead in the Chief’s arms.
7 April 2021 — Make Chevron Clean Up by Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía
U.S. trial judge Loretta Preska has denied all Zoom access to the upcoming contempt trial of human rights lawyer Steven Donziger in a widely condemned move that his lawyers say is designed to limit public access to an unprecedented one-sided trial run by a private Chevron prosecutor.
25 August 2020 — Scheerpost
Those, like environmental lawyer Steven Donziger, who fight the corporate control of our society on behalf of the vulnerable find the institutions of power unite to crucify them.
A citizen of Guanta, Ecuador, shows a butterfly killed by oil pollution, in 2003. [AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa]
By Chris Hedges / Original to Scheerpost
The persecution of the attorney Steven Donziger is a grim illustration of what happens when we confront the real centers of power, masked and unacknowledged by the divisive cant from the Trump White House or the sentimental drivel of the Democratic Party. Those, like Donziger, who name and fight the corporate control of our society on behalf of the vulnerable see the judiciary, the press and the institutions of government unite to crucify them.
17 September 2018 — TRNN
A secret corporate arbitration panel in the Hague ruled that Ecuadorean courts’ $9.5 billion judgement against Chevron for environmental damages is illegal and should not be enforced. We speak to the plaintiffs’ lawyer Steven Donzinger about the ruling (inc transcript)
22 June 2017 — TRNN
Steven Donziger, the lawyer representing affected indigenous communities in Ecuador, calls this “the probably the most outrageous act of industrial pollution in history related to oil.”
12 May 2017 — FAIR
Janine Jackson interviewed Paul Paz y Miño about Chevron’s oil spill in Ecuador for the May 5, 2017 episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. Continue reading
25 March 2014 — The Ecologist
As the US and EU apply sanctions on Russia over its annexation’ of Crimea, JP Sottile reveals the corporate annexation of Ukraine. For Cargill, Chevron, Monsanto, there’s a gold mine of profits to be made from agri-business and energy exploitation.
The potential here for agriculture / agribusiness is amazing … production here could double … Ukraine’s agriculture could be a real gold mine.
20 October 2011 — Class action: OWS first salvo in US class war? — RT
A class war once seemed impossible in a country where being wealthy is part of the national dream. But as thousands march on Wall Street and in other parts of America, digging in with anti-corporate protests, many ask whether US is facing one.
It is week five of the Occupy Wall Street rallying call against bloated banks and Washington’s weakness in doing anything about it. And the growing gap between rich and poor is something which could cost the government dear.
23 September 2011 — williambowles.info
WikiLeaks Book: Julian Assange Unauthorizes His Own Autobiography
ABC News
By RANDY KREIDER WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange leaves Belmarsh
Magistrates’ Court in London, in this Feb. 7, 2011 file photo. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP Photo) WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has a history of falling out with his confederates. …
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/wikileaks-book-julian-assange-unauthorizes-autobiography/story?id=14582962
27 July 2011 — Council on Hemispheric Affairs
This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associate Katie Soltis
30 January, 2010 — Global Research
President becomes UN Special Envoy to earthquake-stricken Haiti.
A born-again neo-conservative US business wheeler-dealer preacher claims Haitians are condemned for making a literal pact with the Devil.
Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Bolivian, French and Swiss rescue organizations accuse the US military of refusing landing rights to planes bearing necessary medicines and urgently needed potable water to the millions of Haitians stricken, injured and homeless.
Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the worlds richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela.
Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, has the geological fate that it straddles one of the worlds most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one anotherthe intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3 to 6 miles thick, floating atop an adjacent mantle. Haiti also lies at the edge of the region known as the Bermuda Triangle, a vast area in the Caribbean subject to bizarre and unexplained disturbances.
14 November, 2009 — AlterNet
As U.S. and British oil companies sign contracts with the Iraqi government, is it time to declare Big Oil the “victor” in the bloody venture?
Before the United States and Britain invaded Iraq in March 2003, their oil companies were shut out of oil-production contracts being negotiated by the government of Saddam Hussein. Today, more than six years of war later, Saddam is gone, and the U.S. and British oil companies are not only in on the oil contracts, they have managed to sweeten the terms.
However, organized resistance by Iraqis and people around the world has thus far succeeded in denying Big Oil its Big Prize: passage of the Iraq Oil Law, alternatively called Iraq Hydrocarbons Law, which would grant far greater control over Iraqi oil to foreign companies on terms much less favorable to Iraq than the current contracts provide.
If the negotiations proceed on their current path, foreign companies will produce the vast majority of Iraq’s oil. How much control they will exert, and who will reap the greatest benefits (and endure the steepest costs) is yet to be determined. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 
