• 27 Posts
  • 4.25K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle


  • The lawyers always win

    Not always

    Steven Robert Donziger (born September 14, 1961) is an American former attorney known for his legal battles with Chevron, particularly Aguinda v. Texaco, Inc. and other cases in which he represented over 30,000 farmers and Indigenous people who suffered environmental damage and health problems caused by oil drilling in the Lago Agrio oil field of Ecuador. The Ecuadorian court awarded the plaintiffs $9.5 billion ($13 billion in 2024 dollars) in damages, which led Chevron to withdraw its assets from Ecuador and launch legal action against Donziger in the US. In 2011, Chevron filed a RICO (anti-corruption) suit against Donziger in New York City. The case was heard by US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who determined that the ruling of the Ecuadorian court could not be enforced in the US because it was procured by fraud, bribery, and racketeering activities. As a result of this case, Donziger was disbarred from practicing law in New York in 2018.

    Donziger was placed under house arrest in August 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of criminal contempt of court, which arose during his appeal against Kaplan’s RICO decision, when he refused to turn over electronic devices he owned to Chevron’s forensics experts. In July 2021, US District Judge Loretta Preska found him guilty, and Donziger was sentenced to 6 months in jail in October 2021. While Donziger was under house arrest in 2020, twenty-nine Nobel laureates described the actions taken by Chevron against him as “judicial harassment.” Human rights campaigners called Chevron’s actions an example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP). In April 2021, six members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus demanded that the Department of Justice review Donziger’s case. In September 2021, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that the pre-trial detention imposed on Donziger was illegal and called for his release. Having spent 45 days in prison and a combined total of 993 days under house arrest, Donziger was released on April 25, 2022
















  • one president signed a bill to move chip production to the US then the next president raided the chip-making facility and arrested all those chip-making people for trying to show the locals how to make chips

    Chip making production has begun to migrate largely as a consequence of the Trump tariffs. The Biden plan to send Intel a few billion in kickbacks in exchange for a chip fab industry that wasn’t the laughing stock of the planet only enriched shareholders and executives.

    I’m not sure what you’re referring to. Maybe Operation Low Voltage, which was a raid on a Hyundai battery plant in Georgia? I can’t find anything about a raid on a chip fab plant.

    In fairness to Trump leadership, a bunch of these workers were, in fact, overstayed on their visas. Although, as usual, Trump sent guys in with shotguns to do what a sternly worded letter would have just as easily accomplished.

    But these are the two faces of Western Capital. The bailout and the beat down. Liberals throw money at the problem. Conservatives slap you around on the thinnest pretexts. Neither president seems to have benefited the US domestic consumer.