How is this even Legal? Yes it is rhetorical in that I know how it is, I am more concerned as to why we are not hearing about, though I think we all know that reason also.
US Media Cowers not Covers Chevron’s Prosecution of Human Rights Lawyer Donziger
by Greg Palast and 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.
Was the human rights hero jailed in Brazil or China? No, he was sentenced to prison in the USA.
How is this even possible? Not the fact that the News Media is not reporting a major human rights violation, that we all know is due to the Corporate Oligarchical Collectivism of the U.S. today. The Corporate advertisers have a massive stranglehold on anything they don’t want to hear.
But how is it possible that this is being allowed in the U.S. court system?
America’s first-ever corporate criminal prosecution
And making the story even more significant: This is the first case in US history of a criminal prosecution by a corporation.
That Donziger has been prosecuted and imprisoned by Chevron is no metaphor. After Donziger won the judgment against Chevron in 2011 in Ecuador, the oil giant filed a racketeering suit in New York against Donziger, claiming he won the Cofan case by offering a bribe to an Ecuadoran judge.
(The Ecuadorian judge admits he never got a dime from Donziger but did take an estimated $2 million from Chevron for "expenses.")
In the US, Chevron found a judge, former tobacco industry lawyer Lewis A. Kaplan, who denied Donziger a jury trial on Chevron’s civil racketeering claim. Kaplan found for Chevron, then ordered Donziger to pay the oil company millions of dollars for their legal fees, thereby bankrupting the him.
So a crime family mob Boss, excuse me “Corporate Lord and Masters”, Damn it, I mean Corporate Boards and Officers, are now able to pursue unwarranted and possible illegal criminal charges on their own by buying a judge? Ok, not news really, either.
However, at what point do we wake up and realize this is ‘Corporate Oligarchical Collectivism’* , where the rights of the Corporations over ride all other laws of the people. Not this hasn’t happened before where The Corporate Lords were always able to take their cases against environmental laws of other Countries on have them overturned in the World Court. But those were under normal “Civil Cases” in a different court system. The Various watch groups told us in the 80’s this was coming when the American Corporations were busy kicking down the legal barries to them coming and screwing over the people of another country. It was only a matte of time before they Chickens came home to roost.
Now it would appear, they are able to not only prosecute citizens who have won cases against them, but to use our own legal system to persecute them for winning. They have long had the ability to re-write certain laws in their favor, due A.L.E.C. and the Brothers Kock (sic), plus it’s well known that L.E.O Orgs in very conservative states have used the R.I.C.O. laws to screw over single citizens in a grab for all their money but even then it was a case of said Civilians breaking criminal laws. Can we imagine what the Koch Industries will do when it grabs this and runs with it?
This is giving The Corporation the right to declare which laws and actions are legal, and to turn Civil actions into Criminal actions. Yes, we all know that they have been fighting for and are often given the right to ‘bring legal prosecution against individuals who destroy the corporations equipment’ as protestors. But now we are seeing, not even theat poor excuse “because it is hurting their profits in the future’. If you win, they can legally have you jailed for winning, using their own system of law, and cherry picking their judges and the laws.
It gets worse: when the Justice Department failed to prosecute Donziger, the judge hired, at public expense, a private lawyer to prosecute Donziger. And still worse: the attorney worked for a firm that that represented Chevron!
Once again, Donziger, despite facing jail time, was denied a jury trial.
And here is where I have the major problem:
“Once again, Donziger, despite facing jail time, was denied a jury trial.”
That is specifically in the constitution, a right to a trail with a jury. I won’t even pretend it would be jury of Donziger’s peers, heaven forbid. But still, how did they get that ability? And what does this mean for us? I seriously doubt that I need to lay out here, at DKos. I think we can see where this Precedence is going, the fact that a judge, used personally money to Persecute a private citizen for legally using the courts to win a case against the Corporate Lords and Masters.
And, unlike the Times, we spoke to Donziger in his apartment in New York where, just before sentencing, he was “celebrating” his 800th day under house arrest wearing an ankle bracelet — completely unprecedented for what is, after all, just the misdemeanor crime of contempt.
And yet, we have folks like Bannon and Trump who have totally pissed on the “crime of contempt” and walked free until They decided to follow the rules; THEY, not the law makers.
The article (which like all of Greg Palast works) explains it well, and shows us that we are not only are we “not out of the Woods” yet but in fact the Corporate Lords and Managers (if you pardon the bit of Pun) are out there with chain saws cutting down the trees in our path, trying to drop them on us.
*The older kind of Socialist, who had been trained to fight against something called ‘class privilege’ assumed that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been short lived, whereas adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
1984 — Part Two, Chapter Nine “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” Ignorance is Strength — George Orwell.