[April 9, 2022: Grant Town, WV] A group of more than 50 activists convened on a West Virginia coal power plant, which burns pricey waste coal bought from Sen. Joe Manchin’s company. Calling for the polluting plant’s closure, 16 people were arrested after … READ MORE
On October 1, 2021, human rights lawyer, Steven Donziger, was given a 6 month sentence — punishment for winning a $9 billion judgment against Chevron for poisoning the Amazon. On the day of his sentencing, I spoke extensively with Donziger about his extraordinary case. When he began his sentence at the federal prison in Danbury, CT, we began posting clips from this interview each week to keep his plight in the public eye. As Donziger approaches the end … READ MORE
Famed indigenous human rights lawyer, Steven Donziger, had been under house arrest for over 800 days when he reported to prison on October 27, 2021 to begin a six-month sentence. His crime: winning the largest single pollution judgment in history, $9.5 billion, for… READ MORE
In 2011, an Ecuadorian court ordered Chevron to pay $9.5 billion for the poisoning of indigenous lands. The courts found that Chevron’s Texaco operation had illegally dumped 16 billion gallons of deadly oil waste.
The smoking gun? This confidential document, in which the Chairman of Chevron Oil’s Texaco division personally orders that incriminating evidence of oil sludge dumping in Ecuador be “removed…and destroyed.” … READ MORE
[Oct 1, 2021: New York] Human rights lawyer Steven Donziger was sentenced to six months in prison today for contempt of court. For the first time in US history in such a case, he was prosecuted not by the US Justice Department, but by a private attorney who worked for Chevron. He received the maximum sentence for… READ MORE
On the eve of his sentencing, human rights lawyer, Steven Donziger, who fought Chevron oil and its destruction of the indigenous lands of the Amazon spoke to me about why, despite being destroyed by the oil company, he is… READ MORE
This is the first time in history that a private corporation has criminally prosecuted a U.S. citizen. In an unprecedented move, a judge asked Chevron’s lawyers to prosecute Donziger for criminal contempt — after the Department of Justice had refused to do so. No jury would convict Donziger, so the judge refused him a jury trial and found him guilty. On October 1 this judge is going to sentence Donziger. He could get six months in jail—on top of the two years he’s already served under house arrest—so I want you to… READ MORE
I ended up out here in the rain forest half by accident. I had some confidential papers from the World Bank I intended to give to Ecuador’s President. But, going through the documents, it was clear that there was no way to understand Ecuador, which had just rejoined OPEC, without first following the oil. And following the oil meant going into the oil fields in the jungle and grilling the Natives about their claims of illnesses and deaths … READ MORE
Calling in to the FlashPoints News studio from his new New York home, where he is currently under house arrest, attorney Steven Donziger talks about his Kafkaesque case. This outrageous tale of oil, power, corruption, corporate murder and ecocide … READ MORE
This is the first ever case in which we have a corporation acting as a criminal prosecutor — a prosecution that is blatant retaliation for a successful lawsuit against them. This, by itself, is deeply, deeply, dangerous. And if you think I take this personally … READ MORE
A decade ago, Haiti was devastated by an earthquake. It’s still devastated. And what I wrote a decade ago remains too relevant. If you want to understand Haiti, you have to understand two and a half centuries of … READ MORE
It wasn’t human error that caused America’s greatest environmental disaster, the Exxon Valdez catastrophe, it was inhuman corporate miserliness — the oil industry’s systemic fraud, corruption, and penny-pinching la-di-da view of safety. In this edition of… READ MORE
