It is exactly what the old Soviet Union used to do to opponents.
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I didn’t say Texaco/Chevron were victims, I just pointed out that the part of the story where the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague documented and ruled that Donziger had committed fraud and they overturned the decision was left out of the articles posted. I thought the facts were relevant to the discussion.
Rather than a Forbes article, here’s a Wikipedia entry:
So, let’s review. An multinational corporation with a market capitalization of more than 2x Ecuador’s GDP goes all in on defeating this ruling. There is no mistake - Chevron’s predecessor Texaco royally fucked a remote region of Ecuador and it’s tens of thousands of indigenous inhabitants, caused the extirpation of not one but two indigenous peoples, caused cancer in thousands, and generally behaved like criminal bullies. The company’s behavior over decades makes Big Tobacco and the Sacklers think “Hey, at least we’re not those guys.”
You don’t think those billions went into buying both US and UN judges? I’m frankly surprised that the Wikipedia article you cited is as negative as it is after what Chevron has spent in PR. And Donziger has been prosecuted over an alleged $300k? Pull my other leg.
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I think, based on documentation, that Donziger is not a highly ethical lawyer. I also think that when reporting on a miscarriage of justice if you leave out half of the history you detract from the overall conversation.
I’m not interested in defending Texaco/Chevron, they obviously were not careful stewards. Which has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Donziger is an good man wrongly accused or a corrupt zealot looking for a few billion dollar payday. I don’t even claim to know the answer - but I do know that there is more to the story than was reported here, and I think some of the facts are significant.
There’s no way to read any report of this whole crapfest without concluding that they were much, much more than “not careful stewards” unless you’re paid to do so. They were, and are, a cruel, evil, multinational criminal enterprise masquerading as a corporation. Your choice of wording gives away your angle.
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Wow, what a dishonest way to restate: Killed people and ruined the earth.
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They gave thousands of people cancer. Your arguments are immaterial to justice in this case. Chevron should not be allowed to exist at all.
I can tell you conclusively that Chevron is a massively unethical company. Moreso than any single human could be. Has any single human existed for 140 years contributing to the collapse of the global ecology?
Chevron is not the victim. Chevron is the perpetrator. Go DARVO someplace gross where stupid people might listen. We’re too ethical for your arguments to gain any traction here. Maybe someplace where people care more about money than human life.
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I’m sure that Chevron hires only the most ethical lawyers.
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[quote=“LDoBe, post:40, topic:206366”]
Why the hell would you ever choose to use the internet with ads? They’re literally trying to brainwash you into losing all your money, all the time.
[/quote Usually most ads are easy to ignore or they don’t last long. I may have to finally ad an ad blocker though. Thanks for the link.
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A lot of the stuff you don’t see that loads in with ads uses your resources, tracks you, and can even load in malware.
Long story short, ads are a security risk.
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THIS. If Chevron were an individual, the CIA would have droned them to death a decade ago.
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If Chevron were an individual, the CIA would have overthrown a democracy and suppressed three attempts at revolution to keep them in power.
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“I’m not interested in defending the Empire, they obviously were not careful stewards of Alderaan. Which has nothing whatsoever to do with Leia. I think based on documentation she was not a highly ethical member of the Imperial Senate on a diplomatic mission.”
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It’s almost trumpian.
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You know what: unless someone can lead me to the supposed toxic waste dump and it turns out to actually be an ecological paradise where birds sing and capybaras frolic (and humans live with only the expected cancer rates of a healthy population) I don’t especially care how the evidence was gathered because dumping millions of tons of waste is clearly only possible with the knowledge of the company that produces it.
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I do mean abject as in an extreme, desperate, and miserable lesson. It’s a valid, though apparently less common, version of that idiom that will NEVER stop using.
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At best, one could maybe argue that Donziger willingly flaunted certain rules in his pursuit of justice — because those rules are slanted in favor of the corrupt corporations that are flagrantly killing people and the planet to make a quick buck. But even that argument doesn’t support the claim that he is “not a highly ethical lawyer.” If anything, it would demonstrate that his sense of morality overpowered his faith in the system. By your logic here, the Boston Tea Party was not “ethical,” and neither was John Brown, nor Martin Luther King Jr.
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Also worth noting that the source for the claim that Donziger committed fraud … admitted that he lied because he was being bribed by Chevron.
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People forget that the legal system is almost never written to protect the vulnerable, but to protect the elite classes and their wealth from the rest of us…
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