How big oil exploits the legal system to intimidate critics

Sharon Lerner details the story of how the oil company Chevron is using the US legal system to hit back against a US lawyer Steven Donziger who won a big environmental case against them in Ecuador brought by the indigenous people there whose land had been massively contaminated by the oil giant.

LAST AUGUST, DURING the second-hottest year on record, while the fires in the Amazon rainforest were raging, the ice sheet in Greenland was melting, and Greta Thunberg was being greeted by adoring crowds across the U.S., something else happened that was of great relevance to the climate movement: An attorney who has been battling Chevron for more than a decade over environmental devastation in South America was put on house arrest.

Few news outlets covered the detention of Steven Donziger, who won a multibillion-dollar judgment in Ecuador against Chevron over the massive contamination in the Lago Agrio region and has been fighting on behalf of Indigenous people and farmers there for more than 25 years.
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More academics behaving really badly

A shocking news report reveals that federal authorities have leveled charges about how Charles M. Lieber, the chair of the chemistry department at Harvard University, engaged in extraordinary acts of academic malfeasance of a financial nature.

Court documents allege Mr Lieber, who has worked as the head investigator at the Lieber Research Group at Harvard University, received more than $15m (£11.5m) in grants from the US National Institute of Health and the US Department of Defence.

Recipients of these grants have to disclose any conflicts of interest, including financial support from foreign governments or organisations.

However in 2011, allegedly without Harvard’s knowledge, Mr Lieber joined Wuhan University of Technology in China as a scientist.
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The anti-Sanders campaign tries to gain traction

The Democratic National Committee is kicking its anti-Sanders program into high gear. Kevin Gosztola writes that its chair Tom Perez has announced the membership of the nominating committee at the party convention this July and has stacked it with the usual suspects, consisting of people involved in torture cover-ups, Russia fear-mongering, and lobbyist glad-handling, apartheid Israel operatives, regime-change experts who defend the corporate order, Wall Street bankers, corporate lobbyists, and free trade fanatics, and those associated with the notorious John Podesta whose emails in 2016 revealed the extent of his anti-Sanders hate where he argued that Sanders needed to “ground to a pulp” and asked “where should we stick the knife in?”
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TV Review: Good Omens (2019) (No spoilers)

This six-part mini-series based on the book by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman is superb. The 1990 book of the same name is very good but this TV adaptation is even better. It definitely benefits from being made into a miniseries that lasted a total of nearly six hours, rather that a shorter feature film. It enabled the screenwriter Gaiman and the director to provide a much richer texture to an already complex story. The series is available on HBO which I do not subscribe to but I happened to be staying at my daughter’s place and they do subscribe so I took the chance to watch it. I can strongly recommend it. In fact, I plan on seeing it again because the dialogue and acting are so good that it is the kind of thing that benefits from a second viewing, where one picks up on gags that one missed the first time around.

The story is based on the impending Armageddon that will climax in a major battle between the forces of Good and Evil that will be triggered by the Antichrist, who is boy named Adam, soon after his 11th birthday. The TV series expands the roles of Aziraphale (an angel) and Crowley (a demon). Aziraphale was the angel guarding the gate of the Garden of Eden who took pity on the banished Adam and Eve and even gave them his flaming sword to protect them from the wild creatures they would encounter in the hostile world outside. Crowley initially appears in the form of the serpent who tempted Eve. The angel and demon are supposed to be on opposite sides in the war but over thousands of years of crossing paths at various major events in human history have developed a sort of friendship that is grudging at first but becomes stronger when they realize that they both do not see the point of destroying the Earth and all its inhabitants and decide to try and thwart the grand plan. This puts them in the bad books of their two organizations, who try to pull them back into line.
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The neoliberals’ last defense against Sanders: Barack Obama

It is clear that Bernie Sanders is worrying the Democratic party that he might win the nomination. While the stated reason for their concern is that he is too ‘left’ to be elected, I think it goes further than that. I think they are more concerned that if he does become the nominee, he will dislodge the entrenched neoliberal control of the party. It seems like the establishment sees Barack Obama as their main weapon to stop them and are waiting for the right moment to ask him to stop progressives from gaining ascendancy, a skill that he has displayed in the past. Back in November of 2019, when Sanders’ campaign seemed to be waning, Obama seemed willing to stay out of the picture.
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The Bolton bombshell

The news that Donald Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton says that Trump definitely wanted the military aid to Ukraine withheld until he got a public declaration of an investigation into Joe Biden’s son has fallen like a bomb on Republicans who had been claiming, against all evidence, that there was no such attempt at extortion and that all the charges were based on hearsay and suppositions. It was pretty obvious that Trump has been lying and that the Republicans were covering it up. But Bolton’s charge is hard for them to ignore because his is first hand testimony and by someone with unimpeachable right-wing credentials.
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Support for Bernie rises just before Iowa

As we enter the last week before the Iowa caucuses on Monday, February 3rd, the first event in which actual voters get to indicate their preferences, the Bernie Sanders campaign is telling its volunteers to dial back the phone calls and instead focus more on talking to friends and neighbors. This may be due to their feeling that given the rising enthusiasm of the their supporters, this may be a more effective tactic of persuasion.

In the final week leading to caucus day in Iowa on February 3, Democrats there are bombarded with phone calls from pollsters, campaigns, and outside advocacy groups. That, in addition to baseline spam, creates a cacophony that is hard for campaigns to break through. It is far more effective, campaign leaders have argued, to have friends and relatives urge those close to them to come out to caucus than to carpet bomb phone lines, what is known as relational organizing. The campaign’s original goal for phone calls before Iowa was 5 million, but volunteers have already surpassed 7 million. The Sanders campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

One sign of enthusiasm is the packed event held in Ames yesterday, even though Sanders himself could not attend, since he was attending the impeachment hearings in Washington. The event featured Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former congressional candidate Brent Welder, but the absence of the candidate did not seem to dampen attendance or enthusiasm.

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