FlashPoints feat. Steven Donziger

Calling in to the FlashPoints News studio from his new New York home, where he is currently under house arrest, rights attorney Steven Donziger talks about his Kafkaesque case with host Dennis J. Bernstein and investigative reporter Greg Palast.

Palast has been reporting on this outrageous tale of oil, power, corruption, corporate murder and ecocide since 2007, when he first met one of Donziger’s clients, Emergildo Criollo, Chief of the Cofan people, deep in the Amazon rainforest. With the help of Donziger, Criollo had launched a David v. Goliath lawsuit against Chevron for poisoning the rainforest and the people who lived in it — the Chief’s two sons being among the many victims of the oil giant’s murderous sludge.

The Ecuadorian courts ruled in Criollo’s favor, finding that Chevron’s Texaco operation had illegally dumped 16 billion gallons of deadly oil waste, but that was just the beginning of Donziger’s battle.

Chevron were ordered to pay Criollo and the other indigenous co-plaintiffs $9.5 billion. Rather than pay up, and to distract attention from their own mass industrial poisoning, Chevron set out to destroy Donziger, to make an example of a human rights lawyer that dares take on the petroleum pirates.

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/facing-prison-for-fighting-chevron/

Support Donziger and join the fight: https://www.donzigerdefense.com

Transcript of interview: https://www.gregpalast.com/why-am-i-the-one-locked-up-and-not-chevron