You know that free-floating sense that multinational corporations are above the law, able to buy their way out of consequences for even the most blatant, heinous crimes?
There's a (nearly) unbelievable, highly concrete example of it underway right at this moment.
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It's the story of @SDonziger, a campaigning lawyer who sued @Chevron for its ecocide in Ecuador, a genocide against indigenous people, committed with cooperation from a brutal military dictatorship.
Donziger managed the impossible. He secured a conviction against Chevron, and a $9.8 billion judgment against the company, owed to the indigenous people they poisoned, whose lands and bodies remain poisoned and sick to this day.
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Now, if you're an exec at Chevron and you value money more than life, the rational move that proceeds from this judgment is straightforward: any legal maneuver that costs LESS than $9.8b is your fiduciary duty to your shareholders.
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Give it to Chevron: buying your way out of red-handed genocidal environmental racism is an art form, and they are masters.
First, Chevron paid $2m relocating Ecuadoran judge Albert Guerra to the US, where he testified that the the Ecuadoran fine was the result of a bribe.
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Chevron paid for Guerra and his family to move to the USA, paid for his immigration process, paid his income tax, and coached him for 53 days before he appeared in the Southern District of New York Court of Judge Lewis A Kaplan.
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Kaplan believed Guerra, and continued to believe him even after Guerra recanted his testimony and admitted that he'd lied at Chevron's behest.
Six other courts, including the Supreme Courts of Ecuadoran and Canada, have upheld the fine against Chevron.
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Why would Kaplan believe Guerra after Guerra said he was lying? Maybe it has something to do with Kaplan's own legal background: before he was a judge, he was a corporate lawyer working for a firm that represented tobacco companies in cancer liability lawsuits.
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Kaplan used Guerra's testimony to convict Donziger on civil racketeering charges. Chevron brought the charges, and cannily, they dropped their demand for monetary compensation, which meant Donziger couldn't get a jury trial.
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But the fact that Chevron didn't seek monetary damages doesn't mean what you'd expect: after Kaplan ruled against Donziger, the judge hit him with an order to pay Chevron millions in court fees.
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Worse still, he ordered Donziger to turn over his laptop and phone - not to the court, but to Chevron, who would then get access to his privileged attorney-client communications with the victims of Chevron's ecocide, opening those people to violent retaliation.
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Donziger appealed the order. Kaplan then charged him with a misdemeanor for having the temerity to appeal. This was so chickenshit that the District Attorney refused to take up the case, so Kaplan appointed a corporate lawfirm that fronts for Big Oil to prosecute Donziger.
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This firm, Seward & Kissel, has a blue-chip roster of climate criminals for clients, including Chevron itself. They are prosecuting Donziger in front of Judge Loretta Preska, whom Kaplan hand-picked to hear the case (he had to violate SDNY procedures to make this happen).
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Preska is a member of the Federalist Society, a corporate-backed law organization whose major donors include Chevron.
Donziger is fighting this with his hands tied behind his back. Not only did Kaplan get him disbarred (there's a pending appeal), but he had him ARRESTED.
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Donziger is in pre-trial detention for a misdemeanor. He's been under house arrest for more than 580 days. The maximum sentence for the misdemeanor is 180 days. He still hasn't had a trial.
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Donziger spoke to @esquire's @jackholmes0 about his case, describing how Kaplan has barred him and his Ecuadoran clients from seeking enforcement of the judgement anywhere in the USA.
Preska, the Federalist Society judge whom Kaplan picked to hear the contempt charge, has denied his request for a jury trial.
Donziger calls it "corporate political prosecution" and calls himself "a corporate political prisoner."
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This is bigger than the judgment against Chevron. As Donziger says, "if you can't do this kind of legal work to hold these polluters accountable, the destruction of the earth will happen at a faster pace."
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The corporate takeover of the justice system isn't an abstract conspiracy theory. It is very specific, and it is playing out before our eyes, in a courtroom in New York City.
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If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Correction: I have deleted Donziger's erroneous claim that he's the only person in pre-trial detention for a misdemeanor. Please see this important correction:
Conspiratorialism is downstream of the trauma of institutional failures.
Insitutional failures are downstream of regulatory capture.
Regulatory capture is downstream of monopolization.
Monopolization is downstream of the failure to enforce antitrust law.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Start with conspiratorialism and trauma. I am staunchly pro-vaccine. I have had so many covid jabs that I glow in the dark and can get impeccable 5g reception at the bottom of a coal-mine.
This was the plan: America would stop making things and instead make *recipes*, the "IP" that could be sent to other countries to turn into actual *stuff*.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
This would happen in distant lands without the pesky environmental and labor rules that forced businesses accept reduced profits because they weren't allowed to maim their workers and poison the land, air and water.
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Trump's doing a lot of oligarch shit, and while some of it very visible and obvious, other moves, like throwing the door open to "stock buybacks" are technical and obscure.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Forget surveillance capitalism - let's talk about *surveillance infantalism*: the drive by the wealthy to spy on you in order to pursue the toddler's goals of getting everything they want from the people around them, without any reciprocal obligations.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
When Elon Musk disagrees with someone, he calls them an "NPC" (non-player character). In video-games, an NPC is a machine-puppeted sprite that engages in predictable movements (e.g. Pac-Man ghosts) and utters some scripted (or AI-generated) dialog:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Seeing people as automata is probably a side-effect of sitting in the command-center of a big online service, in which you primarily interact with users as statistical aggregates in an analytics dashboard.
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When LLM users describe their experience with their chatbots, the results are so divergent that it can sound like they're describing two completely different products.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Previously, I've hypothesized that this is because there are two distinct groups of *users*: "centaurs" (people who are assisted by a machine - in this case, people who get to decide when, whether and how to integrate an LLM into their work)...
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