Michael and Us: An Interview w/ Steven Donziger, Literal Prisoner of Chevron
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 24 April 2021
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When human rights lawyer Steven Donziger won a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the oil giant Chevron, the company retaliated by setting out to destroy Donziger’s life. Now in his twentieth month of house arrest on the orders of a Chevron-linked judge, his Kafkaesque story is a window into the corrupt and corporate-captured US legal system.
Visit the #FreeDonziger website - https://www.freedonziger.org/
The Steven Donziger Legal Defense Fund - https://www.donzigerdefense.com/
A text version of this interview can be found in Jacobin, here - https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/04/attorney-steven-donziger-chevron-ecuador-prosecution-corruption-trial
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everyone, it's Luke Savage from Jacobin and the Michael and us podcast here with an interview |
| 0:05.6 | that we're keen to share. In the following audio you'll hear my conversation with human rights lawyer |
| 0:11.3 | Steven Donziger, a man who's been under house arrest for nearly 20 months under circumstances which |
| 0:17.1 | as well here are as sinister as they come originally stemming from his role in a landmark legal |
| 0:22.5 | victory against oil and gas behemoth Chevron over its activities in the Ecuadorian Amazon. |
| 0:28.8 | Now our interviews are normally behind a paywall on our patreon but for obvious reasons we're |
| 0:33.7 | sharing this so that as many people will hear it as possible this case is one that I think |
| 0:38.7 | everyone needs to know about it touches on a great many things that are of concern today about |
| 0:42.9 | the power of corporations to commit harm to evade accountability and to leverage official legal |
| 0:49.2 | mechanisms to persecute their critics. So please enjoy this interview and please if you can visit |
| 0:55.2 | free Donziger.org that's free d-o-n-z-i-g-e-r.org to learn more about the case and about what you |
| 1:04.4 | can do to help. So without further ado please enjoy my conversation with human rights lawyer Steven Donziger. |
| 1:11.1 | I guess all of this began when or because you were part of a legal team that took action successfully |
| 1:17.7 | I might add against Chevron over its activities in Ecuador and before we get into what happened next |
| 1:24.4 | I'm wondering if you can tell us a bit about that lawsuit. What exactly was Chevron doing in |
| 1:28.8 | Ecuador and how did you originally get involved in the case? Thank you. I got involved in the case |
| 1:35.1 | in April of 1993 when I was invited to join a delegation of lawyers and scientists to investigate |
| 1:42.9 | what we had been told was maybe the world's worst oil-related catastrophe and an area of Ecuador, |
| 1:50.0 | the Ecuadorian Amazon, just south of the Columbia border. So we went there and I discovered really |
| 1:59.1 | an apocalyptic scene with you know huge Olympic-sized pools of oil that had been left in the jungle |
| 2:07.9 | hundreds and hundreds of these open-air toxic waste pits that Chevron had built |
| 2:13.2 | to dispose of waste and in these pits they would put pipes into the sides of them so they could |
... |
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