Bear Pit: now the sole domicile of politics at LuLa

[TechTalk]

Because of Biden's shutdown of the oil pipelines

Which oil pipelines has Biden shut down? Hasn't he for months resisted all the pressure from environmentalists and those on the left in congress to permit a new large pipeline to open?

I asked two questions so we all could become more informed

I asked two questions so we all could become more informed.

[TechTalk]

An interesting story from Michael Moore's podcast Rumble, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-215-kafka-in-america-it-cant-happen-here-w-steven-donziger/id1490354763?i=1000538568437.

Have you ever heard of private prosecutions? I had not. Apparently a judge can assign a private entity to bring about a criminal prosecution. In this case, an oil company friendly judge assigned a law firm that is employed by Chevron to conduct the criminal prosecution of a legal activist who was part of an environmental lawsuit against Texaco (now owned by Chevron) in Ecuador. The blurb on the web site page contains more detail.

I wasn't able to listen to the podcast because my tinnitus is stuck in temporary overdrive right now. I did find a transcript to read on the Rumble website. The transcript is autogenerated, but is pretty good. I always appreciate the consideration of content for those with hearing issues.

It's a very interesting story of which I was unaware. So, thanks for posting it. Below is a link to an article and interview with Steven Donziger from Esquire on this decades long and surprising case. An excerpt from the article is below as well.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/steven-donziger-chevron-house-arrest/

Donziger is a human rights lawyer who, for more than 27 years, has represented the Indigenous peoples and rural farmers of Ecuador against Texaco—since acquired by Chevron—which was accused of dumping at least 16 billion gallons of toxic waste into the area of the Amazon rainforest in which they live. Cancer is now highly prevalent in the local population. Some have called it the "Amazon Chernobyl." They first filed suit in New York in 1993, but Texaco lobbied, successfully, to move the proceedings to Ecuador. In 2011, the team of Ecuadorian lawyers Donziger worked with won the case, and Chevron was ultimately ordered to pay $9.8 billion.

But for Donziger, that was nowhere near the end. Chevron, a $260 billion company, went to a New York federal court to sue him under a lesser-known civil—non-criminal—provision of the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. They later dropped their demands for financial damages because it would have necessitated a jury trial. That is something Donziger has been unable to get. Instead, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a former corporate lawyer whose clients included tobacco companies, became Donziger's judge-and-jury in the RICO case. He heard from 31 witnesses, but based his ruling in significant part on the testimony of Albert Guerra, a former Ecuadorian judge whom Chevron relocated to the U.S. at an overall cost of $2 million. Guerra alleged there was a bribe involved in the Ecuadorian court's judgement against Chevron. He has since retracted some of his testimony, admitting it was false.

But Kaplan, who refused to look at the scientific evidence in the original case, ruled the initial verdict was the result of fraud. And he didn't stop there. He ordered Donziger to pay millions in attorneys fees to Chevron and eventually ordered him to turn over decades of client communications, even going after his phone and computer. Donziger considered this a threat to attorney-client privilege and appealed the ruling, but while that appeal was pending, Kaplan slapped him with a contempt of court charge for refusing to give up the devices. When the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York declined to prosecute the case, Kaplan took the extraordinary step of appointing a private law firm to prosecute Donziger in the name of the U.S. government. The firm, Seward & Kissel, has had a number of oil-and-gas clients, including, in 2018... Chevron. Kaplan bypassed the usual random case-assignment procedure of the federal judiciary and handpicked a judge to hear the contempt case: Loretta Preska, a member of the Federalist Society, among whose major donors is... Chevron. Preska has, like Kaplan, rejected Donziger's requests to have his trial heard by a jury of his peers. Both judges declined Esquire's request for comment on Donziger's cases, citing court policy.

[Alan Klein]

Which oil pipelines has Biden shut down? Hasn't he for months resisted all the pressure from environmentalists and those on the left in congress to permit a new large pipeline to open?

Everyone knows Biden's against oil and fossil fuels.  He's said it and acted against it. That's why he's getting blamed for higher oil and gas prices.  So now his advisors are telling him to lighten up.  Higher prices are hurting Biden and democrats in general.  So he's supporting a pipeline to show "he cares".  Too little, too late.

[Alan Klein]

I wasn't able to listen to the podcast because my tinnitus is stuck in temporary overdrive right now. I did find a transcript to read on the Rumble website. The transcript is autogenerated, but is pretty good. I always appreciate the consideration of content for those with hearing issues.

It's a very interesting story of which I was unaware. So, thanks for posting it. Below is a link to an article and interview with Steven Donziger from Esquire on this decades long and surprising case. An excerpt from the article is below as well.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/steven-donziger-chevron-house-arrest/

Donziger is a human rights lawyer who, for more than 27 years, has represented the Indigenous peoples and rural farmers of Ecuador against Texaco—since acquired by Chevron—which was accused of dumping at least 16 billion gallons of toxic waste into the area of the Amazon rainforest in which they live. Cancer is now highly prevalent in the local population. Some have called it the "Amazon Chernobyl." They first filed suit in New York in 1993, but Texaco lobbied, successfully, to move the proceedings to Ecuador. In 2011, the team of Ecuadorian lawyers Donziger worked with won the case, and Chevron was ultimately ordered to pay $9.8 billion.

But for Donziger, that was nowhere near the end. Chevron, a $260 billion company, went to a New York federal court to sue him under a lesser-known civil—non-criminal—provision of the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. They later dropped their demands for financial damages because it would have necessitated a jury trial. That is something Donziger has been unable to get. Instead, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a former corporate lawyer whose clients included tobacco companies, became Donziger's judge-and-jury in the RICO case. He heard from 31 witnesses, but based his ruling in significant part on the testimony of Albert Guerra, a former Ecuadorian judge whom Chevron relocated to the U.S. at an overall cost of $2 million. Guerra alleged there was a bribe involved in the Ecuadorian court's judgement against Chevron. He has since retracted some of his testimony, admitting it was false.

But Kaplan, who refused to look at the scientific evidence in the original case, ruled the initial verdict was the result of fraud. And he didn't stop there. He ordered Donziger to pay millions in attorneys fees to Chevron and eventually ordered him to turn over decades of client communications, even going after his phone and computer. Donziger considered this a threat to attorney-client privilege and appealed the ruling, but while that appeal was pending, Kaplan slapped him with a contempt of court charge for refusing to give up the devices. When the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York declined to prosecute the case, Kaplan took the extraordinary step of appointing a private law firm to prosecute Donziger in the name of the U.S. government. The firm, Seward & Kissel, has had a number of oil-and-gas clients, including, in 2018... Chevron. Kaplan bypassed the usual random case-assignment procedure of the federal judiciary and handpicked a judge to hear the contempt case: Loretta Preska, a member of the Federalist Society, among whose major donors is... Chevron. Preska has, like Kaplan, rejected Donziger's requests to have his trial heard by a jury of his peers. Both judges declined Esquire's request for comment on Donziger's cases, citing court policy.

The writer of that article could be right.  You know, the American jurisprudence system isn't always fair.  If there was chicanery,  the lawyer will get his day in court on appeals. 

On the other hand, why didn't the lawyer turn his records over to the court?  That was the basis he was held in contempt?  Lawyers cannot argue attorney-client privilege if there is an appearance the lawyer corrupted himself with their client as the judge apparently determined in this case having conspired with the South American court to split the award with Ecuadorian judges.  What did this lawyer fear about showing the records if there was no collusion between him and the South American court who found the oil company "guilty"? But he refused to release his records.  So the judge held him in contempt.

The thing is it's one thing to claim the judges favored and ruled for Chevron because of their personal background.  That happens and it's a reasonable claim.  But then to go the extra mile and send this lawyer to jail seems they had legitimate reasons to do so.  SO the judges really believe he was corrupt and in fraud with the SOuth American court and judges to have gone after him so severely.   If it was just a matter of judicial favoritism to Chevron, which is wrong of course, they wouldn't also have sent the lawyer to jail.  The case would have just ended with Chevron winning but no contempt charges.

[PeterAit]

Everyone knows Biden's against oil and fossil fuels.  He's said it and acted against it. That's why he's getting blamed for higher oil and gas prices.  So now his advisors are telling him to lighten up.  Higher prices are hurting Biden and democrats in general.  So he's supporting a pipeline to show "he cares".  Too little, too late.

Anyone with the wits of an oyster is against fossil fuels. We are stuck with them for the foreseeable future, to be sure, but any moves toward reducing their use must be applauded. If that means higher prices, so be it.

[Alan Klein]

Anyone with the wits of an oyster is against fossil fuels. We are stuck with them for the foreseeable future, to be sure, but any moves toward reducing their use must be applauded. If that means higher prices, so be it.

I appreciate your dedication.  Maybe you have the extra money.

However, not everyone can afford to pay more for gasoline and heating fuels. The cost of food goes up as it's delivered by trucks and railcars and harvested by tractors that use fossil fuels such as diesel.  Higher fuel prices; higher food prices.  A lot of people are out of work or making limited income living week to week.  With everything going up, many of them are finding it hard to make ends meet.  In some poorer areas of the world, people have to rely on fossil fuels exclusively.  Higher food prices are causing people to starve.

We should be operating on two tracks.  While society is converting over to other energies, if that's what it wants to do, we still need the old fuels to keep us going in a cost-effective way. Shutting down domestic supplies to pay the Arabs for their oil just transfers dollars to them that could be better spent in our own country for Americans.  It raises the prices of many products many cannot afford to pay.  It makes us more vulnerable to Middle East blackmail and wars as we then have to protect those foreign supplies and countries.  Keeping domestic production up reduces the chance we'd get into conflicts in the Middle East. Should we really be protecting Salman the murderer of Saudi Arabia?

Let's not cut our nose off to spite our face.

[Jonathan Cross]

Rising fuel prices?  Petrol here at a supermarket in the South of England is the equivalent of US$7.10 per US gallon.  How does that compare with the US?

Jonathan

 

[Alan Klein]

Rising fuel prices?  Petrol here at a supermarket in the South of England is the equivalent of US$7.10 per US gallon.  How does that compare with the US?

Jonathan

 

Here in New Jersey it's running around $3.50 per US gallon for regular gas.

[TechTalk]

Because of Biden's shutdown of the oil pipelines

Which oil pipelines has Biden shut down?

I'm asking you to defend your point by asking salient questions... You defend it.  If you can.

[LesPalenik]

Oil prices could decline in the near future. Hertz just announced that they ordered 100,000 cars from Tesla.
In turn, Tesla share price jumped up just this month by $200 to almost $1,000. That makes many Tesla employees owning shares of their own company rich and happy.
 

[Alan Klein]

Oil prices could decline in the near future. Hertz just announced that they ordered 100,000 cars from Tesla.
In turn, Tesla share price jumped up just this month by $200 to almost $1,000. That makes many Tesla employees owning shares of their own company rich and happy.
 

I saw that. It was a 4.2 billion dollar deal or $42,000 per car. I can only see electric cars in locations where there's very little driving. Who wants to worry about looking for recharging Outlets. It might be a good deal for hotels to provide these Outlets to link up with Hertz.

[Peter McLennan]

I asked two questions so we all could become more informed about the process of who declares "cold" gun, whose responsibility it is to do so, etc.  Questions aren't assertions.  Who else asked questions?  It's unfortunate you refused to answer the questions.  Maybe you didn't know the answers.

It was you who asserted that it was an "Associate Producer" who handed the gun to the actor.  My intent was to point out that, yet again, you made assertions based on misinformation.

 

Only your beliefs and assertions are correct.

Incorrect.  My beliefs are as irrelevant as my faith*. 
My assertions are correct only as far as I can prove them.  If they're disproven, I'll change them.

Like so many others here, you just don't want to respectfully listen to people who believe differently than you.

What others believe is as irrelevant as what I believe. I refuse to listen to (or agree with) people who present their beliefs as facts, especially when they're not facts at all.

* faith is what I have in helicopter pilots

[LesPalenik]

I saw that. It was a 4.2 billion dollar deal or $42,000 per car. I can only see electric cars in locations where there's very little driving. Who wants to worry about looking for recharging Outlets. It might be a good deal for hotels to provide these Outlets to link up with Hertz.

Charging is now less of a problem than years ago.
1. Many hotels provide now free EV charging, so you can charge overnight with a minimum of hassle.
2. Sometimes, you need the rental car for driving only short distances - i.e. from a hotel to a nearby client or to the beach. I remember that on some occasions I drove over 3,000 miles in one week in a rented car and on other trips less than 300 miles in a week. In the later case, you wouldn't need to charge at all, you pick up a fully charged car at the rental place and you return it there one week later with an empty battery.

[Alan Klein]

It was you who asserted that it was an "Associate Producer" who handed the gun to the actor.  My intent was to point out that, yet again, you made assertions based on misinformation.

 
Incorrect.  My beliefs are as irrelevant as my faith*. 
My assertions are correct only as far as I can prove them.  If they're disproven, I'll change them.

What others believe is as irrelevant as what I believe. I refuse to listen to (or agree with) people who present their beliefs as facts, especially when they're not facts at all.

* faith is what I have in helicopter pilots

So rather than correcting my layman's error confusing Associate Producer with Associate Director, you, an expert in the movie industry, would rather just make fun of a simple error on my part.  Meanwhile, you don't answer the question which is the heart of the issue.  Is the armorer suppose to call out "cold" gun, which apparently didn't happen,  or can either the Associate Producer or Associate Director do it?

[Alan Klein]

Charging is now less of a problem then years ago.
1. Many hotels provide now free EV charging, so you can charge overnight with a minimum of hassle.
2. Sometimes, you need the rental car for driving only short distances - i.e. from a hotel to a nearby client or to the beach. I remember that on some occasions I drove over 3,000 miles in one week in a rented car and on other trips less than 300 miles in a week. In the later case, you wouldn't need to charge at all, you pick up a fully charged car at the rental place and you return it there one week later with an empty battery.

Well, if the battery was empty when you returned it, you'd be pushing the car the last mile. 

In any case, when they start making Teslas that look like cherry apple red Camaro convertibles as this one I rented in Hawaii, then I might try one. 

[TechTalk]

So rather than correcting my layman's error confusing Associate Producer with Associate Director

So rather than spend 30 seconds typing a query into Google, you want to use someones else's time to explain it to you, when you could find the answer online yourself very quickly and easily.

[TechTalk]

Meanwhile, you don't answer the question

Meanwhile, you won't answer a question regarding your own assertion. Which oil pipelines has Biden shut down?

[Alan Klein]

Well, at least Biden can say it's not as bad as Trump's were.  That should make Democrats happy. 


Biden’s Average Approval Rating Drops to New Low amid Inflation, Immigration Worries
https://news.yahoo.com/biden-average-approval-rating-drops-141555844.html

[Alan Klein]

So rather than spend 30 seconds typing a query into Google, you want to use someones else's time to explain it to you, when you could find the answer online yourself very quickly and easily.

This is a forum.  We're supposed to discuss things.  If we looked everything up in Google, we wouldn't need LuLa at all.  Peter is an inside guy who works in the movie industry.  He's a director himself. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0572760/ His first-hand experience is more valuable than looking up stuff in Google which wouldn't necessarily provide inside knowledge about what really goes on behind the scenes.  It's disappointing to not get his input.

[Alan Klein]

Maybe it's too sensitive for him to comment because of his position.  I can understand that.