JOURNALISM AND INFORMATION IN CHINA AND UKRAINE

The news about the news in China is anything but good.  I first learned about it close to 2 weeks ago, when my China mentor, and the former Assistant Dean of the Journalism School at Shantou University where I taught the fall semester in 2008, sent the following news clip, a story by Teddy Ng in the authoritative Hong Kong-based newspaper, the South China Morning Post (SCMP)

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1385380/propaganda-officials-head-top-tier-chinese-journalism-schools

“The Communist Party's propaganda authority is planning to tighten its control over major journalism schools across the country and increase Marxist education at the universities,” Ng reported.

“Three people familiar with the plan said senior local propaganda officials would become heads or high-level officials of journalism programs at 10 top-tier universities, in an attempt to ensure their teaching is in line with authorities' directives.”

Leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have hardly hidden their plan, which is to spread soon from 10 elite J-schools to all places where Journalism is taught in China.

The story had actually been reported by Japan’s Kyodo News Agency almost a week earlier.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/kyodo-news-international/131222/china-tighten-control-universities-journalism-schools

Kyodo’s story cited a party source on what triggered the J-School takeover.  “President Xi Jinping senses a crisis ‘at universities and in the mass media where reformists (who support such values as democracy) have the most influence.’”

Several reports agree that officials from the party's Central Propaganda Department will, in Kyodo’s words, “take over the top posts of their journalism schools, and also beef up the media's role in serving as the ‘throat and tongue’ of the Communist Party.”

Herford, whose long career in journalism education was preceded by a distinguished record as a senior producer and bureau chief at CBS News, was properly horrified.

“I feel for our former students and those who might have been our future students,” Peter emailed.  “This latest step cements changes that have been creeping forward. They include the seven "no’s", a list of basics that are no longer to be taught in Chinese universities. These include Human Rights concepts and many of the foundations of literature and history (expunging foreign and particularly Western influences).”

According to SCPM’s Ng, the creeps have been advancing since 2001, when party hard-liners took control of journalism education at Shanghai’s Fudan University.one of the top schools in the country.  Back then, Ng reported, “Jiefang Daily quoted then Shanghai deputy party secretary Gong Xueping as saying the arrangement would ensure local propaganda authorities utilized their strength in leading and organizing the mass media.”

And sure enough, today, Ng said, “The current head of the university's journalism program is Song Chao , who is a deputy propaganda director for Shanghai.”

But today, a dozen years after the CCP put its foot down at Fudan, the party propagandists’ plan for control is widely predicted to be ineffective.

Ng quoted Li Datong, a former editor with China Youth Daily: "’The journalists will memorise some lines of Marxist thought but in the end they won't care too much about it,’"    

5 days later, Ng wrote that the CCP crackdown would extend beyond Journalism, to everything taught at China’s universities, and to what the Chinese people will see on their major broadcast networks “specific programmes for spreading socialist ideologies, as well as more public service advertisements.”

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1389382/communist-party-orders-core-socialist-values-curriculum

But will President Xi’s dictates make a difference? Ng cited another skeptic, Zhang Ming, a political science professor at Renmin University, another top university in Beijing, "’The question remains whether the public will buy it. It is impossible to carve them into the brain’."

Xi’s problem is simple: the world of information is complex, even in China, where the government and Party are just 2 of thousands of would-be sculptors, carving away at the public brain.  Cracking down on J-Schools or all schools, lobotomizing the content of mass media, is a sad old story, and a lot of the sadness and frustration is inside the government/party power structure, which still feels besieged. 

Still, like Peter, and some other former visiting teachers at Shantou, I was pretty disheartened by the news.  Until I saw the following response my wife Amy got from a Chinese friend who is both a professional translator, and a volunteer in a 20-year campaign to give all Chinese access to the significant ideas current in the world, by publishing translations on the internet.

He wrote:  The crackdown is “routine, rather than news.”  CCP policing of the media, “particularly in terms of politic issues,” he wrote, has turned “most Chinese journalists into mere zombie followers who retweet everything the Party says.

 

“Luckily,” he added, “we are not living in North Korea. The best thing that ever happened is the internet. I don't have a TV and I subscribe to no newspaper. I look out to the world through my optic fiber, in which way I can get information from both sides and make my own judgment.”

 

Which was, he said, “I am sure the CCP, no matter how hard they try to tighten their grip on journalism, has weaker influence today on intellectuals and the economically advanced areas in this country.  For journalists, it is just one more test to pass, for which they have already been inoculated during their school days.”

 

Which reminded me of my own wonderful experience at Shantou, and left me convinced he’s got it right. Even 5 years ago, the Journalism school, like every school at the University, had a Party Secretary, who was largely unseen and unheard, but could pop out at any moment with some annoying judgment or admonition.  I was warned (and had already assumed) every class had an assigned Party snitch.

 

Kyodo reported, as early as last May, “university officials in Beijing and Shanghai were saying that Chinese authorities had banned the discussion in university classes of seven subjects (Peter Herford’s “7 No’s.”)  including "freedom of the press," "citizen rights," "universal values" implying respect for human rights and democracy, and "historical mistakes of the Communist Party."

In 2008, there was no such explicit ban, and I regularly discussed journalism’s role in society using all those forbidden concepts, except the last one, on which my students had nothing to learn from me: they were already experts.  Clearly, someone ratted me out to the Dean, who counseled me to “stop talking about China and human rights, and just teach them what you know about journalism.”

I kept to my prior teaching plan, and never heard another word.

Here are 2 things my students taught me (here I paraphrase and combine sources): 

(1) “Journalism in China is a regulated profession.  To work, you must be a member of the Party and go regularly to meetings on party policy and propaganda.  This is true for us as students and will be true for us as journalists for as long as we work.”

“How do you deal with that?” I asked several students.  Their answers made for Lesson  (2)  “It’s all bullshit and everyone knows it.  You join the Party.  You go to meetings.  You nod your head, and go home or back to the office.  Then you do your best to give people real information and hope you don’t piss anybody off too much.  The whole thing is a pain, and it hurts us and the country, but you’d be surprised how much gets through.”

I was surprised at the results of a game my students and I played every week.  I would name a story that had appeared on a portion of the internet which I could see because I was a visiting professor, but which never appeared on a server they could use, and ask them to have read it by my next class.  Every time, every student passed the test.  For them, as for hundreds of millions of Chinese netizens every day, the news does get through.

Which brings me to another country where the government is trying desperately to control information and citizens alike: Ukraine.

Over the past year, the Soviet-style governance of President Viktor Yanukovych has asserted increasing direct and indirect control over the nation’s news media, and, recently, has stepped up thuggish violence against opposition reporters and demonstrators.  But all this wave of authoritarianism has produced is a backlash of  popular commitment to opposition, and widespread use of new and old communication networks.  Yanukovych, like President Xi in China, is not just failing to cut the flow of ideas, he is failing to suppress the demand for reform.

In Kyiv, the worse the government behaves, the more people know about it.  It has now been documented; the government’s own violence produces bigger crowds of demonstrators and more definitive demands for reform.  

A recent blog post in the Washington Post by Oxford University political scientist Olga Onuch passed along the results from ongoing polling of demonstrators in Kyiv.  They  suggest that a lot of journalists and activists have been mis-describing what’s going on there. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/01/02/social-networks-and-social-media-in-ukrainian-euromaidan-protests-2/

For one thing, Onuch reported, more than 1200 interviews show, the protests are not a youth movement.  “While many reports have championed Ukrainian students and youths for being the predominant actors in the protests, the majority of the respondents (69 percent) are in fact older than 30. The average age of the Ukrainian protester in Kyiv is closer to 36, with approximately 24 percent of participants older than 55.”

What the crowds are is diverse: students, academics, workers, and retired people; Orthodox and Catholic believers and atheists.  One characteristic of the people on the streets of the Ukraine capitol that should be shockingly bad news for the government is how many of those polled are newly declared dissidents.

Onuch reported, “A surprising 38 percent of current protesters did not participate in previous protests, and 37 percent did not participate in the “Orange Revolution” [of 2004.] 

“This is, of course, not to say that students, youths and activists are not a significant group,” Onuch reported, “but they do not represent the majority of participants.”

The diverse protesters against the government have, Onuch’s poll revealed, definably diverse goals.

“The students and youth under 30 use more media savvy language of ‘EU accession,’ ‘global human rights’ and employ abstract concepts such as ‘freedom.’

But, Onuch wrote, “The 30 to 45 year-old protesters focus more on practical matters like ‘economic security,’ ‘better opportunities for their children,’  and their desire to live in a ‘normal, European democracy.’  They insist that their presence lets the regime known the ‘voters are here.’

“The protesters over 55 explain that they ‘have lived through many injustices’ and that because they are ‘retired, [they] can protest in the place of the young, who have to work and raise families.’ Thus, they see themselves as guardians of the protests, when others cannot be there.”

And while social media are important, informing people about the time and place of manifestations and framing issues, they are just part of a diverse set of communications inputs Ukrainians draw on, inputs that, as in China, are moving more and more from the policed official media to the internet. 

Asked how they follow the protest campaign, 48% of those polled said they watched on broadcast TV; but, already 41% said they have shifted their allegiance and now watched internet news channels instead.

Internet influence could be seen in the way personal contacts outweighed media contacts, including social media. Almost everyone told the pollsters they got political information from their friends, most of it from computers, tablets and mobile phones: 46% by text messages, 30% via email, versus 23% by telephone.  Asked if they responded to protest invitations posted on social media, 10.4% said yes, they had responded to an invitation on Facebook, 14% from Russian competitor VKontakte.

It is in a form of “elite communication,” that Onuch said the polls showed important influence from the social networks. “Our analysis of demands (as reflected in slogans and signage), is still very preliminary, [but] it does seem to follow certain patterns of words mentioned on Twitter, Facebook, chain e-mails and internet news sites. We have noticed a pattern whereby a sign or slogan first goes viral on Facebook, and then seems to show up more often in protester signs. While making any serious conclusions from this method is complicated, first impressions point to an “Internet-to-the-streets” directionality of claims and framing of demands.”

In China, this pattern has long been observed, although the word patterns are closer to coding than sloganeering.  Although mass media coverage of the Arab Spring was long-delayed and closely-crimped in China, it soon acquired an internet code name, “Jasmine,” which soon became a banished word from the Chinese internet.  Banished, but not forgotten.

As the world changes, communication, social and journalistic, changes with it.  Usually, it is the repressive government that can’t keep up.

Will that mean political change?  The attitude I get from people in China is typically patient and confident.  Just as most your people assume it is inevitable that the 21^st Century will be China’s (just as the 20^th was America’s), they also assume, slowly, the unstoppable spread of popular knowledge about the ideas and options available outside China will force the government in Beijing to serious reform.

Right now, most of the global evidence suggests, the coalescence of public recognition of the realities of the world into greater public participation in political and economic power is a long way off.

Great troughs of information, most of it introduced to the region by Al Jazeera (Arabic), and the implicit imperative for viewers to sort it out for themselves, are what set off the Arab Spring.  Today, a few short years later, “people power” in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria is being crushed, the old-fashioned way, under the boot heels of unpopular state force (except in Libya, where the state, as well as the people, are prey to the new-fashioned pandemonium of well-armed, poorly-disciplined independent militias.)

Long-term, I’m betting on information and the innumerable ways people devise to obtain it

The master-pessimist Herman Melville unforgettably wrote: “What like a bullet can undeceive?”

To which I reply, “What like a tyrant can unleash communication?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"HUMAN RIGHTS" FOR CORPORATE CRIMINALS?

I think the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was among the worst and most destructive in American legal history.

The Court’s finding that the First Amendment protections of free speech should be extended to paid speech defies logic, reality, and the intent of the Framers.  Their idea, I’ve always believed, was that the function of free speech was to counter-balance public discourse against the inherent advantages of the loud voices of wealth and class.

The idea that the freedom to “shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” can be legally limited, but the freedom to shout down less well-funded voices in political debate cannot is nonsense; legal nonsense; political nonsense.  Or worse.

The freedom of speech being defended in the Constitution is for individual voices, contesting fairly, openly, and responsibly.  Citizen’s United turns those ideals upside-down, giving further advantage to the already-advantaged rich and powerful to bend public conversation to their interest.  The “free speech” being paid for under the rules of this ruling is all political, (and presently hyper-partisan, and under license of the Court,  it is secret and therefore detached from responsibility. This is the second way in which this wretched and heretical decision corporatizes “free speech.”

Now, Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas et al are considering extending the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom to corporations, to enable some corporate  claims that scripture requires them to cheapen the health insurance provided their employees by failing to cover abortion.

Again, this reverses the letter and the logic of the First Amendment’s absolute that “Congress shall make no law” regarding religion.  To allow insertion of any particular religious scruple into a legal contract is exactly what the Framers meant to forbid.

And besides, corporations do not have religious beliefs.  The same nullification of personhood which is at the heart of the incorporation idea makes such a relationship with any God impossible. 

The right to speak freely and the right to follow any religious dictate or none, pertain to homo sapiens, while incorporation is about removing “the human element,” and limiting the concept that is at the heart of both religious and expressive freedom: personal responsibility.

Here’s what investopedia.com has to say:

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/corporation.asp

“The most important aspect of a corporation is limited liability. That is, shareholders have the right to participate in the profits, through dividends and/or the appreciation of stock, but are not held personally liable for the company's debts.”

In law, shareholders are also absolved of personal responsibility for their corporation’s crimes, and recent practice suggests, that immunity extends to corporate executives and directors.

Who but this Court of corporatist clowns would contend that human rights can be extended to those held to no human responsibilities?

All of which leads us to two recent cases of corporate crime without the prospect of punishment.

Case 1:  The Corporations: Nissan and General Motors.  The Crime: Manslaughter.

A powerful investigative report published by the Associated Press and correspondent Adriana Gomez Licon makes a strong case for prosecutors in Mexico (and any number of Latin American countries) to charge the brass at General Motors and Nissan with legal responsibility for thousands of preventable deaths in Latin America.

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/28/mexicos_booming_car_industry_selling_unsafe_cars/

Gomez Licon’s story begins:  “In Mexico’s booming auto industry, the cars rolling off assembly lines may look identical, but how safe they are depends on where they’re headed.

“Vehicles destined to stay in Mexico or go south to the rest of Latin America carry a code signifying there’s no need for antilock braking systems, electronic stability control, or more than two air bags, if any, in its basic models.”

Of course, those same Mexican factories are sending cars carrying the same marque and model to dealers in the US, Canada and Western Europe.  But, the AP reported, those vehicles “must meet stringent safety laws, including as many as six to 10 air bags, and stability controls that compensate for slippery roads and other road dangers, say engineers who have worked in Mexico-based auto factories.”

You might think that there is economic logic here.  After all, the peoples of Mexico and the rest of the Latin American car market are so much poorer than those in the US and other “first world” countries, that Nissan and GM are forced to cut safety “frills” to make their products more affordable.

This is the same logic, applied by the pack of right-wing morons, predictably on both sides of the aisle in Congress, who are fighting to give their poorer constituents the right to imperil their families health and savings by getting less for their money, by buying “cheap,” high-deductible/ low-service health insurance policies.

Obamacare meant to upgrade the insurance market by banning these viciously inefficient “choices,” which happen to produce very limited benefits to their buyers, but very large profits to the villains in the health insurance industry who dreamed them up.

Except here, the AP showed that stripping cars of critical safety features confers little or no economic advantage to the Latino consumer. 

“For example,” AP reported, “basic versions of Mexico’s second most popular car, the Nissan Versa, made in central Aguascalientes, come with two air bags, but without electronic stability control systems, which use sensors to activate brakes when a car loses control.

“The sticker price of the newer generation of the sedan comes to $16,000,” the AP report continued. ”The U.S. version of the same car has six air bags in the front, on the sides and mounted in the roof, in addition to an electronic stability control system. That sticker price is about $14,000.

“Similarly, the basic version of the Chevrolet Aveo, which has been revamped and renamed Sonic, sells for about $14,000 in the U.S. and comes with 10 air bags, antilock brakes and traction control. Its Mexican equivalent, the country’s top-selling car, doesn’t have any of those protections and costs only $400 less.”

“Nissan Mexicana spokesman Herman Morfin,” told AP retail price comparisons of cars bearing the same brand and general equipment, except for safety items is invalid, “’Because there are many choices of specifications and equipment, specific marketing strategies by country, in addition to the tax difference among countries, states and cities, also including transportation and delivery costs.’”

In addition to the less-safe version of the Versa, Nissan has another very popular car made in Mexico for Latin American distribution: the cheaper $10,000 Tsuru, which AP said, “is so outdated it has only lap seat belts in the back and some versions have no air bags at all. The car is not sold in the U.S. or Europe.

At a recent Latin NCAP crash test presentation, the Tsuru's driver's door ripped off upon impact at only 37 mph. Its roof collapsed and the steering wheel slammed against the crash test dummy's chest. The Tsuru scored zero stars out of a possible five.”

Nissan declined AP’s request for comment on the crash test results.

Alejandro Furas, technical director for NCAP, the Global New Car Assessment Program, which conducts crash tests around the world told the AP’s Gomez Licon, “We [Latin Americans] are paying for cars that are far more expensive and far less safe. Something is very wrong.”

Here’s how wrong.  AP reported, “In 2011, nearly 5,000 drivers and passengers in Mexico died in accidents, a 58 percent increase since 2001, according to the latest available data from the country’s transportation department. Over the same decade, the U.S. reduced the number of auto-related fatalities by 40 percent.”

Many of those American lives were saved, experts say, by the very safety features cut from the cars made to be sold in Latin America. In their absence, the roads south of our border have become terribly dangerous.  World Health Organization figures show that Argentina, which has recently upgraded its auto safety standards, has almost 3 times as many fatalities per motor vehicle as the United States, and that is by far the best record in all Latin America. Again, according to the WHO,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate

in Mexico, vehicles are more than 5 times as likely to produce a fatality as in the US, while in Central America, vehicles in Panama kill people 7 times as often as here, in Guatemala 8 times, Honduras 9 times, and in Nicaragua roughly 17 times as often as in the US.  Move further south and the pattern is the same.  Brazil’s rate of death per  vehicle is almost 5 times the US’s, 71 to 15 out of every 100,000 vehicles; while in Venezuela the deadly disproportion is 10:1, in Ecuador 12:1, in Colombia more than 13:1, and in Peru almost 25:1. Of every thousand cars on the roads of Peru, roughly 4 will be involved in a traffic fatality.

If a used car dealer knowingly sold an unsafe vehicle that killed someone, he might be criminally charged, but when corporate cars makers like GM and Nissan offer Latin Americans products they have re-engineered so that they are less likely to protect the lives of their customers, it’s just another day at the office. 

Case 2: The Corporation: Chevron.  The Crime: Environmental Destruction

Lives and life expectancies in the Ecuadorian Amazon really are too different for meaningful statistical comparison to the United States, so reports of cancer clusters and other notable outbreaks of disease or ill health in Oriente Province’s oil patch probably can’t be treated legally as manslaughter.  But there are both laws and industrial standards meant to protect environments (if not the people who live in them). 

I’ve seen the damage done to Ecuador’s Oriente Province and the people living what was once a unique and pristine environment. It is both wanton and preventable.  No one questions that it was caused by decisions by executives at Texaco (since swallowed by Chevron) to breach long-accepted American legal and professional standards for human safety and environmental protection.   

As a corporate entity, Chevron has a pile of weasely reasons to duck responsibility: the actual damage (but not the corporate decisions that caused it) was done not by Chevron or  Texaco, but by Texaco’s now-folded Ecuadorian subsidiary Texpet, and its Ecuadorian government partner, the hapless national oil company Petroecuador.  And besides, a legal contract between an Ecuadorian government and Texaco allowed the company to buy up its culpability at less than half a penny on the dollar (the latest Ecuadorian court decisions put the damage at $9.1 billion; in 1998, Texaco agreed to a final payoff of $40 million for all clean-up costs.)

I went to Oriente in 1998, for ABC News Nightline, to look at what lay behind the first legal action against Texaco in support of native tribes from the affected region, I can tell you, that slice of the Amazon Basin is the most apocalyptic landscape I’ve ever seen.

From ground level, the area drained by the Rio Coco looks and feels like a painting by Henri Rousseau, a jungle of swelling, sweating fecundity, “the beginning of the world” in shades of brilliant yellows and greens.  But from the air, in a helicopter, what you see is a truly Hellish vision of “the end of the world” that could have been painted by Hieronymus Bosch. 

From 1000 feet, you see a sprawl of dense grey smoke plumes from deforestation fires, set to clear land for farms, roads and pipelines, mostly to feed and service the local oil industry.  Interspersed among the smoke trails are up-thrusting vermillion flares of unwanted natural gas being “burned off” by the same folks who are extracting and pipelining the oil from Amazonia over the Andes to the world.  Between the smoke and the fire are gleaming mirrors of waste oil, reflecting the tropical sunshine to which they have been left untreated and uncovered.  Many of these waste pools are also unlined, and are leaking toxic chemicals into the ground water and nearby streams.

All of this slaps you in the eyeballs like some 400 square mile video-screen display of despoliation. 

How dare Chevron not take human responsibility for this unmetaphoric Hades?  And why do they fight paying anything to the people, like those who showed me, by punching sticks or rods into the seeping soil, the track of wastes from an unprotected pond migrating sub-surface to a river which had once been a source of drinking water and cooling recreation?  Now the stream poisons animals which drink from it and causes skin disease among people whose clothes are washed in the water.

So far, the only thing the victims of this massive irresponsibility have gotten from Chevron is the stiff-arm.

Corporations are inhuman because they are not human.  They and their shareholders’ benefits live in a world legally walled off from humanitarian concerns, much less responsibilities.

The Chevron strategy to justify the stiff-arm is to attack the American lawyer Steven Donziger, who brought the suit, and to muscle the people and firms who testified against them in the Ecuadorian trial.  A co-defendant in Chevron’s suits, the Washington PR and lobbying firm of Patton, Boggs, has estimated the oil giant is burning through $250 million a year pressing its case.  As Donziger’s defense lawyer John W. Keker put it to the Washington Post’s Steven Mufson,

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/02/why-chevron-is-suing-one-of-d-c-s-most-powerful-lobbying-firms-over-the-amazon-jungle/

“This is an extraordinary case, which has degenerated into a Dickensian farce. Through scorched-earth litigation, executed by its army of hundreds of lawyers, Chevron is using its limitless resources to crush defendants and win this case through might rather than merit.”

 

All this, of course, is being done to protect the company’s “good name” and its shareholders’ profits.

This is not to say Chevron doesn’t have a case.  It does appear that the Ecuadorian natives’ lead American lawyer Steven Donziger breached some legal ethics himself, admittedly coaching and (though he denies it) maybe even buying witnesses and judges, as well as exaggerating his claims. But as Robert V. Percival, the Director of the environmental law program at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law wrote in a letter to the Post:

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/chevron-could-have-enjoyed-us-justice-sooner/2013/11/18/26187f8a-4f92-11e3-9ee6-2580086d8254_story.html

the judgment against Chevron is not about Donziger, and the company’s legal attack on him (and a cheerleading op-ed by 2 former Federal lawyers from the Reagan and GHW Bush Administrations printed in the Post) “ignored that the oil company defendant is the party responsible for [what happened] in Ecuador.”  

In making its case, Chevron has itself been giving money to, and helping to relocate from Ecuador to the United States, their key witness to “bribery.” The judge alleged to have been bribed denies he agreed to a payoff, and there’s no evidence he ever got any money.  The only one who clearly did take money from Donziger is the witness who Chevron is rewarding for turning against him. Chevron has also reportedly made threats to destroy the experts and firms who helped set a value on the indisputable damage.  Some of them have recanted their testimony in Ecuador, blaming Donziger for their misstatements.

By the time they are done, Chevron will have spent maybe ten, maybe 20, maybe more  times as much to fight the case as Texaco paid to “settle” it.  But that would still save shareholders billions in unpaid damages, even if it re-victimized those already damaged.

Let us restate: the basic charges that the Texaco/Texpet/Petroecuador operation left behind thousands of waste ponds, hundreds of contaminated waterways, and spilled 50% more oil in Oriente than the Exxon Valdez leaked in Alaska, and that farm lands and lives of thousands of Native Ecuadorians have been ruined, remain undeniable, and if you’ve been there, obvious.

What Chevron asserts is that, through Texaco, they have already paid enough, and what it hopes to accomplish is to deter any future legal claims against them, no matter what the corporation does. 

Here the oil guys have gotten some extraordinary help from the American judge who is hearing their case against Donziger, his witnesses and supporters.  Lewis A. Kaplan has allowed Chevron to supersed a tradition First Amendment protection of press freedom by subpoenaing “off the record” outtakes from a video documentary in which Donziger indiscreetly overblows his own horn, and to pierce attorney-client protections to access documents, emails and other Danziger communications. Finally, Judge Kaplan issued what WaPo’s Mufson called “a worldwide injunction against enforcement of the Ecuador judgment.” 

Had this held up, Judge Kaplan would have been the stuff behind the stiff-arm.  Fortunately, it didn’t take long for the Federal Court of Appeals to remind Kaplan he had exceeded his legal mandate.  His authority does not extend beyond America’s borders, and so his injunction was junked.  But so far, although it reversed his misjudgment, the Appeals Court has denied defense requests that it boot Kaplan from the case.   

Another contaminant in this legal waste pool is The Burford Group, a toxic clot of corporate “investors” who bet $4 million of financial support for Donziger’s near-bankrupt operation, in exchange for a 5.5% cut of his expected $600 million share of the winnings.  This would have given Burford a profit of more than $7 for every buck invested. 

And here’s something interesting: sometime after Chevron’s hauled Donziger et al into Judge Kaplan’s playpen, not only did Burford and its lawyer Joseph Kohn turn on Donziger, denouncing him as an unethical liar, they found someone to buy out their $4 million stake.

Might that “risky” purchase have been an investment against future returns from Chevron’s “favors bank?”

As things stand now, I’d guess the Burford share’s buyer and Donziger’s chances of becoming multi-millionaires are lower than the lawyer’s chances of being disbarred.  And the chances of the poor Ecuadorians getting anything humane out of Chevron are somewhere between slim and none.  That would probably be against Chevron’s religion.  If the concept of corporate religion weren’t a perfect oxymoron.

LETTER TO THE U.K. --THROW THE BUMS OUT

My dear friends in the United Kingdom,

I'm sure there is nothing more annoying than political meddling from an outsider from one of "the colonies," but ...can you say snap election?

The Metropolitan Police's anti-terrorism unit's raid on the editorial offices of The Guardian, a pre-cursor to the Securi-Bobbies' Heathrow detention of Guardian investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda just revealed today, shows the Miranda detention was not just a stupid mistake, but part of a concerted, and very stupid policy: to try to crush press freedom and hide from citizens facts about what their elected leaders are up to.

To put it mildly, such actions are anti-democratic, and show the British Government's fear of and contempt for ordinary citizens.

In short, the happy chumps who Guardian Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger says forced Guardian personnel to destroy computers and hard drives before his astonished eyes were also putting David Cameron's feet deep into the shite, because I have a hunch, this nano-Krystallnacht for journalists, will not go down well with the British public.

So, if I may suggest...

Step #1)  Put it to Nick Clegg and Simon Hughes -- is this the policy of a government you can still support, still accept co-responsibility for?  Suggested answer: No.

2)  After the Lib-Dems withdraw from Cameron's Government, they should immediately join Labor in asking for a special session of Parliament for a vote of No Confidence.

3)  After that vote passes, and with the support of leaders of both parties it can hardly fail, call for snap elections.

4)  Polls suggest that the popular romance with the public school boys is already over; that their version of Thatcher II has been publicly judged to be not just mean-spirited, but incompetent.  If George Osborne's profits and impunity for the lending class, and higher unemployment, lower wage scales and crimped benefits and services for the struggling class weren't electoral burden enough, let David Cameron explain this week's security police crackdown.  It reeks of Mrs. T's bloody mix of simple-minded bossy-pants and single-minded intolerance.

5)  Even in our narrow little world of journalism, there is a fine distinction to be made.  On the one hand there are Cameron's relations with Rupert Murdoch, coddling his attempts to mislead Parliament, dominate news coverage, corrupt the cops and invade a dead girl's privacy, while professionally and personally cuddling with Murdoch's minion and mignonette, the indicted former chief editors of the late News of the World Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks.  On the other, there would be campaign promises by all anti-Tories to protect the freedoms of papers like The Guardian, while vigorously prosecuting the crimes of the right-wing Aussie-American publishing tycoon.

6)  I would also humbly suggest the anti-Tories demand a public airing and political reconsideration of Government's domestic spying and (shades of President George W. Bush's "lapdog" Tony Blair) enabling of America's attempts to spook everyone in the world.  Cameron has acted out the role of the "old school" elitist,  ignorant about and dangerous for the most widely-used freedom in the world, communication through digital devices.  Almost everyone, certainly almost every voter, has a computer, mobile phone or tablet and uses them to gather information and express ideas.  Therefore almost everyone can instantly recognize the futility as well as the ugliness behind trying to eradicate a message by chilling a messenger and and killing a few copies. This Government is too dumb to live.

7)  With speed and daring, its opponents can get voters to prove that.

8)  Here in the States, we don't have snap elections, but we do already have a fiery reaction, from the Tea Party Right to the Progressive Left to the unrestrained  and dishonest NSA surveillance machine.  Barack Obama will have to do much more than pay attention; he'll have to pay respect to that reaction, its logic and its values, or he will face political paralysis even worse than he experienced in his first term, and disgrace like he's never seen before.  Many have already noted Obama's kinship with the much-regretted President Richard Nixon, their paranoia about dissent, their hypocritical abuse of words like "transparency" and "reform."  But now they are revealed alike in their devotion to "imperial" Presidencies.  But where Nixon was infamous for his love for imperial fripperies like uniforms for White House servants and guards, Obama is intent on the essence of imperialism, absolute control of information and communication.  How fortunate for us, and for the world, that imperialism as as dead as secrecy and, alas, privacy.

Again, I apologise for being a buttinsky, but, unless I'm dead wrong, these are themes you'll be hearing plenty of from your own folks.

Hoping for the best,
dmarash