https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdMVafPa4Bj78L38QQoMDyNzX2E1tX15nKpXKsaYbu0xRzjrg/viewform

This above link should take you to the signature page. If not, I hope I bolded the link below. Here’s the email. Lauren is a local whom i have volunteered under and with many times. Lauren Regan CLDC.

Please excuse the length.

On Aug 6, 2020, at 1:30 PM, Lauren Regan wrote:

Dear colleagues in the public interest plaintiff bar—I (Lauren Regan, Civil Liberties Defense Center) am one of the lead trial lawyers defending Steven Donziger pro bono. As you may know, human rights lawyer Steven Donziger has been SLAPP’d by Chevron after winning a 9 billion dollar judgment against the fossil fuel tyrant for poisoning the Ecuadorian Amazon. That SLAPP suit, which included outrageous RICO charges, bribes to witnesses by Chevron, and a district judge who is a former tobacco industry defense lawyer who just hates plaintiff do-gooders has been going on for years.

In fact today (Thursday) will mark the one year date of his pretrial home detention for the criminal contempt charge he faces as a result of appealing a decision made by Judge Kaplan ordering him to turn over his attorney client privileged documents and records that would imperil his indigenous clients and give his litigation strategy to Chevron. Steven did the right thing by informing the court that he disagreed with the order and was going to follow the proper process of filing an appeal of the decision to the 2nd circuit b/c you can’t ‘unring the bell’ once the info was turned over. Normally that would have been the end of the story. But this was is not normal, and the judge himself drafted criminal contempt charges and brought them to the US Attorneys office for prosecution. The US Attorneys refused to prosecute so Kaplan appointed a private law firm to be a private prosecutor instead. And several months ago we uncovered that the private firm, Seward & Kissel has Chevron and Chevron affiliates as clients. The audacity of this fossil fuel giant goes on and on….see links below for more details

It is important to remember—if they come after one of us, they come after all of us. And as Martin Niemoller once said:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Please sign on to this letter below:
and feel free to reach out to me if you would like.
In solidarity,
Lauren

Dear All,

On August 6, 2020, environmental human rights Lawyer Steven Donziger will have spent one year under house arrest facing charges of criminal contempt initiated by Chevron Corporation and ordered by Federal Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Southern District of New York. The charges stem from Mr. Donziger’s objections to an order to turn over all of his electronic devices to Chevron Corporation, revealing all of his communications, including privileged communications. His objections are on constitutional and freedom of association grounds. This order is a culmination of a ten year battle by Chevron to discredit the Ecuadorian judgment to provide funds to clean up the oil pollution of Chevron’s predecessor, Texaco, in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Chevron’s attack on this judgment is to discredit the lawyers who brought it, particularly Mr. Donziger. This is a dangerous precedent, chilling legal representation.

In response, a dedicated group of human rights lawyers, initiated by the National Lawyers Guild and the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, reviewed the record in the case and came to believe Judge Lewis A. Kaplan violated the Canons of Judicial Conduct in his handling of the case and facilitating Chevron’s attacks on Mr. Donziger and the Ecuadorian judgment and that his actions with respect to the criminal contempt charges are evidence of his misconduct.

The way Judge Kaplan has instituted and allowed lawyers who represent Chevron and the oil and gas industry to prosecute Mr. Donziger, has been criticized by two retired federal judges, Nancy Gertner and Mark Bennett as excessive. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ac2615b8f5130fda4340fcb/t/5f0dc3fd6a8632767c2de633/1594737663061/2020-07-13-law360-gertner-bennett.pdf

Complaints of judicial misconduct may be filed by anyone concerned with this conduct. Your signature on this complaint will assist in making the reviewing judges realize the importance of this case to the community of lawyers and lawyer/jurist/bar associations. This complaint is five pages and can be read at the attached link. This complaint is supported by a long Appendix and exhibits supporting the allegations in the complaint. It is available upon request.

View the full text of the complaint at this link: https://bit.ly/donzigerjudicialcomplaint

To sign on to the complaint, please visit this link: https://bit.ly/judicialcomplaintkaplan

The judicial complaint alleges that the “statements and actions of Judge Kaplan over the last ten years show him to have taken on the role of counsel for Chevron in these cases rather than that of a judge adjudicating a live controversy before him. By these actions, he has violated his duty of impartiality under the canons of judicial conduct.” It alleges that Judge Kaplan’s misconduct in this case has violated the Judicial Canons of Conduct and calls for the Second Circuit Court to appoint a special investigation committee and/or transfer the case to another circuit for further proceedings.

> We are asking for your support for this important judicial complaint. All legal and human rights organizations, lawyers, legal workers, and law students in the United States and internationally are invited to sign on to add your support for the complaint, which will be submitted to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

We ask for your signatures by 5:00 pm Pacific time on Monday, August 10, 2020.

To sign on to the complaint, please visit this link: https://bit.ly/judicialcomplaintkaplan

For further background on the Donziger case, please see:
· 475 international lawyers and human rights organizations support Steven Donziger in Chevron case: https://iadllaw.org/2020/05/over-475-lawyers-legal-organizations-and-human-rights-defenders-support-lawyer-steven-donziger/
· Amicus brief filed by the NLG and IADL in Steven Donziger’s mandamus case: https://iadllaw.org/2020/06/iadl-and-nlg-file-amicus-brief-in-donziger-case-highlighting-corporate-impunity-and-human-rights-violations/
· Article by distinguished retired federal judges Hons. Nancy Gertner (D. Mass.) and Mark Bennett (S.D. Iowa), “Criminal Contempt Charges In Donziger Case Are Excessive:” https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ac2615b8f5130fda4340fcb/t/5f0dc3fd6a8632767c2de633/1594737663061/2020-07-13-law360-gertner-bennett.pdf

Thank you for your consideration on this important matter.

“One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change,” Reverend Martin Luther King, 1968.

Democrats are fueling a corporate counter-revolution against progressives

These are bleak days for America’s progressive movement. The Democratic primary process handed the party’s nomination to the candidate with the most conservative record.

Corporate-friendly politicians like the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, are using the pandemic to brandish their images and install billionaires to run things. Progressive lawmakers in Congress are being steamrolled, even by their own party’s leadership. And a recession is battering the state and local budgets that fund progressive priorities like education [and a social safety net].
Perhaps this is a temporary stall-out – a fleeting moment of retreat in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back trajectory. After all, polls continue to show that from workers’ rights to universal healthcare, a majority of Americans support a progressive policy agenda.

The problem, though, is that Democrats in Washington are not just passively failing to mount a strong opposition to Donald Trump – they are actively helping Republicans try to fortify the obstacles to long-term progressive change well after this emergency subsides.
This corporate counter-revolution is easiest to see in Democrats’ enthusiastic support for Republicans’ legislative response to the coronavirus crisis. Democrats’ entire 2018 electoral campaign told America that the opposition party needed to win back Congress in order to block Trump’s regressive agenda. And yet, when the Republicans proposed a bill to let Trump’s appointees dole out government cash to their corporate allies with no strings attached, this same opposition party mustered not a single recorded vote against the package. Not one.

Thanks to that, Trump appointees and the Federal Reserve can now hand out $4tn to politically connected corporations as they lay waste to our economy and steamroll progressive reforms. Private equity firms and fossil fuel companies get new tax breaks as they buy elections and try to lock in permanent climate change.

These bailouts were part of a larger legislative package that included good things like expanded unemployment benefits – and so you could argue that Democrats simply had to swallow a bitter pill and vote yes. Except, they subsequently proposed their own standalone legislation that would further strengthen the corporate opponents of progressive reform.

For example, there is the Democrats’ push to alter the so-called paycheck protection program (PPP). Those loans were designed to help employees of mom-and-pop enterprises throughout the country. House Democrats’ new stimulus legislation would open up the small business lending program to what they call “small nonprofits”, but their language was crafted to provide the forgivable loans to industry trade associations. Those lobby groups represent the planet’s biggest corporations – and their political action committees have delivered more than $191m of campaign cash to lawmakers in the last two decades.

Democrats have pitched their legislation as a “message” bill that declares their values – and in this case, they are reassuring Washington power-players that money meant for workers at neighborhood restaurants, local shops and other mom-and-pop concerns can be raided by the front groups representing giant drug companies, health insurers and Wall Street firms. If the legislation passes, it would not merely be an epic tale of greed – the new funding stream for corporate lobbying groups would bolster the very forces that make sure federal policy disempowers workers, maximizes private profit and generally protects the ruling class.
The tragedy is we’re already moving in that wrong direction, and chances to change the dynamic don’t come around often.

It’s an even worse story on healthcare. As 43 million Americans face the prospect of losing private health insurance, Democrats had a huge opportunity. After Trump himself suggested he wanted the government to pay healthcare providers directly for treating uninsured Covid-19 patients, they could have called his bluff and passed existing legislation to expand a Medicare program that provides actual medical care. Instead, House Democrats passed a bill to support lightly regulated private insurance marketplaces and to subsidize existing private insurance plans through a Rube Goldberg machine known as Cobra – and they passed this giveaway just after receiving an infusion of campaign cash collected by insurance lobbyists.

See you below.