(As one of the world’s largest music festivals, Tomorrowland attracts 500,000 people from 200 countries every July to Belgium to celebrate and enjoy electronic dance music. This year, the organizers invited me to a speaker’s summit called Love Tomorrow held the day before the opening. Thousands of people attended. I used the opportunity to recount my journey battling the fossil fuel industry and I shared my perspective on how young people might think about confronting the world’s challenges. I have spent a lot of time in Europe cultivating support for the legal work of the Amazon communities against Chevron. It was deeply satisfying to return and connect with old friends after Chevron had my passport confiscated for seven years, denying my my right to travel and forcing me to turn down an invitation to the same event in 2022.

(Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription on this platform to help support my writing and my broader human rights advocacy. You can go to FreeDonziger.com to learn more about my work. A written copy of my speech, which differs in some respects from what I said on stage, follows. Thank you! — Steven)

We are here today as a very representative example of the best life force -- the very life force that Trump, Musk, Thiel and the vultures who are starting wars, and financing genocide, and destroying the planet don’t want to see happen.

I am here to tell you that if we keep our goals are clear and our focus strong, we can’t be stopped.

We have awesome power. Look around this space and feel it. I’ve learned over the course of my life that we have more power than we know. They spend massive funds trying to convince us we have less power than we have. Trying to disconnect us from each other. Trying to demoralize us and even lock us up if we pose too much of a threat to their power.

They want us to think real political change is futile; that trying to save the planet is futile. We are not that stupid. That’s why we are here at this festival – or at least one reason we are here.

Because dancing in the current environment – feeling joy — is not only fun but I believe is an act of political defiance.

I’m going to talk about power. And how one of the worst sins in life is not to use the power you have – and to not leverage the power you have into more power, with the aim of making this world more just and safe for everyone.

It’s a high honor to be here. I was here once before in 2022 via video because an oil company had my passport confiscated. I was not allowed to travel outside the United States for seven years. I had been to Ecuador once a month for over 20 years, or over 250 times, trying to hold Chevron accountable for its human rights abuses in the Amazon. From August 2019 until December of 2025 I never left the United States.

My name is Steven Donziger.

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I’m an attorney who has worked on one case for 33 years.

During that time I represented Amazon communities in Ecuador against Chevron. Chevron is a company that in addition to wrecking the rainforest with toxic oil waste, works closely with the Israeli government to – in my opinion — essentially steal Palestinian-owned gas off the coast of Gaza and market it commercially to the world.

Chevron, and it’s rapacious appetite for oil and money regardless of the consequences to vulnerable communities, is illustrative of much of what is wrong with corporate power in the world.

To retaliate for my working helping Amazon communities, Chevron manipulated the legal system to make me a corporate political prisoner in the United States for almost three years. It was an act of persecution condemned by the United Nations, multiple judges and bar associations, 68 Nobel laureates, and dozens of US political officials including 34 members of Congress who demanded President Biden pardon me.

I want to explain my experience with the dark “art” of corporate political persecution in a western liberal democracy.

I have represented Amazon communities since 1993 when I took my first trip to Ecuador. On that trip, I witnessed what is probably the worst environmental catastrophe on the planet. Chevron had dumped billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste into the streams and rivers that local communities for millennia had used for their drinking water, bathing, and fishing.

Cancer was everywhere. Doctors were virtually nowhere. People were dying.

The people we talked to had never been in court in their lives. Had never met a lawyer. Did not think they had a right to walk into the local courthouse. We convinced them otherwise.

The case against Chevron was filed in New York. Chevron insisted it be moved to Ecuador’s courts, believing it it could engineer a political dismissal. We spent 10 years fighting over the issue of jurisdiction. Chevron won that battle and the case went to Ecuador on the condition that the company accept jurisdiction there.

I believe Chevron knew at that point that it could not win. So they declared war on the communities and their lawyers through the legal system.

After years of intense litigation involving more than 200,000 pages of evidence, the affected communities in 2011 won the largest environmental judgement ever. Chevron could not accept the fact that Indigenous peoples and humble farming communities had the intelligence and resourcefulness to do such a thing; so they had to attribute all of that success to a “gringo” from the North.

Chevron targeted me with 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers. They persuaded a judge in New York who had investments in Chevron to lock me up in my own apartment in Manhattan, with a battery-charged GPS monitor attached to my ankle all day and night. They used the pretext that I was a “risk of flight” and would flee the country even though I was only charged with a misdemeanor.

I couldn’t ever take the GPS monitor off. Slept with it. Showered with it. Ate with it. It would talk to me remotely. Wake me and my wife Laura up in the middle of the night to tell us to charge it.

The surveillance claw was attached to my body and administered by a private, for-profit corporation that runs several ICE detention centers in the United States. My son Matthew, who is here, spent the main part of his adolescence living with a detained Dad.

For good measure, they also shoved me into a federal prison for six weeks. Once in, I never knew if I’d get out.

Chevron had sued me personally for 60 billion dollars claiming the case was a sham even though it had been affirmed by six different appellate courts, including the Supreme Courts of Ecuador and Canada.

That’s the most amount of money anybody ever has been sued for in history. There’s not a bank, oil company, or insurance company on earth that ever has been sued for so much – and I’m a human rights lawyer working out of the table in my kitchen.

They ultimately took my passport, all of my money, and finally my freedom. I became the first person in history to be prosecuted by an oil company on a contempt of court charge. The United Nations determined my detention was illegal and ordered the US government to pay me compensation. (This order was ignored.)

Obviously this story is long and I am leaving out important details. Obviously I’m free now. They tried to silence me. They tried to get me to jump off the roof of my building. They used me to try to intimidate activists and to undermine environmental advocacy.

They failed on all counts.

So what can we learn from this concept of a corporation directly caging an activist?

I want to say something plainly, because plain language is what this moment requires. The criminal case against me was sort of the canary in the coal mine of what we are seeing now all across the West – in Germany, the UK, Canada, Australia, and so many countries.

The oligarchs have declared war against the activists.

We are living through things the world has not seen before.

First, the United States — a country that spent decades, however imperfectly, presenting itself as a defender of democracy and human rights — has become something else. Under Trump, it has gone from a nation that at least claimed to respect the rule of law to a pariah state actively undermining the global order it once built.

And it is not happening quietly.

In Gaza, we are watching what I can only call an open-book genocide carried out by perpetrators who act as though accountability no longer applies to them — because, increasingly, it doesn’t.

Second, the rule of law, human rights norms, the basic architecture of international accountability — these are being violated in plain sight by the powerful, and nothing happens.

No consequence. No correction. Just the next violation.

Third: At the same time, the climate crisis is not a future threat anymore.

It is actively destroying the conditions for sustained life on this planet, right now. Trump is actively promoting fossil fuels – he just had the US government pay billions to wind companies to take down their turbines. Europe is burning from fires. Millions now die each year from heat and drought. The oil industry is drilling more than ever.

Fourth, the world’s 400 million Indigenous peoples hold 80% of oil, mineral, and gas reserves. The conflict between Indigenous rights and resource extraction is one of the fundamental battles of our generation, yet Indigenous peoples get far too little support and too often the first people targeted.

These are the frontline defenders of the planet. They are the victims of the original genocide in the United States, Canada, and Australia among other places. Their critical role and needs must be centered on all of our platforms.

Fifth: Underneath all of it, corporations have more unchecked power than at any point in history— power that is actively hollowing out our freedom and democracy from the inside. Here is the pattern I want you to actually understand, not just feel: as corporate power grows, repression of progressive activists grows with it. And as popular movements grow stronger in response, the tools built to repress them grow stronger too.

Sixth: Wealth inequality drives so much of this. The need of the oligarchs and the ultra-elites to preserve this system of inequality has created the needs for massive repression. It drives the fossil fuel industry, war, and genocide – and the targeting of people like me.

When their corruption is thrust by us into the open – when too many are hip to their rigged game – they become more naked in their attempt to repress us with their money, soldiers, and power. Which is my mind is a great opportunity for us to build our power in response.

That’s what happened to me on a small scale.

They play by the rules until they lose, at which point they become openly corrupt. This is what got Navalny killed in Russia. It’s what led to my life being threatened in the United States. It’s what led to Julian Assange being locked up for years.

The technique is classic: criminalize those who speak out. Call them “terrorists” while you commit terrorism. Shrink the civic space by scaring the hell out of people – so people stop speaking out.

In the Prairieland case in the state of Texas, which involved a protest at an ICE detention facility, eight defendants were handed exorbitant prison sentences ranging from 30 to 100 years after they were cast as “terrorists”. One man who was not even at the protest was given 30 years for moving a box of literature related to the protest from one location to another.

I believe that under the Trump Administration ICE has become a domestic terrorist organization. So why are those protesting ICE being sentenced as “terrorists”?

Because here’s what few fully reckon with: the propaganda and surveillance apparatus around us is so pervasive that we are already living inside Orwell’s 1984. We just don’t call it that, because it isn’t hooded men and telescreens. It’s an app. It’s a terms-of-service agreement. It’s a camera you paid for yourself. And it’s algorithms that serve corporate profits rather than human needs.

Do you know that the Israeli company NSO Group developed spyware called Pegasus that remotely can be put in your phone. Once in, it can access all of your data, your messages, your calls – and it can secretly activate the camera and microphone even when the phone is turned off. Governments and corporations buy this service to spy on journalists and their political opponents.

How can activists fighting the power structure unwittingly be turned into listening devices for the power structure?

I need you to unlearn something you might have been taught in school: the concept of the law as neutral. It was never neutral. It is, in practice, in every society I have seen whether it be the United States or Cuba or Belgium -- largely a tool that the powerful use to legitimize what they were going to do anyway.

I learned that lesson in a Manhattan courtroom with an ankle bracelet on my leg.

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I did not survive that experience to stand up here and hand you despair. Us feeling despair is exactly what this system is counting on. So let me give you what it cost me a great deal to learn — five things that I want you to carry away with you today.

One: leadership is about organizing movements. One person cannot do it alone.

Two: one leader can ignite an entire social justice movement as long as they understand it’s about the movement.

One person, willing to go first. Gandhi was one such person. Mandela. Fidel Castro in 1954 landed in Cuba with 120 armed men intending to overthrow a US-backed dictator. Sixty of the men were killed almost immediately; the rest fled into the mountains with almost no weapons to face a brutal 60,000-person army.

Sixty against 60,000. The movement won.

Think about Greta and what those first school strikes did for the climate and Gaza solidarity movements.

History does not wait for consensus before it starts moving — it waits for someone willing to take the first step alone, and trust that others will follow.

Three: Take the first step and see what happens.

Not the perfect plan. Not the fully-formed strategy. Action. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step — and I want you to actually believe that, not just nod at it. Look at what happened in New York City with Mayor Mamdani. Nobody handed that campaign a guaranteed outcome. Somebody took a step that looked improbable, and then took another one. That is how every movement you admire actually started — not with certainty about the outcome, but with motion.

Four: combine the inner spirit and the outer activism.

This is the one people skip, and it’s the one that keeps you alive to keep fighting. You cannot sustain years of confrontation with power on rage alone — I know, because I tried, and it nearly broke me. You need the outer fire of activism and the inner discipline of peace, together. Not instead of each other. Together. One without the other burns you out or hollows you out. Both together is how you last long enough to actually win.

Five: redefine what it means to win in an asymmetrical environment.

In the world we’re in now, a win is not only when you achieve your objective. A win is also when you stop the other side with its vastly superior resources from achieving theirs. Or slow them down.

Chevron has still not gotten what it wanted from me — my silence, my surrender, my disappearance from this fight. Every day I’m still standing here is a win, even on the days I haven’t gained an inch. Don’t let anyone tell you that only total victory counts. Denying them their victory counts too.

Six: understand both the promise and the limits of the law.

The law can be a genuine tool for justice — I’ve used it to win real victories for real people. But it is not your savior, and it is not neutral, and it will not save you by itself. Use it. Master it if you can. Never worship it. Understand its limitations. And understand it is most effective when used as a component of a larger advocacy strategy across multiple platforms.

I look out at this crowd and I know exactly what some of you are thinking: this is a lot to carry. It is.

But you are not carrying it alone, and you are not carrying it first. People have stood exactly where you’re standing, facing forces that looked exactly this immovable, and moved them anyway. Not because the system corrected itself. Because they refused to disappear.

The powerful are counting on your despair. Don’t give it to them.

Protect your peace while you fight. Redefine winning on your own terms. Build your solidarity. Never, ever allow them to silence you. Take that first step. And keep moving.

Thank you.

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In honor of our nation’s anniversary, I want to call you attention to something positive — how the media, even in the corporate context, can at times actually help advance the ball in holding the power structure accountable.

I direct your attention to a 60 Minutes segment on Chevron’s environmental destruction in Ecuador’s Amazon. The segment aired on the network in 2009 at the height of our legal battle with the company that years later led to my 993-day detention.

Please watch this and let me know what you think. It includes an interview with me and a Chevron lawyer, Sylvia Garrigo.

The segment was reported by Scott Pelley and produced by Draggan Mihailovich. Both recently were fired in the right-wing putsch led by billionaire Larry Ellison and his new editor, Bari Weiss. In a staff meeting, Pelley had accused Weiss of “murdering” 60 Minutes by repeatedly interfering with editorial decisions to ensure they have a pro-Trump slant.

This segment is an example of the kind of robust and balanced reporting that Weiss and her allies in the Trump universe are trying to kill by taking control of CBS and possibly CNN and HBO, if Ellison succeeds in purchasing Warner Brothers Discovery.

I had ample contact with both Pelley and Mihailovich in the lead-up to the 2009 story on Chevron. I found both to be objective and professional, despite massive and inappropriate pressure applied by Chevron to the network to kill the story.

I heard at the time from a source inside CBS that Chevron’s top brass was so nervous that they contacted the then-CEO of the network, Les Moonves, to try to get him to spike the Ecuador story from the executive suite. Unlike Ellison and Weiss, Moonves actually respected the independence of the show and refused the request.

In a state of apparent desperation, Chevron’s team then hired former CNN reporter Gene Randall to produce a pro-Chevron segment on the same topic, which the company posted online a few days before the 60 Minutes segment aired. It received almost no attention and actually backfired against the company.

In the meantime, 7 million people watched the initial airing of the 60 Minutes segment posted here. The segment also won several awards.

After the segment aired, the company’s Board of Directors was furious that company management had let the Ecuador legal case get so out of control that it would be covered on a national broadcast. That’s when Chevron shifted gears and ordered its legal team to attack me personally, ultimately locking me up in 2019 in the nation’s first corporate prosecution. In the meantime, Chevron has not spent the first dollar to remediate its pollution disaster in Ecuador, despite multiple court orders that it do so.

Please share this 60 Minutes segment with others as a testament to the truth about what Chevron did in Ecuador, and as a testament the type of reporting that today is sorely missing from most major news networks.

—Steven

For New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, it’s long past time to raise hell to force the closing of the brutal ICE detention facility Delaney Hall in Newark. Credible reports suggest Delaney — owned by a private prison company — is functioning more as a torture chamber than a regular jail. The infliction of gratuitous cruelty appears to be official policy.

I spoke today at a rally in New Jersey where dozens of community leaders demanded Delaney Hall be shut down once and for all and that New Jersey state police cease coordinating with ICE to attack peaceful protesters outside the facility. About 600 or so detainees inside have been on a hunger strike for 11 days to protest the horrid conditions. Reports indicate the food is rancid and infested with bugs. One full-time doctor serves the medical needs of all 900 detainees. The neglect puts hundreds of lives at risk.

Delaney Hall is a massive human rights violation. It could even be a basis for action by the International Criminal Court against US officials.

In a disturbing example of backwards-facing leadership, Governor Sherrill has allowed New Jersey state police to attack peaceful protesters outside the facility with tear gas and batons. That’s disgraceful. It’s also personal for me. The private company that owns the facility, the GEO Group, donates massively to Trump and has a business model that explits human rights abuses for profit. GEO Group employees under contract with the federal prison system subjected me to harassing “check in” phone calls day and night after Chevron orchestrated my 993-day house arrest for winning the landmark $10 billion pollution case in Ecuador. There were nights I couldn’t sleep more than two hours straight because of this company’s harassment.

New Jersey’s Attorney General, Jennifer Davenport, must open a criminal investigation of the GEO Group. Why the wait? The company clearly is violating the state’s criminal laws. The evidence from testimonies of those inside is overwhelming and proof enough. Videos of attacks by ICE on peaceful protestors are also potential evidence of criminality. Police should arrest the for-profit brutes from ICE and the GEO Group running the place, not the courageous protesters trying to hold them accountable for their abuses.

Thanks to Ben Dziobek and Climate Revolution New Jersey for their incredible work in organizing the protests and today’s action. More soon.

—Steven

(Chevron might have taken my law license, but I still spend time confronting the predators who are destroying our planet. This platform is one way I can generate income after Chevron wiped out my bank accounts in retaliation for winning the landmark $10 billion pollution case in Ecuador. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. — Steven)

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You know the Supreme Court of the United States is bad. It’s actually worse than you think — even much worse.

I’m going to try to explain from the perspective of a longtime human rights advocate how the US Supreme Court is putting a blowtorch to American democracy. Yes — the court that is supposed to be the last line of defense to protect our democracy is now actively undermining it with a super-majority of six right-wing extremists that is consistently and systematically hostile to the very concept of majority rule.

I highlight five Supreme Court rulings dating back to 2010 to help illustrate this point. There are of course many more more problematic rulings from the court, particularly in recent years. I have chosen these five because I believe they are representative of how the law in the United States is being weaponized to target our democracy.

All of the five decisions issued under the tenure of Chief Justice John Roberts (who came on the Court in 2005), an ardent corporatist. These rulings are not a series of bad one-offs; they are part of an overall strategic plan that has existed in right-wing networks for decades to try to achieve a multi-generational dominance of American society by the billionaires, oligarchs, and large corporations. This plan — documented brilliantly by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse in the book The Scheme — is for the wealthy (including billionaires like Musk and Bezos and powerful corporations like Chevron and Merck) to achieve societal dominance by exercising power via the lever of the Supreme Court, part of the only branch of government not elected by the people.

This plan for right-wing dominance is in my view simply incompatible with democracy. It cannot coexist with rule by the majority because that would threaten the growing power of the elites. Most importantly, it could not happen unless the six right-wing justices of the Supreme Court were willing partners open to using the “law” to systematically undermine the key infrastructure that makes democracy possible.

Think about how clever this is.

If a tiny elite wanted to create a society where those with the greatest economic power control key decisions, all one has to do is to gain control of the one political body where power is the most concentrated and all-encompassing. That’s the Supreme Court. This is where a majority of only five people can determine to an almost unbelievable degree how the rest of us 370 million people in this country are allowed to live — including whether people of color can enjoy the right to vote, whether women can control their own bodies, and whether the President of our country is allowed to commit crimes with impunity.

Below are the five key cases the US Supreme Court used to put a blowtorch to liberal American democracy. There’s many more cases and rulings contributing to the demise of our liberal democratic system of governance, but I consider these to be the bellwether cases. I am going to try to describe them in a way where everyone can understand their meaning, independent of the technical esoterica the Court often employs to obfuscate its very obvious political agenda.

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(Chevron might have taken my law license, but I still spend time confronting the predators who are destroying our planet. This platform is one way I can generate income after Chevron wiped out my bank accounts in retaliation for winning the landmark $10 billion pollution case in Ecuador. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. — Steven)

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Big news on the music front. There’s a new masterpiece about to hit the market.

Rock icon Roger Waters and the incredibly talented Palestinian singer-songwriter Mona Miari have joined forces to re-imagine the Pink Floyd classic “Comfortably Numb” as an anthem to Palestinian rights with new lyrics in English and Arabic. After watching the live debut the other night with both of these artists at an extraordinary event in New York City, I believe this new version of a song originally released 47 years ago will touch hundreds of millions around the globe.

These two artists clearly have created a powerhouse musical partnership. Both have a long history of using their art to shine light on injustice. I love that they are working together, and I was honored to serve as host of the event in Manhattan where the song and a film about it were shown for the first time in public. (The online release of the song is scheduled for May 10.)

Many of you know that Roger and I have known each other for years and that’s he’s steadfastly supported the landmark pollution case brought by Amazon communities against Chevron that resulted in a record-breaking $10 billion court judgement. Roger’s music is globally known, but I’ve been privileged to have seen his human rights activism in real time. In 2018 Roger came with me to Ecuador to meet Indigenous leaders and farmers who were the victims of Chevron’s mass toxic dumping. Residents of these communities have been my clients and collaborators for over three decades. The way Roger hung out with the locals — listening attentively to their every word — is something I’ll never forget.

Roger of course has human rights in his very bones which helps explain why he catches a lot of hostility from the pro-Israeli lobby. He’s courageous and clear about calling out human rights violations wherever they occur — including in Israel and the United States. I can relate: Chevron has attacked me for years for calling out their human rights violations in the Amazon. They even had me detained for 993 days on a baseless contempt of court charge after I refused to turn over my confidential case file. I’ve learned that being attacked like this is the surest sign of you’re being effective. It actually can be an empowering experience.

At the event, I moderated a panel about the re-imagined song that included renowned Palestinian leaders such as the novelist Susan Abulhawa, the journalist and poet Mohammed El-Kurd, and the award-winning Brooklyn-born poet Aja Monet. Mona is also the founder and director of the first Arab choir in New York, a 50-person group that appears in the brilliant film of the song that was premiered at the event

It bears mention that the dispossession of the Palestinian homeland began well over 100 years ago and is still happening now with the ongoing genocide and war crimes committed by the Netanyahu government with the support of US tax dollars. I want to state this clearly: I believe Palestinians for decades have been leading one of the greatest, strongest, and most profoundly inspiring resistance movements in world history. The legitimate Palestinian aspirations for self-determination give this Jew more security and safety because justice for all peoples is bound up together.

Roger and Mona have made a huge contribution. Look for the re-imagined song on May 10 and share it as widely as possible.

-Steven

The corporate media won’t say it out loud yet, but it is becoming clear that the United States is losing the war in Iran. It’s gotten so bad that I predict Trump will try to cut his losses and pull out within days.

This could be one of the biggest military and political setbacks for the United States since the Vietnam War. Trump and Hegseth and Rubio will still try to claim victory, but there is no reason to believe the bombast they will be peddling.

The meta view is pretty simple. Regime change and “unconditional surrender” in Iran — Trump’s stated goals — clearly are not going to happen. The leaders of Iran are as united as ever. The country’s government has succeeded (at least temporarily) in walloping the US economy and global commerce by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Gas prices in the US and around the world are soaring — as is the price of medicine, food, airline tickets, electricity, and more. Trump’s political prospects are sinking alongside the rise in prices. Our allies are furious. US prestige globally stands more wrecked than ever. This is being reported all over, including by the right-wing Wall Street Journal.

Let’s face it: the US empire is weakening because it is structurally overstretched and in a state of decline. It has produced massive wealth but spread it around to too few people. The masses are angry. The decline in empire is exacerbated by Trump’s wild incompetence. The US government and the world’s most powerful military are under the control of a true lunatic. That’s bad for business. Launching a war of choice against Iran is bad for business.

More to the point, Iran’s military capability has shocked the United States. The country has used cheap drones to outmaneuver our most sophisticated missile defense systems, thus far killing or wounding roughly 150 US soldiers. We are simply unable to engage in the simple task of protecting our military and diplomatic assets in the region from a country that already suffered a severe degradation of its military in a 12-day war a few months ago. Our embassies in the region, including the one in Saudi Arabia, are closing. US soldiers are being hidden away in hotels to minimize the risk of attack. The claims of Chairman Dan Cain and Secretary Hegseth that we are “winning” ring hollow. They are similar to the eerily optimistic claims of the generals running the war in Vietnam before it got so bad that defeat had to be admitted.

I get that I have no special access to information other than what I read from a wide variety of sources in the public domain. But one can easily come to this conclusion by connecting the dots from some basic on-the-ground reporting from the region — much of it from mainstream (and even conservative) outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Axios, and The New York Times.

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Consider the following five key points:

(1) Iran’s leadership is as united as ever. After one of the most intense short-term aerial bombardments in world history, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported this week that the Iranian leadership is holding strong. There are no defections from the military and virtually no street protests except those against the United States and Israel. The majority of the country has pulled behind its new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. (To be clear, I am not defending this regime. There are obviously massive human rights problems being committed by the governments of Iran, Israel and the United States.) For Iran’s political elite to survive in unified fashion is an extraordinary accomplishment from a regime supposedly on the ropes. It’s also a significant geopolitical setback for the United States.

(2) Iran’s military capability is far greater than anticipated. Iran prepared for this moment by playing possum and holding back much of its firepower during the 12-day Israel-US bombardment of the country last year. Iran’s government quietly manufactured thousands of cheap but sophisticated drones in makeshift factories that are outmaneuvering billion-dollar missile defense systems produced by Lockheed and Raytheon. There is no way the US and Israel can destroy this capability through the air. Since the war began on February 28, Iran has struck at least ten countries in the region. It has struck both US and Israeli military bases and the capital cities of almost every Persian Gulf nation. It is targeting radar systems that the WSJ says serve as “the eyes of the air defenses in the Middle East.” The ability of the US and its allies to track incoming missiles has been severely degraded. US stockpiles of key missiles and interceptors are severely depleted. Our military is far more vulnerable now than before February 28.

(3) Iran effectively jacked up global oil prices. Through some clever maneuvering, Iran is inflicting massive harm on the economy of the United States and the world. The country controls the choke point through which 20% of the world’s oil must pass to get to market. The Strait of Hormuz is now closed indefinitely. Oil tankers filled to the brim are idling with nowhere to go. Those who foolishly attempt the journey (including two tankers from Iraq) are being destroyed. Iraq and Oman closed their oil terminals today. Iran used this strategy to send prices for oil, gas, plastics and fertilizers soaring across the global economy. It also has sunk Trump’s political prospects even further as we approach election season in the United States. It was the naive Trump who granted Iran this power by being sucked into a war of choice by the truly messianic religious extremists now running Israel (more on that below). I am convinced from watching this that Trump’s personal flaws are actually worse than most people realize; aside from being an extreme narcissist (which is universally obvious), he’s also a dupe and really quite obtuse on policy.

(Interestingly, Israel and Iran have much in common even though they are now at war. They are both states with discriminatory laws targeting those who are not part of the dominant state-sanctioned religion.)

(4) We are in a world war involving at least 20 countries. In an excellent summary of how the conflict is going global, Axios reported this week that upwards of 20 different countries have involved their military forces in this war. France has dispatched a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to the region. British warships are in the region. Greece and Turkey have rushed forces to Cyprus. Australia is sending radar equipment to the United Arab Emirates. Russia is sharing key intelligence with Iran’s military. China is preparing to send Iran financial assistance. And the Persian Gulf states are reeling trying to defend themselves. Many have lowered or stopped oil production because there is no way to get oil to market. No matter what Trump does, there’s a chance Iran’s response will drive the price of oil to $200 per barrel.

(5)The human rights implications are catastrophic. While Trump puts the US in a geopolitical bind, huge numbers of innocents are dying in Iran but also in Israel and elsewhere. Close to 800,000 civilians have been displaced in Lebanon because of Israel’s vicious and unrelenting aerial attacks (using mostly US weaponry) in and around Beirut. It also appears the United States and Israel are deliberately bombing civilian targets in Iran, along the “Gaza model” that has led to the killing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians. The decision by Israel to bomb Iran’s oil depots is poisoning the air and over the coming years will lead to cancers, neurological damage and other preventable diseases affecting tens of thousands of people. Evidence suggests thousands are at risk of dying slow and quiet deaths from poisoning.

While the corporate media largely ignores the human rights dimension of the war, it was illegal for the US and Israel to bomb the country in the first place. It is indisputably a violation of international law for one country to invade another absent evidence of imminent attack (of which there is none) or authorization from the UN Security Council (of which there is none). I don’t know about you, but I still believe in international human rights law as expressed in the UN Charter (ratified by the United States as the supreme law of our land under our constitutional structure) and other legal instruments. We must never abandon human rights law in the face of the Trump-Netanyahu-Putin attempt to render it meaningless.

Against this disturbing backdrop, the US economy is in rapid decline. Inflation is up while job growth has ground to a halt. That’s in addition to the long-term problems created by rampant structural inequality, pervasive greed, and a tax system that largely redistributes wealth from the poor to the rich. Polls show the Iran war — which costs about $1 billion per day — is deeply unpopular as a military exercise. In the context of a deteriorating economy, it’s truly stunning in its stupidity.

Why might this be happening?

In my view, the answer rests on two main pillars. First, Trump is now using forever wars (which he derided when campaigning) to try to keep us distracted from the Epstein scandal and his own family’s fleecing of the country. In addition, Trump believes that by waging war he can increase his own personal power. This is the playbook of autocrats and fascists. Former General Mark Milley (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Trump’s first term) aptly said Trump is “fascist to his core” and I have no reason to doubt that characterization. Aspiring fascists want to generate emotion by manufacturing nationalist wars targeting “enemies” to mobilize the populace to get behind the leader. But that strategy is failing miserably for Trump in the Iraq version of the playbook.

The cable news outlets and most of the corporate media unfortunately are easy prey in the distraction part of the game, and are playing along by reorienting most of their coverage to the Iran conflict. Let’s remember the Iran war is in addition to the war Trump is waging on urban areas in the US through ICE, which in my opinion is largely an extra-judicial domestic terrorism force designed to intimidate black and brown people and expel them from the country. Trump is still the same television huckster from The Apprentice who now tries to create a spectacular story on a daily basis to keep people consumed with anything other than the truth about the pervasive harm he is creating. Given there is evidence in the Epstein files that there are credible allegations that Trump sexually abused a minor (see here), these distractions are necessary for the man to have a chance at political survival.

On the fleecing issue, the Trump family’s wealth has increased by an estimated $4 billion in the year since he returned to office. Much of that wealth was generated through a cryptocurrency scheme that screwed thousands of unsuspecting investors. The Nation magazine just concluded — read the stunning article —Trump might be the “biggest crook” in the history of democracy.

The real winner is…

The big winner from this fiasco is the man who might be the modern world’s worst human rights violator: Benjamin Netanyahu. The strategic goal of Netanyahu and the extremists running Israel is fundamentally expansionist. They want to control the whole of what used to be known as Palestine as a Jewish state. To do this, they need to expel millions of Palestinians from their homeland. It is all blatantly illegal and horrifying to think about, but weakening Iran’s military helps these men accomplish this nefarious goal. And Israel’s own forever wars allow Netanyahu to avoid prison for his own major corruption problems. (As with almost all wars, the other big winners are the military-industrial complex and the fossil fuel industry.)

Trump was played for a fool by Netanyahu. It comes at a staggering cost to humanity. Stay tuned.

-Steven

I recently sat down for a wide-ranging conversation with , a storyteller and climate advocate from Los Angeles who hosts a provocative podcast called Better Future. Michael and I discussed Chevron’s environmental crimes in Ecuador and the company’s rogue behavior around the world, how to deal with the worsening political environment in the United States, and the outrageous $660 million verdict against Greenpeace stemming from what I believe was a rigged trial in North Dakota orchestrated by the pipeline company Energy Transfer and its billionaire owner Kelcy Warren.

One of my bottom line conclusions: the Democratic Party has been so hollowed out by corporate power that we no longer have a viable opposition party on a national scale in the United States. And that’s a huge problem.

Conversations like these allow me to try to connect the dots between the climate crisis, unchecked corporate power, and the rise of authoritarianism here and abroad. And talented young journalists like Michael play a critical role in holding power accountable and in making a better world possible.

Please check it out.

(Chevron might have taken my law license, but I still do all I can to confront the predators who are destroying our planet and undermining our freedoms. This platform is one way I can generate income after Chevron wiped out my bank accounts in retaliation for winning the landmark $10 billion pollution case in Ecuador. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. — Steven)

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Let’s get real: ICE is not just a rogue police agency. It’s actually a domestic terrorist organization designed to cow us into silence.

Let’s review the last few weeks. Trump sent hundreds of ICE agents to invade the US city of Minneapolis (population 3.7 million) to arrest immigrants. Most are Somalis who fled violence and persecution in their homeland and are living in the US legally. During a tactical operation on January 7, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed an unarmed citizen named Renee Good by putting three bullets in her head. In my view, this was murder under any reasonable legal definition. Rather than investigate Ross and hold him accountable, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to investigate her widow for any “ties” to activist groups. It is standard procedure for the civil rights division of the DOJ to investigate police killings that appear to deprive people of their civil rights or are motivated by hate, as this killing apparently was; Trump and his team instead ordered the civil rights division of the DOJ to stand down and not investigate. He also refused to do a joint investigation with Minnesota’s state law enforcement agency, which is standard operating procedure.

Think about it: a federal cop just killed an unarmed civilian in cold blood, called her a “fucking bitch” as he shot her, and there’s not even an investigation from the Department of Justice.

To the contrary, Trump is using the cold-blooding killing of Good by one of his own agents to double down and launch an all-out military occupation of Minneapolis by masked ICE agents recruited from far-right extremist groups like the Proud Boys. These men and women, almost all of them white, are the modern-day version of the old slave patrols. They essentially hunt down people of color to try to have them removed from the country. ICE is amassing more power as I wrote this. It has doubled in size (now 22,000 officers) just in the last year; that’s more people than every urban police force in the country other than New York City. At the urging of Trump, Congress over the summer allocated $150 billion to super-charge ICE and border “protection” more broadly. That includes $45 billion for new ICE detention centers, mostly built and operated by for-profit prison companies that will allow for the incarceration of and additional tens of thousands of people beyond the 60,000 already held by the agency. (For details on the ICE expansion, see this article from Bloomberg.)

The sort of invasion taking place in Minneapolis already has happened in Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, Portland, and other cities whose multi-ethnic and multi-racial character is a direct challenge to Trump’s conception of America as a white Christian nation.

Many of the ICE agents carrying out the Trump agenda are openly abducting people of color (many of them citizens) from their cars and homes. The purpose is to freak out, intimidate, and terrorize the local population to submit to Trump as our strongman leader. It’s also to divide the working class based on race and ethnicity while we get fleeced by the oligarchs. Terrorism is the wanton infliction of violence to produce fear across the population to achieve political ends. This particular iteration is in service of Trump’s brand of fascism. And it’s happening not just in Minneapolis, but all over the country in Democrat-led cities.

What can we do about this? It is clear that the Democratic party leadership has gone AWOL; Schumer and Jeffries have so hollowed out the Democratic Party that we no longer have a real opposition force in this country capable of mobilizing popular resistance. These leaders won’t even call out ICE for what it is; they criticize it around the edges.

So any solution has to come from the people and the elected leadership in the cities that are bearing the brunt of this illegitimate and anti-Democratic agency. Here’s my proposal: we must hit the streets to force ICE out of our cities and demand that it be abolished. This must be a central part of any political platform for the next national election. A massive rally scheduled for January 23 in Minneapolis combined with constant 24-hour monitoring of ICE operations are examples of how to do this work effectively.

In the meantime, state prosecutors in Minnesota should charge ICE agent Ross with murder for killing Renee Good. More broadly, local police must start protecting us by arresting ICE agents who violate our rights through assaults, shootings and false arrests. In New York City where I live, our new Mayor must try to create a model for the nation along these lines. For more on how ICE agents can legally be charged criminally by local prosecutors, read this recent article by my colleague Marjorie Cohn.

Let’s be clear about the purpose of ICE. It’s not about protecting public safety. It’s about threatening public safety in service of Trump’s power grab. Once we understand that, we can proceed more effectively. 👊👊

-Steven

(Chevron might have taken my law license, but I still do all I can to confront the predators who are destroying our planet and undermining our freedoms. This platform is one way I can generate income after Chevron wiped out my bank accounts in retaliation for winning the landmark $10 billion pollution case in Ecuador. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. — Steven)

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In this festive season, I want to focus again on one of the major predators destroying our planet: Chevron. Is there an oil company in the world that engages in more outright criminality across more countries than this one?

Of course, I have a special distaste for Chevron. Many of you know that I’ve been battling the company as a lawyer for more than three decades. Most of that time I was on the legal team that in 2013 won the landmark $10 billion pollution case against Chevron in Ecuador — a damages award the company refuses to pay in open violation of various court orders. For many years, I’ve also been defending myself against a vicious company retaliation campaign targeting me and my family. This ultimately led to me spending almost three years in home detention and prison (from 2019 to 2022) on a baseless contempt of court case in New York. The contempt case had been flatly rejected by the federal prosecutor’s office, but a judge authorized Chevron to step in to the shoes of the government to prosecute me anyway. I remain the only person in US history ever to be subject to a private criminal prosecution by a corporation. The case also cost me my law license, which was taken without a hearing in a brazen violation of due process. (I recently began a process to get it reinstated which you can read about here.)

(Yes, most observers believe the private prosecution of me was illegal. It’s been condemned by five US federal judges as unconstitutional — here is the decision by two Supreme Court justices to that effect. Five respected international jurists from the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention of the United Nations separately determined my detention violated international law — read that decision here. Through various Chevron-orchestrated machinations too tricked-up to write about in detail here, the prosecution and detention happened anyway.)

Here’s the latest Chevron Amazon outrage: after spending more than a half-century decimating Indigenous and farmer communities in Ecuador by dumping billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste into the rainforest, Chevron just sent Ecuador’s government a bill for $220 million to cover its legal fees defending our $10 billion pollution case. The decision in our case required the company to finance the remediation of its toxic cesspool covering an area roughly the size of the state of Rhode Island; the company still has refused to pay the damages award to the communities. (For details of Chevron’s latest maneuver to suck $220 million out of Ecuador, see this report from Inside Climate News.)

The recent Chevron invoice was the product of a secret and (in the opinion of many experts) illegitimate private investor-state arbitration process that is attempting to end-run Ecuador’s court system and nullify the pollution judgement that our team of lawyers won after years of arduous litigation. To be clear, the environmental case against Chevron has been affirmed unanimously by Ecuador’s highest court in the very country where Chevron insisted the trial be held and where it had accepted jurisdiction. It’s also been affirmed unanimously by Canada’s Supreme Court for enforcement purposes.

For those unfamiliar with the process, investor-state arbitration is a private dispute resolution process created by corporations to try to “protect” their foreign investments by creating an end-run around the national court systems of sovereign nations. It allows corporations (the investor) to sue a host country government in a private process when they feel their investment has been negatively affected by some public court or legislative decision. The process is held in secret where local citizens cannot have access. The process is not part of any public court system. Technically, nothing that happens through this process can overrule or upend a public court decision; it is more of an intimidation play to wield by corporations to try to get foreign countries to abide by their wishes and to screw over locals who on rare occasions muster the resources to win a case or two in their own court systems (like the communities did against Chevron). The provision for this dispute resolution process was included in the US-Ecuador bilateral investment treaty, which was signed in 1997.

The Ecuador case is a vivid example of the utter bankruptcy of this process. (I and my colleagues Laura Garr and Aaron Page explain the details in a 2010 article from a law journal published here.) To be clear, the private corporation dispute resolution mechanism is not a judicial process. In my opinion, it’s a racket to protect corporations from liability when they harm people, as Chevron did on a massive scale in Ecuador. Worse, the process is designed to be dressed up in the esoterica of legal vernacular to make it look legitimate even though it is fundamentally anti-democratic. It was this process led recently led Ecuador’s current President, the Trump-aligned billionaire Daniel Noboa, to “agree” to send Chevron the $220 million even though Chevron actually owed the people of Ecuador at least fifty times as much for the environmental damage it caused.

This is Chevron’s new outrage in the Amazon. Rather than pay the court-ordered damages, Chevron and its shameless CEO Michael Wirth are now asking their victims in Ecuador to bail them out.

More broadly, Chevron has a big and growing global human rights problem. Aside from Ecuador, the company is a major partner with the Netanyahu government. Chevron generates massive revenue from gas fields it owns off the coast of Gaza (that should be the property of the Palestinian people) that help Israel finance its war crimes. Chevron’s reckless operational behavior and its policies of aggressive tax avoidance and attacks on advocates literally take place in dozens of countries, including Australia, Canada, and the United States. The academic Nan Greer documented the alarming degree of Chevron’s global misconduct in her 2021 report, Chevron’s Global Destruction: Ecocide, Genocide, and Corruption. (Read the report here.)

There are two more notable facts to this story. First, Chevron’s latest plan could well backfire. Lawyers for the Amazon communities — that is, my colleagues in Ecuador who unlike me still have their law licenses — just asked an Ecuador court to embargo the $220 million and divert it to pay for the clean-up of the contamination that Chevron caused. If the $220 million in Ecuador becomes a Chevron asset, then that asset under law must be used to satisfy the company’s legal debt to the Amazon communities. Chevron had stripped its assets from the country in anticipation of our judgment. Well, they now might have an asset that the communities can seize. I also found out that Chevron is so shameless it tried to pressure Ecuador’s government to reimburse it for the tens of millions of dollars of legal fees the company spent to sue me personally in New York and have me locked up. Turns out that part of Chevron’s claim was rejected by the corporate arbitrators.

Happy holidays. Very grateful to each of you for the support. I’ll report back soon on how this story evolves.

— Steven

(Chevron might have taken my law license, but I still use my voice to battle injustice. This platform is one of the ways I generate income since Chevron wiped out my bank accounts after our victory in the landmark pollution case in Ecuador. Please consider a paid subscription. — Steven)

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Want to hear an interesting story? I don’t talk about this too much, but I want to share some intimate details of how I became a corporate political prisoner.

This week marks four years since Chevron forced me into prison in the United States in retaliation for helping Amazon communities win a landmark $10 billion pollution case in Ecuador. That was a particularly challenging time for me, my family, and the Ecuadorian communities who continue to suffer because of Chevron’s deliberate dumping of billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste into the Amazon ecosystem. I want to share some brief reflections on what happened and what it might mean.

I know we face major challenges in the world — the struggle against the Trump regime and the battle for Palestinian self-determination are top of mind — but I don’t want to forget what we went through as Chevron with the help of two federal judges slowly and methodically over several years turned me into a corporate political prisoner. They did this through many techniques, large and small, usually applied incrementally so it would not be too obvious. The techniques were largely obfuscated by the technical esoterica of the law so even sophisticated observers would have a hard time noticing what was happening. It’s the art of the legalized persecution. What most would call Kafkaesque. The more I and my clients resisted, the more they upped the ante and came at us from fresh angles. The goal was to grind us down so we would give up. But we would not. In fact, each blow they landed only seemed to make me and the community leaders in Ecuador more determined.

Our refusal to give up infuriated Chevron. The company had hired 60 law firms and used 2,000 lawyers on the case, and it was not working.

It finally got to the point when the judges authorized private Chevron lawyers to prosecute me criminally in the name of the government on a petty criminal contempt charge. The charge was filed by a judge after I appealed his clearly unprecedented and likely illegal order that I turn over my computer and confidential case file to Chevron. I believe the charge was baseless — more on that below. Most notable is that the federal prosecutor in Manhattan at the time (Goeffrey Berman), who had been appointed by Trump in his first term, analyzed the charge and refused to bring the case. Because judges are not allowed to prosecute criminal cases — that is the exclusive domain of the executive branch prosecutors — the decision not to prosecute should have been the end of it. But that was not Chevron’s plan. It was clear that they (Chevron and the complicit judges) wanted me neutralized and concluded that orchestrating my detention through a baseless criminal case designed to look real was one of the few options left.

Let me repeat: I was prosecuted criminally by a fossil fuel company in the name of the US government. That’s why I consider myself a corporate political prisoner. To be clear, this appears to be the only private corporate criminal prosecution in US history. (For more detail, see this article and this interview I did with Jacobin Magazine.) As a result of this private prosecution, to this day I am not fully free. I still have no law license — it was taken under pressure from Chevron without a hearing after the bar committee declared me an “immediate threat” to the public order. I still must deal with all sorts of restrictions that limit my work and life options. Those details I’ll reserve for another article.

So what does this private corporate prosecution mean?

In many ways, what happened to me was a precursor to the increased level of political persecution we are now seeing today in this country and around the world. But the technique as applied to me had a peculiar characteristic: the attacks were carried out not by the Department of Justice, but by a private corporation with the complicity of judges who in my view had deeply pro-corporate agendas. (This obviously is my opinion. The judges in question who facilitated the attacks — Lewis A. Kaplan and Loretta Preska — have written extensively and critically about me in opinions that are available online. I’ll note that six appellate courts, including the Supreme Courts of Ecuador and Canada, have issued unanimous opinions upholding the validity of the Ecuador judgment against Chevron.)

One interesting aspect of my experience was that the judicial attacks transcended the political flavor of the moment. My transformation from human rights lawyer to corporate political prisoner began to take root during the Obama Administration. It picked up steam during Trump’s first term, and did not slow during the Biden Administration. In fact, even after I garnered the support of a diverse group of 34 Congresspersons (see the letter), President Biden earlier this year capitulated to Chevron’s pressure and refused to grant me a pardon. That’s after he knew that my contempt conviction and detention had been ruled unconstitutional or illegal by five federal judges and five respected international jurists from the United Nations. (See the UN decision. ) Biden in my view was too weak and indecisive to issue the pardon to an innocent man who spent years trying to right Chevron’s wrongs. It stung even further when hours after Biden’s term ended, Trump pardoned roughly 1,500 people who had stormed the Capitol and tried to overthrow the US government.

I’m posting several photos below that capture some of what we went through as I was criminalized and shoved into a federal prison in October 2021. The one photo at the top of this article is of me with my kind and resilient son, Matthew. It was taken outside of the federal courthouse in Manhattan just minutes after Judge Preska sentenced me to the maximum possible prison term on October 1. I felt like I was on the knife’s edge leaving court that day. Not only was our son’s innocence stolen, I feared if they succeeded in getting me into prison I might not ever come home. What went down with Jeffrey Epstein weighed heavily on my mind. Epstein’s body was found in the Manhattan detention center next door to the courthouse three days after my home detention began in August 2019.

The background to the criminal case is also deeply disturbing.

With the financial risk facing Chevron increasing, Judge Kaplan in 2019 charged me with civil contempt of court for refusing his order that I turn over my computer and confidential case file to the Chevron attorneys. In my view and in the view of many experts, that order was designed to put me in an impossible position: it required me either to violate my ethical duty of confidentiality to my clients (which would have blown up the underlying case), or to violate a court order. So I appealed the court order. While my appeal of Judge Kaplan’s order was pending, Kaplan charged me with criminal contempt of court thereby exposing me to a lengthy prison sentence. He then bypassed court rules requiring random assignment of cases and personally assigned the criminal contempt case to Judge Preska, an ideological ally and leader of the Federalist Society who promptly locked me up pre-trial at home with a GPS ankle bracelet. Due to Kaplan and Preska’s obstinance and their own determination, this pre-trial lock-up without being convicted of a crime lasted over two years on a contempt charge with a maximum sentence of six months in prison.

By the time I got to trial I already has spent more than four times my maximum possible sentence detained at home.

The subsequent trial, which took place in May 2021, was in my opinion pure farce. I explained some of this in an interview I did during my home detention with Amy Goodman from Democracy Now. Preska refused to seat a jury, and she made evidentiary rulings that so hollowed out my defenses that there was no point in even trying to testify. The silver lining is that my excellent lawyers, Ron Kuby and Marty Garbus, exposed what was happening by the arguments they made in court. Preska started to look bad. The reporting suggested serious flaws in the process. Preska even was caught reading a newspaper during witness testimony. Nothing about it seemed fair. An independent commission of trial monitors led by war crimes prosecutor and former U.S. Ambassador Stephen Rapp observed the proceedings and concluded they fell far below minimal standards of due process, and violated various provisions of domestic and international law. (That independent trial monitoring report is here.)

In other words, I was denied a fair trial.

I remember the day of my sentencing vividly. Matthew and my wife Laura Miller were seated in the court gallery just behind me along with friends and supporters. I went to court knowing I might be marched from the courtroom directly into prison after sentencing. Even if I was guilty (and I maintain my innocence), there was no legal justification at that point to make me spend even one more minute incarcerated. I already had served my sentence many times over. Yet Preska, a known Trump supporter whose COVID mask featured an American flag, had other plans. She imposed on me the maximum possible sentence of six months in prison even though I already had served more than four times that amount detained at home.

In front of my family and numerous friends and supporters, Preska spoke to me in a way designed to inflict maximum humiliation. She said I needed to be “hit on the forehead by a 2 by 4” to force me to respect the rule of law. This was ironic given that in the opinion of many jurists, including those from the United Nations, Preska had run roughshod over the law for years. The international jurists from the UN also had ordered the U.S. government to release me and pay me compensation for illegally depriving me of my liberty. (That decision has been ignored by both the Biden and Trump administrations). The UN jurists found an “appalling” level of judicial bias by Judges Kaplan and Preska. This experience was one of the more notable corporate human rights violations in our history — one that in hindsight was a precursor to so much of what we are seeing today.

I want to thank Laura and Matthew for the strength and perseverance. Because of the solidarity of each and every one of you, we grew bigger and stronger. The struggle for justice in Ecuador and for my complete freedom continues in full force. Please look at the pictures below and share this post if you feel inclined. Most of all, thank you for supporting the affected communities of Ecuador and their advocates.

—Steven

(Chevron might have taken my law license, but I still use my voice to battle injustice. This platform is one of the ways I generate income since Chevron wiped out my bank accounts after our victory in the landmark pollution case in Ecuador. Please consider a paid subscription. —Steven)

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Almost every leading genocide scholar in the world, including some in Israel, have concluded the country’s mass killing and forced starvation policy in Gaza constitute genocide. With a ceasefire in place, the chances Israel will now face trial on genocide charges in the International Court of Justice are rising. The extent of Israel’s killing of Palestinians in Gaza surely will be used as evidence to prove the genocide case.

It is also time to revisit the issue of the death toll in Gaza and what it means.

But first I want to state something important: once again, despite being the victim of massive war crimes and genocide funded by the most powerful military in the world, the Palestinian people have survived. The Palestinian people have outlasted what surely is the most intense, cruel, sustained, and hateful bombardment of a civilian population in history. Israel is more isolated than ever.

I salute the incredible resilience and courage of the Palestinian people.

As for the death toll, most informed observers know that the actual body count in Gaza due to Israel’s attacks is far worse than the large media outlets are reporting or the number being reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health (currently 67,000 deaths). What I am outlining in this article likely will never be published by The New York Times, BBC, CNN or any other outlets dependent on corporate advertising.

To put it bluntly, we have calculated based on a valid statistical model that close to one out of every four people who lived in Gaza prior to the beginning of the latest phase of the conflict (October 7, 2023) is now dead. This is either because of either direct Israeli military strikes, or because of indirect deaths caused by starvation, disease, or lack of medical care.

Last February, my colleague Coll McCail — an astute university student in Glasgow who has helped me as a researcher — worked out a basic mathematical calculation on a piece of paper. The result of this calculation back then was chilling; now it is much worse.

Here is the latest data, updated as of October 10.

Based on a statistical model developed by the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, Israel has killed roughly 494,100 people in Gaza since the country’s military started to attack the territory on 8 October 2023. That’s 23.5% of Gaza’s entire pre-conflict population dead, our roughly one of out every four people. Hundreds are still dying every day — even after the ceasefire, as Israel has continued its military strikes with six people dying yesterday.

Over half of the dead are women and children. In a few days, the death toll ignomoniously will surpass 500,000.

The real number likely is higher. Because of indirect deaths caused by disease and lack of food and water, the death toll is likely to rise for months even with the implementation of a ceasefire and the cessation of military strikes. And The Lancet’s calculation is conservative. In wartime conditions like those found in Gaza, research shows there are anywhere from 3 to 15 indirect deaths for every death from a military strike. The Lancet used the low end of that scale (4) to calculate indirect deaths its model.

If the same level of killing and indirect death happened in the United States proportional to population, roughly 79 million Americans would have been killed. That’s the equivalent of every person in the entire states of California and Texas, the two most populous states in the country.

In February of this year, I wrote that roughly 306,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israel directly or indirectly – the latter a result of starvation, disease and lack of access to health care – since 7 October 2023. (The UN recently declared Gaza the “hungriest place on Earth” and its mission to deliver aid into Gaza as “one of the most obstructed” in recent history.) By July of this year, that number had risen to 434,000.

My colleague Coll extrapolated from the model created by The Lancet on a piece of paper, which we have inserted below. The data he used is freely available in the public domain. It is a clear dereliction of journalistic duty that most western media outlets have not compiled such estimates.

The failure of these institutions to report accurately on the extent of the destruction enables the continuation of Israel’s blatant violations of international law. It also shields the American people from knowing the full extent of the Netanyahu regime’s brutality.

Here’s how one arrives at the rough estimate of 500,000 people dead in Gaza:

• First, The Lancet conservatively estimated in a peer-reviewed analysis that as of 19 June 2024 roughly 186,000 Gazans had died from “direct” and “indirect” deaths since 8 October 2023. (That article and the explanation of the statistical model is here.) To be clear, “direct” deaths under the model are caused by the Israeli military; “indirect” deaths are caused by a lack of access to food, water, and medical care and by disease.

• The Lancet found that on average, 732 people died every day from “direct” and “indirect” causes since Israel started attacking Gaza.

• There were 469 days between 8 October 2023 and 18 January 2025 when a temporary ceasefire was implemented and there was relative quiet in the territory. There were 206 days between the collapse of the ceasefire – on 18 March – and 10 October 2025, when the latest ceasefire was implemented. This amounts to 675 total days of killing. (Note we are not counting for the days of the first ceasefire even though many people continued to die from indirect causes and ceasefire violations.)

• Based on The Lancet’s data, if 732 people died every day for the 675 days of conflict, then the true Gaza death toll is now more than 494,100. It will pass 500,000 on October 19th, or in four days. The calculation is laid out by Coll below:

According to the World Health Organization, Gaza’s October 2023 population (prior to the conflict) was 2.1 million. This means that Israel has killed approximately 23.5% of the enclave’s population over the last two years, by our calculations.

Now, a few caveats.

Obviously, this number is a rough estimate. But it does something important: it uses a valid statistical model to try to calculate the rough extent of the carnage in Gaza in a way that official statistics from the territory’s Health Ministry are not capturing. While the number it produces demonstrates the barbarity of Israel’s crime, it also might be an underestimate given that the severe deprivation that produces “indirect” deaths has worsened considerably since the original analysis in The Lancet.

On the other hand, it also could be an overestimate. The reality is that the reporting system for fatalities in Gaza has collapsed due to Israel’s destruction of hospitals, health care infrastructure, and morgues. There are no precise numbers. But we can and should make educated estimates. This is one attempt based on extrapolating from a model that I believe holds up well. I encourage experts to think about this and to try come up with more precise models.

The larger issue is what the scale of death means in terms of the human tragedy, and the extent of the legal impunity obtained thus far by Netanyahu and his extremist government. That matters greatly as a question of accountability, and will matter greatly in Israel’s genocide trial in the International Court of Justice.

It is also simply undeniable in my view that the scale of Israel’s level of killing in Gaza is now comparable to what Pol Pot did in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Pol Pot’s regime killed roughly 1.5 million to 2 million people, or about 25% of the country’s population. (Pol Pot also was credibly accused of genocide. He died before he could be brought to justice.)

The refusal of corporate media outlets in the US and elsewhere to report on how Israel has transformed the entirety of Gaza into a mass killing field is a moral and institutional failure. It also allows the architects and perpetrators of this industrial-scale violence — including Netanyahu and some of his ministers — a short-term escape hatch from full accountability. We must work to ensure that escape hatch is sealed shut.

Remember: just because the military attacks from Israel stop does not mean deaths from the conflict cease. Unless Gaza nis immediately flooded with aid and medical supplies and the health care infrastructure is rebuilt, indirect deaths of Palestinians at the hands of Israel are likely to continue for months if not years.

— Steven

I generally don't like to jump in to electoral politics or endorse candidates. But sometimes the circumstances require it.

Meet Saikat Chakrabarti. I believe Saikat one of the most talented young political leaders in the country at a time the Democratic Party in the United States is flailing with its lowest approval rating ever. I just interviewed him for the second installment of the "Donziger On Justice" podcast. This young man is the opposite of Schumer and Jeffries and Pelosi. If we want to rise up again, it has to be because more people like Saikat emerge as leaders.

I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. I hope you do too.

Chakrabarti is particularly relevant because he is going after former Speaker Pelosi’s seat in the Congress in the 2026 midterms. I believe he can win. Pelosi has held the seat for almost 35 years. She’s 85; Saikat is 39. This is far more than a generational clash. Saikat is the former Chief of Staff to AOC and one of the guiding forces behind the Green New Deal and Mission for America, a detailed policy blueprint to reshape the economy and the country. There’s a chasm between Pelosi and Saikat in terms of their views on progressive politics, their openness to new ideas, their willingness to get in bed with corporations, their willingness to fight for human rights and against genocide, and their creativity in moving forward with an agenda that addresses economic inequality. This race also is shaping up to be a metaphor for a larger battle for control of the Democratic Party. (In my view, under Pelosi’s leadership the party got so hollowed out by corporate money it stopped fighting hard for working people. That paved the way for Trump to take power by posing fraudulently as a working class champion.)

More broadly, I am heartened and encouraged by the wave of progressive candidates across the country. There is a deeply visceral hunger for change. We’ve seen that here in New York City with Zohran Mamdani. Trump's push toward authoritarianism and beyond is actually an opportunity to define the fault lines with greater clarity and fight back with greater fervor.

To learn more about Chakrabarti or to help him, go to www.saikat.us.

(Chevron might have taken my law license, but I can still use my voice to battle injustice. This platform is one of the few ways I can generate income since Chevron wiped out my bank accounts in retaliation for our victory in the landmark pollution case in Ecuador. Please consider a paid subscription. If not, read on. —Steven)

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Most informed observers know that the actual death count in Gaza due to Israel’s attacks on the territory is far worse than the large media outlets are reporting. Last February, my colleague Coll McCail — an astute college student in Glasgow — worked out a basic mathematical calculation that the corporate media refuses to do. The result of this calculation back then was chilling; now it is much worse.

Here is the latest data, updated as of yesterday (July 21): based on a statistical model developed by a prestigious medical journal called The Lancet, Israel has killed roughly 434,800 people in Gaza since the country’s military started to attack the territory on 8 October 2023. That’s 20.7% of Gaza’s entire pre-conflict population dead. Over half are women and children.

If the same level of killing and indirect death that took place in Gaza during the 594 days of the conflict happened in the United States proportional to population, roughly 70 million Americans would have been killed.

I repeat: It is likely that the number of deaths in Gaza is the rough equivalent of 70 million Americans in proportion to current population. That’s the equivalent of every person in the 28 least populous states in the United States. Or roughly every person in the entire states of California and New York.

In February of this year, I wrote that roughly 306,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israel directly or indirectly – the latter a result of starvation, disease and lack of access to health care – since 7 October 2023. (The UN recently declared Gaza the “hungriest place on Earth” and its mission to deliver aid into Gaza as “one of the most obstructed” in recent history.)

My colleague Coll extrapolated from the model on a piece of scrap paper. The data he used is freely available in the public domain. It is a clear dereliction of journalistic duty that The New York Times and other US-based outlets have not bothered to compile such estimates. 

The failure of these institutions enables Israel’s blatant violations of international law. It also shields the American people from knowing the full extent of the Netanyahu regime’s brutality.

Here’s how one arrives at the rough estimate of 434,800 dead in Gaza: 

• First, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet conservatively estimated in a peer-reviewed analysis that as of 19 June 2024 roughly 186,000 Gazans had died from “direct” and “indirect” deaths since 8 October 2023. That article and an explanation of the statistical model used is here. To be clear, “direct” deaths under the model are caused by the Israeli military; “indirect” deaths are caused by a lack of access to food, water, and medical care (all largely denied by Israel to Gaza) and by disease.

• The Lancet found that on average, 732 people died every day from “direct” and “indirect” causes since Israel started attacking Gaza.

• There were 469 days between 8 October 2023 and 18 January 2025 when a temporary ceasefire was implemented and there was relative quiet in the territory. There were 125 days between the collapse of the ceasefire – on 18 March – and yesterday, 21 July 2025. This amounts to 594 total days of killing. 

• Based on The Lancet’s data, if 732 people died every day for the 594 days of conflict, then the true Gaza death toll is now more than 434,800. The calculation — which for various reasons might underestimate the actual death toll — is laid out below:

According to the World Health Organization, Gaza’s October 2023 population (prior to the conflict) was 2.1 million. This means that Israel has killed approximately 20.7% of the enclave’s population over the last 20-plus months, by our calculations. 

Now, a few caveats.

Obviously, this number is a rough estimate. But it does something important: it uses an intelligent statistical model to try to calculate the rough extent of the carnage in Gaza in a way that official statistics from the territory’s Health Ministry are not capturing. While the number it produces is horrifying, it also might be an underestimate given that the severe deprivation in the territory that produces “indirect” deaths has worsened considerably since the original analysis in The Lancet.

On the other hand, for various reasons it could be an overestimate. The reality is that the reporting system for fatalities in Gaza has collapsed due to Israel’s destruction of hospitals, health care infrastructure, and morgues. There are no precise numbers anymore. But that is not the end of the story. We absolutely can make educated estimates. This is one attempt based on extrapolating from a model that I believe holds up well.

The larger issue is we need to think about what the scale of death means in terms of the human tragedy, and the extent of the legal impunity obtained thus far by Netanyahu and his extremist government. That matters greatly as a question of accountability, and will matter greatly in Israel’s genocide trial in the International Court of Justice. It is also simply undeniable in my view that the scale of Israel’s level of killing in Gaza is now comparable to what Pol Pot did in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. (Pol Pot also was credibly accused of genocide. He died before he could be brought to justice.)

The refusal of corporate media outlets in the US and elsewhere to report on how Israel has transformed the entirety of Gaza into a mass killing field is a moral and institutional failure. It also allows the architects and perpetrators of this industrial-scale violence — including Netanyahu and his ministers — a short-term escape hatch from full accountability. We must work to ensure that escape hatch is sealed shut.

— Steven

I’m warning everyone on this July 4th holiday: The US Supreme Court isn’t trying to hide it anymore. It is now openly in the bag for Trump.

Chief Justice John Roberts is failing miserably in his duty to use the judiciary to protect the rule of law. The six ultra-conservatives on the nine-person court firmly control it as an institution, despite the valiant efforts of the three liberal-centrist justices (Kagan, Sotomayor, and Brown Jackson) to beat back Trump’s assault on the rule of law.

Please watch the video above for my take on what is rapidly becoming a crisis — and why a ruling one week ago in a case involving birthright citizenship portends serious problems for our liberal democracy and the rule of law. As always, thank you for the support.

Here is a short written summary:

A blockbuster Supreme Court decision last week stripped all 700 or so federal trial judges of their power to issue nationwide injunctions. This is disastrous because it eliminates the most critical legal tool to hold the Trump administration accountable on a national level for its abuses of power. It also signals the high court is now seriously considering limiting the right to birthright citizenship enshrined in the Constitution, meaning children of “immigrants” born here likely will be stateless and deported. This is a frontal attack on the very idea of a multi-ethnic society.

More deeply, the decision encourages Trump to violate constitutional rights simply by signing an executive order given that trial courts are now barred from stopping the orders on a nationwide basis. What this portends is frightening. I expect Trump to cook up all sorts of unconstitutional executive orders and then force his victims to chase him into all 94 district courts across the country to stop them on a case-by-case basis. The court has created a path that allows a bad man to turn a good country into a dystopian landscape. Stripping citizenship from “undesirables” or those who challenge Trump could be next.

This latest decision also is part of a deeply disturbing trend. In 2024, the six ultra-conservatives who control the court gave Trump immunity from criminal prosecution while in office. This put him above the law. This is all part of an unprecedented power grab by the executive branch facilitated by the very judicial branch that is supposed to keep the presidency in check. Given that Congress has abdicated its own authority, there’s now no clear way to stop Trump from becoming a full-blown autocrat. Our governing system of checks and balances is in tatters.

Bottom line: the highest court in the land is now ruling in service of an authoritarian leader. Expect other vulnerable groups — including brown and black U.S. citizens who came to this country as first-generation immigrants — to now be targeted with even more ferocity.

—Steven

(Chevron might have taken my law license, but I can still use my voice to battle injustice. This platform is one of the few ways I can generate income since Chevron wiped out my bank accounts in retaliation for our victory in the landmark pollution case in Ecuador. Please consider a paid subscription. If not, read on. —Steven)

Just like in Iraq two decades ago, the US government appears ready once again to plunge itself into a major war under false pretenses. And again, much of the media is falling for it.

Today, echoes of 2003 are everywhere. Back then, our politicians and their allies in the mainstream media were busy manufacturing consent for a war that will doubtless have global consequences. Then, it was Saddam Hussein and his government in Baghdad that we were told possessed what where called weapons of mass destruction (WMD) — despite the fact that independent United Nations weapons inspectors had visited the country multiple times and reported that they had found no such weapons. Today, the same playbook is being applied to Iran.

In 2018, Senator John McCain, a leading advocate of the Iraq war, issued a self-damning verdict: “The principal reason for invading Iraq, that Saddam [Hussein] had WMD, was wrong. The war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it.” The war killed 654,000 people either directly or indirectly, according to the prestigious medical journal The Lancet (see here for the study).

It is clear that our leaders have learned little from this history.

The most critical fact is that Israel’s claim that Iran is on the cusp of having an operational nuclear weapon is a lie, according to US intelligence agencies. Yet this falsehood is presented as the basis for Israel’s attack on the country — and would also be the basis for any military action by Trump, including the increasingly likely use of enormous bunker-busting bombs to try to destroy Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility, which is encased in a mountain. (Israel does not have the bombs needed to penetrate the mountain.) The mainstream media in the US ignores or grossly downplays this foundational lie.

The false claim that Iran is inches away from having a nuclear weapon has been a talking point propagated by Netanyahu for years as a way to try to induce the US to join him in the illegal act of attacking Iran. Every year or so since the 1990s, Netanyahu beats his chest and claims Iran is almost there. Yet it’s never happened. We know the Israeli pretext for attacking Iran is false because on March 25 of this year, the highest-ranking intelligence officer in the US government (Tulsi Gabbard) told Congress in a public hearing that evidence showed Iran was not building a nuclear weapon and that the country’s Supreme Leader had not authorized one to be built since the program was suspended in 2003. Gabbard’s testimony was based on the consensus opinion of all the US intelligence agencies. Nothing has happened in the months since to change that assessment, even though Trump reportedly has sidelined Gabbard for being “off message” (i.e., he’s punishing her for being truthful).

Reinforcing the validity of Gabbard’s assessment in the last few days is none other than the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the international body that inspects Iran’s nuclear facilities under the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This man, Rafael Grossi, said repeatedly this week that Iran is not and was not building a nuclear weapon. The agency found that Iran has enriched uranium to a 60% level, which would leave it months away from being able to create an operational bomb even if it had the intent (uranium must be enriched to 90% to make a bomb).

I find it extraordinarily interesting that Netanyahu just last week bombed the home of Iran’s lead arms negotiator with the United States, killing him. The reality is that Iran for years has been negotiating in good faith with the US and other western countries on the nuclear issue. Netanyahu detested that process because it legitimized the Iranian government and foreclosed the idea the US would ever join Israel in an attack on the Fordow facility. When Trump decided to negotiate with the Iranian government as a way to avert war, Netanyahu was furious. He blew up those negotiations literally and figuratively by launching the bombing campaign.

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Consider the hypocrisy. Iran is a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which entered into force in 1970. This treaty mandates regular and independent inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities (and those of most other countries with nuclear capabilities) by scientists operating under the auspices of the IAEA. Israel, which according to a recent report maintains an arsenal of 90 nuclear bombs, has not signed the treaty and bars all international inspections of its facilities. Netanyahu also claims his attack on Iran (which thus far has killed an estimated 225 civilians) was a “pre-emptive” strike against an “imminent” threat, which is an effort to provide a legal justification under international law. That’s BS given that there was nothing “imminent” about a nuclear weapon existing in Iran, according to US intelligence.

What’s really happening is Netanyahu has become a “forever war” leader because he knows once the bombs stop falling, be it in Gaza or Iran or Lebanon, his governing coalition will collapse. He then will be out of a job. Once that happens, he will be forced to face a corruption prosecution at home that could lead to prison and a genocide trial in the International Court of Justice. He’s made a deal with the devil and co-opted Israel’s US-backed war machine and turned it into a personal project while sucking the naive Trump into his game. Whether Trump actually pulls the trigger remains to be seen, although I think we are moving in that direction.

Bottom line: Iran has no active nuclear weapons program. Iran was and is open to a peaceful resolution with the United States. The “forever war” leader of Israel is sucking the pliant Trump into a conflict based on false pretenses. The same neo-con warmongers who pushed the invasion of Iraq based on false stories of WMD are now pushing Trump into Iran based on false stories of the imminence of nuclear weapons.

The ghosts left by the main architects of the Iraq war — Cheney, Perle and Wolfowitz — live on in Trump and his team.

—Steven

(Chevron might have taken my law license, but I can still use my voice to battle injustice. This platform is one of the few ways I can generate income since Chevron wiped out my bank accounts in retaliation for our victory in the landmark pollution case in Ecuador. If possible, please consider a paid subscription. If not, read on. —Steven)

It appears to me that Trump is taking domestic repression to an entirely new and frightening level in Los Angeles. I believe one of his ultimate goals is to see whether he can get away with imposing martial law and curfews on certain urban areas of the United States.

What is increasingly clear is that Trump and his Stephen Miller-led immigration attack team are using LA to incite violence as a performative display of authoritarian power. Trump can’t impose martial law unless there is sufficient “violence” to convince enough of the American public it can be justified. Trump’s tactics must be considered in this context. His recent moves strongly suggest he wants the violence to escalate so he has more options to project power.

Here are some of the key points from Los Angeles as I see them.

Trump’s masked ICE agents began raiding work places all over LA last week to carry out warrantless (and therefore largely illegal) arrests of so-called immigrants. (I say “so-called” because every non-Indigenous person here is either an immigrant or comes at some point from an immigrant family.) That’s an outrage in and of itself, but there’s much more. When people in the affected communities of LA understandably took to the streets to protest the attacks on immigrants, federal agents fired pepper spray, rubber bullets, and flash-bang grenades to provoke the very angry reaction they can be cited to justify even greater repression (multiple journalists from the @latimes reported that law enforcement were the aggressors). These federal agencies include ICE, the United States Marshals Service, and agents from the Department of Homeland Security Investigations. None of these agencies are trained in managing domestic protests.

Local police — meaning mostly the Los Angeles Police Department — usually are the entities dealing with these types of street-level protests but they had much of their authority usurped by Trump’s hyper-aggressive federal agents. Trump also took the extreme step of “federalizing” the California National Guard which allows him to send 2,000 heavily armed wartime soldiers dressed in camouflage into LA’s streets (see pictures); he’s also threatening to send 500 Marines into the city. No US President since Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1965 has ever federalized a state national guard without the permission of the state’s governor. (Johnson did it over the protest of segregationist Governor George Wallace in Alabama to protect civil rights protestors who were marching from Selma to Montgomery.)

It’s virtually unheard of for a President to take over a state national guard — which is a reserve force of the US Army — without a formal request from the state’s Governor. Yet California Governor Gavin Newsom has condemned Trump’s move and is suing him over it. But if the Trump-Miller anti-immigrant crusade keeps going in the same direction, I believe Trump’s next step will be to try to invoke an obscure statute from 1807 called the Insurrection Act (see here for an explanation) to turn the actual US army into a policing force that can be unleashed against US citizens. This has long been on his authoritarian wish list. In my view, this easily could lead to martial law, curfews, and shoot to kill orders in certain neighborhoods. He’s already called for Governor Newsom’s arrest.

Trump is using federal law enforcement to try to create a spectacle of violence that can be used to justify turning the US military against the people. LA Mayor Karen Bass said it best: “These tactics sow terror in our communities and disrupt basic principles of safety in our city.” Whether this happens depends on a number of factors, including whether enough people hit the streets to oppose Trump during the national No Kings protest scheduled for the President’s birthday on June 14.

Trump and his ICE agents need to be forced to respect the law. That depends to a great degree on us and our courts. 👊👊👊

-Steven

(This platform is one of the few ways I can generate income after Chevron wiped out my bank accounts and had my law license confiscated following our victory in the landmark pollution case in Ecuador. If possible, please consider a paid subscription. If not, please read on. —Steven)

Please join me in celebrating the exceptional life of the global leader whose values stand in the starkest contrast to the narcissism of the billionaire Donald Trump. This person is Jose Mujica, the former President of Uruguay who passed away last month at the age of 89 with a net worth of less than $2,000. See the pictures to get a feel for a man who cut the poverty rate of his country in half while leaving Uruguayans with an unprecedented level of social and economic stability.

What’s even more interesting is how few people have heard of Mujica. Must of the western media ignores him because his model of governance is deeply threatening to societies based on deep inequality, such as the United States. (For more on how Mujica is appreciated in Uruguay, read this account of his recent funeral.)

While Trump flies around the world in a luxury 747, President Mujica refused official transportation and continued to drive his 1987 Volkswagen Beetle while in office (he served as President from 2010 to 2015). While Trump rides in a black stretch limousine, President Mujica often got around on a 60-year-old bicycle. While Trump lives in the 132-room White House, President Mujica lived in a 3-room house on a small farm at the end of a dirt road that was owned by his wife.

Unlike Trump, President Mujica’s economic plan did not take from the poor to give to the rich. While in office, he actually cut the poverty rate from 19% to 9% while doubling the minimum wage. He also spent 14 years as a political prisoner — while being tortured repeatedly — under the country’s military government in the 1970s and 1980s.

I’ve always admired Mujica. He’s proof positive that there is an effective leadership and governance model that actually serves the interests of the majority of working people. It’s based on humility, intelligence, integrity, courage, self-sacrifice and service. I find it interesting that this special person was largely ignored by western media outlets. Actually helping the majority and living humbly is a threat to those like Trump who want to further concentrate wealth in a tiny sector of the elite.

The people of the United States deserve their own Jose Mujica. Maybe the only United States politician in modern times who possibly could be compared to Mujica is Bernie Sanders. Bernie almost was elected President in 2016 — and probably would have been had we had a free and fair election in the Democratic primary. So there clearly is a thirst in this country for this type of leader. That said, I shudder to think how many good women and men of the Mujica leadership style have stayed away from electoral politics in the United States thinking it could not be done.

Does anyone think a Jose Mujica can happen here?

-Steven

(Please consider a paid subscription. This platform is one of the few ways I can generate income after Chevron wiped out my bank accounts and had my law license confiscated after we won the landmark pollution case in Ecuador. If not, please read on and try to share. —Steven)

Israel’s Netanyahu-led government is now directly handing out morsels of food to the very people in Gaza it has been deliberately starving, according to news reports. Experts have concluded the distribution of food — as meagre as the amounts are — clearly is being weaponized to enhance political control and to carry out a plan for ethnic cleansing. Worse, the cages pictured above where people must wait for hours to eat could be the precursors to full-blown concentration camps.

I know it’s hard to face this. The strategy in part is to so exhaust us with the pain that we don’t even look. To pay attention and raise your voice is a form of resistance. Here’s the latest, according to numerous citizen-journalists in Gaza:

After blocking food from Gaza for three months — leading to mass famine and numerous deaths from hunger — Netanyahu reportedly has hired US contractors to help distribute meagre amounts to starving residents if they agree to be herded into pens where they are subject to biometric analysis and surveillance. Some who came to the pens to try to get food have been arrested and taken to detention centers to be held indefinitely without charges under military law.

It appears Israel is turning Gaza into a brutal high-tech concentration camp where there is a dossier on almost everyone; the latest plan, according to Israeli military officials, is for the government to occupy 75% of the land in Gaza while herding all 2.1 million people into three tiny areas. In the meantime, the IDF relentlessly bombs innocents while 35 of 36 hospitals have been rendered all but inoperable. The food is now being “distributed” by a US-funded rump group called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in coordination with the Israeli military. This is Netanyahu’s way to bypass traditional aid groups such as the United Nations or the Cindy McCain-led World Food Program, entities that distribute food impartially and independently. The average person in the pen above reportedly walked 9 miles only to be forced to stand for hours in the sun before being given a small ration that feeds a small family for two days.

This is also part of a clear plan for ethnic cleansing designed and carried out at the highest levels of the Israeli government. Israeli media outlets openly report the existence of such a plan while The New York Times and other corporate-dependent media in the US largely ignore it. The Israeli outlet 972 Magazine (I highly recommend everyone read this regularly) reported on a written memo from Israel’s former Intelligence Ministry way back on October 30, 2023 — less than one month after the October 7 attack. This memo outlined how the ethnic cleansing was part of a plan from the very beginning, not a response to any supposed new transgressions from Hamas in regard to the ceasefire. I recommend everyone read the 972 Magazine article here to understand how to contextualize what is happening today. Per the plan Netanyahu is now trying to make conditions of life in Gaza so horrific for Palestinians that they will clamor to leave — a forced “self-deportation” process similar to what Trump is now trying to carry out against brown-skinned immigrants and pro-Palestinians students in the United States. It’s about using using fear, intimidation, cruelty and (in Israel’s case) outright murder or the threat of it to drive “undesirables” away.

Remember the Israeli hostages in Gaza? Netanyahu continues to use them as a foil to make this happen. This is another cynical, craven, and sickening part of this picture. Israel’s prime minister and his team of right-wing ethno-nationalists carry out this plan — which is at core an attempt to erase the very idea that a Palestinian people even exist — under the guise of rescuing the hostages. The hostages are the pretext to carry out what seven of the world’s leading legal experts on genocide unanimously have concluded is, in fact, a genocide. Trump does his part by providing the weapons and political support, while arresting the student-scholars in the US who criticize the Israeli atrocities. Think of Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil still illegally locked up in a gulag-like for-profit jail in Louisiana after three months merely for engaging in peaceful and constitutionally-protected protest against Israel. Then, connect the dots.

The only real hope is to cut military aid to the Netanyahu government and to consider expelling Israel from the United Nations as a serial violator of international law. FIFA (the international footfall federation) should also consider booting Israel from participating in the 2026 World Cup, just as South Africa was barred from almost all international athletic competition during the apartheid era. Qualifying matches for the World Cup start soon. Israel should not be allowed to participate. Can any western country prove it has the courage to step up and try new measures to stop Netanyahu?

-Steven 👊👊

(If you are able, please consider a paid subscription so I can continue this work. This platform is one of the few ways I can generate income after Chevron wiped out my bank accounts and had my law license confiscated in retaliation for winning the landmark pollution case in Ecuador. If not, please read on and try to share this post. —Steven)

The photos that accompany this essay capture some of the horror of the mega-prison in El Salvador called CECOT where Trump is forcibly and illegally sending legal immigrants with no criminal record — without even a court hearing or due process of law — after abducting them from the streets and immigration detention facilities of this country. This prison is actually a tool of state terrorism, not a place to incarcerate real criminals.

Prisons are supposed to detain people convicted of crimes after they are given the right to a trial with due process of law. CECOT — which in a nod to Orwell is called the “Terrorism Confinement Center” — houses thousands of people never charged with a crime, tried of a crime, or sentenced for a crime. It opened in early 2023.

Nobody on the inside is allowed to communicate to anyone on the outside. Nobody inside is allowed to receive a visitor, even a family member or lawyer. Nobody there knows if they ever will get out, although some do emerge. It is indefinite detention that flagrantly violates numerous national and international human rights laws. Bukele justifies it all in the name of fighting “terrorism” — the new all-ecompassing term applied to anyone these right-wing authoritarians disagree with and wish to attack. (See the illegal arrests in the U.S. of the distinguished graduate students Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturn for examples of how this process of “terrorist” demonization works to target peaceful protestors.)

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Evidence from international human rights groups demonstrates that CECOT is being run as a mass torture chamber by the country’s young dictator, Nayib Bukele. Trump this week met with Bukele in the White House (see photo below) and said the next move on his own dictatorial journey might be to send US citizens — or at least those convicted of violent crimes — to this hellhole. Such a move would be illegal, but if it were to happen it could effectively force any US inmate to face an indefinite lifetime sentence in El Salvador with no legal recourse in that country.

The vast majority of men currently in the CECOT are from El Salvador and were targeted with mass arrests in a supposed anti-gang crackdown that began three years ago when the government declared a state of emergency in response to rising violence. In fact, since 2022, police and military forces in the country have rounded up a staggering 85,000 people out of a total population of 6 million and imprisoned them without charges or trial. That’s 1.4% of the country’s entire population (including men, women, and children) held in violation of the law. This is a flagrant attack on human rights that Bukele and Trump are celebrating. It is also in my view a terrifying model for what Trump would like to do in the United States to legal immigrants and dissidents who are citizens, the courts be damned.

I’ve read reports and statements by respected international monitoring groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International (see here, here, and here) about the worsening human rights problems under Bukele and what goes on inside CECOT, which can hold 40,000 people and is likely the largest prison in the world. The reports are chilling. Prisoners are caged in large cells with no personal space; deprived of adequate food; beatings are common; many have died from strangulation and are buried in unmarked graves; all are deprived of communication with the outside world; nobody is allowed outside or can be exposed to sunlight; and no visits from family members or lawyers are allowed. Roughly 350 people reportedy have been killed in the country’s prisons in the last three years.

It’s a sadistic high-tech death camp designed to instill fear in the entire society, but most inside did not commit a crime. The entire “evidence” of wrongdoing cited by the government seems to be a tatoo on the body.

Bukele, an advertising excutive by profession, is the latest human rights violator to be welcomed by Trump in the people’s house. (Netanyahu, facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for committing atrocities against civilians in Gaza, was embraced by Trump at the White House a few days before.) As bad as the situation is, and understanding that the Democratic Party leadership seems incapable of effectively fighting this descent into authoritarianism, I am convinced we have yet to come close to hitting the bottom.

-Steven