UPDATE, 24 September 2024: Gallup issued today a new report about the percentage of people in scientifically representative samples of 1,000 people, in each of 140 countries and areas around the world, the percentage who answered “Yes” to “Do you feel safe walking alone at night in the area where you live?” That percentage is the lowest in Ecuador. Gallup’s report is titled “2024: The Global Safety Report”, and its page five is headlined “Ecuadorians Least Likely in the World to Feel Safe.” Shown there is a graph which indicates that whereas prior to 2017 — which happened to be the year when the U.S. Government took over Ecuador’s government (as this article will explain) — that percentage averaged slightly higher than 50%, it headed downward starting in that year and is now only 27%. Gallup reports there that “Excluding active war zones, feelings of safety in [the province of] Guayas, Ecuador, are the lowest in the world [11%],” and also notes that “the country has spiraled into a deep security crisis. Ecuador is an increasingly important node in global cocaine trafficking.”
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In the March 2022 issue of the academic journal Global Environmental Change, appeared an article by Hickel, Dorninger, Wieland and Suwandi, “Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015”, which reported that:
in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.
This is being done by the mega-imperialistic U.S. Government and its colonies or ‘allies’, against the global South, and the operation’s center is the U.S. Government, which, itself, is, amongst all of its empire, the paragon of economic inequality: it is the country where 30.3% of U.S. wealth is owned by richest 1%, and where the richest .01% donate 57.16% of all of the political money, so as to control their Government, in order to be able to get for themselves, virtually all of the profits from this looting of the world.
Whereas U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) had, during August 1941 till his death on 12 April 1945, been carefully planning his “United Nations” (which he even named), so as to eliminate and replace all empires and imperialisms for after WW2, and produce a U.N. which would be a democratic world federal government of independent nations, his immediate successor Harry Truman reversed all of that planning, on 25 July 1945, and started the planning for the Military-Industrial Complex that he and his personal hero General Dwight Eisenhower, and also the secret Rhodesist Winston Churchill, had advised him to do in order for the U.S. Government, instead of the U.N., ultimately to take control over the entire planet, every nation, including especially all of the Soviet Union. The way that Eisenhower had put this matter to Truman, was that unless the U.S. will control the entire world, the Soviet Union will; and this purely win-lose thinking that excluded any possibiity of a win-win result (plus Churchill’s seconding that) led Truman, on 25 July 1945, to demand from the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, that Stalin grant the U.S. Government a veto power over both the domestic policies and the foreign policies of the nations that the Soviet Union had captured from Hitler’s forces. Truman proudly wrote to his wife that night, saying that Stalin “seems to like it when I hit him with a hammer.” (In other words: Stalin didn’t like it at all.)
Stalin couldn’t accept Truman’s demand, any more than Truman would have accepted a similar demand from Stalin about the nations that America and its colonies such as the UK had conquered in Europe. Stalin (like FDR would have done if he had survived) made no such demand upon Truman or anyone else; and, from that date forward, Stalin recognized that unless he could change Truman’s mind on this (which never happened), the U.S. Government would be at war against the Soviet Government. It turned out to be (on the American side at least) a war not actually between capitalism versus communism (as Truman, Ike, and Churchill, propagandized it to be) but instead between the U.S. against the entire world — to take all of it — as was made clear when U.S. President GHW Bush started, on 24 February 1990, secretly instructing his stooge leaders, such as Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand, that their war against the soon-no-longer-communist Russia would secretly continue until it too becomes a part of the U.S. empire — that America’s NATO will expand all the way up to Russia’s borders.
So, America’s Deep State was born on 25 July 1945, when the U.S. Governmental Executive decision was made that not the United Nations — as FDR had intended — but instead the U.S. Government itself, should take control over the world after WW2 ends. Until 25 July 1945, Truman had been undecided about this, but now he made the decision for a future all-encompassing global American empire, and this decision has profoundly affected the U.S. Government in all of the years that followed. It was the actual beginning of America’s Deep State: the rule over the U.S. Govenment by America’s super-rich, for unlimited expansion of their empire to control the entire planet. It’s a money-funnel not merely from all Americans to America’s few super-rich, but from all people throughout the world, to America’s few super-rich. And that is how it operates, while cutting in the local aristocracy within each colony, to split with them the local take.
Althouth many examples of this imperial rule over its colonies (or ‘allies’) by the U.S. Government are well known, such as the entirely lie-based U.S. invasion of Vietnam (for ‘democracy and freedom’), and the entirely lie-based invasion of Iraq (against ’Saddam’s WMD’), plus numerous U.S. coups such as against Iran and Guatemala and Chile and Ukraine, many other such cases are little known, such as in Ecuador, which is the example that will be discussed here:
An excellent article about how corrupt the U.S. Government is was published on 8 February 2022 and headlined “What if, instead of a movie, I got flung in jail? This lawyer who fought Chevron was”, by Erin Brockovich. It described the case of the U.S. lawyer for Ecuador, Steven Donziger, whom the U.S. regime imprisoned for having won a court case against Chevron/Texaco, to pay a nearly $10 billion fine for having recklessly poisoned indigenous Ecuadorians. The polluter refused to pay, and U.S. courts instead sent to prison Ecuador’s lawyer — and had him disbarred. The victims got nothing. The question of Chevron/Texaco’s guilt was ignored: the fine was simply cancelled. Crucial to Donziger’s penalties was the decision by what Brockovich referred to as “In 2018, an international tribunal ruled that Chevron had been previously released from liability for pollution in the Amazon and ordered Ecuador not to enforce the $9.5bn judgment.” But that ‘tribunal’ wasn’t actually a court-case; it was an arbitration-case, and Ecuador had never authorized sidelining their case, moving it out of the courts and into the extremely corrupt ICSID private system of international arbitration that the U.S. Government had largely created in order to protect the investment assets of its billionaires. Actually, ICSID was started by the U.S. controlled World Bank in 1966, to provide ICSID “arbitration panels” to settle ISDS disputes that international corporations have against governments, substituting for law courts and judges, so as to give corporate investors rights above and beyond those which governments have (rights against foreign governments); therefore, this was a straight-out fascist (or libertarian/neoliberal) invention by the U.S. regime with the cooperation of its colonies. In fact, the entire ISDS system had first been proposed and instituted in 1959, by the former leading Nazi banker Hermann Abs, along with Britain’s Baron Shawcross. ICSID’s real growth that made these fascist (or ‘libertarian’) arrangements common started with Nixon in 1974, and then expanded afterwards by Clinton’s NAFTA treaty, and then by Obama’s proposed TPP, TTIP, and TISA, treaties — and all of that since 1974 has veered way off the rails of the U.S. Constitution, but the U.S. Supreme Court has deferred to the other branches of the U.S. Government, to interpret the Constitution regarding commercial treaties, because America’s billionaires like it that way — regardless of what the Constitution says about ALL treaties (and even though the Supreme Court was, by its passivity on this matter, allowing, basically authorizing, blatant violation of the Treaty Clause in the U.S. Constitution, by allowing the Legislative and Executive Branches of the Government to interpret the Constitution — as-if allowing that didn’t itself violate the Constitution and its separation-of-powers clauses). So, the corruptness here runs as deep as possible.
Though the initial case between Ecuador and Texaco/Chevron was about pollution and deaths from it, that case was nullified by Chevron’s amassing a team of hundreds of lawyers from 60 firms who swamped Donziger and financially destroyed him and got a far-rightwing U.S. judge to convict him with the federal crime of racketeering, by the judge’s accepting the bribed testimony of the Ecuadorian judge who had assessed the $9.5B fine against Chevron, to testify that he had been bribed by Donziger to rule in his country’s (Ecuador’s) favor against Texaco/Chevron. There was no evidence that Donziger had bribed him, but clearly Chevron did, and yet the ‘trial’ judge (whom Chevron had managed to get to handle this case) arbitrarily chose to believe him and thus absolved Chevron of any wrongdoing, and disbarred Donziger and placed him into prison.
Even Wikipedia’s article on Donziger makes clear that his treatment by the U.S. regime was barbaric, corrupt, and illegal, but the regime prides itself not on adhering to any international laws-based order, but instead to its own international rules-based order (where those ‘rules’ are whatever the U.S. regime says they are — no democratic procedure produces them). ICSID is setting some of those “rules.” WarOnWant.org concluded, about the Texaco-v.-Ecuador case: “This case is unprecedented, as far as we know, in directly overturning a democratically accountable, national court judgement. Until now, ISDS tribunals have, on occasion, been asked to order legal proceedings to be put on hold until after the outcome of an ISDS case, but no more. The Chevron case sets an incredibly dangerous precedent that could lead to ISDS tribunals trespassing into domestic courts all over the world, rewriting justice in favour of corporate power.”
In fact, the judge’s ruling against Donziger was so corrupt so that on 26 February 2020, the ABA Journal headlined “Lawyer blasted by judge for conduct in Chevron case should get his law license back, ethics referee says”. The referee was highly critical of the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, who found Donziger to have committed fraud against Texaco/Chevron, and the referee brought forth character witnesses who were themselves highly credible, saying that Donziger is a person of extraordinary integrity and courage. One of these character witnesses was John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and other books against megacorporate criminality and governmental corruption, who is certainly an expert on the subject and who said “from knowing Steve he is incredibly honest.” The referee also grilled Donziger himself, and found him persuasive that Judge Kaplan’s allegations against him were false and that Donziger had presented to Kaplan evidence to that effect, which Kaplan simply ignored in the opinion he wrote. The referee then noted that the susequent Appeals Court decision made at least one crucial false statement in affirming Kaplan’s ruling. There were other remarkable findings by the referee, such as “A total of fifteen to seventeen judges reviewed the Chevron charges of fraud and concluded ‘…contrary to Judge Kaplan.’” The referee noted that “There appears to be no case like this. While Respondent is often his own worst enemy and has made numerous misjudgments due to self-confidence that may border on arrogance, and perhaps too much zeal for his cause, his field of practice is not the usual one.” He urged “that Respondent’s suspension immediately be ended and that he be restored to the bar of this State.” However, it was not done.
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On 24 January 2022, the 67-page detailed “Report of monitors: United States v. Steven Donziger” headlined and documented “Donziger Criminal Contempt Proceedings Violated International Human Rights Law and Standards”, and concluded:
After carefully reviewing the transcripts and relevant laws and standards, the Panel’s unequivocal assessment of the criminal contempt proceedings against Steven Donziger is that he has been subject to multiple violations of his internationally protected human rights, including his right to a fair trial by an independent and impartial tribunal and his right to the presumption of innocence. These violations have resulted in prolonged arbitrary detention for Mr. Donziger [which still continues]. …
In instance after instance, when a procedural rule could be deployed against the defendant, the prosecutor and judge did so. Judge Kaplan and Judge Preska consistently interpreted and deployed laws and rules in ways that gave a “rule by law” air of legitimacy to proceedings aimed toward seemingly predetermined conclusions while disregarding fundamental principles of the rule of law. The result was multiple violations of international human rights law and standards. …
The Panel further notes that a proposed visit from the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers has been outstanding since 2014, and recommends that the visit be arranged on an urgent basis.
On 27 January 2022, The Nation headlined “Chevron’s Prosecution of Steven Donziger: Documents reveal a close collaboration between the oil giant, its law firm, and the ‘private prosecutor’ who sent the environmentalist lawyer to federal prison.” Donziger, who still was in prison, was quoted: “Private corporations aren’t supposed to be able to help put people in prison, which is what Chevron did to me. Corporations can sue you in a civil proceeding, but they aren’t allowed to finance a criminal prosecution. If Chevron gets away with this, what kind of a country are we living in?” Of course, the answer is clear.
This case had been dealt with first by a criminal court in Ecuador, against Texaco/Chevron, during the Presidency of that country’s progressive President Rafael Correa, in order to deal with illegal pollution and resulting illnesses and deaths, that were due to Texaco then Chevron’s dumpings of toxic wastes into the forest. In February 2011, an $18 billion judgment — later reduced to $9.5 billion — was rendered against Chevron by the Ecuadorian court. On 4 March 2014, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (in Manhattan) ruled that the $9.5 billion Ecuadorian judgement was the product of fraud and racketeering activity, and thus unenforceable.
