Mayflower Interview

Back in Arkansas, where the pipeline ruptured, members of the Tar Sands Blockade spill response team interview a local resident known as Duck. 
 


The spill response team also visits this wetland and duck nesting habitat destroyed by Exxon.



Over at the Valero Texas Open, a protester interrupts:

Pipeline Ruptures

Two dozen Arkansas homes evacuate (video below) as an Exxon Mobil pipeline ruptures, pouring an estimated 84,000 gallons of Canadian crude into their neighborhood on Friday about 20 miles north of Little Rock.  Police report that the oil gushed for 45 minutes before being stopped.  Meanwhile, Texas landowners join activists in the Keystone XL pipeline blockade.  Events unfold as President Obama considers the fate of the pipeline, with the Arkansas crisis providing further impetus to the argument as to why the pipeline project should cease.  A much-discussed Canadian op ed here at the NY Times from Thomas Homer-Dixon.

You Tell Us

In the continuing Tar Sands story, Manchester residents have issued a community statement demanding that Valero Refinery CEO and President William R. Klesse release information on industrial pollutants the company is releasing into their atmosphere.

From the TSB website: 

The National Disease Clusters Alliance reports (pg. 2) that children living within two miles of the Houston Ship Channel have a 56% higher likelihood of developing leukemia than those who live more than ten miles away.

As blogged earlier, the community is predominantly Latino with the average resident living below the poverty line.   Environmental observers describe the situation in the Houston neighborhood as "a textbook case of environmental racism."  The TSB site reports growing police harassment of residents for organizing on health hazards in the area, including intefering with the group's distribution of food from a free community grocery outlet and patrolling the neighborhood in vehicles owned by Valero.

The statement issued:

William R. Klesse,

As CEO & President of Valero you must be held accountable for the human rights abuses your corporation is committing in communities like ours. One need not do anything more than visit Houston’s Manchester neighborhood to know that the air here is dangerously polluted; air monitors have recorded 1,3-butadiene levels measuring 11 times greater than what is allowed in a toxic waste dump.

Nearly all children here have persistent coughs, and adults are plagued with sickness and headaches. We have come forward and documented countless stories of illnesses and disease such as asthma, leukemia, and a variety of cancers all of which we attribute to the presence of your refinery.  No more will we allow you to poison our air and lungs without question.

Manchester is almost completely Latino, and the average family here lives below the poverty line.  In 2011, you earned $11,027,067 by exploiting us and other communities like ours.  It would take the average resident in our community 368 years to earn what you do in one. What you are forcibly doing to us is without a doubt environmental racism.

You have 5 days to be accountable to the following information:

1. What are you putting into our air?
2. How do these chemicals affect our health
3. What kind of violations have happened here that you haven’t told us about?
4. What are the annual emissions limits for each chemical you emit, and what are your measured emissions of these chemicals?

We know that your refinery can not operate within federal law, and now it’s time that the rest of the world know as well. We demand transparency from you, and want you to know that we do not consent to the presence of your refinery in our community.

We are in solidarity with the Tar Sands Blockade, TEJAS, and all those who fight for truth and justice. We oppose all those who seek to exploit others for their personal gain.

Not only do we hold you, William, personally accountable, but we hold all Valero shareholders and the American people who lay eyes on our community and only provide passive support.  We will not be your sacrifice.

In March 2010, Associated Press reported that William Klesse received 10.9 million dollars in compensation in 2009, in a 64 percent increase from the prior year. 

Diane Wilson and Bob Lindsey, whose story was also blogged earlier, are now in the 29th day of their hunger strike.  Both were arrested after chaining themselves to a truck outside the Valero refinery in solidarity with the Tar Sands Blockade.  Manchester is the end of the line for the TransCanada Pipeline.

In another action, two of the three Tar Sands protesters arrested after sealing themselves inside the pipeline in Smith County, Texas have been released on reduced bail, with the third activist, Matt Almonte still in jail at the time of the latest linked story from the group.  Their bail was originally set excessively high at $65,000 each, and the judge in that case is reported as recusing himself since for undisclosed reasons.  The current bail is still excessively high, but reduced to 20-30,000 dollars for each protester.
 

Photo credits/top, courtesy of Tar Sands Blockade/Manchester Community Unity, a child paints at a Manchester community function organized by residents to oppose the presence of industrial pollutants in their neighborhood./bottom, courtesy of Tar Sands Blockade/Manchester Community Unity, Manchester residents pose with protest sign in English and Spanish demanding transparency and accountability from Valero Refinery.  The sign reads, "We demand to know what you are forcing us to breathe!" And, "¡Exigimos saber lo que nos están obligando a respirar!"

Bah Humbug

Courtesy of AllHipHop.com

Uploade by illseed

"Epic Fail Of The Day"

Via Commondreams and AllHipHop (video at those links),  Santa arrested in Austin for chalking' on sidewalks with children about Peace On Earth.  Now that is dangerous, and when so many Texans are walking around armed instead with guns .. ?

No word yet if he's been deported to the North Pole.  Was Santa read his Miranda?   

  

Courtesy of Common Dreams

Uploaded by Abby Zimet

"Free Santa" .. looks like S.W.A.T. missed someone?

steinbeck

 

from film portrayals of lennie small 

in john steinbeck's of mice and men -

adapted for film several times,

also for stage and radio.

pleas for justice fall again upon deaf ears as the state of texas executes a developmentally disabled man named marvin wilson who had an i.q. of 61.

robert mackey with the new york times reports that john steinbeck's family has expressed outrage that a texas judge used of mice and men to support the decision to take marvin wilson's life.  thomas steinbeck, the writer's son, released a statement reading, in part:

On behalf of the family of John Steinbeck, I am deeply troubled by today’s scheduled execution of Marvin Wilson, a Texas man with an I.Q. of 61. Prior to reading about Mr. Wilson’s case, I had no idea that the great state of Texas would use a fictional character that my father created to make a point about human loyalty and dedication, i.e., Lennie Small from “Of Mice and Men,” as a benchmark to identify whether defendants with intellectual disability should live or die.

My father was a highly gifted writer who won the Nobel Prize for his ability to create art about the depth of the human experience and condition. His work was certainly not meant to be scientific, and the character of Lennie was never intended to be used to diagnose a medical condition like intellectual disability. I find the whole premise to be insulting, outrageous, ridiculous and profoundly tragic. I am certain that if my father, John Steinbeck, were here, he would be deeply angry and ashamed to see his work used in this way. And the last thing you ever wanted to do, was to make John Steinbeck angry.

 

mr. mackey continues:

In 1937, the novelist himself told The New York Times that the model for his character, a killer who did not comprehend his own actions, was shown leniency by the American legal system of the time. “Lennie was a real person,” Mr. Steinbeck said. “He’s in an insane asylum in California right now. I worked alongside him for many weeks. He didn’t kill a girl. He killed a ranch foreman. Got sore because the boss had fired his pal and stuck a pitchfork right through his stomach. I hate to tell you how many times I saw him do it. We couldn’t stop him until it was too late.”

the following youtube was released by democracy now! the night before mr. marvin was executed, and includes discussion with mr. wilson's attorney, lee korvarsky, and richard dieter, executive director of the death penalty information center, a nonprofit group working to educate the public about capital punishment.

mr. dieter says that texas is disturbingly experimenting with humans in new ways to execute death row prisoners, and that they are purchasing various drugs for execution indirectly from european companies that did not manufacture the drugs for this purpose.  

the european nations - which have outlawed capital punishment - are expressing outrage that these drugs are being used to execute people in the united states.

the texas tribune reports that prior to mr. wilson's execution, and amidst an outcry of objections, 

State Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, on Monday wrote to Gov. Rick Perry seeking a stay of execution on Wilson's behalf. Human Rights Watch also decried the planned execution.

“Texas is circumventing the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment,” said Antonio Ginatta, U.S. advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.