updates HERE http://tarsandsblockade.org/
Currently enduring their fifth day of incarceration after barricading themselves inside the Keystone XL pipeline. Help get them out with a donation to their legal fund.
WINONA, TX – MONDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2012 7:30 AM – Several protestors with Tar Sands Blockade sealed themselves inside a section of pipe destined for the Keystone
XL tar sands pipeline to stop construction of the dangerous project. Using a blockading technique never implemented before, Matt Almonte and Glen Collins locked themselves between two barrels of concrete weighing over six hundred pounds each, aided by Isabel Indigo Brooks who went in with them .
Located twenty-five feet into a pipe segment waiting to be laid in the ground, the outer barrel is barricading the pihttp://tarsandsblockade.org/pe’s opening and neither barrel can be moved without risking serious injury to the blockaders.
Matt Almonte
The barricaded section of the pipeline passes through a residential neighborhood in Winona, TX. If TransCanada moves ahead with the trenching and burying of this particular section of pipe, it would run less than a hundred feet from neighboring homes.
Tar sands pipelines threaten East Texas communities with their highly toxic contents, which pose a greater risk to human health than conventional crude oil. TransCanada’s existing tar sands pipeline, Keystone XL’s predecessor, has an atrocious safety record, leaking twelve times in its first year of operation.
“TransCanada didn’t bother to ask the people of this neighborhood if they wanted to have millions of gallons of poisonous tar sands pumped through their backyards,” said Almonte, one of the protesters now inside the pipeline. “This multinational corporation has bullied landowners and expropriated homes to fatten its bottom line.”
Recently, over 40 communities worldwide planned actions with Tar Sands Blockade during a week of resistance against extreme energy extraction and its direct connection to the climate crisis. A growing global movement is rising up against the abuses of the fossil fuel industry and its increasingly desperate pursuit of dang
erous extraction methods.
“I’m barricading this pipe with Tar Sands Blockade today to say loud and clear to the extraction industry that our communities and the resources we depend on for survival are not collateral damage,” said Collins, another blockader inside the pipe and an organizer with Radical Action for Mou
ntain Peoples Survival (RAMPS) and Mountain Justice, grassroots campaigns in Appalachia working to stop mountaintop removal coal mining.
“This fight in East Texas against tar sands exploitation is one and the same as our fight in the hollers of West Virginia. Dirty energy extraction doesn’t just threaten my home; it threatens the collective future of the planet.”
Glen Collins
“At this late stage, doing nothing is a greater danger than the risks of taking direct action to stop destructive projects like Keystone XL,” said Ron Seifert, a spokesperson for Tar Sands Blockade. “That’s why folks working with groups like RAMPS, the Unist’ot’en Camp fighting a natural gas pipeline in British Columbia and Tar Sands Blockade are willing to use everything including their own hands and feet to ensure we all have a safe climate and healthy, thriving communities.”
Today also marks day 5 of the Houston Hunger Strike in which Gulf Coast activists with Tar Sands Blockade are going without food to demand that Valero divest entirely from the Keystone XL pipeline and invest in the health and wellbeing of the communities it’s poisoning.
Diane Wilson and Bob Lindsey are undertaking a sustained hunger strike in solidarity with the Manchester community in Houston. Their hunger strike began with an act of civil disobedience on November, 29th when they locked their necks to tanker trucks attempting to enter the Valero refinery in Manchester. They refuse to eat until the following demands are met:
1. Velero completely divest from Keystone XL and all forms of tar sands exploitation
2. Velero invest in the health and well being of the Manchester community
3. Valero refinery shut down and vacate the Manchester community
The Media Release states as follows:
On 14-N, day of the General Strike, our companion ALFON, was arrested in the neighborhood of Vallekas. After several days of confinement and interrogation in the dungeons of the Spanish State, he was sent to permanent prison, thanks to higher orders of the judiciary and the power of the government delegation, to this must be added the pressure of the mass media “communication “. Continue reading “Alfon.. LIBERTAD. Freedom for General Strike comrade NOW!”
6th Dec. last Update.. unfortunately we were right. Cateel was devastated with at least 28 dead, hopefully the report/warning below, which came out 1 day before and was read by over 3000 people on the net, helped some people escape to safety.
”Davao Oriental Governor Corazon Malanyaon said initial reports indicated that in one town, Cateel, 95% of the buildings had been damaged. Twenty-three people had drowned or were buried under fallen trees or buildings there, she said…..” the massacre toll has risen to at least 500 with more than 400 others reported missing and about quarter of a million people made homeless.At least three cities on Mindanao’s east coast remain cut off after bridges collapsed and roads were swept away by floodwater.The sheer numbers of refugees have overwhelmed the Philippine disaster agencies prompting government to call for international aid to help cope with the mega disaster.The…
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from an extract on Slendermeans
…..This goes some way to explaining the power politics behind otherwise inexplicable decisions. Faced with a gap between the rhetoric of equality and what actually happens within organisations, it’s not so surprising that some women choose the safe option of identifying with traditional centres of power.
Look at those “first ladies” who find it easier to get close to power than seek it on their own behalf. When Carla Bruni-Sarkozy announces in Vogue that women don’t need feminism, she’s speaking as a woman who’s experienced the material advantages of attaching herself to one of the world’s most powerful men.
These women have got where they have – somewhere quite comfortable – without rocking the boat, and they’re not keen on women who challenge the status quo. Identifying with men is a traditional means of negotiating patriarchal power, and women who go down that route tend to share reactionary male views of other women.
If you’re a conservative woman in the Church of England, the prospect of “pushy” women getting power is quite scary, so of course you’re going to vote against it. The last thing any traditional woman wants to be accused of is appearing confrontational, even if accepting male power is self-defeating in the long run….
Dump Michele Bachmann http://www.dumpbachmann.com/
Oh Carla Bruni, so feminism’s over, is it? | Barbara Ellen (guardian.co.uk)
Debating Creative Feminist Tactics: Moran and Femen
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The Free 