Argentina Court Freezes Chevron’s Assets: Penalty for Polluting the Amazon in Ecuador

By Pratap Chatterjee
Global Research

Adrian Elcuj Miranda, a judge in Buenos Aires, has ordered the seizure of Chevron’s assets in Argentina, to force the company to pay a $19 billion penalty for polluting the Amazon in Ecuador. The plaintiffs are seeking similar legal action in Brazil, Canada, Colombia and other countries.

Chevron – a Northern California-based oil and gas company – merged with another company named Texaco in 2001 whose actions are the basis of the lawsuit. Between 1964 and 1992 Texaco admitted to dumping more than 16 billion gallons of toxic “water of formation” into the streams and rivers of the Ecuadorean Amazon that were used by local inhabitants for their drinking water sickening indigenous tribespeople and farmers.

Some 900 open-air toxic waste pits still dot the area, where approximately 9,000 people are expected to contract cancer unless it is cleaned up, according to a study by Dr. Daniel Rourke, former of the Rand Corporation.

POSCO Protest in Pictures: Warren Buffet, TIAA-CREF finance Indian land grab

Lying Down For Justice: The POSCO Satyagraha in Pictures

By POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti
Countercurrents.org

Here is an excerpt from an article by S.G.Vombatkere “Lying Down For Justice Children Show The Way”

“The people and especially the children of Dhinkia, Gadkujang, Govindpur and Nuagaon villages in Jagatsinghpur District in Odisha have shown the nation how people matter over governments’ plans for development of business corporations at their cost. The children ‘illegally’ lay down on the hot earth under in the blazing summer heat and refused to move to allow entry to government officials to take over forest land and their villages for the POSCO mega-project.

“This was in the face of around 1,000 policemen armed with lathis, tear gas and rifles threatening dire consequences if the villages were not vacated, making loudspeaker announcements every 15 minutes. Apprehending night or dawn attack by the police, the people have also been maintaining overnight vigils. This situation prevails not for one or two days but for two weeks, during which normal life in the villages is completely disrupted; the area is essentially in a ‘state of war.’ But the people have been strictly peaceful throughout and have been able to withstand the Odisha government’s terror tactics that work towards the strategy of acquiring the land for POSCO in terms of the MoU signed in 2005.”

Blair Mountain Project demands Obama end regulated manslaughter in mining industry

By Jeff Biggers
AlterNet

Hundreds of marchers are peacefully re-enacting the historic March on Blair Mountain this week in a nonviolent celebration to remind the nation that the safety and health of coal miners and coal mining communities must be placed above the profit interests of union-busting absentee coal companies.

If the safety, health and civil rights of all Americans are protected by the same laws, then our nation’s President and lawmakers are obliged by the staggering health and human rights crises and mounting deathtoll in the central Appalachian coalfields to call for an immediate moratorium on all mountaintop removal operations.

Ohio House passes bill to open parks to fracking: Stop it in the Senate

By Alex Beauchamp
Food & Water Watch

Last week the Ohio House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, in our state parks. This risky drilling process will turn our pristine state parks into industrial parks, but we’ve got a chance to stop it in the state Senate. Can you contact your state senator today?

What will drilling in state parks mean for you? It could be devastating for Ohio’s drinking water.

Survival wins Hollywood award for tribal rights film

By Survival International

Survival International’s film ‘Mine: Story of a Sacred Mountain’ has won the award for ‘Best Short’ in the category of International Human Rights at the Artivist Film Festival to be held in Hollywood.

‘Mine’, narrated by British actress and activist, Joanna Lumley, depicts the struggle of the Dongria Kondh tribe of Orissa, India, to save their sacred mountain from Vedanta Resources’ proposed open pit bauxite mine. In August, the Dongria Kondh won an historic victory as India’s environment minister blocked the controversial mine.

Delhi files charges against Arundhati Roy for defending India’s tribes

They can file a charge posthumously against Jawaharlal Nehru, too

By Arundhati Roy
The Hindu

My reaction to today’s court order directing the Delhi Police to file an FIR against me for waging war against the state: Perhaps they should posthumously file a charge against Jawaharlal Nehru too. Here is what he said about Kashmir:

Canada caves on mining subsidy, eco-protection bill

Canada’s Parliament Buckles under Weight of Mining Industry

By Paul Weinberg
IPS

The corporate clout of the mining industry trumped political ideology in Canada when members of all political parties helped to narrowly defeat a bill late last month that would have imposed standards on Canadian mining companies operating in developing countries.

The Trickledown Revolution

Andhra Pradesh State Police assassinate tribal people on behalf of mining corporations.

By Arundhati Roy
Outlook India

The first step towards re-imagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination—an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future, writes Arundhati Roy.

Restraining the Profit Itch

By Robert C. Koehler

The gap between the diffuse human yearning for a decent world and the organized agenda of the corporatocracy has never, in my lifetime, been wider.

I continue to be unable to turn away from the Gulf and what seems to be the unceremonious ushering in of a new age, a new awareness — or maybe just the beginning of the end of our amped-up, gated, reckless civilization . . . and all that has a chance to come after it.

What the spill has yet to reach are the headquarters of corporate power and the consciences ensconced therein. The arrogance of the great capitalists remains undamaged, as they busy themselves with post-disaster job one: fending off what they fear will be a tide of market-fettering regulations and restrictions curbing their freedom to plunder the planet.

Arundhati Roy resists Operation Green Hunt (transcript and video)

BUZZ THIS

By Rady Ananda

The Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights held a public lecture by Gautam Navlakha and Arundhati Roy on June 2, 2010 in Mumbai, India. They cover populist resistance to bauxite mining in particular, but also expand the discussion to clarify that this is a war on all peoples, on all continents, by global corporations who seek to destroy the earth and all tribal cultures in their relentless and psychopathic pursuit of profit.

This 52-minute speech is a companion to her piece, Walking with the Comrades, when she met with armed resistance units early this year.

West Virginia workers speak on mine disaster

Tom

By Andre Damon and Samuel Davidson
World Socialist Web Site

Miners, their family members and neighbors spoke with the World Socialist Web Site about the conditions that led to Monday’s deadly explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, West Virginia.

Tom, 52, a disabled worker who lives down the road from the Upper Big Branch mine, spoke of how Massey Energy Company controls the lives of the people in the area. “I grew up here,” he said, “and when we were kids we used to go and play on that mountain. Now it is all private property. If you go up there they want to arrest you for trespassing.

Arundhati Roy Walks with the Comrades: India’s Resource Wars

Dantewada: Roy with the Maoists

Walking with the Comrades

Gandhians with a Gun? Arundhati Roy plunges into the sea of Gondi people to find some answers.

For every ton of iron ore mined by a private company, the Indian government gets a royalty of Rs 27 and the mining company makes Rs 5,000. In the bauxite and aluminum sector, the figures are even worse. We’re talking about daylight robbery to the tune of billions of dollars. Enough to buy elections, governments, judges, newspapers, TV channels, NGOs and aid agencies. Over the past five years or so, the governments of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal have signed hundreds of Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) with corporate houses, worth several billion dollars, all of them secret, for steel plants, sponge-iron factories, power plants, aluminum refineries, dams and mines. In order for the MoUs to translate into real money, tribal people must be moved. Therefore, this war.

By Arundhati Roy
Outlook India

The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with India’s Gravest Internal Security Threat. I’d been waiting for months to hear from them. I had to be at the Ma Danteshwari mandir in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given times on two given days. That was to take care of bad weather, punctures, blockades, transport strikes and sheer bad luck. The note said: “Writer should have camera, tika and coconut. Meeter will have cap, Hindi Outlook magazine and bananas. Password: Namashkar Guruji.”

The Progress of Man

Art by Kate MacDowell; photo by Dan Kvitka for NYTimes

By Robert C. Koehler

How much longer can we tolerate soulless progress?

“Then the coal company came, with the world’s largest shovel/And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land/Well they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken/Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.”

John Prine was writing about his parents’ home in western Kentucky, not Niyamgiri Mountain in eastern India, but I couldn’t help but hear the echo of these four-decade-old lyrics as I thought about the struggle of the Dongria Kondh, around whom a global protest movement has grown to stop the digging of an open-pit bauxite mine in the middle of their land.

Maybe it seems odd to link Appalachia and tribal India, but I do so intentionally because it’s the same planet, the same phenomenon of progress, the same devastation of traditional life tied to place. 

Did mining and oil drilling trigger the Haiti earthquake?

By Ezili Danto
OpenSalon

Did the mining of Haiti’s riches since 2004 GW Bush regime change cause the earthquake? Listen to Ezili Dantò on mining Haiti’s riches and concern for environmental degradation by the foreign companies. (Read the transcript with reference links.)

“The idea that human activity can cause seismic activity is widely accepted in the scientific community …the connection between oil production and earthquakes dates back to at least the 1920s, when geologists in South Texas noted faulting near the Goose Creek oil field…A 1967 human-triggered earthquake in western India linked to the Koyna Dam registered a 7.0 earthquake.”

Since the earthquake, I’ve had occasion to ponder, like many others, about what may have caused this heretofore-unknown natural disaster in Haiti? 

Genocide for Land Grab: News from Survival Tribes

By Survival International

News from around the globe on resistance to the New World Order, as multinational corporations use deadly force to seize land for resource extraction.