At the end of the protest of the Keystone XL Pipeline, I’m seeing my comrades willing to get arrested by blocking the entrance into the Justice Department office at 1 Market Plaza. That’s about 25 feet from the building where the corporate citizenship concept was created.
The XL Pipeline will start at Alberta, Canada through indigenous territories down into the US through every indigenous sacred site they could ruin. It ends in a poverty-stricken area in Texas, where the oil transported by the pipeline will be created for third world countries that’s too polluted for the US or Canada to use. The oil is so thick that they need to use steam to push the oil through the pipeline, where the oil is then sent to a cracking tower that takes the tar soil sands, and heats it up to a high temperature. The oil will be constantly steamed and will poison the area from the cracking facility. The cracking towers are about 200-300 feet tall.
The protest was on Hawthorn St in SF. The nearby condos, which were vacant for years, are now being filled with by a phone company building that I will write about in a future story. The EPA (US Environmental Protection Agency) government building’s entrance is blocked by signs with the usual environmental slogans. The indigenous negotiators came out as well as one member of the EPA. The EPA negotiator said absolutely nothing of value for five minutes. He mainly gave a “thank you very much, we’re doing the best we can” empty speech. Then more local spokesmen came out; some of them from the Bayview where they’re shoving people of color and low-income people to. This poverty scholar knows of at least one nuclear dump that they’re placing the people on in Bayview. Then another spokesman talked about Richmond, CA where the standard oil refinery is, better known as Chevron. It’s been polluting the area for the past 40 years. They use local students to clean up the mess, not only hurting and harming the people, they are hurting and harming the students by giving them brain damage by cleaning up the mess and not hiring a professional clean up crew, said the spokesman. Then they discussed the expansion in Arizona of the largest nuclear waste facility on the west side of the US, where they will expand it onto an indigenous reservation. The backdrop for the speakers was a painting of the earth with the background of Turtle Island, the Americas, and a blue background that has “Green Earth” written across it.
We marched down Hawthorn St to Howard St up 2nd to Market to Front St past the standard oil headquarters, that a new villain had come in, AKA US Bank, that holds a lot of people’s foreclosed property. Past the Federal Reserve at the 1 Market Plaza, groups of people stood behind the entrances of the plaza, facing the street and someone spoke out. As I said before, the building is next to the old southern pacific station, where the term “corporate citizen” was formed with a lawsuit, which makes a corporation a citizen, with higher rights than an actual human being. The corporate companies will take this to a higher level known as the NAFTA Commission. In California, when we took lead out of Lake Tahoe, the state of California lost a 2 billion dollar lawsuit against an oil company because of that. This is only phase 1.
Your reporter, Bruce Allison. Thank you for reading my piece.