Tag Archives: Union Carbide

What percentage of a partially eaten donut would YOU bet…

Leave a reply

That the chemical spill which has currently gotten Monument evacuated… is going to be neatly and safely taken care of and that you’re not going to be in any danger from it?
Because the Chemical Industry, especially those divisions most closely tied to the Military, are betting a hundred percent of Your Ass that if they have a Chernobyl or Fukushima or Bhopal or Texas City happen say, in Downtown Colorado Springs, they’ll be able to cover it up as neatly as they have their other little boo-boos.
What’s that? Texas City? Oh, yeah. Not only were they experiencing a chemical spill, and arresting people for taking pictures, draining the equivalent of the weeks worth of water used in Texas City, Galveston Co Texas in sheer liquid volume of volatile petrochemicals. Volatile means they react with other chemicals very quickly, sometimes explosively. The volatility of some, like Raid and Black Flag insectides, is such that they even kill (most of) the roaches in any given area. Oh, that volatile. This was done by BP at the same time their little boo-boo Earth Day present from last year was going full blast. Still is, but reporting on the damage is being covered up like cat droppings in the litter box. On the scene police brutality to keep nosy citizens from seeing first hand what’s killing them, to a neat little YouTube channel where soothing music and deep mellow voices assure us that all is well, no need to worry, the Smart People are working on it, nothing to see here, citizen, all is Hell…

But that’s not the boo-boo I’m talking about. Some people still think about that and are still trying to get answers and get those answers to US.

No, children, The Boo-Boo in question was a long time ago. End of World War 2 long time.
A cargo ship being loaded at Texas City (Oh, did I mention also that that volatile chemical leak went directly to the Gulf too? No? Bad Me, very Naughty)
But there was a huge stack of fertilizer on the pier. The fertilizer is Ammonia Nitrate.
One of the most nitrogen rich naturally occuring chemicals. Nitrogen increases volatility as well. Plants need nitrogen in the soil to metabolize other chemicals like Oxygen, Water, carbon dioxide, sugars, starches, fiber and proteins. One way to increase nitrogen is to use legume crops on a rotation basis, beans, peas, peanuts, clover…
Another is to add Anhydrous Ammonia. Much like Ammonia Nitrate it has a higher percentage of its mass in Nitrogen. Difference being Ammonia Nitrate has one extra nitrogen atom in the molecule and Anhydrous has one less hydrogen atom than the ammonia you’re accustomed to using to clean your glass.
And then there’s Nitric Acid. Used in, among other things, production of fertilizer, refining metals, making Explosives ooooo…

Bet some of the smarter readers were wondering when I was going to bring it back to all that Ammonia Nitrate, just a’ sittin’ on the dock of the bay, in the very Hot Texas Sunshine, high explosive Ammonia Nitrate, just heating up…

Now, children, what do YOU think happened on that fateful day?

From Wikipedia:

The Texas City Disaster is the deadliest industrial accident in U.S. history. The incident took place on April 16, 1947, and began with a mid-morning fire on board the French-registered vessel SS Grandcamp which was docked in the Port of Texas City. The fire detonated approximately 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate[1] and the resulting chain reaction of fires and explosions killed at least 581 people.[2] These events also triggered the first ever class action lawsuit against the United States government, under the then-recently enacted Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), on behalf of 8,485 victims

Oh NO! Not the Class Action Lawsuit! OMG that paved the way for all those Indian peasants who were the survivors of the Bhopal chemical leak from a Union Carbide plant to Oppress the Poor, poor victimized by a lawsuit (where they had to pay an outrageous sum of less than three hundred dollars apiece for Dead Children) Corporate Sucks! Wicked, Bad, Naughty Tort Laws, assuming that People had the same right to petition the government for redress of grievances as the Corporation does!
And, to further PISS OFF the Tort Reform faction of the Tea Party, it was at a time when safety regulations were blatantly ignored.

Note the date, (of the Texas City disasters, both of them) April 16th. Let’s go to the Terrorist Wing of the TeaParty/Millitia/Minutemen Republicans. On April 19th 1995 Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and an unidentified Third Murderer detonated a truck full of Ammonia Nitrate mixed with diesel fuel in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City, aiming for the IRS and BATF offices. Which were virtually untouched.
What WAS “touched” were the buildings across the street, and the offices facing the explosion on either side. One of which was a Day Care Center.

WHY do Right Wing Terrorist Freaks hate American Children?

But they were loading the ship, not unloading. The Ammonia Nitrate had come down from Nebraska on a rail line very similar to the one that passes through both Downtown and Monument. Like the one where a chemical train made a boo-boo today in Monument and could just as easily have been Denver, or Pueblo, or El Paso Texas.
Accidents happen, sure. And the more you push your luck, the more times the accidents happen.
This one just happened to happen, at at time when Republican TeaBag Fanatics are screaming that they should be allowed to slash safety and environmental regulations even further, that they have a God-Given RIGHT to poison our water land and air, a RIGHT to risk and sometimes accomplish Killing us and our children, and that we, in contrast, have a Right To Shut the Hell Up About It. And we’d better not dare file a claim for compensation when they do it to us and our kids either. They are the Royal Corporations, Bow Before Them, O Ye Peasants!

Recent rally against Monsanto and a little not-so-very-recent

Leave a reply

At a recent rally in Downtown Colorado Springs… Mark made some good points about Monsanto. Here’s some more.
You remember, as do I, how exactly Monsanto got busted back in the late 70s with the Paraquat Pot?
Paraquat is one of their signature lines of “weed” killers, herbicides, such as Agent Orange and Roundup.
The company li(n)e is and was that there was no evidence that soldiers exposed directly to Agent Orange had (significantly) higher incidence of cancer than soldiers not exposed to it. Denial because they were being sued. Well, other herbicides they make, RoundUp and Paraquat, contain the same type of chemical, not the active ingredient, but a side-product of the chemical reactions to manufacture the “goodies”. A class of chemicals called Dioxins. Their harmful nature ranges from damn that’s freakin’ scary to OhMyGod we’ve kicked open the doors of Hell and those are esoteric chemical-talk terms. If you don’t recognise them then you’re not a chemist.
At the high end of the spectrum is where the product was burned. As in, soldiers usually on punishment detail raking up the dead plants and burning them.
Monsanto didn’t out themselves, nor did the Army. The DEA did instead, by publishing a warning that they had been spraying Paraquat JUST LIKE AGENT ORANGE and J.L.A.O, if you inhaled the burning product it could cause you to die and cited an Army Agent Orange study. The one the Army and Monsanto and Dow and Dupont were denying ever existed. So, the Army stopped using Agent Orange. Big deal, they still use the other chemicals that have that same nasty little add-on, the part they can’t get rid of without destroying the goodies, the Dioxins.
Now how much would you pay? Monsanto and the U.S. (taxpayers) government paid a settlement in 1983 that equalled about a weeks worth of hospitalization for each veteran who was diagnosed before then. NONE for anybody diagnosed afterward and certainly none for the South VietNamese, Filipino, Thai or other allies who were also sprayed with the shit. They sprayed it around U.S. bases so the native vegetation wouldn’t be so overgrown that people could walk right up to the fence. They Still Do.
Then there’s the Monsanto and Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds connection, tobacco bred to be resistant to A.O. or more specifically, RoundUp.

Yep, there was a video article on the NOVA television program in 1990 describing Genetically Modified Organisms and of course, Monsanto was the star of the show. One of their projects was with Big Tobacco growing successively more resistant plants. See, with the herbicides, they only work when the plant is above ground, sprouted.
After the cash crop, in this case tobacco, WHICH IS TYPICALLY USED BY LIGHTING IT ON FIRE and inhaling the toxic smoke, has sprouted, no more Agent Ora RoundUp. So they have to kill the weeds before the cash crop sprouts. Doesn’t, however, kill the seeds of the weeds like the farmer needs. But at the end of the show, there were tobacco plants being sprayed directly with RoundUp and living.
Tobacco is stupidly poisonous just by itself. What Monsanto isn’t telling anybody, you won’t see it in that warning label the Big Corporations like to whine and snivel about when they say how badly picked upon they are at the hands of liberal judges and juries waa waaa tort reform waa waa waaa had to pay a couple hundred bucks for every dead person in Bhopal waaa waaa waaa..

You won’t see that warning label saying “Warning: this product probably contains Dioxins from herbicide spraying”.
Monsanto was also doing something with Genetically Modified Organism potatoes. Who’s the biggest single market for potatoes? McDonalds. Think about that the next time you’re chewing those fries.
Go ahead and smoke you a ciggie afterwards, it’ll help you to not think about it.

Failed Musicians, Earning Potential and Tort Reform

Leave a reply

Charlie Manson, David Koresh… described as “failed musicians” because they played the guitar, and like the vast thundering herd of people who pick the git-fiddle they didn’t make a career of it.
Adolf Hitler, a “failed artist” even though, in the economic blight of inter-bellum Vienna, he actually DID make a modest living selling painted postcards on the street. John Wilkes Boothe, said to be a “Failed actor” by some who had never trod the boards.
Because their names are vilified and the demonization of their memory has to be complete. .Something you’d practically have to be a Documentary Junkie to notice, maybe after a marathon of History Channel BioPics.. Fairly subtle. Insidious even.
What’s almost but not quite as subtle as a Taser to the testicles or a sledgehammer to the lower skull/first vertebra is the demonization of working class people throughout the world in Tort.
The civil liability sections of law.
In civil court, “earning potential” is taken seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it proves the LIE of the Capitalist Dream which is foisted onto the workers, that if we work hard and diligently, do a good job putting money into the pockets of our Wealthy Masters, we, too, could have a chance of acquiring Wealth.
Compare that BULLSHIT with the descriptions of the Workers of Bhopal, India and their children by the Captains of Industry and their Weasel Lawyers.

In the “Unlimited potential for success” of the Free Market, the children of the poorest and most vilified of the working class, were valued at a couple hundred dollars.
Apiece. Per HUMAN life. Would you sell your childs life for that?
This is about as condescending as if the CEO of Union Carbide were visiting a bordello in the slums, his limousine runs over a child and he tosses a $100 bill out the window, rolls up the window and imperiously waves his driver to proceed, with a “Home, James!” type of dismissive command gesture.

This is also the way that the people of the Gulf Coast, even employees of British Petroleum, are being treated in back to back “incidents”.
Not just the Oil “spill” that cost 11 human beings (ahem… that’s by BP count and employees who tell a different tale than BP front office do, are punished….) immediately and God alone knows how many to follow.

There’s also a chemical “leak” that was described by later censured then fired BP employees as “like a fire hose” in Texas City. Tort Reform advocates have done their job well, and limited the final tally to less than a half billion dollars.

The state of Texas is suing BP for a huge release of toxic chemicals—including benzene, a carcinogen—that went on for 40 days at the company’s Texas City refinery last spring. The lawsuit could result in civil penalties reaching into the millions.

The release, as we have reported [1], started April 6, just two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, when a key piece of equipment failed and, rather than stopping production to fix it, BP attempted repairs [1] while operations were continuing — resulting in a release of 538,000 pounds of toxic chemicals.

Texas City by the way is between Houston and New Orleans on the Gulf Coast corridor, and it’s a hellaciously overcrowded area. If the final tally is less than a hundred million, that’s less than fifty bucks apiece for those affected by it. Would you sell YOUR life or that of your child for that?

“Tort Reform” advocates like FOX Noose Nutwerx and Rush Limbaugh are telling us we’re being a bunch of meanies, picking on those poor, underprivileged Oil Company Big Pigs and the investors who made their fortune destroying the Earth.

Like their business partners Tidewater Oil, Halliburton, Union Carbide, Monsanto, Blackwater (aka “Murderers for Hire, Inc.”) they’re riding high on a wave of Tort Reform giving them in many cases absolute immunity from prosecution for whatever violent crimes (rape, murder, theft by murder) they choose to commit but ABSOLUTE immunity from their actions which result in deaths by the thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions…

Monsanto made a deal in 1983, after more than a decade of denying that their product Agent Orange actually caused cancer and liver disease and general Systemic Failure in the bodies of the victims, the deal was for less than a hundred thousand for each Serviceman who was diagnosed with Agent Orange before that date.. and absolutely NONE for the CIVILIAN citizens of VietNam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Guam… (the shit was loaded onto the planes partly at Anderson AFB on Guam) or for that matter any Military personnel of ANY nation or civilian employee of Monsanto diagnosed AFTER that date.

We’re approaching another deal where British Petroleum will simply skate away from their liability for their Corporate Wrongdoing.

After all, their victims are merely Peasants, and didn’t have nearly the Earning Potential as their Wealthy Masters anyway.

Would you sell your kid for 253 dollars?

1 Reply

That’s what the people of Bhopal India were told to do when the “compensation” was announced 24 years ago. That’s after 2 years of LawyerFights over Limited Liability and “Tort Reform”. The Reaganites including Ron Paul, the Dad-part of the Paul and Paul Father-son Hate Team, rather than celebrate the judgment of 12,400 rupees per each dead Indian, bitched and whined that it was Too Much.

The BAIL for the Guilty Parties, or at least the lower level Guilty parties, nine in all, one deceased and one “hiding” in a Country Club gated community on Long Island, was 25,000 rupees apiece. $502. For 25,000 counts of Murder. That’s three times the “official” count. The official count was 8000 initially and another 9000 since.
If Union Carbide wants to call that libel or slander, it would be up to them to prove it.

The Union Carbide Corporation, the truly guilty party, is not required to meet the responsibilities of a Real Human Citizen even though they have more “rights” than a real human citizen. Ron and Rand Paul and all the other Reaganite Corporate Sucks say Amen.

I was charged with possession of a knife that doesn’t fold up in Texas once, the bail for that was $800. The actual BOND for it was $2000. You know, that makes me feel especially hard core when my bond for merely carrying a knife was 4 times that for 25,000 counts of Capital Murder.

Incidentally, the BBC report only counts the initially killed, not those who have died subsequently. The clinic that Union Carbide opened to “treat the injured” closed about 12 years ago. The residues of that explosion and all the accumulated Union Carbide waste chemicals over the decades are still killing people. Sans the $253 payout per dead kid.

Maybe the criminals at British Petroleum will receive a stiffer payment. It would be next to impossible for the punishment to be lighter than that.
No, Really. Look up “impossible” in the dictionary and right next to it will be a picture of somebody getting a lighter slap on the wrist for a heinous crime.

But, after all, the economic victims of BP are (for now) mostly American citizens, a large part of them White and there’s even the damage to some of the Playground Beaches where the richest like to go, when their Very Important Jobs holding down their office chairs, keeping them from drifting off into space, become too wearisome and they need a break.

I figure one oil stained beach on a Private Island will fetch more in damages than 25,000 dead Indians.

Diane Wilson of Texas

Leave a reply

Diane WilsonThere is so much senselessness and vacuity all around us in the United States, that it is utterly refreshing to know here actually are some good people living in our country. Diane Wilson is one of those people.
Check out her blog at diane4justice.

And now that your interest in this remarkable woman is piqued, check out more about her work at the website of the I N T E R N A T I O N A L C A M P A I G N F O R J U S T I C E I N B H O P A L She makes one proud to be a Texan, unlike many another Texans out there, who plain as hellfire sure don’t.