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
Tag: Union Carbide
Recent rally against Monsanto and a little not-so-very-recent
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
Failed Musicians, Earning Potential and Tort Reform
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
Would you sell your kid for 253 dollars?
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
There 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.