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Ohio residents shut down fracking waste storage facility

New Matamoras OH – Ohio residents and allies from numerous environmental groups including Earth First! have disrupted operations at Greenhunter Water's hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” waste storage site along the Ohio River in Washington County. Nate Ebert, a 33-year-old Athens County resident and member of Appalachia Resist!, ascended a 30 foot pole anchored to a brine truck in the process of unloading frack waste, preventing all trucks carrying frack waste from entering the site.

Over one hundred supporters gathered at the facility, protesting Greenhunter’s plans to increase capacity for toxic frack waste dumping in Ohio. Greenhunter is seeking approval from the Coast Guard to ship frack waste across the Ohio River via barge at a rate of up to half a million gallons per load. The Ohio River is a drinking source for more than 5 million people, including residents of Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Test results from multiple frack waste samples reveal high levels of benzene, toluene, arsenic, barium, and radium, among other carcinogenic and radioactive chemicals.

According to NBCi.com, at least 10 people were arrested.

Guns, not the Klan, are the real threat

Chicago suffers unbearable levels of gun violence, yet the victims remain largely silent. They travel from funeral home to graveyard, rather than march from church to gun shop. The president is applauded when he calls for action on gun violence, but before his plane leaves the tarmac, more are shot, including even the sister of one of the young children standing behind him during his address.

If we are to free ourselves of this terror, we will have to change our minds.

Victims of tyranny have three options. They can adjust, they can resent but turn anger inward, or they can fight back.

Abbottabad-land

Diseased racist voting system needs a cure

The February 18, 2013 front page of the New York Times proclaimed “Voting Rights Act is Challenged as Cure the South Outgrown.” In reality, the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 is needed now, nationally, more than ever.

The new Jim Crow, same as the old Jim Crow, has contaminated virtually every state in the Union. The turning point that allowed the racist contagion to spread began with the outbreak in Florida in the year 2000. BBC reporter and investigative journalist Greg Palast has documented and detailed the deliberate targeting of Democratic voters, a majority of them black, that paved the way for George W. Bush’s theft of the 2000 presidential election.

Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore hastened the spreading of the undemocratic virus by refusing to let members of the Black Caucus speak during the counting of electoral votes in January 2001. It spread to Ohio where then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell became the Typhoid Mary of disenfranchisement.

Hell cruise

The Foodopoly: Too big to eat

We've come to understand that the banks are too big to fail, too big to take to trial, too big not to let them write our public policy, too big not to reward them for ruining our economy.

Why have we come to understand that?

We've been told it by a mega media cartel that has itself been deemed too big to fail, too big not to subsidize with our airwaves, too big not to reward with political ads buying back our airwaves in little bits and pieces.

Speaking of which, the buying of elections is moving rapidly in the direction of monopoly ownership itself.

The concentration of wealth and power in the United States over the past half century is not a story of ineluctable forces of technology or progress. It's a story of orchestrated corruption. Some of its key players were born after it had begun. One of them, the man who was president when some of the worst of the deregulatory legislation was passed, was of course Bill Clinton -- who ended welfare as we knew it and recreated it as we wish no one had ever imagined it. Giant corporations and banks are feeding at the public trough.

Letter from a drone protester's jail

Dear Friends,
Greetings from the Federal Prison Camp in Yankton, South Dakota! As of this writing, I am two months into a six month sentence imposed due to my protest of war crimes committed by remote control from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri against the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Betsy accompanied me here to Yankton on November 29, and that evening the Emmaus House Catholic Worker community, Beth Preheim, Michael Sprong and Dagmar Hoxie, hosted an evening of music, good food and good company to see me off. Activists from around the Midwest attended, including some sisters from the Benedictine monastery here.

In the morning after a great breakfast and Gospel prayer, Betsy and Dagmar and Michael, along with Renee Espeland and Elton Davis, Catholic Workers from Des Moines, and Jerry Ebner, a Catholic Worker from Omaha, walked a “last mile” with me to the gate of the prison where I expect to remain until the end of May.

Cambodia: Former King Sihanouk's war of words survive his cremation

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- Former king Norodom Sihanouk was cremated on February 4, but the flames could not destroy the legacy of his words, describing how he transported weapons to Vietnam's communists to kill Americans, and promising guns and ammunition to Cambodians to avenge the coup which toppled him.

Crowned by the Nazi-backed Vichy French regime in 1941, Sihanouk's most violent quotes were uttered in the early 1970s when he committed what critics say were his bloodiest mistakes.

Sihanouk's words give voice to his revenge-filled, contradictory personality as one of Asia's last powerful monarchs.

The U.S. Pentagon and politicians who "secretly" began bombing Cambodia in 1969 for five years -- during Washington's spiraling Vietnam War -- can hear Sihanouk ordering his military to allow deadly assistance to communist-nationalist Viet Cong guerrillas who eventually chased U.S. forces out of Vietnam.

"My own militant support for the Viet Cong was...no mere gesture," Sihanouk said.

Sierra Club and Franklin County reach agreement on keeping sewage out of waterways

After more than a year of negotiations, the Sierra Club and Franklin County have reached an agreement to settle the Club’s claims that Franklin County is violating the federal Clean Water Act.

In June of 2011, the Sierra Club filed a sixty-day notice of intent to sue Franklin County and seventeen townships in federal court for illegal discharges from private sewage systems within Franklin County. Failing septic tanks and aerators are responsible for this contamination. The discharges have been contaminating Franklin County waterways with human and other waste, posing an environmental and public health threat.

The Sierra Club believes the agreed upon measures will form an important beginning in improving the health of Franklin County’s waterways and its residents. Although this settlement won’t completely eliminate the problem of contamination from home sewage treatment systems, it is certainly an improvement and will go a long way toward establishing a county program to eliminate sewage pollution from our waterways.

An Incubator for Peace

You’re young and prone to trouble. You get triggered quickly. Someone tells you that you’ve screwed up and you’re about to lash back. Then, instead, you think:

1. Look at the other person.

2. Say “OK.”

3. Stay calm.

This is what you do. And nothing happens, except that the moment passes and life goes on. Got it?

This column is another dispatch from Chicago, murder capital of America. How many of the murders — 506 of them last year — were committed by people who had no grasp of this particular social skill (accepting criticism or a consequence), or any of the dozen or so others tacked to the bulletin board in the peace room at Fenger High School?

These skills, which address an array of very basic life situations — e.g., getting no for an answer, greeting others, getting the teacher’s attention, disagreeing appropriately, making an apology, accepting compliments, asking for help and many more — come from the Father Flanagan Boys Town Classroom Social Skills list. The instructions are simple and precise and without moralizing, the equivalent of “lather, rinse, repeat.”

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