Submission
Some graffiti against the Cellicon Valley development for those Sexy Elves and Fairies out there in the Sex Forest. Let’s make the space more fun and cute while we defend the land. đ Fuck Cellicon Valley! Developers and Gentrifiers Get The Fuck Out!
from Dreaming Freedom, Practicing Abolition
When Ruthie Wilson Gilmore and I sat down for a conversation, we spoke about how the PIC not only exploits the labor of imprisoned folx (mainly via reproductive labor of the prison), but also extracts value from us. I came to this conclusion because I knew that our labor wasnât the only or even major source of value the PIC was after. The PIC extracts our lives, our life time. Ruthie helped me to see each person as a territory that the PIC extracts value from via a time-space hole that imprisonment creates. Incarceration creates a mechanism through which money/capital can flow through a person and into the pockets of the PIC. This all sounds abstract. I know. But since coming to SCI Dallas, I clearly and concretely see how extraction, not exploitation, is the big game the PIC is using. And we need to get hip.
I am housed on a Veterans Service Unit (VSU). This is one of four blocks within the PA DOC prisons system that partners with the Veterans Services Administration (state and federal). Currently imprisoned people who have served in the military, no matter how they were discharged, are eligible for the services on these blocks. Most of these people donât work. But they still provide value to the PA DOC/PIC. How? Programming.
The PA DOC receives state, federal and private funds for creating these types of programs and keeping them filled. Almost every prison in PA has a therapeutic community (TC) for drug/alcohol treatment. Money has been flowing to the PIC via imprisoned people in these programs for decades. But now, DOCs are getting hip and creating more programs (usually centering on mental health) in order to extract more value from imprisoned people. We donât need to work to be of value to the PIC. Just being here and being âdiagnosedâ by their staff makes extraction possible and valuable.
PA has created an alphabet of solitary under the mental health programming name. Thousands of people are in these programs and capital/money is flowing through them and into the PIC. These funds could be and should be used to provide non-coercive, community based services. But the PIC is gobbling up more and more of them. Mental health, substance and alcohol treatment, reentry services, elder care programming is ramping up behind the walls. We donât have to work. All we have to do is be imprisoned and we become of value.
Some of us are experiencing exploitation. We donât program, but we work. Most imprisoned folx donât work but those of us who do are being exploited. These places couldnât run without us. But many more people are experiencing extraction. Remember, many programs are mandated for parole purposes. Working isnât. Some of us experience both. And what is even more disturbing is that many of these new programs use the labor of imprisoned folx to succeed. On my block, there is a program almost everyday. Only once a week does a DOC employee run the groups! Every other group is run by a DOC trained imprisoned person. All sign ups and paperwork too! The staff donât even have to show up!
Extraction is going to become the dominate game. With fewer jobs available (most of us didnât work anyway) and less out of cell time since COVID, programming is the way to create value and keep imprisoned folx running. And what makes it more sickening is that many imprisoned people are fooled into thinking these programs are the way to success, happiness, peace and safety.
***
These observations help me to see extraction as the major mechanism of the PIC. While this is more easily seen and accepted outside the walls, exploitation has been the major topic behind the walls. Even though most people donât work in here. And work is becoming less important. They are using fewer people to work. And they are giving us less hours. A shift in the kitchen used to be 6-8 hours. Now itâs 4-6 hours. It is a rare person who gets paid for an 8-hour shift.
People out there see how extractive the PIC is. Offender-funded punishments are common. Remember Ferguson? What do we think e-incarceration is all about? But people donât realize extraction is happening in here too. And it is taking money, programs and services from our communities and sending them through imprisoned people and into the pockets of those vested in the PIC.
Besides capital, legitimacy is being bestowed upon the PIC. It continues to offer itself as the âsolutionâ to social problems. State, federal and private funds are flowing into prisons. These death making spaces are passing themselves off as life enhancing. Besides state and federal money, I have witnessed nonprofits like LOOP get into the game, partnering with the DOCs in a number of states to provide programming, often dependent on imprisoned peopleâs labor.
We have to talk more about the role of extraction in all of this.
Always,
Stevie
from It’s Going Down
[This post only contains information relevant to Philadelphia and the surrounding area, to read the entire article follow the above link.]
Download pamphlet: Print â Tabloid
Download action poster:Â Print â Tabloid [For a Risograph]
A banner dropped in Eugene, OR this past February read âAgainst Cop City and Its World.â These words have come to echo throughout Atlanta and across Turtle Island, indicating that the struggle extends far beyond the construction of this particular police facility. But what exactly is âthe worldâ of Cop City?
One interpretation has to do with the strategy of secondary and tertiary targeting. This past winter, night owls across the country have set their sights beyond the state officials behind the Cop City project, focusing instead on the contractors hired to build it and the banks and corporations funding it. This is a practical approach to stopping this specific project â sabotaging the offices of contractors like Atlas and Brasfield & Gorrie is intended to put pressure on them to drop their contract with Atlanta, which would make it harder for the city to move forward with its plans.
Many of the communiques accompanying the actions weâve seen this season state this as their goal. A claim for an action against an Atlas office in Detroit included the warning, âAtlas, until you stop supporting Cop City, there will be no safe corner for you on Turtle Island.â A communique out of Indiana writes that all executives and property of Atlas should be considered legitimate targets âuntil Atlas publicly announces that it will no longer work on the project.â
Additional communiques from this winterâs solidarity actions with Atlanta â to our knowledge, only a handful of claimed actions took place that were not Atlanta-related â clarify their opposition not just to Cop City but to the world that needs it. In many cases, they do this by drawing connections in writing to additional struggles that the authors see as interconnected. In other cases, this projectuality that aims to destroy both Cop City and the world that makes it possible is embodied in the choice of target. Many of this winterâs actions expanded from the more âpreciseâ choice of targets like Atlas offices and into the wider world of exploitation and domination, which, after all, would likely just find a replacement for Atlas elsewhere if the contract was dropped. This is not to minimize the significance of actions against contractors, but rather to consider some critical questions being raised and experimented with through action, a powerful and beautiful dynamic that we were happy to see growing this winter.
Night owls in the Ozarks sabotaged âfour forest-killing machines,â writing that their action was taken in solidarity with âforests under siege everywhereâ as well as with the Atlanta forest. This thought was echoed later by Portland anarchists, who similarly took up a solidarity action that burned a machine unrelated to the specific contractors of Cop City. Other actions, like ones in Durham and Oakland, were dedicated to Tortiguita, who was murdered in the Atlanta forest in January, as well as to Tyre Nichols and others recently executed by the police.
Anarchists in Denver remind us that that the violence of US-based private extraction companies extends beyond US colonial borders, acknowledging âthe murder of three land defenders in Honduras since the beginning of the year.â In another communique, Brooklyn anarchists included shoutouts to âthe struggles in Latin America, the Palestinian struggle and the struggles against exploitation the world overâ alongside their solidarity with Atlanta.
But there are also ways in which these struggles, regions, and systems of oppression are materially and logistically interconnected. A handful of actions in solidarity with Stop Cop City have turned their focus to this aspect of Cop Cityâs world. In a communique about an action against Norfolk Southern, three weeks after the catastrophic derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, anarchists in Philly wrote that they chose this target not only because NS is itself a funder of Cop City, but because âlarge shipping companies like NS are the circulatory system of industrial colonialism.â The authors illustrate this by discussing how rail and other logistics provide the means through which industrial agriculturists move their soy and corn, loggers get lumber to and from mills, and Amazon gets shipping containers from ships to distribution centers. âPerhaps NS funds cop city because they understand both how crucial they are in building a dead world and exactly how vulnerable they are.âÂ
Thereâs been a lot of talk of winning with regard to the fight in the forest, but in a world whose brutal domination and exploitation extends so much further than one police facility in one city, what exactly constitutes a victory? If Brasfield & Gorrie drop the contract, is it still a win if a new company then gets hired to do the same thing? If this police training facility is never built in Atlanta, but is built somewhere else instead, should we call that winning? What exactly are actions accomplishing if their perspective is confined to winning a campaign goal?
Any particular struggle against a specific manifestation of domination will have its ebbs and flows â triumphant moments, waves of repression, and responses to that repression. Moments of success and failure happen throughout a particular struggle, not merely at the end of it. Memories of past struggles can be used as a weapon, too, whether to avenge our fallen comrades or to send a kind of smoke signal that the will to rebel endures.
Projectuality is a word the insurrectionary anarchist tradition uses to describe the longterm and contextual dimensions of the projects that rebels take up, and how we make sure these projects take us to, and help us create, the places we want to go. This often includes fighting against a particular project the state is proposing, but is not confined to responding to the initiatives of those in power.
Our conception of victory and defeat must similarly extend beyond the immediate goal. For one thing, to say that nothing is truly a victory while capitalism is still intact is not just an ideological flourish, but quite literal. It is a commitment to continue fighting against all forms of domination and to resist recuperation at any cost. From resource extraction projects to new prison construction, in the rare cases in which we do succeed in stopping a particular thing from happening, the state and capital tend to simply shuffle things around until they get what they needed from that project through other means. When the state is just giving us the stick, it can be difficult to remember that the carrot is just as dangerous.
For examples of how to move through these peaks and valleys, we can look to those who have kept fighting long after a particular phase of the struggle has ended. In a recent communique in solidarity with Tortiguita, comrades resisting a nuclear waste storage project in Bure (France) wrote:
âWe have taken the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the evacuation of the forest [in Bure] to show that we have neither forgotten nor forgiven what they did. And that they are mistaken if they think they have hunted us and defeated us forever.â
In torching an ANDRA transmission pylon near Bure, the writers aimed not specifically at the corporation (CIGEO) that drove the police to evict the forest occupation, but rather âdeliberately place[d] our action in the context of a series of attacks carried out last year against measuring stations intended to collect geological, hydrological and meteorological data.â This choice of target comes from observing that âthese structures are of paramount strategic importance in the current development phase of the project given that the data collected, for example for environmental impact studies, alone constitute a necessary basis in the creation authorization procedures. Thus, destroying them, putting them out of service, are and will inevitably be a thorn in the side of the âsmooth running of the CIGEO project.’â
âAnd its worldâ is adopted from the slogan accompanying the struggle to halt the airport slated for development in Notre-des-Landes, France, this past decade. Proponents of the ZAD (âzone to defendâ) saw the horizon of victory squashed there after a long, brutal, and dedicated fight. After the state announced that they were no longer planning to build the airport, the fixation among certain participants in the struggle on securing their hold on this particular piece of land led them to effectively recuperate their own struggle. The long and violently repressed fight against another airport in Atenco, Mexico State ended when the current progressive president AMLO was elected. He was able to claim the victory of cancelling the contentious project in the name of the popular struggle, carrying out mediatized âconsultationsâ with the affected communities, and then proceeded to build the airport elsewhere. His government has proceeded to use the support garnered from this strategic concession to pave the way for further industrialization and militarization across the country.
Both of these struggles cost the state and the corporations behind the projects dearly, and both live on in the multitudes of actions that took place against the world that made the proposed airports possible. The claims of âvictoryâ are attempts to rewrite these stories of struggle, and the heavy costs suffered by the rebels, as part of the necessary democratic process of checks and balances within the power structure. From unions to politicians to social movement leaders, opportunists everywhere seek to pacify our intransigent struggles with âwinning strategiesâ.
Specific struggles are part of the fight against domination, but the whole cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts â this fight is also long, intergenerational, and cyclical. Out of the endless daily miseries of this world, choosing where to draw lines in the sand enables rebellious energy to coalesce and build on itself. The most significant struggles are ones that are approached not with an expectation of âwinning,â but rather with an eye towards how to spread practices of lived anarchy and struggle, how to build capacity as individuals and networks, and what can be taken from this struggle into the next. The words âCop City will never be builtâ evokes a powerful and transformative commitment to fight to the end, to refuse surrender. The fact that there is no end, that the fight against domination cannot be reduced to a single target, but is a tension that must be created and maintained, doesnât make this specific fight any less important.
The only way to really do away with the world of Cop City is through profound revolutionary upheaval, an insurrectional process that goes so far that normalcy canât return. The fight to defend the Atlanta forest has disrupted the social peace that those in power reimposed following the 2020 uprisings for Black lives and against the police. The combative struggle against Cop City lays the social groundwork for insurrection, spreads indomitable practices and ideas, and provides anarchists with the experiences of autonomous self-organization that will be needed to decisively intervene when widespread social revolt comes knocking.
Along these lines, the epic mass action on March 5th during the Week of Action in Atlanta was in itself a major milestone. That a combative crowd was able to force police out of their own outpost and then burn it down in front of them in broad daylight â unprecedented in the US as far as we know â potentially opens up vast new fields of action for those with the courage and ability to pursue them.
The publication Storm Warningsâ 2018 essay âWithout Victory, Nor Defeatâ argues that the logic of victory and defeat comes from politics, i.e. activities that distribute power relations and status among individuals. Anarchy, the beautiful idea, abjures the realm of politics and proposes instead to live and fight in a state of tension towards freedom and the destruction of power relations. The only defeat is submission, resigning ourselves to the world of policing, Cop City or no; and as all those who put their freedom on the line showed us this winter, that seems unlikely to ever happen.
âContrary to cats, we indeed only have one life, and we dare to say that it is during this life â the only one we have â what matters is to fight, to live that tension towards the destruction of authority. Itâs by moving, moving on the path we have chosen, that we live up to ourselves, that we become what we are. It is the quality that bursts into our life, the quality of actions and ideas that go hand in hand. Victory or defeat have no place here, only persisting or abandoning, perseverance or resignation, passionate love and hate or obliteration to politics.â
1/21: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
A small group broke off from a vigil for Tortuguita and threw up barricades and graffiti before smashing a realty office. âNeither innocent nor guilty, neither terrorists nor protesters, simply anarchists!â
2/12: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
A vandalized Comcast fiber optic cable provoked a major outage during the Super Bowl.
2/28: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The railway mainline belonging to the Norfolk Southern company was sabotaged with copper wire, which trips the signal and potentially stops traffic until the wire is located. âWith love for Tort, and infinite hostility for cops who killed them.â
3/18: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Bleach was poured into the tank of a âmonster of steel and rubberâ by Tortuguita Revenge Gang.
If you come across existing articles from mainstream media youâd like to see included in our next action briefs, or have feedback on the column, weâd love to hear from you at nightowls [at] riseup [dot] net. Please do not send us your communiques or any actions you are personally taking responsibility for â send these instead to one of the counter-info projects that publish claims, some of which are listed here.
Distribution of Night Owls is decentralizedâdonât forget to print the column, bring it to infoshops, drop it in newspaper boxes, or just pass it to your friends.
from Iffy Books
On Tuesday, April 11th at 6 p.m. weâre writing letters to ATL forest defenders, in solidarity with the ATL Week of Resiliency. See you there!
from Twitter
from Viscera
Join us Sunday, April 16th from 1-3 in Clark Park near the chess tables for our next anarchist reading discussion! Weâll be reading some excerpts from Jacques Ellulâs The Technological Society!
Technique must reduce man to a technical animal, the king of the slaves of technique. Human caprice crumbles before this necessity; there can be no human autonomy in the face of technical autonomy. The individual must be fashioned by techniques, either negatively (by the techniques of understanding man) or positively (by the adaptation of man to the technical framework), in order to wipe out the blots his personal determination introduces into the perfect design of the organization.
Weâll be reading three sections of Chapter One (Machines and Technique, Science and Technique and Organization and Technique) and a section of Chapter Two (The Autonomy of Technique). Find the readings after the links!
Bread & Puppet Theater celebrates its 60th year with a tour to cities and towns across the US Northeast, presenting the companyâs latest show: Inflammatory Earthling Rant (with help from Kropotkin).
https://breadandpuppet.org/tour-schedule
Earthlings are now aflame and consequently need inflammatory rants, directed against the arsonist: Western Civilization and its incompetent government. The habitual pragmatic communication jargon wonât do, so the ranters have to resort to the original language which was tasked to employ the spells, charms, and incantations needed to confront the disaster in order to instigate change â with help from Kropotkinâs Mutual Aid ideology.
After the show Bread & Puppet will serve its famous sourdough rye bread with aioli, and Bread & Puppetâs âCheap Artâ â books, posters, postcards, pamphlets and banners from the Bread & Puppet Press â will be for sale.
Show Length: Approximately 1 hour.
Tour Schedule
Saturday, April 1 â Glover, VT
Sunday, April 2 â Barre, VT
Tuesday, April 4 â Albany, NY
Wednesday, April 5 â Ithaca, NY
Thursday, April 6 & Friday, April 7 â Milton, PA
Saturday, April 8 â Kensington, MD
Monday, April 10 â Baltimore, MD
Tuesday, April 11 â Vernon, NJ
Wednesday, April 12 â New York, NY
Thursday, April 13 & Friday, April 14 â Hudson, NY
Saturday, April 15 & Sunday, April 16 â Philadelphia, PA
Tuesday, April 18 â Keane, NH
Wednesday, April 19 â Northampton, MA
Thursday, April 20 â Wakefield, RI
Friday, April 21 â Somerville, MA
Saturday, April 22 â Amherst, MA
Sunday, April 23 â Portland, ME
Philadelphia, PA
Saturday, April 15, 5pm & Sunday, April 16, 5pm
First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia
2125 Chestnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19103
$10-$25 suggested donation, no one turned away for lack of funds
No tickets necessary. Just bring cash for the hat.
https://philauu.org/
Book Bread and Puppet
If you are interested in booking Bread and Puppet at your venue or school, please email Paul at breadandpuppettour@gmail.com. We are eager to present shows and workshops with your community!
Submission
Paul Minton (aka Misk) is a neo-nazi and a snitch living in South Philly. He organizes with White Lives Matter and the Rise Above Movement.
Last week we drank John Zerzan’s cum, we dissolved our sense of symbolic thought and lost all restraint. We took a stroll in South Philly and went apeshit on Paulie’s car. Fuck that ugly White Lives Matter sticker. White lives Shatter! Oops…
Solidarity with Alfredo Cospito
Submission
from Its Going Down
[This post only contains information relevant to Philadelphia and the surrounding area, to read the entire article follow the above link.]
The San Francisco Bay View has published two recent works by Black Liberation prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, Women of the Party and Straight out of Memphis. Also, as this column was being put together, a judge ruled against a new trial for Mumia, despite new evidence.
Dwayne âBIMâ Staats of the Vaughn 17 has published a new statement, âNew Year, Same Fight.â
Everyone should support the defendants facing charges related to their alleged participation in the George Floyd uprising â this list of our imprisoned comrades needs to be getting shorter, not longer. See Uprising Support for more info, and check out the Antirepression PDX site for updates from Portland cases. The status of pre-trial defendants changes frequently, but to the best of our knowledge they currently include:
David Elmakayes 77782-066
FCI McKean
Federal Correctional Institution
P.O. Box 8000
Bradford, PA 16701
Birthdays
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Mumia is an award winning journalist and was one of the founders of the Black Panther Party chapter in Philadelphia, PA. He has struggled for justice and human rights for people of color since he was at least 14 years old; the age when he joined the Party. In December of 1982, Mumia, who moonlighted by driving a taxi, happened upon police who were beating his brother. During the melee, a police officer was shot and killed. Despite the fact that many people saw someone else shoot and then runaway from the scene, Mumia, in what could only be called a kangaroo court, was convicted and sentenced to death. During the summer of 1995, a death warrant was signed by Governor Tom Ridge, which sparked one of the most effective organizing efforts in defense of a political prisoner ever. Since that time, Mumia has had his death sentence overturned, but still has a life sentence with no opportunity for parole.
Pennsylvania uses Connect Network/GTL, so you can contact him online by going to connectnetwork.com, selecting âAdd a facilityâ, choosing âState: Pennsylvania, Facility: Pennsylvania Department of Correctionsâ, going into the âmessagingâ service, and then adding Mumia as a contact by searching his name or âAM8335â.
Birthday: April 24
Address:
Smart Communications/PA DOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM8335
SCI Mahanoy
Post Office Box 33028
St Petersburg, Florida 33733
Janiis Mathis
Pennsylvania uses Connect Network/GTL, so you can contact him online by going to connectnetwork.com, selecting âAdd a facilityâ, choosing âState: Pennsylvania, Facility: Pennsylvania Department of Correctionsâ, going into the âmessagingâ service, and then adding him as a contact by searching his name or âNU0423â.
Birthday: April 24
Address:
Janiis Mathis
SBI# 00492275
Sussex Correctional Institution
P.O. Box 500
Georgetown DE 19947
from Instagram
WATCH FOR CALLS TO ACTION On Wednesday, March 29th, a “deputy landlord-tenant officer” shot a woman in the head while carrying out an eviction. The officer in question is not a sworn law enforcement officer, and the property owner has an expired rental license. This horrific act of violence cannot go unacknowledged.WE ARE RIGHT TO BE FURIOUS ABOUT THAT Be angryand let them know you’re angry Landlord and Tenant Officer is an appointed position, currently occupied by Marisa Silberstein Shuter. Her office carries out some of eviction-related court orders. She is married to Municipal Court Judge David C. Shuter. David Shuter presides over eviction cases, and has a track record of ruling in favor of landlords. Landlords, in turn, pay Marisa Shuter a fee for the services she provides, such as armed private contractors who carry out the evictions. Marisa Shuter runs her office from suite #1645 at 123 S Broad Street in Philadelphia.she profits by depriving people of a place to live.The deputy landlord and tenant officers are not sworn law enforcement, but they are armed and carry court-issued identity cards. According to Shuter, âMost if not all of the deputies are either retired police officers or constables, or at least have extensive background in a security related field.”To summarize, court ordered evictions are performed by a small group of hired mercenaries, on behalf of the wife of a corrupt judge who orders those evictions in the first place. The entire scheme generates a lot of money for Marisa and David Shuter. This week one of these mercenaries shot a tenant.These people are willing to kill on behalf of landlords.
from Unicorn Riot
Philadelphia, PA â A warm and sunny Sunday afternoon was suddenly interrupted by an emergency phone alert: Philadelphia authorities warned the city water supply could be endangered and everyone should cease using drinking water after 2 p.m. Eastern time. Within minutes, people headed to grocery, corner and beer stores to grab water jugs and bottles. By 4 p.m. a couple stores Unicorn Riot checked were mostly picked over.
City authorities warned at a Sunday morning news conference that ethyl acrylate, methyl methacrylate and butyl acrylate spilled into Otter Creek from a pipe rupture at the Trinseo PLC chemical plant near the Delaware River late Friday night.
The Samuel S. Baxter Water Treatment Plant along the Delaware River has reportedly closed its intakes, and as of 5:30 p.m., city authorities said that the city water supply was still safe to drink. The Philadelphia Water Department advised it is safe to store tap water through Monday night, and advised residents should generally store about 2 days of water per household.
Alarmingly, butyl acrylate was also released in the recent East Palestine, Ohio chemical disaster (EPA files here in PDF, lists butyl and other acrylates in that disaster).
A map from the city this morning clarified that West Philadelphia is ostensibly not impacted, but almost all the city east of the Schuylkill River is affected. A report on Sunday stated the release is estimated at 8,100 gallons, a maximum of 12,000 gallons.
A release from the city at 3:30 p.m. said that the Baxter facility had been sealed off from the river so that water would be safe through the end of Monday until midnight. (The cityâs homepage for this incident is being regularly updated.)
âBased on updated hydraulic modeling and the latest sampling results and data, the Philadelphia Water Department is now confident tap water from the Baxter Drinking Water Treatment Plant will remain safe to drink and use at least through 11:59 p.m. Monday, March 27, 2023.
There is no need to buy water at this time. Customers can fill bottles or pitchers with tap water with no risk at this time. We will provide a media update at approximately 5 p.m. today, Sunday, March 26, 2023.
This updated time is based on the time it will take river water that entered the Baxter intakes early Sunday morning to move through treatment and water mains before reaching customers.
The water that is currently available to customers was treated before the spill reached Philadelphia and remains safe to drink and use for bathing, cooking, and washing.
The earlier advisory that customers receiving water from the Baxter Drinking Water Treatment Plant may choose to drink bottled water on March 26 was issued out of an abundance of caution. Testing has not shown the presence of water impacted by the spill in the Baxter system at this time.
We will continue to share updates as more information becomes available through sampling and monitoring of river conditions.
The Philadelphia Water Departmentâs Tidal Spill Model Tool is being used to track contaminant plume movement and inform when the chemical spill will no longer impact the Philadelphia drinking water intakes.â
Update Monday 3/27: The timeframe about safety advisories shifted again around 5 p.m. At a city press conference from the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) streamed at 5 p.m., officials extended the assurance on the Baxter plant to 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 28, 2023. Per a 1:30 p.m. release, the Baxter plant wasnât cleared earlier in the day beyond midnight. (Also in EspaĂąol, ä¸ć, íęľě¸)
âThe water that is currently available to customers has been treated and tested to confirm that it is safe to drink and use for bathing, cooking, and washing. ⌠Residents can sign up for free alerts from the City by texting READYPHILA to 888-777 or by visiting the ReadyPhiladelphia signup page.â
Update March 27, 1:30 p.m., water.phila.gov âCurrent guidance for residentsâ
A video clip aired on 6ABC included the disturbing claim that the East Palestine disaster slowed operations during this incident: âIt took us a little while to gather the resources as the Ohio incident is still draining a lot of resources regionally,â said Samuel Manka, a US Coast Guard marine science technician.
However ABC6 claimed that the chemicals did not overlap with the East Palestine disaster, although butyl acrylate has been released in both disasters. The report appears to have aired before city officials mentioned the chemicals at the Sunday morning news conference. As of 9:30 p.m. Eastern time the city incident webpage does not feature the names of the chemicals.
âBut unlike the toxins spilled in the Ohio chemical spill after the major train derailment, environmental experts are adamant that the material shouldnât be a concern to the public.
âItâs like the material you find in paint,â said [Senior Vice President of Manufacturing and Engineering at Trinseo, Tim Thomas]. âItâs your typical acrylic paint you have in your house, thatâs what really this material is, in a water base.’â
ABC6 Report, âPipe burst at Trinseo PLC releases hazardous material into Bucks County creek; Coast Guard responds,â March 26, 2023
In a Sunday press conference around 10:15 a.m. authorities explained the series of events. Just before midnight on Friday, the chemicals spilled through a storm drain, down Otter Creek into the Delaware River. The Trinseo plant in Bristol Township was the source, a spinoff company of Dow Chemical, which has a history in Pennsylvania for chemical contamination. Another Dow site in Bristol Township is the site of an EPA-directed cleanup.
An update in a live Zoom chat around 5:15 p.m. Sunday from the city indicated that the intake at the Baxter facility had been open as late as 5 a.m. that morning, and they will have to open the intake again late on Sunday, or risk damaging equipment if it runs dry.
An Emergency Operation Center was activated in-person on Sunday and âvirtuallyâ on Saturday according to emergency manager Dominick Mireles.
Ethyl acrylate is considered a health hazard. According to the National Library of Medicine, âThe International Agency for Research on Cancer stated, Overall evaluation, Ethyl acrylate is possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B).â Butyl acrylate is considered harmful in the workplace above 10 parts per million (10 ppm) per CDC.gov. Methyl methacrylate (MMA) is a âmonomer of acrylic resinâ which is not considered carcinogenic in normal circumstances, but can have negative health effects.
Aside from the East Palestine chemical fallout that spread from Ohio, Pennsylvania continues to suffer industrial disasters and controlled toxic release conditions. At least five people were killed and two still missing in West Reading, after a candy factory exploded on Friday evening. On Saturday, the Shell oil company announced that their major new ethane cracker plant was firing off an âelevated flare for a period of time.â The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection monitors the Shell Petrochemicals Complex in Beaver County, Potter Township, and the most recent violation notice was on February 13, 2023 (PDF). Beaver County is also one of the most impacted areas in the East Palestine disaster.
Submission
posted some food not bombs flyers around west philly the other week
from Philly ABC
Just us at Iffy Books (319 N. 11th St. #2I) at 6:30pm on Monday, March 27th to send letters of solidarity to Urooj Rahman, a human rights lawyer and activist arrested during the protests in response to the murder of George Floyd.
Urooj has spent her legal career protecting the rights of refugees around the world. She spent the last year representing low income New Yorkers facing eviction. She received both her undergraduate degree and law degree from Fordham University where she championed, and continues to champion, civil rights. During her time at Fordham Law, Urooj co-directed an LGBTQI human rights defender training in Cape Town, South Africa and contributed to a shadow report on behalf of Afro-Colombian women submitted to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (UNCERD).
During the 2020 protests in response to the murder of George Floyd, Urooj was arrested and then indicted on seven counts for causing damage by fire to an abandoned and previously vandalized police vehicle. After over a year of fighting a slew of federal charges that together carried a mandatory minimum of 45 years in prison and a possible life sentence, Urooj initially took a non-cooperating plea to one count of possession of an unregistered destructive device which carries a sentence up to 10 years. Prosecutors indicated that they would seek to apply a âterrorismâ sentencing enhancement against Urooj, which would make it much more likely that she would be sentenced to the full 10 years.
In June of 2022, after months of additional litigation and negotiation, Urooj entered a new non-cooperating plea deal to only one count of Conspiracy, which carries a maximum sentence of only 5 years, and prosecutor agreeing to recommend a sentence of 18 to 24 months. On November 18, 2022, Urooj was sentenced to 15 months in prison with two years of supervised release and over $30,000 in restitution. She was ordered to turn herself to begin her sentence on January 15, 2023.
Snacks and letter-writing supplies will be provided. If you cannot make the event, send Urooj some love at the address below. Note: Her name is Urooj but the BOP has her in the system as âUroo,â so for the time being it is probably best to address the envelope that way.
Uroo Rahman #83822-053
FDC Philadelphia
P.O. Box 562
Philadelphia, PA 19105
We will also send a birthday card to another political prisoner born in April: Mumia Abu-Jamal (the 24th).
from Making Worlds Books
Join us on 3/30 for a benefit film screening and discussion of Riotsville, USA.
Advance registration is encouraged, please RSVP here.
The fight in Atlanta against âCop Cityâ is heating up. The Autonomous South Philly Cinema Association is hosting a benefit screening of Riotsville, USA (2022, 91 mins) to raise funds for mounting legal expenses. Riotsville, USA takes its name from the mock cities built by the U.S. government in the late 1960s to train police and military in repressive techniques to throttle uprisings, much as Cop City hopes to do â unless the struggle against it is victorious.
