Green Scare Lite: When the Feds Come Knocking on the Climate Movement's Doors
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/23-2
Activists in Texas last year positioned themselves to thwart construction of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. (Photo: via Tar Sands Blockade)
In 2003, my friends and I organized a forest defense campaign against a financial holding company called Maxxam We called the campaign Dirty South Earth First! (DSEF!). Maxxam were the owners of Pacific Lumber, a California based company that was rapidly clear-cutting Northern California’s redwoods for big profit. Maxxam had also hired private security goons that violently extracted tree-sitters non-violently defending those forests. In response, we aggressively targeted not just Maxxam, but individual executives in both their Houston offices and lavish homes. We quickly got the attention of Houston police, the company’s private security team and the federal government.
Years later, through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests (both mine and friends), I found out that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had tracked my air travel, watched my home, listed me as an associate of a “criminal organization,” paid at least one fellow Houston activist to inform on us and most likely reported me to the Australian government while I traveled there resulting in my detention and forced removal from that country as a “national security threat.” Others in DSEF! had similar or worse experiences.
I’d never been arrested or charged with any crime in that campaign, yet organizing bold and effective campaigns against wealthy corporations put me on the government’s blacklist.
Carrying forward with that work, over the past seven plus years, I’ve been an active organizer in the climate movement for both grassroots groups and environmental non-profits. I’ve supported fights against mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, coal exports in the Northwest, heavy tar sands refining equipment shipments and pipelines in Idaho and Montana and the Keystone XL Pipeline in my home state of Texas and beyond.
= new reply since forum marked as read
redwoods."
That makes it seem as if there are no redwoods left? Is that true?!
because it illustrates so dramatically how rotten the system has become.
Please note that granhapuba posted:
"For you unaware of MAXXAM etc.. Maxxam crook Charles Hurwitz Bought Pacific Lumber Company (Palco) with 'assets' from junk bonds generated during S&L scandal. The taxpayers, were later then charged for the bailout of these assets used to acquire Palco and extract our national treasure for profit, to the tune of $3,240 for each taxpayer at the time."
We have seen public funds used over and over again to rob the public, the public commons, the environment, our rights. I wish DU would organize a separate section in DU that provides documentation on individuals, corporations, politicians, etc., who have robbed us of national treasure in one way or another. Maybe the section should be entitled: "WHO AND WHAT HAS ROBBED THE U.S. OF OF OUR TREASURE, BOTH PERSONAL AND NATIONAL".
