{"id":25482,"date":"2010-05-28T15:44:08","date_gmt":"2010-05-28T20:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=25482"},"modified":"2010-05-29T06:10:44","modified_gmt":"2010-05-29T11:10:44","slug":"the-good-kind-of-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/the-good-kind-of-chaos\/","title":{"rendered":"The Good Kind of Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday in one of the comments<\/a><\/strong> to Eric’s post, Fe Bongolan brought to our attention a story on The Daily Kos<\/a><\/strong> about protests at a Chevron shareholder meeting leading to the new CEO’s loss of control of the meeting (his first as CEO) and arrests. According to to an Amazon Watch press release quoted in the Daily Kos story, 27 protesters held legal proxies to vote in the meeting, but only seven were allowed in. They were there specifically to vote on a resolution regarding an Ecuadorian oil spill court case and protest Chevron’s practices.<\/p>\n

In an interview today on Democracy Now!<\/a><\/strong>, Antonia Juhasz, one of the five protesters arrested at the meeting and the director of Global Exchange’s Chevron Program, stated that shareholders traveled to Chevron’s Houston, TX headquarters (in the former Enron building, no less) from far-flung communities suffering environmental and human rights abuses at the hands of Chevron. The protesting shareholders’ homelands include Nigeria, Angola,\u00a0 Ecuador, Burma, the Phillippines, Australia, Kazakhstan and more domestically, Alaska and California.<\/p>\n

Juhasz described her arrest to Amy Goodman:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

As I was saying, “These are the people who are here to tell you about your corporation and its operations,” I was aggressively grabbed by the police, by private security. I was dragged very forcibly\u2014I still have a handprint on my arm from the law enforcement\u2014dragged, prone on my back, out the back, thrown by four police officers it took to get me, lift me into and move me into the van, and arrested. And I was charged with criminal trespass and disrupting a meeting, and I was incarcerated for […] a twenty-four-hour period.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Her assessment of the reaction by Chevron’s management is, however, positive:<\/p>\n

\n

But I think most importantly, what we demonstrated was that Chevron is afraid of the organizing against it, that when the communities from the location where it operates not only tell the truth about what it does, but link and form a community and a network, that we send an enormous amount of fear and shock through this company, because, believe me, this has never happened in a Chevron meeting before. They have never felt the need to have such aggressive, physical, abusive tactics to arrest activists in the front from Richmond, California, from Houston, Texas, from around the world, and to drag me physically from inside the meeting.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The fear Chevron is feeling may be more widespread. In conversation with Eric he remarked that this might not only be the tip of the iceberg in terms of a spreading chaos in the oil industry in the wake of the BP oil spill, but the actual beginnings of the oil industry endgame. If so, the next months and years will likely not be tidy or easy to navigate. But I think the more groups like Global Exchange keep taking actions like Wednesday’s and the more we individuals band with them, holding corporate criminals’ feet to the fire in very visible ways, the more likely it is we can take back our planet and bring it closer to balance. This may just be the good kind of chaos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday in one of the comments to Eric’s post, Fe Bongolan brought to our attention a story on The Daily Kos about protests at a Chevron shareholder meeting leading to the new CEO’s loss of control of the meeting (his first as CEO) and arrests. According to to an Amazon Watch press release quoted in … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":191,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25482"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/191"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}