The Battle For Clean Air Continues

By Steve Halpern

On November 21, the City Council of Philadelphia passed a resolution asking a new owner of the land that had been used as a refinery to adopt clean-energy goals. Why did City Council members vote to support this non-binding resolution?

On June 21, 2019, at about 4:00 AM there was an explosion at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery. This is the largest oil refinery on the east coast and is located in the Point Breeze section of the city. The explosion was so powerful, a 19 ton piece of shrapnel flew across the Schuylkill River. Over 5,000 pounds of lethal hydrofluoric acid leaked out of the refinery.

What was the cause of this so-called accident? An elbow pipe in the refinery, that had been installed in the 1970s, had deteriorated to the point where it was half the thickness of a credit card. This elbow pipe was made of materials that are no longer used for this application.

Within two minutes a worker at the refinery diverted the hydrofluoric acid to another location. Had this worker failed to take this action, the Philadelphia Inquirer estimated that hundreds of thousands of people might have come in contact with hydrofluoric acid. The Inquirer also estimated that when 2.5% of a human body comes in contact with this material, that exposure can be fatal.

Philly Thrive

In the year 2015, activists in the Point Breeze section of Philadelphia were knocking on doors alerting residents that corporations were planning to make their neighborhood into an energy hub for natural gas. These activists learned that many of the residents of this area suffered from asthma, and cancer, as well as other life threatening conditions. Several children had died because of these ailments.

In their conversations with these residents, several community members became active and the organization Philly Thrive was born. So, for several years before the PES explosion, Philly Thrive was working to protest the environmental damage this refinery had already caused to the community. The PES refinery is the largest single polluter of toxic chemicals in the city. The entire city of Philadelphia has one of the highest rates of asthma and cancer in the nation. Philadelphia is also the poorest of the largest cities in the United States.

After the refinery explosion, meetings were held to discuss what will happen with the land owned by the now bankrupt Philadelphia Energy Solutions Corporation. During the first meeting, after ninety minutes, no one mentioned the explosion or the children who had died of respiratory diseases in the Point Breeze neighborhood. The primary concern was how to generate a corporate profit from the land where the refinery is located.

The organizers of the second meeting attempted to have a similar agenda as the first meeting. However, Philly Thrive members felt that the lives of the community were more important than the corporate profit that had been promoted in the first meeting. So, supporters of Philly Thrive, who were the majority of those present, took over this meeting. Then, everyone was able to learn about the horrendous effects this refinery has had on the community.

City Council compromises on Philly Thrive’s demands

These were the events that prompted City Council to take some action on the PES refinery. However, at the last moment, City Council decided to compromise on the Philly Thrive demands for the use of the land where the refinery is located.

Andrew Maykuth is the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who wrote an article on the City Council resolution. He argued that this resolution was, “an unwelcome signal to potential buyers who might revive the facility to process fossil fuels.” Maykuth’s article only mentioned the refinery explosion, and failed to mention the injuries and deaths in the Point Breeze neighborhood, or Philly Thrive. Judging from his words used in this article, Maykuth’s primary concern appears to be corporate profits.

Then, Philly Thrive supporters demonstrated in front of Philadelphia Mayor Kinney’s office. A representative of the Mayor who knew nothing about our concerns spoke with us. The Mayor eventually agreed to have a meeting with Philly Thrive, but asked that the group he would meet with include only a few members. 

Asbestos in the schools

After attending the City Council meeting on this resolution, I walked a few blocks north to the Board of Education headquarters. There, about one-hundred people attended a demonstration protesting asbestos, lead, and mold in city schools.

Speaker after speaker testified to the fact that the city knowingly allowed their children to attend schools where they were exposed to asbestos. Many in the demonstration supported the demand that Schools Superintendent Dr. William R. Hite Jr. resign.

Then, the demonstrators entered the building and attended a School Board meeting, where the question of asbestos in the schools was discussed. Dr. Hite responded to those who asked for his resignation with the following words: “its my responsibility to fix this problem that started long before I got here, but it is all of our responsibility to advocate for what young people need in Harrisburg. You can’t just come and yell at a meeting.”

Well, those who attended this meeting did in fact yell because they were justifiably enraged by the indifference of Superintendent. Dr. Hite. He has been Superintendent since 2012 and the federal government requires all school districts to report all instances where students have been exposed to asbestos. The school board refused to allow the Philadelphia Inquirer to review those records.

Lea DiRusso

Three days after this demonstration, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a front-page story about Lea DiRusso. DiRusso, is a 51 year old former Philadelphia public school teacher, who now has the asbestos created disease of mesothelioma. DiRusso worked in two Philadelphia schools for 28 years, and was exposed to asbestos in those schools.

The Johns Manville Corporation was the primary manufacturer of asbestos. Dr. Anthony Lanza gave Johns Manville his report in 1933 on workers he examined who worked with asbestos. After a period of five to ten years half of those workers contacted asbestos related diseases. Dr. Lanza worked for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.

Johns Manville then went on a decades long campaign to cover-up this information. Today, Manville is still in business, but they have paid out about $5 billion in claims of people who contacted mesothelioma. Manville established this trust fund because of court decisions that made them liable for asbestos related diseases. About 3,000 people are diagnosed with mesothelioma every year. Symptoms of this disease can take 10 to 50 years to appear. Berkshire Hathaway now owns Johns Manville.

One of the schools where Lea DiRusso worked was Meredith Elementary. This school is 90 years old and there has been asbestos in this school for all those years.

The demonstrations continue

Then, on Friday November 22, City Council had a meeting to discuss what will happen with the land where the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery is located. Several corporations have placed bids to purchase this property. A bankruptcy court will supervise the sale of the property.

Those hearings were scheduled to begin at 10:00 AM. At 9:00 AM, Phiily Thrive had a demonstration outside City Hall where we demanded clean air in the city. Then, traffic was blocked for fifteen minutes to bring attention to the health hazards that had been created by the PES refinery.

The City Council meeting began with a detailed report by the Philadelphia Government Managing Director Brian Abernathy. In his report Abernathy argued that the Philadelphia Energy Solutions Corporation contributed to Philadelphia with a substantial salary base, as well as millions of dollars in taxes.

I believe that Abernathy understands that this part of his report was a game of smoke and mirrors. Every day millions of consumers purchase gasoline for their cars and oil for their homes. The PES Corporation uses some of that money to pay their staff, upkeep of the refinery, and taxes. The rest of their income goes towards profits. All corporations that I know of make investments in order to gouge out profits.

So, when we look at economics from this perspective, it becomes clear that PES contributes absolutely nothing to Philadelphia. All of their revenue comes from the workers who create their products. Corporations learn who creates their wealth when workers go on strike. Then, corporations become aware that their valuable assets will loose millions of dollars every day when workers choose not to go to their jobs.

City Council then listened to experts who testified on all the other toxic chemicals, aside from hydrofluoric acid, that come out of the PES refinery. We listened to testimony of someone who had been infected with hydrofluoric acid. She needed to inject herself with calcium chloride to neutralize the hydrofluoric acid to prevent an amputation. She also said that most doctors are unaware of how to treat an exposure to hydrofluoric acid.

Philly Thrive members also testified about the cancer and respiratory diseases in their families in the Point Breeze section of the city. This neighborhood, located in close proximity to the refinery, and has had increased numbers of cancer and respiratory diseases for many years.

The testimony of the Steelworkers Union

We also listened to union officials who represented the 1,100 workers who were laid off by Philadelphia Energy Solutions after the explosion at the refinery. These officials asked that this facility continue to be used as a refinery. Their reasons for supporting this perspective are about saving the jobs of the union workers. They also noted that the city receives enormous tax revenues from this refinery.

The President of the Steelworkers local that represented the refinery workers testified that he was raised in the Point Breeze neighborhood. He argued that he continually did his best to ensure that the refinery operated in a way that would not endanger the workers or the neighborhood.

The facts are, that the new owners of this property will be under no obligation to hire any of the laid off refinery workers. The facts presented in this hearing underscore the fact that the diligent actions of union members have not sufficiently protected the community. PES demonstrated its contempt of the union as well as the community when they eliminated the jobs of the workers who saved Philadelphia from a disaster.

We can also think about the fact that unions are the primary organizations that forced employers to make the jobs we work at safer. In the past, thousands of workers in many of the industries of this country lost their lives in work-related accidents every year. Unions organized strikes in all the major industries to make those jobs safer. The civil rights and women’s movements also organized to improve the working conditions of Black and women workers.

Corporations in Philadelphia and the rest of the country responded to the improved conditions for workers by moving their factories to nations where the prevailing wages are between $1 and $10 per day. As a result, the overall standard of living in this country has been deteriorating for about forty years.

In the past workers could afford to support their families with one job that might require a high school diploma. Today, workers routinely have more than one job, and many feel the need to attain a masters degree. The cost for those degrees are exorbitant, and many graduates go into debt for decades.

When I was a member of the United Auto Workers Union, my union President explained his perspective. He argued that in the old days unions worked to shut the company down. Today they work to keep the factory open.

However, teachers throughout the country have gone on strikes and forced their employers to comply with their demands. A recent strike by the United Auto Workers Union won significant concessions from the General Motors Corporation.

My opinion is that unions need to return to their original methods of organizing. The majority of people in this country are a part of the working class. I believe we all might benefit by considering ourselves workers who live in the world. An injury to one is an injury to all.

I believe the former workers at the PES refinery ultimately have the same interests as the people who live in the Point Breeze section of Philadelphia.  Establishing that kind of unity will be the best way to advance the battle for clean air.

Conclusion

When I look at the actions we took demanding clean air, I believe there are a few conclusions we can make. First, the future owner of the PES refinery will be primarily motivated by profit. That priority will, no doubt, undermine the safety of the workers, as well as the surrounding community.

While the city government listened to testimony concerning the dangers associated with this refinery, it is unlikely that they will take any concrete actions required to properly clean up the refinery. In fact, bankruptcy court judges usually favor the highest bid for a bankrupt corporation.

However, the actions of Philly Thrive as well as the actions of those protesting the asbestos in the schools demonstrate that we have the potential to establish an environment where the people of Philadelphia can breathe clean air.

We also see how working people all over the word are demonstrating because we are fed up with the status quo. Looking at the politics of the world from this perspective, I believe there is on inescapable conclusion. If we dare to struggle, then, we can dare to win.

Bolivia and the Open Veins of Latin America

By Steve Halpern

The recent coup against the elected President of Bolivia, Evo Morales appears to be another chapter in the continuing rape of Latin America. Eduardo Galeano documented this rape in his classic book titled: Open Veins of Latin America – The Pillage of a Continent. Galeano’s primary argument is that one of the principle reasons for the underdevelopment of Latin America has to do with the immense wealth that has been taken from its soil.

So, when we think of Latin America, we are talking about the fact that the sugar grown in the Caribbean islands was the center of the word economy for over 100 years. Today, the nation of Haiti is one of the poorest in the world. However, in the 1700’s Haiti was the French colony of San Domingue that was the most productive sugar producer. 30% of the French economy came from this lucrative sugar harvest.

After the Haitian Revolution the slave-owning powers isolated Haiti. They didn’t want the example of the abolitionist Haitian government to spread to their slave labor camps.

Today, capitalists are scrambling to get their hands on the oil from Venezuela. That nation has the largest oil reserves in the world. The Venezuelan people are struggling against those powers, so they might have access to some of the wealth created from those oil reserves. The people of Chile are also struggling to stop the theft of the wealth produced by the huge copper deposits located in that nation.

I believe it is useful to look at this history when we look at the coup against President Evo Morales. Today, Bolivia has huge deposits of lithium that is a necessary ingredient for cell-phones. Bolivia also has large gas deposits that can be used to generate electrical power. However, taking wealth from Bolivia is not a new endeavor.

Eduardo Galeano quoted from Karl Marx who wrote about the theft of resources from Bolivia in the first volume of his classic work Capital. This is what Marx had to say: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”

The silver mines of Potosí

Where were the largest deposits of silver that Marx was talking about? Answer: Bolivia. Who were many of the people representing the “aboriginal population” that that were enslaved and entombed in the silver mines? Answer: The indigenous people of Bolivia. When Marx wrote about what he sarcastically called, “the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production, what was he talking about? Answer: The international capitalist system we are living with today.

So, in his book Open Veins Eduardo Galeano exposes a piece of history that the educational system in this country ignores. In the year 1573 the Bolivian city of Potosí had a population of 120,000. Of the most populous cities in Europe, only London had a population as large as Potosí. By 1650 the population of Potosí had increased to 160,000. At that time the most populous city in the thirteen colonies that became the United States was Boston. Potosí had a population ten times larger than Boston.

In the following extended quotation, Galeano gave us an idea of the immense wealth of the city of Potosí in the 1600s. We might consider that residents of Potosí had to endure an altitude of 1400 feet:

“Suddenly a rich and disorderly society burst forth beside the silver, and Potosí became the ‘nerve center of the kingdom,’ in the words of Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza. By the beginning of the seventeenth century it had thirty-six magnificently decorated churches, thirty-six gambling houses, fourteen dance academies. Salons, theaters, and fiesta stage-settings had the finest tapestries, curtains, heraldic emblazonry, and wrought gold and silver; multicolored damasks and cloths of gold and silver hung from the balconies of houses. Silks and fabrics from Granada, Flanders, and Calabria; hats from Paris and London; diamonds from Ceylon, precious stones from India, pearls from Panama; stockings from Naples; crystal from Venice; carpets from Persia; perfumes from Arabia; porcelain from China.”

However, Spain only managed to keep about five percent of the wealth it had taken from the Americas. The reason is that Spain was slow to develop a manufacturing base, so most commodities needed to be imported. The Spanish Inquisition blocked independent thought and became a roadblock to capitalist industrial development. Today, the official who replaced Evo Morales as President claims that she is bringing the Bible into the government. 

In other words, Belgium, Holland, France, and Britain all profited from the Spanish plunder of the Americas. The British became the world power because of their navy proved to be more powerful than the naval forces of Spain.

Capitalists have ignored the lessons of the past

So, how is this history relevant to the current reality?

The labor movement, the civil rights movement, and the women’s movement all worked to improve the standard of living in this country. Capitalists responded to these movements by relocating factories from the United to nations where the wages vary from $1 to $10 per day.

Corporations also went into enormous debt and today there are investments of hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivatives. Derivatives are nothing but bets that the economy will be all right.

So, just as Spain had enormous wealth and went into enormous debt, today capitalists in the United States are in a similar position. Yet, President Donald Trump claims that he is a “genius.” How can this be?

When we think about the capitalist system, those who have power don’t need to have an understanding of history. Their primary concern is supply, demand, and the drive to maximize profits. The question is: Can the relative stability of the capitalist system continue indefinitely?

We can answer this question with a few historical facts. These are the depression of the 1930s, and the recessions of 1987 and 2008.

As Karl Marx and Frederick Engels argued in the Communist Manifesto written in 1848, in capitalism there is the disease of overproduction. When Native Americans had more food then they needed, they had a party and celebrated. When there are vast amounts of commodities on the market that people are not buying, there are recessions and depressions. In other words, in the capitalist system overabundance actually creates scarcity for working people.

In Cuba the revolutionary government first removed the former military before it took power. Ernesto “Che” Guevara led a Cuban and Bolivian force attempting to establish this same kind of transformation in that country. We should never forget that Che was murdered because of orders emanating from Washington. I have confidence that sooner or later the Bolivian people will take control of the defense of their country.

Today, Bolivia is only one country in the world where the people are demonstrating and risking their lives demanding a profound change. We are learning that we do not need to continue to create super-profits for the affluent. We can begin to use the enormous wealth of the world to establish an environment where poverty will no longer be a part of the human condition.

James Baldwin – Living in Fire

By: Bill V. Mullen

Published by: Pluto Press

A review

I’ve read many works by outstanding writers, but James Baldwin is my favorite. What I like about Baldwin was his ability to break down the complexities of the problems we face into an understandable language. While Baldwin is known for his fiction writings, I believe that his nonfiction writings are also unique, outstanding, and inspiring.

Bill Mullen has written an important book that gives clear evidence of the revolutionary character of who Baldwin was. In order to appreciate that perspective, I think it is useful to look at the outlines of Baldwin’s life.

The life of James Baldwin

James Baldwin was raised in Harlem, New York and was the oldest of nine children. Oftentimes there was barely enough food for the family. His father didn’t like white people because the only ones who visited their home were bill collectors or social workers. Although James Baldwin didn’t get along with his father, he blamed his father’s problems on the racist system they lived with. 

Because young James was the oldest, he shared responsibility for caring for his younger siblings. Oftentimes while they sat on his lap, young James would be reading a book. Reading became young James escape from this reality. He claimed to have read every book in two libraries.

At the age of fourteen, James was brutalized by New York City police officers. He developed a perspective that this wasn’t a matter of a few “bad cops”, but that the police were a repressive force that is used to intimidate the Black community. These are the words Baldwin used to protest his outrage:

“Now, what I have said about Harlem is true of Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—is true of every Northern city with a large Negro population. And the police are simply hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function.  .  .

“This is why pious calls to ‘respect the law’ always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer, and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self respect.”

 

Baldwin also had a white woman teacher who took him to plays and encouraged young James to pursue his writing. That, as well as other experiences, convinced young James that there were some white people who supported the struggle for Black rights.

At an early age, Baldwin joined or worked with several socialist and anarchist organizations. This had an influence on Baldwin throughout his life. Unlike many activists who embraced the Stalinist politics of the Soviet Union, Baldwin found his own way of expressing his ideas in the following passage:

“This means an indigenous socialism, formed by, and responding to, the real needs of the American people.  .  .The necessity for a form of socialism is based on the observation that the world’s present economic arrangements doom most of the world to misery, that the way of life dictated by these arrangements is both sterile and immoral, and finally, that there is no hope for peace in the world so long as these arrangements obtain.”

Baldwin also stated clearly how this economic system has historically affected Black people:

“And the man who is now known as the American Negro who is one of the oldest Americans citizens and the only one who never wanted to come here, did the dirty work . . . I think it is not too strong for me to say, let me put it this way: without that strong back, the American economy, the American nation would have had a vast amount of trouble creating its capital. If one did not have the captive toting the barge and lifting the bale as they put it, it would be a very different country, and it would certainly be much poorer.” 

“Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. But this is not a distinction so extremely hard to make that the West has not been about to make it yet. And at the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk—eviction, imprisonment, torture, death.” 

Here Baldwin strips away the mythology of standard American history textbooks. Those textbooks routinely argue that the Civil War “freed the slaves.” While this is technically true and the end of chattel slavery was a huge advance, that statement gives only part of the story.

Northern capitalists supported the war against the confederacy because the goals of the slave states stood in the way of advancing capitalism. Slaves were the most valuable investment that slave owners had. By making chattel slavery illegal, the slave owners lost their so-called wealth as well as much of their power. Those capitalists never supported the genuine liberation of Black people in this country.

Then, the Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes made a deal that effectively gave political power to the Ku Klux Klan in the year 1877. This decision effectively stripped Black people of their citizenship rights in this country. Not until the mid 1960s did the federal government bow to the civil rights movement and overturn the segregationist Jim Crow laws.

However, when we read James Baldwin’s writings about the police, we see that the Civil Rights Act of the 1960s failed to give Black people full rights in this country. Michelle Alexander documented this in her groundbreaking book: The New Jim Crow—Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. This book reports on the facts that while the Jim Crow laws were overturned, Black people are grossly overrepresented in the dungeons of the United States.

In the following passage Baldwin opposed the war against Vietnam by arguing how the struggle of the Vietnamese people has many similarities to the struggles of Black people in this country.

“Long, long before the Americans decided to liberate the Southeast Asians, they decided to liberate me: my ancestors carried these scars to the grave, and so will I.  A racist society can’t but fight a racist war¾this is the bitter truth.  The assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad and every American Negro knows this, for he, after the American Indian, was the first ‘Vietcong’ victim.  We were bombed first.  How, then, can I believe a word you say, and what gives you the right to ask me to die for you?” 

Going to France and then around the world

As an adult James Baldwin became so enraged at the routine racial discrimination he experienced, that he felt compelled to move to France. According to Mullin, Baldwin had writing opportunities in the United States at that time. Moving to France initially made it more difficult to earn a living. However, at that time Baldwin felt it was dangerous for him to remain in this country.

For a time, living in France for Baldwin meant living in poverty. He spent some time in a French prison because he was falsely accused of a petty crime. He also lived in the area where Algerians lived, and witnessed the open discrimination they faced.

Baldwin returned to the United States to become a part of the civil rights movement. By this time he was a well-known author and went on a speaking tour in support of the movement. He gave all of his $20,000 honoraria to organizations that were working to liberate Black people.

James Baldwin was one of the most consistent supporters of Black rights of his generation. He was friends with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers. He understood why many Black people became alienated from the Christian church and supported the Black Muslims. He also supported the Black Panther Party.

However, Eldridge Cleaver, who was a leader of the Black Panther Party ridiculed Baldwin for being gay in his book Soul on Ice. Huey Newton, who was also a leader of the Panthers attempted to correct that error by stating that people who are gay were welcomed to join the Panthers. However, this criticism had an effect on Baldwin.

Towards the end of Baldwin’s life, he spent ten productive years living in Turkey. During that time he produced a play about the gay community in Istanbul. Eventually Baldwin felt he needed to leave Turkey because of the increasing repression of the government. He lived his last years in Southern France. Baldwin had this to say about the idea of sexuality in the United States.

“The American ideal then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.”            

Another source for Baldwin’s nonfiction writings is the his 690 page book The Price of the Ticket. Ironically this book happens to be out of print. Amazon has a limited number of hardcover copies at the exorbitant price of: $77.80.

For me one of James Baldwin’s most relevant quotations predicted the times we are living in today. I will conclude this review with those words.

“Power, then, which can have no morality itself, is yet dependent on human energy, on the wills and desires of human beings.  When power translates itself into tyranny, it means that the principles on which that power depended, and which were its justification, are bankrupt.  When this happens, and it is happening now, power can only be defended by thugs and mediocrities––and seas of blood.  The representatives of the status quo are sickened and divided, and dread looking into the eyes of their young; while the excluded begin to realize, having endured everything, that they can endure everything.  They do not know the precise shape of the future, but they know that the future belongs to them.  They realize this––paradoxically––by the failure of the moral energy of their oppressors and begin, almost instinctively, to forge a new morality, to create the principals on which a new world will be built.”

A protest against the life-threatening pollution of the city of Philadelphia

By Steve Halpern

Last evening I attended a protest of a so-called community meeting billed as information about a cleanup of a Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery. In order to explain this protest, some background information is useful.

The explosion at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery

Several months ago there was an explosion at the largest oil refinery on the east coast, that is owned by the Philadelphia Energy Solutions Corporation. Four workers were injured because of the explosion. The explosion had so much force, that a twenty-ton piece of shrapnel flew over the Schuylkill River. The pipe that contained a potentially lethal chemical had deteriorated to the point that it was paper-thin.

This refinery used to be owned by the Sonoco Corporation. A large stockholder of Sonoco used to be the Pew family that now runs the Pew Charitable Trust.

The explosion released close to two tons of hydrogen fluoride. This is an extremely dangerous material. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, if 2.5% of a person’s body is exposed to hydrogen fluoride, this can be fatal. To treat an exposure of hydrogen fluoride, a person needs to be injected with calcium chloride. As we might imagine, few people in Philadelphia know about this reality.

One of the workers at the refinery moved the hydrogen fluoride to a safer location within two minutes of the explosion. The Inquirer reported that if this measure had not been taken, hundreds of thousands of people living in the Delaware Valley would have been exposed to this potentially lethal substance.

Since the explosion, Philadelphia Energy Solutions has closed the refinery and laid off about 600 workers. The Inquirer has reported that the ground underneath the refinery has been polluted with dangerous chemicals. Those chemicals have the potential of polluting the Delaware Valley aquifer that supplies water to millions of residents in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The protest and the meeting in Point Breeze

The protest of this meeting was organized by the community organization Philly Thrive. Many people became active in this organization because of the increased numbers of deaths due to respiratory illnesses and cancer in the surrounding Point Breeze neighborhood. Several leaders of Philly Thrive spoke about their personal experiences with relatives who had cancer or respiratory illnesses.

So, why did Philly Thrive organize a protest of a so-called community meeting billed as an educational about the cleanup of the refinery?

About one month ago, I attended another so-called community meeting billed as an educational to inform people about the future of the land where the refinery is located. On the panel of that meeting were representatives of the Chamber of Commerce, the University of Pennsylvania, and the union that represents workers at the refinery.

I listened to speaker after speaker at this meeting for about ninety minutes. During that time, no one spoke about the explosion at the refinery, the workers who had been injured, or the adults and children who have suffered from respiratory illnesses or cancer. The primary topic of discussion at this meeting was how to use the land where the refinery is located in order to create profits for a corporation.

I found that discussion insulting to the people who live in Philadelphia, given the seriousness of the problems caused by the owners of the refinery. This refinery was the biggest polluter in the city. People might have died or suffered because of the pollution emitted by that refinery. Yet, all the organizers of that so-called “community meeting” could talk about was, how to generate profits for the very corporation that created this crisis.

So, when I arrived at this meeting held at a public school, Philly Thrive members encouraged people to join with them in holding placards protesting this so-called community meeting. These members told us that they made several attempts to meet with city officials in order to ensure that the land that had been used for this refinery will be made safe for the residents of this area. They were met with a wall of indifference.

Initially we blocked an entrance to the auditorium where this event was supposed to be held. Then, after about an hour the organizers of the meeting began their presentation. At this point, we entered the auditorium and discovered that the protesters greatly outnumbered those who were attending the meeting.

One of our leaders then took the microphone and gave a statement explaining why we were taking this action. Then, she invited anyone who wished to speak to take the microphone. At this time we listened to many speakers who gave us a detailed analysis of the effects this refinery has had on the Point Breeze neighborhood.

After we made our presentations, someone who organized this meeting attempted to explain his position. He argued that the meeting was about informing the public, and that he felt he represented all the people in Philadelphia.

At this point I took the microphone. I spoke about how the government has been inspecting this refinery for as long as it has been in operation. The explosion at the refinery, as well as the deaths due to respiratory diseases and cancer represent clear evidence that the government has failed to properly inspect this refinery. Any discussion that government officials have on this issue needs to start with an admission that the government shares responsibility for this disaster.  

Then, I noticed that two plain-clothed police officers were talking to an organizer of our protest. When the meeting started to break up, I went out to the hallway and noticed that there were about ten police officers lined up and ready for action.

What can we do?

What are the goals of these protests? We chanted again and again that we want clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. These demands couldn’t be more clear.

However, when we look at the operations of this refinery, and well as the indifference by the government to proper inspections, these demands appear difficult to achieve. The corporations that have owned the refinery have compromised safety. While the government claims to represent all the people, their actions clearly demonstrate that their priority is corporate profit over human needs.

The evening before I attended this protest, I viewed the new film about the life of Harriet Tubman. There was a scene in that film that I believe is relevant to this discussion and I mentioned this at the protest.

Harriet Tubman had escaped from slavery, and was planning to return to a slave plantation to free more slaves. An abolitionist warned Tubman that this was too dangerous. If she was captured she could have been tortured and or murdered.

Tubman replied that this person didn’t know what it meant to be a slave, and all the insidious horrors of that institution. The question was not whether she could or could not free slaves. The question was that this must be done.

Yes, we need to understand that a human life is a human life. Our lives are more important than money. If the government refuses to properly cleanup that refinery, then we will need a new government that has different priorities. Our lives are more important than the corporate drive for profit.