Capitalisms Cult of Human Sacrifice
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/capitalisms_cult_of_human_sacrifice_2015
1213/
Posted on Dec 13, 2015
By Chris Hedges
A girl walks on a track in a park across from the Valero refinery in the
Manchester neighborhood of Houston. (Pat Sullivan / AP)
HOUSTONBryan Parras stood in the shadows cast by glaring floodlights
ringing the massive white, cylindrical tanks of the Valero oil refinery. He,
like many other poor Mexican-Americans who grew up in this part of Houston,
struggles with asthma, sore throats, headaches, rashes, nosebleeds and a
host of other illnesses and symptoms. The air was heavy with the smell of
sulfur and benzene. The faint, acrid taste of a metallic substance was on
our tongues. The sprawling refinery emitted a high-pitched electric hum. The
periodic roar of flares, red-tongued flames of spent emissions, leapt upward
into the Stygian darkness. The refinery seemed to be a living being, a
giant, malignant antediluvian deity.
Parras and those who live near him are among the hundreds of millions of
human sacrifices that industrial capitalism demands. They are cursed from
birth to endure poverty, disease, toxic contamination and, often, early
death. They are forced to kneel like bound captives to be slain on the altar
of capitalism in the name of progress. They have gone first. We are next. In
the late stages of global capitalism, we all will be destroyed in an orgy of
mass extermination to satiate corporate greed.
Idols come in many forms, from Moloch of the ancient Canaanites to the
utopian and bloody visions of fascism and communism. The primacy of profit
and the glory of the American empirewhat political theorist Sheldon Wolin
called inverted totalitarianismis the latest iteration. The demand of
idols from antiquity to modernity is the same: human sacrifice. And our cult
of human sacrifice, while technologically advanced, is as primitive and
bloodthirsty as that which carried out killings atop the great Aztec temple
at Tenochtitlán. Not until we smash our idols and liberate ourselves from
their power can we speak of hope. It would have been far, far better for the
thousands of activists who descended on Paris for the climate summit to
instead go to a sacrifice zone such as Parras neighborhood and, in waves of
50 or 100, day after day, block the rail lines and service roads to shut
down refineries before being taken to jail. That is the only form of mass
mobilization with any chance of success.
Parraswho organizes protests and resistance in the community through Texas
Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (TEJAS), a local group he co-founded
with his father, Juanwas standing in Hartman Park. He pointed out the array
of storage tanks and other equipment clustered around refineries run by
Valero, LyondellBasell and Texas Petrochemicals. The neighborhood, known as
Manchester, is hemmed in by the Rhodia chemical plant; a yard for trains
that transport tar sands oil, gas, coal and toxic chemicals; a Goodyear
synthetic rubber plant; a fertilizer plant; a molasses plant; wastewater
treatment plants; and tanks of liquefied chicken. There are numerous
superfund sites here. The neighborhood is one of the most polluted in the
United States. A yellowish-brown dust coats everything. The corporations,
Parras said, are not required to disclose the toxic chemicals they store and
use to refine or treat their products. The people who live in this
industrial wasteland, who dream of escape but remain trapped because they
are poor or because no one will buy their homes, know they are being
poisoned but they do not know exactly what is poisoning them. And that, he
said, is the really scary thing.
The chemical operations are killing people, although no one wants to admit
this is happening, he said. And it is largely Mexican-Americans being
killed.
Alarms go off inside the refinery, he said, but we in the community do
not know what they mean. We live in a constant anxiety. We will see cops or
fire trucks arrive. The 18-wheeler trucks fall in the ditches because the
streets are so narrow. People die prematurely, often from cancer. There are
schools here. Kids are often sick. Energy levels are depleted. I was always
tired as a boy. There is a lot of hyperactivity. Children cannot
concentrate. The chemicals add to problems of obesity, especially the diesel
particular matter. The fruit and vegetables we grow in our gardens are
black. The chemicals lead eventually to heart disease and lymphocytic
leukemia. But the impact of the chemicals is not only biological or
physiological. It is psychological. You feel you are less, especially when
you see other communities.
We are near a port, he went on. There are men on ships for long periods
of time. There is a lot of sex trafficking. There are a lot of drugs. There
are more bars on these streets than stores. If you cant escape, you end up,
at best, in a low-paying service industry job or prostitution.
We have a metal crushing facility, he said, pointing into the gloomy night
haze. There is a worldwide shortage of metals. They grind up cars, buses
and appliances into shards of metal. There have been explosions. They do not
always drain the liquids in the vehicles. There are combustibles. There have
been fires. There are particulates thrown into the air. The noise from the
crushing is 24/7.
We walked down a narrow, sloped street past rows of small, ranch-style homes
built by poor Mexican immigrants in the 1930s. Manchester is one of the most
depressed neighborhoods in Houston. The beat and high-pitched wail of a
Tejano ballad blared through the open windows of a shack. Parras told me as
we walked along the unlit street how he and other young activists organize
protests and photograph emission violations and how Valeros private
security personnel harass those engaged in such activities in the streets
around the refinery.
We are followed, photographed and have our license plate numbers taken
down, he said. We dont always know who [is watching us]. They drive black
cars with tinted windows. There is a security threat [to the petrochemical
equipment]. It is easy to walk up to these trains or into the Valero
facility. But what we are doing is documenting their negligence. Our concern
is for the people who live here and the employees. Do they really think we
are going to shut down all these facilities? Houston is built on oil and
gas. On top of that we have the endemic racism and colonialism towards
Mexicans and Indians, any brown person. This is where Manifest Destiny
began.
We met up with other young activists including Yudith Nieto, who was reared
in Manchester by her grandparents. She suffers at 26 with an array of health
issues including asthma, a damaged thyroid and chronic back pain she
suspects is the result of stress and heavy metal contamination. I cant
afford a toxicologist to tell me if my pain is connected to what I have been
exposed to in my environment, she said. Nieto, Parras and other TEJAS
activists, along with fellow activists from across the country, led a series
of protests against the now-rejected Keystone XL pipeline, which would have
carried tar sands oil from Canada to refineries in or near Houston.
People are afraid to get involved, Nieto said. They are poor and often
undocumented. Or they have been in and out of the prison system. The Border
Patrol carries out raids. We are trying to educate people. We did an
air-monitoring project over the summer and into the fall where we collected
particulate matter. We go to City Council meetings. But our congressman,
Gene Green, is pro-industry. He showed up at a chemical security hearing and
said he was there to represent the industry.
Nieto expressed frustration with wealthier, largely white sections of
Houston that she said have failed to rally to the defense of her
neighborhood and have tokenize her and other Mexican-American activists.
The activists took me to one of the seedy bars near the port. The sign out
front read Cobetasos, slang for buckets of beer, and advertised a Show de
Bikini. Four overweight women danced or drank at the bar with white and
Mexican-American laborers. The bars, which prey on the impoverished women
and the single men who work in petrochemical industries and on the tanker
ships, offer the only signs of human activity late at night.
Those who work in these industries come in from outside Houston, said
Yvette Arellano, also with TEJAS. They live in cheap motels with a 20 days
on and 20 days off schedule. It feels like I never meet another Houstonian.
They are from Colorado, the Dakotas or Louisiana. We dont have man camps.
We have motels. These are mostly temporary workers. They are not full time.
This creates issues with safety. No one wants to complain about safety when
they know they might not have that job if they complain. And so no one says
anything.
The 21 international climate summits that have been held over the decades
have produced nothing but empty rhetoric, false promises and rising carbon
emissions. Paris was no different. We must physically obstruct the
extraction, transportation and refining of fossil fuels or face extinction.
Those who worship before the idols of profit will use every tool at their
disposal, including violence, to crush us. This is a war waged between the
forces of life and the forces of death. It is a war that requires us, in
every way possible, to deny to these industries the profits used to justify
New on Truthdig
© 2015 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
Capitalisms Cult of Human Sacrifice
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/capitalisms_cult_of_human_sacrifice_2015
1213/
Posted on Dec 13, 2015
By Chris Hedges
A girl walks on a track in a park across from the Valero refinery in the
Manchester neighborhood of Houston. (Pat Sullivan / AP)
HOUSTONBryan Parras stood in the shadows cast by glaring floodlights
ringing the massive white, cylindrical tanks of the Valero oil refinery. He,
like many other poor Mexican-Americans who grew up in this part of Houston,
struggles with asthma, sore throats, headaches, rashes, nosebleeds and a
host of other illnesses and symptoms. The air was heavy with the smell of
sulfur and benzene. The faint, acrid taste of a metallic substance was on
our tongues. The sprawling refinery emitted a high-pitched electric hum. The
periodic roar of flares, red-tongued flames of spent emissions, leapt upward
into the Stygian darkness. The refinery seemed to be a living being, a
giant, malignant antediluvian deity.
Parras and those who live near him are among the hundreds of millions of
human sacrifices that industrial capitalism demands. They are cursed from
birth to endure poverty, disease, toxic contamination and, often, early
death. They are forced to kneel like bound captives to be slain on the altar
of capitalism in the name of progress. They have gone first. We are next. In
the late stages of global capitalism, we all will be destroyed in an orgy of
mass extermination to satiate corporate greed.
Idols come in many forms, from Moloch of the ancient Canaanites to the
utopian and bloody visions of fascism and communism. The primacy of profit
and the glory of the American empirewhat political theorist Sheldon Wolin
called inverted totalitarianismis the latest iteration. The demand of
idols from antiquity to modernity is the same: human sacrifice. And our cult
of human sacrifice, while technologically advanced, is as primitive and
bloodthirsty as that which carried out killings atop the great Aztec temple
at Tenochtitlán. Not until we smash our idols and liberate ourselves from
their power can we speak of hope. It would have been far, far better for the
thousands of activists who descended on Paris for the climate summit to
instead go to a sacrifice zone such as Parras neighborhood and, in waves of
50 or 100, day after day, block the rail lines and service roads to shut
down refineries before being taken to jail. That is the only form of mass
mobilization with any chance of success.
Parraswho organizes protests and resistance in the community through Texas
Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (TEJAS), a local group he co-founded
with his father, Juanwas standing in Hartman Park. He pointed out the array
of storage tanks and other equipment clustered around refineries run by
Valero, LyondellBasell and Texas Petrochemicals. The neighborhood, known as
Manchester, is hemmed in by the Rhodia chemical plant; a yard for trains
that transport tar sands oil, gas, coal and toxic chemicals; a Goodyear
synthetic rubber plant; a fertilizer plant; a molasses plant; wastewater
treatment plants; and tanks of liquefied chicken. There are numerous
superfund sites here. The neighborhood is one of the most polluted in the
United States. A yellowish-brown dust coats everything. The corporations,
Parras said, are not required to disclose the toxic chemicals they store and
use to refine or treat their products. The people who live in this
industrial wasteland, who dream of escape but remain trapped because they
are poor or because no one will buy their homes, know they are being
poisoned but they do not know exactly what is poisoning them. And that, he
said, is the really scary thing.
The chemical operations are killing people, although no one wants to admit
this is happening, he said. And it is largely Mexican-Americans being
killed.
Alarms go off inside the refinery, he said, but we in the community do
not know what they mean. We live in a constant anxiety. We will see cops or
fire trucks arrive. The 18-wheeler trucks fall in the ditches because the
streets are so narrow. People die prematurely, often from cancer. There are
schools here. Kids are often sick. Energy levels are depleted. I was always
tired as a boy. There is a lot of hyperactivity. Children cannot
concentrate. The chemicals add to problems of obesity, especially the diesel
particular matter. The fruit and vegetables we grow in our gardens are
black. The chemicals lead eventually to heart disease and lymphocytic
leukemia. But the impact of the chemicals is not only biological or
physiological. It is psychological. You feel you are less, especially when
you see other communities.
We are near a port, he went on. There are men on ships for long periods
of time. There is a lot of sex trafficking. There are a lot of drugs. There
are more bars on these streets than stores. If you cant escape, you end up,
at best, in a low-paying service industry job or prostitution.
We have a metal crushing facility, he said, pointing into the gloomy night
haze. There is a worldwide shortage of metals. They grind up cars, buses
and appliances into shards of metal. There have been explosions. They do not
always drain the liquids in the vehicles. There are combustibles. There have
been fires. There are particulates thrown into the air. The noise from the
crushing is 24/7.
We walked down a narrow, sloped street past rows of small, ranch-style homes
built by poor Mexican immigrants in the 1930s. Manchester is one of the most
depressed neighborhoods in Houston. The beat and high-pitched wail of a
Tejano ballad blared through the open windows of a shack. Parras told me as
we walked along the unlit street how he and other young activists organize
protests and photograph emission violations and how Valeros private
security personnel harass those engaged in such activities in the streets
around the refinery.
We are followed, photographed and have our license plate numbers taken
down, he said. We dont always know who [is watching us]. They drive black
cars with tinted windows. There is a security threat [to the petrochemical
equipment]. It is easy to walk up to these trains or into the Valero
facility. But what we are doing is documenting their negligence. Our concern
is for the people who live here and the employees. Do they really think we
are going to shut down all these facilities? Houston is built on oil and
gas. On top of that we have the endemic racism and colonialism towards
Mexicans and Indians, any brown person. This is where Manifest Destiny
began.
We met up with other young activists including Yudith Nieto, who was reared
in Manchester by her grandparents. She suffers at 26 with an array of health
issues including asthma, a damaged thyroid and chronic back pain she
suspects is the result of stress and heavy metal contamination. I cant
afford a toxicologist to tell me if my pain is connected to what I have been
exposed to in my environment, she said. Nieto, Parras and other TEJAS
activists, along with fellow activists from across the country, led a series
of protests against the now-rejected Keystone XL pipeline, which would have
carried tar sands oil from Canada to refineries in or near Houston.
People are afraid to get involved, Nieto said. They are poor and often
undocumented. Or they have been in and out of the prison system. The Border
Patrol carries out raids. We are trying to educate people. We did an
air-monitoring project over the summer and into the fall where we collected
particulate matter. We go to City Council meetings. But our congressman,
Gene Green, is pro-industry. He showed up at a chemical security hearing and
said he was there to represent the industry.
Nieto expressed frustration with wealthier, largely white sections of
Houston that she said have failed to rally to the defense of her
neighborhood and have tokenize her and other Mexican-American activists.
The activists took me to one of the seedy bars near the port. The sign out
front read Cobetasos, slang for buckets of beer, and advertised a Show de
Bikini. Four overweight women danced or drank at the bar with white and
Mexican-American laborers. The bars, which prey on the impoverished women
and the single men who work in petrochemical industries and on the tanker
ships, offer the only signs of human activity late at night.
Those who work in these industries come in from outside Houston, said
Yvette Arellano, also with TEJAS. They live in cheap motels with a 20 days
on and 20 days off schedule. It feels like I never meet another Houstonian.
They are from Colorado, the Dakotas or Louisiana. We dont have man camps.
We have motels. These are mostly temporary workers. They are not full time.
This creates issues with safety. No one wants to complain about safety when
they know they might not have that job if they complain. And so no one says
anything.
The 21 international climate summits that have been held over the decades
have produced nothing but empty rhetoric, false promises and rising carbon
emissions. Paris was no different. We must physically obstruct the
extraction, transportation and refining of fossil fuels or face extinction.
Those who worship before the idols of profit will use every tool at their
disposal, including violence, to crush us. This is a war waged between the
forces of life and the forces of death. It is a war that requires us, in
every way possible, to deny to these industries the profits used to justify
gaiacide. It is a war we must not lose.
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