Excerpt, re-reporting by Carolyn Bennett
“I dreamed about the harbor. Went down to the bay and nobody was there. No fishermen, no trucks, no boats. … Froggie sold the fish house and only a white slab of cement remains as a marker. The fish house next door is gone too. … The shrimp season failed again and again, and now you’ll see more FOR SALE signs on the shrimp boats than captains. …
“I didn’t’ fight all the time. I went out on my little skiff in the mornings and contemplated the birds and the fish and the elusive porpoises. Then the corporations messed with my mind where it hurt even more:
“Seismograph boats hunting for oil and gas appeared on the bays! They strung dynamite charges hither and yonder and proceeded to blow up the bay, and when a few fish blew out of the water, more knowledgeable heads than theirs decided that they needed airboats (the equivalent of jet planes on the water) to chase the fish away from the dynamite. So five zipping airboats met me every morning with their racket, and there went our fish. The fish didn’t return to the bays for a year; the oil and gas in the bays resumed and goes on to this day. It was within this window of opportunity that the idea for An Unreasonable Woman was born. What else to do but write and starve ─ a starving writer …” Diane Wilson was writing in the epilogue of her first book.
Texas shrimper, author, activist Diane Wilson fished the bays off Texas’s Gulf Coast from the time she was eight years old. She was boat captain at the age of 24. Her environmental activism, at great personal cost, began 21 years ago. Thugs threatened her, neighbors despised her but she won some battles too; and for her work on behalf of the people and aquatic life of Seadrift, Texas, she has received many awards. Among them the National Fisherman Magazine Award, Louis Gibbs’ Environmental Lifetime Award, and Louisiana Environmental Action (LEAN) Environmental Award. In the present era of BP and partners in the Gulf of Mexico, Wilson, despite brutal suppression, insists on being a voice of resistance.
At a Senate hearing on BP and partners’ destruction of and immunity in the Gulf of Mexico disaster, Diane Wilson stood in a Senate hearing and poured syrup (not oil as reported in the corporate press) over herself to dramatize the oil spill problem and express anger with legislators’ continuing corporate collusion. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski was standing in the way of legislation to lift the oil company’s liability cap.
Seeing elected representatives like Senator Lisa Murkowski blocking BP from being legally responsible to pay for this catastrophe, Wilson decried Murkowski’s action as an outrageous complicity “with big oil over the American people who have been so devastated by this manmade disaster.” Capitol Hill police arrested Wilson. In another action on June 17, Diane Wilson stood up during an Energy and Commerce Committee hearing featuring BP CEO Tony Hayward. This time she poured black paint over her hands and body. Before being ejected from the hearing room, she extemporaneously charged that Hayward “needs to be charged with a crime [and sent] to jail!”
Yesterday on KPFA Wilson concluded, “If these people went to jail, there’d be less of a problem.”
For her nonviolent actions, Diane Wilson has stood before the court and received indictments of two counts of unlawful conduct and another of resisting arrest. She said she faces up to two years in prison. Her jury trial is set for August 20, the four-month anniversary of oil spill.
The U.S. [in]justice system is charging Texas shrimper, author, activist Diane Wilson (not an entrenched private-public, government-corporate cabal of persons) with “unlawful conduct.”
Sources and notes
Diane Wilson appeared in a KPFA Flashpoints interview on July 6, http://www.flashpoints.net/
An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters, And the Fight for Seadrift, Texas [Paperback], excerpt from Epilogue (Chelsea Green, 2006), http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1931498881/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/6/17/181658/078
www.youtube.com www.cbsnews.com
“Shrimper Shows Outrage to Oil Shill Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Diane Wilson)..., www.cbsnews.com\
http://www.squidoo.com/holy-rollers-by-diane-wilson
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/pgs/portraits/Diane_Wilson.php
http://codepink4peace.org/blog/2010/06/diane-wilsons-statement-to-sen-murkowski/
WHAT HAPPENED TO TONY HAYWARD’S YACHT?
ReplyDeleteGiven the deep level of piscesit incest between BP and Mohammed Reza Shah, all true sons of BP, like Tony Hayward, are know as Shans. So with a toot from Lilibet de Fart Hayward’s Bob went three sheets in the wind, i.e. a fit hit the shan.