ChevronTexaco photos-San Ramon

the police sort of opened this line fairly often to move their vehicles through, promising us that we could blockade again once they had passed.
The adjacent road was fairly difficult to impede. It had 8 lanes and took almost 30 seconds to cross! You could have triple parking and still not block the street, although there isn't much reason to stop on this road, or any lack of parking.
The police took their time in clearing locked down people. I think that the obvious expense Chevron Texaco went to in fencing their perimeter and hiring guards, and all the adjacent malls in hiring guards to patrol their parking lots was probably the biggest impact.

Thanks for posting. It IS bizarre to look at these pictures, and the other ones showing more bikes - excellent! - in this sort of environment.

This is where the ugliest aspects of corporate capitalism and fascism thrive - there's little that bears any sense of humanity in the area. I expect we'll soon all be demonstrating at such places, over and over and over. Even the media will probably resist coming out there.

Yes, Chevron is terribly wrong in this entire Iraq situation. Have a look for yourself.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/apbiz_story.asp?category=1310&slug=Corporate%20Crime

There is irrefutible proof regarding Chevron's connections with this war.

Oh, wait, they HELPED Iraq by giving them priviledge with contracts. Damn. Nevermind.

Those who locked down at gate 1 were connected to the exhaust pipe of the automobile they had placed there

the "bloodied" and veiled penitent mourners in black, in the last photograph here at present, each wore a word printed in red on a black placard: "fear," "rage," "grief," "shame" (and one other?); they moved through the crowd silently and ritualistically, raising and lowering their "blood-stained" arms, and for an interval gave solemn animation to the median on Bollinger Canyon Road


Some carried well worded signs imitating oil drums; across from the last gate, a large banner read: "End Oil Pollution, End Oil Addiction"

We were a small contingent of the loosely organized "artists against the war". We wanted to represent visually the blood that is being spilled for oil & the human emotions associated with this tragedy -- emotions that people are feeling on all sides, in Iraq and throughout the world.

you make it sound like you wanted an event not to protest for what you beleive in...who cares about the charasima of the chief. HES A PIG

i, you express yourself badly, but you point out the obvious. Do you think people would voluntarily get arrested even if no one were to hear about it? The point is to get some attention. The problem is that it has been decades since nonviolent civil disobedience generated much media attention, and even in the case of the civil rights marches of the 50s, and antivietnam war protests, it took over a decade to get results over rather elementary issues.(i.e. 1955 protests in the south to 1964 voting rights act giving franchisement to the whole population for the first time). The SF Chronicle published an editorial describing how they routinely ignore protests unless they are violent or very novel. Channel 7 ABC had reporting of the event that amounted to an opinion-piece, where they were acting like those people were being arrested yesterday to earn coolness points for themselves, and they consulted an expert at the university who gave description about 'each generation adding it's mark', as though this is an entirely social/lifestyle based phenomenon for people in their 20s. So just 'serving witness' or risking something in a peaceful protest is not really useful unless you know that it will be reported, or you just need to be on the right side before god.

If you were to investigate the concept of 'democracy', you would learn that there are a range of government systems that can be considered 'democratic'. A system where you are expected for vote for a representative for your block of 1/2million citizens every four years and then go home and permit this person's judgment to run your life, or let one 'leader' who got 49% of the vote run the world via his intuition-based foreign policy is not particularly democratic - this would be in the 'barely democratic' range of nations, along with the USSR that permitted one party elections.
Any real democracy involves citizens expressing their opinions on issues every week, and when the delegate to government doesn't represent the majority, the delegate should be recalled, or direct action should be taken to cause real democracy to occur.

Our foreign policy and waste of oil in this country is not a trivial issue. And the administration is definitely going against the majority, if the issue were phrased appropriately. The majority of US citizens is definitely against entering a long list of dictatorships in the world at our cost. They are against this if it is just for humanitarian purposes (you don't hear anyone clamoring to enter Pakistan or Burma do you? - so why Syria just because Bush directs us there), and they are against this for resource extraction purposes. The majority of citizens does not consider global warming to be an acceptable exchange for wasteful use of fossil fuels when there are alternatives such as wind or requiring already existent technologies for improving efficiency to be implemented. However, the distant government doesn't even ask citizens or offer the choice - they just make the top-down decision themselves.

The San Ramon Police and Contra Costa Sheriffs displayed courtesy and restraint to the protesters and kept the protest civil and without injury or major incident. They are to be commended. See my Commentary in the San Ramon Observer, http://www.sanramonobserver.org/commentary.html.

Roz Rogoff
San Ramon Observer
For what's happening in and around San Ramon, CA.