Women Born Transsexual

Geez…  The last few days my news feeds have been filled with various stories about TS/TG people and the problems with finding a place to pee.

This comes at a time when I have also observed more and more public places having gender neutral single occupancy restrooms which say “Occupied” when the door is locked rather than having the international symbols for male/female on the doors.  The other accommodation is the third restroom with the door wide enough to permit the motorized wheelchair or scooter to pass through it.  This restroom often includes the diaper changing station.

Indeed many of the articles are about colleges and the like making accommodations and designating restroom as gender neutral.

I don’t have a stake in this fight.  I can feel empathy though as I can remember the concerns I had prior to coming out.  I was terrified of using public men’s rooms, especially in San Francisco.  I don’t know if it is still a common practice but in the pre-Stonewall days plain clothes cops used to patrol the rest rooms and arrest obviously gay men.  Of course the cops always said the gay men groped them or solicited them, but cops like like rugs.

When I worked at the office in the early 1970s I heard that sisters using certain store’s rest rooms were subject to arrest, but never actually met anyone or took a complaint from anyone who had actually been subjected to arrest.

Perhaps it goes with what some call passing privilege but this isn’t something I thought much about.  When I transitioned we had cards issued by the SF Center for Special Problems and those were supposed to keep us from being arrested for using the public restrooms.

Some of my T to M friends mentioned their restroom issues when I was hanging out with them back in the 1990s. Their issues were needing a stall and not really being able to stand and pee at a urinal.

I’ve worked in some big box stores and have had customers complain about the difficulties regarding motorized wheel chairs.  Other customers have children with them of the other sex and are concerned about leaving them alone while using the restroom.

This is all about equal access to public restrooms for all, including not just trans folks but thoose who are mobility challenged, those needing changing stations for infants and for parents with children of the other sex.

It sounds like a stupid issue, but it isn’t for people who simply need a safe place where they can use the restroom without having their dignity shredded or being forced to face danger.

This isn’t just an American issue and people are working to make it better.

WPIX Orange County Fla:  UCF adds gender-neutral restrooms

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. —

Students at the University of Central Florida will see a different kind of restroom around campus.

The new facilities aren’t just only for men or only for women; they’re marked as gender neutral.

“I wouldn’t want to go to a bathroom that I don’t feel comfortable in,” one student told WFTV.

Nine of the gender-neutral restrooms have been added around campus.

The gender-neutral restrooms are essentially family bathrooms that have new signs. Some of the new restrooms feature a man and woman on the placard outside the door.

The Argus UK:  New Rottingdean toilets go ‘gender neutral’

By Tim Ridgway
Feb. 14, 2013

Unisex toilets are to be rebranded as gender neutral by “politically correct” council chiefs.

A £140,000 refurbishment of the facilities in Rottingdean seafront started this week.

But emails seen by The Argus indicate bosses “wish to promote the term gender neutral” when discussing the block that will be open to everyone regardless of their sex.

Supporters claim it will make it more accessible for those who do not identify with the male-female binary.

Boston Herald:  Mass. Ed Dept issues rules on transgender pupils

February 15, 2013

BOSTON — The Massachusetts Department of Education on Friday issued directives for handling transgender students, including allowing them to use the bathrooms or play on the sports teams that correspond to the gender with which they identify.

The guidance was issued at the request of state board of education to help schools follow the state’s 2011 anti-discrimination law protecting transgender people.

During the same time frame the above articles were published there were also articles about sisters getting hassled for using public rest rooms.

Pink News UK: Trans woman student abused and shoved out of toilets at Leeds University

The Advocate:  ‘It’s The Women’s Room!’ and Other Bathroom Complications

The Lariat:  Former Saddleback student returns as transgender, is told not to go into female restroom

Even with accommodation non-discrimination laws that protect TS/TG people, gender queer or gender ambiguous people can be subjected to harassment on the part of both the public and the police. If someone is in that position: Personal safety comes first.

Don’t endanger yourself to make a point, that list of people we memorialize in November always has too many names. Don’t do something that will get you arrested.  If it is at a school or place of work take it up with management.

It isn’t my issue, but I learned from many years of not having an automobile to plan my trips using the safest routes and well lighted bus stops.  Better to plan things out and avoid danger while fighting for your rights in situations where you aren’t facing physical harm.

If it is any consolation TS/TG people aren’t the only folks facing this.

Gay Star News: Lesbian bride who Fox News mistook for a man speaks out

Stephanie Figarelle, the handsome bride and half of the Alaska-based couple, won a contest to become the first same-sex couple to marry at the iconic Empire State Building last year.

Currently on her honeymoon with her wife Lela, she took to her Facebook to say how she feels about the internet laughing at Fox News’ mistake.

Figarelle writes: ‘Yes, I’m aware that I look like a dude. I have known this my entire life- I’ll prove it by sharing baby photos sometime. I’ve gotten bullied, hit on by gay dudes and hot “straight” girls, seen the inside of both male and female bathrooms.

‘Gotten yelled at for going into the women’s restroom- but never the men’s. I’ve had to tell my parents, grandparents and the rest of my family that I am gay, ultimately facing their rejection. Luckily, since I’ve looked like a dude since birth, they all accepted me with open arms since they really weren’t surprised…

Be assertive about your right to live with dignity but stay safe.

From Complicity UK:  http://www.complicity.co.uk/blog/2013/02/equal-marriage-bill-amendments/

A number of amendments for trans people have been submitted formally in parliament, but unless you’re a legal whiz with some spare time to hand it’s not immediately obvious what they are. So, here’s a quick guide to what the relevant ones do…

Amendment 4 – Prevent voiding of marriages with a trans person

At the moment, a spouse can have a marriage voided (As if it had never happened) by claiming they did not know that their partner had a gender recognition certificate at the time they married, and this amendment removes this. There is no similar provision covering, for example, religion or similar and creates a situation whereby a spouse who does know about their partner’s history later claims ignorance if their partner is not very publicly “out”.

Amendment 5 – Remove spousal veto of legal recognition of gender

Because a marriage would, under the existing system, need to be converted to or from a civil partnership on one partner transitioning, there is a requirement for an interim Gender Recognition Certificate to be issued and the existing partnership be annulled prior to full recognition of legal rights. This was done to prevent a spouse being forcibly re-entered into a new relationship (Civil partnership or Marriage) they didn’t want and could not get out of due to the one-year minimum term before divorce can be applied for in a new relationship.

This is no longer the case, but the bill did not reflect that fully. Instead, it allowed a partner to delay or potentially block someone getting full legal rights in their acquired gender by refusing to give consent, a situation that would also incur additional costs for the trans person by forcing them to use the interim GRC process.

The amendment levels the playing field by only issuing an interim GRC if both parties request it, rather than simply if the spouse refuses consent. (As it stands, it also causes an Interim GRC to be issued in the case of a civil partnership, because the current bill does not allow for mixed-sex civil partnerships)

It takes 2 years post-transition to get a GRC, so an unhappy spouse still has plenty of time to apply for divorce.

Amendment 6 is tidy-up related to amendment 5, removing clauses that are no longer relevant.

Continue reading at:  http://www.complicity.co.uk/blog/2013/02/equal-marriage-bill-amendments/

From Gay News Network Australia:  http://www.gaynewsnetwork.com.au/viewpoint/viewpoint/10552-gender-neutral-marriage-laws-needed-to-help-prevent-further-tragedies.html

Ben Cooper
Feb 15, 2013

There are many arguments that have been articulated in favour of marriage equality, such as equal rights for LGBTI people and marriage strengthens relationships to name a few; but there’s one argument that for too long has been ignored in this debate, with that argument being that we need marriage equality because our society and its citizens need a gender-neutral Marriage Act. There are many reasons why we need a gender-neutral Marriage Act. Trans and Intersex communities in particular benefit from this reform, and women benefit from a Marriage Act free of sexism. But the main reason being is because our society needs a culture shift and the law to celebrate sexual, gender and social equality.

A perfect example of why this change is necessary is the story of a guy named Shaun (not his real name). Shaun was someone who I met in a youth choir and he was one of the most talented tenors in the choir. He was fairly butch in his appearance, enjoyed playing cricket and was a fairly gentle natured person with a bright future. Shaun like every man fitted some male stereotypes but like every person there were many aspects of his personality and gender expression that simply didn’t fit gender stereotypes. Shaun was someone who was bullied because of his gender and personality expression and on a daily basis he endured homophobic slurs and was consistently de-gendered by many of his peers. In essence he was denied social acknowledgement of his gender identity by the way others treated him. Shaun, who to the best of knowledge was and is heterosexual, was even once accused of being gay and bashed by a group of guys after they saw a poster advertising an upcoming musical that featured a picture of him in costume.

At age 15, after enduring such disturbing discrimination for several years, Shaun started to hang out with an extremely hyper-gendered group of guys and within weeks he quit the choir and began to drift away from many of his friends. Shaun began to go to house parties and raves with his mates and the morning after one of these parties I ran into him and I saw he had a black eye. I asked him how he got it and he told me that he and his mates were causing a ruckus and when the host of the party asked them to leave, they laid into him and a brawl erupted. I then briefly continued the conversation by asking him about a mutual friend of ours from choir and if he had caught up with her recently. This girl was for years one of his closest friends and he responded by saying, “Nah I don’t have time for skanks that don’t put out.” I was stunned and finished the conversation and kept walking. I remember being quite shocked at how much he had changed as a person. The relatively gentle country boy who loved singing and cricket, and who had plenty of healthy friendships with men and women had become a deeply insecure, drug addicted bully, who had lost all respect for not only himself but for women and any male who in his eyes wasn’t a real man. The only thing that Shaun really cared about nowadays was fitting in with the boys, having as much sex as possible and getting off his face whenever he could. The guy who endured so much oppression was now running around causing trouble and oppressing others.

Continue reading at:  http://www.gaynewsnetwork.com.au/viewpoint/viewpoint/10552-gender-neutral-marriage-laws-needed-to-help-prevent-further-tragedies.html

From Vitamin W:  http://vitaminw.co/society/woman-saved-vagina-monologues-considers-1-bn-rising

By Megan Reback
Tue February 12, 2013

Like many women, discovering The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler, and V-Day changed my life. A close friend told me about the Monologues, which I read cover to cover on Valentines Day of 2007. I was sixteen years old, a disempowered witness in a household plagued by violence. Privy to the pressures that young women face from the media, from men, from billboards, from magazines, and from a patriarchal society, combined with watching the physical and emotional abuse against women in my family, I had never considered the power of my femininity or of my vagina. After reading The Vagina Monologues, my reality was different: my role in the world had changed, my position as a young woman changed, and my perception of myself as an activist — an empowered, smart, capable, woman. It saved me.

Two friends and I were shaken to life by the Monologues on rape as a tactic of war, a male savior called Bob, and especially a monologue called “My Short Skirt,” which asserts, “I declare these streets, any streets, my vagina’s country.” We decided to perform the monologue at an open-mic night at our high school, but were told to omit the stanza that said the word “vagina.” As a 16 year old, I had yet to develop my feminist consciousness or truly understand the systemic roots of gender inequity; I had realized, however, that this was some kind of injustice — that it was right to perform the monologue in its entirety against the wishes of our school’s administration.

For that insubordinate act, as the administration called it, I was suspended from school.

In the ensuing months and years, I met Eve Ensler, discussed the whole ordeal on The Today Show, and attended the tenth anniversary of V-Day in New Orleans. I went on to study at Connecticut College, where I applied a gendered lens to my liberal arts education, exploring the question “Where are the women?” in everything I studied. I acted — as an actor and activist — in four years of The Vagina Monologues, and produced the show my senior year with a cast of 90 intelligent, complex, passionate, and compassionate women. The show and all of its implications has been the guiding light in what could have been a very dark world for me.  Finding V-day and developing a feminist consciousness brought purpose to my life, and framed my existence in a way that was meaningful for the first time.

***

Now I can add Ensler’s new project, One Billion Rising, to my list of major life influences.

Continue reading at:  http://vitaminw.co/society/woman-saved-vagina-monologues-considers-1-bn-rising

From In These Times:  http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14547/of_rape_and_roe/

What the war on women means for pregnant teenagers.

BY Ann Russo
February 10, 2013

Forty years after Roe v. Wade, even as polls show a majority of Americans supporting women’s reproductive rights, the possibilities for women’s reproductive justice feel surprisingly dim. Each day, it seems, brings another effort to undermine and attack women’s life choices, one of the most recent being a bill introduced in New Mexico to jail rape survivors who choose abortions. The bill follows months of Republican legislators’ trotting out recycled rape myths, undermining rape survivors to bolster anti-abortion policies. These disembodied debates over rape and abortion dangerously overlook the complex contexts in which young women struggle to make choices that will impact the rest of their lives. I know this, because I once was one.

When Rep. Phil Gingrey conjured up what he thought to be a common sense “non-legitimate rape” scenario—involving “a scared-to-death 15-year-old” who  “becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents … ‘Hey, I was raped’”—he merely added fuel to the cultural fire that dismisses and marginalizes young women who fight for sexual agency and who are in dire need of knowledge, resources and support to help them negotiate dating relationships.

Gingrey’s “story” took me back 37 years, to when I was a first-year college student in an abusive relationship, pregnant and terrified. Like many young women my age, I had no framework to label my relationship as abusive. I had had no sex ed, and I grew up in a conservative, Roman Catholic, sex-negative community. I had been taught that premarital sex was shameful and wrong, that pregnancy was cause for further family shame, embarrassment and dishonor, and that abortion was murder. I had no idea where to turn. I only knew for sure that my father would “kill me” no matter what I did. At the time, I felt abortion was my only option, a choice requiring deep silence, shame and isolation from friends and family—and ultimately from myself.

It’s not so different today. Adolescent girls and young women experience the highest rates of unplanned pregnancy, as well as the highest rates of sexual abuse and violence in dating relationships. A Harvard School of Public Health study found that girls experiencing dating violence are four to six times more likely than non-abused girls to become pregnant. Having worked with young women over the past 30-plus years, both in college and in youth organizations, I’ve witnessed the devastating impact of this culture of shame and blame. Informed by the same rape culture that creates a classification of “legitimate rape,” many young women find it hard to address dating violence and sexual assaults that do not fit the brutal-stranger-rape model. When these young women find themselves pregnant, the dynamics of these relationships make their decision-making that much more complicated and painful.

Continue reading at:  http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14547/of_rape_and_roe/

From The Pacific Standard:  http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/us-postal-service-saturday-delivery-postal-banking-52778/

Signed, Sealed, Deposited

How to save the Postal Service—and protect ordinary Americans from financial predators—in one easy step: bring back postal banking!

By David Dayen
February 15, 2013

How bad have things gotten for America’s national mail delivery system? The US Postal Service lost $1.3 billion last quarter, and this was regarded as good news. The venerable agency has been saddled with significant financial problems since a 2006 law forced it to pre-fund 75 years of employee retirement benefits, something no other public agency or private company has to do. This cash crunch (the Postal Service gets no money from the federal government and must survive on the revenues it generates) has led to austerity measures for the nation’s second-largest employer (right behind Wal-Mart). Mass layoffs last year were followed, earlier this month, by the announcement that Saturday deliveries of first-class mail will cease come August.

As many have noted, this is a largely manufactured crisis. Simply relaxing the pre-funding requirement—as the postmaster general beseeched Congress to do this week—would wipe out virtually all of the Postal Service’s deficit. (Absent this heavy payment, the agency would have made $100 million in the last quarter.) But given the reduced use of letters in an age of digital communication, it’s nonetheless true that the Postal Service is due for some changes to its business model. Democrats from Sen. Tom Carper to Rep. Elijah Cummings have laid out various ideas. But there’s one idea they haven’t suggested that would kill two birds with one stone: make money for the Postal Service and level the financial playing field for some of the most vulnerable Americans. Namely: We should allow the Postal Service to return to the practice of offering simple banking services.

According to the FDIC’s 2011 National Survey, over 10 million US households are “unbanked,” with no access to the financial system. Another 24 million households are “underbanked,” meaning they have a bank account but they also rely on providers of “alternative financial services”: remittance or money order shops, payday lenders, check-cashing operations, pawn shops, or associated services. Many of these services are among the most unscrupulous in American society, preying on people with few other options and charging usurious interest rates or carving out large fees. These roughly 68 million unbanked or underbanked Americans represent a huge market for non-bank financial predators.

Continue reading at:  http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/us-postal-service-saturday-delivery-postal-banking-52778/

Actually I would put a 1% sales tax on all trades in stocks, bonds and derivatives. Plus a 50% tax on all annual income over 1 million with exemptions for one time windfalls such as lottery winnings.

A little bit of austerity shouldn’t hurt the rich who are the ones clamoring for a balanced budget.  Oh and social security tax on all income with not cap.

From Pro Publica:  http://www.propublica.org/thetrade/item/the-03-solution

by Jesse Eisinger
ProPublica, Feb. 6, 2013

The unwritten rule of Washington debates about taxing and spending is to never consider anything new. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if the pressure of the next few months’ debate changed that?

Last month, 11 European countries, including France and Germany, moved forward on introducing a minuscule tax on trades in stocks, bonds and derivatives. The tax goes by many names. It’s often called a Tobin tax, after the economist James Tobin. In Europe it goes by the more pedestrian financial transaction tax. In Britain, it goes by the wonderful Robin Hood tax, and is supported in an often clever campaign.

Continue reading at:  http://www.propublica.org/thetrade/item/the-03-solution

From Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janine-r-wedel/caymans-folly-do-you-know_b_2684536.html

Janine R. Wedel
02/14/2013

When you imagine a person with one hand in overseeing your retirement, do you envision them holding a blender drink in the other hand? Perhaps you should.

Islands like the Caymans are well-known as corporate tax havens, and earlier this week in the Huff Post, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders railed against rampant offshore tax abuse.

What’s less well-known, but perhaps just as troubling is that hedge funds use these havens to avoid something else as well: proper governance. This is especially disturbing because many pension funds have poured money into offshore hedge funds, desperate for higher and higher returns to cover their rising liabilities.

With perhaps two-thirds of all hedge funds domiciled in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and British Virgin Islands (BVI), a web of “independent directors” has developed in these island paradises. Officially, these directors are independent watchdogs who protect the interests of investors, such as pension funds. The problem is that some appear to be little more than “paper directors,” with perhaps billions of retirement dollars exposed to funds with weak oversight and potentially conflicted governance. This might not be an urgent concern if hedge funds lived up to their hype, but broadly speaking, they do not: hedge funds have actually been underperforming the S&P.

Recently, investors and politicians who have sought more transparency scored a partial win: the Cayman Islands has reportedly proposed creating a public database revealing details of their funds including information about their independent directors (pending ongoing negotiations), letting a few rays of that powerful Caribbean sunlight into one of the darkest corners of the financial world. But other crucial questions necessary for investors to reasonably judge risk remain unanswered: hired by hedge fund managers themselves, whose interests do these directors really have at heart? How many boards do they sit on simultaneously, and is it alongside other directors who also are serving on the same multiple boards? What is their level of competence, and does their supposed oversight have any teeth? Hedge funds are known for their “lone wolf” approach, without the same supervision as, say, a mutual fund or a typical corporation. This gives hot-shot managers enormous latitude to invest and operate as they see fit. And the culture of hedge funds is straight from today’s Shadow Elite playbook in that accountability is elusive.

Continue reading at:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janine-r-wedel/caymans-folly-do-you-know_b_2684536.html

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/feb/15/sec-freeze-swiss-accounts-heinz-inquiry

Regulators chasing ‘highly suspicious options trading activity’ that may have earned traders $1.7m over Buffett’s Heinz deal

Heidi Moore
guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 February 2013

US regulators investigating potential insider trading in Thursday’s $23bn takeover of Heinz have asked a court to freeze the Swiss bank accounts of unnamed traders who may have speculated on the deal before its announcement.

Less than 40 hours after Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital announced they were together buying Heinz, the Securities and Exchange Commission said it was seeking an emergency court order freezing the Zurich-based assets of the traders and prohibiting them from destroying any evidence. The SEC said it was chasing “highly suspicious options trading activity” that may have earned the traders as much as $1.7m.

The SEC alleges that the traders knew details of the Heinz acquisition before they had been made public. “The SEC alleges that the unknown traders were in possession of material non-public information about the impending acquisition when they purchased out-of-the-money Heinz call options the day before the announcement.”

On Wall Street, the only surprise in the SEC’s announcement was its speed. The issue of insider trading was widely discussed among investors interested in Heinz after the deal. Immediately after the deal was announced, savvy investors noticed that something was odd about the Heinz option contracts.

Options are a way for investors to bet on the future price of the stock. Traders noticed that the afternoon before the deal was announced, an unusual number of Heinz options contracts – 2,593, to be exact – were bought, particularly betting that the stock would be worth at least $65 in June. Previously, Heinz stock had not been worth more than around $60 in over year.

Traders familiar with Heinz options said the contracts were bought starting at 2.22 pm on February 13, the day before the deal, and that they were bought in small lots. If that proves to be the case, the small lots may have been designed to evade attention.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/feb/15/sec-freeze-swiss-accounts-heinz-inquiry

From Ad Busters:  https://www.adbusters.org/blogs/can-america-really-go-forward-climate.html

The Biggest Climate campaign in History eclipses the elephant in the room.

Adbusters,
14 February 2013

The Sierra Club, Bill Mckibben’s 350.org fight-climate-change crew, 130 other organizations, plus thousands of Americans from all walks are meeting at Noon on Sunday, February 17 in Washington, D.C. to make “Forward on Climate” the largest climate rally in history.

Their first goal is to convince Obama to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline once and for all, for it could unlock vast amounts of additional carbon the planet simply cannot afford to burn. But his final decision on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline will only be a test of whether he’s truly serious about walking his talk. The Forward on Climate Rally will put unparalleled pressure on Obama to act on his word, and in an unprecedented way. It is their hope that he will do all in his power to face, and combat, global warming.

But before America can move “Forward” on climate issues – they must “face” the facts. Ignorance and denial abound in individuals and institutions across the country (there are, alas, institutions like Heartland dedicated to perpetuating skepticism and denial about climate change). A 2007 Harris poll found that 71% of Americans believe that continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 this figure dropped to 51%, and fell again in 2011 to just 44%. According to Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, this is “among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history.”

Meanwhile, record droughts, food scarcity, floods, severe super-storms, billions in damage, lives lost, and the hottest year on record in the United States have all come to pass in 2012. The amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere has increased by 40 percent in a century, due to our perpetual burning of coal, oil, and natural gas. NASA’s James Hansen explains that business as usual – such as burning the tar sands bitumen – will guarantee “game over for the climate.”

But America could be a major leader in a worldwide clean energy revolution, that is, if Obama chooses the people, the land, and the future of the planet, over corporate interest. This clean energy revolution could transform the nation, cut carbon pollution drastically, and resist or even reverse the inertia of impending climate disaster. Forward On Climate states, “we need President Obama to commit to that fight with all the ambition and determination he can bring.” But why do they put so must faith in Obama’s character and power? How are they so easily assuaged by his soaring rhetoric?

Continue reading at:  https://www.adbusters.org/blogs/can-america-really-go-forward-climate.html

From Truth Out:  http://truth-out.org/news/item/14577-ohio-fracking-ceo-pleads-not-guilty-in-federal-toxic-waste-dumping-case

By Mike Ludwig
Friday, 15 February 2013

Ben Lupo, owner of D&L Energy and Hardrock Excavating, pleaded not guilty Thursday to federal felony charges under the Clean Water Act.

Lupo is accused of ordering the dumping of thousands of gallons of chemical-laced fracking waste into streams in Youngstown, Ohio.

On the night of January 31, state investigators acted on an anonymous tip and caught Lupo’s employees dumping oil and gas drilling waste – fluid, mud and oil – into a storm sewer that empties into a tributary of the Mahoning River, according to the Justice Department.

Lupo admitted to state authorities that he ordered the initial dumping and later told investigators he ordered employees to dump the contents of a fracking waste storage tank into the storm drain on six occasions. A Hardrock Excavating employee, however, told authorities that he was aware of 20 dumping incidents since November 2012, according to the Justice Department.

Lupo’s storage tanks hold about 21,000 gallons of waste.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a controversial drilling technique that is facilitating an oil and gas boom in Ohio and nearby states. Fracking produces large quantities of chemical-laced waste fluids and mud.

Lupo’s D&L Energy operated the Northstar 1 fracking wastewater injection well that caused a series of earthquakes in 2011 and early 2012, including one quake that measured 4.0 on the Richter scale. Truthout published an investigative report on the earthquakes last summer.

Continue reading at:  http://truth-out.org/news/item/14577-ohio-fracking-ceo-pleads-not-guilty-in-federal-toxic-waste-dumping-case

The Sierra Club’s reluctance to engage in demonstrations that included civil disobedience was reason why I started supporting Earth First over thirty years ago.

From Raw Story:  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/02/15/sierra-club-leader-tells-moyers-keystone-xl-so-horrendous-we-lifted-our-ban-on-civil-disobedience/

By Arturo Garcia
Friday, February 15, 2013

From Common Dreams:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/02/15-0

by Yves Engler
Published on Friday, February 15, 2013 by Common Dreams

On Sunday tens of thousands are set to converge on the White House in what organizers are promoting as “the largest climate rally in U.S. history.” The protesters will be calling on Barack Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.

Alongside one of this country’s biggest corporations, Stephen Harper’s government has entangled Canada in one of the most controversial decisions of Obama’s presidency. The Conservatives have lobbied vigorously in support of Calgary-based TransCanada’s plan to build a $7 billion pipeline to take up to 800,000 barrels of oil a day from Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The prime minister has pressed Obama to approve Keystone XL while his ministers have visited Washington to pursue the matter with the Secretary of State. During two visits to Washington in recent weeks foreign minister John Baird said Keystone XL was his main priority.

Canada’s ambassador in Washington, Gary Doer, has also spent a large amount of his time pushing the pipeline, prompting TransCanada to send him a “thank you” note on August 30, 2011. “Gary,” reads an email from the pipeline firm, “I just wanted to send a quick note to thank you and your team for all of the hard work and perseverance in helping get us this far, I know it has made a big difference.”

The ambassador responded to critical media commentary and pressed state officials to support the pipeline. When Nebraska’s Republican governor Dave Heineman initially came out against the project Doer visited him in Omaha. Similarly, the 28 members of Congress who urged the State Department to consider the “major environmental and health hazards” posed by Keystone XL received an immediate letter from Canada’s ambassador and Alberta’s minister of intergovernmental relations. “I believe it necessary to address several points in your letter,” Doer wrote. The ambassador’s letter trumpeted Canada’s plan to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. “[This is] a benchmark we intend to meet,” Doer wrote, even though planned tar sands expansion will make this objective impossible to reach.

Canada’s 22 consular offices in the US have also been ordered to take up the cause. When the New York Times ran an editorial titled “Say No to the Keystone XL” Canada’s consul general in New York wrote a letter supporting the project.

Continue reading at:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/02/15-0