Shocking Video Emerges out of Lieber Correctional Institution

Shocking footage has emerged from inside Lieber Correctional Institution in South Carolina. Orange water from the running faucet and sewage water flooding cells were captured on video from inside of the prison which is known for human rights violations of the people incarcerated there.

Sewage flooding inmate cell at Lieber Correctional. (Video taken 12 hours after flooding began)

Lieber CI has been on an indefinite lock-down since April 2018. Inmate’s windows have been blotted out by storm shutters and calls to SCDC and the warden’s office have yielded only defensiveness and aggression, “Those shutters aren’t coming down! They can see rays of light through the slats.”

A still from leaked video out of Lieber Correctional Institution exposing unsafe drinking water

Concerned masses have flooded the institution with calls only to be hung up on, screamed at and delivered terse narratives that “the inmates are liars.” Denying clean drinking water and forced exposure to sewage while caged, which puts the incarcerated population at risk for a Hepatitis A [HAV] outbreak, are blatant and severe human rights violations that need to be addressed NOW.

Incarcerated populations are already particularly vulnerable for contracting HAV, Hepatitis A is spread through contact with feces of infected persons or through contaminated food or water. Drug users, individuals experiencing homelessness, people in prison and people who live in unsanitary conditions are at a higher risk of contracting the virus.

It is clear through numerous phone zaps placing pressure on those who create and exacerbate unsafe conditions for the incarcerated inside of Lieber that they are well aware of the violations they continue to commit.  Warden Randall Williams’ office has been particularly adversarial and hostile towards anyone asserting that rights of inmates be recognized.

These operations are under the watch of South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster who, like Warden Williams, has been consistently made aware of right’s violations inside of Lieber, yet violations continue unabated.

An ongoing campaign demanding an end to the indefinite lock-down continues.  Meanwhile, in the silent space of failed response from every complicit institution in this disaster, inmates have died from deadly violence and suicide in the anxiety and trauma-inducing 24-7 conditions they are forced to exist within.

Institutions committing these abuses must be continually exposed and confronted until violations cease, clean water is restored and dignity is recognized.

EF! Roadshow tips its support to the Elliot Free State.. and so should you!

EF! Roadshow ends with a bang!

[Note from Cascadia Summer and friends]

Dear Friends of the Forest,
On July 6th forest defenders from Cascadia and across the country set up road blockades at the Umpcoos Ridge timber sale to save some of the last native forests in Oregon from clearcutting. The Elliot State Forest is one of the few remaining intact coastal forest ecosystems, and provides critical habit for Spotted Owls, Coho Salmon, and Marbled Murrelets.

Logging has been halted in the forest but the Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF), the state patrol, and the Douglass County Sheriffs have begun extracting people from the blockades using heavy handed police state tactics. So far over 23 people have been confirmed arrested in police raids on the blockade. There are still 6 people holding it down in the trees and intricate aerial blockades keeping the logging company out of our native forests. All of these people desperately need your support! [The remaining blockaders were arrested this morning, 6/9/09, but the resistance continues!]

We are reaching out to our friends far and wide to try and raise bail and legal support money for those already arrested and those facing charges for defending the forests. You can donate using paypal by going to the website http://www.forestdefensenow.org . You can also call ODF to demand they withdraw, drop all charges and buy back the Umpcoos Ridge and Fishing Cougar timber sales from Roseburg Forest Products:

ODF # 503-945-7200
Roseberg Forest Products # 541-679-3311

Getting Rowdy at the Elliott Free State

Also, read and view photos about the Elliot Free State, Cascadia
Summer and Oregon forests:

Updates from the blockade-
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/07/392582.shtml and
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/07/392548.shtml

Photos from logging on Umpcoos Ridge-
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/07/392605.shtml

Info on Cascadia Summer-
http://www.forestdefensenow.org/

Thanks!

From the Forests,
Cascadia Summer (and friends)

[please post and forward widel

Native forests in the Umpcoos Ridge timber sale, destroyed by Roseburg Forest Products

Almost There!

After four months of tour, we’re finally nearing our final destination – the Round River Rendezvous in southern Oregon. As of writing, we are on our way to the Trans and Womyn’s action camp east of Portland, the first of the three action camps in Cascadia this summer.

The past few weeks have been loaded with trainings, old friends, and beautiful landscapes. After leaving the midwest, we headed to Denver, where we led trainings for High Country Earth First!, who is kicking off their campaign against the expansion on I-70. Then we headed to Durango, for the Feral Futures gathering – a coming together of the primitive skills community, the radical environmental movement, and the rainbow family – where we played in the woods for three beautiful days, soaking up all the ponderosa pines and hot mountain springs. Salt Lake City and its surrounding towns hosted us for 5 days of trainings and presentations, including some trainings focused on the work that Peaceful Uprising is doing around SB81, local anti-immigration legislation, climate change, and fossil fuel extraction. From there, onward onto Reno and the Bay area.

Arriving on the west coast has given us a chance to reconnect with folks who have been doing Earth First! work for decades and we’ve been doing a lot of sharing stories and songs around the campfire. We stopped in Humbolt County for a few days of skillshares with the folks who are involved in the full-time direct action campaign just outside of Arcata, protecting second-growth redwoods from being cut by Green Diamond.
We’ve been overwhelmed with all the learning and adventures! We can’t wait to see you all at the rondy!

Earth First! Roadshow joins call for solidarity with indigenous resistance in Peru

Peruvian Police Attack Indigenous Communities Opposed to Mining and Fossil Fuel Extraction in Amazon Jungle…
For more info, check the Root Force site

Join the Earth First! Roadshow and others in front of the Peruvian Consulate in San Francisco, Tuesday, June 16, 2009, at 9:00 AM

Peruvian Consulate
870 Market St
San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 362-5185 … give ’em a call!

What’s going on? ~~~~~~~~~~~
Dozens of people are estimated to have been killed in clashes between police and indigenous activists protesting oil and mining projects in the northern Peruvian Amazonian province of Bagua. Peruvian authorities have declared a military curfew, and troops are patrolling towns in the Amazon jungle. Authorities say up to twenty-two policemen have been killed, and two remain missing. The indigenous community says at least forty people, including three children, were killed by the police this weekend.

Home Depot has Earth First! activists arrested for action against dams in Patagonia

Earth First Roadshow dams Home Depot in Lawrence, Kansas

Our friends were arrested this morning at a Home Depot action in Colorado (see details below.) They should be out in a few hours, and we will be back on the road without missing a stop! (but we are missing a chunk of change in our account.. so, if you wanna help us make it up, you can donate online!)

-EF! Roadshow crew (the one’s left on the outside)

[PLEASE PASS THIS ALONG!]
————————————-

Hey, all you ‘angry Home Depot customers’ and friends of the Earth
First! Roadshow would you mind callin’ 1-800-553-3199 (press extension # 5), Or you can also, send an email to them direct from this link: DAM HOME DEPOT

Tell Home Depot to drop the charges against our friends in Arapahoe
County Jail, Colorado.. and to get the hell out of wild Patagonia!

——————————————————–
For Immediate Release: May, 27, 2009

Home Depot has Earth First! activists arrested for action against dams in Patagonia

Denver, CO– Two Earth First! activists were arrested at a Home Depot
this morning in Glendale. The arrests followed a banner being hung off
the roof of a Home Depot store reading “Dam Home Depot, NOT
Patagonia!” Supporters of the arrested activists demand that Home
Depot cut all ties and voice their opposition to this project at
tomorrows corporate shareholders meeting tomorrow in Atlanta, Georgia.

The banner-drop action was intended to remind both the public and the company: “We’ve fought The Home Depot before and won.” Almost ten years ago, Earth First! groups around the country joined with Rainforest Action Network and others forced Home Depot to adopt wood product policies that removed old growth from their shelves. But their ongoing economic involvement with the Chilean interests that are proposing to dam wild rivers with the HidroAysen project in Patagonia shows their commitments to ‘green business’ practices to be merely empty Public Relations maneuvering.

International Rivers, an organization working to protect rivers and
defend the rights of communities that depend on them, explains that:

“The HidroAysen project involves 3 dams on the Pascua River and 2 dams on the Baker River that would flood globally rare forest ecosystems and some of the most productive agricultural land in the Aysen region. Electricity from these dams would be sent thousands of kilometers north to serve Chile’s biggest cities and its mammoth copper industry. More than 1,500 miles of transmission lines would require one of the world’s longest clearcuts–much of it through untouched temperate rainforests found nowhere else on the planet. US retailer The Home Depot is the largest buyer of timber products from the main Chilean interest promoting the dams. The Home Depot has been asked by thousands of people, including socially responsible investors, to stop buying timber from suppliers that plan to destroy the rivers and forests of Patagonia.”

According to Ron DeFeo of Home Depot (from a blog post this morning): “we don’t think it’s our place to weigh in on an issue that we have no expertise or influence over.” While DeFeo denies the company’s involvement and refuses to accept the research of International Rivers, his blog post admits that “the president of our supplier’s parent company owns shares, along with his family, in one of the companies that would work on the project.”

Earth First!, which is more of a movement than an organization, has
autonomous groups around the world who target corporations that are
responsible for devastating the planet. The movement currently has a
national Roadshow crossing the country to mobilize people to take
action against companies like Home Depot, which is currently featured
on their website http://www.earthfirstroadshow.wordpress.com

More information about this campaign at:
http://internationalrivers.org/patagonia

xxx

Totally charmed by the Midwest

Tripods take over! (Athens, Ohio)

As our schedule continues to be full to the brim, we continue to fail at updating our blog regularly! I suppose it’s just indicative of how good of a time we’ve been having. A special thanks to Bad Heart Bull who enriched our tour with their brilliant music and ridiculous antics from Chicago through Iowa City. It’s so good to hear this story told through music!

The Heartland
Our time in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois brought lots of new friends out to our presentations and trainings and also gave us the chance to connect with some of the old movers and shakers of the radical eco and animal rights movements. A shout-out to Roger, one of those old friends, and all he’s building at Lakevillage Homestead in Kalamazoo, a beautiful farm project that left us cold-lake refreshed and with bellies full of goat milk.

The Northwoods
Traveling to the north, we witnessed spring unfurling its first tendrils and caught folks’ enthusiasm to finally be seeing the sun. We led trainings for folks in Wisconsin who are fighting to keep the developers out of their community land project, Drumlin Farm, took a cold dip in lake Superior, and shook our booties at a show in Minneapolis.

The Plains
Just when we think it can’t get any better, we meet more people working on more inspirational projects. In Iowa we met up with some of the folks in the Wild Rose Rebellion, visited The Solidarity Center in Lawrence, Kansas, and were treated incredibly well by McFoster’s Cafe in Omaha, a place run by some long-time eco-rebels. Even where things are spread out, the prairies are all but destroyed, and sprawl is an ever-growing threat, we’re finding large communities of resistance.

Every time we start to wonder if we’ve packed our schedule too full or if we’re crazy for even attempting such a journey, we’re reminded why it is we’re doing this: to get to sing songs and share stories of inspiration around the country and remember that we’re in this together — a whole shit ton of us. Thanks to everyone for all the life-blood and inspiration!

A Song of Hope & Resistance from Michigan

We just came through Michigan, and at our show in Grand Rapids someone asked us if we had heard about the proposed sulfide and uranium mining plans in the Upper Peninsula (UP). Our interest was peaked, so we did some research and found this map.. a terrifying glimpse of the devastation planned in the region:
http://www.savethewildup.org/blog/maps/
A day later, another friend asked if we had heard of May Erlewine and let us know that she would be playing a Mother’s Day show on our way through Kalamazoo… They name sounded familiar, and as it turned out, she had written a song for the group fighting to protect the UP from the madness of proposed mining. Check it out:
http://www.savethewildup.org/downstream/
Thanks to May and Seth for keeping the spirit of the wild alive n’ kicking through their music… Maybe they’ll join us this summer at the Rendezvous!?

Half Way There…

...we've been hard at work to keep you informed of Roadshow happenings amidst the crumbling of civilization.

As we make our way through what’s left of the once-vast hardwood forests of the midwest, the beauty of dogwoods and redbuds along the roadside to keep us company, it occurred to us that some of you who have attended or are anticipating the Roadshow (and those we didn’t get to cross paths with) may be interested in hearing a bit about the trail behind us, and the one to come.

Hope you enjoy checking out what we’ve been up to. There is a fuller assessment and analysis of our efforts that is on the way, looking at where we have succeeded and where we have fallen short.

Please help us spread the word by adding us as a links to other sites. Thanks.

Stay in trouble, take risks,
-EF! Roadshow Crew

P.S. Got plans to get out to Cascadia this summer yet?!…
http://www.2009rrr.org/
P.S.S. Still haven’t subscribed to the EF! Journal yet? Now’s your
chance! www.earthfirstjournal.org

Earth First! is Alive and Well!

Leaving the Northeast, heading Into the Heartland

Mass
We passed through western Massachusetts, stopping in Amherst and Northampton, joining a hike in the state forest with local activists fighting to protect public lands from clearcutting. For more info contact: enviroshow@valleyfreeradio.org

Boston greeted us with a great benefit show with several bands including Even Greer of the RiotFolk collective, and a reunion with our friends from Appalachia, Here’s to the Long Haul!

Back to New York
We completed our northeast tour loop in the Hudson Valley with a stop in Albany (where Emma’s Revolution played) and headed west, on to Ithaca, a stronghold of the opposition to drilling the Marcellus Shale for gas extraction and on to Rochester. Although our tour was dealt a disorienting blow by the arrests of friends in Indiana (for their opposition to I-69), leaving the Roadshow crew smaller than ever as one of us left to assist with jail support, we left the Empire state buzzing from the great music, good discussions and successful blockades workshops knowing that the State’s repression only feeds our resistance.

Into the ‘Heartwood’
Some thoughts on the region from our friends with Heartwood: “This region was once blanketed with a majestic hardwood forest containing more than 70 species of hardwood trees. Unfortunately, much of this forest has been cleared and what remains is mostly isolated fragments of public land that nonetheless play a critical role in providing habitat for wildlife, purifying the air and water, moderating global climate change, and offering places of beauty and enjoyment..Today, [Heartwood’s] efforts remain rooted in the heart of the central hardwood region, with an emphasis on our “core states” of Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, and Missouri.”
Thus far we have made stops in Cleveland, Athens, Cincinnati, (Ohio), offering presentations, tri-pod and climbing training, and more.

As we post this update, we are about out the door to the “Community Forum on Repression of Eco-Activists” here in Bloomington, Indiana.

Take risks, stay in trouble… See you all on the road!