As news of Shell’s decision to abandon its Arctic oil drilling operations spread, protesters came together at Chelsea Manning Plaza in San Francisco to speak out and confront some of the biggest banks and corporations that have played major roles in the climate crisis.
The demonstration, deemed “Flood Wall Street West,” came a year after protesters “flooded” the streets of New York City in a mass direct action the day following the massive People’s Climate March. The People’s Climate March was held in conjunction with the UN Climate Summit in New York, calling on world leaders to take immediate and comprehensive action to deal with the threats associated with climate change.
Now, a year later, after President Obama and leaders of other major world powers have done nothing substantial that properly addresses the crisis, environmental justice movements aren’t waiting for the UN conference on climate change this year in Paris to take to the streets.
Scott Parkin, one of the demonstration’s main organizers, spoke with Liberation News on the Paris climate negotiations and who the protest would be targeting in the city. Referring to the conference in Paris, Parkin said, “It’s going to be talks for politicians and corporate lobbyists. So, what we’re trying to do is create some momentum around a people’s climate talk…We’re going to stop at Wells Fargo. They’re a big driver of predatory lending, racial discrimination in lending, as well as the prison system. We see racism and economic issues as being very much tied to what’s causing the climate crisis. We’re also going to be looking at Bank of the West. Bank of the West is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BNP Paribas, a French bank, which is actually bankrolling the climate talks in Paris and is a big funder of the French coal sector.”
Liberation also had the opportunity to speak with Khafre James, director of the non-profit group HipHopForChange, on the ties between social and climate justice. James pointed to the fact that, “we’ve had corporations take over, destroy political borders, and spread out this neo-liberal global world trade thing that is a beast…Capitalism is an inherent contradiction of competition where everybody eats everybody and eats the planet in the process. As a Black man growing up in Hunter’s Point next to the second largest superfund site in the nation at one point, the Naval Hunter’s Point shipyard, it just hits home when we see that the worst pollution is in the backs of the ghettos and where poor minorities and poor people in general are.”
Before the protest hit the streets to begin its “tour of shame” of climate profiteers, Megan Zapanta, a community organizer with the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, enlightened the crowd to the struggles of organizing the mostly Asian immigrants and refugees that live nearby the Chevron refinery plant in Richmond. Zapanta stated, “Our members are mostly refugees from Laos, so they were forced to leave their homelands from U.S. imperialist wars in Asia, and now they’re living in the U.S., and they’re suffering at the hands of corporate greed. Many of our members are sick with asthma, cancer, with other diseases, and this is all at the hands of the capitalist system.”
Two hundred protesters marched through the city’s financial district, calling out Chevron, Wells Fargo, and Bank of the West for their direct involvement in furthering climate destruction. Four protesters occupied the lobby of the Bank of the West at Bush and Montgomery street and were arrested, while later the intersection was occupied by protesters and several more were arrested as part of a civil disobedience action.
