Posts
PNN's Guests
Mark Pafford
Steve Horn
Rhana - in the steps of Granny D
Rhana - in the steps of Granny D
Debbie Jordan
Charles Messina
Rachel Pienta
Meredith Ockman
Meredith Ockman
Anita Stewart
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events
Nov 21 - 23 at the Friends Quaker Meeting House, 823 North A Street, Lake Worth.
Three days of movie screenings and discussions focusing on the environment and the activists fighting to protect it!
Each day will include documentaries and short films throughout the day, and will end with a feature film and discussion. A complete schedule of each day's films and start times will be posted shortly.
Schedule and Features:
Friday, November 21: 6:00 PM - 10:00 PM
Feature film: Bidder 70
Description: Economics student Tim DeChristopher makes a startling bid to save 22,000 acres of Utah wilderness at the 2008 BLM Oil and Gas Lease Auction.
Watch the trailer:
Saturday, November 22: 5:00 PM - 10:00 PM
Feature film: Wrenched
Description: The film Wrenched captures the passing of the monkey wrench from the pioneers of eco-activism to the new generation which will carry Edward Abbey's legacy into the 21st century. The fight continues to sustain the last bastion of the American wilderness - the spirit of the West.
Watch the trailer: http://wrenched-themovie.com/
Sunday, November 23: 2:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Kids day! Child care will be provided. We'll be watching environmentally-focused kids movies throughout afternoon and evening. Call us at 561.320.3840 or email us at collective[at]earthfirstjournal.org for more information.
Feature film: Hoot
Description: Roy Eberhardt moves from Montana to Florida's Gulf Coast, and when he and his new friends learn that a restaurant will be built where burrowing owls live, the three decide to enlist the help of a local policeman to save the birds.
Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgT_xT587MY
Suggested donation: $10 per day, or $25 for the weekend. All money raised supports the Earth First! Journal. No one turned away for lack of funds.
Questions? Email us at: collective[at]earthfirstjournal.org
Or call us: 561.320.3840
For the Wild!
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NEWS:
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what is the end state: rep. walter jones $5-6 billion (how does it end)
we had to do it - rummy said
general demsey - we'll have to have a branch plan
Google is amassing huge amounts of personal user data while simultaneously accruing big-time political clout, a new report from Public Citizen confirms.
1. "Mission Creep-y: Google Is Quietly Becoming One of the Nation’s Most Powerful Political Forces While Expanding Its Information-Collection Empire" (pdf) looks at the ways Google is accumulating political power—through high-powered lobbying and sizable campaign donations—as well as massive amounts of personal information that make the company a "treasure trove for agencies like the NSA."
"Google is becoming exponentially more powerful in federal and state governments," said Sam Jewler, author of the report and communications officer for Public Citizen’s U.S. Chamber Watch. "At the same time, it’s pushing boundaries in technology, and it has shown that it can’t always be trusted to do the right thing with people’s information. When we see such massive influence, it raises the question, will regulators and lawmakers be reluctant to rein in Google?"
While the company admittedly provides popular and useful services, Jewler continued, its business model and "history of questionable practices indicate that, if left to its own devices, it may not always do what’s best for the public."
The report states that Google "is becoming the most prolific political spender among corporations in the United States, while providing less transparency about its activities than many other of its politically active peers."
Over the first three quarters of 2014, Google ranked first among all corporations in lobbying spending, according to OpenSecrets.org, and is on pace to spend $18.2 million on federal lobbying this year. In fact, it has spent $1 million more on lobbying than PhRMA, the trade association of the pharmaceutical industry. Since 2012, no company has spent more money on federal lobbying than Google.
In addition, the company's political action committee (PAC) spent $1.61 million this year, according to Federal Election Commission records, surpassing PAC expenditures by Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs.
Meanwhile, the company's "qualms about peering into people’s lives seem to have steadily diminished," the report says. In September, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Google's practices are "almost identical" to those of the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, the GCHQ. The company's business model "is to spy," Assange said.
For example, Google has recently acquired new technologies such as Skybox, which owns satellites that capture high-definition images and video around the planet multiple times per day; Nest and Dropcam, home devices that monitor things like temperature, energy usage, proximity of the owner to the house, and take video in the home; and Emu, which could be used to monitor and advertise in online chats and text messages.
The combination of expanding technology and exploding political influence could be dangerous, Public Citizen warns.
"Google has essentially responded to concerns about its practices by saying 'just trust us'," said Taylor Lincoln, research director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division and editor of the report. "But Google is gaining so much power that regulators may find it difficult to act if it turns out that the public’s trust has been misplaced."
A new survey by the Pew Research Center suggests that public trust is already pretty weak.
On Wednesday, Pew's "Public Perceptions of Privacy and Security in the Post-Snowden Era" (pdf) showed that the majority of Americans lack confidence that they have control over their personal information. A full 91 percent of adults surveyed said they "agree" or "strongly agree" that consumers have lost control over how personal information is collected and used by companies.
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Since there has been a lot of media focus on Jonathan Gruber’s recently uncovered remarks about the American voters, I want to put it in the proper historic context. During the 2008 election a major attack line from candidate Obama was pointing out that John McCain planned to tax employer-provided health insurance. It was very effective so Obama repeatedly used it during debates, appearances, and inmultiple campaign ads. Obama spent months convincing the American public that any change to the tax exempt status of employer-provide health insurance was a Republican idea. Yet almost immediately after getting elected President Obama became determined to end the full tax-exempt status of employer-provided health insurance.
Instead of Obama being honest with the public by saying he changed his mind or was wrong during the campaign, Democrats came up with this contrived “Cadillac tax.” While technically it was an excise tax on insurers, every economists know it was designed to effectively be a tax on individual insurance.
When Gruber says ending the tax-exempt status of employer-provided health insurance wasn’t political viable so they needed to come up with a plan utilizing the “exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter,” he is referring to the fact Obama wanted to break one of his biggest campaign promises and still be able to lie about it.
While experts at the time saw through this fiction, it is refreshing to see a key architect so openly admit Democrats did it solely to con the public. Democrats embraced an idea they campaigned against, but in an attempt to trick the public they made it an even worse and needlessly more complex policy.
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The meteoric rise to power of Barack Obama in 2008 was propelled by one of the greatest demagogic US Presidential campaigns of all time: To millions of young Americans, he promised to end the US wars in the Middle East. To millions of working and middle class voters, he promised to end the economic crisis by confronting Wall Street. To women, he promised to protect and expand their social rights and end the gender gap in wages and salaries. To human rights and civil liberties activists, he promised to end police state surveillance and torture, and to close the Guantanamo concentration camp, which had denied political prisoners a fair and open trial. To blacks, he promised higher living standards and greater racial equality in income. To Latino-Americans, he promised immigration reform facilitating a path to citizenship for long-term residents. Overseas he spoke in Cairo of a “new chapter” in US policy toward the Muslim world. To Russia, he promised President Putin he would ‘reset relations’ – toward greater co-operation.
Obama’s rhetorical flourishes attracted millions of young activists, women and minority voters and leaders to work for his election and the Democratic Party. He won a resounding victory! And the Democrats took control of the House and Senate.
Obama Embraces the Rightwing Agenda
The rhetorical exercise was a massive smoke screen. For his electoral campaign Obama raised over one billion dollars from the ‘1%’ – Wall Street bankers, Hollywood media moguls, Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Chicago Zionists and the Mid-Western business elite. Obama was clearly playing a double game – talking to “the people” and working for ‘the bosses’.
A few analysts cut through the demagogy and identified Obama as the ‘Greatest Con-Man of recent times”, the Washington counterpart of the great contemporary Wall Street swindler Bernard ‘Bernie’ Madoff.
According to the somewhat more skeptical liberals and progressives, Obama would have to ‘choose’ between those who elected him and those who groomed and bankrolled him.
Obama quickly and decisively resolved the progressives’ ‘dilemma’. He re-appointed the two central officials who designed disgraced President Bush Jr’s war policy and Wall Street bailout: Robert Gates was confirmed as Secretary of Defense and Timothy Geithner was renewed as Treasury Secretary. Obama followed by teaming up with the head of the Federal Reserve, Benjamin Shalom Bernacke and Treasury Secretary Geithner to launch a multi-year trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street, while hundreds of thousands of Obama voters had their mortgages foreclosed and millions of workers, who voted Democratic were fired and remained unemployed, because Washington prioritized Wall Street recovery of profitability over funding job-creating public works.
In response, millions of indignant citizens repudiated the Washington bailout and Congress temporarily shelved approval. However, the White House and the Democratic majority in both Houses, reversed course and approved the biggest State –to- Bankers handout in US – or for that matter, world – history.
If the Obama’s ‘First Wave of Reaction’ appointed powerful Wall Street clones and Pentagon war hawks to his cabinet and the ‘Second Wave of Reaction’ led to sacrificing workers’ incomes, employment and living standards, so that Wall Street could return to profitability, and the ‘Third Wave of Reaction’ was the escalation of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama has dispatched tens of thousands of US combat troops to ‘end the war by expanding the war’!
The Democratic Electorate Strikes Back: 2010
By the end of 2010, sufficient masses of Obama and Democratic voters were disenchanted to the point of notvoting in the Congressional elections: The Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives.
The most lucid and clearheaded progressives understood that nothing more was to be gained by waiting patiently ‘at the gate, like benighted pilgrims’ for their president Obama’s gaze to ‘turn left’ or for the Democrats to reverse course in Congress. Hundreds of thousands of citizens shook off the trickster’s spell and took to the streets blocking financial districts. ‘Occupy Wall Street’ – direct action in the streets, citizens clearly targeted the principle source of the economic crisis and the real power behind the demagogic rhetoric of the White House confidence man.
Federal, state and local police broke up, arrested and incarcerated the peaceful activists. The Occupy Wall Street movement, under massive and coordinated police-state siege, and without political direction, dispersed and disintegrated.
The ‘Fourth Wave of reaction’ was illuminated by the Snowden revelations of National Security Agency (NSA) intrusive spying into the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans as well as allied leaders in four continents – and unimaginable numbers of citizens in countries around the world. The White House gave unconditional backing to the entire, gargantuan police state apparatus and its unconstitutional intervention into everyday life of individuals and their families. Hundreds of thousands of civil libertarians, human rights activists and attorneys and millions of liberal democrats were shocked by Obama’s blatant refusal to rein-in or even acknowledge the enormous scope of illegal domestic spying.
The ‘Fifth Wave of Reaction’ was the cumulative impact of five years of nurturing Wall Street profits and ignoring working and middle class income and declining living standards. Thanks to virtually free federal ‘bailout’ money, Wall Street borrowed and invested overseas -reaping returns triple the miniscule interest rates in the US. They speculated on the stock market. The ‘D-J boom’ continued for five years while real incomes of most Americans continued to decline. Young Democratic voters, who had believed the con-man, remained mired at entry level jobs barely paying room and board. The ‘Audacity of Hope’ became the ‘Humiliation of Return’ into their parents’ homes for millions of young workers unable to support themselves…
Disenchantment Deepens
Millions of Latino citizens, who were conned into believing that Obama would provide a ‘road-map to citizenship’ for twelve million fellow immigrants, discovered that the real Obama policy toward immigrants was a ‘road map to violent arrest, incarceration and deportation’: A record two million immigrants were expelled in five years, exceeding the totals of all previous Presidents, even the most rabid rightwing Republicans.
Probably the most egregious and cynical con-job of all was the mega-con Obama perpetrated on Afro-Americans. More than any other group in the US, Afro-Americans have supported Barack Obama: Ninety-five percent voted for the ‘First Afro-American President’.
Under President Obama, Afro-Americans have lost more personal wealth than under any president since the Great Depression. Many key indicators show that the economic conditions of Afro-Americans have worsened dramatically under Obama.
According to the US Federal Reserve’s survey of consumer finances, between 2009-2014, non-white household incomes have declined by nearly a tenth to $33,000 a year. Median incomes fell by five percent. Data on net wealth – assets minus liabilities – tells an even more brutal story. The median non-white family today has a net worth of just $18,100 – almost a fifth lower than it was when Obama took office. In contrast, white median wealth increased by one percent to $142,000. In 2009 white households were seven times richer than blacks; that gap is now eightfold. Both in relative and absolute terms, black Americans are doing much worse under President Obama. His ‘Wall Street First’agenda (bailing out the banksters and mortgage swindlers) has relegated Afro-Americans to last place. Racial inequalities have deepened because Obama, who may have ‘shot some hoops’ on an urban ghetto playground and dressed up as a ‘black role model’, in fact, oversaw an increasingly segregated and deteriorating school system. In Washington, he marginalized African-American concerns about double digit rates of unemployment in Detroit and other urban centers, while offering pompous, stern ‘moral’ lectures to unemployed blacks about their ‘family responsibilities’.
Obama’s demagogy and deceptive populist posturing bamboozled most progressive voters for a period of time, but after five waves of reaction, many of the activists ‘wised up’ – first in the streets and then in the elections – by refusing to vote for Democrats running in the Congressional elections of 2014.
The Democratic Debacle of 2014
The major reason for the Democrat’s debacle in the ‘mid-term elections’ was the high rate of abstention and lack of activists getting out the vote.In many states, where the Democrats lost, the overall rate of abstention among eligible voters approached seventy percent. And there is reason to believe that the vast majority of non-voters (aka – the ‘none of the above’ voters) were Democrats, people disenchanted or hostile to Obama’s betrayals and, in particular, voters who believed that he had deceived or ‘conned them’.
Young people’s participation in this election, a major factor in mobilizing voters for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and doubly deceived, were notable by their absence: Young voters’ share of the electorate declined from 19% in 2012 to 13% in 2014. Parallel declines were documented in Latino-American and Afro-American turn-outs.
For those who voted, nearly half (45%) said that the ‘economy was the key consideration’ and by economy they didn’t mean Wall Street’s booming profits, or record high Dow Jones Stock quotes, which White House Democrats had hailed as their ‘economic success’. For the American middle and working class voters ‘ the economy’ that drove some to vote on November 4, 2014, was measured in the deterioration of affordable health insurance coverage and pension plans, the decline of living standards and the growth of ‘dead-end’ low-paid, contingent employment that rendered the lives and future increasingly unstable.
Most former Obama voters did not defect to the Republicans: They realized that both Democrats and Republicans were responsible for the domestic economy-busting decade-long wars and Wall Street hand-outs. They didnot vote: Most abstained! Some former Democrats and Independents, and not a few Republicans, turned their anti-Obama animus into a rabid racist rant against the black President and extended their anger toward people of color in general. Obama’s con game has aroused deep racist undercurrents in US politics.
If his image as the first African-American President inspired a moment of hope and promise for greater racial equality in this country, his reactionary economic policies in practice allowed rightwing politicians to divert white worker and middle class economic discontent away from the criminals and swindlers on Wall Street to racist hostility toward the beleaguered black communities.
Post-Elections: The Con-Man is Cornered
The new Republican Congressional majorities will continue to implement the fundamental economic and foreign policies of the Obama regime. Wall Street profits will continue to grow, income disparities between capital and labor will continue to sharpen and the highly militarized foreign policy of the last six years will become more overtly bi-partisan. The Democratic President will join with the Republican Congress in pursuing military confrontations in the Ukraine and in sending more US troops to Syria and Iraq. Under pressure from Israel and its powerful US supporters, increased sanctions against Iran will scuttle US negotiations with Tehran.
Obama’s blockade of Cuba will continue, as will bi-partisan hostility to center-left governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil and Argentina. The grotesque narco-state terror and mass murder in Mexico and Central America will continue to fuel the massive refugee pressure on the US border and expose the hypocrisy of Washington’s humanitarian military missions in the Middle East.
The Republicans rode to power by exploiting discontent with Obama’s ‘Five Waves’ of reactionary policies; they will now co-operate with him in launching a ‘6th Wave’. The Republican Congressional majority will embrace Obama’s proposal to ‘fast-track’ free trade treaties covering Asia and Europe, currently blocked by House Democrats and opposed by US trade unions.
The Republicans will join with Obama in backing corporate tax ‘reform’, which substantially reduces the tax on US multinational corporations’ overseas earnings in order to end the hoarding of profits in low tax countries – while intensifying austerity on American workers and the poor.
In other words, Obama will now openly coordinate with his Republican counterparts on an agenda they have shared from the first day he took office. This time Barack Obama, the Con-Man, will have to play it straight and cut the populist palaver – Republicans and their business partners demand economic payoffs and overseas military victories. Obama, the ‘cowering Con-Man’, has been unmasked by progressives and is cornered by the Republicans … and they have no further use for his confab
4. SENDING MORE VETERANS to FIGHT to make the World Safe for the POPPY PLAYERS
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Posted: 14 Nov 2014 10:47 AM PST
Though the US has already sent about 1,000 soldiers into Iraq after ISIS took over a large swath of the country, President Obama continues to claim he hasn’t/won’t send in ground forces. The rationalization for that claim is that those new troops are not designated as combat troops but as advisors and guards. But now even that fiction may have to melt away as the Pentagon has flatly said they may need to send straight up combat troops to help the fledgling Iraqi army fight ISIS.
The announcement comes as ISIS and Al-Qaeda have reportedly reached an agreement to fight together rather than against each other. There was already a non-aggression pact and local collaborations but a meeting recently conducted in Syria appears to have concluded with both militant groups agreeing to a more comprehensive alliance. More bad news for the “moderate” Syrian rebels who now mostly serve as anunintended source of US weapons for ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
In Washington, U.S. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress on Thursday that the United States would consider dispatching a modest number of American forces to fight with Iraqi troops as they engage in more complex missions in the campaign against ISIS militants.
“I’m not predicting at this point that I would recommend that those forces in Mosul and along the border would need to be accompanied by U.S. forces, but we’re certainly considering it,” Dempsey told the House Armed Services Committee.
You had to see this one coming. Was there ever any doubt that the US was going to eventually send troops back in? It’s imperialism by numbers at this point – “advisors” go in first, air power, a small detachment to help locals with combat and then comes the big numbers. Only real question is when not if.
The US will be reoccupying Iraq soon enough, the only mystery left is how hilarious Obama’s backtracking will be when he has to send the troops in given his absolutist rhetoric earlier on in this fiasco. If you like your troop withdrawal, you can keep your troop withdrawal.
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Posted: 14 Nov 2014 07:01 AM PST
Here we go again. The Department of Justice has been using a legally questionable program to target criminal suspect’s cell phone data. The program involves flying small Cessna planes equipped with a device known as a “dirtbox” which mimics cell towers in order to trick cellphones into giving out their registration information. Like the now notorious NSA programs exposed by Edward Snowden, the dirtbox program scoops up large amounts of data from entirely innocent people in order to look for those suspected of wrongdoing.
The use of this electronic dragnet is, according to an anonymous Justice Department official that spoke to The Wall Street Journal, legal and done with a judge’s approval. How a general warrant program gets by Fourth Amendment protections is an open question and one that could face some scrutiny now that the program has been revealed.
Cellphones are programmed to connect automatically to the strongest cell tower signal. The device being used by the U.S. Marshals Service identifies itself as having the closest, strongest signal, even though it doesn’t, and forces all the phones that can detect its signal to send in their unique registration information. Even having encryption on a phone, such as the kind included on Apple Inc.’s iPhone 6, doesn’t prevent this process.
The technology is aimed at locating cellphones linked to individuals under investigation by the government, including fugitives and drug dealers, but it collects information on cellphones belonging to people who aren’t criminal suspects, these people said. They said the device determines which phones belong to suspects and “lets go” of the non-suspect phones.
The value of the program for law enforcement beyond getting everything and the deciding what to disregard (rather than building from the ground up) is that using the dirtboxes cuts out the phone companies altogether. Instead of getting authorization to have the telcom companies track someone on their system – requiring legal justification and a paper trail – the government bypasses them and snatches up all the cell phone information in a given area itself.
What does DOJ do with all the information related to innocent people it grabs? It remains unclear. In theory that information should be disregarded as not relevant to the suspect they are pursuing, but we all know how hard it is for the government to give up data once it has it. Looks like DOJ may have its own metadata program.
Right now small Cessnas are being used to run the dragnet creating some technical limitations on time in the air and area that can be covered, but we all know this technology is going to be part of the domestic drone program, don’t we? A domestic drone fleet could fly all day and night in every corner of the country. Can you locate me now?
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6. XL Pipeline BACK AGAIN - This one's for (Mary? [Landrieu?] Not for BIG OIL)
There are myriad reasons to oppose the expansion of the already-existing Keystone system.
Tar sands, tar sands pipelines and related issues are vast and complex with literally thousands of reports and articles on the subjects. We’ve tried to distill this information in a digestible form by coming up with a simple list of the ten reasons why you should oppose this pipeline project–and join our action to stop it.
1. CLIMATE CHANGE – NASA’s leading climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen has called the Keystone XL pipeline “a fuse to the largest carbon bomb on the planet.” Hansen has said that if all the carbon stored in the Canadian tar sands is released into the earth’s atmosphere it would mean “game over” for the planet.
2. SPILLS – All pipelines spill. According to TransCanada the Keystone 1 pipeline was predicted to spill once every seven years. It spilled 12 times in its first year and it has spilled more than 30 times over its lifetime. The Keystone XL pipeline is built to spill, and when it does it will have a devastating effect upon employment and the economy, according to Cornell University.
The oil firm Enbridge ignored warning signs for more than five years along its 6B Line, and when it spilled in July of 2010 in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River it caused the most damaging onshore oil spill in US history.
3. EMINENT DOMAIN ABUSE – TransCanada has intimidated landowners along the pipeline route into signing contractual agreements for their land. TransCanada fraudulently steals land from private citizens through eminent domain.
A recent Texas Supreme Court case ruled that the application process for common carrier status, the status that allows private companies to seize property, does not not conclusively establish eminent-domain power.
4. WATER CONTAMINATION – The Keystone XL pipeline threatens Texas’ Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer which supplies drinking water to more than 12 million people living across 60 counties in drought-stricken East Texas.
TransCanada has indicated that up to 700,000 gallons of tar sands crude could leak out of the Keystone XL pipeline without triggering its real time leak-detection system.
The pipeline’s cross-border section also threatens the Ogallala Aquifer, the largest aquifer in the western North American region, upon which millions of people and agricultural businesses depend for drinking water, irrigation and livestock watering.
5. THE JOBS MYTH: KEYSTONE XL WILL DESTROY MORE JOBS THAN IT CREATES – According the Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute, the pipeline project will actually destroy more jobs than it creates.
While proponents of the Keystone XL keep repeating the mantra of job creation in the media, it has become clear that the numbers they continue to project are patently false.
Far more jobs could be created by the development of a clean energy economy and infrastructure.
6. GAS PRICES – The Keystone XL pipeline will drive up gas prices, not lower them, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
7. TAR SANDS FOR EXPORT – TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline will not reduce American dependence on foreign oil. The pipeline will carry tar sands from Alberta, Canada to refineries in Port Arthur, Tex. to be sold on the global market to the highest bidder. This is a for-profit for export pipeline.
8. THE PIPELINE VIOLATES TRIBAL SOVEREIGNTY – The Indigenous Environmental Network has drafted the Mother Earth Accord with traditional treaty councils to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline and preserve the integrity of First Nations and tribal lands across Canada and the Untied States.
9. UNDISCLOSED TAR SANDS DILUTANTS – TransCanada refuses to disclose a comprehensive analysis of its mixture of chemical dilutants used to transport the otherwise viscous tar sands oil through the pipe, as well as human health and environmental risks associated with this secret mixture.
The Pipeline Hazardous Material Safety Administration told Congress that pipeline regulations were not designed for raw tar sands crude, that regulators had not yet evaluated what measures would be necessary to ensure that raw tar sands pipelines could be built and operated safely, and that PHMSA had not been involved in the environmental review.
10. FRAUDULENT ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEW – The Environmental Impact Statement done of the Keystone XL pipeline was conducted by the State Department, not the EPA. Controversy erupted last fall over Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s ties to one of TransCanada’s top lobbyists, Paul Elliot. Elliot was one of Clinton’s top campaign officials during her 2008 presidential bid. The EIS found that the pipeline would have minimal impact on the environment, failing to properly analyze direct, indirect and cumulative impacts of the pipeline project.
The “Gulf Coast Project” or southern portion of the Keystone XL does not have its own environmental review despite the fact that many issues unique to Texas and Oklahoma, such as wild fires and drought conditions, have yet to be analyzed.
7. War with the Sioux
House Vote in Favor of the Keystone XL Pipeline an Act of War
Lakota News
Rosebud, SD – In response to today’s vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to authorize the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, the Rosebud Sioux Tribal President announced that the Rosebud Sioux Tribe (Sicangu Lakota Oyate) recognizes the authorization of this pipeline as an act of war.
The Tribe has done its part to remain peaceful in its dealings with the United States in this matter, in spite of the fact that the Rosebud Sioux Tribe has yet to be properly consulted on the project, which would cross through Tribal land, and the concerns brought to the Department of Interior and to the Department of State have yet to be addressed.
“The House has now signed our death warrants and the death warrants of our children and grandchildren. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe will not allow this pipeline through our lands,” said President Scott of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. “We are outraged at the lack of intergovernmental cooperation. We are a sovereign nation and we are not being treated as such. We will close our reservation borders to Keystone XL. Authorizing Keystone XL is an act of war against our people.”
In February of this year, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and other members of the Great Sioux Nation adopted Tribal resolutions opposing the Keystone XL project.
“The Lakota people have always been stewards of this land,” added President Scott. “We feel it is imperative that we provide safe and responsible alternative energy resources not only to Tribal members but to non-Tribal members as well. We need to stop focusing and investing in risky fossil fuel projects like TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline. We need to start remembering that the earth is our mother and stop polluting her and start taking steps to preserve the land, water, and our grandchildren’s future.”
The Rosebud Sioux Tribe, along with several other South Dakota Tribes, stand together in opposition to risky and dangerous fossil fuel projects like TransCanada’s Keystone XL. The proposed route of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline crosses directly through Great Sioux Nation (Oceti Sakowin) Treaty lands as defined by both the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties and within the current exterior boundaries of the Rosebud Sioux Reservation and Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation.
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PNN 's PROGRESSIVES ADVANCE We've (NO TIME TO RETREAT)
Join News Director Rick Spisak as he welcomes a group of Progressive Activists evaluate the 2014 Election as we discuss how we can continue to advance the PROGRESSIVE AGENDA.
NO SENSE Counting Coup - We're building a FUTURE!
Our Guests:
Steve Horn Progressive Journalist with DeSmog Blog
Mark Pafford Progressive Legislative leader
Ray Seamans Progressive leader / Education Activist
Debbie Jordan former candidate for County Commission
Charles Messina former candidate for the Legislature
Rachel Pienta Progressive Democratic Consultant
Meredith Ockman NOW SouthEast Regional Director / Human /Women's Rights ACTIVIST
Mark Pafford Progressive Legislative leader
Ray Seamans Progressive leader / Education Activist
Debbie Jordan former candidate for County Commission
Charles Messina former candidate for the Legislature
Rachel Pienta Progressive Democratic Consultant
Meredith Ockman NOW SouthEast Regional Director / Human /Women's Rights ACTIVIST
Tune in Sunday Nov 16th 7pm - 9pm
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