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In Effort to Kill Pipeline, Groups Call Directly on Obama to Oppose Permits
U.S. Judge James Boasberg said he would make a decision by September 9 on whether to halt work on the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline
Aug 25, 2016
As Indigenous activists maintained resistance to a proposed oil pipeline in North Dakota this week, allied groups on Thursday sent an open letter to President Barack Obama asking him to urge the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to pull its permits for the project.
"After years of pipeline disasters--from the massive tar sands oil spill in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 2010, to the recent oil pipeline spills in the San Joaquin Valley and Ventura, CA--our organizations and our millions of members and supporters are concerned about the threat these projects pose to our safety, our health, and the environment," reads the letter (pdf), signed by groups such as the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Sierra Club, and 350.org.
The letter was published as a federal judge delayed a decision on allowing the construction to continue.
U.S. Judge James Boasberg said after a hearing in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday that he would decide by September 9 on whether to halt work on the pipeline amid a lawsuit filed against the corps by Standing Rock Sioux tribal leaders. Last week, pipeline developers agreed to pause construction until the decision is made.
"Whatever the final outcome in court, I believe we have already established an important principle--that is, tribes will be heard on important matters that affect our vital interests," Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Dave Archambault II said Wednesday, according to the Bismarck Tribune.
If the $3.7 billion pipeline is built, it will transport 500,000 barrels of oil a day past the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota and through several rivers, including the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, which supply water to millions of people. The pipeline would then traverse North Dakota, South Dakota, and Iowa before eventually stopping in Illinois.
"Everyone knows what is at stake, and we won't be sacrificed."
--Angela Bevans
Camps have sprung up around the contested area as the action against the pipeline stretches into its third week, and Amnesty International announced Wednesday that it had sent a delegation of human rights observers to the protest site. Opponents say the project would destroy sacred and culturally important lands and threaten their access to clean water.
Angela Bevans, an assistant attorney with a Sioux background, told the Guardian on Thursday that "[a]ny delay is a win for us. It will give Dakota Access pause and let people know that Standing Rock still needs assistance on this."
"We've suffered incarceration, massacre, and internment. This is just another chapter in the government allowing a private company to take something that doesn't belong to them just because they can," Bevans said. "It's not a matter of whether there will be a spill; it's when it will happen. Everyone knows what is at stake, and we won't be sacrificed. We are protecting the lifeblood of our people; these rivers are the arteries of Mother Earth."
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How Two Toxic Trade Deals Just Got a Litttle Bit Less Likely
Though the fight continues, the prospects for both TTIP and CETA have taken new hits
Apr 29, 2016
This week, the chances of passing the corporate trade deal TTIP have been dealt several more serious blows. Even the chances of passing TTIP's sister agreement, CETA (the Canada-EU deal), are starting to look decidedly shaky.
Here are the key highlights of the week.
The big new fact is the sheer scale of opposition to 'free trade' deals in the US. All leading presidential candidates have expressed some opposition to the current free trade agenda, with even free trader Clinton saying she's deeply uneasy. A new opinion poll shows only 18% of Americans support TTIP, down from 53% in 2014.
This matters because Obama only has eight months left in office and it seems unlikely that substantial progress will be made in that time. After that, the future is anyone's guess. That's a key reason Obama came to Germany this week - to speed things up.
But the US President was met by tens of thousands of protestors in Hannover, making clear that TTIP is toxic in Europe, too. The same opinion poll already quoted found 17% of Germans support TTIP—down from 55% two years ago. TTIP campaigning is reported to have accelerated substantially in France this week, and it's growing as an issue throughout Europe.
We released papers this week that show that the UK government isn't taking the corporate courts too seriously. The only risk assessment they've carried out on TTIP strongly advises the government that there are lots of risks and no benefits. On EU-Canada deal CETA, they hadn't even conducted a corporate court system risk assessment. So much for the evidence!
Events have moved rapidly on CETA this week too. CETA risks becoming a Trojan horse for TTIP, with many of the same provisions, including the infamous corporate court system. Although the EU Commission has created a reformed version of this system in CETA, all the most notorious cases we cite would still be a problem under this 'new' system.
CETA will go to the EU Council (of all EU governments) for ratification in June, and be formally signed in September. It will then go to the EU parliament, where we expect a vote next January or February.
Although we didn't expect to win any victories at the Council, that's all changed this week. First up, Romania, in dispute with Canada over visa issues, has threatened to veto CETA at the June meeting. Next, the Walloon parliament voted a critical motion on CETA that could tie the hands of the Belgian government and force it's abstention.
One problem with EU trade deals is that they can come into effect even without a vote in member parliaments. Under something known as 'provisional implementation', CETA could take effect in Britain early next year without a parliamentary vote here. In fact, even if the British parliament voted CETA down, the corporate court system would still stay in effect for 3 years! The June meeting is the last chance governments have to block these processes .
However, last night the Dutch parliament voted for a non-binding motion to reject this provisional implementation. The Netherlands might yet hold a referendum on CETA too.
In The UK we got news of the 41st TTIP Free Zone: Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council. This came hot on the heels of the Barcelona TTIP Free Zones conference, attracting 40 councillors and mayors from across the EU, where a declaration was agreed on which called for the end of negotiations on TTIP and TiSA and for the non-ratification of CETA.
It was also the 13th round of negotiations happening in New York, prompting German Economic Minister Sigmar Gabriel to comment: "Whether we can reach a deal this year really depends on whether we can create trust in the process. And unfortunately, we are very far from creating trust in the process."
So we're very much on the front foot. With the EU referendum approaching, is David Cameron really going to attend an EU meeting and support the idea that CETA come into effect without a parliamentary vote? We have 2 months to convince him that that's a terrible idea.
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Will Obama Destroy America Before It's Too Late?
Feb 19, 2016
America! Something is amiss. We are in the final throes of a desperate situation, and the numbers just aren't adding up. What can be done?
The facts are almost too dreadful to discuss: No matter how you slice it, spin it, or openly lie about it like Ted Cruz on a ketamine bender, it's become officially impossible to find any true and tangible evidence that President Obama - AKA Kenyan Comrade Nazi Socialist Obama - has utterly destroyed America, as promised.
Worse still, there is very little time left. The months are ticking away until Obama leaves office and becomes something altogether more terrifying: One of the most effective, lauded, sought-after ex-presidents in American history, next to Bill Clinton. Calamitous!
Ergo, the question is getting more urgent by the day: Can he still do it? Is there enough time for President Obama to undo all the undeniable improvements and socioeconomic progress that President Obama hath wrought? Let us pray.
The signs, regrettably, are not good. Unemployment just hit an eight-year low, down to 4.9 percent. Wages are (finally) ticking up, keeping better pace with all the new jobs, another 150,000 in January alone, officially joining Obama's nauseating string of 71 straight months of consecutive job growth.
That's downright shameful. Reports suggest the economy is so robust, many people are actually quitting their jobs, confident they will easily find another, thanks to the Obama-led economic recovery. Dude must be mortified.
It gets worse. It turns out the Affordable Care Act, which every Right-wing politician and pundit, bar none, swore on his mother's dead Medicare would devastate the economy and cause what was already the worst, most expensive, least effective health care system in the modern world to implode completely, has instead added another 13 million to the roster of the newly insured, most of them younger people.
Uglier still? Minimal adverse effects. It's doing pretty great, actually. Insurance companies have not collapsed. Rates, for most, have been dinged only mildly. Doctors are not jumping out of windows. And of course, millions now have insurance who would otherwise have been prevented from getting it before, and you can't be turned down for pre-existing conditions, and... oh, hell, you know the rest. Blah blah blah, good news many improvements everybody's mostly pretty happy.
Fools!
Perhaps a bit of gratitude is in order? Because truly, it could have been a lot worse. What if those early liberal visions for true health care overhaul - single-payer, for example - hadn't been so brutally beaten down by the Right? What if real reform had taken place? Or, for that matter, real environmental legislation? What if the GOP and the late Justice Scalia weren't so helpfully, openly partisan and grossly obstructionist?
Disaster, that's what. Pharmaceutical lobbyists would almost certainly be less obscenely powerful. Exxon's donations to GOP SuperPACs would slump. Hospital executives would struggle to buy a third Range Rover. Ghastly!
So I ask again, with extra ominousness: Why aren't we suffering more? Why aren't the vast majority of Americans far worse off? I mean, is this it? When will this nightmare of imperfect growth, recovery and undeniably improved overall health finally end?
Look, it's been nearly eight years. The mellow intellectual socialist black dude has had forever to make good on the GOP's fanatical demand that he ruin the nation and impregnate their terrified white daughters. Shouldn't the rich be much less rich? Shouldn't the stock market have collapsed by now?
Why is America's standing in the world so much better than a decade ago? Why are gay people so goddamn happy? Why are women becoming increasingly powerful and omnipresent? Why is the Republican party mocked and derided the world over? What happened to the ruinous supremacy of the Angry White Christian Male?
The answer, of course, is obvious: You've been duped.
Don't you get it? Everything is actually far worse than it seems. There are no jobs. You are not healthy. Your stock portfolio has not exploded in the past decade. CNN Money is lying when it says "Obama is shaping up to be one of the best presidents for the stock market in modern history, even with the recent pullback in 2016." It is not likely you reading this column right now on a beautiful, technologically marvelous digital device paid for, in sum, by the overall economic recovery. North is actually south. Progress is actually failure. Women and black people and Muslims and immigrants are actually destroying the country.
All part of a monstrous liberal hoax, you see, this "recovery," this "robust economy," this "historic resurgence," exactly like climate science and organic bananas, electric cars and feminism. Don't you see?
Here's the real truth: We are, each of us, floating inside a strange, mystical eight-year Obamabubble made of thoughtful rejoinders, Zen-like calm and effortless three-pointers from the perimeter. It's a bubble that's about to pop any second to reveal that the Dow is really at 3,000, ISIS has taken over the Freedom Tower and we've all been speaking German and just didn't realize it.
It's the onlyway to explain it. How else to vindicate the curdled Republican Establishment, every member of which has been so egregiously, so laughably wrong, and so consistently, for eight years straight? How to excuse the fact that every one of them has been promising us the exact same thing: a face-melting Obamacalypse, any second now?
And yet... nothing. Just the opposite, in fact. The poor dears.
Surely, some underwhelming charts exist. If you tweak the metric a little, unemployment isn't all that great - it's only, uh, moderately great. And many of those new jobs cited by the DOL are low-wage and service sector. And employment participation rates aren't quite as strong as they could be. So, you know, take that.
Also, military spending is actually up. And the truth is, Obama's health care reform is pretty weak on the actual reform: Insurance companies are still making billions. Big Pharma has never been so powerful. Most hospitals are still for-profit. Wall Street could not be more happily coldblooded.
Wait, isn't that good news? Obama's policies have only made the rich richer, the military machine more bloated, the stock market explode, oil companies mostly quite happy? I'm getting confused.
But never mind that now. Because it appears Obama hasn't given up just yet.
Behold, his administration's final, $4.1 trillion budget. It's packed to the brim with all sorts of nation-killing initiatives, soul-destroying taxes and hope-obliterating spending plans, a gruesome pile of mostly good ideas, a few fairly lousy ones and a handful of truly great ones that, should some of them actually make it through, would almost certainly leave the country much better off... all by destroying us completely.
Typical.
Good luck, Mr. President! We're all pulling for you. You monster.
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