Major kudos go out to the Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners and their multitude of Wall Street financiers that reads like a lineup of who’s-who. (Sunoco, Bank of America, HSBC, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, US Bank, Barclays, Wells Fargo, Bank of Nova Scotia, CITI Bank, Credit Suisse, Royal Bank of Canada, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland, Bank of Tokyo, Societe Generale, Intesa Sanpaolo, Compass Bank, Phillips 66, Enbridge, Marathon, to name but a few of the 30+ international funders of over 10 Billion dollars). Their collective contributions to the Dakota Access Pipeline are in keeping with the time-honored brutal, ruthless American tradition of racism, fascism and corporatism towards people of color and the sacredness of land and life.
The Dakota Access Pipeline debacle is intent upon creating an underground pipeline wall 1,172 miles long back and forth across the Missouri River, through North and South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois with further pipeline connections to the Gulf of Mexico and other international destinations beyond.
The penchant among politicians and corporatists alike to constantly build walls of various kinds, whether above or below ground, between nations of people makes this current pipeline controversy especially poignant on the eve of 2016’s US Presidential Election as voters struggle to decide who is the lesser evil regarding the support of Wall Street, the Pentagon and all the establishment’s Mongers of Environmental Destruction and War in the world. One wonders what relevant, pithy commentary, if any, will be forthcoming from Candidates Trump, Clinton, Stein and Johnson?
The clever, underhanded way in which Energy Transfer Partners and its coterie of Fat Cats recently sent in a fleet of Caterpillar tractors to intentionally destroy the culturally-sensitive, sacred burial grounds of the Standing Rock Sioux people before their legal representatives could address relevant state and federal protocols in a court of law, or North Dakota’s State Historic Preservation Office could do a proper survey of the area; was a stroke of genius.
It was matched only, perhaps, by the diabolical craftiness of North Dakota Governor Dalrymple who adroitly cut off all cell phone and internet WiFi reception in the contested Sioux lands of North Dakota to try to muzzle any factual accounts from ever reaching the outside world.
Meanwhile, the brutal ruthlessness continues at the hands of those like the Frost Kennels of Ohio and their ex police and military dog handlers who’ve been hired to sic their trained vicious German Shepherd guard dogs onto peacefully protesting men, women, elders and children from all races and nations who have begun to gather in ever-greater numbers to protest what is going on.
This confrontation in those distant, isolated northern plains and prairie lands of the Lakota and Dakota Sioux people has all the earmarks of another potentially-brewing Wounded Knee of either the original Massacre of 1890 or later Siege of 1973.
Will America and the fat cat corporatists and politicians ever learn how to live in peace and harmony with those so different than themselves and the lands upon which they live?
