Major kudos go out to the Texas-based, crude oil Energy Transfer Partners and their multitude of Wall Street financiers that reads like a lineup of who’s-who from the financial world (Sunoco, Bank of America, HSBC, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, US Bank, Barclays, Wells Fargo, Bank of Nova Scotia, Citibank, 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 ruthless American tradition of racism, facism and corporatism towards people of color and the sacredness of land and life.
The moguls of the petroleum industry and reckless abusers of the Earth’s finite resources are now intent upon creating an underground pipeline wall 1,172 miles long back and forth across the Missouri River, through North & South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois with pipeline connections to the Gulf of Mexico and a multitude of international destination’s 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 the Establishment’s Mongers of Environmental Destruction and War in the world. One wonders what relevant, pithy commentary will be forthcoming from Presidential candidates Trump, Clinton, Stein and Johnson?
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. One could either call it a stroke of genius or stupidity, matched only, perhaps, by the diabolical craftiness of North Dakota Governor Dalrymple who sought to cut off all the 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 brutality and 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 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 the distant, isolated northern plains and prairie lands of the Lakota & Dakota Sioux people has all the earmarks of another potentially-brewing historic Wounded Knee. Will it end up becoming yet another massacre of 1890 or another Siege of 1973?
Will America & the Fat Cat corporatists and politicians ever learn how to live in peace and harmony with those so different than themselves who live on ancestral lands they consider to be forever sacred?
Author’s Bio Note: During the 1960’s and early 70’s Irwin lived with the Dakota and Lakota peoples on the Crow Creek Sioux & Oglala Sioux Reservations in South Dakota and later published the book, “The Wild Gentle Ones; A Turtle island Odyssey” (www.turtle-island-odyssey.com) that documents their historical plight and those of other indigenous peoples on Turtle Island.
