The news from Standing Rock in North Dakota is just starting to break through. Thousands of Native people and their supporters have gathered to protest the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline that would bring oil from North Dakota through Iowa and into Illinois.
Last week, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota emerged as climate change heroes when, with little political clout or media spotlight, they halted construction of the $3.7 billion Dakota Access oil pipeline. After tribal chairman David Archambault II and others were arrested for pushing past barricades to block excavating machinery, Leonardo DiCaprio tweeted that he was inspired, and Bill McKibben touted Native Americans as the “the vanguard of the movement.” As the tribe sued the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to stop crews from burrowing beneath the Missouri River immediately upstream from their land, the homely, unpronounceable hashtag #NoDAPL surged—short for No Dakota Access Pipeline.
The Corps of Army Engineers is working to put the pipeline under the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers.
What could possible go wrong with that idea? Other than an environmental disaster impacting a major portion of the nation’s water supply.
That the Dakota Access Pipeline must be stopped is a no-brainer. President Obama could stop it with the a pen.
Meanwhile the oil companies who are building the pipeline have hired the world largest police force, G4S to provide security and attack the Native American protesters with dogs, gas and pepper spray.
Dakota Access security guards with dogs. No uniforms, name tags and corporate insignias are visible.
The use of dogs on protesters brings back memories of Birmingham said National Lawyers Guild representative Jeff Haas.
Birmingham, Alabama. 1963.
You may have heard of G4S Security. Omar Mateen was an employee until he killed himself after committing the largest mass shooting in U.S. history.
On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a terrorist attack/hate crime inside Pulse, a Gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
G4S has also been the target of a global boycott campaign for its role in profiteering from the imprisonment of Palestinians. They were contracting with the Israeli prison system and other occupation agencies to provide control rooms, equipment and security systems for Israeli prisons, checkpoints, and the Erez/Beit Hanoun Gaza border crossing where the siege on Gaza is imposed.
There currently exists an embargo of the Standing Rock tribal reservation. The main road has been blocked to entry or exit. Not unlike the embargo of Gaza.
The company is also at work with private prisons in the United States and United Kingdom, and has involvement in migrant detention and deportation in the US, UK, Canada and Australia.
As in the U.S. G4S provides security to pipeline and mining projects on stolen Indigenous lands in Canada and security for environmentally destructive tar sands mega-projects.
My brother, Mike, is on his way to Standing Rock this morning. Look for his reports.
In Chicago on Friday, September 9th, at 4pm at Daley Plaza you can attend the rally in solidarity with Standing Rock Sioux and the Sacred Stone Camp in their fight against Big Oil and the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Fred Klonsky 
bring oil fro North Dakota through Iowa and into Illinois.
Right – what we desperately need now is a way to stop anyone from helping the economic situation in Illinois. Go to, Freddie. When the State’s money is gone, maybe the Supreme Court justices will pay your pensions?
Confiscation will not work at the State level; people leave. You refuse to acknowledge this aspect of a free society – mainly because a free society is not in your value system. You may prevail, but state-administered economies do not tend to last long.
But long enough for you to finish out your pension-lifetime. And that’s all that counts, isn’t it?
What could possibly go wrong with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers burrowing beneath the Missouri River? Answer: The Corps was the group responsible for the levy failures in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Humans do error. Why play with nature? It seems mankind stops at nothing when greed is calling.
The Corps had called for the levy to be topped with concrete for many, many years, but congress failed to put it in the budget. Finally, the funds were approved and the project was to be completed the year before Katrina. At the last minute the funds were “swept” by G.W. Bush to fund infrastructure projects in Iraq, and the project was postponed for lack of funding. Hell of a job, Bushy!
The tribe filed papers the day before showing they found burial sites, Dakota Access hires professionals to hold off protesters so they could travel to the site the burials were found and destroy it because it is a federal law you cant build on burial sites. They have reached the lowest of the low.
And this money grubbing action on behalf of the .01% is a surprise to who????
It appears that “free society” is the code for ‘I got mine f**k everybody else.”
akivida–Please–it’s not about job creation &, sorry, don’t mix apples w/oranges here (IL pensions)–it’s about big $$$ for the corporate 1%–as usual. Not to mention the small detail that this will most certainly pollute our precious water supply in numerous states, in addition to the horrific–total disrespect & disregard– treatment of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
If you think that New Orleans has recovered from the Levee Breaches or that the gulf states have recovered/been compensated from the BP Oil Spill
(in caps. because these were monumental, man-made catastrophes, killing people, killing jobs & negatively affecting generations to come).
I recommend you read The Boys of Wichita & watch–on this, the 11th anniversary of Katrina–Spike Lee’s doc When the Levees Broke.
They should demand that if the pipeline is allowed to proceed, that the parts going under the rivers be triple-thick stainless steel with every weld x-ray inspected. That would reduce the chance of a leak occurring and getting in the rivers. Total cancelation of the project now looks unlikely with Trump, so if we could get them to at least make it as safe as possible, it would be a good thing. In an interview today, the head of the pipeline company expects to get the approval to proceed after Trump gets in.