Bring back the protests! Trump gives go-ahead for Keystone XL and the Dakota Access Pipelines

Well, Donald Trump said he’d bring those big pipelines back early in his Presidency and on Tuesday, he did just that, signing orders for the go-ahead of both the Keystone XL Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline.

When he’s not poking a normally lackadaisical and sleepy lion in the Far East with a sharp stick, yelling insults and spouting off tough talk while doing so, President Donald Trump can be found trying to whip a pack of wolves in the Midwest. Bring back the Indian Wars! Wachi’ku you haven’t seen anything yet!

Donald Trump’s wild whirlwind of a political tornado on Tuesday— signing controversial orders that really needed much thought and discussion with experts — well, “The Donald” surely made his poll numbers dip another 10 points earlier today.

And yes, Donald, you orange, dumbass, dick-wad, you really should have consulted a few scientists before you signed these pipeline continuation orders. This was not an action that should have been handled by shooting at the hip, Tweety Bird. Oh, but that whole thing about climate change is but a conspiracy theory that is braided like tapestry into an old Chinese wives tale, which some believed came from a cozy fireside scene right out of the movie Godzilla, which was cut out of that S/F classic with dull iron scissors, and it fell silently on the producer’s floor. — a future tweet blasted out of the Oval Office?

Never mind that today, Tuesday, Jan. 24, the Gropenfuher also brought up that ridiculous talk that millions voted illegally; well, Trump, that half year of ugliness near Cannonball, N.D., very possibly could be flaring up again like an exploding bomb train this time, possibly even making the protests of last year look like a Fourth of July picnic. Trump signed orders to allow the go-ahead of both the Keystone XL Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline on Tuesday. A more tactful right-wing nutcase would have at least waited a day or two before giving that thumb’s up sign to a second pipeline, but the flashy showman did it all on a Terrible Tuesday Reality Show afternoon. And he even made this treacherous act of debauchery a photo op, according to mainstream news accounts. Smile widely, now, oh orange one, and show the beautiful shine of that cheesy popcorn skin of yours!

The Route of the Keystone XL Pipeline will travel directly south through the Midwest, crossing land owned by Indian tribes, farms, and into and around cities and villages. It will also affect around 1,000 bodies of water, including rivers, lakes and an aquifer that provides the water supply to 81 percent of the people living on the Great Plains.

Both these petroleum-pumping monsters, with the Keystone XL said to be carrying the dirtiest crude oil on the planet from the Canadian oil sands, were nixed by outgoing President Barack Obama because the greatly loved Democrat feared climate change consequences, along with other environmental problems with these pipelines, like leaks that consistently plague these noxious monsters. And although Trump’s orders did not include permits for either pipeline to continue, if it was up to the world’s biggest con-man now occupying the Oval Office, these documents would have been thrown in Big Oil’s lap like the Trumpenfuhrer’s braggadocios snake oil that’s banging around like an old 8-cylinder jalopy. For simplicity’s sake, suffice it to say that the two orders Trump signed for these monstrous pipelines gives Big Oil and Gas companies laying these venomous snakes throughout the Midwest and Deep South the ability to get started again. Thanks to Trump, the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access are no longer stuck in the mud alongside the road. They’re on track and they’re idling. Vroom. Vroom. Vroom. And surely, Big Oil & Gas wants to see these projects continue. Soon. Very, very soon.

Holding near and dear to his isolationist and protectionist policies that America can stand on its own — even in the area of economics – Trump’s pipelines would pump oil so filthy that the current environmental protection policies would never allow the Alberta and Canadian oil sands crude to be sold domestically, It will most likely be used by countries having little in the way of environmental control measures, possibly in the Far East or in the Eastern Bloc of Europe and in some of the states of the former USSR. Unless, of course, the Trumpensteinian monster reverses almost all environmental protectionist policies and the spineless powers-that-be allow him to have such a free reign. There’s no need smokin’ dem unfiltered Pall Malls no more, Ma, I kin jest go outside and breathe that foggy gray air. Hack Hack. Cough cough.

Trump dashed his signature on these orders like a school superintendent would hastily dash off his John Hancock on a voucher to allow for a construction crew to put a new roof on the school district’s high school. The Dakota Access Pipeline has been projected to run from the Bakken shale oil fields in western North Dakota, shooting pretty much on a straight course southeast, through South Dakota, then into Iowa, and terminating at a humungous oil tank farm near Patoka, Ill. Along its trek, it will be crossing beneath the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers and will venture through or near many farms, lands owned by Indian tribes and sundry communities. The Dakota Access Pipeline has also been penciled in its etchings to run under part of Lake Oahe, near the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Indian Reservation. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, along with another treaty signed a few decades earlier of the same name, protects the lands owned by the seven tribes of the Lakota Nation. Even much of the land in this area of the country not actually protected by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 falls under protected lands of a legal trust set up through this treaty. And although treaty law is supposed to be “the supreme law of the land,” to a leader like Trump, who seems to have a total disregard – if not an outright arrogant disdain – of even Constitutional Law, these pipelines are going to continue, by gawd! And I thereby crown myself to be gawd!

Many in the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe consider the pipeline and its intended crossing of the Missouri River to constitute a threat to the region’s clean water and to ancient burial grounds. In April of last year, Standing Rock Sioux elder LaDonna Brave Bull Allard established a camp as a center for cultural preservation and spiritual resistance to the pipeline; over the summer the camp grew to thousands of people. The protests near Cannonball, N.D., lasted around a half year and more or less broke up, for the time being, at least, when outgoing President Barack Obama ordered construction of this venomous snake to cease. Just as the case of the Keystone XL Pipeline, Obama said he had grave environmental concerns, most notably, concerning climate change, in making this final decision on the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The ongoing, day-in, day-out protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline were ugly and harrowing. Pictures of people being sprayed with water cannons by large legions of militarized police, water protectors being attacked by trained police dogs, being shot with rubber bullets and tear gas, showed a side of America that emphasized BIG BROTHER IS IN CONTROL!

Well, protests began Tuesday night against these pipelines and surely will continue and gain more strength and mass. The protests that began around the Sacred Stones Encampment in North Dakota late last summer and more or less were quelled, for a spell, in early December, drew international attention and have been said to be “reshaping the national conversation for any environmental project that would cross the Native American land”.

Thousands, if not figures estimated to over ten thousand, of Native American protesters and water protectors, joined the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline for half of last year. It was the largest peaceful demonstration of unarmed Native American demonstrators in world history.

Furor among the Natives protesting erupted on Sept. 3, 2016, when construction workers bulldozed a section of land the tribe designated as “sacred ground” and when protesters entered the area, security workers used attack dogs, sicking them on these unarmed, defenseless Natives, who only wanted to protect their sacred lands from an outside force that has nefarious intents. Armed soldiers and police with riot gear and military equipment cleared an encampment that was directly in the proposed pipeline’s path on Sept. 3. At peak times during the protests last year, tens of thousands of water protectors descended on and around the Sacred Stones Encampment and the Cannonball area. Every American Indian tribe from the USA and Canada was represented in the long, ongoing series of protests, unequivocally deemed the largest protest of Native Americans in world history. On the water protectors’ side, most of the demonstrations were peaceful and nonviolent, but on the side of the militarized police — made up of police departments throughout the Dakotas, their reactions were horrid and violent – the use of trained police dogs, tear gas, rubber bullets, and water cannons were commonplace and these ‘ultimate sanctions” were normally Number One on the law and order agenda to quell what authorities saw as a major social disturbance.

The Keystone XL, meanwhile, is a proposed 1,179-mile (1,897 km), 36-inch-diameter crude oil pipeline that will originate in the Alberta oil sands territory in or near Hardisty, Alberta, Canada, then will travel immediately east through Saskatchewan and continue through Manitoba, and will travel directly south through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and will end at the Gulf Coast in Texas, making a split into the vicinities of Houston and Nederland. This crude is probably going to be shipped via ocean barge to foreign lands, according to reports. In addition to Native American tribal leaders and activists opposing the Keystone XL Pipeline, farmers throughout the Midwest also opposed this, and will undoubtedly again voice their opposition to this petrol-pumping monster, which will surely leak along its course in places. Experts familiar with this type of petroleum transport state that all pipelines leak, creating a threat to the well- being of humans, animals, and vegetation along their courses. When pipelines are placed under bodies of water, like rivers or lakes, this creates even more harrowing and horrid possibilities, with water pollution coming into the wet picture. The Keystone XL Pipeline will be cut through or near at least 1,000 rivers, lakes, and wetlands, including the Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies water to about 81 percent of the Great Plains. To make the tar sands available for processing the greasy, oily, sandy soil, a tract of boreal rain forest in Alberta about the size of Florida had to be cut down — totally decimated — which adds to climate change problems. Rain forests are believed by the scientific community to cool the earth and prevent greenhouse gases from taking over.

The current route of the Keystone XL Pipeline will see it cross over many lands owned by Indians, protected by treaties, what Native people call “The Supreme Law of the Land,” but to a kleptogarch like Trump, who lost the popular vote by more than 3 million to rival Hillary Clinton thanks to an anachronism called the Electoral College, initiated to make things fairer to the people who lived along the route of the Pony Express, well, we’ve already witnessed through his arrogance, along with his antisocial narcissistic behavior a very mean-spirited little man who could care less about treaty law.

The Trumpenfuhrer could care less about Constitutional Law, let alone treaty law. Some of his critics have even posited the question, “Has Donald Trump even given a quick read to The Constitution?”

The Keystone XL was actually the economic goose egg of Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who spearheaded the project, in which a large mass of an Alberta boreal rain forest was decimated so as to allow the oily, greasy, sandy soil on the ground to be refined into a dirty, filthy crude oil. President Barack Obama has originally said he would only approve the Keystone XL if it did “not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” In early November, 2015, Obama totally rejected the pipeline, killing the project, or so, many thought, until today’s signing of Trump’s order to allow the monster to get back online.

“The State Department has decided that the Keystone XL pipeline would not serve the national interest of the United States,” Obama said in a 10-minute announcement at the White House with Secretary of State John Kerry and Vice President Biden. “I agree with that decision.”

But even as he rejected it, Obama downplayed the importance of the decision, saying the project had an “over-inflated role in our political discourse.” The pipeline, he said, was neither a “silver bullet for the economy” nor “the express lane to climate disaster.”

Obama combined his statement on the Keystone rejection with a comment on a “positive jobs report” that he released shortly later, saying the latter proves that the economy is expanding and that the $5.4 billion project requires his approval because it crosses an international boundary. In a January 2014 environmental impact statement, the State Department concluded that Keystone XL would not affect carbon emissions. Oil companies, it said, would develop the tar sands regardless of whether the pipeline is built.

When fossil fuel production becomes such a necessity that we have to squeeze petrol out of the dirt, maybe it’s time to consider alternative sources of energy. So coming your way in the near or distant future, you’ll find close by a big, round, ugly pipe pumping crude so dirty that it will choke your car’s pistons.