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Human Rights Risks Are Investment Risks

The resolution by Marathon shareholders is one of more than two dozen resolutions on environmental matters filed with oil and gas companies. Those resolutions, which address concerns such as reducing methane emissions and curbing global warming, could be considered during annual meetings usually scheduled throughout the spring.

Marathon shareholders filed a similar resolution last year that met resistance from the company but still earned approval by 35 percent of the company's stockholders who voted.

The New York State Comptroller's Office, which manages public employee pension funds that are major shareholders, was the lead sponsor of both resolutions.

Although the office declined to discuss the resolution in detail, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said a year ago that investors had a right to know how Marathon considered the rights of indigenous peoples.

"Given the nationwide protests and controversy that surrounded the Dakota Access Pipeline, we assume Marathon would have undertaken robust due diligence before getting involved with that project," DiNapoli said in a 2017 statement. "Risks to the environment and to human rights create risks for our pension fund's investments and should be addressed as part of a sustainable business plan."

Why Marathon Says It Opposed the Resolution

The company, in its proxy statement last year, said it "respects the human, cultural and legal rights of individuals and communities" but still urged shareholders to reject the resolution.

Preparing the kind of reports sought through the resolution would require a highly customized study of projects under consideration, the company's 2017 proxy statement said."Providing a report of the nature the proponent seeks would require (Marathon) to present an incomplete and potentially misleading picture of prospective strategic transactions," it said.

Marathon's Board of Directors argued that the company's community engagement program provided a forum and allowed adequate opportunity for any group to make its positions known.

The resolution resonated with shareholders, though, said Jonas Kron, a senior vice president for Trillium Asset Management, a Boston-based company that focuses on socially responsible investing and that filed the resolution.

Similar resolutions addressing environmental and social justice issues with oil and gas companies typically generate around 20 percent approval, he said. "This vote shows the intensity of the issue with shareholders," he said. "I would hope they would be more responsive to such a significant plurality, and take steps to reexamine the way they consider indigenous people issues and maybe don't get involved with these types of projects."

A year ago, Marathon sought permission from the Securities Exchange Commission to suppress the resolution. The commission, which regulates publicly traded companies like Marathon, rejected the company's request.

This year, Marathon has not tried to block the resolution and is in discussions with DiNapoli's office. "Should Marathon decide to endorse its provisions as company policy, the comptroller will ask that the proposal be withdrawn from consideration at the annual meeting," Patrick Doherty, the comptroller's director of corporate governance, wrote to Marathon.

'People Are at Stake'

Shareholders in Marathon's partner, Enbridge Inc., a Canadian pipeline company that owns more than 10,000 miles of pipelines in Canada and the United States, filed a similar resolution last year that was also sparked by the faceoff at Standing Rock.

"To put it very bluntly, the protest, the movement, if you will, could most likely have been prevented," Chad Harrison, a Standing Rock councilman, said during the Enbridge shareholders meeting last year.

The solution would have been for the company to engage the people affected by the pipeline, he said. "People are at stake," Harrison said, according to a transcript. "People on the ground, people where pipelines are built."

Although Enbridge opposed the resolution and it was defeated, the company nevertheless vowed to update its policy on indigenous peoples and expand its disclosures about how it addresses human rights.

"One thing that shouldn't be in doubt is the fact that we recognize and respect the legal and constitutional rights of indigenous peoples, and the vital relationship they have with traditional lands and resources," Enbridge President and CEO Al Monaco said in a statement following the shareholders meeting.

The Dakota Access pipeline is part of Marathon's 8,300 mile pipeline system. It begins in the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota and runs nearly 1,200 miles to Illinois, where it connects to other pipelines that carry oil to refineries as far south as Texas. Along the way, it crosses hundreds of streams, rivers and other waterways, including the Missouri River a half-mile upstream from the Standing Rock reservation.

The people of Standing Rock rely on the river for drinking water, irrigation and fishing.

A prolonged protest involving people from more than 100 tribal nations, along with veterans and supporters from across the country, began in 2016 during construction of the pipeline. Along with their fear of polluted water, the tribe decried the desecration of sacred sites and the loss of tribal sovereignty; issues that highlighted the tribe long-standing struggle for social justice.

Oil began flowing through the $3.78 billion pipeline last year. It was designed to carry 470,000 barrels of oil a day.

Jodi Gillette of Standing Rock, a former adviser to President Barack Obama on Native American affairs, reminded Marathon shareholders last year of the tribe's rich heritage. While she said she believes the company can change, she said this of Marathon executives: "They are the ones who will have to look their grandchildren in the eye and say they are the ones who continue the abuse of the indigenous people of America even when they had the chance to change."

https://steemit.com/news/@wallhaxx/the-merger-of-corporation-and-state-can-be-seen-no-clearer-than-nodapl-response-peaceful-protesters-treated-as-terrorists-at-the

OIL POLICE: A private army for the rich.

If you haven't heard yet, The Intercept has obtained a trove of leaked documents, as well as some acquired through FOIA requests, that show the private security firm "TigerSwan", hired by DAPL, was the defacto leader of the law enforcement operations surrounding the protests in North Dakota and beyond. They worked closely with local police, the FBI, DHS, and the National Guard, guiding the strategy, and public relations of the operation.

(TL;DR: see videos at bottom)(All emphasis mine)

More than 100 internal documents leaked to The Intercept by a TigerSwan contractor, as well as a set of over 1,000 documents obtained via public records requests, reveal that TigerSwan spearheaded a multifaceted private security operation characterized by sweeping and invasive surveillance of protesters.

Yes, you read that correctly. A private mercenary group, hired by a private oil company, was essentially in charge of what local, state, and federal law enforcement did and said about the Standing Rock Water Protectors. This is the very definition of fascism.

This story sheds light on the fallacy that the police and military serve and protect the citizens of this nation. The truth is that from their inception, police and soldiers serve only the interest of the uber-wealthy elite and actually exist to keep us plebs from overturning the pyramid. For more on that, Read This.

For more evidence of the State acting as a branch of corporations, look at the language used to describe protesters:

Internal TigerSwan communications describe the movement as “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component”and compare the anti-pipeline water protectors to jihadist fighters. One report, dated February 27, 2017, states that since the movement “generally followed the jihadist insurgency model while active, we can expect the individuals who fought for and supported it to follow a post-insurgency model after its collapse.” Drawing comparisons with post-Soviet Afghanistan, the report warns, “While we can expect to see the continued spread of the anti-DAPL diaspora … aggressive intelligence preparation of the battlefield and active coordination between intelligence and security elements are now a proven method of defeating pipeline insurgencies.”

In other words, if you present a threat to a corporation (not the state) you are treated as a violent enemy combatant; a terrorist. Is a private company poisoning you water or air supply? Do you want them to stop? You might be a terrorist.

As policing continues to be militarized and state legislatures around the country pass laws criminalizing protest, the fact that a private security firm retained by a Fortune 500 oil and gas company coordinated its efforts with local, state, and federal law enforcement to undermine the protest movement has profoundly anti-democratic implications.

The merger began almost as soon as TigerSwan was hired, quickly embedding themselves in local law enforcement operations.

The leaked situation reports indicate that during the company’s first weeks working on the pipeline, TigerSwan operatives met with law enforcement in Iowa and North Dakota, including Sheriff Dean Danzeisen of Mercer County, North Dakota, who “agreed to sharing of information.” By September 13, the documents indicate, TigerSwan had placed a liaison inside the law enforcement “joint operation command” in North Dakota. The fusion of public and private intelligence operations targeting water protectors was underway.

Activists on the ground were tracked by a Dakota Access helicopter that provided live video coverage to their observers in police agencies, according to an October 12 email thread that included officers from the FBI, DHS, BIA, state, and local police. In one email, National Security Intelligence Specialist Terry Van Horn of the U.S. attorney’s office acknowledged his direct access to the helicopter video feed, which was tracking protesters’ movements during a demonstration. “Watching a live feed from DAPL Helicopter, pending arrival at site(s),” he wrote. Cecily Fong, a spokesperson for law enforcement throughout the protests, acknowledged that an operations center in Bismarck had access to the feed, stating in an email to The Intercept that “the video was provided as a courtesy so we had eyes on the situation.”

Asked about the intel group, Fong replied, “The Intelligence Group was formed from virtually the beginning. It involved personnel from our [State and Local Intelligence Center], the BIA, FBI, and Justice” consisting of “around 7 people who monitored social media in particular, in this case, because that was the medium most if not all of the protestors were using.”

And this didn't end at the North Dakota border either.

As the water protector movement expanded from North Dakota to other states, so did the surveillance. A report dated March 29, for instance, points to a meeting between TigerSwan and “the Des Moines Field Office of the FBI,with the Omaha and Sioux Falls offices joining by conference call. Also in attendance were representatives of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, Department of Homeland Security, Iowa Department of Emergency Services, Iowa Department of Homeland Security and Iowa Department of Wildlife. Topics covered included the current threat assessment of the pipeline, the layout of current security assets and persons of interest. The FBI seemed were [sic] very receptive to the information presented to them, and follow-up meetings with individuals will be scheduled soon.”

FUSION CENTERS: The surveilance state in your backyard.

In part 2 of The Intercept's report (part 3 coming soon) we learn of a Bush era policy that created facilities for exchanging counter-terrorism intelligence between law enforcement, which is now being used to help an oil company.

In 2007, President George W. Bush signed the 9/11 Commission Act, which allocated $300 million to the Department of Homeland Security for the establishment of fusion centers, originally intended to facilitate sharing of anti-terrorism intelligence among different state, local, and federal law enforcement agencies. According to the DHS website, there are currently 77 fusion centers nationwide, with every state home to at least one.

Brendan McQuade, an assistant professor of sociology at the State University of New York, Cortland, who is working on a book on fusion centers, said the records pertaining to the North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center’s monitoring and repression of Standing Rock demonstrations offer unique insight into how fusion centers are used for political repression. “We’ve seen hints of this monitoring of the online presence of Black Lives Matter and Occupy protests, but never such explicit evidence of it as in the documents you’ve collected,” he told The Intercept after reviewing a selection of the documents.

According to former FBI Special Agent Michael German, who is now with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, fusion centers have become part of a broader “surveillance-industrial complex” in which security agencies and the corporate sector merge together in a frenzy of mass information gathering, tracking, and surveillance. Federal support for fusion centers is predicated on increased government access to “non-traditional information sources,” he notes. And one of the goals of fusion centers is to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure, 85 percent of which is owned by private interests.

“The insidious thing is that the role of private-sector entities in fusion centers has grown up without any specific legislation authorizing it,” said German, who co-authored a 2007 report on behalf of the ACLU called “What’s Wrong with Fusion Centers?” “Instead, the development of these techniques and relationships, such as the one involving TigerSwan and North Dakota law enforcement, has occurred within the closed-off world of law enforcement.”

PROPAGANDA: A battle of memes and misinformation.

Beyond bashing the heads of peaceful protesters and spying on organizers, TigerSwan's role also included steering public perception of the situation in favor of ETP and DAPL. Do you remember how all the local news reports out of the area just regurgitated what law enforcement was telling them? Who do you think told law enforcement what to say?

A document dated October 16, obtained via a public records request, lays out the mission of the TigerSwan-led security team working in North Dakota: In addition to protecting the pipeline workers, machinery, and construction material, the company was also expected to “protect the reputation of DAPL.” The public relations mission quickly became a priority for the firm, documents show. As a leaked situation report from early September puts it, success would require “strategic messaging from the client that drives the message that we are the good guys, tell the real story and address the negative messaging with good counter messaging.”

On numerous occasions, TigerSwan agents stressed the need to change the public narrative established by protestors and to swing public support in favor of the pipeline. As accounts of protest repression garnered nationwide support for the NoDAPL movement, the firm’s agents painstakingly collected and analyzed media coverage, warning their client about how certain incidents might be received by the public.

And they didn't stop at trying to limit or control the news of the pipeline, they also just straight-up fabricated stories and lies to make ETP look better. (That's called propaganda)

In a report dated September 7, TigerSwan agents discuss the need for a “Social Engagement Plan.” On September 22, they discuss the development of an information operations campaign run by the company’s North Carolina-based intel team and Robert Rice, who without disclosing his TigerSwan affiliation posed as “Allen Rice” in a series of amateurish videos in which he provided commentary critical of the protests. The videos, posted on the Facebook pages “Defend Iowa” and “Netizens for Progress and Justice,” were removed after The Intercept contacted TigerSwan, Rice, and the pages’ administrators for comment. None responded.

But it gets worse than corny Facebook videos. TigerSwan and various law enforcement also tried to twist and contort events surrounding the severe injuries of protesters, such as Sophia Wilansky, with baseless accusations of protesters building IEDs and other violent activities.

On a freezing night in November, as police sprayed nonviolent Dakota Access Pipeline opponents with water hoses and rubber bullets, representatives of the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, North Dakota’s U.S. Attorney’s Office, and local law enforcement agencies frantically exchanged emails as they monitored the action in real time.

By 4 a.m. on November 21, approximately 300 water protectors had been injured, some severely. Among them was 21-year-old Sophia Wilansky, who nearly lost her arm after being hit by what multiple sworn witnesses say was a police munition.

The emails exchanged that night highlight law enforcement efforts to control the narrative around the violent incident by spreading propaganda refuting Wilansky’s story, demonstrate the agencies’ heavy reliance on protesters’ social media feeds to monitor activities, and reveal for the first time the involvement of an FBI informant in defining the story police would promote.

Roughly eight hours prior to Sophia Wilansky’s injury, Bismarck police officer Lynn Wanner — who, records indicate, acted as a liaison between intelligence agencies and field officers throughout the anti-DAPL protests — alerted local, state, and federal law enforcement partners that an “FBI inside source”(pg11) was “reporting propane tanks inside the camp rigged to explode.” Wanner’s email about the FBI informant echoes the story the Morton County Sheriff’s Department would later tell journalists about Wilansky’s injury.

“We probably should be ready for a massive media backlash tomorrow although we are in the right. 244 angry voicemails received so far,” wrote Ben Leingang, a North Dakota state official, at about 10 p.m. on November 20. By morning, images of Wilansky’s severely injured arm were circulating online.

TigerSwan fretted about the backlash, too. “Protesters are claiming over 100 injuries associated with the demonstration and will surely contort video of the event into anti-DAPL propaganda,” the security firm noted in its internal report that next morning.

As another day passed, U.S. Attorney’s Office National Security Intelligence Specialist Terry Van Hornsent an email to members of various federal agencies noting the FBI’s claim that “a source from the camp reported people were making IED’s from small Coleman type propane canisters.” Van Horn added that Wilansky “was witnessed throwing an IED while on the bridge, it detonated early and caused the below injuries (see graphic photos).”

But one bogus theory about Wilansky's injury wasn't enough.

Less than an hour later, Van Hornemailed to the thread the text of a Facebook post from the page Netizens for Progress and Justice.“This wasn’t caused by law enforcement, it was caused by dumbass ‘direct action’ protesters that think they are doing the right thing without any consideration for the safety and welfare of honest protesters nearby that are caught up in things,” the post read, going on to describe a theory of the injury that conflicted even with law enforcement’s propane tank theory.

His version of events, presented as fact, and feigning concern for Sophia, was that a chainprotestors were using to pull barracades with a truck snapped and whipped the flesh from Wilansky's arm. This despite numerous sworn accounts and Sophia's own statements that it was a concussion (stun) grenade thrown by an officer that in fact blew her arm open. Even Snopes confirmed this. The whole story is absurd and full of attempts to contort the facts to frame the protesters as bad, including suggesting that protesters delayed getting aid to Wilansky because it would 'make a better story', neglecting to mention that the ambulance was delayed by the blockade the police (and TigerSwan) had put up to limit the flow of resources into the camp. There were also reports from those on the ground that officers were holding their grenades for several seconds before throwing them, so they would explode in the air instead of on the ground. In my opinion, this constitutes a war crime. The police also roundly denied using any grenades despite ample evidence to the contrary.

Despite the lies and inaccuracies, the team eagerly sought to spread this propaganda and muddy the waters against the protesters.

“How can we get this story out?” replied Maj. Amber Balken, a public information officer for the National Guard, which was also involved in policing the protests. “This is a must report,” Balken added, suggesting the name of a local conservative blogger. Cecily Fong, a public information officer with the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services, replied by promising to “get with” the blogger to circulate the article.

As The Intercept reported last week, Netizens for Progress and Justice also frequently published content produced on behalf of TigerSwan, including videos critical of pipeline opponents.

Ultimately, police promoted a story about the incident that echoed the claims of the FBI informant. On November 22, the Morton County Sheriff’s Department distributed press releases implying that Wilansky’s injury had been caused by a protester’s IED.

The Intercept reached Lauren Regan, an attorney representing Sophia Wilansky, and read the text of Van Horn’s email to her over the phone. “So much of it is totally factually incorrect,” Regan said.

“There has never been any evidence I have seen or heard of that gave any credibility to the allegation that propane tanks were being rigged as explosive devices,” continued Regan, who is a staff attorney at the Oregon-based Civil Liberties Defense Center. “To me, the timing of that revelation, in light of their having just basically blown a white woman’s arm off, always seemed extremely dubious.”

Sophia Wilansky’s father, Wayne Wilansky, agreed that “there’s not a shred of truth” to Van Horn’s account of Wilansky’s injury. “Obviously, disinformation is a major component of how they dealt with the protests,” he told The Intercept.

ing: what passes as "Evidence" to a DAPL supporter. Reminds me of a Sealab episode. :(style="box-sizing:inherit"/maxresdefault.jpg)

In addition to lies about protest activities and tactics, TigerSwan repeatedly tried to smear the protesters characters and personal activities, portraying them as wild and desperate deviants, outside of societal norms.

The internal situation reports from around the time of Wilansky’s injury contain their own examples of disinformation, invasive intelligence-gathering practices, and a fixation on the purported violence of DAPL’s opponents.

Overall, TigerSwan depicted the situation on the ground as volatile, at times painting the anti-pipeline camps as rife with drug use and “sexual deviance,” its inhabitants likely to stir violence. The security company found ways to interpret even the most benign social gatherings as potentially dangerous. One document previewed a casino concert featuring Jackson Browne and Bonnie Rait, fretting that it would draw “numerous outside influencers.” The document predicted, “Depending on the progress of drilling by then, the project could be adversely affected if not counter measured.”

After November 8, TigerSwan noted that “the election of President-elect Trump is likely to have a positive effect for the project overall and cooperation from the Federal level will likely improve after 20 JAN.” At the same time, TigerSwan commented on protesters’ post-election “despair,” writing on November 12 that “the DAPL protesters are inherently desperate and are not looking for a peaceful solution regarding the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in turn we can expect this situation to become more volatilethan it has ever become before.”

PINKERTONS: History repeats itself.

All of this has happened before (and all of it will happen again). A similar situation unfolded during the industrial revolution. The Pinkertons acted on behalf of factory owners to squash labor unions.

In the late 19th century, Allan Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency offered private detective and security services to public and corporate clients. The “Pinkertons,” as they were known, relied heavily on undercover agents and often acted as agents provocateur, triggering violence as much as they engaged in surveillance and propaganda.

Through their involvement as armed guards during labor conflicts, the Pinkertons “became a shorthand for the abusive power of unchecked capitalism,” Paul O’Hara, a history professor at Xavier University who wrote a book about them, told The Intercept. To workers, the Pinkertons were “hired thugs for capital” and “a symbol of corporate power,” he wrote. Their activities led to two congressional investigations and the Anti-Pinkerton Act of 1893, which barred the federal government from contracting with the Pinkertons and similar groups. But the act largely failed in its intent, and the Pinkertons set the stage for public partnerships with mercenary groups continuing to this day.

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Homestead Strike: Wikipedia]

These loopholes currently give TigerSwan leeway to do what would be unconstitutional if it were done by the police or government. In a nutshell, as I understand it, as long as private security is telling the police/government what to do and not the other way around, they are not breaking the law (God bless the united states of freedom!)

TigerSwan’s status as a private company has enabled it to operate with virtually no transparency or oversight. The North Dakota Private Investigation and Security Board confirmed in an email to The Intercept this week that TigerSwan still has not obtained a license to work as a private security firm in the state despite nine months on the ground. The company’s close collaboration with law enforcement, to which it has regularly fed intelligence, raises serious questions.

“The line between private security and law enforcement at DAPL has been nonexistent,” Bruce Ellison of the National Lawyers Guild, who also works with the Water Protector Legal Collective, told The Intercept. “They have been one in the same.”

To a large degree, unless they were found to be acting at the direction of government, TigerSwan’s agents would likely be held to similar standards as regular citizens, their most likely violations being things like trespassing.

Despite the legal ambiguity, TigerSwan’s actions raise questions. “You have these privatized actors that are performing what are commonly understood to be government functions — whether or not we’ve agreed that these are acceptable government functions,” said Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York School of Law. “Private corporations are taking these actions on a scale that is unheard of before — this isn’t your local private eye investigative service, we’re talking about tactics that the military uses overseas.”

And don't think that TigerSwan is going home just yet. They are just getting started. And with the historical context along with Trump in the WhiteHouse, the future is dark and full of (suspected) terrors.

In recent weeks, the company’s role has expanded to include the surveillance of activist networks marginally related to the pipeline, withTigerSwan agents monitoring “anti-Trump” protests from Chicago to Washington, D.C., as well as warning its client of growing dissent around other pipelines across the country.

And just to make sure you have nightmares, the founder of TigerSwan, Jim Reese, is now being pitched as a potential replacement for FBI director James Comey. Gods help us.

I will try to update this after part 3 is released, but you should probably keep an eye on this story yourself. It's quite long as it is.

You can find the full stories Here and Here. As well as the full collection of documents Here

Some details were also reported on Grist and Reveal

Videos:

Private Mercenary Firm TigerSwan Compares Anti-DAPL Water Protectors to "Jihadist Insurgency" - Democracy Now!

https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-greenpeace-dapl-2476132561.html

Trump Attorney Sues Greenpeace Over Dakota Access Pipeline in $300 Million Racketeering Case

By Steve Horn

Energy Transfer Partners, owner of the Dakota Access pipeline, has filed a $300 million Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) lawsuit against Greenpeace and other environmental groups for their activism against the long-contested North Dakota-to-Illinois project.

In its 187-page complaint, Energy Transfer alleges that "putative not-for-profits and rogue eco-terrorist groups who employ patterns of criminal activity and campaigns of misinformation to target legitimate companies and industries with fabricated environmental claims and other purported misconduct" caused the company to lose

billions of dollars."

In the case, Energy Transfer is represented by lawyers from the firm Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, one of the namesakes of which is Marc Kasowitz. Kasowitz is a member of the legal team representing President Donald Trump in the ongoing congressional and special counsel investigation of his 2016 presidential campaign's alleged ties and potential collusion with Russian state actors. The press release announcing the filing of the lawsuit details that Kasowitz attorney Michael J. Bowe is leading what the firm describes as an ongoing probe into the environmental groups' "campaign and practices."

Trump Connections

Bowe, according to multiple press accounts, is serving as Kasowitz's deputy in the ongoing Russia investigation. He also represents Resolute Forest Products and co-plaintiffs in its ongoing RICO lawsuit against Greenpeace, Stand.earth and other defendants involved in a corporate social responsibility campaign revolving around Resolute's forest-originated products.

Bowe, furthermore, is an attorney-of-record in a $50 million defamation lawsuit filed against freelance journalist Yashar Ali by suspended Fox News anchor Eric Bolling. Ali published a freelance article commissioned by the HuffPost on August 4 in which multiple sources told Ali that Bolling had sent a litany of unsolicited lewd text messages to Fox News' female employees.

Another attorney of record for the latest Greenpeace lawsuit, Jennifer Recine, formerly represented Trump"against the owners of one of the last large scale real estate development sites in Manhattan" and helped him win "the largest ever attachment in New York City history," according to her biographical sketch on the Kasowitz Benson Torres website. Bowe also lists that detail on his Kasowitz biography.

According to a New York Times article published in June, Marc Kasowitz represented Trump during the Trump Organization's financial travails in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and has served as his attorney in other recent matters. He even considered setting up an office in the White House, though he serves as Trump's personal attorney and not White House legal counsel.

"Kasowitz has been central to Mr. Trump's recent legal battles, helping his client keep divorce records sealed and representing him in the Trump University fraud lawsuit, in which Mr. Trump ultimately agreed to pay $25 million to settle claims from former students that the institution had cheated them out of tuition money," reported The Times. "In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Mr. Kasowitz threatened to sue The New York Times for libel on Mr. Trump's behalf over a story in which two women accused Mr. Trump of inappropriate touching years earlier."

Energy Transfer Partners CEO Kelcy Warren was a major campaign donor to President Trump, giving him more than $100,000 in campaign contributions.

'Meritless Lawsuit'

In its press release, the legal team for Energy Transfer Partners says that a website "will be established to catalog information and publish progress reports on the case and, when necessary, to set the record straight as the facts warrant."

A similar website has been set up in the Resolute Forest Products case. In a press release, Energy Transfer Partners accuses Greenpeace and other groups of "inducing and directing violent and destructive attacks."

"The alleged Enterprise is comprised of rogue environmental groups and militant individuals who employ a pattern of criminal activity and a campaign of misinformation for purposes of increasing donations and advancing their political or business agendas," Energy Transfer Partners says in its press release about the lawsuit. "In addition to its misinformation campaign, the Enterprise directly and indirectly fundedeco-terrorists on the ground in North Dakota. These groups formed their own outlaw camp among peaceful protestors (sic) gathered near Lake Oahe, and exploited the peaceful activities of these groups to further the Enterprise's corrupt agenda by inducing and directing violent and destructive attacks against law enforcement as well as Plaintiffs' property and personnel."

The "eco-terrorist" language mirrors that used by law enforcement and the public relations firms it and Energy Transfer Partners paid during the height of protests at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. In response to a request for comment from DeSmog, Bowe said that the alleged RICO conspiracy had a global reach.

"The complaint alleges the manufacturing and aggressive worldwide dissemination of a completely phony narrative inconsistent with overwhelming and incontrovertible facts," said Bowe. "We intend to successfully prosecute the case to its conclusion, vindicate this good company, and compensate it for the substantial harm it has suffered."

Greenpeace, though, sees the lawsuit as an act of "bullying" and in the category of "Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation," or SLAPP.

"This is the second consecutive year Donald Trump's go-to attorneys at the Kasowitz law firm have filed a meritless lawsuit against Greenpeace," Greenpeace USA General Counsel Tom Wetterer said in a press statement. "They are apparently trying to market themselves as corporate mercenaries willing to abuse the legal system to silence legitimate advocacy work. This has now become a pattern of harassment by corporate bullies, with Trump's attorneys leading the way."

Reposted with permission from our media associate DeSmogBlog.

http://www.alternet.org/activism/indigenous-woman-facing-federal-charges-protesting-dakota-access-pipeline

http://forward.com/news/356876/sophie-wilansky-leaves-hospital-after-nearly-losing-arm-to-grenade-at-stand/

The young Jewish woman whose arm was nearly torn off by a grenade at the protests against a natural gas pipeline at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation is back home this week, preparing for more surgeries.

Sophia Wilanskyposted a photo of herself with her dog, Angus, at her parents’ home in The Bronx after spending weeks at a Minnesota hospital.

“Sophia is doing better each day,” her father, Wayne Wilansky, wrote on Facebook last week. “She is very brave and I witness that bravery on a daily basis.”

In the weeks since Wilansky’s injury, the Army Corps of Engineers has moved to bar a portion of the Dakota Access Pipeline that the protesters opposed. But activists remain wary, noting that Donald Trump’s administration could reverse the decision as early as January.

Sophia Wilansky

‘Grenade’ Tears Limb Off Jewish 21-Year-Old at Standing Rock Protest

Josh Nathan-KazisNovember 23, 2016

Wilansky, 21, a recent graduate of Williams College, was hit by a police concussion grenade while protesting the pipeline in mid-November, activists say. The explosion tore off much of her arm. Police denied that their explosives could have caused that kind of damage, but Wilansky’s father says that the doctors found evidence of a grenade inside of her arm.

“A surgeon said he pulled shrapnel out of her arm,” he said. “It’s pretty clear it’s a grenade that caused this.”

Wayne Wilansky has tracked his daughter’s progress on a public Facebook page, as interest in her case has swelled, and donations to help pay for her medical care have flowed into a GoFundMe account.

[Sophia Wilansky at home in The Bronx with her dog, Angus.

On December 7, Wilansky wrote that Sophia was in severe pain, but was working to be ready to leave the hospital. She was back in the Bronx by December 11.

In an earlier post, Wilansky praised the care his daughter had received at the Hennepin County Medical Center. “The Nurses have been especially kind to her and that has been a major ingredient of her recovery so far,” Wilansky wrote. “Her body is recovering and she has gotten out of bed and can now walk around the hallways. It will be a very long time and many surgeries before we know the status of her arm and hand.”

Sophia is slated to undergo further surgeries at hospitals in New York. She has posted her own brief updates on the Facebook page, thanking her supporters and offering to pass on portions of the funds donated for her medical care to other injured protesters.

“If anyone else is hurt on the frontlines and needs to pay up front and out-of-pocket for time-sensitive emergency medical care, I would be happy to either lend or give the money out of my medical fund,” Wilansky wrote, while still in the Minnesota hospital. “I think that I received a disproportionate amount of money because I’m white, so I want to make sure that all the Sioux and other native people are taken care of as well.”

Wilansky’s father told the press in late November that he had been in touch with the Department of Justice about the police role in his daughter’s injury.

Read more: http://forward.com/news/356876/sophie-wilansky-leaves-hospital-after-nearly-losing-arm-to-grenade-at-stand/

ref

police concussion grenade tore off much of the arm of a 21-year-old Jewish woman at the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, activists say.

Sophia Wilansky was evacuated to Minneapolis, where she is undergoing rounds of surgery. It’s not clear whether she will lose her hand.

“There’s no words to be a parent and look at your kid, look at her arm that’s not there,” said Wilansky’s father, Wayne Wilansky, struggling to speak through his tears in an interview with local Minneapolis television station KMSP. “She’s peacefully trying to get people to not destroy the water supply, and they’re trying to kill her.”

The local sheriff’s department told the Los Angeles Times that the explosion that injured Wilansky was not caused by police explosives, and alleged that protesters had been making their own explosives out of propane bottles, one of which may have blown up and hurt Wilansky. Protesters fiercely denied the charge, and Wilansky’s father said that doctors had found evidence of a concussion grenade inside her body.

“A surgeon said he pulled shrapnel out of her arm,” he said. “It’s pretty clear it’s a grenade that caused this.”

Wilansky said that his daughter’s body also bears bruises from rubber bullets.

“They threw a grenade right at her,” he said.

A 2016 graduate of Williams College, a small private college in Massachusetts, Wilansky is an actress, artist and a committed activist.

“She feels very strongly that the environment is going to be crucial to the planet, and she wants to have a future where people have clean water and clean air and clean soil,” her father said.

Asked by the KMSP reporter how Sophia was raised, Wilansky said: “I didn’t raise her anything. She raised herself. She’s a brilliant, strong, beautiful girl.”

Sophia Wilansky had been at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests for three weeks at the time she was injured. She planned to stay through the winter.

The protests, which have been ongoing for months, are led by Native American activists from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The tribe opposes the pipeline, which will carry oil from North Dakota to Illionis. Clashes between local police and activists have grown increasingly violent. On the day Wilansky was injured, police used water cannons against protesters in sub-zero temperatures. In June, Wilansky was one of a group of protesters arrested at a “symbolic climate mass grave funeral” at the site of the West Roxbury Lateral Pipeline, a controversial natural gas pipeline project in Boston. Wilansky and other protesters climbed into the pipeline’s trench and lay down as if they were dead. Fellow activists said in a press release that she had been scheduled to appear in court in connection with the West Roxbury arrest on the day she was injured in North Dakota.

Read more: http://forward.com/news/355224/grenade-tears-limb-off-jewish-21-year-old-at-standing-rock-protest/

djt sez no protest to XOrder

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/6/16/standing_rock_sioux_chair_on_militarized

http://www.alternet.org/environment/huge-victory-court-finds-approval-dakota-access-pipeline-violated-law

federal judge ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration must conduct additional environmental review of the Dakota Access Pipeline, handing a limited victory to Native American tribes fighting the administration's decision to move forward with the project.

In an extensive opinion, Washington, DC District Court Judge James Boasberg sided with the tribes by agreeing the Army Corps of Engineers "did not consider the impacts of an oil spill on fishing rights, human rights, or environmental justice."...

On Tuesday, Sen. John Hoeven (R-ND) and Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) issued separate statements suggesting that the acting Secretary of the Army Robert Speer has ordered the Army Corps to issue the final easement to tunnel under Lake Oahe.

Cramer's statement appeared on his website with a photo of a shovel and a hashtag saying, #Build It.

"I have received word the Department of Defense is granting the easement for the Dakota Access Pipeline and Congressional notification is imminent," he said. "It's time to get to work and finish this important piece of energy infrastructure enhancing America's energy security and putting North Dakotans and Americans back to work. President Trump has proven to be a man of action and I am grateful for his commitment to this and other critical infrastructure projects so vital to our nation."

But in a statement Tuesday night, the Standing Rock Sioux said they had not received notice that the easement had been granted, calling the lawmakers' claims "premature" and challenging the possible suspension of the Army Corps' environmental impact statement as a "wholly unexplained and arbitrary change based on the president's personal views and, potentially, personal investments."

Law enforcement has arrested 696 protesters since August 10, 2016, the Morton County Sheriff's Office said. Unfortunately for the Water Protectors, they might be facing a legal nightmare.

As Freshet Collective reported:

"A randomized survey conducted by the National Jury Project concluded it is highly likely that the more than 600 water protectors facing criminal charges in the coming months will not receive fair trials from petit jurors impaneled in Morton and Burleigh Counties. The survey found that 77 percent of the juror-eligible population in Morton County and 85 percent of the juror-eligible population in Burleigh County had already decided the defendants were guilty."

http://www.ecowatch.com/arrested-standing-rock-dapl-2233136348.html

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24012017/keystone-xl-dakota-pipeline-donald-trump-executive-order

President Donald Trump issued executive actions on Tuesday to revive two highly contested oil pipelines previously blocked by the Obama administration.

The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and the Dakota Access pipeline had become litmus tests of President Obama's commitment to the fight against climate change as each project galvanized widespread grassroots opposition. Disputes over them had also created a bitter split over fossil fuel development that sharply divided Democrats from Republicans.

Trump's actions, called presidential memoranda and signaled throughout his campaign, may revive the projects' fortunes, but they also may further galvanize environmental forces. Activists are coming to grips with a broad assault against climate activism in favor of unfettered development of fossil fuels.

The memoranda, which White House officials said would be published later on the White House website but were not immediately released seek to advance construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, according to the Associated Press. Trump invited the Canadian pipeline company TransCanada to re-apply for a permit for the pipeline that would carry approximately 800,000 barrels of oil per day from the Alberta tar sands in Canada to Steele City, Neb., where it would connect to existing pipe en route to refineries in Texas. The Dakota Access pipeline would ship roughly half a million barrels of oil per day from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota to a transfer facility in Illinois.

At his daily press briefing, White House spokesman Sean Spicer explained that Trump wanted "the best possible deal for the American taxpayer. But he also said that among the conditions sought on both pipelines—and on future projects—might be requirements that they be built with American steel. The Dakota pipeline, however, is almost finished.

The Standing Rock tribe won a major victory against the builder of the $3.8 billion pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, on Dec. 4 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called for a more complete environmental analysis. Such an analysis would typically take a year or more to complete and could result in rerouting the pipeline.

...=

leaders ask camp go

This story was updated Jan. 24, 2017, to reflect President Trump's presidential memorandum to advance construction of the Dakota Access pipeline.

After months of largely peaceful protests by thousands of demonstrators from across the country who congregated at a camp near Cannon Ball, N.D., to help bring the Dakota Access pipeline to a halt, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has asked the pipeline opponents to go home.

The tribe said it plans to continue its action against the pipeline in the courts, but the protest camp has run its course. The protesters have until Jan. 30 to depart the main camp, according to a resolution passed by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council in Fort Yates on Friday. It also said the tribe may call on federal law enforcement officials to help them remove protesters from all of the camps and to block their re-entry if they haven't left in 30 days.

"Moving forward, our ultimate objective is best served by our elected officials, navigating strategically through the administrative and legal processes," the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe said in a statement. "For this reason, we ask the protectors to vacate the camps and head home with our most heartfelt thanks."

The plea came a day before the political debate was revived by Donald Trump's presidential memorandum on Tuesday calling on the pipeline to be built. Opposition leaders said they had not immediately decided whether to retract their call to clear the camp.

"We are prepared to push back on any reckless decision made by this administration," Dallas Goldtooth, campaign director for the Indigenous Environmental Network, said Tuesday. "If Trump does not pull back from implementing these orders it will only result in more massive mobilization and civil disobedience on a scale never seen [by] a newly seated president of the United States."

The call to clear the camp had also highlighted concerns about spring flooding—the camp lies in a flood zone expected to be inundated by spring snowmelt—and economic hardship suffered by the tribe due to a highway closure caused by the ongoing protests. Several hundred protesters have remained in the camp through the winter, down from the high of nearly 10,000 in early December.

The Standing Rock tribe won a major victory against the builder of the $3.8 billion pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, on Dec. 4 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called for a more complete environmental analysis. The process could delay construction by a year or more and could involve rerouting the pipeline. It is still unclear what the Trump administration will do.

Following the Army Corps decision, Standing Rock tribal chairman Dave Archambault urged protesters to return home as their opposition shifted to a legal battle and as potentially life-threatening winter storms and sub-zero temperatures set in. The region has since been hit with record snowfalls, increasing the probability that Oceti Sakowin, the main protest camp which sits on a floodplain near the Missouri River, will be underwater as early as March.

Residents of Cannon Ball, the district of the Standing Rock reservation closest to Oceti Sakowin, passed a resolution last week opposing the establishment of any new winter camp within their district. Residents expressed frustration over a highway closure near the camp that significantly increased the driving time to Bismarck, where many residents work, shop and receive medical care. Residents also expressed concern over the Cannon Ball gym, which has been used as an emergency shelter for pipeline opponents. The community uses the gym for sporting events, meetings and funerals, and it is in need of cleaning and repair.

Archambault continued to press the case against the pipeline speaking alongside former Vice President Al Gore and Amy Goodman, a journalist from Democracy Now, at the Sundance Film Festival last Sunday.

When asked about the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines at a press briefing on Monday, Sean Spicer, Trump's press secretary, said Trump may attempt to overrule the Army Corp's decision to halt the pipeline. "I don't want to get in front of the president's executive actions," he said, but the president wants to "maximize our use of natural resources."

http://www.ecowatch.com/dapl-trump-missile-launch-2203044415.html

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2016/12/pipelines-of-funds-support-allies-of-dapl/

When the Army Corp of Engineers announced Sunday it would block construction of an essential part of theDakota Access Pipeline Project and study alternative routes, thousands of protestors at the site — members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, environmentalists, veterans and others — joined hands in jubilation.

Concern about potential damage to the tribe’s sacred lands and leaks that could poison the water supply led to the outcry; a semi-permanent encampment of RVs, teepees and tents sprang up in recent months as the ranks of the objectors grew.

But they’re not breaking camp just yet. The forces behind the $3.8 billion pipeline, which is expected to carry Bakken Shale oil from northwest North Dakota through South Dakota and Iowa to connect to an oil reserve in Illinois, have a lot of sway with President-elect Donald Trump, who could order the Corps to reverse course, and those around him.Trump indicated his support for the pipeline, including the segment that has triggered the controversy, on Monday.

North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D), who has been mentioned as a possible Interior secretary under Trump,has avoided taking a position of the pipeline per se, but encouraged the protestors to go home: “When you look at it, we know one thing for sure: When the administration changes, the easement is going to be approved,” Heitkamp said Monday. “I understand the frustration of the protesters, I just think that this fight is not winnable.”

A member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, Heitkamp and her leadership PAC have raised $8.7 million since 2011, with $277,879 from the oil and gas industry. That includes $1,500 from the political action committee of Energy Transfer Partners, which owns Dakota Access, LLC, the key player in the project.

Fellow North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven (R), who recently came out supporting the pipeline, also received $5,000 from the PAC during his re-election campaign this cycle. With seats on the Energy and Natural Resources and Indian Affairs committees, Hoeven’s single biggest financial supporter throughout his senatorial career has been the oil and gas industry, which has given his campaign $673,030 since 2011.

In total, Energy Transfer Partners’ PAC donated $128,000 to federal candidates this in the 2016 cycle.

Trump’s interest in the pipeline has been more than just tangential: His 2015 financial disclosure report showed he owned Energy Transfer Partners stock valued at between $500,000 and $1 million. Trump’s latest financial report, filed in May 2016, shows he reduced his investment to somewhere between $15,000 and $50,000, but also revealed an investment in Phillips 66 of between $100,000 and $250,000. Phillips 66 owns about 25 percent of the pipeline, making it the biggest partner in the project after ETP. Trump sold all his shares in companies in June, including the investment in ETP, according to his spokesperson, though no documentary evidence of that has been shared.

Energy Transfer Partners CEO Kelcy Warren showed his strong support for Trump in late June by donating $100,000 to his joint fundraising committee, $3,000 of which went straight to his campaign.

Like many big donors this cycle, Warren flirted with other presidential prospects first, most notably former Texas Gov. Rick Perry. The pro-Perry super PAC Opportunity & Freedom I got a $5 million donation from Warren soon after Perry announced his bid last year — but Warren received a refund after Perry dropped out of the race a few months later. Perry, it turns out, is on the board of Energy Transfer Partners. National Republican party committees also received $203,400 from Warren this election cycle.

:{At the state level, Warren donated [$250,000](http://followthemoney.org/show-me?f-fc=2%2C3&d-eid=11563260&f-eid=11281947&d-cci=33#[{1|gro=y) to Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott (R) in this election cycle and [$10,400](http://followthemoney.org/show-me?f-fc=2%2C3&d-eid=11563260&s=LA&f-eid=16072644&d-cci=33#{1|gro=y,f-eid) to Louisiana Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle, who oversees public utilities in the state. Angelle, the onetime head of the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, is a board member of Sunoco Logistics Partners, a subsidiary of Energy Transfer :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:and one of the smaller owners of the pipeline project. Angelle faces a run-off election for Louisiana’s [3rd Congressional District seat on Saturday, and his single biggest supporter has been the oil and gas industry, which has contributed $103,150 so far.

Warren doesn’t skimp: He has donated over $2.4 million to candidates, parties and committees at the federal level since 2007 and [$1.7 million](http://followthemoney.org/show-me?f-fc=2,3&d-eid=11563260#[{1|gro=f-eid,d-cci,s) at the state and local level in the last decade.

Energetic support

Heitkamp is only the latest addition to the list of oil executives and pro-development politicians being considered to run the Interior Department, overseeing the nation’s wildlife and natural resources.

Trump’s key energy advisor and Continental Resources CEO Harold G. Hamm, in particular, has been the mastermind of the energy policies of the president-elect.

Hamm and his wife Sue Ann Hamm have donated nearly $1.9 million to federal candidates and committees over the years. This election cycle, individuals (including the chief executive) and the political action committee of Continental Resources donated $15,226 to Trump as well as $10,300 and $10,200 to Heitkamp and Hoeven, respectively. The oil billionaire who was at the forefront of the fracking boom in North Dakota was also considered a leading contender for the top job at the Department of Energy, but recently denied any plans to join Trump’s cabinet.

In a Wall Street Journal column published Monday, another key energy adviser to the Trump campaign, Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) — who also received $7,400 from Continental Resources this year — censured the protesters. He, too, counts the energy and natural resources sector as his biggest source of financial support, especially the oil and gas industry: The sector has given his campaign and his leadership PAC $932,925 throughout his congressional career, including his unsuccessful 1996 campaign. Oasis Petroleum, whose well leaked more than 67,000 gallons of crude oil last year, endangering a tributary around the Missouri River, topped Cramer’s donors, giving $68,500. North Dakota-based Armstrong Corp and Koch Industries also have given Kramer $32,800 and $33,000, respectively.

While members of Congress have voiced their views on the high-profile project, the permitting process has mostly been in the purview of the states. Both the Iowa Utility Boardand the North Dakota Public Service Commission have been key here.

Unlike IUB members, who were all appointed by Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, the three North Dakota public service commissioners — Julie Fedorchak, Randy Christmann and Brian Kalk — were elected to their six-year terms and boasted strong financial support from the energy and natural resources sector. Combined, they brought in a total of $117,550 from those interests. The North Dakota Petroleum Council forked over a total of $15,900 to the three. Hamm, of Continental Resources, gave them $1,000 each.

And energy and natural resources donors have been crucial to Branstad, too, accounting for over $1 million out of $1.8 million total contributions to the governor since 2010.

Unfortunately for protesters, the Dakota Access Pipeline is not the only pipeline plan that could be revived by the new administration.

Cramer — formerly a North Dakota Public Service Commissioner who helped approve the original Keystone Pipeline in 2010 — has been a leading voice in reviving the fourth phase of the Keystone project, which would add North Dakota and Montana to its route.

Called the Keystone XL, the pipeline proposal was a top election issue in 2014. The Obama administration rejected it last year, but Trump says he backs it to free America from dependence on foreign oil. Beneficiaries of the pipeline would be American oil moguls operating in the region, like Hamm and the Koch brothers.

Keystone XL’s biggest owner, TransCanada, appears to be stepping up its political game. Contributions from the company’s employees and PAC jumped from $4,600 in the 2014 cycle to $243,226 this time around. Ohio Gov. John Kasich received $11,000, while Cramer and Trump received $5,000 and $4,136 each. Even Hillary Clinton, who publicly opposed the extended pipeline, received contributions totaling $1,639.

Categories: Campaign finance Congress Congressional Committees Environment Oil & gas Politicians & Elections

Tags: b3, Continental Resources, Dakota Access Pipeline, energy transfer partners, harold hamm, Heidi Heitkamp, John Hoeven, Kelcy Warren, Keven Cramer, Keystone Pipeline, north dakota, Rick Perry, Scott Angelle, soorin kim, transcanada

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/01/1589340/-Security-Firm-Running-Dakota-Pipeline-Intelligence-Tied-to-U-S-Military-Occupations-Abroad

TigerSwan is one of several security firms under investigation for its work guarding the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota while potentially without a permit. Besides this recent work on the Standing Rock Sioux protests in North Dakota, this company has offices in Iraq and Afghanistan and is run by a special forces Army veteran.

According to a summary of the investigation, TigerSwan “is in charge of Dakota Access intelligence and supervises the overall security.”

The Morton County, North Dakota, Sheriff's Department also recently concluded that another security company, Frost Kennels, operated in the state while unlicensed to do so and could face criminal charges. The firm's attack dogs bit protesters at a heated Labor Day weekend protest.

Law enforcement and private security at the North Dakota pipeline protests have faced criticism for maintaining a militarized presence in the area. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and National Lawyer's Guild have filed multiple open records requests to learn more about the extent of this militarization, and over 133,000 citizens have signed a petition calling for the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene and quell the backlash.

The Federal Aviation Administration has also implemented a no-fly zone, which bars anyone but law enforcement from flying within a 4-mile radius and 3500 feet above the ground in the protest area. Dallas Goldtooth, an organizer on the scenes in North Dakota with the Indigenous Environmental Network, said on Facebook that “DAPL private security planes and choppers were flying all day” within the designated no-fly zone.

Donnell Hushka, the designated public information officer for the North Dakota Tactical Operation Center, which is tasked with overseeing the no-fly zone, did not respond to repeated queries about designated private entities allowed to fly in no-fly zone airspace.

The largest bank in Norway, DNB, has sold its assets in the companies behind the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline, and it’s considering whether to terminate three separate loans the bank has made to finance the project. The sold assets were worth $3 million. The loans under consideration finance up to 10 percent of the pipeline’s construction. Norway’s DNB is not connected to DNB First, which is based in Pennsylvania and is not involved in the Dakota Access pipeline. This comes as Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline, is almost certain to miss the January 1, 2017, deadline by which it had promised oil companies it would have completed construction, opening up the possibility the pipeline company may lose its contracts with oil companies. In recent court documents, Energy Transfer Partners acknowledged that if the Army Corps of Engineers does grant the final permit to drill underneath the Missouri River, it would still take the company between three and four months to finish the project. It’s still not clear whether the permit will ever be granted. Even if it is granted, missing the January 1 deadline means oil companies will have the right to renegotiate or even cancel their contracts to have oil shipped through the Dakota Access pipeline. These cancellations are likely, given that Bakken oil production has fallen by 20 percent since its peak in December 2014—the same year the contracts were first signed. Energy Transfer Partners has acknowledged in court filings "loss of shippers to the project could effectively result in project cancellation."

http://www.alternet.org/environment/clear-evidence-emerges-outrageous-militarized-police-collaboration-mining-companies

trump investor

Trump's Personal Investments Ride on Completion of Dakota Access Pipeline

Lorraine Chow

Donald Trump's surprise election win has encouraged Energy Transfer Partners's Kelcy Warren, the CEO of the parent company of Dakota Access LLC, which is building the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). In an interview with CBS This Morning, Warren said he is "100 percent" confident that the president-elect will help the company finish the project.

The Standing Rock Sioux and their allies have been trying to block the controversial project since spring. The planned route cuts through the Missouri River, and protestors fear that a potential spill will contaminate the tribe's main source of drinking water and destroy sacred sites.

More than 80 percent of the pipeline has already been constructed. The final phase is an easement to build a tunnel beneath the federally protected river, but it first needs approval from the Obama administration.

"We will get this easement and we will complete our project," Warren insisted in his CBS interview.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is mulling alternative routes and has requested a temporary halt to the $3.8 billion project but Dakota Access LLC is pushing ahead with construction. According to a Nov. 8 release, the company said it is "currently mobilizing horizontal drilling equipment to the drill box site" and will commence drilling activities upon completion of mobilization in about two weeks.

Yesterday, Army Corps's Omaha office said it was "concerned" that the company plans to continue building despite the Corps's request.

Trump has not spoken about the DAPL but holds stocks that are directly funding the Dakota Access Pipeline. According to Trump's financial disclosure forms, The Guardian reported that he has invested between $500,000 and $1 million in Energy Transfer Partners.

The ardent supporter of fossil fuels wants to bring back the Keystone XL and announced plans to undo President Obama's climate change and environmental policies.

Warren said he has "never met" Trump but has donated $103,000 to his presidential campaign. He believes the DAPL will result in cheaper oil and more jobs.

Warren, however, brushed off any leak concerns: “I'm not gonna win that argument with you because pipelines do leak. It's rare. I think the chances of this pipeline leaking is extremely remote."

The Texas businessman went on to say that the protestors "will not stop our project, that's naive."

DAPL opponents have also responded to Trump's win. Standing Rock Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault II told Yes! Magazine the day after the election he hopes that the new commander-in-chief will be sympathetic:

"We have to be hopeful and mindful that the new president understands what we're about. We're about protecting our future. And that's what he should be about. He should think, How can I protect my future so that 50 years from now, 100 years from now, there's something there? And that if we continue to do what we're doing at the pace that we're doing it, in 50 years we're going to see mass destruction because Mother Earth cannot sustain herself with all the activity that's taking place.

"So if there's an understanding of that, we can build relationships, and we can work together on how to make this place better and to salvage what is left."

Senator Promoting Dakota Access Pipeline Invests In Bakken Oil Wells Named After Indian Tribe

U.S. Senator John Hoeven (R-ND) recently...

http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/10/12/officers-riot-gear-arrest-dozens-protesters-dakota-access-pipeline-construction-resumes

activist and prtess suppression

http://www.alternet.org/environment/white-tribes-onslaught-against-native-americans-isnt-history-tale-its-alive-and-well

....

Americans who don’t live in the West may think that the historic clash of Native Americans and pioneering settlers is long past because the Indians were, after all, defeated and now drive cars, watch television, and shop at Walmart. Not so. That classic American narrative is back big time, only the Indians are now the good guys and the cowboys -- well, their rightwing representatives, anyway -- are on the warpath, trying to grab 640 million acres of public lands that they can plunder as if it were yesteryear. Meanwhile, in the Dakotas, America’s Manifest Destiny, that historic push across the Great Plains to the Pacific (murdering and pillaging along the way), seems to be making a return trip to Sioux country in a form that could have planetary consequences.

Energy Transfer Partners is now building the Dakota Access Pipeline, a $3.7 billion oil slick of a project. It’s slated to go from the Bakken gas and oil fracking fields in northern North Dakota across 1,100 miles of the rest of the Dakotas and Iowa to a pipeline hub in Illinois. From there, the oil will head for refineries on the Gulf Coast and ultimately, as the emissions from fossil fuels, into the atmosphere to help create future summers so hot no one will forget them. Keep in mind that, according to global warming’s terrible new math, there’s enough carbon in those Bakken fields to roast the planet -- if, that is, the Sioux and tribes allied with them don’t stop the pipeline.

This time, in other words, if the cavalry does ride to the rescue, the heroes on horseback will be speaking Lakota.

Last Stand at Standing Rock

If built as planned, the Dakota Access Pipeline will snake through the headwaters of the Missouri River, a life-giving source of fresh water for millions of people who live downstream, including Native Americans. It’s supposed to pass under that river just a few miles from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation that straddles North and South Dakota. Protestors point out that, eventually, the pipeline is likely to leak into that vital watershed and the contamination could prove catastrophic. The Army Corps of Engineers, which green-lighted the project’s design, and Energy Transfer Partners have continued to insist that there is no such risk -- even though, suspiciously enough, they decided to change the pipeline’s route to avoid the water supply of North Dakota’s capital, Bismark. As ever, tribal leaders point out, they were ignored rather than consulted in the planning stages, even though the project was to pass directly through their lands.

When the Keystone XL Pipeline, slated to bring especially carbon-heavy tar sands from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast, was killed thanks to years of fierce environmental protests, the stakes were raised for the Dakota Access Pipeline. Keystone was a disaster for the energy industry. In its wake, opponents claim, the new project was fast-tracked without the usual environmental reviews so that construction could be completed before a Keystone-style opposition formed. Fast as they were, it turns out that they weren’t fast enough.

Keep in mind that such a project wasn’t exactly a first for the native peoples of the region. In the wake of their defeat and confinement to reservations in the nineteenth century, they lived through a profound transformation of their landscape. Settlers let cattle loose on meadows cleared of wolves, cougars, and bears. The rude stamp of progress followed: fences, roads, dams, mines, sawmills, railroads, power lines, towns, condos, resorts, and in the twenty-first century, vistas increasingly pockmarked with fracking’s drill rigs and service roads.

In the Dakota prairies, hundreds of species of grass and flowers were replaced by monocultures of soy and corn, while millions of cattle were substituted for herds of free-roaming bison. As recently as the 1950s and 1960s, the neighboring Sioux and Cheyenne lost 200,000 more acres of valuable reservation farmland to dams built without their permission. Entire villages had to relocate. The Dakota Access Pipeline is just the latest of these assaults and yet, in every way, it’s potentially more disastrous. As Lakota Chairman David Archambault puts it, “To poison water is to poison the substance of life.”

Slaughter, internment, and neglect were bad enough, say tribal leaders, butthreatening the people’s life-giving water was the last straw. As a result, thousands of Native Americans drawn from 280 tribes across the country and even around the world are now camping out at the construction site where the Dakota Access Pipeline nears the tip of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Almost two million signatures have been gathered on a petition opposing the pipeline; dozens of environmental groups have signed on to the resistance; and tribes nationwide have expressed their solidarity.

On September 3rd, the private security guards hired by Energy Transfer Partners used pepper spray and dogs on those trying to block the pipeline. This eruption of violence halted work until U.S. District Judge James Boasberg could rule on the tribe’s request for an injunction to block construction while its case was heard in court. On September 9th, while conceding that “the United States’ relationship with Indians has been contentious and tragic,” he denied that request. Then, in a move described even by the Sioux as stunning, the Obama administration suddenly stepped between the protesters and the pipeline construction crews. The Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and even the Army Corps of Engineers called for a halt to the process until the permitting procedure could be reviewed.

Although putting an oil pipeline under a major river should have triggered an environmental review, the Corps chose not to do one. Now, it will take a second look. The administration also committed itself to finding better ways to include Native Americans in future land-use decisions.

Where this goes next is anyone’s guess. The construction halt could, of course, be lifted if the protesters were to disperse under a false sense of victory. The Sioux now plan to litigatevigorously against the pipeline. One prediction, however, is easy enough. The unity and purpose experienced by the people in that encampment will resonate powerfully for years to come. A movement has been born along the banks of the Missouri River.

Native Americans have played the crucial role in this campaign to “keep it in the ground,” just as they were leaders in the successful struggle to block the Keystone XL Pipeline, the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline that would have carried dirty crude across Canada to the Pacific, and the building of a massive coal export port on Canada’s Pacific coast. As Native American leader Winona LaDuke puts it, “For people with nothing else but land and a river, I would not bet against them.”

This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the cowboys have been engaged in a not-so-old-fashioned range war over who can best manage 640 million acres of public lands now owned collectively by the American people. Backed by the Koch brothers and their American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, legislators across the American West, where most of the public lands are located, are calling on the federal government to cede control and management of them to counties and states. This would include some of our most beloved national parks.

In Utah where I live, the Republican-dominated legislature has put forward the Public Lands Initiative (PLI). It’s the latest round in a 30-year feud pitting conservationists and businesses tied to tourism and recreation against ranchers and miners. At stake: whether to give the last publicly controlled wild places in the state formal wilderness status and federal protection or (though this isn’t often directly said) let private interests exploit the hell out of them. Every few years the Utah legislature’s “cowboy caucus” has pushed just such a “wilderness bill” filled with poison pills and potentially devastating loopholes that the local conservation community can’t abide.

Billed this time as a potential grand bargain to settle who controls public lands and how they can be used, the PLI has proven no different. It was, in fact, generated by local fears that President Obama might use his wide-ranging powers under the Antiquities Act to create a new national monument in the state as he left the Oval Office. This was exactly what Bill Clinton did in 1996, establishing the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument on 1.9 million acres of land in southern Utah’s spectacular canyon country, already the home of five national parks.

That 1906 act, passed while Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House, gives the president wide-ranging authority to create national monuments from public lands in order to protect significant natural, cultural, or scientific features. Since activities like drilling for oil and gas, mining, timber cutting, and grazing are barred or tightly restricted on such protected lands, Western politicians tend to regard them as a tool wielded by conservationists tosuppress economic development.

Grave Robbing for Fun and Profit

Sure enough, the nightmare of the cowboys is being realized. A coalition of five tribes, all either presently in Utah or claiming ancestral lands there, is now pushing a bold proposal for just such a national monument -- a park co-managed by the five tribes and the National Park Service (which in itself would be a significant first for the Native American community). It would include 1.9 million acres of the ancestral grounds of the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain, and Ute Indian tribes and would be known as the Bears Ears after the area’s most famous landmark, twin buttes that are said to resemble a bear's ears.

Interior Secretary Sally Jewel recently toured the proposed monument and was amazed by what she saw, including spectacular cliff-house ruins, as well as paintings and rock carvings depicting clan signs, shamanic visions, and ghostly herds of bighorn sheep and elk. Bears Ears would possess more than 100,000 archaeological sites, including many of the oldest and most spectacular ruins in the United States. Members of the coalition of tribes regard them and the ground littered with their ancestors’ artifacts and bones as sacred.

A grassroots group, Utah Dine Bikeyah, did extensive groundwork collecting data and interviews to create cultural maps of the region. The extraordinary archaeological and historical record they built effectively made their case that the ancestors of the coalition tribes have relied on that landscape for hunting, gathering, and ceremonial activities for centuries. The Utah conservation community, which had mapped out its own plans for such a monument, stepped aside for the tribal proposal.

Protecting the Bears Ears is considered an urgent matter. A mere handful of rangers currently patrol thousands of square miles of rugged canyons where the looting of archaeological sites for fun and profit is a rural tradition. In remote outposts like Blanding, Utah, Indian grave robbing was considered an acceptable family pastime until agents from the FBI infiltrated the black market for artifacts and busted a prominent local family. Ute leader Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk expresses a motivating concern of the tribal leaders. “Without swift action,” she says, “we fear that the archaeological and cultural riches of the Bears Ears will suffer shameful, disgraceful dissolution and obliteration.”

Her fear is well founded. In recent years, for instance, rural county commissioners have led illegal all-terrain-vehicle rallies on a route through Recapture Canyon that Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rangers shut to motorized traffic because it crosses several key archaeological sites.State and county politicians were not content to challenge the BLM’s closure of that canyon in court. Instead, they openly promoted such rides to defy the feds. The last of these protests in 2014 did, in fact, significantly damageunprotected archeological sites. The indigenous community saw it as a shocking show of disrespect, like driving directly over cemetery graves. The well-armed vigilantes who rode through Recapture Canyon were led by Ryan Bundy, son of Cliven Bundy and the famous hothead of the Bundy clan.

You may remember the colorful Bundy boys. After all, they became the stars of the “cowboy rebellion” against federal regulation on public lands. In 2014, BLM rangers were dispatched to Nevada to remove Cliven Bundy’s cows from lands on which they had been grazing illegally for 20 years. The feds claimed that he owed the taxpayers a million bucks in unpaid grazing fees. He, on the other hand, insisted that such public lands belonged to the ranchers whose grandparents first grazed them. The rangers sent to enforce the law were met by hundreds of armed cowboys, many of whom took up sniper positions around them. Faced with such overwhelming firepower and the prospect of bloodshed, they withdrew and a range war was on.

The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight

That retreat in Nevada undoubtedly emboldened the Bundy clan and their militia allies to seize Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January 2016. Well-armed, they occupied the visitor center at that bird refuge, leaning on every cowboy cliché in the book. They dressed the part with chaps, boots, buckles, and Stetson hats, carried American flags, and regularly posed with their horses for news photographers.

In the end, despite the Marlboro Man look and the Clint Eastwood demeanor, the Bundyites came across as the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. The “constitutional revolution” they wanted to spark by seizing Malheur fizzled amid a festival of cognitive dissonance and irony: men carrying assault rifles and threatening to use them proclaimed themselves “peaceful protesters” and, while declaring it off limits, attempted to “return” land to the American people -- land that they already owned. Federal agents eventually arrested all of the principal players in both the earlier Nevada standoff and the Malheur fiasco, except for one killed at a roadblock when he charged armed rangers and reached for his gun. Trials began on September 7th and are slated to last for months.

Given the open hostility of state and local politicians to the protection of sacred sites, as well as their willingness to break the law and offer tacit support for vigilantes like the Bundys, tribal leaders decided to take their concerns about protecting their ancestral grounds to the top. A delegation traveled to Washington and met with President Obama, while a media campaign was begun to persuade others to endorse the plan.

A broader coalition of tribes and the conservation community rallied to the idea, especially because it was the first time that Native American tribes had proposed such a monument. The vision of a park to honor sacred indigenous lands, shaped and directed by Native Americans themselves, caught the public imagination. The *New York Times* and *Washington Post* have both written editorials urging the president to create such a park and Utah polls show a solid majority of citizens in favor of it.

Peace Pipes, Not Oil Pipes

The genocidal policies that accompanied settlement across North America crested in Sioux country at the close of the nineteenth century. The survivors of the vanquished indigenous nations there were interned on reservations. Their children were taken from them and sent to boarding schools where their hair was cut, and their language and ceremonies banished. This was -- and was meant to be -- a form of cultural genocide. In the Bears Ears and Sioux country today, however, the culture of Native Americans endures. The descendants of those warriors who died defending their homeland and of those children taken from their families and their native cultures have proven remarkably resilient. They are once again defending their world and, as it happens, ours too, because even if you don’t share the Missouri River watershed, you live on a planet that is being rapidly transformed by the sort of toxic cargo that will fill a future Dakota Access Pipeline.

In the Hollywood Westerns of my youth, Indians were often one-dimensional villains who committed atrocities on good white folks trying to bring civilization to the frontier. As with so many notions I inherited in my youth, reality has turned out to be another story.

Certainly, before the onslaught of colonialism, the way indigenous people across the planet viewed what we now call our environment has come to seem like sanity itself. The land, as the Sioux and other tribal peoples saw it, was a living being saturated with spirits that humans should both acknowledge and respect.

The Indians whom the cowboys and bluecoats fought didn’t share European concepts of cash, property, profit, progress, and, most importantly, technology. Once upon a time, we had the guns and they had the bows and arrows, so we rolled over them. But here’s the wondrous thing: a story that seemed to have ended long ago turns out to be anything but over. Times have changed, and in the process the previous cast of characters has, it seems, swapped roles.

An economy hooked on carbon is threatening life on Earth. The waters of seas and oceans are warming fast; the weather is becoming unpredictable and harsh. Perhaps it’s time to finally listen to and learn from people who lived here sustainably for thousands of years. Respecting Sioux sovereignty and protecting the sacred sites of tribes in their own co-managed national monument could write the next chapter in our American story, the one in which the Indians finally get to be heroes and heroines fighting to protect our way of life as well as their own.

http://www.ecowatch.com/bill-mckibben-dakota-access-pipeline-2013589024.html

bill m

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Maybe there's a Citibank branch in your neighborhood. Or Wells Fargo or Bank of America or HSBC. Maybe you even keep your money in one—if so, you inadvertently helped pay for the guard dogs that attacked Native Americans as they tried to keep bulldozers from mowing down ancestral grave sites.

Maybe you have a retirement plan invested with Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley—if so, you helped buy the pepper spray that the company used to clear the way for its crews as they cleared the right of way straight to the Missouri River.

Perhaps you bank overseas. Credit Agricole? Deutsche Bank? Sumitomo? Royal Bank of Scotland? Barclays? Yeah, them too.

http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/09/15/dakota-access-pipeline-fake-twitter-accounts-dci-group

A DeSmog investigation has revealed the possibility that a front group supporting the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) — the Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now (MAIN) — may have created fake Twitter profiles, known by some as “sock puppets,” to convey a pro-pipeline message over social media. And MAIN may be employing the PR services of the firm DCI Group, which has connections to the Republican Party, in order to do so.

DeSmog tracked down at least 16 different questionable Twitter accounts which used the #NoDAPL hashtag employed by protesters, in order to claim that opposition to the pipeline kills jobs, that those protesting the pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's encampment use violence, and that the pipeline does not pose a risk to water sources or cross over tribal land.

On September 13, people began to suspect these accounts were fake, calling them out on Twitter, and by September 14, most of the accounts no longer existed.

The Dakota Access Pipeline is set to carry oil obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) from the Bakken Shale basin in North Dakota across the Dakotas, Iowa, and Illinois. Its owner, Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), says it plans to talk to the Obama administration and “reiterate [its] commitment to bring the Dakota Access Pipeline into operation.” It will do so despite the administration requesting that the company halt construction “voluntarily — particularly around the contested sacred tribal sites located 20 miles east and west of Lake Oahe and the Missouri River — until further notice.”

In his memorandum announcing his company's plans to do so,ETP CEO Kelcy Warren espoused many of the same arguments that were deployed by the Twitter sock puppets,which calls into question whether his company helped spearhead the social media campaign behind the scenes in order to create the appearance of grassroots support, a technique known as “astroturfing.”

In that memo, Warren said his company plans to engage more aggressively in the PR sphere.

“It has not been my preference to engage in a media/PR battle,” wrote Warren. “However, misinformation has dominated the news, so we will work to communicate with the government and media more clearly in the days to come.”

Vicki Granado, a spokesperson for the company, did not respond to a request for comment.

In the meantime, as all stakeholders in the debate await a definitive next move from the Obama administration, protests both on-site and nationwide have continued, with a militarized police presence at the Sacred Stone Camp intensifying. U.S.Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at a September 13 Washington, DC protest against the pipeline, while U.S.Representatives Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) and Raul Ruiz (D-CA) that same day called for a congressional oversight investigation of the hotly contested permitting issues which have arisen in the ongoing saga over the pipeline's future.

With that backdrop, in came the “sock puppets” for their own September 13 day of action on Twitter — and with MAINlikely pulling the strings.

The Sock Puppets

The sock puppet profiles had names such as Ashley Lovinggood, Garnett Vreeken, Yong Fetner, and Ying Baars, and all of the profile pictures featured women. Besides tweets promoting the Dakota Access Pipeline, what links all of the bogus profiles together is that they all “follow” (similar to “liking” a page on Facebook) the company Hootsuite.

img

Image Credit: Twitter

Hootsuite serves as a social media platform management tool which allows an administrator for many different social media accounts, such as Facebook and Twitter, to toggle quickly between accounts and send out posts in the form of tweets and other status updates. One of those accounts, that of Angla Dullea, formerly followed MAIN — and like all of the other pages — also followed Hootsuite; that is, until the account became suspended.

Dullea's profile photo bore an identical resemblance to the Twitter profile for Palma Mackerl, another bare-bones Twitter account.

Image Credit: Twitter

Dullea also retweeted a tweet from a group called Standing Rock Fact Checker, which on its website describes itself as a project of MAIN. The website also states it is “dedicated to promoting the truth” and battling “misinformation about the approved — and nearly complete — Dakota Access project.” Five other suspicious Twitter profiles also shared Fact Checker tweets.

MAIN members include the South Dakota Petroleum and Propane Marketers Association, North Dakota Petroleum Council, Petroleum Marketers, Convenience Stores of Iowa, and others.

Reverse photo searches on Google revealed that the pictures used for other sock puppet profiles also appeared on a dermatologist website, a mail order bride website, and a hairstyle website featuring a photo of Eva Longoria, as well as images of Chinese model Crystal Wang Xi Ran, singer Keri Hilson, and the late singer Amy Winehouse.

Eva Longoria doppelgänger; Photo Credit: Twitter | Oliver Keyes

The use of political bots and sock puppets is nothing new and in fact, has become normalized by political factions worldwide, explained Norah Abokhodair of the Political Bots research program based at the University of Washington and Oxford University.

“There are many ways in which social bots can disrupt or influence online discourse, such as, spamming, phishing, distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), or other nefarious activities,” Abokhodair explained, pointing to examples such as the Syrian Civil War bots and bots used in Turkey. “They can also be deployed for sophisticated activities like astroturfing, misdirection (botnet that tries to get the audience to attend to other content by spamming the hashtag) and smoke screening (serves to hide or provide cover for or obscure some type of activity).”

MAIN and DCI Group

MAIN was the only industry group to issue a press release in response to the Obama administration's September 9 announcement halting construction on a portion of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Its press release contained a statement attributed to spokesperson Craig Stevens. Stevens also recently did an interview with KVLY-TV, the NBC and CBS affiliate for Fargo, North Dakota. When on TV, however, he was billed as the “spokesperson for a pipeline sort of group, if you will” by segment host Chris Berg.

Despite the lack of disclosure by KVLY and Berg, it turns out that Craig Stevens actually works as Media Affairs and Crisis Management Lead for DCI Group. His DCI Group contact information is listed for MAIN's profile page on the websitePR Newswire.

Image Credit: PR Newswire

DCI is a PR firm tied to the GOP and with roots in creating front groups on behalf of Big Tobacco, spearheading the modern Tea Party movement, and representing oppressive dictatorial regimes such as that of Burma and oil- and gas-soaked Azerbaijan. Stevens formerly worked for the George W. Bush presidential campaign, served as spokesperson for U.S.Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman for the George W. Bush Administration, and also worked on Mitt Romney's 2012 Republican Party presidential campaign.

Jim Murphy, the political director for Donald Trump's Republican Party presidential campaign, formerly served as President and Managing Partner for DCI Group. Beyond the DCI Group connection, Continental Resources — whose founder andCEO Harold Hamm is one of Donald Trump's top energy advisers and a potential candidate for U.S. Secretary of Energy under a Trump presidency— said in a recent investor statement that a significant chunk of the company's Bakken oil will flow through Dakota Access.

Before DCI Group began working on Standing Rock-related projects for MAIN, it appears thePR firm LS2Groupmaintained the PR account for Dakota Access. A MAIN press release from November 2015 lists LS2's Kayla Day as the contact person and her LS2 work number is also listed, while metadata for the press release's PDF shows the document was last saved by former LS2 staffer Alex Shaner.

DCI's Role

As DeSmog has previously revealed, LS2 also did PR work in support of TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline. The group Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement published emails from 2014 (obtained via a public records request) showing LS2 also doing advocacy work in support of Dakota Access.

LS2's Day told DeSmog that LS2 still does some work on behalf of MAIN, but declined to comment further on how the work is divvied up between LS2 and DCI Group. Stevens was first listed as a spokesperson for MAIN in a September 6 press release, two days after the now-infamous dog biting incident took place at the protesting Standing Rock Siuox Tribe's Sacred Stone Camp. The Standing Rock Fact Checker website was registered the day before, and it also sent out its first tweet that same day.

Image Credit: WhoIs.net

Stevens declined to comment on who funds MAIN, referring to the membership list and confirming he was brought on in the past couple weeks to do PR work on behalf of the coalition, “as the whole public discussion has increased and been elevated” surrounding the pipeline. He also confirmed he runs the Fact Checker portal.

Asked about whether his firm or MAIN had anything to do with the sock-puppet tweets, Stevens denied he or MAIN had any involvement.

“It's frustrating to me because we're working to be respectful in tone and fact-based and any tactics like these are a distraction for what we're trying to do and that's to bring facts and contexts to this discussion,” Stevens said. “I don't know about the tactics themselves and I don't know who or what is behind it, but as someone who's trying to get facts out and trying to be respectful in tone, it was incredibly frustrating that this was going on. As far as I know, and think I know, theMAIN Coalition had nothing to do with them.”

However, noted environmental advocate and co-founder of climate group 350.org, Bill McKibben, doubts the authenticity of such claims from PR firms with a record like DCI, saying:

“There's a word for this kind of thing, and that word is: lying. The invention of fake people to make fake arguments perfectly exemplifies the tactics Big Oil has been reduced to. They can't win an argument on the merits, so they've given up trying. Instead, they literally make things up. The contrast with the steadfast straightforwardness of the tribes, and of the climate scientists, couldn't be more stark.”

Main Image: Twitter

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/dapl-dakota-sitting-rock-sioux/499178/

To hear the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe tell it, an old-fashioned American land grab transpired earlier this week in rural North Dakota.

The tribe’s members and hundreds of other Native people have been protesting the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline since April. When built, the pipeline will stretch more than 1,100 miles from oil fields in North Dakota to a river port in Illinois. The tribe claims that the pipeline—which climate activistsportray as a sequel to Keystone XL—could threaten their sole water source and that, more importantly, they were not consulted before the pipeline was approved.

Despite the newsy nature of the protests, the trial has plodded forward in U.S. federal court since July, with the judge weighing the tribe’s claims against those of the defendant, the Army Corps of Engineers. (The Corps is the federal agency that approved the pipeline.) But according to the Standing Rock Sioux, these standard legal proceedings received a ruthless and unprecedented emendation on the ground over the weekend.

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http://www.alternet.org/environment/whos-funding-dakota-access-pipeline-bank-america-hsbc-ubs-goldman-sachs-wells-fargo

GOODMAN: Juan, in a moment we’re going to be talking about the Attica prison uprising, but right now we’re going to be looking at the banks and who is funding the $3.8 billion pipeline, the Dakota Access pipeline.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, we’ll continue to—on Wednesday in Minneapolis—what we want to do is continue to cover the coverage of the standoff at Standing Rock over the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline with a look at who is profiting off of it. On Wednesday in Minneapolis, dozens protested at U.S. Bank Plaza, demanding U.S. Bank stop funding the pipeline. According to an investigation published by LittleSis, U.S. Bank has extended a $175 million credit line to Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the pipeline.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, Saturday was the first day of a two-week call for actions against the financial institutions that are bankrolling the Dakota Access pipeline project. We turn to Part 2 of our conversation with Hugh MacMillan, a senior researcher with Food & Water Watch whose new investigation reveals the dozens of financial institutions that are bankrolling what’s called DAPL, the Dakota Access pipeline. I began by asking Hugh what’s most important to understand about the corporate structure of the pipeline company.

HUGH MACMILLAN: Dakota Access, LLC, is a joint venture of Phillips 66 and a joint venture of two members of the Energy Transfer family—Energy Transfer Partners and Sunoco Logistics. Enbridge and Marathon Oil have bought into this, this joint venture. Together, they now have about a 37 percent stake in the pipeline, in the Dakota Access pipeline.

AMY GOODMAN: How are the banks involved?

HUGH MACMILLAN: Well, that’s—they are banking on this company and banking on being able to drill and frack for the oil to send through the pipeline over the coming decades. So they’re providing the capital for the construction of this pipeline.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what the banks are. Which banks are they? And how are they involved?

HUGH MACMILLAN: Well, I’ve got a list of the 17 banks that are specifically providing financing for this project. And it’s also coupled together with a Energy Transfer—Energy Transfer Partner project to convert an existing pipeline that would connect to the south end of the Dakota Access pipeline and run oil all the way down to the Gulf Coast, where there are refineries and also export infrastructure. AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us that list of 17 banks?

HUGH MACMILLAN: I can. Citibank is the bank that’s been running the books on the project, and that’s the bank that beat the bushes and got other banks to join in. So, we have Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, SunTrust, Royal Bank of Scotland, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Mizuho Bank, TD Securities, ABN AMRO Capital, DNB First Bank—and that’s actually a bank based in Philly; it’s not the DNB Bank based in Norway, which is actually provided several hundred million to the Energy Transfer family separately—and ICBC London, SMBC Nikko Securities and Société Générale.

...

MACMILLAN: That’s right, by and large. So they have the largest share, and they’ve spearheaded the effort. So, what we published in LittleSis was the 30-plus banks that have provided general financing for Sunoco Logistics and Energy Transfer Partners. Through working with Rainforest Action Network, we were able to—who has access to Bloomberg Terminal, we were able to determine these 17 banks that I just listed, who are providing the direct financing for the Dakota Access project and, in addition, for an Energy Transfer Partners project to extend this pipeline on down to Texas. So, collectively, this pipeline would run from near the Canadian border on down to the Gulf Coast of Texas over 1,800 miles.

AMY GOODMAN: I was just talking to an oil trucker in the plane back from North Dakota, and he trucks from the Bakken fields to other areas of North Dakota, just locally. And he said it is stunning to see the drop in demand for oil just in this past year. He has been trucking for four years. What about this decline in demand and what this will mean?

HUGH MACMILLAN: Well, you know, if you ask Morgan Stanley, they said a year ago that the oil producers are getting into prison shape—and without irony. So, you know, this is a long-term—these are long-term investments from the banks. There’s fully the—they fully expect the United States to maximize its production of oil and gas through widespread fracking.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, "prison shape"?

HUGH MACMILLAN: Well, I have a note here. They explain that "Some prisoners"—and I quote—"contrive clever equipment in workouts that result in fitness levels that surpass the traditional gym shape." And so they’re speaking in—they’re drawing an analogy to prisoners getting in good shape, drawing an analogy from that to oil and gas companies, fracking companies, learning how to do things more cheaply and more efficiently.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Hugh MacMillan, as we wrap up, what do you think is most important for people to understand about the corporate structure of the company, Dakota Access pipeline, that is building the Dakota Access pipeline?

HUGH MACMILLAN: Well, I think it’s important to see the forces behind this particular pipeline as the same forces behind numerous other pipelines across the country, both for—both to support fracking for tight oil as well as fracking for shale gas, all toward maximizing production of oil and gas, when the science is clear that we need to maximize what we keep in the ground. Our current policy has not made that switch. And if you look at the Department of Energy’s Quadrennial Technology Review published a year ago, you’ll see, under clean energy technologies, permeability manipulation is included, along with improved understanding of well integrity and improved understanding of injections and how they’re causing earthquakes, such as occurred over the weekend. The Quadrennial—

AMY GOODMAN: In Oklahoma. HUGH MACMILLAN: That’s right, in Oklahoma. The Quadrennial Technology Review speaks of a future mastery of the subsurface toward maximizing production.

AMY GOODMAN: Hugh MacMillan, senior researcher with Food & Water Watch. His new investigation reveals the dozens of financial institutions that are bankrolling the Dakota Access pipeline. We’ll li