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SERVING THE ‘NATIONAL INTEREST’?

Tribal Rights and Federal Obligations from Dakota Access to Keystone XL

by Monte Mills, Jurist

On March 23, Thomas A. Shannon, Jr., the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, determined (PDF) that issuing a permit to authorize the Keystone XL pipeline (KXL) “would serve the national interest.” In doing so, Under Secretary Shannon admitted that, from an environmental justice perspective, the 875 miles of the KXL traversing portions of Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska, “could…disproportionally affect[ ]” Indian tribes in the region “should an oil release occur.”

The State Department’s national interest determination relied upon environmental reviews completed in 2014, but the legal, cultural, and social protests brought last year by the Standing Rock Sioux and other tribes to the Dakota Access Pipeline prompted a distinct shift in the world’s consciousness of tribal rights. Although the water protectors have been evicted from their camps and oil can now flow beneath Lake Oahe, Standing Rock’s legal challenge to the pipeline is yet to be resolved. As lawsuits over the State Department’s KXL decision begin to mount, the pending outcome of Standing Rock’s case may give tribes new grounds on which to challenge the State Department’s decision by properly protecting tribal treaty rights and the federal government’s trust responsibility to tribes.

DONALD TRUMP: A FASCIST BY ANY OTHER NAME

by Bill Weinberg, Fifth Estate

In the streets of Washington DC on inauguration day, Black Bloc protesters notoriously smashed windows and set a limousine on fire. Fortunately, I wound up on the other side of the police lines when the cops sealed off the area and herded some 200 into pens of metal barricades, where they were kept waiting in the cold for hours before being hauled off to jail.

The surrounding streets were filled with less militant if more colorful protesters. Two young fellows held aloft a big banner with a reproduction of a frame from a 1940s comic book showing Captain America slugging Hitler. The caption: “Fighting Nazis is an American tradition! Stop the ‘alt-right’!”

The radical right is now ensconced at the highest levels of power, and is emitting an increasingly fascistic stench.

COMMUNITY POWER AGAINST MEGA-MINING

The Municipal Resistance in El Salvador

by Sandra Cuffe, Waging Nonviolence

Communities and organizations in northern El Salvador continue to organize referendums in an effort to keep their territories free of mining.

Established by the country’s Municipal Code as a mechanism for community participation, the consulta popular is an official municipal-level referendum on an issue of local concern that can be invoked by petition if residents are able to gather signatures from 40 percent of registered voters. On the books for years, the mechanism had never been used, but it now plays an important strategic role in the country’s movement against metallic mining.

The most recent referendum took place on February 26, when more than half of all registered voters in the municipality of Cinquera flocked to polling stations in four communities. The final tally was along the lines of the four previous referendums on the issue: 98.1 percent of participating registered voters in Cinquera cast a ballot opposing metallic mining exploration and exploitation. The local government will now draw up an official municipal ordinance prohibiting mining in its jurisdiction.

BURMA: SCRIBE’S MURDER TESTS DEMOCRACY

by Nava Thakuria, CounterVortex

Killings of media workers on the Indian subcontinent are nothing unusual. The subcontinent annually losses around 10 journalists to assassins. India, Pakistan and Afghanistan often top the list of victims, with additional inputs from Bangladesh and Burma. Despite its still-tentative democratic opening after generations of dictatorship, Burma (also known as Myanmar or Brahmadesh) as a whole witnesses fewer incidents of journo-killing, with only five regsitered over the past one-and-a-half decades. But the recent murder of a young reporter in Burma’s northwestern region, adjacent to India’s conflicted states of Nagaland and Manipur, exposes the vulnerability of writers who dare to cover critical issues—in this case threats to the environment by rampant resource exploitation in the region.

Ko Soe Moe Tun, 35, of Monywa, a town in northern Sagaing region, was found dead near his home on December 13—clearly targeted for his extensive investigations and reportage on timber-smuggling and illegal logging and mining in northwest Burma. The reporter, employed by national newspaper Daily Eleven, also posted few details on his Facebook page about the figures involved in the illegal timber trades. The autopsy report revealed that Soe’s skull was fractured. He leaves behind a young wife and a son. The family source claimed that he was popular in his locality, with no enmity toward anyone.

AMERICAN ‘LEFT’ ABETS TRUMP-PUTIN AXIS

by Bill Weinberg, Muftah

The United States is poised on the brink of a fascistic situation since the inauguration of Donald Trump. But the American left, logically the wellspring of resistance to the establishment of a fascistic order in the world’s most powerful country, finds itself in a very compromised position.

With many Democrats denying the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency on the basis of evident Russian manipulation of the election, it is a bitter irony that the most popular “progressive” voices are rushing to exonerate Moscow of meddling. Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Jeremy Scahill are among those effectively seeking to exculpate Vladimir Putin, demanding the CIA show its “evidence,” as if this—and not preparing to resist Trump—were the urgent priority. It also ignores the reality that Trump’s toeing of the Moscow line on Syria, Ukraine and NATO (not to mention his fawning praise of Putin) strongly points to a quid pro quo.

CLIMATE CHANGE & BOLIVIA’S CRISIS DROUGHT

by Amy Booth, IRIN

"This should be tremendous, deep. There should be karachi fish and silverside in here," says Abdon Choque Flores, pointing to a shoulder-high tide mark on the long road bridge that crosses the Desaguadero River in Bolivia’s drought-hit Oruro department.

High on the Andean plateau, the Desaguadero used to connect vast Lake Titicaca with smaller Lake Poopó. But the second lake dried up in late 2015 and there is now so little water in the river that the stretch beneath the bridge is completely dry.

Flores lives in nearby Puñaka, a community of Uru people who traditionally made their living on Lake Poopó, fishing and hunting water birds for their meat and eggs. Now, the village looks across an expansive, white plain that stretches as far as the eye can see.

With the Urus’ main source of food gone, along with the lake, many in the community have been forced to leave to find work in nearby towns. The government is providing those left behind with food aid, but it doesn’t come close to plugging the gap. Flores says they chew coca to suppress their appetite.

Lake Poopó was once Bolivia’s second largest lake, after Titicaca. Climate change has melted the Andean glaciers that fed the lake. Water from its tributaries has been diverted for mining and agriculture. But it was the country’s worst drought in 25 years that dried it up completely.

NEW YORK CITY PROTEST AGAINST EVICTIONS …IN TIBET

by Bill Weinberg, The Villager

“Stop the forced evictions! Stop the demolitions!”

That’s what was repeatedly chanted, and what the big banner read, at the spirited rally of some 200 at Union Square the evening of Oct. 19. But this wasn’t about the depredations of dirty New York landlords or saving historic East Village buildings from being cleared to make way for a luxury hotel. The large type above these demands on the banner read: “Stand With Larung Gar.”

Larung Gar is the world’s largest Buddhist sanctuary, in a valley in the traditional region of Tibet—although today officially in the Chinese province of Sichuan. At the rally, activists stood with painted cardboard cut-outs representing the monastery or Buddhist academy there, and smaller outlying buildings. Other cut-outs represented a bulldozer and truck-mounted wrecking ball, both “driven” by activists wearing People’s Liberation Army uniforms. Sitting below the display were two monks in traditional robes, Tibetan flags draped across their shoulders.

Protest organizer Urgyen Badheytsang, who just arrived here from Toronto to work in the Students for a Free Tibet office on 14th Street, relates some of the history to me. The community was founded in the 1980s, when post-Mao China started to loosen up, by the lama Jigme Phuntsok, dedicated to preserving and reviving the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. It rapidly grew, with some 10,000 small cabins today lining the valley walls. These are what the Chinese government is now demolishing, claiming safety and overcrowding concerns. But Badheytsang doesn’t buy it.

“It is political,” he said. “China fears the growing influence of Larung Gar.”

COUNTER-REVOLUTION CRUSHES ALEPPO

by Ashley Smith, Socialist Worker

The combined forces of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Russian air power and Iranian-backed Shia death squads are reconquering Eastern Aleppo, according to reports—and with it, the last of the major cities liberated by the Syrian Revolution since 2011.

“Aleppo is being destroyed and burned completely,” Mohammad Abu Rajab, a doctor in Aleppo, said in a voice message quoted by the Guardian. “This is a final distress call to the world. Save the lives of these children and women and old men. Save them. Nobody is left. You might not hear our voice after this. It is the last call, the last call to every free person in this world. Save the city of Aleppo.”

After it was freed from regime control in 2012, Aleppo was “a symbol of the democratic alternative that could be Syria,” as Syrian revolutionary Joseph Daher put it.

That’s why Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies declared unremitting war against it. They subjected Eastern Aleppo to a siege to starve its people and force them to flee.

TRUMP’S VICTORY AND MIGRATION

by Kristy Siegfried, IRIN

Note: This story ran on the eve of Election Day, on IRIN news service. —CounterVortex

Immigration has dominated the US presidential campaign like never before. Donald Trump’s oft-repeated promise that, if elected, he will build a “big, beautiful” wall at the US-Mexico border helped secure him the Republican nomination, and his rhetoric about illegal immigration appears to have struck a chord with many working-class Americans.

But how many of his election promises on immigration are implementable? And what threat does a Trump presidency pose to migrant and refugee rights in the US and beyond?

THE KGB HAD NOTHING ON VERIZON

by Bill Weinberg, The Villager

What really fills me with despair is that amid it all—the rise of an open fascist at the forefront of the Republican party, the relentless reign of deadly police terror, the impending collapse of the global biosphere—even the most quotidian aspects of our lives are being colonized by sinister corporate bureaucracies that eat up our time and energy… making it impossible for us to fight back against all that other stuff.

As heretical as it is, I have to confess that I am nostalgic not only for the pre-digital world, but also for the world before the Ma Bell break-up. I know this was supposedly a blow to the corporate leviathan, but service interruptions in the monopolistic era were virtually unheard-of. Today they are more or less constant.

Is this due the chaos of competing companies and technologies, as opposed to the efficiency of a centralized monolith? Or is it merely a function of digitization, and the decision to let the old copper wires deteriorate—those wires on which (as we shall see) I unwillingly depend?

In any event, Verizon (like its competitors) has perfect impunity to make my life hell—and demand that I pay them to do so.

DANES WHO STAND WITH REFUGEES

Activists Revive Heroic WWII-era Practice of Smuggling to Safety

by Phil Wilomt, Waging Nonviolence

About 100 Danes, young and old, stood outside Copenhagen City Court in the chilly seaside winds last week to show their solidarity with four activists alleged to have illegally assisted refugees in their trek across the waters from Denmark to Sweden.

While only two of the accused are Danish citizens, all are members of MedMenneskeSmuglerne, or “Those who smuggle thy neighbor”—an outgrowth of the more broad-based initiative Welcome to Denmark, which welcomes migrants and refugees into the country.

Last year, over one million migrants and refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea and other unstable nations endured the risks of exodus to Denmark and other parts of Europe. Many died during the journey or ended up in refugee camps for prolonged periods. This migration wave correlates directly to the growing xenophobia and shift to the right in many European countries, including Denmark.

“Pretty much all leftist organizations in Europe neglected to consider the refugee influx on their agendas,” said Mimoza Murati, one of the non-Danish activists facing criminal charges that day. “We should have been prepared because we know the political landscape.”

THE DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE

A Legal Environmental Justice Perspective

by Dayna Jones, Jurist

The largest multi-tribal gathering of indigenous peoples in North America in over a century is happening now at the Sacred Stone Camp in North Dakota. Leading the cause is the Standing Rock Sioux Nation. The Standing Rock Sioux and their allies are standing against construction of the “black snake” Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), slated to run under the Missouri River and through their historically sacred tribal sites. The tribe states it had not been properly consulted prior to construction of the DAPL, a requirement legally mandated by Executive Order 13175 (PDF). The order stipulates that: “[e]ach agency shall have an accountable process to ensure meaningful and timely input by tribal officials in the development of regulatory policies that have tribal implications.”

The Standing Rock Sioux Nation’s assertion that the Army Corps of Engineers, an executive agency charged with overseeing and granting pipeline permits, has failed to meet the clearly-enunciated requirement of meaningful consultation, makes this case one of the strongest Native American environmental justice legal claims in history. Environmental justice, a paradigm born of a merger between the civil rights and environmental movements, is unique in Native American communities. This unique status stems from the legal classification of tribes as domestic dependent nations, sovereign as political entities, yet still under the plenary authority of Congress, as per Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. The plenary authority of Congress over the tribes is a stretch at best, as Native Americans predate the Constitution. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court has established a solid judicial body of law giving Congress, and only Congress, the ability to act in good faith as wards over the affairs of Indian Country, such as the 1886 case of US v. Kagama.