Obama Passes Magic Baton of Oligarchy to Trump in Plain Sight

On Sun., I’m joining thousands of veterans who are standing in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe #noDAPLhttps://t.co/wGfhGKF0Km

— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) November 29, 2016

On Sunday, December 4th, volunteer veterans deployed to Standing Rock to serve as human shields for the water protectors in Standing Rock.

That same day, the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) denied an easement to the Dakota Pipeline.

The ACE ruling was enough to prevent a clash between the DAPL forces and the veterans, but it wasn't enough to prevent the companies behind the pipeline (Sunoco Logistics Partners and Energy Transfer Partners) from responding defiantly:

As stated all along, ETP and SXL are fully committed to ensuring that this vital project is brought to completion and fully expect to complete construction of the pipeline without any additional rerouting in and around Lake Oahe. Nothing this Administration has done today changes that in any way.

That defiance appears to have provoked a decision the ACE made (on December 9th) to raise the water level in Lake Oahe so as to make the ground surrounding the lake too "unstable" for drilling:

Good news from #StandingRock via @JordanChariton @TYTPolitics https://t.co/ZygKpOlITV #NoDAPL Water going up, Drilling not possible. pic.twitter.com/SLy0kVHzfi

— Bernie2016 TV (@Bernie2016tv) December 9, 2016

As Jordan Chariton mentions in his report, one wrinkle created by this solution is that protectors must evacuate the Oceti camp to make way for the incoming water. Those inclined to regard Obama as a moustache-twirling villain will presume that this is merely a feint designed to get protectors out of the way of the DAPL drilling equipment. They may be right. But we have good reason (after eight years) to believe that Obama's villainy is a bit more sophisticated than that.

If it takes the ACE an entire workweek to respond to DAPL's defiance, how long will it take to issue an evacuation order to the Oceti camp? How long to enforce that order? How long to clear the campground of debris in preparation for the influx of water? How long to deal with all the legal objections and logistical complications that are difficult to foresee at this point?

Long enough to get us past Donald Trump's inauguration?

And how will Donald Trump address Lake Oahe once he's in office? In all likelihood, he'll order the ACE to lower Oahe's water level to make the ground stable for drilling, and DAPL will proceed as planned.

Trump will contend (accurately) that he always advocated eliminating business-killing regulations. He will point to the toxic pipe underneath Lake Oahe as a triumph of his presidency. He might even bring in thousands of his minions to chant "Drain the Swamp" as he has the water pumped out at the behest of the bankers who are already filling his cabinet.

It will be fine and natural to hate him then.

But it will be terrible and unnatural to yearn for the days of Obama, whose chief donors are the business partners of Trump's cabinet.

Obama isn't using the baton of the presidency to smash DAPL; he's merely preparing to pass it to his successor in what will amount to a seamless transition of power for the oil companies, banks, and war profiteers that control the US government.

The bank bailout of 2008 was a bi-partisan hand-off of corruption from Republican George W. Bush to Democrat Obama. The DAPL bailout of 2017 will be a bi-partisan hand-off of corruption from Obama to Trump.

I don't know that we can stop them. We never do. But I hope that we won't fall for the revisionist history according to which the Democrats will say that they fought for us when we can see right now, in real time, that they're simply stalling.

Photos from the #NoDAPL Protest outside the Energy Transfer Partners Office in Austin, Texas

From 7 to 8 p.m. on September 13th, concerned Austinites participated in the national day of action against DAPL by assembling outside the Energy Transfer Partners office downtown.

The event featured speakers, prayer (see the second photo below), chanting, and smudging.

If we measure the success of a protest in terms of its ability to connect the participants to each other and their cause, then the protest gets an A. 

But if we measure that success in terms of how much attention a protest calls to the target problem and how much of an impact it has, it's not clear the protest earned anything higher than a C-.

Passing cars honked at us in a show of support, so we definitely reached people who weren't participating in the protest.

But I'm not sure we generated much media coverage outside the local area--which is a pity, since the people on the front lines of Standing Rock need to know that they have support way down here in Texas.

In this blog, I've often commented on the scant and misleading coverage given to progressive causes by mainstream media. That problem is more significant than most people recognize because it doesn't simply mean that uninterested people remain uninformed about what's happening. More damning is the fact that highly interested people can remain uninformed about important things that are happening elsewhere in the country--even if those things relate directly to the causes that are nearest and dearest to their hearts.

Of course, we can use alternative media to overcome this deficiency. But no one in Austin seems to be doing so (at least not in an effective enough way for me to have discovered their efforts).

So for what it's worth, I've included a series of photos from the protest in this blog post. But since my readership is small, I would love to pass these photos along to a local or regional progressive blog aggregator of some kind. So if anyone knows of such a thing, please provide me with a link in the comments below.

Corporate Social Responsiblity, Greenwashing, and the Austin Environmental Justice Team

On September 12th, concerns about DAPL drove local citizens to attend a meeting of the Austin Environmental Justice Team (ATXEJ).

According to the meeting organizers, turnout was about 150% higher than usual, suggesting that DAPL is having a galvanizing effect on activism in Austin (and presumably throughout the country).

The meeting was scheduled to run from 6:30 to 8:30, but it lasted far longer than anticipated because the moderators stuck to an agenda designed for sixteen to eighteen people even though there were more than twice that many in attendance. By the time the icebreaking/introduction activity was over, we were already 20 minutes behind schedule.

Most of the attendees were college-aged, and the event was a hybrid of the typical college workshop and an academic or corporate committee meeting.

There were brief periods of general discussion punctuated by structured group activities. And there were also summaries of reports from subcommittee members on various topics (from the funding of the local police department to the extra fees Austinites must pay to receive electricity generated by solar power).

I don't know anything about how ATXEJ receives its funding, but these folks are getting ripped off if their coffers aren't routinely filled by the sinister agents of corporate social responsibility (CSR)--because it's hard to imagine an intentional greenwashing campaign being more effective at dissipating civic energy than this meeting was.

I was one of a group of people who rose to leave at 8:30--partly because that was when the meeting was supposed to end, partly because not one word had yet been said about DAPL (the concern that had brought most of us to the event), and partly because it had become evident, by that point, that ATXEJ takes a neoliberal approach to environmental concerns.

I sensed the neoliberal tendencies in one of the earlier exercises, when roughly one in five people talked about how important it is for activists to listen to communities in order to get anything done--without a single one of these people indicating what they had learned by listening.

Then came the admission (from a leader named Josh) that the community of environmental activists in Austin is so fragmented that it's hard to organize collective action. Lots of people followed up on his remarks to lament that fragmentation, but no suggestions for building coalitions were examined or discussed. Such suggestions were merely "listened to."

My heart sank especially when we heard from Pete, an environmentalist in east Austin (where the population of African-Americans and Latinos is most concentrated). Pete found his way to ATXEJ because he noticed, as a Hispanic living in east Austin, that all the other neighborhoods around town had beautiful parks. Unfortunately, instead of enjoying nicely maintained parks, the people of east Austin have been living with an area called Red Bluff, where garbage and used oil have been illegally dumped for decades.

Pete's premise was perfectly reasonable: All taxpayers in Austin are entitled to decent parks.

But after working with ATXEJ, Pete's perspective seems to have been warped by neoliberalism. He has done a great job of motivating local citizens (and some politicians) to help clean up Red Bluff, but city officials are unwilling to provide the funding that will maintain it--so Pete is currently working with community leaders to figure out how the citizens in the immediate area can raise money on their own to maintain Red Bluff.

This is the lesson that neoliberalism teaches us: Your tax dollars are going to be spent on the elites, so if you want anything for yourself, you'll have to do it on your own.

It's great that Pete tackled the problem of Red Bluff, and it's great that his community is exploring ways to maintain the area. But what isn't great is the persistence of the fundamental injustice underlying the problem (the fact that wealthier, whiter communities throughout Austin will continue to spend tax dollars raised in east Austin on their own parks without supporting Pete's efforts in any way).

So when ATXEJ bills itself as a "safe space," that's probably because it's designed to preserve the privileges associated with the status quo. If you come to ATXEJ with a problem, they'll be happy to suggest ways that you can address the problem--without rocking the boat.

And if you come to them with a solution, such as how to unify the various environmental groups in the city, they'll listen--without doing anything.

This was my first time to attend an ATXEJ meeting, so it's entirely possible that I've formed an incorrect impression of how the organization operates. However, my first impression of ATXEJ is that this is what greenwashing looks like.