11/04/16 – Sandy Tolan – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, introducing Sandy Tolan.
He is the author of Children of the Stone, The Power of Music in a Hard Land, and also The Lemon Tree, an acclaimed history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He often writes for our friend Tom Dispatch, Tom Englehart, over at TomDispatch.com.
Here he is for Public Radio International, and there was one in the LA Times, actually, that I have here somewhere, also.
Both of them about the Indian protest and the pipeline, the battle over the pipeline in North Dakota.
This one at PRI is called It's Not Just About a Pipeline, Native Activists Say Dakota Battle is Their Biggest Stand in Decades.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Sandy?
Hey, Scott.
Good to be back.
You're always sticking up for people with no power.
What's up with that?
I don't know.
I'm kind of a child of the civil rights movement, and, you know, I actually grew up with some children of the local Milwaukee, Wisconsin civil rights leaders.
I went to school with them, and read a lot of the literature at the time in the 60s, and I guess, you know, that's, and plus, you know, my parents and what they taught me about being fair and all that.
And then I started covering Indian country as a young journalist in the 80s, out in Navajo country in particular, and saw these uranium miners who, ex-uranium miners, who had never been warned of the dangers, never wore any protective clothing, ended up with silicosis and cancer, a lot of them, and it kind of fueled an outrage and a sense of, wait, what?
And so I've been kind of, I've been covering indigenous issues ever since, like, the last 35 years.
Well, you know, it's important, that what thing there, because I think what that represents is that Americans, by and large, feel bad about the Indian wars now that they're over, and you know, the Discovery Channel in the 90s ran the special five-part miniseries, How the West Was Lost, and told the story from the Indian's point of view, and everybody goes, well, you know, now that we do own the place, then yeah, sorry, that probably could have been handled a little bit better, that sort of thing.
But your point is that just because people now feel bad about it and have a little bit, you know, more nuanced understanding than simple cowboys and Indians of previous eras, that that doesn't mean that the actual Indians who are still left alive in this country are being treated any more fairly than they were before.
I mean, maybe they are, but just because people feel nicer toward them now or something is no guarantee of that, that's for sure.
Well, especially if you look at North Dakota, but I mean, your point is well taken.
I mean, I think a lot of the tropes about Native Americans are, you know, there's either, you know, the stereotypes are, you know, misery and poverty, or the defeated, and never a sense that, you know, these are individuals with a great amount of hopes and not only traditions but, you know, a distinct identity from white America and yet, you know, universal aspirations for their children and for being treated fairly and being able to live with, you know, on their own lands without interference, without intrusion and desecration of sacred sites, without the danger of their water being poisoned.
A lot of these issues have come up in North Dakota, especially around the Standing Rock Reservation where I've been for most of the last two or three weeks.
All right.
So break it down, man.
Tell me the whole story about this pipeline and the whole fight.
Okay.
So first of all, there's the pipeline.
It is a massive, one thing is, you know, people know a little bit about a pipeline in North Dakota, right, near the Standing Rock Reservation.
There's a few things just to set it up, Scott.
It's a huge pipeline and I think it's 40 inches wide but the more important figure is 570,000.
That's the number of barrels a day that this pipeline, if connected and finished, will have the capacity to deliver.
That is more than the entire production for the country of Ecuador, which is an oil-exporting OPEC member.
Originally, this was described as a way to promote energy independence and yet now it's an export pipeline.
So that argument has gone but also- Wait, wait, wait.
What makes it an export pipeline?
Well, because, I mean, originally it was like, we need domestic sources of energy to promote our energy independence.
Well, certain members of Congress, prominently in the Republican Party, helped lift the ban on domestic oil production that was supposed to be kept in the United States so that it can be exported now.
So you're not saying necessarily this oil but just, we're already past independence and now we're exporting again.
This oil.
Oh, this oil particularly.
Yeah.
Okay, so where's the pipeline go then?
It starts in what's known as the Bakken oil field.
It's fracked, a lot of it's fracked oil that goes from the Bakken oil field in northwestern North Dakota and all the way down 1,200 miles to a terminal in southern Illinois and then eventually down the Mississippi and out the Gulf and exported.
So the people of North Dakota, the predominantly white community of North Dakota said, we really need this pipeline for jobs.
But the people of Bismarck, the state capital, which is largely a high majority of white population, they said, you know what, we don't really want this pipeline passing by our community because it could contaminate our water.
Let's put it down by the Standing Rock Reservation.
They won't care.
But you know what, as Linda Black Elk, who's a professor at Ethnobotanist and PhD professor at Sitting Bull College told me, they were wrong.
And people started organizing.
It started with two people praying in a teepee on the Standing Rock Reservation and has now grown to this summer almost 6,000 or perhaps more than 6,000 were coming.
People from all over Native America, 300, some 300 tribes, people, Native people from as far away as Norway, the Philippines, Central America, and then a lot of environmental activists.
This is also a climate fight.
So you have a lot of climate activists.
This would put the equivalent of 21 and a half million cars on the road per year if it goes online.
So there are a lot of people both within this movement who are worried about their own water and chanting the most well-known slogan, water is life, or meaning wachoni.
But there's also people who are part of a movement called keep it in the ground.
Let's stop developing oil for export because we can't stand to go much more than 350 parts per billion carbon or we're going to get into a sort of a feedback loop that's going to be at the point of no return.
So there's a wide coalition of people that have come together, Native and non-Native activists.
Well, you know, I think the latter there really discredit the former's argument, which even if they're right, they're still, you know, the fight was over whose land this particular pipeline crosses and that kind of thing.
And it sounds, I think, to people who aren't global warming activists like, oh, well, you know, we know you people would be against any pipeline anywhere, keep it in the ground and that kind of thing.
It would be a lot more, it seems like that would be a less successful argument than, hey, look, yes, we need energy and nobody's saying we don't.
However, in this case, these human beings are having their rights violated by the government coming in here and building this oil pipeline on their land.
Or is that the trick, that it's actually not their land?
It's government land, U.S. government land just north of their land or state land just north of their reservation or how's that work?
It's a combination of things.
The pipeline itself does not cross reservation land.
What it does do is it crosses treaty land.
In other words, treaties that were given of lands that were given to the Great Sioux Nation in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, but then later taken away or people there would say stolen from them.
And they're trying to reclaim that land.
That's a legal matter.
It's under legal dispute right now.
But in the meantime, according to the state of North Dakota, some of that land is owned by the energy company, the Fortune 500 company Energy Transfer Partners.
And on that land, which the activists say is treaty land, is their treaty land that they're reclaiming, and the state of North Dakota say is private land, people, native protesters and what they call themselves water protectors and their supporters erected teepees and sweat lodges and many tents literally directly in the path of the pipeline.
Last week, that's what led last week to a really a paramilitary force.
More than 200 police, National Guard.
You had surplus equipment from the Iraq War, including mine resistant vehicles built to withstand IED explosions in Iraq that were basically grinding forward police from the National Guard, state police, six states, sheriffs, sheriff's officers from six states were were just basically pursuing this line, firing clouds of tear gas, firing rubber bullets.
I was there watching this be a nonlethal beanbag rounds.
You know, they knocked somebody off his horse with with rubber bullets and hit a hit a horse and the leg of the horse later the horse later had to be euthanized.
And this is because they they said, look, you're blocking a state highway and you're on private land.
You have to get off.
They refused.
And it's it should be noted, Scott, that I mean, one, as I already mentioned, this pipeline, you know, people of Bismarck didn't want it.
These people don't want it either, that the native people here at Standing Rock and the Great Sioux Nation, the descendants of those who signed the treaty in 1851, they don't want it either.
But what what has happened now is that the state has kind of unleashed a military force and firing, you know, these these clouds of tear gas which are being captured on video and, you know, reminding some people, you know, at one point they had a private security company unleash dogs, German shepherds.
I mean, this this is sort of reminding people of Selma and Montgomery in the 50s and 60s.
And as someone who has covered Israel and Palestine for 20 years, I have to tell you, it feels like a land under occupation.
It feel felt very familiar to me with the roadblocks.
Yeah.
Helicopters.
How they feel.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so, you know, it's it's really it's it's a real confrontation, to say the least.
And I'm I'm grateful, but but I guess I could say mildly surprised.
I'm not.
I would.
Let me just say this.
I wouldn't have been surprised last week if somebody somebody were killed and luckily nobody has been.
But you know, on the day and the very day of this confrontation, when they arrested 140 people, they put native protesters and their supporters in.
They wrote numbers on their arms when they arrested them.
And then they put them in these cages holding pens.
They called them.
I can't remember what the exact word they use, but go online and look.
I mean, look on my Facebook page.
We also go online and look at the difference between a dog kennel and what these people were put in.
And there really isn't any difference.
So the treatment of the people here, I talked to the head of the Democratic Party in Nebraska, a white woman who is a veteran of many of these pipeline fights all over the plains of the Midwest.
And she said, you know, in Iowa, for example, you know, white protesters are just not treated that way.
They're given their their ushered nicely onto these buses.
They're given playing cards and muffins and then sent home.
And here these people had numbers written on their arms and were put in kennels, the essentially dog kennels.
So the U.N. is on the ground.
Amnesty International is on the ground doing human rights investigations.
Oh, no.
Next thing you know, they're going to be calling for a war against the United States to liberate us from our government.
Those guys are dangerous.
Be careful.
Well, I mean, that's a matter of opinion.
I think they prove they play a very useful role.
They want they mongered the war against Libya and they're in the middle of mongering a war against Syria right now.
We can we can have our system.
It's OK.
Anyway.
Yeah.
No, that's how I spend my day is arguing with Amnesty International people about whether to attack Syria or not.
But anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I'm sorry.
I lost my train of thought.
Which way I was going to go before you got to the the Amnesty International, the U.N. guys there.
I guess, you know, the U.S. government, as always, the North Dakota government here, you know, giving.
Hey, I got to admit.
I'll be the first to concede, even giving you in an amnesty types of plausible excuse to argue for a regime change in the United States, acting toward the Indians the way they always have.
You know, just as you're saying, I mean, it's not like white protesters are always given muffins and cards and treated with kid gloves, but they're not treated like this by the racial disparity in the treatment of I mean, this this thing happened, Scott, on the same day of the Bundy, Oregon wildlife refuge acquittals.
And you know, this was not lost on any people on the ground there.
The disparity in the treatment of people based on race is, in my mind, absolutely indisputable.
And it's interesting to me, too, like as a matter of sociology and what have you, that I mean, and I guess it is the North Dakota government rather than the national government, huh?
Or I don't know.
What is the role of the national government here?
I saw Obama saying he wants to try to do something about it or something.
Yeah.
Well, so so here's where the U.S. government comes in.
The Army Corps of Engineers initially approved the because they are in charge of all of the lands around the Missouri River.
This pipeline has to cross under the Missouri River if it's ever to be completed.
But they the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers holds the buffer zone on either side of the river.
So in order for this pipeline to be completed, the Army Corps has to give its permission.
Initially they did.
And they basically they said, well, there's no environmental impact, no significant environmental impact.
So we can approve this without an environmental impact statement.
Well, it's a pipeline, you know, pipelines burst, they leak.
Maybe it's I mean, under most cases, an EIS would be required.
It wasn't in this case.
This is why the Standing Rock tribe says they feel it was fast tracked.
And so but now because of the protests, largely President Obama has basically reversed, you know, the position of the Army Corps and they have now suspended temporarily the position of the Army of the Army Corps.
And the company, the pipeline company, Energy Transfer, this multimillion, multibillion dollar company, Fortune 500 company, no longer has permission to cross the river.
But they're right at the river.
Once they expelled all those people from what they say is their private land and what the people said were treaty lands, they just rushed forward up to the river over just a few days, two miles of pipe in just a few days.
They're waiting.
And now Obama says, you know, we want we may want to reroute this.
How they're going to reroute it at this point is not clear.
And, you know, you might not think this is significant because, yeah, of course we need need energy, Scott.
But adding the equivalent of twenty one point four million cars per year on to, you know, into the air where carbon is is creeping up every year and at some point, you know, everyone except for just a very, very few climate scientist says, you know, we're reaching really getting close to the point of no return.
The people who want to keep it in the ground are not wild eyed, insane people.
They're basing this on science.
Well, but they're just ignoring the reality of prices in the world is the point.
Well, I mean, if you if you want to say everything is based on economics, then, you know, we can meet in their energy.
Commodities are based on economics as long as oil is cheaper to buy.
So and regulation should be part of capitalism.
I mean, otherwise, you know, I can I can try to meet you in South Beach in 10 years, except for we'd have to take boats.
Well, you know, the thing is, too, is whatever your position on on global warming, the fact that matter is 90 percent of all pollution is a violation of somebody's property rights anyway.
If you really wanted to stop global warming for, you know, the parts per million of carbon going to come out of this pipeline.
Back to our story here.
Protect the property rights of the people of Sioux Country here who stand to have their river water polluted for being stuck downstream.
They have a serious case for an injunction against this just on the face of it.
I mean, I'm no lawyer or whatever, but certainly seems like their rights are being violated.
They have a very credible case that they are.
And so you're killing both birds with one stone anyway.
Same thing as ending the wars, the worst polluters on the planet, of course, is the Pentagon.
So ending the wars is the very first step we got to take to protecting the environment on this planet.
Right.
Deplete uranium everywhere and the amount of oil they burn.
They the military burns as much oil as Germany or something like that.
You know?
Yeah, I didn't I don't know those statistics.
Yeah, it's quite a bit.
They're like the Pentagon itself is like the fifth or sixth largest consumer of energy on the planet.
Uh huh.
So that's surprising.
Yeah, yeah.
You hate government.
One of them libertarian types.
Maybe you just can't stand the president.
Gun grabbers are warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented LibertyStickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them.
But still, if you're driving around, I want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are.
There's only one place to go.
LibertyStickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right.
Libertarian empire.
Police state founders quote central banking.
Yes.
Bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And well, everything that matters.
LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
But any any who about the global warming and all that.
I finally I'm looking at a map here and I see how, yeah, geez, if they're going to build this thing and it's going to get to the Mississippi, somehow they're going to have to cross one or two or three rivers before they get there.
Well, apparently they've already crossed the Mississippi.
They haven't connected the pipe.
And here's the other thing you talk about economics, Scott, the energy transfer negotiated with a number of oil companies when they first started building this pipeline back in 2014, as you may recall, oil prices were quite a bit better then.
So they negotiated a fixed higher price for the oil that they were going to be selling to various distributors.
In other words, oil companies who would be buying the oil from this pipeline.
But since then, guess what?
The price has gone way down and and energy transfer only has until, I think, late mid to late December to to get this pipeline online or what the they will have to renegotiate the price with all of these oil purchasers, the oil companies at that point.
If they do, the economics of this may not make any sense.
So they have the state of North Dakota acting almost as a as an army on the behalf of a corporation.
And that's why you're seeing this very hardcore response that is really reminding a lot of people of Palestine or Selma.
Yeah, it's pretty brutal.
I mean, especially the humiliation of the kennels and all that.
But the MRAPs and all that.
I mean, people ought to be taking this really personally, that even if it's just the Indians and even if it's just in North Dakota, which is a couple of states away, that we're the Iraqis now, really the people of America here fighting for our freedom.
Huh?
And now this is we're occupied just the same as we're the Fallujans, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, when you say just the Indians, you're using that in between quotes, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, and I'm, you know, paraphrasing the thinking of the average American who thinks where the hell is North Dakota anyway?
It's a many states away from me.
These are Indians who are not like me.
Whatever.
That's how people think.
And I'm saying, but you know what?
Hey, they're between Canada and Mexico.
They're Americans.
Ain't that close enough?
And isn't that is it any different really there than it is in your town?
It's what we're talking about is the Ferguson, Missouri treatment.
You know, they've had armored personnel carriers in Austin, Texas for decades here.
You know, that was the point I was going to make.
And I'm glad you made it because, you know, this is military surplus, basically.
And, you know, there was I was party to a very interesting I mean, I was a witness to a very interesting confrontation on the on the highway just the day before this military raid when two local sheriffs and the state police and National Guard had came to, you know, talk to one of the organizers and said, you know, you've got to move people out of this camp.
It's private land.
He's like, we're not going to move.
And afterwards, I I caught up with one of the sheriffs.
I said, Sheriff, you know, why do you need an MRAP, you know, mine resistant vehicle built to withstand IED explosions in Iraq?
Why do you need it?
And he really didn't have an answer.
All he could say was, oh, well, you know, it's part of the tools in our in our toolbox.
Like, OK, but why do you need something that was built to withstand IED explosions when you're you're you're you're using that to confront unarmed people?
He's like, well, you know, we know we have this in our toolbox.
I said, yeah, but but what do you I mean, isn't it just a matter of intimidation?
He goes, well, we don't want it to be.
And the next day, this MRAP, this giant yellow tank like vehicle with something called an LRAD, which sends out these sound cannons, was at work.
And, you know, this is the militarization of the country that that local sheriffs and police forces now have.
You know, it's like, you know, some of these local guys, you know, they they just, you know, sort of, you know, get excited about this.
Let's put it that way.
Right.
Yeah, it's exciting.
And it's like they're toys and they're using it against unarmed people.
And they've got these helicopters circling over.
They're doing surveillance.
They're sweeping.
There's evidence that they're sweeping the cell phone signals of of people who are exercising their constitutional rights.
And it's no wonder there's human rights investigations.
And I think there should be.
Yeah.
Well, you know, with the the MRAP, I mean, if you think about it, if it was just Humvees, that would be way over the line.
I mean, military Humvee, that's just way over the line already.
Right.
And MRAP is what a thousand times the presence of a Humvee in terms of intimidation and militarization of, again, land in one of our 50 states in our union here under the Constitution.
And, you know, the National Guard seeing the National Guard troops out there when I mean, it's pretty hard to believe that it would have been the local sheriff or the state police who panicked and cried that we desperately need reinforcements here or anything.
But somebody sent them anyway.
Yeah, well, I mean, here they are.
They have spent 10 million dollars in security and in bringing all these people in from five different states as far away as Wisconsin, my home state and Wyoming.
And and, you know, they asked Obama and the Obama administration for to get at least partially reimbursed for the six million dollars they initially laid out.
And, you know, the president deferred, demurred rather.
And they they think that they need this kind of response because, frankly, I think it's in the DNA of some of the people who've been, you know, who settled North Dakota years ago, a century ago and more, and their descendants, that this is how you deal with Native people.
And but it's not working.
And, you know, when when these when these images go out of people standing in the water, trying to cross the water to go to a prayer ceremony, inhaling clouds of tear gas or actually technically pepper spray, there is a difference I've learned, you know, that that's that's making people go, whoa, I think it's making people go, whoa, wait a second here.
Yeah, it absolutely should.
And, you know, this is the thing about the killing of Mike Brown, too, is people thought, my God, you know, they shot the cop, shot this unarmed guy and then they left his body in the street in the sun for hours and hours like this with not so much as a sheet over it, whatever.
And then when the people started gathering around, they called out the Third Infantry Division to put down, you know, the blacks of one section of projects in one section of St. Louis.
I mean, what in the world?
And people all over the world saw that and thought, my God, the overreaction.
And again, like you're saying, what were all these tools doing in their tool kit in the first place that they even had the ability to overreact to that degree?
And, you know, really kills me to think.
But my guess is that that, you know, probably people are reacting to this less than they did about that.
It's just some of the pictures there from the nighttime and the lights and rifles shining through the tear gas and what you know what I mean?
Some of that was just so straight out of Hollywood.
Crazy.
I don't know if people are quite reacting the same way about this North Dakota thing, but they should be.
And in fact, that raises a great question, which is what all should I be reading about what's going on there, man?
Because I'm not seeing it on, you know, most of my regular news sources, which are pretty wide and varied, to be honest.
OK, I'm only going to I'm only going to promote myself for like 10 seconds here.
One is go ahead.
You can search for my name, Sandy Tolan at L.A. Times dot com.
And I've got five pieces I've written in the last 10 days and then a sixth one coming up.
I also wrote something for Salon in terms of and then there's this piece that you mentioned that was on the world PR is the world program actually yesterday, Thursday.
But other stuff, I mean, I think you're starting to see more.
There's a there's a native journalist named Jenny Monet who wrote a really nice piece that's up on the side of the NewsHour, PBS NewsHour.
That's a good sort of overview of what's happening.
And especially with a focus on how some of the native protesters or water protectors have been treated.
The the I think some of the mainstream media is coming back into the story.
I noticed that ABC and NBC have had people on the ground.
You can look at coverage in The Guardian, which has been pretty good from what I can see.
It's funny, though, that somebody asked me if I could talk about press coverage of it.
And I was in the middle of things down there.
And I actually had time to read what anybody was doing.
If you if you want to look for a more gonzo and clearly an activist oriented news outlet, there's something called Unicorn Riot.
And these are young journalists.
They have a site called Unicorn Riot dot Ninja.
And, you know, sometimes I differ with some of their terminology, like when they they refer to pepper spray as chemical weapons, which I mean, technically it is.
But honestly, that's a little bit misleading.
But what I like about what they're they're doing is they get right in the thick of it and they show you what's happening on the ground between the police and the protesters in ways I haven't seen done much.
And I certainly haven't seen, you know, that sort of graphic and and visceral feeling of what it's like to be tear gassed and and face down, basically an army when you're unarmed.
So that's something that gives you a real good sense of of what it feels like.
And I do think people are coming to it.
I think President Obama's comments this week to this online news site called Now This News was really probably generated a lot more attention.
I know the world ran like three or four pieces just yesterday, including mine on it.
And then, you know, The New York Times did a piece yesterday.
They seem to have somebody on the ground.
So I think things are going to come to a head here pretty soon.
I think clearly the president is waiting till after the election because he doesn't want this to be an issue between and Hillary Clinton has been absolutely silent on it.
Donald Trump, as usual, has has conflicts.
He's apparently made some investments in this company or in the pipeline itself.
I don't know the exact details, but I don't think that that the president wants to make any comments that will somehow influence the election.
I would say pretty soon after the election, they're going to make a move.
And I don't know what that's going to be, whether it's diverting the pipeline.
I really honestly don't know how they're going to do that, because if it's not online before December, like I said, or before the end of December anyway, it may become economically infeasible because the oil company could renegotiate the contract to a lower, lower oil price.
Well, and yeah, it's a very important point you make there, too, about the falling price, because, you know, I really don't know that much about what's going on in North Dakota, but I know I did see an article maybe a month or two ago about a ghost town for sale.
It was a big corporate company town that was built around a certain patch of oil shale or whatever it was, and that, you know, they needed a good I'm guessing fifty bucks a barrel or whatever was their absolute floor before they're making profit anymore.
It's total oil.
It's not that sweet crew to get out of Saudi.
It's it's tough to get and expensive to refine and all that.
So.
Right.
And it's fracked.
A lot of it is fracked.
And, you know, the North Dakota was the sort of world headquarters essentially of the fracking boom, you know, which, by the way, no one talks about fracking and its relationship to earthquakes.
But that's another story.
But but North Dakota became this, you know, Wild West town.
I mean, Wild West country up in the Bakken region, oil field region, you know, you had man camps, you had people coming from all over, huge prices for hotels.
And and it was it was, you know, sort of anything goes, a lot of social misery, along with, you know, people that, you know, people in fast food places making, you know, fifteen bucks an hour.
I mean, there was this work everywhere.
People were getting well paid.
And then, you know, because of the price of oil, the bottom dropped out of the fracking and fracking will die at much, you know, at well before it reaches, you know, plummets to 50 bucks a barrel.
So, you know, that's one of the reasons the state is so is pushing this so hard.
You know, their state budget is so reliant on petroleum income and they don't want to lose this.
But, you know, it just goes to show what some people will do when they're this determined and they have the force on their side.
Well, and I just Googled it all right now is that forty four bucks.
So, yeah, I mean, that's two bucks from last week, Scott.
Yeah.
And that's certainly below.
And, you know, I don't know.
I guess some of these technologies have advanced and become cheaper to deploy.
But there was certainly a major break point at at fifty dollars for a lot of these things to be profitable in terms of oil sands and shale and all that.
So I don't know how much that's changed over the last, say, decade or so.
But you can see how, you know, makes sense.
I mean, certainly a lot of companies in Texas have gone under and that kind of thing since the bubble.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I don't know how much of the correction is still going on or how much we're on.
Well, economists either.
So I can't say, but I do know that there is a risk for, you know, and I don't know how much President Obama knows about these economic details.
You know, if one were to, you know, do kind of a deep political analysis, one of the theories you could come up with.
And I'm not saying that I certainly don't know this and I'm not saying even I think it's true.
But one one possibility would be if he does know the economic economics of this, then he probably also knows that to reroute the pipeline would mean that they would have to renegotiate the contracts.
And therefore, the economics of this wouldn't make any more sense.
And so maybe that's a way to sort of kill it without saying, you know, we don't care about your investments.
You've got to keep it in the ground.
But again, I don't know what the president knows in terms of the economics of this.
I imagine he's been briefed about it.
He's obviously a very smart guy and he's got smart advisors.
But and he has pledged, you know, he's been to Standing Rock.
He's been to that particular reservation and met with the current tribal chairman, David Archambeau.
And, you know, Archambeau is now calling him out as the spiritual leader of the of the Sioux Nation, Arville Looking Horse.
And basically he's being called out to keep your promises, Mr.
President.
So that's another dynamic.
And I don't think I don't think President Obama is is tone deaf to that.
I think that actually probably matters to him, especially as he thinks about his legacy.
So I wouldn't be surprised, actually, either way.
But I wouldn't be surprised if this project dies.
Yeah, well, you know, I think the protesters have made themselves very clear.
And of course, the government has a lot of actual violent force that they can bring to bear.
But, you know, these people and I don't know how many thousands of people we're talking about, but clearly thousands of people have made it clear that they absolutely are not going to give up.
And so it seems like in the in the boardroom and in the White House and everywhere else, they got to realize that, man, we picked this fight in the wrong spot, as you said, quoting that lady earlier, wrong when you thought you're going to be able to get away with this.
I mean, it's pretty hard to see a company like this back and down, but it's even harder to see these protesters ever back and down.
So it seems like they're already up against the wall.
They must know that.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's it's interesting, too.
I mean, one of the leaders of the of the movement or of this particular resistance is a guy named Mikasi Camp Horanek, whose uncle was was a co-founder of the American Indian movement.
And he was at Wounded Knee in the 70s.
And Mikasi was telling me that he, you know, he says, you know, we have our backs to the river.
And I wouldn't be surprised if I'm going to have my feet in the water at some point.
And in fact, a lot of them did have their feet in the water just a few days, a couple of days ago.
But the other thing to just mention is that the, you know, energy transfer is working very closely with the state of North Dakota.
And one has to ask, you know, what's the appropriate level of collaboration between corporations and the government?
In this case, the the company has a helicopter, a helicopter they're using for surveillance.
And the sheriff's department is on record saying that it's officers ride in the helicopter to assist and work on surveillance in a helicopter supplied by the corporation.
The corporation came out energy transfer just last week saying these people should be prosecuted, referring to the protesters, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Well, isn't that something that a government says or a prosecutor or the police?
I mean, you have a company saying this.
And then the next day, 200 officers.
I'm not saying that one directly led to another necessarily, but it gives you the idea.
It gives you the sense that these two are working hand in hand and that the people who are unarmed and getting surveilled and getting tear gassed are not really treated as citizens with full rights.
Yep.
All right, man.
Well, you're doing great work bringing attention to the issue, Sandy.
I sure appreciate you coming on the show about it.
And it's nice to talk to you, Scott.
Take care of yourself.
You too.
That is Sandy Tolan.
You can find him at the L.A. Times and at Sandy Tolan dot com.
Again, he has this one at Public Radio International.
His books are about Palestine.
Children of the Stone, the power of music in a hard land and the lemon tree as well.
That's Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, y'all for listening.
Check out the archives at Libertarian Institute dot org slash Scott Horton Show.
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