How to Stand with Standing Rock – And Why We Must

Long story short: white people have spent centuries trying to eradicate Native Americans in order to get their land, their resources, and their wealth. That hasn’t stopped. It’s ongoing today. It’s probably happening in your community without you even realizing. It’s happening in North Dakota, and if you’re not aware of the situation, please remedy that right now.

The Standing Rock Sioux are trying to preserve their land and their water from a pipeline that (overwhelmingly white) Bismarck refused to have passing through their city. You know why they don’t want it: pipelines break. They explode. They spill. And for women, there’s a whole other set of horrific problems that come along with a pipeline.

Image is a map that shows the current Standing Rock reservation and the much larger boundaries of the 1851 treaty.
We have taken so much from these tribes, and now we’re trying to take more, and this is where it needs to stop. It needs to stop for the health and safety of our indigenous peoples. It needs to stop so that corporations and governments no longer assume it’s no problem to take what they want from the reservations without regard to the residents. It needs to stop for the sake of our land, our water, and our air.

This is one of the most important movements for Native American self-determination and survival in our lifetime. The people of Standing Rock need you to stand with them. Here’s how you can do it: Continue reading “How to Stand with Standing Rock – And Why We Must”

How to Stand with Standing Rock – And Why We Must
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Gaming the System

We really need legislation that addresses naked corporate greed, not to mention hacks loophole exploiters off at the knees. This is outrageous:

The Nation has a story that provides a perfect example of how corporate welfare operates, transferring enormous amounts of money from middle class taxpayers to the bank accounts of large corporations. And this one wasn’t even done intentionally, it was just an opportunity that the paper industry took advantage of.

Thanks to an obscure tax provision, the United States government stands to pay out as much as $8 billion this year to the ten largest paper companies. And get this: even though the money comes from a transportation bill whose manifest intent was to reduce dependence on fossil fuel, paper mills are adding diesel fuel to a process that requires none in order to qualify for the tax credit. In other words, we are paying the industry–handsomely–to use more fossil fuel. “Which is,” as a Goldman Sachs report archly noted, the “opposite of what lawmakers likely had in mind when the tax credit was established.”

[snip]

The origins of the credit are innocent enough. In 2005 Congress passed, and George W. Bush signed, the $244 billion transportation bill. It included a variety of tax credits for alternative fuels such as ethanol and biomass. But it also included a fifty-cent-a-gallon credit for the use of fuel mixtures that combined “alternative fuel” with a “taxable fuel” such as diesel or gasoline.

Enter the paper industry. Since the 1930s the overwhelming majority of paper mills have employed what’s called the kraft process to produce paper. Here’s how it works. Wood chips are cooked in a chemical solution to separate the cellulose fibers, which are used to make paper, from the other organic material in wood. The remaining liquid, a sludge containing lignin (the structural glue that binds plant cells together), is called black liquor. Because it’s so rich in carbon, black liquor is a good fuel; the kraft process uses the black liquor to produce the heat and energy necessary to transform pulp into paper. It’s a neat, efficient process that’s cost-effective without any government subsidy.

“Seventy-three percent of the energy we use in our mill system we produce,” says Ann Wrobleski, IP’s vice president for global government relations. “We feel like we’re the original green industry, if you will.” (In developed nations, paper is the third-largest industrial greenhouse gas emitter, behind the steel and chemical industries.)

By adding diesel fuel to the black liquor, paper companies produce a mixture that qualifies for the mixed-fuel tax credit, allowing them to burn “black liquor into gold,” as a JPMorgan report put it.

This kind of behavior is nothing short of criminal.

Gaming the System