The Dakota Access Pipeline: Another Epic Clash Between America’s Military-Corporate Powers and the G
The Dakota Access Pipeline: Another Epic Clash Between America’s Military-Corporate Powers and the Great Sioux Nation
October 4, 2016
by Jerome Irwin
As the eve of the 2016 US presidential election draws nearer, and the world inches ever-closer to the edge of their seats, wondering who the winner will be to lay claim to the world’s most powerful seat for committing acts of good or evil, there is yet another David & Goliath story unfolding. It’s yet one more spin on the same old story that has been told in America for eons; a story that pits ‘The People’, who seek to do good for the planet, against ‘The Powerful’ who desire to pursue the same pathways of evil that continues to destroy the people and earth alike. This time the ‘David’ in this epic clash is the Standing Rock Sioux & The Great Sioux Nation, and the ‘Goliath’ is America’s Military forces in the guise of North Dakota’s Department of Homeland Security, its National Guard troops and a host of law enforcement agencies. The other ‘Goliath’ is Energy Transfer Partners and a host of Wall Street speculators, investors and worldwide banking interests who, collectively, could be likened to General Custer and his 7th Cavalry regiment of another time and place in Sioux Territory.
To fully understand what the conflict between the Standing Rock Sioux and Dakota Access Pipeline represents in the bigger scheme of things one has to know something about the history of the Sioux people and their relationship to America’s military-corporate powers. This latest epic invasion in the 21st century of the Great Sioux Nation’s territory in North Dakota isn’t anything new under the sun. It’s but the latest episode in a centuries-old saga of American military and corporate might operating in tandem, hand-in-glove, to constantly dispossess the Sioux and other Native American Nations of their homelands and all its natural, cultural and sacred resources.
Starting in the early 19th century there were the incursions into Sioux territory by American fur companies that sought to strip from the land, as much as they could, all its precious fur-bearing animals for Wall Street’s profiteers in the East; ever since, the homelands of the Sioux has been a non-stop scene of one epic clash after another between those who want to preserve the land and its natural resources and those who want to rape and pillage it.
This epic clash started in earnest in the mid-19th century with the westward movement of immigrants and refugees from the East. What started as a trickle quickly turned into a horde-like swarm of locusts. This epic struggle continued on with the building of wagon roads and railroads by one corporate enterprise after another across Sioux lands.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/04/the-dakota-access-pipeline-another-epic-clash-between-americas-military-corporate-powers-and-the-great-sioux-nation/