What's been going on in Trumpland while the people trying to cure the country of this affliction have been tripping over each other in the hinterlands? Let's try to catch up, shall we? Let's begin in Nevada, which just happens to be the state into which the carnival caravan is moving this week. As has become customary for this administration, it seems that hard-working civil servants are being pushed around by corporations and the government for which they purportedly work. From Politico:

The Rhyolite Ridge project boundary sits atop the plant’s tiny 21-acre habitat and from what [Patrick] Donnelly could see, the work was already having a damaging impact. Donnelly pointed to newly graded roads on the site, including a path that cut through two of the main populations of [a rare wild]flower. Three weeks before, Donnelly had filed a petition with federal and state officials to have the plant listed as an endangered species. Now, on a holiday weekend, the mine was buzzing and Donnelly was livid. He had seen nothing like this level of activity on three visits over the summer.

“What’s changed?” he asked. “Since September 1, well, we submitted our petition.” But rather than BLM limiting exploration activity at the site as Donnelly had hoped, the work appeared to have significantly expanded. “It’s like BLM is doubling down,” he said.



The Bureau of Land Management—BLM—approves the mining permits on all federal land. Since its creation in 1946, the agency has had a dual mission to balance the demands of industry and environmental protection. In this part of Nevada, that job falls to the BLM’s Battle Mountain district office, located more than 250 miles away. But according to a sweeping whistleblower complaint filed on October 4 by Dan Patterson, a five-year BLM employee, and obtained by POLITICO and Type Investigations, the Battle Mountain office has repeatedly disregarded its own environmental rules and regulations to fast-track permits on public land. The historic antipathy toward federal oversight common to this region, combined with a presidential administration that has announced its hostility to decades of environmental law, has left public lands especially vulnerable.



You're a fool if you think this doesn't come from the top. (And if you don't suspect that some money is changing hands under the table somewhere.) The institutions of the federal bureaucracy are being weaponized and monetized to work in exactly the opposite way they were designed. This is a Republican tactic dating back to James Watt in the 1980s, but we never had a president* who was as pure a grifter as our current one is. So, naturally, everything is worse.

But of all Patterson’s allegations, the Rhyolite Ridge project—which pits a foreign mining corporation against a handful of environmentalists defending a rare, ankle-high wildflower—epitomizes how vulnerable the regulatory apparatus has become to pressure from the Trump administration. In 2017, President Donald Trump issued an executive order on minerals deemed critical to national security, including lithium, and called for “increasing activity at all levels of the supply chain.”

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt has injected plenty of slime into our government. SOPA Images Getty Images

Specifically, the order directed federal agencies to streamline the leasing and permitting processes. In July 2019, while visiting a major gold mine in Nevada, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who has made a point of reducing the time required to conduct environmental reviews, said the mining industry’s gross domestic product has increased 39 percent since Trump took office. In an interview with an Australian business publication, Bernard Rowe, managing director of Ioneer, the Australian company behind the Rhyolite Ridge project, said, “This designation of critical minerals that President Trump introduced a while back started the ball rolling in terms of streamlining permit process times and requirements, and our project has certainly been a beneficiary of that.”



I'll bet.

We can move along to an even older scam: the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death-funnel and longtime conservative fetish object, which once again threatens to gouge out the most valuable farmland on the planet while bringing with it a whole host of new problems. From Mother Jones:



TC Energy’s refusal to admit defeat has led many environmental leaders to nickname the project, first commissioned in 2010, “the zombie pipeline”: no matter how many times they kill it, it rears its head again. Yet opposition to the project is no less undying.

“We’ve been fighting this for ten years,” says Joye Braun, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and front-line organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network. Braun has long worked to mobilize Great Plains communities against oil pipeline construction, but the unique risks and history of this project gives it special weight. “Kesytone XL is the granddaddy of them all. Obama stopped it, Trump revived it, [while] tribes have said a very firm ‘no. Not on our land.'” Braun, along with other Indigenous organizers and their allies, are gearing up to once again resist. “I’m not going to tell anyone what our plans are, but we will exercise every right that we have available to stop this.”



So far, the fight against the pipeline has been peaceful and civil. This may not be the case going forward. And is there any doubt that this administration will put law-enforcement and (possibly) the military at the service of the Canadian energy giant that so wants this incipient disaster on its books, especially since TC can't seem to keep its pipelines from leaking? From the Lincoln Journal-Star:



Another oil pipeline in TC Energy's Keystone network in October spilled an estimated 383,000 gallons of oil in eastern North Dakota. The company's critics say a damaging spill from Keystone XL is inevitable given the length of the line and the many rivers and other bodies of water it would cross beneath.



Moreover, the indigenous people in the proposed pipeline's path are concerned about more than the fact that the world's dirtiest fossil fuel will spill into the watersheds, although that's bad enough. They have seen what's happened to their people in the newly formed petro-state of North Dakota, and they don't want to see it in Nebraska.

Those man camps are one of the greatest concerns for Braun and others in Native and non-Native Western communities in the areas where building will happen. “Pipelines don’t bring the best people,” she says. The camps, which will be put up in rural areas with low populations, are known to attract alcohol and drugs, as well as human trafficking. “Should a person want to come in and do harm, it can take 2 or 3 hours for a police officer or ambulance to arrive,” says Braun. “Our rural police departments, on and off reservations, don’t have the resources to contend with a camp town all the sudden springing up.”



Indigenous people have fought the pipeline tooth and nail for nearly a decade now. AP/Shutterstock

The connections between pipeline man camps and sexual violence, particularly against Indigenous women, are well-documented. Detailed reports have shown that the male-dominated camps can become hotbeds for the trafficking and exploitation of Native women. The Sovereign Bodies Institute is tracking 529 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska alone, many of whom went missing near North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields and other pipeline-adjacent projects in Canada.



Anybody who wants my vote in November had better commit to cleaning out the whole Augean stables of this administration*. If that means putting people in jail, so be it. If that means clawing back billions of dollars of ill-gotten, shady profits, bring out the earth-movers. If that means exposing to public scrutiny and anger every single crooked nickel that has passed through this administration, well, then, if Jared and Ivanka end up sleeping under cardboard in Lafayette Park, that wouldn't make me sad at all.

I don't want conciliation if this president* loses in the fall. I don't want to look forward and not backwards, and I sure as hell don't want to turn any pages. I want democratic government restored to its full and righteous power until the last slime that has seeped into our institutions has been burned away with god's own blessed fire. This isn't vengeance. It's justice, full, transparent and complete. And it is our common right to see it done.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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