'This Is the Only Way That Pipelines Will Be Stopped'

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

26 August 16

Dispatches from D.C.

hings were not as usual on Wednesday afternoon in John Marshall Park, a semi-shady oasis next to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Dead in front of the building, five Native American drummers pounded and chanted and chanted and pounded. The crowd around them, some in Native dress and some in T-shirts and jeans, and some in the biker leather of a Native motorcycle club from upstate New York, joined in. This was the language of the prairie and the hills come to the capital of the land of politics and the law.

Inside the courthouse, in Courtroom Number 19, where there were no seats to be had, District Judge James Boasberg was conducting a hearing in the matter of The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Corps of Engineers. At issue was an injunction which would delay the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline through the tribe's land. Ever since April, members of the Standing Rock nation in North Dakota have been demonstrating and blocking the construction of the pipeline, arguing that it is profaning lands that the tribe considers to be sacred. The pipeline is meant to carry Bakken oil from North Dakota through Iowa to Illinois.

The confrontations between the protesters and the people who are building the pipeline have grown increasingly touchy. Governor Jack Dalrymple, in charge of one of the continent's few petro-states, has declared the demonstrations to be a threat to the public order and has declared a state of emergency along the pipeline route. Electric power to the protest camp, as well as its water supply, have been cut off. In front of the courthouse on Wednesday, people who had come to Washington from North Dakota expressed concerns for their people back home, because nobody was quite sure what steps Dalrymple might take to enforce the state of emergency he declared.

There seems little question that the Dakota Access pipeline has replaced the defunct Keystone XL pipeline as ground zero for the multi-faceted battle over pipelines and, therefore, over energy policy going forward. After the president canceled Keystone, it seemed that a little of the air went out of the anti-pipeline forces. Major environmental groups moved on to other issues. However, on the ground in places like Iowa and the Dakotas, local grassroots activists looked at the campaign against Keystone and drew their own lessons from it. Purely through the dint of the efforts of local ranchers and Native tribes along the proposed route, the Dakota Access pipeline is the new Keystone XL.

"Some of the environmental groups decided to focus their attention elsewhere, and after six years, I can understand that," said Jane Fleming Kleeb, the chairman of the Nebraska Democratic party who made her bones leading the fight against the Keystone project in that state. "What should have happened after Keystone got rejected was a huge influx of resources to local and state groups fighting pipelines, and that hasn't happened. What has happened is landowners and tribes on the ground are fighting with everything they have and there have been 20-plus projects that have been cancelled."

Beyond the environmental questions regarding more pipelines carrying more carbon-based fuels to more places, Kleeb's key issue has been the shadowy use of the eminent domain power of the several states at the behest of private companies like TransCanada, the extraction behemoth behind the Keystone project and, in this case, Energy Transfer Partners, the company seeking to build the Dakota Access pipeline. Politically, it's a very shrewd idea; both liberals and conservatives have railed against the use of eminent domain ever since the Supreme Court's Kelo decision. You may recall that it briefly was an issue in the Republican primary debates. Jeb (!) Bush, in particular, hammered Donald Trump hard on Trump's own use of eminent domain in his various casino enterprises.

In fact, very much like what happened in Nebraska, the resistance in Iowa against the Dakota Access pipeline is led by ranchers furious at what they see as the state's complicity in a private land-grab. Earlier this week, a judge denied a stay on construction of the pipeline, kicking the decision over to the Iowa utility board. The plaintiffs in that case accused Energy Partners of blackjacking them into granting easements by threatening to have their land condemned, a charge that the company's lawyers denied, but one that is more than familiar to the people in Nebraska who fought TransCanada. "This has been the slow erosion of property rights," said Kleeb. "This is the only way that pipelines will be stopped. Construction companies will find ways to get around permits and other obstacles. That has to be brought through the courts."

There are other problems as well. On Wednesday, The Des Moines Register ran a story in which farmers who were paid to allow an easement through their property along the pipeline's route in Iowa complained that the pipeline company had reneged on promises to restore the land once the pipeline got buried.

Instead, he's got a scar running across his soybean fields where the dark, fertile topsoil is being stacked on top of several feet of hard clay mixed with clay loam. The result, Goebel fears, will be soil less suited for growing crops—and much less valuable. "Nature separated those soils for a reason, that's the way I feel," said Goebel, who runs a 164-acre century farm in Sioux County. "If nature put it there, they should put it back the way it was." His complaint is one of several popping up across Iowa as work ramps up on the pipeline that will stretch from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota across Iowa to Patoka, IIl.

(Perhaps the most interesting speculation centers on the fact that, three weeks ago, Energy Partners sold its stake in the Bakken pipeline system to everybody's favorite disaster farm, Enbridge Energy Partners of Houston. A few cynical souls have noticed that this combination might allow not only the transport of Bakken crude to Illinois, but also, in conjunction with the existing TransCanada Upland pipeline, the development of a system that could reach the tar-sands moonscape of Alberta, giving us Keystone by another means.)

The hearing was long and polite, touching on the threat to delicate archaeological sites along the Standing Rock portion of the route and on whether or not the pipeline company had done due diligence as to its commitments and responsibilities to the Native people of the region. Judge Boasberg promised that he would render a decision on the injunction within two weeks.

Outside the courtroom, Bobbie Jean Threelegs, a member of the Standing Rock nation, spoke about how she had come to be involved in the resistance among her people. She is one of a group of runners who have run the length of the proposed pipeline in relays from South Dakota to Omaha in order to deliver a petition to officials of the Army Corps of Engineers, who did not accept them. Bobbie Jean and her fellow runners then organized a massive relay that brought them to Washington to sit in on the hearing.

"It took us 28 days," she said. "I got involved in the cause by my relative. She came back to the reservation, to each district meeting, informing people about the Dakota Access pipeline. I was involved with the youth then. This is an important issue for the youth because it will affect future generations."

They ran for 28 days in order to sit in witness at a two-hour court proceeding. Outside, the drumming and chanting went on and on, even after the lawyers all had gone home—the voice of the prairie and the hills come to the land of politics and the law, which has been so often deaf to it.

Roger Ailes, the Clintons, and the Scandals of the Scandalmongers

By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker

25 August 16

his election year, the big question was supposed to be whether Hillary Clinton would shatter the glass ceiling. Instead, it has become the year in which one of the country’s most towering glass houses has shattered. Few people may remember it now, but Fox News, which Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation launched in 1996, became a ratings leader largely because of its gleefully censorious coverage of Bill Clinton’s sex scandals. Now the network is mired in its own scandal. Last month, Roger Ailes resigned as Fox News’s chairman and C.E.O. in the face of multiple allegations of sexual harassment, including a lawsuit filed against him by the former anchor Gretchen Carlson. (Ailes has denied Carlson’s allegations.) The unfolding embarrassment at the network poses a host of questions—not the least of which is how the network’s executives justified their Javert-like pursuit of Clinton’s extramarital affairs, given their boss’s own repeated sexual misconduct. If you go back and look carefully at the chronology, some of Ailes’s most egregious alleged harassment of women was taking place at the same time that Fox News was suggesting that Clinton deserved to be impeached. Sexual harassment is a serious issue, and it merits serious coverage, but it’s hard to believe that the suits at Fox were motivated by genuine concern, given their own corporate culture.

Gabriel Sherman, in his 2014 book “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” describes how brilliantly and relentlessly Ailes exploited Clinton’s scandalous affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky in order to build Fox News’s brand. Sherman writes, “Whatever else it was, the scandal was a media bonanza, and no medium benefited from it more than cable news—and no cable channel more than Fox News.” Within hours of the Lewinsky story breaking, in January, 1998, Ailes inaugurated a new nightly show devoted to the melodrama, and assigned five producers and correspondents to cover it. No detail was too sordid for Fox to cover. With Ailes, a former Republican political operative, at the helm, Fox covered the affair as a criminal act, and rode the story straight up the cable-ratings charts. “Monica was a news channel’s dream come true,” John Moody, Fox’s executive editor, once admitted.

Fox News has devoted considerably less attention to its own sex scandal. When the network announced Ailes’s departure, his alleged improprieties were not mentioned. Carlson’s attorneys told the Guardian that at least twenty women have accused Ailes of sexually harassing them throughout his career. Carlson and the anchor Megyn Kelly, who has also reportedly alleged that she was harassed by Ailes, are the best known among these women, but the story of Laurie Luhn, the former head of booking for Fox News, is especially damning.

Luhn’s account, if true, suggests that, at precisely the same time Ailes was leading Fox’s breathless coverage of the Clinton-impeachment proceedings, Ailes, who was married, was paying Luhn—who was single, broke, and decades younger—to service him sexually. In a recent blockbuster interview with Sherman, in New York, Luhn said that she met Ailes in 1988. Soon afterward, Ailes began paying her a monthly retainer, for sex and for private research on his competitors. When he helped launch Fox, in 1996, Luhn said, Ailes offered her a staff job in “guest relations.” Over time, her job descriptions at Fox changed, but Ailes, whom Luhn described as a “predator,” did not. She told Sherman that her twenty-year involvement with Ailes had been “psychological torture.” As she grew increasingly unhappy, she said, Ailes grew more controlling, insisting that she tell no one of their sexual relations. Luhn told Sherman that Ailes kept an incriminating videotape of her in a safe-deposit vault, as a form of insurance. By 2011, however, Luhn said, she had informed Fox’s general counsel that Ailes had sexually harassed her for decades. All of this might sound hard to believe, and Luhn has acknowledged a history of psychological difficulties. But Ailes and his lawyers declined an invitation from Sherman to rebut Luhn’s story. Moreover, in 2011, Fox agreed to pay Luhn an astounding $3.15-million severance agreement, which included nondisclosure clauses. It looks a lot like hush money, paid for with corporate funds and handled by multiple Fox executives. Yet, if silencing Luhn was the aim, it hasn’t worked. Luhn was reportedly among the first women to contact investigators hired by Fox, in the wake of Carlson’s lawsuit, to straighten out the twisted truth about sexual harassment at the company.

Fox viewers were, of course, left in the dark about Ailes’s personal life as the network relentlessly exposed Clinton’s private life. The campaign was nearly successful. On December 19, 1998, the Republican-ruled House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton on two articles, for perjury and obstruction of justice, contending that he had lied under oath about his extramarital affair with Lewinsky. The Senate eventually acquitted Clinton, after a highly partisan trial.

Here, too, hindsight has revealed more hypocrisy. The drive to impeach Clinton was led by three successive House Republican leaders. As ThinkProgress noted last year, each of these self-styled moral authorities was subsequently tarnished in his own extramarital sex scandal. Newt Gingrich, the first Speaker to whip his members into an impeachment frenzy, has since acknowledged that during the same period he was engaged in an extramarital affair with a congressional aide, who was then in her twenties. Gingrich subsequently got divorced and married the aide, Callista Bisek, who became his third wife. (His second wife has also said that he began an affair with her while still married to his first, who, at the time, was recovering from cancer. Gingrich has never specifically admitted to that affair.) All the while, he was publicly castigating Democrats as the party of moral degeneration. For example, while the Democratic Party was nominating Clinton, in 1992, Gingrich introduced George H. W. Bush at a campaign stop by declaring that Woody Allen’s “non-family” was one that “fits the Democratic platform perfectly,” because Allen was “having non-incest with a non-daughter to whom he was a non-father.”

Gingrich resigned from the House Speakership in November, 1998, at which point the Republican House members unanimously voted to pass the gavel to Bob Livingston, a congressman from Louisiana. Less than two months later, on the same day that the House was scheduled to vote on Clinton’s impeachment, Livingston announced that he would not assume the Speakership. Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, had revealed that he had gathered evidence that Livingston had been involved with at least four women during the previous decade.

After Livingston stepped down, the Republican majority in the House voted to replace him with Dennis Hastert, an amiable-seeming congressman from Illinois. Hastert spoke of how his “conscience” had led him to “the solemn conclusion” that Clinton had “abused and violated the public trust” and therefore needed to be impeached. In 2015, Hastert was revealed to have sexually abused a boy during his years as a wrestling coach in Illinois, between the mid-sixties and early eighties; according to prosecutors at his later trial, the number of known victims has climbed to five. This past October, Hastert pleaded guilty to bank fraud, and in April admitted to the abuse at his sentencing hearing. He had concealed an effort to buy the silence of his victims, through payments that amounted to more than three million dollars. The presiding judge called him “a serial child molester” before sentencing him to serve fifteen months in federal prison. (He was not charged for the abuse because the statute of limitations had passed.)

Murdoch, the chairman of News Corp., has stepped in to temporarily fill Ailes’s shoes at Fox News, but he has his own baggage. According to the Wall Street Journal and Vanity Fair, Murdoch’s second marriage was upended, in 1999, by an extramarital affair with Wendi Deng, a young émigré from China and an intern at Murdoch’s Star TV. The affair likely overlapped with the Clinton impeachment proceedings. Murdoch’s marriage to Deng ended fourteen years later, again amid sensational rumors of infidelity.

The Clintons, by contrast, have remained married. It’s impossible for anyone on the outside to judge whether that is a marital triumph or a Faustian bargain. Will past Clinton scandals become a focus of the fall campaign? It’s possible. Trump, who has admitted to his own sexual infidelities, is reportedly now being advised by Ailes. Trump has called Bill Clinton “the worst abuser of women in the history of politics,” and said that his sex scandals are “fair game.” Voters may or may not be swayed by the the exhumation of such arguments, this time around. But the unending scandals of the scandalmongers have made one thing clear: neither party has a lock on virtue.