Selling Out: Frackin Blood Money for the Sierra Club and Tex Hall

By Brenda Norrell writing for Censored News.

The road into New Town, of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara, in North Dakota, fouled with dust, pollution and heavy trucks. Photo Brenda Norrell

In ‘Breaking Up with the Sierra Club,’ Sandra Steingraber said the Sierra Club admitted secretly accepting $25 million from the fracking industry between 2007 and 2012 and most of it came from Chesapeake Energy.

Steingraber wrote, “… more than a month has past since your executive director, Michael Brune, admitted in Time magazine that the Sierra Club had, between 2007 and 2010, clandestinely accepted $25 million from the fracking industry, with most of the donations coming from Chesapeake Energy. Corporate Crime Reporter was hot on the trail of the story when it broke in Time.” http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/26-7

Continuing his push for the destruction of his homelands, Chairman Hall fought new regulations to protect the environment and the people.

The Minot Daily News in North Dakota reports, “Tex Hall told members of the House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies in Washington, D.C., that the BLM’s proposed regulations on hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, will hurt energy development on Indian reservations.”
http://www.minotdailynews.com/page/content.detail/id/564391/Tex-Hall–Proposed-fracking-regs-will-hurt-energy-development-on-reservations.html?nav=5010

Last summer, Indigenous Peoples from the Americas gathered on the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara homelands in North Dakota at the Indigenous Environmental Network gathering.

The roads were jammed with heavy trucks, the air polluted with dust and fumes, and the entire region fouled with pollution. It looked like a scene from a war movie. When local tribal members described their fight to protect Mother Earth and how friends had been killed by those heavy oil and gas trucks, there were no reporters from either the mainstream media or the national Native American media, there to report it.

The media, too, is to blame for the continuation of this blood money in Indian country.

In Washington, the media is all too happy to report on what tribal leaders say to Congressional committees, without ever going out and actually talking to the people who live on the land.

With the collapse of the news media, online news websites repost these one-sided corporate articles without undertaking real journalism. The motives of these news websites — which undertake no journalism — include gains from advertising and the promotion of gambling.

Meanwhile, AP and other reporters continue to report their racist message to the joys of the corporations. They convey this message: The only way Indian Nations can obtain revenues or jobs is to rape the earth and pollute their land, water and air, with coal fired power plants, oil and gas drilling, toxic dumps, and other destructive and disease producing industries.

The corporations and the spin masters, and the lazy news reporters, have far more cash on their hands than the grassroots Native Americans fighting the destruction of Mother Earth.

Chesapeake’s destruction to the environment is from Powder River in Wyoming to Oklahoma and Texas, to the northeast United States. Now, Sierra Club is a partner in that destruction.

Hall is among those responsible for the destruction of the environment, and what has happened to the people as a result, on the Hidatsa, Mandan and Arikara Nation. Hall rose to national popularity with the aid of a good speech writer, and is now using that fame to destroy his land, water, air and his own people.

Source