OK, but here’s the thing. I get that Steve Bannon is now the new Bogeyman, who out-Roves Rove, and if you start with the view that he’s the personification of evil, then I get that you’d be concerned about him being on any sort of council. But I don’t share that view. From everything I’ve seen of Bannon, he’s a very bright guy who’s been successful in a variety of fields (and has a masters in national security studies from Georgetown), and who is also an influential advisor to the president at this time. If these guys feel that having him attend these meetings makes sense, I can’t dispute that.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, but it sounds like you’re saying that the ACOE routinely does not follow the regulations and that DAPL should have known that they were doing this because they interact with other agencies who take a different approach. I don’t know if I buy this (my feeling is that you properly rely on the relevant government agency to tell you what the rules are, and whatever any other agencies do is irrelevant), but if you’re right then the DAPL will presumably lose in court. So far they’ve been doing pretty well, but it’s not over yet.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. You can probably argue that the DAPL can’t be expected to properly know the standards, which is technically true. However, in reality, they did know the standards and they knew that not following them could bite them in the ass, which it did. Besides, most people generally know that when you’re finding human bones in your backdirt pile, it’s probably time to call the authorities.
As for losing in court, well, you have a rosier view of justice than I do. This is the sort of thing that’s very easily ignored as not that important, and it has often been so in the past. The Army Corps has been operating like this for awhile with nothing more than strongly worded letters against them. The only reason it’s getting press now is because of the protests, and clearly the press is not telling the whole story. Native American groups don’t typically have the lawyers that oil and gas companies do.
If there’s not the will to follow regulations in the relevant federal agencies, it won’t happen unless people protest. But then, protest only works if you have people in power willing to listen. The protests worked on Obama, but Trump clearly doesn’t care.
POTUS makes the ultimate go/no go decisions. To not be up to date on the issues is to place a lot of people in danger. Having his decisions filtered through people like Miller and Bannon does not bode well for anybody, particularly when he seems to just go with whatever he was told last by any random person.
In this very thread (on this very page) is someone who works on federal and state cultural and historical regulations, and has worked on oil and gas pipelines, and you’re disagreeing with him (her?) about the Dakota Access Pipeline being run through culturally sensitive areas.
You need to pay attention to context. I don’t claim to know anything about pipeline regulations, but I’m not arguing anything based on my expertise.
The sum of expertise in the universe is not “people posting in this thread”. The government agency who sets the regulations OK’d the project. I’m entitled to assume that these people are also experts on what the regulations are, even if they don’t happen to be posting here.
But beyond that, I’m not even relying on the above claim. What I’ve been saying is that even if they’re wrong, the company who followed their guidance and process is OK in doing that, and properly relied on their guidance.
Again, none of this relies in any way on my (non-existent) expertise in pipeline regulations. I try to know my limitations, and pipeline regulations is well to the outside.
My point is that the issue is not “that DAP followed standard procedure and got sandbagged when activists found a sympathetic ear in the Obama Administration.I don’t agree with this.” Arguing that the DAPL just didn’t know better than to do what the Army Corps told them is disingenuous. The idea that they don’t know what the standards are is laughable. They got “sandbagged” because they knowingly did not follow the standards, knowing they were backed up by the lead federal agency. If they had followed the standards, which they were perfectly capable of doing, they could have avoided the whole mess. But, again, they decided that it was more profitable to bulldoze through people’s graves, and the lead agency failed to do its job in requiring that they at least check for burials first.
But the bottom line is you’ve acknowledged that the Army Corps enforced the standards in the manner that they’ve typically enforced the standards for these types of projects.
My point stands on that alone.
ETA: this is leaving aside your suggestion that the judge - another guy who should know pipeline regulations - would rule in favor of DAPL because he’s bamboozled by DAPL lawyers.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but this is classic “I don’t understand what’s so complicated about X, they should just do Y!” where X is some extremely complicated issue currently burning through millions of dollars and occupying thousands upon thousands of billable hours by well educated people who are intimately familiar with their fields and the specific facts of this case. As though the DAPL company just needed to show some judge an approval stamp from the Army Corps of Engineers and the whole thing would have been thrown out! One simple trick! Environmentalists hate him!"
I genuinely don’t mean that to be terribly snarky, we all do it.
…don’t feed me that bullshit. There is a world of difference between what you wrote, the opinions of the experts you cited, and what is actually happening. Because what is actually happening is this:
[QUOTE=NYT]
WASHINGTON — These are chaotic and anxious days inside the National Security Council, the traditional center of management for a president’s dealings with an uncertain world.
Three weeks into the Trump administration, council staff members get up in the morning, read President Trump’s Twitter posts and struggle to make policy to fit them.
[/QUOTE]
Sorry, but I’ve not been commenting on “what is actually happening”.
I was commenting on the EO reshaping the security council. I said that “there are undoubtedly a lot of meetings and updates etc. which don’t require the attendance of every last player”, and you quoted that and expressed shock and horror. However, it turned out that the experts cited by PolitiFact agreed with this precisely.
So now you’ve gone out and found some reporting criticizing Trump’s management of the NSC. That’s something else.
Yes, in direct contradiction to the Advisory Council’s recommendations and against the standards of the federal government as a whole. If the Advisory Council had more power, the Corps would be in serious trouble. As it is, they are pretty toothless, alas.
I’m not saying a judge would be bamboozled. I am saying that a judge can be swayed by arguments presented by skilled lawyers. There are ways to recount the events that put a better light on the DAPL or a better light on the tribal agencies. It doesn’t help that, by necessity, the laws governing CRM are pretty vague. Our industry is concerned with everything cultural; the laws have to be vague and broad to have any hope of covering it all. It also means there’s a lot of room to weasel out of things, unfortunately. The Corps and the DAPL may be able to argue they’ve followed the letter of the law, but they certainly have not followed the spirit.
…why yes, yes you are actually commenting on what is actually happening.
Quote the whole thing. You said: “People have the impression that anything involving intelligence involves some super important stuff, but there are undoubtedly a lot of meetings and updates etc. which don’t require the attendance of every last player.”
Intelligence does contain super fucking important stuff. Intelligence is never perfect. Intelligence is “bits of a puzzle.” Each piece on its own might not seem (to the layman) to be “super important stuff.” Part of the job of the National Security Council is to “put the puzzle together.” To dismiss the importance of this is arrogant and horrific.
Why yes, you did create a strawman, then found some experts that agreed with it.
National Security Council staff members making policy based on tweets is not “criticism of Trumps Management.” It is a damming indictment of a dysfunctional government that is going to drive your country off a cliff.
Keeping a few of his louder and stupider promises, perhaps. His promise to “drain the swamp” has been implemented by placing foxes to guard the hen houses in just about every area of government. His rhetoric may satisfy too many of his adherents, but that is clearly not draining the swamp. Trump supporters may love DeVos and Carson without understanding either what the departments do or how DeVos and Carson are unqualified, but how in the world is putting Pruitt in charge of the EPA, Perry in charge of energy, Puzder in charge of Labor, (Goldman-Sachs) Mnuchin in charge of Treasury, (“King of Bankruptcy”) Ross in charge of Commerce, and similar appointments keeping the promise to drain the swamp?
ETA: Personally, I think Perry was the worse choice of them all. Wanting to eliminate an agency of which he knew nothing about. Including our nuclear arsenal.
