Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Against DAPL | Standing Rock Nov 15 Press Conference

Videos For An Earth In Transition – http://www.earth-heal.com/index.php/videos.html  

Source: Indigenous Rising 

Working Transcript:

“It has the arrogance to break the law and the ability to get away with it.

Not only that. But when people stand up peacefully to ask that the law be enforced – instead of aligning itself with the law abiding citizens of our country, the power of this state and other states are aligning themselves with the law breaking entity.

I say they are law breaking because I’ve been an environmental attorney for 30 some years and I’ve been fighting these battles and I know what they are doing is illegal. They are trying to build this pipeline fast so that they don’t have to face their day in court. So that they can say it’s already built.
“Yeah we trampled on some of the laws but it’s already built.”

A reporter asked me an hour ago, “what’s the point of stopping them now, they’ve already built most of the pipeline.” And I said to the reporter, if you had people robbing a bank and they came in the bank with their guns blazing and they tied up people and they started emptying the cash register, and the police then came, do you think the police would say ‘well they got this far, we might as well let them just take the money.’ What’s they difference.

What they are doing here is an environmental crime and there’s real victims.

What they did is in order to get away with breaking EPA, EPA is our most important environmental statute, National environmental policy act. That was our first environmental statue passed in 1969, and it was the first time that the US government said that when somebody has a proposal to do something that requires a federal permit that is going to distribute or possibly diminish the value or change the use…that they have to do a cost benefit analysis first.

This company took that loophole [Permit 12] and they tried to draw it around a 1,200 mile pipe. XL pipeline didn’t even think they’d get away with that. That pipeline, only 7 miles longer than this one, did the full environmental impact statement. The way that they did it is called segmentation, and it’s an old strategy and it is a device of chicanery that when we wrote EPA everyone foresaw.

“What would happen if a really diabolical polluter said I’m going to build something and only build a little bit at a time…and therefore each segment…it will just be an incremental change in the status quo so I won’t have to do an environmental impact statement.

They are trying to invoke that loophole for a project that is going to disrupt 209 streams. I they were going to disrupt one stream, they’d have to do a full environmental impact statement. They are trying to invoke that loophole for a project that will produce the same amount of carbon as 29 coal burning power plants.

We know what the law is. This company knows what the law is, and they use a flim-flam to break the law, and when peaceful protestors are saying ‘wait a minute, we want to see a cost-benefit analysis’ the company is saying ‘no, we aren’t going to do that.’

And the reason they don’t want to do it, is because they don’t want the American people to see the results of that cost-benefit analysis. We all know what it says.

This pipeline is not going to benefit the American people. This pipeline, this is what they’d be forced to disclose, this pipeline is going to benefit a few billionaires like Donald Trump and it’s going to make the richer by impoverishing the rest of us. By impoverishing the American people. By diminishing the quality of life for people around the globe. By adding to global warming which is the biggest threat to civilization.”