Pine Ridge, Dakotas are sacrifice zones

Energy independence is code for: the elites will make Gazans of us all.

Scientists at the American Geophysical Union are circling around the mass movement of soil as the boundary at which the Anthropocene began. Tina Ghose at LiveScience:

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) could also serve as markers. These are formed from combustion in natural wildfires, but also come largely from the burning of fossil fuels.

Western North Dakota, eastern Montana, and all of Wyoming are sacrifice zones: red states where the Right to Work for less will kill workers and ecosystems. West Virginia is a wasteland already plowed under by coal and death.

Now, the grim reaper comes for South Dakota. Chris Hedges at Democracy Now!

Pine Ridge is a Lakota reservation in South Dakota. The average life expectancy for a male is 48. That is the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti. At any one time, 60 percent of the residents have neither electricity or running water, 80 percent alcoholism rate, because you break—you break these people. You create a culture of dependence. You make self-sufficiency impossible. And then people anesthetize themselves. But it’s incumbent upon us to look at these sacrifice zones to understand what happens when there are no restraints, no impediments on corporate capitalism, because they’re doing this globally.

There are 83 vacancies on the federal bench in a country that purports to have a right to a speedy trial: the resulting bottlenecks are burying cases that should enjoy sunlight to be settled by the very corporations creating sacrifice zones.