“Charity Begins at Home”- Except in Republican North Dakota

By Charlie Barber
Staff Writer

“A proposal to allow North Dakota American Crystal Sugar Co. workers collect unemployment benefits has been rebuffed by a state Senate committee…The locked-out Minnesota workers can collect unemployment benefits but the North Dakotans cannot.”
-Bismarck Tribune, 11/8/11

“WILLISTON - After living all of her 82 years in the same community, Lois Sinness left her hometown this month, crying and towing a U-Haul packed with her every possession. She didn’t want to go, but the rent on her $700-a month apartment was going up almost threefold because of heightened demand for housing generated by North Dakota’s oil bonanza…’Our rents were raised, and we did not have a choice, Sinness said. ‘We’re all on fixed incomes, living mostly on Social Security, so it’s been a terrible shock.’

“Former North Dakota Gov. Ed Schafer has joined the board of Continental Resources Inc., the state’s largest oil producer, months after he led an unsuccessful public campaign to prod the Legislature into cutting oil tax rates.”

“It’s the syme the whole world over,
It’s the poor what gets the blyme,
While the rich ‘as all the plysures,
Now ain’t that a blinkin’ shyme?”
- Anglo/American folksong

While watching the local news on a recent Monday night instead of a really good football game, I was told that “oil industry spokespersons” were warning of a shutdown of oil production over the next two years if the federal government’s Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] were allowed to regulate frakking on the Bakken.

Really?!? Would the EPA really shut off the magic job producing machine that is even luring New York Times coverage to Williston?

No, not really.

This assertion that the North Dakota “oil boom skies are falling” is merely eye wash designed to cover the venal and mean spirited insertion of irresponsible oil and coal industry interests into a disaster relief bill by the State Industrial Commission, consisting of Governor Jack Dalrymple, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem, and Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring.

These Republicans are blowing a million dollars of North Dakota taxpayers’ money on legal fees, ostensibly to defend oil frakking procedures, but also to defend Lignite energy corporations, who refuse to accept accountability for their carbon and pollution production. They practice the mantra: “We are Lignite, and we do not have to be accountable to any government regulator.”

What Dalrymple and Stenehjem haven’t told us is that North Dakota’s Bakken oil country is an excuse Republicans in Washington, D.C. and their paymasters on Wall Street are using for refusing to pass President Obama’s jobs bills. The other 49 States (excepting mineral rich Wyoming) could really use jobs that Democrats are proposing. Their bridges and roads are a shambles, and so are the hopes of their citizens.

But Nooooooo…say the Tea Baggers and Republicans like John Boehner, Erik Cantor, and Paul Ryan. [“We can’t have jobs if any credit might go to Barack Obama. Let’s just send everybody to North Dakota. They have plenty of jobs there.”].

Yeah. Right.

Fortunately, responsible oil interests do exist among employers on the Bakken. They also are from outside of North Dakota. I refer to Norway, and its State owned oil industry which just purchased Brigham Oil for $4.4 Billion. Brigham is out of a more rational part of Texas, the university town of Austin, and is known to have high standards that are not necessarily followed by some of their greedier competitors. The EPA will not likely impose standards on this company, or its new Norwegian owners, that are any higher than those they already impose upon themselves.

So what do Governor Dalrymple, Attorney General Stenehjem and Republican law makers want us to be afraid of, or, more to the point, what are THEY afraid of?

One can only guess, but my bet is that bad actors on the Bakken, who see Republican State Government in North Dakota as a front office for their bottom line, don’t want to see the nation’s Environmental Protection Agency up there anymore than a drunk driver wants to see the flashing light of a police car in his rear view mirror.

Republicans in Bismarck and Washington, D.C. want to turn back the clock of American History to a time when there was little or no regulation of industry, not just back before Franklin Roosevelt, but Teddy Roosevelt as well. As such, they show their backsides to the future as well as to the American people.

In addition to opposing any form of federal regulation of a run away industry like oil, Dalrymple, and Senator John Hoeven, want a soft landing for the soft coal industry in this State. Meanwhile, Montana-Dakota Utilities [MDU] is looking to the future with the production of electricity from natural gas, a fossil fuel that is much less of a contributor to air pollution and climate change than the burning of coal.

Climate change, or global warming, of course, is far more real than the personhood of Mitt Romney’s cherished corporations, and coal is the biggest fossil fuel culprit driving climate change, despite its advantages of being abundant and cheap. The science on this is clear now. There is no more room for rational, scientific doubt. But in States like North Dakota, where public officials see themselves more as extensions of the Chamber of Commerce than their own people who depend upon them for clean air, clean water, and infrastructure, bullheadedness and politics continue to trump science.

When MDU lost their bid to build yet another coal plant in northeast South Dakota a few years ago (Big Stone II) they were advised by one of the lawyers who defeated them to go the route of turning natural gas into electricity.

Better late than never.

It is also, one hopes, not too late to ramp up development of geo-thermal, large and small wind operations, and French style conversion of nuclear waste material which is especially abundant in one of the world’s greatest repositories from the Cold War - North Dakota. These new technologies all offer opportunities for quality jobs that don’t require Man Camps and mayhem on the highways.

Something has to be done with the nuclear stuff, and French scientists and engineers have shown us how to do it over the past thirty years. But North Dakota elected officials need the support of the the old lignite energy to support their political careers. That is more important to them than supporting better, cleaner economic development. The age old politics of despising the French in this country trumps the science of people who gave us the process for pasteurizing milk, and forestalls a local industry which could provide higher incomes for North Dakota citizens than is paid to them by foreign corporations who develop lignite here.

Shortsightedness is a hallmark of smug and well-heeled Republicans in North Dakota, but Republicans in another coal State, Kentucky, are not quite so dim. Yet it makes little sense to transport dangerous material from Minot to Paducah, KY, where Mitch McConnell and others have set up a nuclear waste facility. Why create jobs there for the leader of Republicans in the Senate who is doing everything he can to deny job opportunities for Americans all over the rest of the country?

Lignite can no longer create an economic boom in North Dakota. It can only continue to blow out pollutants and carbon, and burden the nation with repair costs of the environmental harm Lignite causes.

Instead, we can produce more high paying jobs in Minot, and greater revenues for the State of North Dakota, by keeping the Air Force Base open and develop a nuclear waste and recycling plant adjacent to the facility up there. A policy of protecting dirty lignite cannot compete with the velocity of money and dramatic increase in quality employment in the Minot community by converting nuclear “swords” into “plowshares” of electricity for the Bakken, and much else besides.

The lesson of the Japan accident is this: there were 800 tons of nuclear material at the site, and 400 tons of it was nuclear waste! The United States has duplicated the model of Japan by storing nuclear waste at its plant sites rather than following the French model of recycling this waste and getting rid of its toxic, dangerous junk heap. The present U.S. policy of hoping the waste will go away by itself only serves to wait to be exploded by a natural disaster, or the failure of old equipment.

Meanwhile, the lure of the Bakken Fossil Toad masquerading as a Fairy Job Princess continues.

A friend of mine encountered one of these job seekers from a city in the Florida panhandle at the bus terminal in East Bismarck on cold, blustery Sunday in November.

My friend is a warm hearted person, like 99% of North Dakotans when their minds focus on human beings rather than politics. She has a farm near Williston, and a home in Bismarck, and is constantly torn between which place she loves the most.

She was headed to the bus terminal to get a ticket for a friend from Minot. It was closed, except for the entryway, where she found the man huddled there. He reminded her of so many forlorn figures she has noticed in Williston over the past two years.

He said he was supposed to meet four friends who were headed for a place called “Willis…..” - he didn’t know for sure. His bus from Florida had been four hours late, and his friends were nowhere to be seen, so he was just waiting around until Monday - no food, no money, just a voucher of some kind from a private charity to get him up to the Bakken.

North Dakota Job Services, of course, has many people who would help if they were given the resources and a mandate from the Governor and the Legislature to do so, but there is only silence from the Republican land of anti-government dogma, and anyone in North Dakota, caught in the switches of joblessness, must depend on the kindness of strangers and over burdened private agencies like the Salvation Army.

My friend told the man that his destination was “Williston,” bought him $40. worth of groceries, and gave him $20. in cash, and then wished him “Good Luck.”

He’ll need it.

What the gentleman from Florida fails to understand, but will learn all too quickly, is that North Dakota winters freeze the butts off fairy princesses as well as fossil toads, and that that is only half of the bad news.

The worst news is that he will get little or no help from State Government when he runs into trouble on the Bakken. The 1% of North Dakotans who run this place, men like Governor Jack Dalrymple, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem, House Majority Leader Al Carlson, and Senate Majority Leader Rich Wardner, and women like House member Betty Grande, have hearts that are much, much colder than North Dakota winters.

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