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TODAY'S HEADLINES:

Another day, another pipeline bites the dust. A district court ordered that the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was fought for years by indigenous activists, must be shut down and emptied of oil by August 5, pending a fresh environmental review.

Meanwhile, Trump passed down one of his most spiteful and pointless immigration orders yet today, ruling that students in the U.S. whose universities were switching to online classes would have to return to their home countries until their schools resumed in-person learning.

And lastly, new data that the New York Times had to sue the government to get shows the horrifying racial inequalities in the coronavirus pandemic, and all the while, states are still struggling to perform adequate testing.

THESE ARE THE STORIES YOU NEED TO KNOW:

Courts Slap Down Dakota, Keystone Pipelines

It’s only Tuesday, and it’s already been a massive week for environmental and indigenous activists fighting the big oil and gas companies trying to skewer their lands with destructive pipelines. On Sunday, two energy giants canceled the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and on Monday, a district court struck a massive blow against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The Dakota victory is huge. Here’s how it went down. A D.C. district court essentially struck down a prior federal permit that allowed the pipeline to continue flowing while the Army Corps of Engineers did an extensive environmental review. The new ruling is that the pipeline has to shut down and drain itself of oil by August 5, following early court decisions that said the government hadn’t done its full due diligence in figuring out how destructive the pipeline would be.

For the indigenous activists who put their bodies on the line for years at Standing Rock, this is a much needed reprieve. The Texas energy company that owns the pipeline said it would file a motion to stay the decision and keep the oil flowing, and potentially appeal the case to a higher court.

But even further up in the courts, activists can’t stop winning. In another huge decision yesterday, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump Administration’s request to go ahead with construction on parts of the Keystone XL pipeline that had been blocked by a federal judge in Montana.

The Keystone pipeline got held up when a Federal judge deemed that the government had violated the endangered species act.

It’s pretty clear that these pipelines wreak havoc on the land they go through. But it’s also clear that oil companies are willing to spill as much blood and oil as they need to to get their payday. But if activists keep winning the battles in court, there may be some way to stop them.

Trump Kicks Out Foreign Students

The Trump administration added yet another ridiculous, destructive immigration policy to it’s long list on Monday. The policy was a subtle one that flew under the radar of a lot of major media coverage, but is going to have a profound effect on thousands of students around the country.

On Monday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that it would no longer honor visas for non-immigrant students whose universities are only offering online classes in the fall semester. ICE says that those students either have to go back to their home country and take online classes, or transfer to a university that offers in-person classes.

For students who have physically moved to a new city or country to study, this is clearly a ridiculous proposition. It’s ICE literally turfing students out of their homes and saying that because their classes are online, they have no reason to be in the country.

If students don’t comply, ICE’s announcement threatened to start deportation proceedings.

This is obviously going to cause havoc on universities, particularly research institutions with a large number of foreign students who contribute to laboratories that have already been disrupted by the coronavirus. It also serves no practical purpose: kicking out students who have already been here isn’t going to make our already-out-of-control domestic pandemic any better.

It’s just pure vindictive spite from the Trump administration, on a level that we should expect by now but that isn’t any easier to swallow.

NYT Sues CDC for Corona Data

We’ve known for some time that the coronavirus pandemic was hitting some communities harder than others, but for months, the largest and most important source of data was absent.

The CDC was being tight lipped about their data -- so quiet, in fact, that it took a lawsuit for them to cough it up. The New York Times sued the CDC for a full accounting of the pandemic, and the data they got back shows that Black and Latino people have been disproportionately ravaged by the disease, despite their location in the country or age groups.

In other words, it’s not about urban versus rural: the disease is hitting communities that are already underserved by health care systems, impoverished, or otherwise isolated from the care and resources they need. In America’s racist system, those communities are black and brown.

According to the Times, federal data showed that Black and Latino americans are three times as likely to get the disease as white people.

All of this comes as testing remains a struggle in many metropolitan areas. The fresh wave of cases across the country has left even increased testing resources stretched thin, and it doesn’t show any signs of letting up.

Texas topped 200,000 cases, just 17 days after topping 100,000 cases. Many other places in the country don’t look much better. Unless we get realistic about who’s being hurt by this disease and what we have to do to help them, the country is resigning itself to thousands upon thousands more deaths.

AND NOW FOR SOME QUICKER QUICKIES:

New data shows that while most of the government’s small business loans went to restaurants and car dealerships, President Trump’s personal lawyer and multiple high-profile lobbying firms also all took a cut of the federal pie.

The Supreme Court ruled that states can abolish faithless electors, or electoral college voters who decide not to cast their ballots for the candidate their state selects. A better system would be abolishing the whole electoral college, but sure, we’re getting there.

Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, declared a second, six-week lockdown on Tuesday, citing “unsustainably high numbers of new cases” of coronavirus. The city had previously started to reopen, only to see cases start to skyrocket again. And their outbreak was nowhere near as bad as the one here, for the record.

Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro is once again displaying symptoms of coronavirus, and was tested for the disease on Monday. He’s presided over one of the worst outbreaks anywhere in the world (outside of the U.S.), and multiple members of his inner circle have already had the disease. His administration said they should have the results back on Tuesday, so we’ll see how they decide to play it from here.

That’s it for the Majority Report’s AM Quickie today. Sam’s out on vacation, but the Majority Report team will have more live-to-tape content lined up later this afternoon.

July 7, 2020 - AM Quickie

HOSTS - Sam Seder & Lucie Steiner

WRITER - Jack Crosbie

PRODUCER - Dorsey Shaw

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER - Brendan Finn