Thoughtful Patriotic Americans Do Not Support Crony Corporate Fracking

Thoughtful Patriotic Americans Do Not Support Crony Corporate Fracking

We are well into summer 2013, and in the West temperatures are high, wildfires are raging, and droughts are in effect in many states. Mora County, NM bans fracking, June 2013.

One state that has been hit particularly hard is New Mexico.  Nearly 90 percent of the state is experiencing extreme to exceptional drought conditions, and the Rio Grande is now often referred to as the “Rio Sand.”  This is why a recent headline in the Albuquerque Journal titled “NM Farmers Selling Water to Oil and Gas Developers” makes absolutely no sense.  In fact, it reflects the sheer folly and arrogance of humankind.

The paper reported that some farmers in New Mexico, who have been impacted by the drought, have been selling water to the oil and gas industry for fracking (hydraulic fracturing refers to the process by which fluid is injected into wells under high pressure to create cracks and fissures in rock formations that improve the production of these wells).  Some are even pumping precious water from aquifers to sell to frackers.

A New Mexican water official said “The oil and gas industry is requiring a lot of water and our concern is the effect it’s having on our aquifer,” he added. “We are concerned about losing water that can’t be recovered. Hopefully, we will get through this drought and everyone will be intact.”

On top of the insanity of desperate farmers selling water for fracking is the number of people still moving to arid places, and the impact on the environment.  A recent article in the Los Angeles Times – “New Mexico is the Driest of the Dry” – noted that “As Western cities continue their march into wildlands, the growing desert and the sprawling suburbs are on a collision course.”  At least in New Mexico the population is barely growing, but there is the ever constant push for more and more unsustainable development.

Facts on Fracking and Water

The Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research and policy organization, reported in its 2012 study Hydraulic Fracturing and Water Resources: Separating the Frack from the Fiction that “The United States Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) reports that fracturing shale gas wells requires between 2.3 million and 3.8 million gallons of water per well.  An additional 40,000 – 1,000,000 gallons is required to drill the well.”  The authors also found that “New data, however, suggest that the water requirements for fracking shale gas wells might be both much larger and more variable than is reported by the U.S. EPA.”

Lastly, the Pacific Institute study also noted that “Water for hydraulic fracturing is typically withdrawn from one location or watershed over several days. Additionally, in some cases, the water is taken from “remote, often environmentally sensitive headwater areas”, where even small withdrawals can have a significant impact on the flow regime.”

Business as Usual or a Move to Clean Energy?

The farmers mustn’t be faulted for trying to survive in a tough business and climate conditions.  Those who can and should be faulted are those pushing business as usual.  The evidence that society must get off fossil fuels is too great to be ignored.   The oil and gas industry are certainly guilty, as are their lobbyists and political supporters, and of course, climate change deniers.

But consumers who continue to ignore the call to invest in clean energy play a huge role too.  When enough people demand sustainable energy options and are willing to pay the price for dirty fuel (such as a carbon or gas tax), more decision-makers will listen.

The fracking companies will take what they want and leave.  Business as usual is too high of a price to pay.  We won’t get off natural gas and other fossil fuels until we prioritize and invest in clean energy.  Additionally, arid regions will need to stabilize population growth and end sprawl. 

Joe Romm of Climate Progress stated it well when he wrote “You’d think state officials would see the value for farmers and residents in sustainable consumption given where the climate is headed.”  This applies to communities not just in New Mexico, but everywhere.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License


Suzanne York is Senior Writer with the Institute for Population Studies, where she writes the blog 6degreesofpopulation.org. She is a contributing author to Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples' Resistance to Globalization (Sierra Club Books).

Fracking is all about a hand full of already very wealthy people getting even wealthier. As usual they warp their message in free enterprise, dire warnings of higher fuel prices ( like they're not going to rise them anyway), the flag and even God. These greedy plutocrats are as shameless as they are greedy.

Wal-Mart Proves They Are Not a Business, They're a Conservative Plantation

Wal-Mart Proves They Are Not a Business, They're a Conservative Plantation

There's a power struggle going on between the D.C. city council and the world's largest retailer, one that Wal-Mart is likely to win.

There's a power struggle going on in Washington right now, not between Republicans and Democrats but between Wal-Mart—which is supposed to open six stores in the District—and the city council, which has a bill pending to require big-box retailers to pay a living wage. As you surely know, Wal-Mart was built on keeping costs as low as possible, particularly labor costs. The model Wal-Mart recruit is someone who has no other employment options and will take whatever they can get. The retail colossus isn't going to let some uppity city council tell it how much it can pay its employees:

    The world's largest retailer delivered an ultimatum to District lawmakers Tuesday, telling them less than 24 hours before a decisive vote that at least three planned Wal-Marts will not open in the city if a super-minimum-wage proposal becomes law.

    A team of Wal-Mart officials and lobbyists, including a high-level executive from the mega-retailer's Arkansas headquarters, walked the halls of the John A. Wilson Building on Tuesday afternoon, delivering the news to D.C. Council members.

    The company's hardball tactics come out of a well-worn playbook that involves successfully using Wal-Mart's leverage in the form of jobs and low-priced goods to fend off legislation and regulation that could cut into its profits and set precedent in other potential markets. In the Wilson Building, elected officials have found their reliable liberal, pro-union political sentiments in conflict with their desire to bring amenities to underserved neighborhoods.

For Wal-Mart, this isn't just about these particular stores. They can make money even if they pay a higher wage at these stores, and with over 10,000 stores around the world, the D.C. locations are a drop in their enormous bucket anyway. It's about their relationship both to the people they employ and to the communities they locate in. It's about power, and as far as they're concerned, power has to reside with Wal-Mart. Their employees do what they're told and get paid what they're told, and if they don't like it they can go find another job. By the same token, the city council gives Wal-Mart what it wants, and if it doesn't they can try to find somebody else to open a store there.
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My guess is that in the end, either the city council will cave or Mayor Vincent Gray will veto the bill (he says he's considering it). Why? Because Wal-Mart can walk away from the D.C. stores without a second thought, while the council desperately wants both the jobs the stores will bring and the ability for their constituents to have a convenient place to shop. One side has virtually nothing to lose, while the other side has a great deal to lose.

Would Wal-Mart make less money if they paid their employees a little more? Not necessarily. There are other models out there, most notably Costco and Trader Joe's, which believe that by giving their employees higher wages and good benefits, they can reduce turnover and provide better service, which lowers costs and increases sales. And it works: they've achieved steady growth and excellent profits by making their employees happy.

The owners of Wal-Mart, the Walton family have a set in cement attitude about who deserves what. They are worth more than 40% of the population that earns at or below median income, that means they are worth about $89 billion dollars. They could easily pay every employee a living wage, but they believe it is their God given right to run a wage slave plantation. The Waltons and their conservative supporters do not care about American values, they care only about wealth and the power that goes with it..

Welcome To Conservative Planet Where The World's Richest 8% Earn Half of All Income

Welcome To Conservative Planet Where The World's Richest 8% Earn Half of All Income

The lead research economist at the World Bank, Branko Milanovic, will be reporting soon, in the journal Global Policy, the first calculation of global income-inequality, and he has found that the top 8% of global earners are drawing 50% of all of this planet's income. He notes: "Global inequality is much greater than inequality within any individual country," because the stark inequality between countries adds to the inequality within any one of them, and because most people live in extremely poor countries, largely the nations within three thousand miles of the Equator, where it's already too hot, even without the global warming that scientists say will heat the world much more from now on.

[  ]...Wealth-inequality is always far higher than income-inequality, and therefore a reasonable estimate of personal wealth throughout the world would probably be somewhere on the order of the wealthiest 1% of people owning roughly half of all personal assets. These individuals might be considered the current aristocracy, insofar as their economic clout is about equal to that of all of the remaining 99% of the world's population.

Milanovich says: "Among the global top 1 per cent, we find the richest 12 per cent of Americans, ... and between 3 and 6 per cent of the richest Britons, Japanese, Germans and French. It is a 'club' that is still overwhelmingly composed of the 'old rich'," who pass on to their children (tax-free in the many countries that have no estate-taxes) the fortunes that they have accumulated, and who help set them up in businesses of their own - often after having sent them first to the most prestigious universities (many in the United States), where those children meet and make friends of others who are similarly situated as themselves.

For example, on 22 April 2004, The New York Times headlined "As Wealthy Fill Top Colleges, Concerns Grow Over Fairness," and reported that 55% of freshman students at the nation's 250 most selective colleges and universities came from parents in the top 25% of this nation's income. Only 12% of students had parents in the bottom 25% of income. Even at an elite public, state, college, the University of Michigan, "more members of this year's freshman class ... have parents making at least $200,000 a year [then America's top 2%] than have parents making less than the national median of about $53,000 [America's bottom 50%].'"

Most of the redistribution that favors more than just the top 1% has occurred in the "developing" countries, such as China. However, a larger proportion of the world's population live in nations of Central and South America, Africa, etc., where today's leading families tend overwhelmingly to be the same as in the previous generation. They, too, near the Equator, are members of the "club," but there are fewer of them.

Milanovic finds that globally, "The top 1 per cent has seen its real income rise by more than 60 per cent over those two decades [1988-2008]," while "the poorest 5 per cent" have received incomes which "have remained the same" - the desperately poor are simply remaining desperately poor. Maybe there's too much heat where they live.

This study, in Global Policy, to be titled "Global Income Inequality in Numbers: In History and Now," reports that economic developments of the past twenty years have caused "the top 1 per cent to pull ahead of the other rich and to reaffirm in fact - and even more so in public perception - its preponderant role as a winner of globalization."

Conservatism preaches that those are the top are there because they earned it, while those at the bottom are lazy moochers. This report verifies what most rational people se as obvious. Conservative economics in action are a form of thief from workers. Conservatism is not about merit and working hard, it is about redistributing wealth upwards to the 1%.

Conservative Republican Dreams Come True, American Workers Live on the New Wage Slave Plantation

Conservative Republican Dreams Come True, American Workers Live on the New Wage Slave Plantation

Imagine you’ve just landed a job with a big-time retailer. Your task is to load and unload boxes from trucks and containers. It’s back-breaking work. You toil 12 to 16 hours a day, often without a lunch break. Sweat drenches your clothes in the 90-degree heat, but you keep going: your kids need their dinner. One day, your supervisor tells you that instead of being paid an hourly wage, you will now get paid for the number of containers you load or unload. This will be great for you, your supervisor says: More money!  But you open your next paycheck to find it shrunken to the point that you are no longer even making minimum wage. You complain to your supervisor, who promptly sends you home without pay for the day. If you pipe up again, you’ll be looking for another job.

Everardo Carrillo says that's just what happened to him and other low-wage employees who worked at a Southern California warehouse run by a Walmart contractor. Carrillo and his fellow workers have launched a multi-class-action lawsuit for massive wage theft (Everardo Carrillo et al. v. Schneider Logistics) in a case that’s finally bringing national attention to an invisible epidemic. (Walmart, despite its claims that it has no responsibility for what its contractors do, has been named a defendant [3].)

What happened to Carrillo happens every day in America. And it could happen to you.

How big is the problem?

Americans like to think that a fair day’s work brings a fair day’s pay. Cheating workers of their wages may seem like a problem of 19th-century sweatshops. But it’s back and taking a terrible toll. We’re talking billions of dollars in wages; millions of workers affected each year. A gigantic heist is being perpetrated against working people: they’re getting screwed on overtime, denied their tips, shortchanged on benefits, defrauded on payroll, and handed paychecks that bounce like rubber balls. A conservative estimate of unpaid overtime alone shows that it costs workers at least $19 billion per year.

The laws protecting workers are grossly inadequate [4], and wage thieves go unpunished. For giant companies like Walmart, Citigroup and UPS, getting fined is just the cost of doing business. You could even say that they're incentivized to cheat because punishment is so unlikely, and when it happens, so light. The protections we used to take for granted, like the right to receive at least the minimum wage, the right to workers’ compensation when hurt on the job, and the right to advocate for better working conditions, are nothing more than a quaint memory for many Americans. Activist Kim Bobo, author of Wage Theft in America,calls it a "national crime wave."

Corporate America does not believe in an honest day's pay for an honest day's work. They believe that workers should shut up and produce so that the corny elite can have more money and even more power. Workers who get uppity and demand the freedom and dignity they deserve are branded Marxists. How ironic that conservative claim to love America and freedom, yet are working to make America less free and less humane.

The Sleazebag Conservative Movement Complains About The Recovery as Corporations Make Record Profits

The Sleazebag Conservative Movement Complains About The Recovery as Corporations Make Record Profits

Too many Americans are unaware of the extreme disparities that have been caused by the unregulated profit incentive of capitalism. Our winner-take-all system is flailing away at once-healthy parts of society, leaving them like withered limbs on a trembling body, even as the relative few who benefit promote the illusion of opportunity and prosperity for all. Concerned citizens armed with facts are not fooled. Instead, the more they learn the angrier they get. And as in revolutions of the past, discontent leads to change.

Hacking Off the Poor Half of Society

Some wealthy and uninformed individuals have referred to the lowest-income 47% of Americans as the "takers," who enjoy government benefits at the expense of the high-earning one percent. But their claim is meaningless. The total amount paid out in 'welfare' (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) is less than the investment income of just three men in a single year.

The monthly TANF income for a family of four is less than what the average member of the Forbes Top 20 made in one second at the office.

The 47% don't own stocks. They don't own anything. The so-called 'takers' have ZERO wealth. The value of any assets owned by nearly half of the country is surpassed by their debt.

Slashing the Security of the Elderly

Recipients of 'entitlements' are accused by the uninformed of getting something for nothing. The opposite is true. According to the Urban Institute, the typical two-earner couple making average wages throughout their lifetimes will receive less in Social Security benefits than they paid in. Same for single males. Almost the same for single females.

Getting something for nothing? Yes, the rich are. Tax expenditures, which are deductions and exemptions that primarily benefit the highest-earning individuals, cost about 8% of the GDP, the same percentage that goes to Social Security and Medicare.

If just one of the tax breaks for the rich, the $113,700 cap on Payroll Tax, were eliminated, Social Security would be almost entirely funded for the next 75 years.

Slicing Up Justice

In the last few months American citizens, some of them children, have been arrested for:

    Looking for Indian arrowheads on federal land.
    Throwing peanuts on the school bus.
    Lying about a home address to get the kids into a better school.
    Sitting on a milk crate.

Meanwhile, not a single banker was arrested for these actions:

    HSBC Bank laundered money for Mexican drug cartels.
    Goldman Sachs designed and sold mortgage packages that were meant to fail.
    Bank of America and Lehman Brothers hid billions of dollars of bonuses and loans from investors.

Severing the Head from the Global Body

If you could gather together the world's 200 richest individuals, ask each one his or her net worth, get the actual numbers from Forbes, and then add it all up, the total would be more than the total wealth of half the population of the world, 3.5 billion people.

The U.S. is one of the greatest contributors to this shameful disparity. It's no coincidence that we're both the third least taxed developed country and the fourth highest in wealth inequality among all nations. It's also no surprise, with so little revenue going to the general public, that our country is the fourth worst in the overall well-being of its children.

Castrating the Taxman

Corporations have doubled their profits and cut their taxes in half in ten years. The burden of taxes, which Oliver Wendell Holmes called the price of a "civilized society," has been shifted to workers. For every dollar of employee payroll tax paid in the 1950s corporations paid three dollars. Now it's 22 cents.

Globalization has allowed U.S. corporations to stop paying for national defense and infrastructure and all the benefits of the U.S. legal and educational systems. All of the following companies had sizable U.S. revenues, but they claimed losses here while declaring billions of dollars of profits overseas.

    -- Bank of America, with 82% of its revenue in the U.S., declared $7 billion in U.S. losses and $10 billion in foreign profits.
    -- Citigroup, with 42% of its revenue in North America (almost all U.S.), declared a $5 billion U.S. loss and a $28 billion foreign profit.
    -- Pfizer, with 40% of its revenues in the U.S., declared almost $7 billion in U.S. losses to go along with $31 billion in foreign profits.
    -- Abbott Labs, with 42% of its sales in the U.S., declared a $256 million U.S. loss and $12 billion in foreign profits.
    -- Dow Chemical, with 32% of its sales in the U.S., declared a $15 million U.S. loss against foreign profits of over $5 billion.

Conclusions

If there's any way capitalism can work, it has to be regulated. Otherwise greed takes over. Blind greed. The sneering head at the top of the body watches limbs being chopped off, but it doesn't seem to recognize that we're all bleeding to death.

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press).

How can this be. Conservatives keep saying that if we would only lower taxes yet again for these wealthy corporations and millionaires, and cut regulations that protect our air and drinking water, corporate America might make enough money to hire people. When is America going to tell conservatives they're fed up with the anti-American policies wrapped in the flag.

How America's Sleazy Fast Food Industry Screws Over Workers and Capitalism

How America's Fast Food Industry Screws Over Workers and Capitalism

The gulf between CEO pay and staff McWages is shockingly wide: a strike serves this system of super-exploitation right.

Last week, approximately 400 workers in the fast food industry went on a one-day strike protesting the "McWages" that keep them them living at or even below the poverty line. Despite their modest demands – the workers want to be able to exercise their right to form a union without intimidation or harassment and they want to be paid a living wage of $15 per hour – they face an uphill battle to achieve them.Fast food workers take part in a protest at a McDonald's restaurant in Harlem, New York for better wages, 4 April 2013. (Photograph: VIEWpress Corp/Corbis)

One of the catch phrases used by striking workers was "we cannot survive on seven twenty-five," a reference to the insulting $7.25 average hourly wage most fast food workers in New York get paid. This paltry sum, which adds up to less than $300 pre tax for a 40-hour week, would not amount to a living wage anywhere in the country, and doesn't even come close in New York, one of the most expensive of cities in the US to live in. That is the federal minimum wage, however – and it's not hard to imagine that employees would be paid even less than $7.25 an hour if their bosses could get away with it.

One striking worker, Joseph Barrera, who works for TacoBell, told MSNBC's Chris Hayes that when he started working at the chain, at the age of 15, he was paid $7.15 an hour. Six years later, as a supervisor, his pay has increased to $7.25 an hour, a ten cents raise. If you're finding it hard to imagine how Barrera makes it through the month on such meager wages, that's because he can't. He says he often has to skip meals or walk to work because he can't afford the subway fare and he hasn't bought clothes in years. He'd like to be able to get married and start a family, but doing so on his full-time supervisor's salary is impossible.

Treating an employee this badly might be excusable if the company that hired him was struggling for survival, but this is far from the case. Yum Brands Inc, which owns Taco Bell, as well as KFC and Pizza Hut, proudly boasts on its website an EPS growth of 13% in 2012, an increased dividend for shareholders of 18%, and a net income of $1.6bn. Rival fast food companies like McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's are all doing similarly well: according to Business Wire, fast food is one of the fastest growing industries, thanks to a competitive cost advantage.

Yet, the fast food companies are not only unembarrassed about how they exploit their workers, but they actually seem to think they are doing employees like Barrera a favor in providing him with a job that is a step above indentured servitude. This attitude is evident in the various statements made by the companies to the media following the strike. Burger King issued a communique saying that the company has provided "an entry point into the workforce for millions of Americans" and that they "offer compensation and benefits that are consistent with the QSR [quick service restaurant] industry".

McDonald's also waxed lyrical about their commitment to their workers, and said that "employees are paid competitive wages and have access to flexible schedules and quality, affordable benefits." The National Restaurant Association went a step further and seemed to be almost looking for sympathy with their statement that "the industry provides more than 13m jobs, that could be jeopardized if the minimum wage goes up." My personal favorite was this nugget, also from the National Restaurant Association:

    "The industry is one of the best paths to achieving the American Dream."

If the American Dream circa 2013 has morphed into a nightmare of inescapable poverty and struggle, then I guess they have a point. I think, however, most hardworking Americans – and surely, anyone who puts in a grueling 40-plus-hour week at a fast food restaurant counts as a hardworking American? – have higher expectations of the American Dream than the fast food industry has in mind for them. But perhaps the National Restaurant Association was referring to senior executives and those lucky few who end up as CEOs, because for them, the fast food industry is dreamy indeed.

In general, CEOs in the US earn 380 times what their average employee earns. That rather shocking disparity starts to look almost modest, however, when compared with the fast food world. In 2011, the CEO of McDonalds earned over $20m, which means he was paid nearly 1,333 times more than the average crew member or cashier, who earns around $8 an hour or less. Even if those employees were to get their wish of earning $15 an hour, the CEO would still be earning 640 times more than them.

But don't expect McDonald's CEO, or any of the fast food restaurant CEOs, to accept this outrageous pay disparity as a reason to raise their employees wages. The only way workers will ever change their situation is to mobilize and strike. But going on strike when you are not in a union, and are easy to fire and replace, is incredibly risky. Last week, 400 workers took that risk regardless – and as long as the media and the public keep paying attention, it will be difficult for their companies to make them suffer for it.

So far, it's one-nil for the brave 400. Imagine what could happen if all 13 million of their colleagues followed their lead.

Sadhbh Walshe is a film-maker and former staff writer for the CBS drama series The District.

 One can also imagine that Social Security and Medicare funding would be in better shape if more workers earned a living wage. Is this the America we want to live, are these the ideals we want to live up to- creating millions of wage slaves.