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..

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.

Republicans learned Nothing From The 2012 Election, They Continue The War on Women

Republicans learned Nothing From The 2012 Election, They Continue The War on Women

Interstate 5 runs down the middle of California’s San Joaquin Valley for hundreds of miles. On either side are dusty rows of almond, peach and orange trees. In the summer, the ground is tan and dry. Telephone poles measure out the time for passing cars, their sagging power lines scalloping out to a vanishing point on the horizon. Somewhere almost halfway from San Francisco to Los Angeles is a town called Huron.

This is where Carla (not her real name) used to work, shaking almonds from the trees at harvest time for $8 an hour. This is also where she was raped by her foreman. But as a Mexican immigrant with no papers, she was afraid to tell anyone.

It’s a common tale. Some 630,000 of the 3 million migrant farm laborers in the United States are women, and at least 60 percent are undocumented. Most are subject to sexual abuse but fear deportation if they speak up. The reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which expired almost a year and a half ago, would have helped change that. But after being held hostage by House Republicans who wanted fewer protections for women, it died in the 112th Congress. The next class of legislators will have to start from scratch on a new bill. Meanwhile, women are waiting.

A 2010 survey by Irma Morales Waugh of the University of California, Santa Cruz, reported that 80 percent of female farmworkers interviewed had been subject to sexual assault or harassment. A recent Human Rights Watch report found that sexual abuse of female farmworkers is so common that many see it as “an unavoidable condition of agricultural work.” And a mid-1990s study by the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission concluded that among California crop workers, “hundreds, if not thousands, of women had to have sex with supervisors to get or keep jobs and/or put up with a constant barrage of grabbing and touching and propositions for sex.” The female laborers, or campesinas, called one company’s crops the “field of panties,” since so many women had been raped there by their overseers.

The women are stuck, because even though the same labor laws that forbid workplace harassment for legal residents also technically cover undocumented workers, enforcement is spotty and laborers seldom know their rights. Female crop workers make an average of $11,250 a year. “They don’t want to lose their job,” said Amparo Yebra, a senior caseworker at Westside Family Preservation Services Network, a community group in Huron that provides social services to migrant laborers.

The Senate passed a version of VAWA in April that would have expanded escape routes for these women. The bill would have increased the number of special U-visas, which give temporary legal status to undocumented immigrants who are victims of sexual assault or domestic violence, and who are willing to cooperate with an investigation.

* * *

When the foreman drove Carla home for the first time, it was raining. She piled into his truck with other workers. He stopped at a gas station to drop everyone else off, but told Carla he’d give her a lift all the way back to her place. Instead, he took her out into a field and raped her.

There’s so much space out there in the flat fields, sounds don’t travel much. Sometimes there’s a background noise: an unseen bird chirping, or power lines buzzing, or a giant eighteen-wheeler groaning by, mud flaps beating.

Over the next couple of months, he raped her five or six more times, and she became pregnant. She was 22. When she started to show, the women working alongside her asked who the father was, and told her to go to the Westside community group. Carla went because they gave out free food. At Westside, her caseworker Yebra, who knew all about U-visas, called the police and helped Carla through the ensuing investigation, which concluded with the arrest and deportation of her assailant back to Mexico. About eight months later, in 2010, Carla got a temporary work permit.

* * *

In 2012, the number of U-visas issued by the Department of Homeland Security hit its annual 10,000 limit a month before the end of the fiscal year—for the third year in a row. The Senate version of VAWA would have made up to 5,000 rollover visas from previous years available annually to undocumented women. The bill included additional safeguards for immigrants, and new provisions for Native American women and LGBT victims of sexual abuse as well.

But in the version of the bill that passed the House in May, Republicans stripped out the new protections for these three vulnerable groups, slamming them as politically driven. They also scaled back the law’s existing protections for women—for example, removing the chance for immigrants with U-visas to become eligible for permanent residency after their temporary visas expire. The House bill would also have required a stricter standard of proof for asylum, and would have broken with current confidentiality laws to allow the government to interview the abuser about the applicant.

The conservative movement's message is that they're happy for you to be a silent wage slave, but do not expect basic human rights protection just because you pride cheap labor for greedy industrial farms.

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SCOTUS Case on Patenting Human Genes Will Likely inflict "Devastating Harm on the American People"

SCOTUS Case on Patenting Human Genes Will Likely inflict "Devastating Harm on the American People"

(Editor’s Note: Last week, the Supreme Court decided to hear an intellectual property case where it will decide [3] whether human genes can be patented. The case started several years ago when the Public Patent Foundation filed a lawsuit with the ACLU challenging some patents that concerned genes affecting breast cancer and ovarian cancer. Daniel Ravicher is one of the lead attorneys on the case. He was interviewed by Steven Rosenfeld for AlterNet radio.)

Steven Rosenfeld: Daniel, first, congratulations for having the Supreme Court take the case.  Were you surprised?    

Daniel Ravicher: Well, thank you for having me on and thanks for the congratulations. No, we weren’t surprised that the Supreme Court agreed to hear our case because the lower court had come to such an incorrect decision. In fact, the lower court decision was a split decision amongst three judges. That was even further proof that the lower court decision was not correct.

SR: As your brief says the key central question is, ‘Can genes be patented?’ When you get into the brief, you have some really interesting language, where you talk about the laws of nature versus what I would call the products of man. Talk about that distinction.

DR: Well, the Constitution gives Congress the power to grant patents to inventors in order to promote progress. The theory is that if we grant patents to people who come up with an invention that will incentivize people to create these inventions.

It’s always been understood that if you were to grant patents on things that God gave us, the laws of nature, E=mc2, or natural phenomenon, like gold or water, that would be too much power given to the patent holder. They then can use that patent to exclude other people from making or using the covered thing. So there’s a line between that, what God gave us, that cannot be patented and that, what humans make. Now of course, everything a human makes comes from what God gave us, right? Humans don’t create materials out of thin air. They change what’s been given to us.  So there has to be enough of a change from what we were given by God to what we’ve actually created with human ingenuity.

SR: Now in this case, you have a company, a biotech firm that has isolated two genes that are used to identify whether a woman is likely to have breast cancer or ovarian cancer. In your brief, you discuss not only how they’ve sought patents for these but in the application and use of these, they’ve actually prevented other researchers from studying these genes. They’ve prevented women from getting second opinions based on other tests that cannot be developed that are tied to using these genes. Talk about why that is, first of all, a constitutional violation and why it’s just so offensive. 

DR: Let’s remember that these patents were granted by our federal government. Some bureaucrat in the Washington DC area decided that it was smart to give one company the exclusive control over the patented thing and eliminate every other American’s right to do that thing. In this case, the patent holder claims to have been the first entity to realize that if you have certain mutations in a couple of different places along your genetic code in every cell of your body, then you’ve got an increased risk of breast or ovarian cancer.

The vast, vast majority of breast cancer is not genetically caused. It’s through environmental and behavioral decisions of the woman or man. Men can also get breast cancer. But there is a small percentage of people who can get breast cancer because they received genetic mutations from one of their parents. In fact, that type of breast cancer is generally much more aggressive and begins much earlier in life. So this is critical information, and because there’s no exception from patent infringement for fair use, unlike in copyright law and trademark law where we do have exceptions for fair use or the exercise of constitutional rights, there’s no constitutional exception in the patent laws.  Any making or using of the patented thing is infringement.

We represent women, real women, who have a family history of breast and ovarian cancer that led their doctors to tell them that they should have their genes looked at. It’s almost as simple today as having your temperature taken by a thermometer. To do it, you actually have to withdraw blood from the patient, and you just run it through a machine, and the machine prints out the answers for you. It’s not very difficult at all. In the near future, most patients will likely have their entire genome mapped so that they can understand what diseases they’re at risk for.

The patent holder, in this case, wasn’t letting anyone else do that or offer that service, even to poor women who couldn’t afford their test, because they were making super-competitive profits.  They were charging ten times as much, if not more, to do the test than it actually cost to do. They had no sympathies if a woman wasn’t capable of affording it. As you mentioned, they wouldn’t let women even who paid them to take the test, if they wanted to get a second opinion from a different lab, from a different person doing the analysis, the patent holder wouldn’t let them do that. Women had to make very life-altering decisions about prophylactic surgeries, to either undergo or not undergo, based on just this one company’s opinion about their genetic code. We have proof that they had given patients both false negatives and false positives in the past, which is not necessarily because they’re bad guys, it’s just because in all things medical there can be mistakes and errors. That’s why we need second opinions. It’s because of their aggressive use of these patents to impede on women’s rights, that’s why we took the case. 

SR: I’ve read, in some of the business press, like ‘corporate counsel’ columns, that the patent bar was baffled that there would be a civil liberties argument here. Indeed, in your brief, you say that there are First Amendment violations, and I think there’s also Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8.  What are those constitutional infringements?   

DR: The Article 1, Section 8 issue is that granting these patents violates the Constitution in that they don’t promote progress. They actually deter progress by granting a monopoly over a fact of nature to one entity. The First Amendment breaches come in because these patents can be used to impede the speech between doctors and their patients. It also impedes upon thought, because these patents are so broad that if you merely recognize that someone does or does not have an alteration in one of these genes and then correlate that to the risk or lack of risk for early-onset aggressive breast and ovarian cancer, you’ve infringed their patent just by having that thought. So the government is now granting patents, making it illegal to think certain thoughts, to think about science, to think about knowledge, and that impedes upon the First Amendment.

SR: It’s like a prior restraint in a sense? 

DR: The government acts… A lot of people try to say, ‘Well, this is a private company.’ The government is an actor here that is granting… Every Tuesday there are 4,500 things you’re no longer allowed to do, because the patent office granted 4,500 patents every Tuesday. There is insufficient checks and balances to ensure that when they do that, it is justified. They have a financial conflict of interest. The patent office makes 10 times as much money when it grants a patent as opposed to when it denies it. So there are all sorts of problems with our patent system, which have caused it to create real serious negative harms to the public, like in our case.  

SR: I’m wondering how much this case is indicative of larger trends? Whether it’s problems with the patent system itself, as you were just discussing, or since we’re in this ascendant biotech era, how many other applications are out there? I wonder, for example, if you really can distinguish between patenting human genes or Monsanto doing seed stock? I know you’ve been involved in that litigation.

DR: Unfortunately, I hope I’m wrong, but I think this is just the first of many instances where our patent system is going to be causing devastating harm to the American people. Because, to date, most American people don’t realize how the patent system negatively affects them. If they know anything at all, they think patents are rewards for garage inventors. But that’s not at all the case. The patent system is an excuse for corporate welfare, where the government intervenes in free-markets and freedom and gives control to corporations. It’s in some ways, I’ve called it ‘outsourced fascism.’ There’s no adequate control. Our patent office is complete rubber stamp that gives corporate America anything it wants so it can raise prices and reduce availability.

We go and talk about alternative fuels. You know who’s got the most patents on alternative fuels? The oil companies. Why? Because they want to keep those technologies from being developed and brought to the marketplace.

That a corporation would even consider wanting, or the courts consider granting a patent on genes is a result of the decadent, purely profit driven culture of conservative Republican thinking. Money and profits are the only morality. Other considerations are just excess baggage to the conservative concept of values.

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