Kochs Move To Acquire Ownership In Time/Life, Which On The Political Spectrum Was Previously. . . (Let Me Tell You) - Our Media, Never In a Good Place, Shifts Toward. . ??

Before we get to the "Time Goes Bye" part of this article (Koch Brothers stalking ownership of the once mighty Time Magazine), let's speak of "times gone by." 

I want to tell you a story that involves looking way back.

At the time of which I am speaking I was quite certainly in college, although when I think back remembering it feels almost as if I was still in high school, that I was so recently out of.  Since I was listening to WBAI on the radio, I had to have been in college and that means the year was probably 1970 or 1971.

On WBAI I heard a truly startling and appalling story about recent events in the Vietnam War.  I was sure it was going to be big news and probably would have a big influence on a lot of people when they too learned about it.  I wanted to see how else it would be reported, and I waited with eagerness for my weekly Time Magazine to come out and see how the story was featured.  When Time came out I scoured the week’s Vietnam War coverage and the event wasn’t there at all, not even a hint.  I was fit to be tied.

Once upon a time I had supported the Vietnam War, in high school seeing it in the basic good guy/bad guy terms in which my father had explained it to me: We were helping good guys against bad guys.  By the time of the story I am telling, I had shifted over in my thinking to oppose the war, having been chagrined to learn that by that time I did shift I was only just catching up with father’s own changed thinking to oppose the war.  Somehow, father and son, we had neglected to have that updating conversation before I told my father how increasingly troubled I was by the way I could not reconcile and sort through to believe that there were any truly good reasons for fighting a bad war.

My father, who voted for Lyndon Johnson instead of Barry Goldwater, was a Republican.  He was firmly against the war before he died at the end of 1968.  In addition, although I knew there were reasons my father had disliked Robert Kennedy based on my father's own early personal, youthful encounters with Kennedy (my father was from a similar Irish Catholic family that had contacts with the Kennedys), my father supported Robert Kennedy and his campaign for the White House that terminated with his assassination.  My father liked Kennedy’s stance on race relations (about which my father was growing increasingly passionate) and on the war.

Unfortunately, my memory is dim so I cannot tell you exactly what incident happened in Vietnam that went unreported by Time, but I was outraged and I was going to do something about it.  I called the Editor In Chief of Time Magazine to complain.

You might think this was absurdly presumptuous of me to do, and how could I possibly get through to someone of his stature.  I did get through, and I was encouraged to make the phone call by my mother.  My uncle, Ralph Delahaye Paine, Jr., had been an important man at Time/Life.  Among other things he had been Managing Editor and Publisher of Fortune Magazine, part of that Time/Life/Fortune triumvirate.  Part of our family lore (and there were many stories about my uncle) was how my uncle had been in charge of the Time/Life staff as they retreated back as the Nazis advanced through Europe and France and my uncle remembered vividly how vital it was for him to get everyone successfully out ahead of time.  Many of that Time/Life staff he sought to get out safely were Jewish.

The editor of Time Magazine took my call.  I am named after my uncle.  (And to be 100% complete, my daughter, born days after my uncle died in 1991, is now also.)  I played the relationship card, mentioning names, when I made my call as my mother encouraged me to do.  The editor’s secretary took my information and the editor picked up.  I am not going back at this time to check on that editor's name.  As I am telling a story after a long intervening time where my memory has some fogginess, it is probably better to leave names out.

What I remember was that the editor graciously took my call.  He probably enjoyed talking with me as an unusual break in his day.  I remember that he was more than polite, but I think I detected some bemusement on his part respecting my naive passion as he explained that there is lots of news to print and editorial decisions to be made and that not everything can always be printed.  It just doesn’t happen that way.  I was too young to have heard many of these kinds of explanations in my life and, no doubt I was out of my league knowing little about how best to express things in this kind of situation.  Some young people are savants and have natural instincts about these things at a very young age: Not me.

I don’t think my energy on the subject carried me over to write an official “letter to the editor” in hopes that it might get published.  I couldn’t have whipped one out at that point in my life and I certainly didn’t yet know the formula for quickly commanding attention, or tricks to succinctly synthesize the politically complicated.  My unwritten letter with respect to something that Time had not deigned to mention in the first place would not have been published, I’m sure.

I tell this story mostly to emphasize that, back in the day, Time Magazine and the Time/Life publishing empire were not exactly found on the left of the political spectrum in terms of the way they saw the world or what they chose to report.  I also tell the story to bring up and emphasize that where you get your news can powerfully affect your point of view because of what is and is not included.

After a few more years of reading both Time and Newsweek cover to cover every week (they were both weeklies for those who have forgotten or were not around), I finally terminated my subscription to Time because I found it so much more conservative than Newsweek when reporting on the same items.  Part of me felt a bit like a traitor.

And it also seemed as if I was acting against my own self interest: I owned a tiny amount of Time Incorporated stock that had been given to me as a baby present.  Escalating in value in those past decades, it was, in fact, my sole success with stock ownership.  My father had coached me in learning the benefits of investing in the stock market by encouraging me to buy Studebaker stock with some of my saved allowance combined with his contributed subsidy.  The purchase was not a good idea: Studebaker was an American automobile manufacturing company and in 1963 they closed the plant in South Bend, Indiana where they were based.  I learned then that what happens to stock when companies fail to thrive is not pretty.

Nowadays, what is happening to the stock of ever less profitable legacy news organizations like Time is not pretty, except that the stock of Time Magazine after a period of decline has reportedly just jumped up 25% percent because the Koch bothers, Charles and David, are circling around to engineer a takeover of the ownership.

This is yet more frightening news about the ownership of our news sources.  We are seeing that as income and wealth inequality become ever more pronounced, as the finances of news organizations grow increasingly anemic (reducing their relative price to that of play things), and as the government fails to enforce anti-monopoly laws and regulations, the sources of much of our news is increasingly supplied by just a few disproportionately wealthy men (or their corporate extensions) that hold some very peculiar ideas.  Those ideas include bizarre thoughts about how everyone else should sacrifice so that they can become wealthier, how we should continue to destroy the planet with exhumation and burning of fossil furls, and the glories of spending on weapons and waging wars.

But, to go back a bit, this is just the half of it, because however much worse it can be to have “news” provided by the likes of the Koch brothers, what I indicated at the outset with my story about Time Magazine and its previous conservative non-reporting about the Vietnam War, doesn’t do justice in giving you a true flavor for how biased-by-omission so much news media reporting has been in this country over the years.

Last week, Edward S. Herman died on November 11, 2017 at the age of 92.  Among other things, Mr. Herman was coauthor with Noam Chomsky of “Manufacturing Consent.” Some say he was the principal author.  That important and influential book was about how media cooperates with the powerful so that the electorate capitulates to what those in power want.  That consent manufacture includes a lot of non-reporting (and skewed reporting) of events that happen in our world.  In this vein, The New York Times virtually didn’t report Mr. Herman’s death.

The disregard was mutual. . .

. . . We understand that Mr. Herman’s last published work was about the New York Times.  It was about the Times' omissions and some very unreliable reporting on the part of the Times over multiple decades, a complete disaster if for those endeavoring to formulate their world view. His article ran in the July/August 2017 edition of Monthly Review: Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies- The New York Times, 1917-2017.  The article covers a lot of ground.  And, (to get around, in a sense, to where we began) it includes a section about misleading reporting about the Vietnam War by the Times, with criticisms you might not have thought of until you hear Mr. Herman express them eloquently with many others.

I suggest you read it next.  Consider your read of Mr. Herman's last solemn article as a commemorative mediation on things missing: the lost, the departing, and things lost when they were never included in the first place.

Big Changes!: And The More Things Change, The More They Are Changing In the WRONG Direction- GLOBAL WARMING and INCREASING WEALTH INEQUALITY

The news didn’t wait to come out on the day of Mr. Trump’s inauguration (if that’s what you were expecting): Last year we got the news on January 20th.  This year we got the news today. . . .

Last year, on January 20th, we learned that 2015 had set the record for the world’s warmest year ever, eclipsing 2014, which, in turn, had been the world’s warmest year ever.

This year we learned today: 2016 is the world’s warmest year ever.  That makes it three years in succession that the temperature has set escalating records.

When this was announced last year, we were told that the odds were starkly against the phenomenon of "two back-to-back record years," that they were only 1 out of 1,500 unless. . .  climate change with the ever present prospect of continually increasing temperatures is undeniably here. -

. . . so what are the odds of THREE successive years of annual increase?  What’s worse is that the New York Times reports that record-setting figures of 2016 were “trouncing” those set a year earlier.

Last year, National Notice looked at this frightful record setting with respect to our climate and connected it to another dismal trend in setting records: News had come out that world wealth inequality had increased to the point that just 62 of the world’s richest were as wealthy as as half of world's population.  See: Hot News Connection: 62 Billionaires Now Own More Than Half The Planet's Population And 2015 Far Outpaced 2014 as Planet's Hottest Ever Year (January 23, 2016).

Well, this week similarly brought news that last year’s record of wealth inequality has been trounced by this year’s record as well.  Now just eight individuals have as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population:  World's 8 Richest Have as Much Wealth as Bottom Half, Oxfam Says, by Gerry Mullany, January 16, 2017

Eight individuals (including Michael Bloomberg, who was hardly even on the map of wealth before becoming NYC mayor)?. .

. . .  Only six years ago in 2010 this power of holding as much wealth as half the world's population was dispersed among 388 multi-billionaires.

Are these racing increases in wealth inequality related to the fast racing increases in climate change?  Yes, they are.  That was exactly what I wrote and explained when I wrote last year in National Notice about those records being broken.. . .  Consider this just an update about how increasingly out of hand the situation is getting.

BTW: In a related vein, if you want to read about how one of the world’s most bizarrely wealthy man is buying a central destination library from the New York Public Library, which will be snuffing out its major science library just when what we need to know about climate change is vanishing from the libraries, there is a Noticing New York article you should read.

Hot News Connection: 62 Billionaires Now Own More Than Half The Planet’s Population And 2015 Far Outpaced 2014 as Planet’s Hottest Ever Year

Headlines and accompanying graphs that document significant progressions of some unwelcome change- Are hey related

This week brings two jaw-dropping headlines accompanied by graphs that document significant progressions of some unwelcome change.  With the news of each, arriving together, one must wonder about the possible relationships between the two. .

The Guardian reports that, according to a new report by Oxfam, our accelerating inequality means that the richest 62 people in the world are now as wealthy as half of world's population.  What's more, 1% of people on the world own more wealth than other 99% of the population combined.  See: Richest 62 people as wealthy as half of world's population, says Oxfam- Charity says only higher wages, crackdown on tax dodging and higher investment in public services can stop divide widening, by Larry Elliott, 18 January 18, 2016.

More than half the world's wealth held by just 1% and just 62 people owning as much as half the world's population?  If you believe that we live in a world where money is power and probably increasingly so, then an exceedingly small set of individuals hold an awful lot of power.  As for how fast this situation is getting worse, the Oxfam report tells us that only five years ago in 2010 this power of holding as much wealth as half the world's population was dispersed among 388 multi-billionaires.

On this side of the Atlantic the New York Times has just reported that 2015 was earth's warmest year by the widest margin on record; outstripping 2014, the previous record setter.  This means we have "two back-to-back record years," the odds against which are 1 out of 1,500 unless. . .  Yes, worsening climate change with the prospect of annually increasing temperatures is undeniably here.  See: 2015 Far Eclipsed 2014 As Wordls Hottest Year, Climate Scientists Say / 2015 Was Hottest Year in Historical Record, Scientists Say, by Justin Gillis January 20, 2016.

Climate change is definitely here.  It is phenomenally destructive to our planet and yet the world is doing very little about it.  Why?

The Oxfam report on the increasing concentration of wealth tells us a little bit about climate change:

. .  while the poorest people live in areas most vulnerable to climate change, the poorest half of the global population are responsible for only around 10 percent of total global emissions. Meanwhile, the average carbon footprint of the richest 1 percent of people globally could be as much as 175 times higher than that of the poorest 10 percent.

Another Oxfam report cited in a footnote to the above amplifies that, "The richest 10% of people produce half of Earth’s climate-harming fossil-fuel emissions,"  See:  World's richest 10% produce half of global carbon emissions, says Oxfam,  the Guardian, December 2, 2015.

Probably more important than the correlation between wealth accompanied by disproportionate consumption, and therefore much larger carbon footprints, is that the poorest in the world are the most vulnerable to the costs of climate change.  That's exceedingly relevant because, if money is power, then those worst affected by climate change are those least powerful to compel civilization to adjust and chart a better course.

It is clear that large carbon footprints and excessive consumption can be laid at the doorstep of the wealthiest, even citing the those amongst the tippy-top 1% with alarmingly cavalier consumption.  A recent hard-to-believe report, "Elite Emissions: How the Homes of the Wealthiest New Yorkers Help Drive Climate Change” by the Climate Works for All coalition concluded that with NYC buildings being responsible for "70% of New York City’s emissions" that generate the "greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming . . a mere two percent of the city’s one million buildings use 45% of all of the city’s energy."  See: New York Post- Rich New Yorkers' homes are ruining our air, by Hana R. Alberts, November 20, 2015.

Using the Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list to investigate The Elite Emissions report was able to present a list of  buildings with their high energy consumption figures.  It includes buildings with the homes of those ranking among the top 62 wealthiest people in the world, among them: The apartment building housing the home of David H. Koch (740 Park Avenue- the building made infamous by a book and an Alex Gibney documentary about it,) Alice Walton (515 Park Avenue in a a $25 million apartment), and Donald Trump (721 5th Avenue- "Trump Tower").  David Koch, along with is equally wealthy brother Charles, are, in whatever order you want, the sixth and seventh wealthiest multi-billionaires in the world.  Alice Walton is the eleventh.  Christy Walton and Jim Walton are higher up the list than Alice, right after the Kochs.  Climate science denying Donald Trump, with only an estimated $4.5 billion to his name, is way down the list of the world's wealthy at #405 with only a fraction of their wealth.

Of much more concern than whatever may be the aggregate personal carbon emissions are of these particular, exceedingly wealthy individuals, is the effect these individuals have on what systemically contributes to and establishes the societal infrastructure for climate change throughout the world.

An article in the New York Times wrote about how the richest multi-billionaires are now so wealthy that they are forming their own political parties: How Billionaire Oligarchs Are Becoming Their Own Political Parties,
by Jim Rutenberg, October 17, 2014.  Certainly, many already perceive the Tea Party, in view of its funding, as being essentially the party of Koch.

Of course, there is very visibly also Trump.  And, now, apparently, goaded or "galled by" the success of the relatively small-change Trump in this election cycle, Michael Bloomberg (multi-billionaire #14 on the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest) has disclosed renewed ambitions to run for Unite States President.  Mr. Bloomberg's credentials are environmentally dubious despite a lot of PR to the contrary.  Endorsed fracking he was  then appointed `Climate Change Envoy’ by the United Nations.  Bloomberg is looking to run as an independent candidate declaring that he would spend "at least $1 billion" of his estimated $35.5 billion fortune to run.  Mr. Bloomberg reportedly doesn't like the Wall Street-critical Sanders and 'laments' what he considers Hillary Clinton’s "lurch to the left" to keep pace with Sanders. See: Bloomberg, Sensing an Opening, Revisits a Potential White House Run, by Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, January 23, 2016.

Trump, Koch and most particularly Bloomberg present examples of the cycle of how money and power reinforce each other.  Some may regard Bloomberg's $1 billion proposed to be spent on his campaign, or the cash similarly splashed around Trump as expenditures.  Others may view it as an investment that will more that repay itself no matter who is elected.  When Bloomberg declared his interest in politics to launch his career he was not exceptionally wealthy, but when he completed his third term as mayor he was, having for a time become the richest man in the city.  In the process he far outpaced the wealth increase of most others on Forbes list.

From Noticing New York: Two charts overlaid, showing how Bloomberg's increasing annual wealth makes the increasing annual average wealth of the rest of the "Forbes 400" look virtually flat by comparison

   
The question is what these multi-billionaires do with the huge influence they wield. In theory climate change will adversely affect everybody.  Indeed, we have heard some billionaires tell us they are mobilizing efforts to do what they think should be done to curtail climate change.  See: Bill Gates forms billionaires' super league against climate change- With the COP21 conference starting today in Paris, wealthy investors including Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Mark Zuckerberg team up to give governments a helping hand, by Adam Gale Monday, 30 November 2015 and Top 10 Billionaires Saving the Planet, by Sarah Backhouse, August 21, 2015.

That doesn't necessarily mean that one should agree with the solutions the multi-billionaires promote, or trust their motivations.  One reason to be skeptical about the solutions that get fielded when multi-billionaires mobilize is if you believe that, as we grapple with climate change, there won't be one "silver bullet" top-down solution.  Instead there will be a "mosaic of solutions" generated myriad fashion mostly from the bottom up. What's more Jane Jacobs ("The Economy of Cities") suggested that one upside to large populations is the multiplication of individuals and groups who can innovate to advance society and improve what we do.  If that's a theory you subscribe to, then leaving the half the world's population high and dry of a share of resources with which to participate negates that advantage.

Whatever good some billionaires like Tom Steyer may do with respect to climate battles like Mr. Steyer's opposing the Keystone XL oil pipeline there is all the weight of what is being done to counteract their better efforts.  Steyers is way down the Forbes list of the wealthy (#1190) and not even a multi-billionaire, with only an estimated $1.61 billion to his name.

We find this assessment of the fight between our financial giants at Bill Moyers' Moyers and Company site:

Fred Wertheimer, a long-time advocate of campaign finance reform, tells the Times that a political world where billionaires set the agenda is not a democracy. "This is about as far away as we can get from `representative government,'" he said. And when it comes to politically active billionaires, it would seem that there are more who profit from inaction on climate change than who want to see that action happen - not a good sign for those who agree with Steyer's politics.

See: Bill Moyers- The Billionaires on Both Sides of Climate Change, by John Light, February 19, 2014.

The Koch brothers are the prime example of such "politically active [multi-]billionaires."   With their combined wealth that exceeds that of any individual on the plant they are politically active, spending to fuel climate science denial and inaction about how we are raising the temperature of the earth and they are also fighting public health care (probably it's actually the same thing).

It is not just the first 62 multi-billionaires who are as wealthy as half the world.  What is remarkable is how many more multi-billionaires are up there on the Forbes list in the top sliver of the 1% fraction that holds more than half world's wealth.  You would probably not have to go far down the list before you had collected yet another small set of outrageously wealthy individuals who also collectively own and control more wealth than the poorest half of the world's population. The frightening thing is that many of those multi-billionaires also are either joining the Kochs in stymieing effective measures to address climate change, or they are doing little to prevent it.

For example at #100 on the list we find Stephen A. Schwarzman, head of the Blackstone Group, with an estimated personal wealth of $9.8 billion who lives in the same hugely energy inefficient building as David Koch.  (Great as Schwarzman's wealth is, it is just 8.76% of the combined wealth of the two Koch brothers, and far less than the $121.7 million which is the estimated combined fortune the three Waltons command.) Along with promoting fracking and a list of other objectionable activities, Mr. Schwarzman has been involved in selling off New York City Libraries.  The Oxfam report on escalating income inequality calls for a "three pronged approach" to counter that trend, one prong of which is "higher investment in public services."  Certainly the disinvestment of selling libraries (with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's approval) is the opposite of of such investment and what is otherwise called for if we are to start restoring equality.  The other two prongs called for by the report: are "a crackdown on tax dodging" and "higher investment in public services; and higher wages for the low paid.". .

. . .  As for tax dodging, Mr. Schwarzman has been famously aggressive in promoting what are viewed as dodgy tax loopholes. Mr. Schwarzman may be low on the Forbes list in terms of his wealth, but Forbes has compensatingly ranked him higher on another of its lists:  On the Forbes list of those with power in the world Forbes ranks Schwarzman as number 62.

It seems that Mr. Schwarzman has predilections to tilt the playing field on at least two fronts: Against those who could be trying to catch up and close the gap with him, and secondly, in favor of the tax system advantages that will continue to move him even further ahead.

Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under Clinton, has a new book out, "Saving Capitalism For the Many, Not the Few," that addresses the escalating income inequality we see in the United States.  Median national household income is declining (after adjusting for inflation, an American family earns less in 2013 than it did in 1989) while productivity gains from economic growth collect at the top.  Mr. Reich tells us to remember these recent changes are not because of economics per se, but because of the way that the rules of the market are being written by those with wealth and power, people like Mr. Schwarzman.  . .

. . . Studying the law of property and property ownership in law school and urban planning school I was taught that the rules of property ownership are formulated based, in part, on concepts of what will ultimately benefit society, husband its resources and forestall waste.  The current decimation of our environment while wealth concentrates in the hands of a very few who mostly encourage this devastation or who sit idly by should be viewed as evidence that the rules we have now are not working and need to be rewritten.

Computer Hacker Takes Twisted Advantage of `Get The Rich Out Quick’ Scheme To Fleece Select Gaggle of the World’s Biggest Big-Wigs

"Rescue" helicopters winding up at an island at the bottom of the world?  Priceless. . because there are some things that maybe money just can't buy!

Here’s an astounding story that’s being downplayed and with good reason, given who is embarrassed and what nobody was ever supposed to know about the plans these potentates of power had for themselves . . . plans to that were to launch when/if civilization as we know it was coming to an end.  A computer hacker who had a good dollop of inside knowledge manipulated, leaving only the lightest of fingerprints, to turn a stand-by rescue plan for the world’s wealthiest and most privileged mucky-mucks into their private privilege to be roundly and soundly fleeced.  Over $53.5 billion has disappeared, transferred. . .  Where? . . .  For a while the fleeced tycoons, the hoity–toityest of the ultra-ultra had also themselves disappeared, but now, pretending they never left, they have been creeping back from an unplanned visit to an island at the bottom of the earth, a visit that only slightly resembled the trip they really planned.

What the hacker knew about and took advantage of was a company catering to a need the very wealthiest have evaluated and made contingency plans for that’s far beyond the ken or wherewithal of the rest of us: What happens when the world is coming to an end and society crumbles, civilization as we know it unraveling?  Maybe it’s the particular country or countries that normally serve as your home base where things have headed for terminal kerflooey, or maybe the troubles and political unrest are more infectiously pandemic?  What do you do?  You flee!  But first you need to be notified of the troubles, and you want to be notified before anyone else: No sense being caught up in a traffic jam.  In fact, you don’t want to worry about the kind of traffic that may jam at all, so you are prepared to take to the skies, lifted up the first leg of your journey commencing with a helicopter pickup.

That’s where the premier planning and services of Rapture U.S. come in, an American company that assures its super-elite clientele that it has an inside track on a need-to-know basis from the NSA on everything the privileged will need to know first in order to spirit themselves away to be essentially invulnerable as they decamp to the safety of private sanctuaries in the face of any pending collapse of world or political order.  The services of Rapture U.S. are two-fold: privately providing the informational cue that it is time to leave, and providing the aeronautic wherewithal to lift the financially eminent out of whatever location they are in to locations far away from conflict on privately-owned islands.

The benefits of private islands for the wealthy being written about in the New York Times in February.

Every detail of the escapes was represented to be thoughtfully attended to in advance.  For instance, there was no need to be concerned about emigration and customs matters due to arrangements Rapture, with its connections, put in place in advance.  The islands to which the monarchical magnates will retreat?: The islands together with all the secure structures erected upon them to pamper their arrivals all rise many meters above the significant escalations of sea-level rise predicted to come with severe climate change and a melting of the polar ice caps. Climate change is more than a planned-for possibility to be contingently dealt with through Rapture’s promised assurances, the inevitability of its arrival is described in Rapture’s promotional literature as a driving reason to sign up for its services.  This literature, available on an invitation-only basis, was sent to reporters after the hacking, apparently by the hacker himself.  It reads, in part:

In the relatively near future, climate change is predicted to bring about world-wide shortages of everything from food to inhabitable regions of the earth.  We can confidently predict that front-running the materialization of the very worst of these problems will be war, conflict, extreme political instability and the downfall of governments where the wealthy and their previously recognized privileges will undoubtedly be targeted for elimination. We know even now from our sources at the surveiling NSA that there is much chatter in numerous quarters too organic and diffusely disseminated to expect with a sufficient degree of certainty that biases in this direction will always be successfully squelched year after year into the future.

Through Rapture’s notification, even before the exact nature of the underlying base intelligence is declassified or otherwise revealed, you will be alerted and steered to an appropriate course of action prior to cataclysm-triggering events.   At Rapture’s cue and with Rapture’s help you will have initiated self-preserving sanctuarial action before world leaders have been informed of any set of unfolding imperatives, before they or others may be undertaking any alteration to the status quo potentially disruptive to your essential future options.

In essence, Rapture, with all the systems, procedures and all the pending protocols it put in place loaded the gun, and all the hacker had to do, breaking into its systems, was to pull the trigger and launch the sanctuarial rescue events sequences into operation with only slight modifications.   The helicopters rendezvoused with their pick-ups at designated locations, transported them to private airports with waiting planes and the planes ascended just as planned. This also triggered the "Part II payments" owed to Rapture by these sovereign czars of capital in the event of the rescue program’s activation.  That’s the money that, diverted from Rapture’s own bank account, seems to have gone missing.

Tasmania the island state south of the Australian continent, a day's boat trip from Melborne

Since the “rescues” were always supposed to be conducted with the utmost secrecy and based on information traded out to a few corporate partners including Rapture by the NSA without a compromising disclosure of the parameters of the intelligence gathered, it was days before the traveling barons of the one-percent’s-one-percent or those piloting them fully realized what had happened.  The first clue was that they were not transported to the expected private islands, but, after a longer trip than expected, to the island state of Tasmania part of and south of Australia, in one of the most remote parts of the world.  Transferring from a larger airport on the island's North West Coast with a flight to another nearby private airport, the arriving dignitaries were greeted with what was described as an “orientation” briefing, a lecture about how, after the Europeans arrived eliminating its native Aboriginal inhabitants, Tasmania had been one of Britain’s most notorious penal colonies, known at that time as Van Diemen's Land.  The “orientation” was given by a local historian and tour guide who said he had been hired via email with no knowledge about or reference to Rapture or its operations at all.

The hacking might never have happened at all.  The hacker, considering himself provoked, informed reporters in a transmittal that he conceived it out of a desire for vengeance.  Hitherto the hacker had been working as a reconnaissance photographer in New York City photographing and logging private airplane tail numbers for a financial information company that compiled and translated the data into financial investment advice utilizing the fact that the wealthy and corporate elite are increasingly using corporate and privately owned jets to facilitate private, face-to-face meetings with key deal makers and investors.  Data-collecting via the photography the company ascertained and used the flight plans of companies with corporate jets flying from “money centers” or other key corporate locations to predict such things as pending mergers and acquisitions or stock and bond maneuvers.   (See: Corporate Jets and Private Meetings with Investors.)

From this planespotting website.

In another corporate guise, Rapture U.S., via its sister corporation, Private Skies, Inc., made coordinated and more conventional use of the aviation assets Rapture might one day use.  Rapture and Private Skies, Inc. considered the data collection about its flight paths an infringement. Accordingly, it was a simple matter for them to exercise their influence and connections to have the NYC Department of Transportation eliminate the sidewalk space along the curb of the private airport road where photographers congregated to photograph the planes, thus eliminating the source of the photographers' livelihood.  The hacker, who had been free-lancing to sell his photographs under the assumed name of Justin Chase, apparently had limited other options for work for some reason relating to his use of the assumed name.  That’s when his research and hacking into the systems of  Private Skies, Inc. led the hacker to learn about Rapture U.S. and its operations, in connection with which he extracted his vengeance and, it may be presumed, vanquished any need for future employment.

The story of the get the rich out quick rescue scheme is being denied across the board by various official spokespersons for the world’s wealthy, but the hacker who sent reporters documenting details promised to send more confirming evidence of the Rapture U.S. scheme and the hack that overrode it, together with information that will disclose his actual identity.  The day that information is promised to be provided is today, April 1st.

Lesson Of Election: The Big Money Lost! . . . Or Maybe That's Pretty Far From Perfectly True

Which Times article to believe?  No effect from money or a shift to the right?

People still haven’t got it sorted out: One way you know . . . conflicting headlines in the same edition of the New York Times!  Everybody’s busy proclaiming victory or trying to deny actual defeat.  Fact is, they're both right.

One perfectly good take on this election is that the big money unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision lost.  Upper left hand of its front page the Times today chose to run a story making exactly this point: Little to Show for Cash Flood by Big Donors, by Nicholas Confessore and Jess Bidgood, November 7, 2012.

After what the Times notes was the “most expensive election in American history drew to a close this week with a price tag estimated at more than $6 billion” it comments that “the nation’s megadonors returned home with lighter wallets and few victories.”  Indeed, just as the Times observes, “President Obama will return to the White House in January, and the Democrats have strengthened their lock on the Senate.”

But contrast that with the message conveyed by other articles the Times featured in the same edition.  One picture is worth a thousand words and the message bolstered by Times data graphics proclaimed “most counties shifted toward the Republican side in Tuesdays’s vote, partly reversing large steps to the left in the 2008 election” and “Counties Blue and Red Move to the Right.”   See: Over the Decades, How States Have Shifted, How Obama Won Re-election, Obama Was Not as Strong as in 2008, but Strong Enough.

The Times supplies the above, illustrating a shift to the right, in the form of an animation at their site

And let’s not forget that the House of Representatives, seized by the Republicans in 2010, remained in Republican control.  So Karl Rove’s perspective reported in that first mentioned front page Times article is very important: Without the huge amount of spending by the megadonors, “the race would not have been as close as it was.” *  Among other things the Democrats might have taken back the House.  And this doesn’t even begin to consider what the effect of big money might have been in smaller, more easily bought local elections.

(* Notwithstanding, this philosophical point of view, Rove reportedly melted down on the Fox News set the night of the election unwilling to admit Obama had won Ohio.)

So if there is solace to be taken that the influence of big money can be fought and counteracted, that isn’t to say that its influence isn’t mightily felt.

With big money in play this election was fought very strategically on both sides.  It’s already been mentioned that Republicans “have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections.”  That Republicans have won presidential elections while losing the vote is an indication that money was spent strategically with the most important goal being the winning of the election, not the winning of the hearts and minds of the populace.  But Obama was also willing to play strategically and for a while it was viewed as possible that Obama might have won the all-important electoral college without winning the popular vote.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that with a little campaigning in North Carolina, a state the Obama campaign apparently wrote off due to importance of electoral collage math, Obama probably would have shifted a lot of voters in his favor, adding to his popular vote and electoral collage tallies.

Big money also probably forced the Democrats to play a strategic game concentrating on keeping a balance of power with majority in the Senate rather than devote resources to taking back the House.

How did big money assert itself in this election?  The best analysis will come in time.  Since much of the money invested in political candidates now stays secret, utilizing 501(c)(4) organizations, organizations that are ostensibly formed for charitable and public purposes but these days are abused for political purposes, it may take a long time to figure out whose money was going where, notwithstanding that there are some donors, like Sheldon Adelson, who actually seem to like to attract attention to the money they are giving as well as to whom it's going.

Before we discount the influence of big money too quickly let’s remember that Romney was the Republican candidate because he was the product of the big money.  In the Whac-a-Mole Republican primaries it was the powerful effect of Romney money that was whacking down that long string of anyone-but-Romney alternative candidates.  Speaking of "anybody but Romney," the phrase can be inverted and turned to say that analysts keeping their eye on the money never gave anybody but Romney a chance of being the Republican candidate, consistently and for more than a full year in advance.

The irony is that the other potential candidates taking on Romney were those favored by those in the populace stirred up by the Tea Party.  Consider that the Tea Party, while it masquerades as grass roots, is actually a top-down movement.  It is top-down and well-funded because it is largely the creation of big money.  It served to siphon off and engage a lot of the national anger coming to the surface about privileged elites that would have been channeled more rationally in a direction like the Occupy Wall Street movement.  While most of the establishment's big money wanted Romney, the big money funding the Tea Party couldn’t and didn’t tightly control the free-for-all preferences emerging for for candidates like Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich.

What the donors behind the Tea Party have been buying with their focus on extremism and their picking off of moderates is an intransigent resistance to compromise, leftward movement, and any sort or rational debate and discussion about issues.  Gridlock is acceptable, likely desirable, to them.  Their strategies of creating new out-lying poles of "political" thought parallel the strategies of those spending heavily to create doubt about climate change and to remove from office politicians willing to take steps to deal with it.  This is not surprising because a lot of the money to fund the Tea Party and to fund creation of doubt concerning the scientific conclusions on climate change is actually coming from the same places.

I recently offered a teaser which I will offer here again: This may be the last presidential election where the fossil fuel industry will ever be able to spend this kind of money to buy politicians.  Why?  I’ll have to set that aside and deal with it in a future National Notice article.

Provided that big money is disabled in the future the shift to red that money bought in this election is likely to be counteracted by the changing demographic that favor Democrats in future years.  That's provided that the money, being done with this election, doesn't figure out how to buy new set of voters in the future.

Was big money also spent on the Democratic side of the election?  Of course.  There was some balancing out.  Big money on the Democratic side helped defeat big money of the Republican side, but there was much more of it on the Republican side.  Big money unleashed in politics was exactly what Republican strategists wanted when they pursued the Citizens United case.

There are those who will correctly point out that because there was big money spent on the Democratic side we should expect Obama will inevitably behave with a certain deference to the establishment entities where the money came from as a result.  True, but by virtue of that analysis we can also expect Obama to be less beholden to the Wall Streeters who abandoned him this time around and less beholden to fossil fuel industry that threw so much support to Romney.

Another set of data maps in today's Times showing a shift to red

Did the big money win?  Yes, in part: The House is still Republican.  The Republican’s are proclaiming that the results of the election mean that the people of the United State don’t want higher taxes on the rich.  If that is believed or treated as true that's a win for them.  Also, as mentioned in the last National Notice article, it’s the Republicans in the House of Representatives who won’t even talk about their positions about climate change.

Yes, big money is having a lot of influence.

Could The Environment Be The Main Issue In This Election, Not The Economy And Increasing Disparities In Wealth? It’s Really The same Thing

Mitt Romney during his Republican Convention acceptance speech, biting his lip in sarcastic mockery of the idea that the world should be concerned about climate change

I just put up a National Notice article that said that the central issue of this election and what everyone should absolutely understand is that the most important thing about the economy right now is that our economy bogs down when we focus the nation's policy on squeezing the majority of citizens so that a few at the top can do a lot better than everyone else. (See: Sunday, November 4, 2012, Central Issue In Election And Most Important Thing About The Economy: We Falter Economically When Everyone’s Squeezed To Benefit A Few At The Top.)

But what if that isn’t the most important issue?  Maybe, as superstorm Hurricane Sandy tends to demonstrate amply well, we should all be considering that the environment is really the most important issue in the election, trumping the economy.  If something isn’t done about weather weirding, global warming, climate change, whatever you want to call it, the earth’s demise as we know it may be irreversible before the next presidential election rolls around.



We all remember how in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention Mitt Romney said “President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans. . . .” and then held back for an extended fourteen seconds bemusedly biting his lip while the entire convention hall laughed (see video above).  Romney then proceeded:

     . .  And to heal the planet. [more laughter]

    My promise is to help you and your family.

As if those suffering from disasters like superstorm Sandy or the drought that wiped out much of the corn belt this year would make any such distinction.  Maybe the distinction is that Romney has said that FEMA, the federal agency that comes in and cleans up after disasters precipitated or intensified by climate change, should be discontinued by the federal government so it can be cast down to the state level and privatized.  And Romney wants to totally unleash the fossil fuel industry.

The science on climate change is in.  There are no real scientists on any theoretical “other side” . . . . just a bunch of paid hacks.  Unless we as a country and a species quickly start changing how we do things we may soon be extinct or, at the very least, well on the way to a world that will have little resemblance to the world that has nurtured mankind since the beginning of human existence.

Is it fair for me at this late juncture to say that environmental destruction from climate change trumps the importance of the economy as an issue, along with the increasing disparities in the control of wealth now dragging it down?  No, because they are really the same thing.   

There is only one reason that we are not now addressing the issues of climate change: It's the vast amount of money that is being spent to cause the public to doubt incontrovertible science.   I suggest people take the time to watch Frontline’s recent hour-long documentary, “Climate of Doubt,” that shows exactly how the money is spent to create this doubt and you can meet, on screen, the people that do it.  While you are at it you may also want to watch Frontline’s “Big Sky, Big Money” which is about much the same thing, how money is secretly deployed to buy elections and politicians.  Even if money is paying for political advertisements that are, say for example about a social issue, those paying to finance those ads may be motivated by only an entirely different concern: Whether their corporations can continue to steal from the public.

Here is what I said in a Noticing New York article on the subject (which also said that New York should prepare for storm surges):

Continued burning of fossil fuels persists because it is attractive to the petroleum, gas and coal industry. It is attractive to them because these industries are highly subsidized. They are subsidized overtly with such things as steep tax breaks and, more important, they are subsidized by not having to pay for what they take from the public. The fossil fuel industry doesn’t have to pay for polluting the atmosphere with injected carbon, they don’t have to pay for the cost of higher sea levels, acidification of the oceans, or extreme weather events. They are also insulated, as in the case of the BP oil spill, from full legal liability for the damage done to the environment from spewing oil directly into the ocean.

In essence, the profit of the fossil fuels industry is predicated on what they are able to extract from the public and the public realm without paying for it.

(See: Wednesday, September 29, 2010, Brooklyn Tornadoes and a Cool-Headed Appraisal of Weather Weirding in New York.)

In other words, what’s behind all the money being spent to prevent the country from dealing with climate change is an intentional transfer of our natural environmental wealth from all the rest of us to those few who are wealthy enough to spend such huge amounts of money.  And maybe those big spenders are so wealthy they think they don’t need to care when the world becomes substantially less habitable.

So once again it's the same issue: The wealth that is increasingly aggregating in the hands of a few in this country is not only bad for the economy, it's also contributing to the jeopardy into which our environment has been put.  (This doesn't even get into the discussion about how good for the economy pursuit of alternative energy policy would be.)

Here is a teaser: This may be the last presidential election where the fossil fuel industry will ever be able to spend this kind of money to buy politicians.  Why?  I’ll have to set that aside and deal with it in a future National Notice article.  But it also could just be too late for the planet if the election is decided the wrong way.

Frontline’s “Climate of Doubt” documentary made one thing clear.  While nobody in Congress is willing to act on climate change anymore, there is an important difference between Republicans and Democrats right now when it comes to climate change: Zero Republicans even answer questions about climate change anymore, while Democrats acknowledge the science.  If we can get a few more Democrats in office acknowledging the science is start.

It matters up and down the ticket how people vote tomorrow.

Investors Discover That Fracking Costs Exceed (In The Not-So-Obvious Way) Expected Financial Benefits: What The New York Times Fails To Say

The New York Times Sunday Business section this week ran an article about the trouncing that investors in hydraulic fracturing companies are suffering.  A subhead to the print version of the article calls it a “gut punch to investors.”  It’s happening because the cost of fracking is exceeding the value of what’s being produced.

Fracking Cost Exceeds Benefit

Economists and environmentalists might say: That’s news? . .   We always knew that fracking was so destructive to the public's assets and environment that it wasn’t worth the cost.  But the news the Times story is delivering is different: Fracking investors are losing their shirt because the fracking boom is so much of a boom that it's going bust.  As the Times puts it the gas rush has:

    . . .been a money loser so far for many of the gas exploration companies and their tens of thousands of investors.

    The drillers punched so many holes and extracted so much gas through hydraulic fracturing that they have driven the price of natural gas to near-record lows. And because of the intricate financial deals and leasing arrangements that many of them struck during the boom, they were unable to pull their foot off the accelerator fast enough to avoid a crash in the price of natural gas, which is down more than 60 percent since the summer of 2008.

(See: After the Boom in Natural Gas, by Clifford Krauss and Eric Lipton, October 20, 2012.)

The most interesting thing about the Times article is likely what was left out, the multiple implications it didn’t address.  We’ll get to all that in moment.  First, what the Times did cover.

Fracking Companies Headed Toward Bankruptcies

Although the Times doesn’t use the term it looks like “bankruptcies” are, no doubt, in the future for some of the companies.  That, at least, is what I would glean from information supplied like the following:

    •    Rex W. Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, is quoted in the article saying:  “We are all losing our shirts today,” Mr. Tillerson said. “We’re making no money. It’s all in the red.”

    •    Now the gas companies are committed to spending far more to produce gas than they can earn selling it.

    •    We learn of situations where an  “agreement, negotiated by Goldman Sachs, came with some important strings attached: Exco [Resources] had to keep all 22 rigs drilling for gas, even as the price was dropping.” so that drilling wells continues “even if [Exco] now insisted that it made no economic sense.”

    •    Aubrey K. McClendon, a chief executive of Chesapeake Energy, one of the industry's really big companies is quoted as saying, “At least half and probably two-thirds or three-quarters of our gas drilling is what I would call involuntary.”

Picking on T. Boone Pickens

In this vein, the Times story tells a supporting anecdote about that Exco Resources contract that features Texas oilman, T. Boone Pickens.  I’ve previously quarreled with Mr. Pickens for misrepresenting that lots of fracking has been done before and that what is suddenly massively underway in this country isn’t a brand new technology, the likes of which we haven’t seen before.  In the Times anecdote Mr. Pickens learns that things are shaping up different enough so that he is encountering surprises himself:

    “Quit drilling,” T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oilman, barked to his fellow board members at Exco Resources, . . . .  “Shut her down.”

    * * * *

    There was only one problem: under the contracts that Exco signed, it couldn’t stop drilling.

    * * * *

    Mr. Pickens was furious. “We are stupid to drill these wells,” he said in a recent interview.

In unfolding the anecdote the Times works in that in the late 1980s Mr. Pickens lost his company, Mesa Inc., “when drooping gas prices hurt its ability to repay debts and pay dividends.”

Wall Street Bankers Behaving Badly Again

The article portrays the hammered investors as being the victims of perhaps unscrupulous investment bankers likening the investors’ situation with the “recent credit bubble,” saying:

the boom and bust in gas were driven in large part by tens of billions of dollars in creative financing engineered by investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Barclays* and Jefferies & Company.

(* Barclays is the British bank for which two Brooklyn subway hubs were recently renamed by the city MTA, together with a sports arena that was deeply subsidized by New Yorkers with some help from federal taxpayers as well.)

According to the Times:

After the financial crisis, the natural gas rush was one of the few major profit centers for Wall Street deal makers, who found willing takers among energy companies and foreign financial investors.

Remember how in the aftermath of the financial crisis Goldman Sachs was excoriated for and then avoided prosecution by paying a record $550 million fine to the SEC (many argued it was too low) for playing both sides of the housing mortgage market, promoting housing bonds while at the same time betting that money could be better made from the coming downturn in that market?  The Times has a gas drilling industry-based version of this investment banker story, once again involving Goldman Sachs selling, in conjunction with Jefferies & Company, a debt position in one of these fracking companies while the bankers are at the same time betting on a market decline.

Goldman gets passing mention while the Times focuses in on a Jefferies & Company banker, Ralph Eads III, whom it describes as “a pitch artist” of “unrestrained enthusiasm” and probably a bit of a manipulator as well.  (The Times recounts that Eads was involved with what regulators charged was the creation of “an artificial gas shortage in California” in 2000; Eads’ counter-characterization was that the company he worked for had just come up with “creative financial transactions.”)

Selling a Toxic Product In Which You Don’t Believe

Focusing in on Eads to build its story to a very big extent the Times says that Eads participated in structuring a deal that personally benefitted Eads and his colleagues “far more than the people writing the big checks.”  Giving examples of Eads' hard sell to investors the Times reports he acknowledges their “bluster” but invokes “caveat emptor” (buyer beware) in saying that his investors should be exercising good judgment in deciding whether to invest notwithstanding that a managing director at Oppenheimer & Company describes Mr. Eads as being like a “bartender serving drinks for people who can’t handle it.”

More important, Eads was simultaneously playing the other side:

    Just as in the earlier real estate bubble, the main players publicly predicted success even as, privately, their doubts were growing, court documents show.

    * * * *

    Mr. Eads appears to have fared better. He had seen the coming crash, and, as any master salesman would, found a way to play both sides. He continued to persuade new investors of the great potential in shale while telling his longtime clients to cash out.

    * * * *

    Mr. Eads then helped arrange what will go down as one of the great early paydays of the shale revolution: the 2010 sale of East Resources, which Mr. Pegula had started with $7,500 borrowed from family and friends, to Royal Dutch Shell for $4.7 billion.

But Eads and Jefferies & Company, together with Goldman, were directing investor debt into the troubled Chesapeake Energy.

Bad News Implications Entirely Sidestepped By The Times

The Times article has a lot more information about the apparent targeted swindling of gas industry investors and it is all worth a careful read.  Here are pertinent observations missing from the Times article, not even hinted at in its content:

    1.)  While things are now this bad in terms of the cost equation for the investors, the fracking investment these investors made (and the industry as a whole) were never initially required to internalize all the negative costs to society of hydraulic fracturing.

    2.)  Bankruptcies of these companies are going to make it a problem when society then looks to defunct companies to:

        a.) clean up after themselves,
        b.) maintain wells and equipment in ways that prevents worse damage, and
        c.) pay damages to compensate those suffering from injury (that includes those companies who have been paying to truck in fresh water for people who can no longer drink from their wells.)

    3.)  The companies may still in the future be required to internalize some societal costs they haven't yet been required to internalize.  That would make their situation for investors far worse.

    4.)  Companies that have leveraged themselves by borrowing against assets they theoretically have in the ground will be vulnerable to a bursting bubble on this basis.  (A bigger bust is coming when the industry realizes that eventually it will be barred from extracting most of what the industry currently counts as in-the-ground fossil fuel assets.  The Times article ends with Mr. Eads making statements exactly contrary to this reality: “These shale assets are forever . . .They are going to produce for a hundred years.”)

    5.)  Meanwhile the costs of competing technologies are dropping although the gas glut has interfered with their development to an extent.

Collateral Damage In Other Industries?

If companies in competing industries, for example the solar power industry, were facing that same kind of shakeout while facing an unexpected glut of product, some solar companies going bankrupt and the more efficient ones rising to the top, there wouldn't be so much collateral damage accompanying that shakeout.. .

 . . . Hey, wait a minute: The solar industry is experiencing these kinds of problems at the moment!  My wife has a cousin who works with an electrical company that has been developing solar technology.  Right now they have shelved those research and development efforts.  The reason: The tremendous drop in cost of gas.  Similarly the coal industry, not an industry of the future since it is also fossil fuel, is going through shut-downs.

Those working hard to get out information about the hazards and destruction that fracking entails are, no doubt, going to consider, with some eagerness, promulgating the New York Times Business section story for its cautionary value in discouraging potential investment in fracking.  A reason they might have some reluctance to do that is because the story commences with a long industry-friendly reiteration of the industry narrative that the “gas rush has benefited most Americans.”  That is not true: You can’t claim benefit from fracking when you consider its long-term costs and detriment.  (The last National Notice article summarizing the detriments to take into account was:  Monday, October 15, 2012, Do They Really Think People Just Don’t Know What `Fungibility’ Is?: A Good Question To Ask As The Fracking Industry Tries To Pull Another Fast One.)

Accelerating Crash-Destined Vehicles: A Repeating Story

The Times metaphor about the industry being “unable to pull their foot off the accelerator” to avoid “a crash” (it also alternatively refers to “a train without brakes”) happens to dovetail with what I have said of the industry, that it is engaged in:

a premeditated “hit and run” strategy, looking to do as much as they quickly can while knowing the damage it will inflict, trying to do it before people realize how dangerous and destructive the new technology is, how devastating to the environment and before the lower and lowering cost of alternatives like solar are recognized to have overtaken and relegated the fracking industry to a curious antiquity.

The Times story is evidence that, maybe not so surprisingly, the industry’s bankers enriched themselves with this same quick hit strategy to take advantage of investors.

A Feint and Faint Find of Collateral Damage

Aside from the damage suffered by the investors as a result of such unethical treatment, does the Times acknowledge collateral damage anywhere else?  There are only these two paragraphs at the end of the article and they are insufficient:

    The bust has certainly hit the Haynesville (sic) [A town in Louisiana where Chesapeake Energy was drilling] hard. Some local landowners, having spent their initial lease bonuses, are now deeply in debt. Local restaurants and other businesses are suffering steep losses now that so many drillers have left town.

    “At this point we’re struggling,” said Shelby Spurlock, co-owner of Cafe 171 in the town of Mansfield. The restaurant is decorated with wall collages of drill worker uniforms from companies that are leaving the area. Once open from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. and employing four servers, the restaurant has cut its hours and is down to two servers. “Our very existence is in danger,” she sighed.

Actually, with fracking and global weather change from irresponsible fossil fuel exploitation it's the entire country and the entire world whose very existence is threatened.

Why Are Hearings on High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing (“Fracking”) Held In New York A NATIONAL Issue?

(Above, evening hearing attendees in the 900 seat auditorium)
Last week I presented Noticing New York and National Notice testimony when the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation held a day’s worth of hearings in Manhattan concerning Governor Cuomo's proposal to start allowing High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing, aka “Fracking,” in the state for the first time by lifting the current moratorium under which it is now effectively banned. An account of the hearings, the testimony I provided and amplification for my testimony is available here: Thursday, December 1, 2011, Wednesday’s Department of Environmental Conservation Hearings on High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing (“Fracking”): Noticing New York’s Testimony Plus. .

A shorter article providing, for pith’s sake, just the testimony I delivered that day is available here: Thursday, December 7, 2011, Testimony at Department of Environmental Conservation’s 11/30 Hearings on High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing (“Fracking”): The LONG and the SHORT of It.

(People lined up after me Wednesday morning to get into DEC's first hearing, the afternoon hearing on introducing the new technology of fracking to New York state.)
Why are such hearings held locally in New York a national issue on which National Notice readers would want to focus? Because:

• The brand new technology of fracking, which involves injecting huge quantities of poisonous “hyperslick water” into the earth at enormous pressure in combination with underground explosions, is associated with an enormous amount and a great variety of pollution that travels across multiple state lines, particularly flowing down through river basins and blowing through the air, thereby involving many states, and is likely to pollute, in toto, much of the country’s natural resources.

• By seeking to target a win in the very heart of the opposition, the fracking industry is seeking to hijack New York State’s history as a leader in protecting its environment. As I point out in the longer article linked to above, if the industry can sell its despoliation and overturn environmental protections in New York it can, by “spreadin’ the news,” parlay that into a sales pitch for fracking anywhere else in the country. A sort of “New York, New York” refrain mentality: “If I can frack it there, I'll frack it anywhere, It's up to you, New York, New York.” Conversely, as also discussed in that linked-to article, the industry is attempting to use experiences since 2007 in North Dakota (population 640,000) and New York's neighboring Pennsylvania in order to stage manage a super-hyped sale of fracking in New York.- - In fact, as you can read, what the industry is trying to promote in New York is the idea of “unregulated or lightly regulated fracking” as if any kind of fracking at all isn’t enough to ensure disaster.

• The attempt to get fracking introduced in New York is being pressed by Governor Andrew Cuomo, a man recognized to have presidential ambitions likely viewing this as fulfilling a cherished goal his father, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, fell short of. Andrew Cuomo’s tactics to force the introduction of fracking in New York bespeak some sort of behind-the-scenes political deal which falls in line with an observation that is more and more being offered about Mr. Cuomo: That whatever people may commend him for in terms of his effectiveness, he operates without transparency, and in this case without regard to the true needs of the voters who are properly his elective constituency.

• And then, of course there is the whole giant planet-affecting issue to which all the rest of this is integral: How many years do we have left to forestall pushing beyond a disastrous climate change tipping point?

So you may want to read and find out exactly how matters with respect to those “local” New York hearings are playing out.

(Hazmat suited protester. The first thing many saw approaching the hearing location)