The Other Government Shutdown Now In The Works (One You Are Not Hearing About): A Corporate Replacement Of Government Via The Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty

It sounds like a science fiction vision of a futuristic dystopia, the kind of story whose horrific elements have been slathered on thickly to emphasize the “cautionary tale” a creative writer has dreamed up, one of those, not now, not here, not just yet, but “could be” essays commenting on what might go wrong in the future given the seeds we can observe in today’s society:

A select army of coordinating and elite-trained corporatist operatives, 600 strong, deploy around the world planning to replace government control of corporations with corporate control of governments.   Having found their more nefarious goals stymied by democracy and public debate, the corporations plan a secretive end-run around public process to supplant government with corporate supremacy and, in one fell swoop, enact, unfettered, their long wish list of desires, even at the cost of public health, welfare and the environment.  In the end, even the earth itself may be doomed as a result of this power grab.

The only problem is that this is not science fiction.  It is actually happening.  What I have just described is the move toward passage of something called Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty (“TPP”) and though it may sound like pure paranoia, the fact that political adversaries Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Occupy Wall Street are both among those very concerned about its effects should be a pretty good indication that the nightmare threats are very real.

The TPP gives corporations the right to tell governments to stand down from their functions of protecting the public.  That’s because, in the corporatist view, governments should not be allowed to interfere with the expectations that corporations and their investors have of receiving profits.  It has been described as giving corporations a new “corporate bill of rights” to make profits notwithstanding public detriment.

So, for example, in August New York’s Mayor Bloomberg wrote an Op-Ed published in the New York Times fearful that one result of the TPP’s passage would be that New York City could no longer regulate smoking the way it does because doing so would interfere with the profits the tobacco companies want to make.  The NYC Bloomberg era ban on smoking is considered a signature and, in retrospect, very popular (82% approval) achievement of the mayor’s administration, copied elsewhere around the world.

The TPP’s provisions are actually secret from those who are not among the 600 corporatists working on it, a problem we will get to in a moment.  Mr. Bloomberg, who apparently knew something about what was actually in the TPP about regulating smoking at various times, commented:

The early drafts of the agreement included a “safe harbor” provision protecting nations that have adopted regulations on tobacco — like package warnings and advertising and marketing restrictions — because of “the unique status of tobacco products from a health and regulatory perspective.” This provision would have prevented the tobacco industry from interfering with governments’ sovereign right to protect public health through tobacco control laws. 

(See: Op-Ed Contributor: Why Is Obama Caving on Tobacco? By Michael R. Bloomberg, August 22, 2013.)

Unfortunately, as Mr. Bloomberg was also aware, the tobacco industry successfully lobbied to have the provision removed.  Mr. Bloomberg complained about the agreement's alternative:

weak half-measures at best that will not protect American law — and the laws of other countries — from being usurped by the tobacco industry, which is increasingly using trade and investment agreements to challenge domestic tobacco control measures. 

    . . .  not only will cigarettes be cheaper for the 800 million people in the countries affected by the trade pact, but multinational tobacco corporations will be able to challenge those governments — including America’s — for implementing lifesaving public health policies. This would not only put our tobacco-control regulations in peril, but also create a chilling effect that would prevent further action, which is desperately needed.

There is actually something wrong with this picture of Bloomberg championing protection of the public health: It is Mr. Bloomberg’s very narrow focus about what is wrong with the TPP.  Tobacco is certainly an addictive poison the use of which governments would do well to curtail, but under the TPP it is not just anti-smoking measures, but virtually all public health protections that would be sacrificed or in jeopardy if they conflicted with a desire for corporate profit.

Elsewhere in his Op-Ed Mr. Bloomberg commends that (in his view):

The pact is intended to lower tariffs and other barriers to commerce, a vitally important economic goal.

And later he says:

I could not be more strongly in favor of trade agreements that expand economic opportunity here and around the globe.

In actuality, most of the TPP does not concern itself with these issues of trade.  The current version of the TPP has 29 chapters.  Of these, only five reportedly have to do with trade. The other 24 chapters involve a wide range of grabs by the corporations. Days ago Naked Capitalism commented that the TPP has been mis-branded as a “trade deal”:

The reason the label is misleading is that trade is already substantially liberalized; the real point of the TPP and its cousin, the pending EU-US trade agreement, is to weaken the power of nations to regulate, which will allow multinationals to lead a race to the bottom on product and environmental safety.

(See: Thursday, October 10, 2013, Will China’s Gambit to Undermine the Trans-Pacific Partnership Succeed?)

In this race to the bottom, what else would the TPP override in terms of public protections?  That’s where the problem of secrecy comes in.  Discussion of the treaty’s provisions is very difficult because the provisions under negotiation are being treated as "classified."  The army of 600 corporatist soldiers working on the document may be intimately familiar with the wish list items they are inserting, but the public is not allowed to know anything about them.  A good starter guess though is that anything that has to be secret is not good news for the public.

Said Senator Elizabeth Warren in September:

For big corporations, trade agreement time is like Christmas morning. They can get special gifts they could never pass through Congress out in public. Because it's a trade deal, the negotiations are secret and the big corporations can do their work behind closed doors. We've seen what happens here at home when our trading partners around the world are allowed to ignore workers rights, wages, and environmental rules. From what I hear, Wall Street, pharmaceuticals, telecom, big polluters, and outsourcers are all salivating at the chance to rig the upcoming trade deals in their favor.

Why are trade deals secret?  I've heard people actually say that they have to be secret because if the American people knew what was going on, they would be opposed.  Think about that.  I believe that if people would be opposed to a particular trade agreement, then that trade agreement should not happen.

Congress, which has exclusive authority to approve treaties (in this case both houses), is being asked to “Fast Track” the approval of this treaty  “But until this June, they were not even allowed to see the draft text,” according to Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, who explained that, after 150 members of Congress made a tremendous fuss, the situation now is that:

    . . members of Congress, upon request for the particular chapter, can have a government administration official bring them a chapter. Their staff is thrown out of the room. They can’t take detailed notes. They’re not supposed to talk about what they saw. And they can, without staff to help them figure out what the technical language is, look at a chapter.  This is in contrast to, say, even what the Bush administration did. The last time we had one of these mega-NAFTA expansion attempts was the Free Trade Area of the Americas. And in that instance, in 2001, that whole draft text was released to the public by the U.S. government on the official government websites. So, this is extraordinary secrecy, and members of Congress aren’t supposed to tell anyone what they’ve read. So, for instance, you know, Alan Grayson, who was one of the guys who helped to get the text released, Alan Grayson said, "I can tell you it’s very bad for the future of America. I just can’t tell you why." That’s obscene. 

(See: "A Corporate Trojan Horse": Obama Pushes Secretive TPP Trade Pact, Would Rewrite Swath of U.S. Laws, Democracy Now October 4, 2013.  A full Democracy Now transcript of the video below is available.)


The Obama administration reportedly wants to push through the “Fast Track” authority that would delegate Congressional authority for the treaty review to get it adopted by the end of this year-. . . That’s just months, practically a matter of weeks away, and yet the public knows virtually nothing about what that would mean.  “Fast Track” authority would limit the congressional lawmakers to an up-or-down vote on the TPP.  BTW: The current government shutdown may be a distraction from what is going on but it reportedly isn't slowing down the efforts to bring about this other envisioned shutting down of government functions via the TPP.

What kinds of things are crammed into the TPP?  TPP has been referred to as “son of SOPA” because it contains most of the intellectual property rights restrictions that corporations tried, and ultimately failed, to lobby through as part of “SOPA,” the “Stop Online Piracy Act.”  Remember that fight?  That was when Wikipedia and other internet sites shut down for a day to call attention to that law's proposed Draconian provisions (See: Wikipedia Blackout: 11 Huge Sites Protest SOPA, PIPA On January 18.)

The hotly debated SOPA amounts to 38 pages coming out of my printer.  Think of that as just one of the 25 non-trade related chapters of the TPP!  The money and the corporatists wanted to see that law passed but the public was against it.  Listed on Wikipedia 125 organizations supported the law while 222 opposed it and many others refused to support it: List of organizations with official stances on the SOPA and PIPA.

Here is a list of the corporate end-runs presently understood to be in the TPP that will give you an idea of why the TPP is often referred to as “NAFTA on steroids.”  Note that although there are 25 chapters full of non-trade related provisions, the list below doesn’t approach that number:

    1.    Limitations on food quality and food safety regulation.
    2.    Limitations on regulation of agriculture and forestry practices.
    3.    Limitations on environmental standards, and environmental protections (including provisions whereby corporations expect to be able to avoid having to pay for environmental damage).
    4.    Limitations on the regulation of toxins and poisons.
    5.    Limitations on climate policy measures.
    6.    Limitations on regulating energy markets.
    7.    Establishment of corporate rights to seize natural resources, including for such things as mining.
    8.    Protections for corporations to charge high and unregulated prices for such things as water, gas, energy, transportation and other utilities (unless government provides them to the public entirely without a fee).
    9.    Limitations on regulation of banks and the financial industry, including back doors for those institutions to get around what presently exists.
    10.    Restrictions on taxes such as a ban on the proposed “Robin Hood” tax on speculative Wall Street investments.
    11.    Restricting measures governments undertake to make medication affordable, including limiting generics and affordable medicines.
    12.    Limitations on other consumer health laws like those that deal with cigarettes. (Prevention of gun control regulation Mr. Bloomberg?)
    13.    Restrictions on internet freedoms and intellectual property rights (The “son of SOPA” provisions).
    14.    Effects on labor unions (see discussion below).
    15.    Give corporation new rights to sue governments that try to regulate them and entitle corporations to taxpayer-funded damages for such unpermitted regulation.
    16.    Elevate rights of corporations to a higher level equating them with governments.  It looks as if foreign corporations would thereby wind up empowered with greater rights than U.S. companies in the United States. 
    17.    Turn adjudication and resolution of these corporate rights matters over to new pro-corporate international foreign courts outside of and not bound by the existing legal systems.  The idea is that the those representing corporations seeking to assert their rights would rotate through taking their turn as the adjudicating judges.

Full-fledged world-wide dystopia as was described at the outset?  The twelve countries negotiating to put the TPP into effect (Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam) comprise about 26 percent to 30 percent of world GDP), but that overall reach can be expanded, partly, as Naked Capitalism points out, with the implementation of other parallel treaties.   The exploits of the James Bond super-villains, most of whom all had their own super-corporation empires, once seemed satisfyingly fantastical in scale, but most of them would have picked more sparingly from the above menu in concocting their world-domineering schemes. (In 2008's “Quantum of Solace,” my candidate for the most disappointing of the Bond franchise films, you had a fairly exact match for just one of the schemes above: The villain was a counterfeit environmentalist named “Greene,” whose goal was to monopolistically corner the market for water in Bolivia so as to be able to charge the populace higher prices.)

The above list, generically covering all the bases, manages to be automatically comprehensive about protecting all the worst possible corporate behaviors.  So, for example, those who perceive hydro-fracking to be a threat to our health, water, and with climate change the survival of much of the life on this planet, would lose all possible tools to address the practice.  The hard-fought fight to prevent fracking in New York State?: The industry would have achieved an end-run around it.

When I and others write to say that the TPP contains such disturbing provisions, are we wrong?  If they’d only make the TPP provisions public we’d know exactly what to worry about with accuracy and specificity.  Otherwise we just leave it to those working for Halliburton and Monsanto to assure us that the unpublished provisions they are stuffing into the bill will be as good for us as they will be for them!

Would foreign corporations doing business in the U.S. gain greater rights than domestic corporations?  Days ago, without bring up the advent of the TPP as a possible contributing reason, the New York Times was reporting:

From New York to Silicon Valley, more and more large American corporations are reducing their tax bill by buying a foreign company and effectively renouncing their United States citizenship.

(See: New Corporate Tax Shelter: A Merger Abroad, by David Gelles, October 8, 2013.)

The effect of TPP on jobs and labor unions in the United States under the TPP is not a simple discussion.  Many blame NAFTA for draining jobs out of the U.S.  It is true that when jobs go overseas other jobs can be created here in ways that are complicated and not easy to measure.  Many economists believe a liberal approach to free trade usually results in a net plus.  However, when our domestic labor unions compete with workers in other countries where workers rights are not enforced or don’t exist there is a serious race to the bottom problem.  The subject is too long and complex to debate in this short article, but that complexity too is another example of why passage of this secretly formulated corporate wish list cannot be rushed through without due and proper discussion and airing.

What then might the concerned citizen want to do about the TPP?    Contact your senators and congressmen.  Tell them you are concerned and that, at a minimum, the TPP should not be "Fast Tracked."

Here are sites at which to further educate yourself:

 •        Expose the TPP

 •        Public Citizen’s TPP Trade Watch site

 •        Sierra Club TPP page

 •        Occupy Wall Street TPP page

 •        Citizens Trade Campaign TPP page

 •        Amnesty International TTP information

 •        Public Knowledge TPP page 

 •        Electronic Frontier Foundation TPP webpage and petition

 •        Infojustice.org

 •        Food and Water Watch TPP page

There is a MoveOn Petition you can sign calling for no "Fast Tracking" of the the TPP:

  •        MoveOn Petition: Congress: Don't renew "fast track" authority

Here is a short, simple video to send around through social media: "Why you should care about the TPP."

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.

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

Above, Pennsylvania’s Mansfield University– image from its website–the college on it its 175-acre campus is one of the state colleges recently deprived of funding, whose possible future actions pose a concern.

Last Friday, American Public Media’s Marketplace program presented the information, in a story a story about the funding of state colleges, that the state of Pennsylvania had made a decision to cut the budget for 14 schools in the state System of Higher Education by 18 percent. 

We may infer from this that political officials in the state of Pennsylvania apparently made a considered evaluation that, balancing out relative needs and priorities, the state money it was devoting to higher education would best be reallocated to other state needs.  Although that was key to the story reported, the story was, on its surface, about something else: A new law in that state of Pennsylvania nominally declaring that royalties from hydrofracking on state campuses, supposedly 50% of such royalties, money that would have gone to “state coffers,” be redirected to the colleges.  For the redirection to occur, the colleges have to permit hydrofracking on their campuses.  (See: Pennsylvania allows fracking on public college campuses, by Eve Troeh, Marketplace for Friday, October, 12, 2012.)

The Vice Chancellor of the state education system, Karen Ball, offered an earnest assessment that the fracking revenues would not be “anywhere near” the amount necessary to make up for the 18 percent cut . . .

. . . . This is so silly!  As if these guys think that nobody understands what fungibility means!  Marketplace is a weekday evening show that  focuses on business and the economy so its listeners certainly ought to be well acquainted with the concept of fungibility.  They should have readily caught the flaw that made this story's reporting totally nonsensical. Similarly, true Pennsylvania may be cutting budgets at its state universities by 18 percent but, even with those drastic cuts, the college students there must still be getting educations good enough to know the simple basics of what fungibility entails. . .

 . . . To put it simply, fungibility means money is money.  That means that if Pennsylvania wants its state colleges’ budgets to be down by 18% percent, a law that says that the colleges can directly glom onto some monies that would have headed first to state, doesn’t mean that the colleges get to actually keep more money in the end.  All the state need do is reduce the budget for the schools in the state system by exactly the amount of the “fracking income” the schools have been allowed to take directly, putting the budgets back again exactly where the state put them before, and that’s what you can expect* the state will and should do if the state had honestly assessed what level it thought the schools’ budgets should be relative to state needs and priorities in the first place.

(* You would expect this unless you are of a conspiratorial mind and believe that state politicians cut back on state school budgets only as a way to then induce the state colleges to permit fracking on their campuses.) 

So what is this reported poppycock about income from fracking royalties coming to the rescue of state colleges with tight budgets?  Pennsylvania has been very busy recently allowing the newly-invented practice of fracking everywhere in the state.  Fracking is a practice that was, according to the fracking industry, supposed to help the state’s economy. .  but its economy is doing so poorly that it is cutting back its state colleges by 18%?  (The story starts out with the line: “Pennsylvania's economy has been transformed by hydraulic fracturing for natural gas.”)

Truth to tell, fracking does extraordinary detriment to the environment and has all sorts of external negative costs to the economy.  Many of those costs come home to fully roost only in the longer term.

These laws cited in the Marketplace story are pretty much exactly what one commenting listener accused the Marketplace reporter responsible for the story was buying into: A public relations gimmick.  That’s why the Marketplace story with peppy lines “It's an idea already at work in other states” (citing Texas, Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana) sounds just like a transcription of an industry press release.

Why mobilize a public relations gimmick with respect to college campuses?  Because it’s a good bet that many college students will be well informed about the hazards of fracking and that they will mobilize to tell others.  This tactic might head those students off at the pass and put a dent into some of their youthful energy if those students can be debilitated by confusion.  Then there is the way that parents care protectively about their children: They might be offended that the concentration of young people found on a college campus would be put at risk by fracking there and in the vicinity (even if another Marketplace listener commented with sardonic humor: “Those crazy college kids... always wanting to get high on fumes”!).    

For some time now I have been saying that the fracking industry is engaging 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.

Essential to the industry’s plan is public befuddlement about the true costs of the tradeoffs the public is being asked to make.

The Marketplace story reports that under this kind of shell game arrangement with state colleges, a West Virginia University is to get “15 percent of the revenue” from fracking.  Unmentioned is that while the fracking company (and school) collect this revenue, 100% of the negative harm and destruction caused by fracking goes unshouldered by them, passed on to others, the school’s students and families included.

Here are some of the negative , external costs involved in hydraulic fracturing (even if the Marketplace story had an industry representative on hand to assure those listening to the story that it would be arranged that the “dirty work” would all be “screened from view” at the campuses:

    •    Decades of water pollution that involves the poisoning of:

    •        essential underground drinking water aquifers, and
    •        drinking water in rivers and streams- water treatment facilities will be wrecked.

    •    Massive quantities of water usurpation
    •    Radiation poisoning in the form of released radium and radon (lasting for thousands of years).- Gas produced from the Marcellus Shale is often, itself, radioactive.                       
    •    Earthquakes and instability of the land.       
    •    Significant poisonous air pollution.  (Resulting, for instance, in peripheral neuropathies for those nearby.)
    •    Release of carcinogens.
    •    Greenhouse gas pollution releasing climate change-causing carbon that was safely sequestered for 400 million years.
    •    Roadways and highways destroyed by intensive use by trucks carting in lakes of clean water and carting out about 80% of that afterward in foul “produced” water.

So here is a question: After state colleges allow fracking, will they get to keep at least as much money as they need to play for the costs of cleaning up afterward?  Will they get to keep at least what they need to compensate students for the injury of exposures?  Keep at least what they need to cover the cost of alternative water supplies for the colleges?  Keep money to cover the increased insurance costs for the college, those on campus and those in the vicinity?

The answer to all of the above is: No. . .  It doesn’t work that way.  For one thing the costs are all too great to cover in the end.  For another thing there is that bit we considered at the beginning of this article about fungibility.   Remember, fungibility means the colleges don’t actually get to keep anything at all because the state can cut them right back down to the funding level state officials thought they should be at in the first place.  And when it comes to sorting out the importance of relative priorities: States that permit fracking are going to have plenty other problems of their own to sort out and pay for, aside and apart from tending to the needs of their college campuses.

* * * *
Here are some prior articles, replete with many links, to earlier stories I've written about hydraulic fracturing for both National Notice and Noticing New York:

    •    WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2011, Why Are Hearings on High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing (“Fracking”) Held In New York A NATIONAL Issue?

    •    TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2011, Testimony at Department of Environmental Conservation’s 11/30 Hearings on High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing (“Fracking”): The LONG and the SHORT of It

    •    THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2011, Wednesday’s Department of Environmental Conservation Hearings on High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing (“Fracking”): Noticing New York’s Testimony Plus. .

    •    FRIDAY, JULY 29, 2011, Conundrum: If Gov. Andrew Cuomo Traded The Moratorium on Hydrofracking To Get Gay Marriage Would That Be Good Or a Bad Thing?

    •    MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2011, Fracking Double Whammy: New York Loses Two Aces In The Hole When Confronting Climate Change (i.e.Weather Weirding/Global Warming)

    •    MONDAY, AUGUST 8, 2011, Hydraulic Fracturing’s Deleterious Environmental Effects: Andrew Cuomo’s Plan To End His State’s Ban and the Passage of the NYS Marriage Equality Law

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)

Not THAT Michael White: Visiting Occupy Wall Street and How I Know The Economy Is Bad (For the 99%)

My first visit to the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Zucotti Park I got to chatting with a reporter from the New York Times. When we concluded, she asked my name and I gave her my card. I cautioned her that if she used my name she would have to put in both my middle initials (D. & D.) between the Michael and the White or nobody would know who I was. There are too many Michael Whites I told her. After all you hardly have to go very far at all to find another one who is also a lawyer and an urban planner. (See: Wednesday, August 13, 2008, Not THAT Michael White.)

In fact, I told her (since we had been speaking a lot about the economy), because there are so many Michael Whites I have my own personal barometer of how bad the economy is now. I am getting a lot of calls. I recognize them right away. Someone on the other end of the line adopts a very firm businesslike tone as they prepare to dun me to pay some other Michael Whites defaulted bills. “Do you have any middle initials for the Michael White you want?” (I always ask the same question.) Sometimes they get feisty and want to know mine first or have me give my Social Security number to them, which I don’t do. These days I get pretty conversational with these guys and give them helpful hints about saving time by not going after the wrong people or getting suckered into pursuing some account that was originally handed off to some other collection agency first. And, I politely convey my hopes that they won’t call back.

I didn’t used to get all these calls. Not when the economy was good. I know from the variety of the middle initials they give me that there sure are a lot of Michael Whites having a tough time these days.

The Times reporter wanted to know if I supported the Occupy Wall Street demonstration. Yes, I pretty much do, I said, although I said I recognized that it was still a relatively inchoate movement working on putting together the messages that they wanted to collectively convey. I made the obvious comparison to the Tea Party but noted that I thought that a key difference was that a lot of money had been poured early on into the Tea Party from above, like from the Koch brothers, to help structure it’s messages. The result was a deflection of popular anger from where it should have gone. I told the reporter that I thought the occupiers of Wall Street are much more on target about who they ought to be angry at.

A few days later Paul Krugman, opening up one of his columns, said exactly what I’d meant and since there is always benefit in quoting a Nobel prize-winning professor of economics when talking about the economy I will use his words:

There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.

(See: Confronting the Malefactors, by Paul Krugman, October 6, 2011.)

Krugman’s more recent column about Occupy Wall Street is to the effect that the shrill and disproportionate reaction of the super-rich and their defenders to the protests indicates that they realize that they have something to hide:

The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

(See: Panic of the Plutocrats, by Paul Krugman, October 9, 2011.)

I told the reporter that not all that long ago (January 2010) I had been part of luncheon discussion, attended by another Times reporter, with Jonathan Tasini who was then running for the U.S. Senate against Kirsten E. Gillibrand. That discussion was immediately following the specially held Massachusetts Senate election for Ted Kennedy’s former seat that had been unexpectedly won by Tea Party candidate Scott Brown. I explained that we had discussed at that lunch how we understood and appreciated the anger expressed in that race together with our expectation that we would ultimately see anger, having much in common with the Tea Party’s own, that would be expressed on the left and directed where it ought to be directed. (You will remember that the Senate seat now held by Scott Brown is the one that Elizabeth Warren is seeking to reclaim for the Democrats. Brian Lehrer bluntly ventured that Occupy Wall Street is happy with Ms. Warren, and that's a good guess.)

Michael Cooper, the reporter who wrote about the luncheon with candidate Tasini, put in both my middle initials. (See: An Underdog Who Isn’t Daunted by a New Try for the Senate, January 26, 2010, by Michael Cooper, January 19, 2010- BTW: Reporter Michael Cooper has a problem similar to my own: There are a lot of Michael Coopers, including an attorney who was once part of my legal staff.)

I went back and looked at Mr. Cooper’s article when writing this and unfortunately it does not document our prescience as extensively as I might have hoped, although it does refer to Candidate Tasini’s being “persuaded of broad voter furor” and his diagnosis that the loss of the Massachusetts race reflected, “voter contempt for insiders.” The article also noted that Mr. Tasini, “wants a tax on every transaction on Wall Street.” Our antipathy for the infuriating Yankee Stadium boondoggle was also mentioned in the article.

The reporter covering Occupy Wall Street wanted to know if I had demonstrated against anything else recently. I told her I had been there to protest the Prokhorov/Ratner (“Barclays’) basketball arena ground breaking.

“Atlantic Yards,” she said without skipping a beat. “And before that?”

The truth is that I don’t generally think of myself as much of a street protester. Had I thought about it I should have also mentioned my participation in demonstrations against Columbia’s abuse of eminent domain to gain exclusive control of the swath of West Harlem over by the Hudson (in one demonstration we walked over to the home of Lee Bollinger, the very highly paid president of Columbia, much as the OWS folks just marched to the homes of Wealthy Wall Streeters) and on July 26, 2011 I was also outside Governor Cuomo’s New York City office to protest his apparent intent to open up New York to hydraulic fracturing.
“I remember protesting the Vietnam War and the manufacture of napalm,” I told her, my more recent demonstrating not coming immediately to mind. Perhaps the flavor of the occupancy was prompting me to think back to that era. “I tend to be more of a thinker,” I told her, “putting thoughts together.” I held up a Jane Jacobs book I was carrying with me. (I also had material with me about real estate tax policy respecting not for profits).
“There has been a lot of talk recently about how the banks were helped out and permitted to continue during the fiscal crisis because they were `too big to fail’,” I said. “And people point out quite readily that `too big to fail’ ought to mean `to big to exist.’ What no one is mentioning,” I continued, “is that `too big to fail’ may also mean ‘too big to do a good job.’ Jane Jacobs in `The Economy of Cities’ discussed how in order to promote development, growth and innovation in the economy, it is beneficial for financing institutions to be small and intimately connected with their client businesses. Had the banks not been handed a bailout we might have capital diffused among more effective smaller institutions. Instead, we see huge impersonal institutions sitting on a lot of capital they are NOT lending out.”

“Vietnam!” said my interviewer, impressed, and I admitted, when she asked, that I’ll soon be sixty. A few days later, comparison to Vietnam demonstrations came up in Times articles: “Several New Yorkers said that they had not been to a protest since the Vietnam War” (See: Wall St. Protest Attracts Many New to This Sort of Thing, by Cara Buckley, October 5, 2011) and, because Mayor Bloomberg (a target of many OWS placards) referring to protest of that era commented that, “we treated our vets who came back terribly, just terribly,” (See: For Mayor, ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Evokes Protests From Vietnam Era, by Kate Taylor, October 7, 2011) which assertion by Bloomberg ties in with a commonly perpetuated myth on that topic.
Do I believe the same things that the protesters of Occupy Wall Street believe? I do support many of their positions. To a large extent I find that things I have been writing match up well against the placards I see in Zucotti Park. For instance:

• The economy is poor because with greater income inequality most people’s incomes are going down. See: Friday, May 13, 2011, Inflation That's Causing Deflation: Some Not So Very Good News For the Real Estate Market
• It is not true when we are being told that there are problems with Social Security and that benefits will have to be cut back. Instead, the problem about which we we are not being told is that the wealthier are no longer contributing what they were expected to contribute before. See: Friday, April 29, 2011, Social Security Inequation: This is Rich, Living Longer While Everyone Else Enjoys It Less; Putting Two Together

• Congress is NOT doing it’s job and so-called “job creation” efforts are often rigged games intended to benefit the wealthier instead. See: Sunday, March 27, 2011, Congress Not Doing Its Job? Job Creation Programs That Don’t- The American Jobs Creation Act and the EB-5 Program for Sale of Green Cards

• Women need to be more respected. See: Wednesday, June 29, 2011,Women Are Better Than Men At Nearly Everything- But We Are Eliminating Them! The Absence of Women In A Man-Made World

• The tax system needs to be more favorable to the 99% and less to the 1%. See: Tuesday, October 11, 2011, The First Most Obvious Tax To Eliminate If You Want To Increase Employment: The Payroll Tax

• If we are not going to abolish the Fed, we need to at least consider whether the directors who staff it are serving the 99% or the 1%. See: Wednesday, October 12, 2011, Visiting Occupy Wall Street We Hear “Eliminate the Fed!”: OR Maybe Just Federal Reserve Directors Backing Mega-Monopolies For the Super-Connected?
• Government supported monopolies targeted for those who are privileged and politically connected are unconscionable. See: Friday, September 30, 2011, Could the Atlantic Yards Monopoly Be Even Less Regulated Than It Is? Why A Mega-Monopoly Continuation Isn’t Workable
• Many of the placards in Zucotti park decry the rape of the environment via the fossil fuel industry scam of hydrofracking about which I have written encyclopedically. See: Monday, August 8, 2011, Hydraulic Fracturing’s Deleterious Environmental Effects: Andrew Cuomo’s Plan To End His State’s Ban and the Passage of the NYS Marriage Equality Law
• I have also been alert to how the hydrofracking issue is closely related to the proposed development of the Canadian tar sands together with facilitation of that development by building the XL high pressure pipeline. In this regard I have noted parallels between this and other publicly abusive corporate-government alliances. See: Sunday, October 9, 2011, More Parallels: Atlantic Yards and the Way the Fossil Fuel Industry Is Setting Up An Approval For the Keystone XL Tar Sands High Pressure Oil Pipeline and Wednesday, October 5, 2011, Mayor Michael Bloomberg In the Regalia of Queen Elizabeth I? Noticing New York’s Testimony at the DOT Hearing on Atlantic Yards Bollard Plan
• The oil companies and the rest of the fossil fuel industry, together with their captured politicians, interested only in their own profit, are endangering all of us by absurdly ignoring Global Warming/Weather Weirding. See: Saturday, September 3, 2011, Governor Rick Perry of Texas, Global Warming and Those Texas-based Oil Companies

• Because a captured press is too often not reporting the stories that need to be reported the 1% are able to take advantage of the 99%. See: Sunday, June 26, 2011, “Page One: Inside the New York Times” Reviewed; Plus The “New York Times Effect” on New York’s Biggest Real Estate Development Swindle

• The American public needs to wake up and think rather than be lured into circus side shows. See: Friday, September 16, 2011, Will America Shrink FROM Or INTO Crowds Clamoring For Death? and Friday, July 1, 2011, Cultural Circus? Mr. Ratner’s Attempt to Rechristen His Arena A “Cultural Center”

• Communication in this country is too much in the control of corporate interests. See: Tuesday, September 20, 2011, A Parable: Some Words Concerning the Future of Communication
(Above an interfaith protest arrives Sunday with their version of Wall Street's "bull" being the bible's Golden Calf idol. Below the golden idol gets a wary police escort) • The corporate world has become unethical. See: Friday, April 22, 2011, Applying the Principles of Legal Ethics to New York Development: Lawyers Are Not Supposed to Represent Deceiving Clients

• The miscalculations of the self-interested and greedy will bankrupt us. See: Friday, May 20, 2011, The Miscalculations Encouraged By the Fuzzy Math of Subsidies: Yankee Stadium Bonds on Verge of Default- A Case Study
• Private corporations are too much in control and have taken over the work that government should be doing. See: Thursday, June 16, 2011, Sovereign Immunity, Reconfiguration of Brooklyn’s Traffic And The Peculiar Verisimilitude of Government Functions When Forest City Ratner Takes Over
• There is unprecedented absurdity in making the city’s richest man, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of the city and just because he’s “corporate” and out sources to corporate friends doesn’t mean Bloomberg runs the city well. See: Thursday, October 22, 2009, This Is Rich! Looks Like Bloomberg is Making History and Monday, March 28, 2011, Take TWO (AYR’s) On Times Coverage- Revisiting Light Shed by CityTime Outsourcing Scandal When Reexamining Bloomberg Management Myth
• And perhaps it is worthwhile to extend this list with a mention of one last post. We saw Reverend Billy from the Church of Stop Shopping in the throng at Zucotti Park. His bright white suit makes him stand out, especially as we run into him often at other events important to how New York City is developing including Save Coney Island and Atlantic Yards events. See: Friday, December 19, 2008, A Jolly Good Meet and there is now an OWS Reverend Billy video: Let's call it - Banking!

Some of the above articles from Noticing New York may be more parochial in the concerns they detail than are the articles above from National Notice that focus specifically on national policy issues and debate but the underlying themes are all pretty much in common.
Am I presumptuous to be fairly confident that I have identified above many key concerns that a lot of the Occupy Wall Street protesters share?
Last week on Bill Maher’s Real Time (presumably it is still possible for a number of the 99% to afford HBO which carries the show) there was a discussion about whether the protesters had a coherent message or needed more focus. Journalist P. J. O'Rourke and commentator Nicole Wallace (being snide and juvenile with attempts at potty-humor) provided perfect foils for Democrat Alan Grayson a former one-term Congressman from Florida to address the issue. Said Grayson:

No, listen, Bill I have no problem understanding what they are complaining about. . . .I was an economist for more than three years. . . .

. . . . Now let me tell you what they talking about: They’re complaining that Wall Street wrecked the economy more than three years ago and nobody has been held responsible of that. Not a single person has been indicted or convicted for destroying 20% of our national net worth accumulated over the course of two centuries. They’re upset about the fact that Wall Street has iron control over the economic policies of the country and that one party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street and that the other party caters to them as well. That’s the real truth of the matter as you’ve said before.

O’Rourke jibed that the Occupy Wall Street protesters had “found their spokesperson,” to which Grayson rejoined:

If I am a spokesman for all the people who think we should not have 24 million people in this country who can't find a full-time job; that we should not have 50 million people in this country who can't see a doctor when they're sick; that we shouldn't have 47 million people in this country who need government help in order to feed themselves; and we shouldn't have 15 million families who owe more than their mortgage, then the value of their home.- Okay, I'll be that spokesman.

A video of the exchange is available at Real Clear Politics: Grayson: I'll Be Spokesman For Unemployed, Uninsured.

I don’t know who the Occupy Wall Street protesters will endorse as their spokespersons in the end but Grayson’s endeavor in this regard was credibly eloquent. The one quibble: It is not just that Wall Street wrecked the economy and that no one has been indicted; it is also that much of the wrecking of the economy involved people doing things that were wrong and that they knew were wrong. With or without Grayson’s help one thing is clear: However much sharper the protesters’ message could be in the future it is pretty damn clear already.

A final point. The theory for letting the 1% keep their highly disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth (and keep, as well, all the rules running in their favor that make it that way) is that we can somehow expect that their wealth will ultimately trickle down to the rest of us. In fact it would be truthful to say that New York City is doing better than they rest of the country right now because Wall Street is located here. That makes this city first in line for any trickle down and means the city likely benefits from more "trickle" than anywhere else. Maybe that’s so, but remember all those Michael Whites the bill collectors keep contacting me about? Well, those Michael Whites live around Wall Street too and their creditors are still calling.

Hydraulic Fracturing’s Deleterious Environmental Effects: Andrew Cuomo’s Plan To End His State’s Ban and the Passage of the NYS Marriage Equality Law

(Map of Marcellus Shale from Geology.com. Click on this image to enlarge. Other visuals providing an overview of the hydrofracking problem are available in the Noticing New York article linked to.)
Hydraulic Fracturing is an issue of national concern that should be preoccupying much of the nation. It involves a significant despoiling of public resources including the serious poisoning of vast quantities water and air. And what goes on in one state is apt to be to the very consequential detriment of other states downstream or downwind. For instance, actions now being taken by New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo respecting his planned lifting of a ban in New York State is likely not only to poison or polute, in one way or another, most of New York State, it will also affect much of the eastern seaboard via the rivers that run down from New York (the Delaware and the Susquehanna) and the drinking water of major downstream cities in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware. Also of concern is water flowing into the Ohio River from the Allegheny (going all the way down into the Mississippi) and water flowing into the two Great Lakes bordering New York and and also the St. Lawrence Seaway.

All of the multiple ways hydrofracking poisons broad swaths of the environment is discussed in depth in a lengthy Noticing New York article which also examines the intriguing question of whether Andrew Cuomo might possibly have traded the lifting of the state’s ban on the deleterious hydrofracking industry in order to get the state’s gay marriage equality law enacted: Friday, July 29, 2011, Conundrum: If Gov. Andrew Cuomo Traded The Moratorium on Hydrofracking To Get Gay Marriage Would That Be Good Or a Bad Thing?

The Noticing New York article provides this observation about the proposed hydrofracking of the Marcellus Shale formation respecting the effect on New York State alone:

If you consider what parts of the state lie over the Marcellus Shale formation, what parts are downstream of it and what parts are downwind of it the entire state of New York will be environmentally affected by the drilling the Cuomo plan proposes to permit.

Much of the analysis of the Noticing New York article is more detailed and thorough in the connections it makes than what is frequently to be found elsewhere. Much cannot be found elsewhere at all. The article may not have come to your attention when it first went up at the end of July. This is because Google currently has some sort of block in place making Noticing New York content suddenly exceptionally difficult to find if you use Google. That blocking is something National Notice will cover further in a later post respecting research into this matter. For the moment, you are more likely to find your way to the Noticing New York content through the link in this article when your interest in these matters causes you to Google: “Andrew Cuomo,” “hydraulic fracturing ban” and “gay marriage” or “marriage equality.”