If you go to see the Sundance Award winning film, "Gasland" at the IFC Center in New York City, or if you saw it on HBO this past summer, watched it on PBS or saw it at last fall's Sundance Festival, then you're a concerned citizen exercising your right and duty to stay informed.
However if you saw the film in Pennsylvania, watch out. According to a leaked document from the State Department of Homeland Security, published by Pro Publica, since so-called "environmental extremists" pose an increasing threat to ... the energy sector," your seeing the film in Pennsylvania could get your name circulated to law enforcement officials eager to protect the gas drilling industry from ordinary citizens like you.
As reported by Rachel Maddow and in the Pennsylvania paper, the Patriot News, Homeland Security Director James Powers compared himself to Tommy Lee Jones' character in the film "The Fugitive," saying "My concern is public safety." However, the "intelligence" in the briefings includes lists of public meetings the state has determined anti-drilling activists plan to attend.
Yesterday the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Kathryn Klaber, a spokesman for the gas drillers' coalition implied that in attending state meetings, people from the affected communities were somehow endangering the drilling work sites. "Our industry's top priority and most important commitment is to provide our people with the best and safest workplace that we can, and as you'd expect, we take seriously any threats that seek to compromise that environment."
Even with gas drilling's mounting record of water contamination, air pollution, explosions and fires, up until now no one had ever claimed that its dangers were attributable not to the process itself, nor to a lack of appropriate federal regulations, but instead to ordinary citizens exercising their free right of assembly to watch a film, or attend a public hearing sponsored by government.
The gas drilling practice in use is called fracking. It appropriates millions of gallons of public water from rivers, streams and aquifers, and mixes that with millions of gallons of inflammable, highly toxic, undisclosed and unregulated chemicals. Drillers inject this frack fluid into the earth to release the highly pressurized gas and radiation, which shoot up with magnum force. After Pennsylvania welcomed what gas companies promised would be an economic bonanza, it's been hard pressed to manage the millions of gallons of toxic and radioactive waste water created by the fracking process.
It's well documented that in addition to the risks of toxic seepage into wells, aquifers and water supplies, and the near inevitable air pollution, drillers are unable to predict or manage all the possible effects of their mini-earthquakes and seismic activity in invisible geological strata deep within the earth. That's the likeliest reason that spills, explosions and fires have dogged drillers and thus homeowners in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. The state lacked the budget for an environmental staff sufficient to handle the endless stream of hazardous incidents.
But in the eyes of the PA government officials, and the Marcellus Shale Association, (a pro-drilling group), the danger is not the high intensity, volatile, industrial drilling practices. The danger to public safety was embodied by a group of ordinary citizens sitting in a darkened room watching a film.
In these days of belt-tightening and government cuts, Pennsylvania (like New York state) lacked both the regulations to require safe practices, and the Environmental staff to monitor them. Rather than hold accountable the deep-pocket industry enacting those hazards, it did find the resources to fund the Homeland Security Department, which targeted citizens concerned about the health and safety hazards in their communities.
As New York witnesses what drilling has wrought to its neighbor, New Yorkers face a crucial fork in the road in the upcoming election: accept a so-called economic bonanza that could contaminate not only New York's unfiltered water supply but also its democratic institutions, or turn out in force for candidates who make it clear that they value New York's water and democracy more than campaign contributions, which will leave them beholden to paymasters who seek to call movie goers terrorists. My advice? Go see "Gasland" while you still can.
Update: Late yesterday, PA Governor Ed Rendell, who in news reports was characterized as "appalled," canceled the $125,000 contract between the State's Homeland Security Department and the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, a Philadelphia firm that disseminated "wrongful and improper reports ... about environmental groups," according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Neither Rendell nor former PA Governor Tom Ridge were aware of the contract, yet neither proposed firing the Homeland Security director who issued it. Ridge's firm recently received a $900,000 contract for him to serve as a spokesperson for the driller's group.
Pittsburgh Councilman Doug Shields questioned why the state "would use my tax dollars to contract with a private security company to spy on me and others with serious concerns related to the unsafe conditions... If this isn't a concerted effort by the government and the gas industry to dampen free speech, I don't know what is. It is shameful. It is un-American.''
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I have seen GASLAND on TV
The "friggen frackers" must be slowed down if not stopped.
Dr.Rick Lippin
Southampton,Pa
Tina Traster
author of Burb Appeal: The Collection
http://www.amazon.com/Burb-Appeal-Collection-Humorous-ebook/dp/B0042G0SZA/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1284411635&sr=1-1
You will not change their minds because they will not listen to reason, you will not win by shouting them down, you will not win by hitting them. That is what they want from you. Don’t give them the satisfaction nor the opportunity to do harm to you.
Governor Rendell is very upset with the news about the Antis being on the verge of terrorists. You will hear more about this in the media. Hopefully the media does not draw the nuts out.
Just remember we have 2 wells drilled and 2 wells drilling. It’s only September! There will be more to come.
Be safe. Good luck to us all! Marian
I am reminding all of you not to respond to any of these radical things if you become exposed to them in action. You all did a wonderful job of ignoring them and going inside at the DRBC hearing. I was very proud of our landowners. And I hope you can continue to do so when you find yourself confronted by the Antis. YOU WILL NOT CHANGE THEIR MIND> they are on a mission and that is to KILL THE DRILL.
The EPA hearings are well policed but tempers flare so if you are going tomorrow be on guard. The antis are getting really desperate and some of that will be evident at the DRBC hearing tomorrow too. They feel that the drilling is their worst night mare and they really believed they could stop it. Now that it is happening it is very difficult for them to face the fact that they are failing...CONTINUED IN PART THREE...
--- On Tue, 9/14/10, Alliance wrote:
PART ONE:
From: Alliance
Subject: Are Anti groups the new terrorists?
To: members@nwpoa.info, info@nwpoa.info
Cc: sprigntwig@verizon.net
Date: Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 11:58 PM
Dear Members,
Now more than ever you must be cautious and level headed. There is reason to believe that the Department of Homeland security is tracking the Anti drillers as a form of terroristic folks.
We know they train themselves to protest and how to develop emotional fears in the common people. They know how to incite people. We know that misrepresenting information is common for them. We know that some practice civil disobedience and have said they would resort to those measures if needed. We know that you can not have reasonable discussions with them. They also attract fringe type people, the kind of people that normally would not fit in because they are not quite normal to begin with. We know that some of us have been threatened even with being shot. We know that they have done vandalism here on our home turf...CONTINUTED IN PART TWO
A similar beach of public trust has occurred in Sullivan County, New York, part of which sits on the Marcellus Shale. There, a group of businessman called the Partnership for Sullivan County has been receiving public money to develop the county economically. What are they using it for, in part? To promote drilling. And who will benefit? Very possibly a number of the businessmen who are members of the Partnership. Not only that, they have apparently been inflating the size of their membership soo they can receive even more county money to use in support of causes that will harm the environment but profit them--this according to testimony from Bruce Ferguson given just today before the Sullivan County Legislature. We have to keep an eye on these folks. They will sell the horse to build the barn if we let them.
"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
The social fabric has always been a litte weak in the U.S.--and now, just as we have taken a few baby steps to strengthen it in the last few years, the reactionary forces are freaking out. But the idea of the common good was right there at the beginning. It's not some radical new idea.
Alison
Mercenariness
Anywhere,
threaten Liberty and Democracy
Everywhere.
I believe that Marian Schweighofer owes the common folk of Pennsylvania who have merely exercised freedom of speech an apology for her letter.
Please also note that this is the same Mrs. Scweighofer which the NY Times elected to profile as the happy camper of gas drilling. http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/09/13/13greenwire-obscure-regulator-hits-brakes-on-northeast-sha-11558.html
I guess they know who pays for their Exxon Mobil ads.
PA's DEP and NY's DEC are both supposed to work for "We the People," but instead have become puppets of the drilling industry. A look at DEC's website (http://www.dec.ny.gov/energy/46288.html) shows it merely parroting gas-drilling lobbyist talking points, almost verbatim. Clearly DEC failed to reach out for other opinions, failed to conduct any investigation of their own, and failed to examine independent sources of information. DEC's regulatory response to fracking has been widely characterized as "woefully inadequate". See http://www.propublica.org/article/what-you-need-to-know-about-hydrofracking
PA has gone so far as to use Homeland Security funds to spy on peaceful protesters, and then sent those reports to the drilling companies. http://www.centredaily.com/2010/09/14/2206710/documents-show-homeland-security.html
Fracking is exposing a much bigger issue. Our governments (Federal and State) are out of the citizenry's control and in the hands of corporate interests. I'm not sure if, or how, we can regain control. But every day I have a better and better idea of how the feudal serf must have felt.
Most people find it hard to believe that the water supply of a major metropolitan area, such as New York city, could be under threat from gas drilling. New Yorkers are ready to accept that it could happen in upstate rural areas, in unknown parts of Pennsylvania, way out in the West-- but not to them.
But look at home this has progressed. First, Cheney et al took down all Federal protections, next NY with its barely balanced budget gutted state departments charged with addressing this. The Supreme Court ruling about corporate donations to election campaigns gives vested industries a blank check for buying the elected officials they can control.
Where is that money being spent now in preparation for the upcoming election-- and whose doing the buying? Gas and oil is buying and they are buying New York state. They want in.
Once they got in in PA, they bought the former governor and head of Homeland Security as a mouthpiece. Now they are targeting concerned citizens and calling them extremists. When they are caught out, they simply deny it, as Rendell did this week.
Where does this leave New York City? In deep trouble.
PA, and our governor, jumped headlong into a commitment to fracking for natural gas early on. Not surprising for a state that has had coal mines burning underground for decades, ... whole towns dislocated, properties lost. We proceed as if the earth beneath our feet had no connection to our water, ... rivers, ... wells and soil. Neighbors sell gas rights against the objection of neighbors, ... for lack of viable income, and in the face of sagging property values.
There is a great deal of money to be made in the clamor to shatter the stone beneath the Keystone State in a bid to find natural gas, at any cost. My guess is that a great deal of it is already being paid out in Harrisburg, ... long before many of the wells and hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" ever occurs.
Why is it that so much of what Haliburton touches is ruined forever, and no one stands in their way?
But I often wonder whether the work he was in the midst of when he died, was interrupted because he was unknowingly exposed to toxins from drilling practices. I will never know because we never know how, when, or if we are being exposed. Writing on the Living Page as I have since 2007, where people offer and receive health advice, it's ironic to me how much we seek to reassure ourselves that our individual choices can determine our health. After twenty years of reporting on them, I would certainly never naysay it. But unless we seriously dedicate ourselves to addressing our collective health issues, we're going to learn some tough lessons about the limits of individual self help.
Alison
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TRC = Terrorism Research Center = Owned by Erik Prince and Blackwater
In other words, blackwater is now being paid by the gov't to spy on regular citizens.
Steve