Public Citizen Calls for Closing of Hydrofracking Loophole

The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen is pressing lawmakers to close loopholes that allow energy companies to contaminate drinking water supplies through a controversial gas extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing. Public Citizen submitted comments to the Department of Energy’s Natural Gas Subcommittee calling for an end to what is known as the Halliburton Loophole. The loophole was added into the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and exempted hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act.

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Maryland Hydrofracking Lawsuit To Be Filed Over Spill

The State of Maryland plans to file a hydraulic fracturing lawsuit against Chesapeake Energy Corporation over a recent release of gas mining fluids into the state’s water supply. Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler announced the state’s intention to file the environmental lawsuit on May 2, following a spill that occurred on April 19. Chesapeake Energy allegedly released thousands of gallons of hydrofracking fluid into Towanda Creek, which ultimately feeds into the environmentally sensitive Chesapeake Bay.

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Radioactive Hydrofracking Wastewater Dumped in Water Supply: Report

Radioactive wastewater is being dumped into the drinking water of Pennsylvania and other states by a controversial drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, according to recently obtained documents and investigative reports.

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Environmentalists Protest Against Hydrofracking Outside Gov. Cuomo’s Office

NEW YORK (WCBS 880) – Environmentalists opposed to hydrofracking, a controversial process to extract natural gas from under ground, were protesting outside Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office this week.

About two dozen protesters were outside Cuomo’s office calling on him to ban hydrofracking. The process uses water and chemicals to extract natural gas from the earth.

“The risk of contamination, pollution of our ground water, our drinking water,” said Eric Wiltman is with Food and Water Watch. ”The pollution to the air caused by fracking.”

Jessica Haller calls this an uncontrolled experiment.

“We’re going to keep pumping things that we don’t know the total effects of them and all the systems on the planet,” said Haller.

The state is in the process of possibly allowing some fracking on private property. The governor is waiting to hear from an advisory panel.

‘Shutter Island’ star lends his power to fracking fight

ALBANY — It was not the sexiest issue making the rounds of the Capitol during the summer doldrums: the injection of water and chemicals under high pressure into rock formations to extract natural gas. The grass-roots environmental group Frack Action had failed to gain traction in its homegrown fight against the powerful gas and oil industry and the clean water advocates struggled to draw media attention for its opposition to hydrofracking in New York state.

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"Ameen Izzadeen" - Sandcastles of Capitalism Crumbling

Published on Friday, August 12, 2011 by The Daily Mirror (Colombo, Sri Lanka)

http://print.dailymirror.lk/opinion1/52888.html

by Ameen Izzadeen

Karl Marx must be both happy and sad — happy because capitalism is crumbling and sad because it is not happening the way he thought it would in a revolution of the proletariat. When socialism, albeit a corrupt version of it, was wiped off the political landscape of the world some 20 years ago with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the capitalists touted the free market liberal economic system as the only engine for the progress of mankind. Of course, they interpreted the word progress in a loose sense, confining it to short-term economic prosperity and not taking its social cost into account. Little did they realize then that unbridled capitalism, sustained by selfishness and greed, was evil incarnate — warts and all.

Just as the seeds of destruction of any system are found within it, capitalism's downfall is largely caused by its own rotten core. When greed or selfishness, which the capitalists interpret as economic freedom of an individual, becomes the operative vice, there is little place for values.

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"The Hill" - Nader looks for Obama 2012 challengers

The Hill - 07/27/11 06:00 AM ET

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/173723-nader-to-look-for-primary-challengers-for-obama-in-12

Consumer activist Ralph Nader said Tuesday that he’ll launch an initiative soon to field primary challenges to President Obama in key states. 

Nader, who waged two presidential campaigns as a third-party candidate, is working with a group of frustrated Democrats who are hoping to turn up the heat on Obama from the left. 

“It’s an initiative to scan the possibilities of people who may run,” Nader said in a phone interview. “My guess is that it’s almost 100 percent sure there’s going to be a primary challenge to Obama from somebody or somebodies — plural — in some states.”

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The Fight Over Fracking

By Alexander Zaitchik

May 17, 2011 9:55 AM ET

Josh Fox speaks during a press conference for the Safe Drinking Water act on Capitol Hill, February 17, 2011.

Kris Connor/Getty Images

One afternoon in early April, Josh Fox sits in a café near his Brooklyn home and unfurls a peculiar map of the United States. Featuring a series of red overlapping blobs stretching from Colorado to New York, it resembles one of those Cold War maps depicting the blast radii of Soviet missiles. But it’s decades more current than that. With a sweeping hand gesture, Fox explains that the red blobs mark nearly two dozen vast stores of natural gas that energy firms seek to open for drilling in the near future.

As he’s done nearly every day in the 15 months since premiering his documentary Gasland at Sundance, the 39-year-old filmmaker describes his map as a visual recipe for environmental apocalypse.

“Drilling the red areas means the annihilation of the American Dream,” says Fox, who minus his thick-black frames is a dead ringer for a young Lenny Bruce. “We can stop them from turning the country into an archipelago of unlivable toxic industrial zones, but the Gulf Spill reminds us you never know how much time is on the clock.”

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"Tim Dickinson" - How the Head of Fox News Is Making Americans More Right-Wing, More Ignorant and Ever More Terrified

By Tim Dickinson, The Guardian
Posted on August 10, 2011, Printed on August 14, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151980/how_the_head_of_fox_news_is_making_americans_more_right-wing%2C_more_ignorant_and_ever_more_terrified

At the Fox News Chrismas party the year the network overtook arch-rival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network's founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as "the Chairman" – Roger Ailes.

"It was as though we were looking at Mao," recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. "It's like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders," says a former executive with the network's parent, News Corp. "There are people who turn people in."

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"Matt Stoller" - How America Could Collapse

 A few months ago, a friend in the entertainment industry told me of a new business model in Hollywood: hoarding videotapes. Apparently, the earthquake in Japan knocked offline a Sony factory that makes certain types of tape. That factory was also in the tsunami zone, so now there’s a serious tape shortage threatening the television industry. The NBA scrambled to get enough tape to broadcast the NBA finals; one executive told the Hollywood Reporter, “It’s like a bank run.”

In the last few years, economists have spent a lot of time and energy thinking about bank runs. A bank run happens when depositors think a bank is weak and scramble to get their money out before it collapses. “Tight coupling” of financial institutions, like when banks are overly dependent on each other, can create a cascading series of problems for the system itself. We saw this with Lehman Brothers when it went bankrupt. Its AAA-rated debt instruments lost value unexpectedly; that caused money market funds that held those presumably safe bonds to suddenly lose value. A shadow bank run was the result, as investors rushed to withdraw from the money market funds.

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