How Hollywood’s Own Reality Undermines Its Position on Internet Policy

Credibility Lost

by RICHARD FORNO

The furor over the latest legislative proposals to address online copyright infringement in the United States have cast the major American intellectual property companies – most notably, the entertainment industry — in a very negative light within the global Internet user community.  I join with technologists, scholars, and industry observers who are amazed at the level of concentrated outcry over a single technology policy issue and hope it represents a more civic-minded Internet population when it comes to matters affecting Internet users both in the United States and around the world.

Much of the controversy surrounding The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) [1] and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) [2] pertains to how they were drafted and their potential adverse consequences to the Internet itself, if not society generally. While a prolonged analysis or description of these proposals are beyond the scope of this article – but can be found quite easily online – they represent the latest attempts by the intellectual property (IP) industry (although ‘cartel’ might be a  more appropriate term) to further extend its reach into cyberspace to enact what it believes are necessary measures to protect its copyrighted property such as movies, music, and software.  Unfortunately, these legislative proposals were conceived and developed primarily by industry lobbyists with little input from Internet engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, or other subject matter experts who understand the technical, legal, and social consequences should these proposals, as written, become law.  The secrecy surrounding the drafting of SOPA and PIPA are reminiscent of how these same industry organisations were adamant that the international  development of 2011′s controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) occur in secret with little if any public consultation, comment, or discussion.[3]

Apparently, developing laws to protect intellectual property on the Internet are exempt from Washington’s alleged desire for greater transparency in the policymaking process. It also represents a shift in how technology issues previously were dealt with in the earlier days of the Internet — i.e., involving all stakeholders in a public forum to reach a mutual consensus on a given matter.  Such one-sided practices can lead to proposals like SOPA and PIPA, which indeed may endanger the effective and secure operation of the Internet, harm innocent Internet users, establish a “shoot first” policy based on accusation not proof, and potentially present assorted constitutional concerns over due process and online freedom of expression.  [4]

Concerns over the technical and legal ramifications of SOPA and PIPA were voiced publicly by companies like Google and Facebook and a veritable Who’s Who of Internet Engineering[5]. These concerns subsequently were marginalised or ignored[6] by American legislators wanting to enact them into law quickly while minimising public discussion about their potential consequences.  In response, the Great SOPA Blackout of January 18^th, 2012 was launched by major Internet companies, prominent Web sites, and individual luminaries to protest and raise public awareness of these proposals, building upon the successful online protest the prior month against Internet company GoDaddy.Com, a longtime SOPA supporter.[7]  The significant public attention brought to these proposals during the January 18^th Blackout forced legislators to realise these proposals might be a political problem for them; even before the one-day protest ended, politicians began scrambling to distance themselves from these proposals, including several of their original sponsors.[8][9][10]  Political support turned so quickly against SOPA and PIPA that the president of the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) publicly threatened to cut off campaign support for politicians who didn’t support its legislative desires once it was known that Congressional leaders and the Obama Administration had removed those proposals from active consideration in their current form.[11]

That said, the enforcement of copyright on the Net is an ongoing concern for Hollywood and represents an significant, if not apocalyptic, problem to the entertainment industry, as evidenced in recent years:

• 2005: MPAA claims $6.1 billion in losses due to “continued camcordering” of movies in theaters. [12]

• 2005: US Chamber of Commerce reports 750,000 jobs lost due to online ‘piracy.’[13]

• 2006:  A study based on Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) data from the Institute for Policy Innovation claims the US economy loses $20.5 billon a year from movie ‘piracy.’[14]

• 2011: In a letter to the New York Times, the US Chamber of Commerce’s Mark Elliot says online ‘piracy’ threatens more than 19 million American jobs.[15]

Clearly, the entertainment industry is suffering tremendous financial losses due to online theft.  More frightening, the potential job losses have increased from 750,000 in 2005 to more than 19 million in 2011. This stark news suggests there must be severe financial and employment losses for the entertainment industry resulting from the online ‘piracy’ of its products. These statistics and predictions must be true — after all, these are ‘industry numbers’ being reported!

Interestingly, despite this gloomy news, the MPAA reported that “global box office receipts reached an all time high” of $29.9 billion in 2010 — and soon after announced new statistics showing how movie ‘piracy’ is killing its industry and destroying jobs. [16]

MPAA can’t have it both ways. Either it is losing money and laying people off due to ‘piracy’ or it’s making profits hand-over-fist and keeping its industry very much alive and profitable. Either way, it’s offered up some very misleading statements about its profitability and well-being in the face of an alleged epidemic of online theft that only draconian measures like SOPA or PIPA can address.

Similar antics were used by the MPAA’s musical counterpart, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) over the years to describe its alleged financial woes due to online theft.  In the case of music, iTunes destroyed the decades-old concept of “album sales” — yet recording industry statements and news articles continued to suggest that “declining album sales” was a direct consequence of the online ‘piracy’ problem rather than acknowledging that increasing number of customers now purchased individual tracks from iTunes instead of full albums. [17][18]

Nevertheless, these manipulated statistics are invoked by the entertainment industry at every opportunity to justify and perpetuate attacks on technology, customers, and the Internet itself while ignoring societal evolution and the evolving expectations of its customers.  I do not dispute that the theft of copyrighted materials on the Internet is a problem and needs to be addressed, but we must be mindful of the statistics presented by the entertainment industry on this issue and not blindly accept their view as reflective of reality. Unfortunately, like all pieces of propaganda, repeat it often enough and the audience will believe it’s true.

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.”  So let’s dig a bit deeper into the statistics routinely cited by the entertainment industry as it plays the victim of ‘piracy’ in the eyes of legislators and the media to determine if these indeed are facts or merely fantasy:

• 2010: The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) releases a study that, while confirming online copyright infringement indeed is a problem, cast serious doubts on the intellectual property industry’s ‘piracy’ statistics. It also concludes that measuring the impact of ‘piracy’ with any degree of meaningful accuracy may be impossible.[19]

• 2011: A ‘piracy investigator’ working for the entertainment industry describes how the entertainment industry worked to boost its piracy statistics to gain stronger media and political interest in its efforts.[20]

• 2012: Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute notes that the statistics associated with online ‘piracy’ are flawed if not something purely in the fantasies of lobbyists and their paid-for legislators.[21]

In short, great doubts are, and should be, cast upon the statistics used by the entertainment industry regarding ‘piracy’ and the theft of its products.  Therefore, in negotiating with the entertainment industry, lawmakers must be prudently critical in their analysis and due diligence of the facts presented — or, as the late Ronald Reagan famously said, “trust, but verify.”

Sadly, these very metrics, flawed or fixed as they are, continue to define the entertainment industry’s vision of reality and are used by its Congressional lobbyists to garner support for more far-reaching mechanisms to control the flow of information — theirs or anyone else’s — on the Internet in the name of countering ‘piracy.’  After all, the flurry of widespread public criticism of SOPA was dismissed by lead SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith as “not based in reality”; in other words, the reality conveniently contrived by the entertainment industry lobbyists and subsequently believed as absolute truth by Congress.[22]  Such sentiment, if not simply an excessive sense of self-entitlement, also helps explain why members of the entertainment industry have sued foreign governments that do not enact legislation favourable to them immediately upon request.[23]

Therefore, how can anyone take seriously the claims of Hollywood over its declared losses to ‘piracy’?  Not only do the entertainment industry’s statements about ‘piracy’s’ debilitating effects on its profitability conflict with its proclamations about strong annual sales, but it’s been caught basing its actions on a misconstrued sense of reality and groupthink reinforced by an ongoing inability to work with those whose views differ or raise concerns about its agenda. But Congressional lawmakers routinely believe the entertainment industry’s claims and cater to its needs, because they appreciate the flow of money received by enacting legislation favourable to those supporting their political campaigns. [24]

Interestingly, either through a superb act of irony or willful ignorance, the entertainment industry (and Congress) fails to note that the very technologies it lobbies (or votes) against are the ones that continue to make it so profitable over time.  Technological innovations such as the VCR, DVR, iTunes, NetFlix, and yet-to-be-discovered (or invented) services all contribute to the long-term success of the entertainment industry by allowing customers to enjoy entertainment products in a manner conducive to and consistent with the modern age and societal expectations.  For example, the launch of iTunes as the de facto Internet site to purchase music was a direct response to the rampant theft of music over the Internet in the late 1990s when Napster, GnuTella, Limewire, and other services met an emerging customer need (portabilityof a purchased music to multiple devices and over the Internet) that the recording industry chose to ignore. iTunes transformed that mostly criminal venture – obtaining and sharing music over the Internet – into the recording industry’s standard, if not preferred, method of distributing commercial music to customers.

Unfortunately. any new technology in the hands of average customers absolutely terrifies the entertainment industry. An insane fear of ‘piracy’ and zealous desire to protect its digital products at all costs have contributed to the imposition of restrictive technology controls, laws, and legislative proposals that created the uproar we see currently over SOPA and PIPA. Similar efforts over time explain why customers couldn’t easily duplicate VHS tapes in the 1980s, or DVDs in the 1990s, and are forced to watch un-skippable FBI “Anti Piracy Warnings” on DVDs and Blu-Rays in the 2000s.  It’s why you hear terms like ‘safe harbour’, ‘circumvention’, HDMI, HDCP, DRM, TCP, CSS, TPM, ‘analog holes’, ‘broadcast flags’, and things called ‘content protection’ inflicted upon our computers, monitors, video cards, iPods, cell phones, home theater systems, movies, music, and other digital products we might place on our various ‘authorised devices.’ It’s why since 2005 you risk arrest on federal felony charges if you take a photos or quick movie clips of a relative in a movie theater and happen to also catch a film playing in the background.[25] Why? Because you might be a criminal looking to steal digital content.  Even if you’re not, you might be. But that chance that you might be a criminal means everyone must be considered and treated as one, too — and why every new piece of consumer technology is considered by the entertainment industry as a potential Weapon of Mass Infringement. [26]   Remember that in 1982 the former MPAA president famously equated the VCR to the Boston Strangler [27] in terms of endangering the future success of the film industry; yet despite the proliferation of VCRs, DVRs, and streaming video services in the years since, that same industry reported record profits in 2010!

Effectively working together to counter online copyright infringement requires trust — trust in the data presented, and trust in the trustworthiness of those you are working with. Sadly, the entertainment industry repeatedly demonstrates it is not to be trusted — and the flawed statistics endlessly cited to further its agenda confirms this belief, as does its repeated inability to work with people and groups whose views differ from their own.  Those working to develop lasting solutions to the very real problem of contemporary copyright infringement must strive towards a mutually acceptable resolution to this problem and realise that a winner-take-all scorched-earth outcome may not be an appropriate solution. Legislation and treaties regarding copyright enforcement that raise serious concerns about Internet security, stability, and constitutionality (i.e., SOPA, PIPA, ACTA) must not be developed in secret by a committee of selected lobbyists but rather in full view of the public and with input from qualified external subject matter experts representing all sides of the issue.  Finally, to reach such a solution, the entertainment industry must abolish its practice of treating its paying customers as potential criminals and overcome its paranoia about technologies that it doesn’t yet control or influence heavily[28][29].

Unlike Silicon Valley, Hollywood considers ‘innovation’ as the process of lobbying for newer and more stringent controls over information and the flow of information in modern society. By clinging to its own version of reality, the entertainment industry demonstrates that it prefers to inflict lasting damage on the rest of the world to protect its antiquated Industrial Age business models rather than evolve with the modern world and so-called Information Age. Moreover, I posit that the entertainment industry’s ongoing and frequently controversial efforts to deal with what it purports to be an apocalyptic threat of ‘piracy’ merely are attempts to justify its legitimacy and self-perceived relevance in a world where the capabilities of quality production, marketing, and distribution of entertainment and other digital products now exist in the hands of Every Man[30][31] and not exclusively One Man[32][33].

Sources.[1] http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.3261[2] http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/text[3] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/report-acta-secrecy-is-all-the-united-states-fault.ars[4] https://www.eff.org/document/law-professors-letter-sopa[5] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/internet-inventors-warn-against-sopa-and-pipa[6] http://www.gamepolitics.com/2012/01/04/smith-says-reddit-sopa-protestors-are-039not-legitimate-or-large-number039 [7] http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57349913-281/godaddy-bows-to-boycott-now-opposes-sopa-copyright-bill/[8] http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71697.html[9] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57362990-501465/sopa-is-dead-smith-pulls-bill/[10]  http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/harry-reid-pipa-sopa-mpaa-blackout-283549[11] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120120/14472117492/mpaa-directly-publicly-threatens-politicians-who-arent-corrupt-enough-to-stay-bought.shtml[12] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/pirates-of-the-canadians/article735563/singlepage/#articlecontent[13] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10213367-38.html[14] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5395218.stm[15] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/19/opinion/rogue-web-sites.html[16]http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/03/mpaa_box_office_bragging.html[17] http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/01/the-itunes-effect-and-the-futu.html[18]http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/02/news/companies/napster_music_industry/[19] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-government-finally-admits-most-piracy-estimates-are-bogus.ars(The GAO Report is @ http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-423)[20] http://torrentfreak.com/private-anti-piracy-investigator-spills-the-beans-111003/[21] http://www.itworld.com/security/242587/best-evidence-showing-we-need-sopa-based-govt-studies-never-existed[22] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120105/04462117287/rep-lamar-smith-decides-lying-about-insulting-dismissing-opposition-to-sopa-is-winning-strategy.shtml[23]http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120112/09203917388/insane-entitlement-emi-sues-irish-govt-not-passing-sopa-like-censorship-law.shtml[24] http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/205491-consumer-group-accuses-hollywood-of-threatening-politicians[25] http://consumerist.com/2009/12/charged-with-felony-after-taping-4-minutes-of-new-moon.html[26] http://www.mpaa.org/contentprotection/camcorder-laws[27] http://cryptome.org/hrcw-hear.htm[28] http://www.dvdforum.org/about-mission.htm[29] http://www.digital-cp.com/about_dcp[30] http://www.apple.com/[31] http://www.youtube.com/[32] http://www.riaa.com/[33] http://www.mpaa.org/

How Libertarian Dogmatists Are Sabotaging Ron Paul’s Campaign

(I'm neither for or against Ron Paul at this point, but this is an interesting article.--jef)

An Opportunity Gone to Waste

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

If Ron Paul’s libertarian handlers and support base could escape their ideology, Ron Paul could be much better positioned to win the Republican nomination.

Here are some suggestions.

Ron Paul should be making the point that Social Security and Medicare are threatened by multi-trillion dollar wars that are funded by debt, by bailouts of a deregulated banking system, and by money creation to keep the banks afloat. Libertarians support deregulation, but their position has always been that deregulated industries must not be bailed out with public subsidies, much less subsidies that are so extensive that they threaten government solvency and the value of the currency.

Instead of hitting hard on the serious threat to Social Security and Medicare posed by Obama and Republican candidates for the nomination, all of whom serve Wall Street, the military/security complex, and the Israel Lobby, Ron Paul has been positioned both by his supporters and his opponents as the danger to Social Security and Medicare. This is an amazing strategic mistake by the Ron Paul campaign.

The mistake is somewhat understandable. Ron Paul’s supporters are mainly among the young. The importance to them of Social Security and Medicare will not register for many years, but for the vast majority of the population Social Security and Medicare are essential for survival. A candidate who is positioned as the destroyer of what scant economic protection the American elderly have is not positioned to win an election for president.

Many libertarians regard Social Security and Medicare as welfare handouts and as Ponzi schemes, when in fact these programs are a form of private property. People pay for these programs all their working lives, just as they pay premiums for private medical policies and make their deposits into private pension plans. Libertarians are great defenders of private property, so why don’t they defend the elderly’s private property rights in Social Security and Medicare benefits? Social Security and Medicare are contracts that government made with citizens. These contracts are as valid and enforceable as any other contracts. If Social Security and Medicare are in dire trouble, why is the government wasting trillions of dollars in behalf of private armaments industries, a neocon ideology, and Israel’s territorial ambitions? Why isn’t this question the most important issue in the campaign?

Instead, in a decade that has seen two massive stock market crashes and an amazing amount of financial fraud, libertarians prattle on about privatizing Social Security and about how much larger the retirement pensions would be. They speak about delaying the Social Security retirement age to 70 without any thought to what a person does who is retired by his employer at 65. People who suggest making Social Security and Medicare off limits until people reach 70 need to have a look at the cost of private medical plans for older people. A group plan with Blue Cross Blue Shield Florida for a 64-year old woman has a $18,000 premium, large deductibles per medical issue, and a 20 per cent co-pay. Even a person with private insurance faces potentially ruinous health care expenses.

Libertarians will not wait to think before they inform me that private savings are funded but Social Security and Medicare are not. They are incorrect on both accounts.

Social Security and Medicare are funded with a payroll tax. It is true that the government has stolen the funds, spent them, and left non-marketable IOU’s in their place. But in our deregulated casino financial system with street registration of “securities,” the same thing happens to private holdings. Where is the money that individuals had in MF Global? What happened to people’s savings invested with Madoff? What happened to Enron’s investors? Can AIG make good on its promises to pay the benefits that people have purchased? Can banks whose balance sheets are loaded with subprime derivatives make good on their depositors’ accounts? US government debt is a component of many private pension plans. How secure are the values of Treasury bonds?

The notion that free unregulated markets are totally trustworthy is the enormous mistake that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan made, for which American and European peoples continue to pay. Libertarians endorse this fantastic mistake to the hilt.

This is not meant to be an attack on libertarians. Rather, it is an explanation of some of their mistakes. There is much to admire about libertarians. They believe in civil liberty, that is, in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. They understand that government cannot substitute for the market. I know a lot about libertarians. I was associated with them for years, serving for several years as Distinguished Scholar at the Cato Institute until I was run off for independent thinking.

Libertarians are sectarian, and their tolerance does not extend beyond their ideology.

The biggest mistake that libertarians make is the way they view government and private sectors. Government is the root of all evil, and the private sector is the source of all good. Libertarians have never figured out that people are the same whether in the government or in the private sector. They will abuse their power regardless of where they perch. That is why government needs to be tied down by the Constitution and the private sector by regulation. Yes, regulation can go too far. Certainly, deregulation has gone too far.

The ongoing financial crisis from deregulation and ongoing jobs crisis from offshoring constitute empirical evidence that the belief is false that an unfettered private sector is the source of all good.

Some readers misunderstood the point of my previous column, “America’s Last Chance.” I am endorsing the U.S. Constitution and making the point that Ron Paul is the only candidate for president in either party who is committed to resurrecting the Constitution. Without the Constitution we cease to be American citizens and become subjects of a tyrannical police state. My complaint is that the only candidate who could bring back the Constitution cannot be elected because of the inflexibility and sectarianism of his base. Possibly there are more worthy third party candidates, but they have no prospect of visibility. Ron Paul is visible, and the opportunity is going to waste.

I hope readers will spare me their comments about how important their various single issues are. There are many important things. The question is: what is the over-riding important thing?

Civil Liberty, essentially the accountability of government to law that serves to protect the innocent, is the historic achievement of the English over many centuries from its beginnings with the foundation for common law established by Alfred the Great in the 9th century through Magna Carta in the 13th century to the Glorious Revolution in the 17th century. If this human achievement is lost, it is unlikely to be resurrected. If the Constitution that Bush and Obama have murdered stays in its grave one more presidential term, no one will be able to re-establish the Constitution’s authority.

And please, no prattle from libertarians about “natural rights.” The only rights we have
are rights achieved by centuries of human struggle that we have the wits and strength to retain.

And no prattle from left-wingers who denounce the Constitution for not protecting slaves and native Indians. The Constitution did not establish universal justice. The Constitution protected the people covered by it. Over time rights were extended. During the past decade the Constitution lost its power. Today rights depend on the subjective opinion of the executive branch. This is tyranny. We should be unified in our opposition to tyranny.

War Abroad; Austerity at Home

Drowning in Hypocrisy

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

The US government is so full of self-righteousness that it has become a caricature of hypocrisy.  Leon Panetta, a former congressman who Obama appointed CIA director and now head of the Pentagon, just told the sailors on the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier, that the US is maintaining a fleet of 11 aircraft carriers in order to project sea power against Iran and to convince Iran that “it’s better for them to try to deal with us through diplomacy.”

If it requires 11 aircraft carriers to deal with Iran, how many will Panetta need to project power against Russia and China?  But to get on with the main point, Iran has been trying “to deal with us through diplomacy.”  The response from Washington has been belligerent threats of military attack, unfounded and irresponsible accusations that Iran is making a nuclear weapon, sanctions and an oil embargo. Washington’s accusations echo Israel’s and are contradicted by Washington’s own intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency.  Why doesn’t Washington respond to Iran in a civilized manner with diplomacy?  Really, which of the two countries is the greatest threat to peace?

Washington sends the FBI to raid the homes of peace activists and puts a grand jury to work to create a case against them for aiding a nebulous enemy by protesting Washington’s wars. The Department of Homeland Security unleashes goon cop thugs to brutalize peaceful Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. Washington fabricates cases against Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Tarek Mehanna that negate the First Amendment by equating free speech with terrorism and spying. Chicago mayor and former Obama White House chief-of-staff, Rahm Israel Emanuel, pushes an ordinance that outlaws public protests in the City of Chicago. The list goes on.  And in the midst of it all Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other Washington hypocrites accuse Russia and China of stifling dissent.

Washington’s grotesque hypocrisy goes unremarked by the American “media” and in the debates for the Republican presidential  nomination. The corrupt Obama “Justice” Department turns a blind eye while goon cop thugs commit gratuitous violence against the citizens who pay the goon cop thugs’ undeserved salaries.

But it is in the War Crimes Arena where Washington shows the greatest hypocrisy. The self-righteous bigots in Washington are forever rounding up heads of weak states whose countries were afflicted by civil wars and sending them off to be tried as war criminals. All the while Washington indiscriminately kills large numbers of civilians in six or more countries, dismissing its own war crimes as “collateral damage.” Washington violates its own law and international law by torturing people.

On January 13, 2012, Carol Rosenberg of McClatchy Newspapers reported that Spanish judge Pablo Rafael Ruz Gutierrez re-launched an investigation into Washington’s torture of prisoners in Guantanamo Prison. The previous day British authorities opened an investigation into CIA renditions of kidnapped persons to Libya for torture.

Rosenberg reports that although the Obama regime has refused to investigate the obvious crimes of the Bush regime, and one might add its own obvious crimes, “other countries are still interested in determining whether Bush-era anti-terror practices violated international law.”

There is no question that Bush/Cheney/Obama have trashed the US Constitution, US statutory law, and international law.  But Washington, having overthrown justice, has established that might is right. No foreign government is going to send its forces into the US to drag the war criminals out and place them on trial.

The War Criminal Court at the Hague is reserved for Washington’s show trials.  No foreign government is going to pay Washington several hundred millions of dollars to turn Bush, Cheney, Obama and their minions over to them in the way the US bought Milosevic from Serbia in order to create the necessary spectacle at the War Crimes Tribunal  to justify Washington’s naked aggression against Serbia.

No government can be perfect, because all governments are composed of humans, especially those humans most attracted by power and profit.  Nevertheless, in my lifetime I have witnessed an extraordinary deterioration in the integrity of government in the United States.  We have reached the point where nothing that our government says is believable. Not even the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, the GDP growth rate, much less Washington’s reasons for its wars, its police state, and its foreign and domestic policies.

Washington has kept America at war for ten years while millions of Americans lost their jobs and their homes. War and a faltering economy have exploded the national debt, and a looming bankruptcy is being blamed on Social Security and Medicare.

The pursuit of war continues. On January 23 Washington’s servile puppets–the EU member states–did Washington’s bidding and imposed an oil embargo on Iran, despite the pleas of Greece, a member of the EU. Greece’s final ruin will come from the higher oil prices from the embargo, as the Greek government realizes.

The embargo is a reckless act. If the US navy tries to intercept oil tankers carrying Iranian oil, large scale war could break out. This, many believe, is Washington’s aim.

It is easy for an embargo to become a blockade, which is an act of war. Remember how easily the UN Security Council’s “no-fly zone” over Libya was turned by the US and its NATO puppets into a military attack on Libya’s armed forces and population centers supportive of Gaddafi.

As the western “democracies” become increasingly lawless, the mask of law that imperialism wears is stripped away and with it the sheen of morality that has been used to cloak hegemonic ambitions. With Iran surrounded and with two of Washington’s fleets in the Persian Gulf, another war of aggression seems inevitable.

Experts say that an attack on Iran by the US and NATO will disrupt the flow of oil that the world needs.  The crazed drive for hegemony is so compelling that Washington and its EU puppets show no hesitation in putting their own struggling economies at risk of sharply rising energy costs.

War abroad and austerity at home is the policy that is being imposed on the western “democracies.”

WWJThink...

Raise your hands if you think this guy was pro-capital punishment or pro-torture...--jef

Don’t Drink the Water

(So, fracking was invented in the town where I live. Great...--jef)


Drillers are furious about reports backing up claims of poisoned groundwater.
FW WEEKLY - WEDNESDAY, 25 JANUARY 2012
PETER GORMAN


When Jeff Locker looks out over his 1,500 acres of land just outside Pavillion, Wyo., he remembers what it used to look like: three horses in the corral, fields of barley and alfalfa bending in the breeze. These days the view from every window looks out over nearby shale gas wells, his own contaminated water wells, and an empty pasture: He stopped keeping horses after two of them died from nerve damage after drinking from a large plastic stock tank fed by his well. His wife is suffering from extreme neuropathy — he describes it a shooting nerve pain that radiates from the base of her spine or up her shins — that also came on after she drank the well water.


Locker is not alone in his problems. Louis Meeks lost cattle, horses, and sheep after they drank from contaminated stock tanks.


And there are others. The sparsely populated gas field northeast of Pavillion has become a national focal point in the battle raging between the natural gas industry and those who say they’ve suffered severe damage due to that industry, from illnesses to contaminated groundwater to loss of property value.


Until now, the gas industry has been able to deflect much of the hue and cry over its alleged poisoning of groundwater sources. Drillers have claimed that there was never any proof that hydraulic fracturing — blasting millions of gallons of water mixed with sand and dangerous chemicals thousands of feet underground to blow open shale deposits to free trapped natural gas — has ever contaminated a single well. In those cases where it’s been apparent that the industry’s actions absolutely did contaminate water supplies — including several cases in North Texas — gas companies have simply bought the properties and had the former owners sign nondisclosure agreements, meaning they can’t say they’ve been bought out because of contamination.


But the argument began to change in 2009, when the Environmental Protection Agency decided to investigate the Pavillion gas field. The EPA action came at the urging of the Earthworks’ Oil and Gas Accountability project, people like Locker and Meeks, and the Powder River Basin Resource Council, an organization devoted to protecting Wyoming’s environment from irresponsible development.


The area was quickly designated an EPA Superfund site, meaning that it has been found to be contaminated with hazardous chemicals and that the EPA will try to determine who is responsible so that they can be legally forced to clean up the mess.


The EPA’s findings, released as a draft last month, clearly lay the blame at the feet of the gas industry and in particular, Encana Corporation, the gas field owner around Pavillion.


The agency found that natural gas and dangerous chemicals were migrating through local aquifers. More importantly the EPA discovered, via its own monitoring wells, that man-made chemicals used exclusively for hydraulic fracturing are showing up in the water.


In other words, these chemicals couldn’t have come from some sort of natural source or even another man-made source, but only from gas drilling. It was the first time that a direct scientific link has been made between gas drilling and groundwater contamination.


Not surprisingly, Encana and the industry are fighting back, arguing that the EPA’s findings are flawed on several grounds. The impact on their industry — and the worldwide natural gas supply situation — could be tremendous, if the EPA’s findings are upheld.


At stake are shale plays all around the country that have not been allowed to proceed until the gas industry proves it can drill without contaminating water supplies. Not to mention the blowback in places like Texas, where landowners across the Barnett Shale and other shale areas could conceivably use the EPA’s findings as a basis for damage suits and actions to prevent or stop drilling activities. The Natural Resources Defense Council has a list of 36 places around the country — including nine in the Barnett Shale — where landowners believe that gas fracking has contaminated their water wells.


One of those problem areas in North Texas, involving three homeowners in Hill County, stopped being a problem after the drillers, Williams Production–Gulf Coast Co., purchased all of the affected property. A second local case, involving possible contamination by Range Resources of water wells in Parker County is an ongoing legal battle.


Another contaminated property in North Texas is part of a broader review being conducted by the EPA to be released later this year. Drilling activist Tim Ruggiero said the land he formerly owned in Wise County is included in a review by the EPA of seven regions of the country, regarding fracking’s effects on groundwater. Ruggiero’s land was initially contaminated by a series of spills in 2009 and 2010. Eventually, his water well was poisoned with methane, and the gas also began bubbling up from other sections of his property.


“I don’t think any new science would have changed anything for my family,” he said. “We got them [the EPA] involved early on, but they didn’t even begin to do any testing until the second year of production.”


Deborah Rogers, who brought attention to drilling-related pollution on her Fort Worth-area goat farm several years ago, said she’s not surprised by the industry reaction. “Of course industry is [denying] it,” she said. “The industry stands to lose so much money now. They’ve kept this cat in the bag for so long they have nothing left to do but deny, deny, deny.”


Jerry Lobdill, a retired Fort Worth physicist who has long studied the gas drilling operations around Fort Worth, agreed. “The industry will try to ignore the EPA study and continue with the mantra that there has never been a proven contamination by a gas well. The industry is criminal.”


The groundwater contamination report could turn out to be only the first of several scientific body-blows to the industry. Scientists in Ohio have recently determined that an injection well — the industry’s main method for disposing of its toxic wastes — is the cause of 11 earthquakes there in the last year. The wells shoot the chemical-laden liquid, under extremely high pressure, into formations far below water-bearing strata.


That finding, in turn, comes on the heels of new concerns that sucking out so much gas, as well as extracting vast quantities of water from aquifers to use in drilling, could cause the ground above those aquifers and gas patches to settle. That might not matter much out in the country, but it would be devastating to urban areas that have been heavily drilled, like Fort Worth. In fact, one geologist said, the long history of oil and gas drilling and water extraction in the North Texas geologic zone that includes the Barnett Shale has already led to settling in some parts of the region.


The Powder River Basin, a high-plains region that spans northeast Wyoming and southeast Montana, is home to the largest coal reserves in the U.S. The high mountain desert is also ecologically important, providing habitat to 10 threatened or endangered species. Within the basin’s 24,000 square miles is the Wind River Indian Reservation, home to portions of the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone Tribes. The tiny town of Pavillion (population about 170) and its gas field lie within the reservation’s boundaries. Nearby reservation land, outside of the Pavillion gas patch proper, has also been heavily drilled.

These vials of contaminated well water are samples from DISH, Texas.

The geology of the area is a complex series of sandy crusts folded back on themselves, creating pockets of water and natural gas. Because of the sand pockets, groundwater is not a continuous aquifer. Gas migrates up through the sandy formations in plumes. According to a report by Encana Corp., that occurs because there is no solid cap rock between the deep natural gas deposits and the shallower water-bearing levels. Drillers have brought in gas wells as shallow as 1,100 feet.

The first gas well was drilled in 1960. Locker, who has lived in the area his whole life and bought his current farm in 1988, said his well water was good until about 1998, when Tom Brown Inc., which owned the gas field, began replacing the casing on a well about 1,000 feet from his water source.

“One day while they were working out there, the well just went bad,” he said. “You couldn’t stand to smell it or taste it. I asked the fellow what he’d done to the water, and he denied doing anything. And it’s been a battle ever since.”

His well water “was fine for 10 years ’til it went bad, and when it went bad, it was almost overnight,” he said.

Locker and his family continued to bathe with the water, but he began hauling in drinking water — and kept hauling it for 12 years. At one point he even bought a $10,000 whole-house reverse osmosis unit to clean the contaminated water for bathing. “But I still wouldn’t drink it. Neither would my son. But my wife did. She thought the unit made it drinkable. But about six months after she started drinking it, she got very sick with extreme neuropathy.” That was more than five years ago, he said, and she’s suffered with it ever since. “Nerve damage doesn’t heal; it’s just a question of pain management.”

Encana bought the field in 2004. Between then and the end of 2007, the company drilled 44 new gas wells, bringing the total in the field to 125. The company also inherited several old production pits — large open-air pits dug to store drilling waste, much of it toxic — that Encana never used. The company discovered groundwater contamination seeping from those pits and in 2005 began trying to remediate the problem, a process that’s still going on.

But the presence of a big-name outfit like Encana didn’t put an end to the growing water well contamination in the area.

In late 2004, Meeks, a former gas and oilfield worker, said Encana “drilled a well 500 feet from my house. They completed it — fracked it — in January 2005, and in early February my water went bad.”

When Meeks complained to Encana, he said, the company immediately brought a water tank to his home and hooked it up. “They got the tank to me in March, I think, and they took care of all my house water needs. But then in October they decided it wasn’t their fault my well went bad, and they pulled the tank.”

Meeks brought in a private company to drill a new well, hoping the water would be usable. At the initial completion depth of 180 feet, the water was “horrible. It was filled with floating things, bad smell, just rotten. It was really just production water from the gas drilling.”

Meeks told the water well driller to go deeper. The well reached 540 feet and a new water pocket. “We decided to clean out the hole — we’d already dropped the casing pipe in and had it cemented — to see what kind of water we had,” he said. But when they’d cleaned out the drilling mud and old water with air pressure to about half the water well’s depth, foamy gas began coming up with the water.

“It was thick. If there was a spark, we would have died,” Meeks said. “It came up with the water, and it kept flowing, right over the top of the wellbore. ”

The escaping gas posed enough of a danger that the sheriff’s department closed three roads to keep traffic away. Three days after the gassy water began to escape, Encana plugged Meeks’ well.

“There was so much gas coming out of my water well,” Meeks said, laughing, “that when they plugged it, production on their three closest gas wells tripled.”

Even though he can laugh about it now, Meeks said the situation was terrifying at the time. He could see his home exploding at any minute — but he couldn’t get any help from either Encana or state agencies.

“They called me a troublemaker at first and then a liar,” Meeks said. “Encana actually told people I threatened to shoot the drillers. But I knew I wasn’t wrong. I worked the gas fields. They just didn’t drill this field right. The gas wells were communicating with the water wells. Gas was just flowing into the aquifers.”

Locker, Meeks, and others in the area formed the Pavillion Area Concerned Citizens group to try to get their problems taken seriously. The organization contacted the Powder River Basin Resource Council, which contacted Earthworks’ Oil and Gas Accountability Project. Together they were finally able to get the attention of the EPA.

In March 2009, the EPA sampled 39 private water wells in the area and two municipal wells. The municipal wells in the town of  Pavillion several miles from the gas field were clean, but 11 of the private water wells were found to have traces of contaminants, including methane, oil, and metals. Three of the wells contained a chemical used in hydraulic fracturing. Residents in the area were told not to drink or cook with the water, and to open the windows in their bathrooms before showering to prevent explosions from a buildup of methane.

Encana, through the Wyoming Rural Water Association, began supplying drinking water to anyone in the area who requested it. Locker gets 75 gallons of drinking water every two weeks.

“Twelve years of hauling water, and the EPA shows up, and suddenly Encana can supply drinking water,” he said. “How about that?”

Shortly after the EPA’s initial report was released, Wilma Subra, the Louisiana biochemist who has been studying the health effects of gas drilling activities for years, conducted a voluntary health report in the area. What she found was an array of problems very much like what she’d already encountered in other shale gas areas, including the North Texas town of DISH and the Marcellus Shale in the northeastern United States.

“The health survey correlated the symptoms of people with the chemicals found in the drinking water and air associated with gas drilling. There were both acute and chronic symptoms, from rashes to headaches to neurological disorders and cancers,” she said. More than 90 percent of the survey participants reported symptoms that are known effects of the chemicals identified in the wells studied by the EPA.

Deb Thomas, spokesperson for the resource council, said that gas field residents were relieved and thrilled that the EPA came in.

“Some of those people had been trying for more than 10 years to get someone to pay attention to their problems, and they were continually told that there were no problems,” she said. “The fact that someone took them seriously, and that science was utilized to determine that something was indeed terribly wrong, was a vindication for them.”

 ********

The initial study of the Pavillion gas field was only the start for the EPA. In 2010 the agency declared it a Superfund site and decided to continue to keep tabs on the shallow water wells and to also drill two deep water wells of its own to monitor what was going on. Those wells were drilled to 775 feet, roughly the depth of the deepest domestic water wells in the area, but several hundred feet above the shallowest gas well.

The EPA found that several of the old production pits inherited by Encana were indeed contributing to groundwater contamination of the shallowest water wells, some of which are only about 100 feet deep. According to the EPA draft report released on Dec. 8, “high concentrations of benzene, xylenes, gasoline range organics, diesel range organics, and … hydrocarbons” were strong indications that the pits were causing part of the problem.

The shallow groundwater con-tamination from the old production pits had been expected, but there were also problems with deeper water wells not associated with the pits. In several, the EPA “identified contaminants of concern,” including low levels of hydrocarbons and high levels of methane.

While the levels of hydrocarbons and other chemicals were found to be “generally below established health and safety standards,” they were high enough to draw another agency’s concern. The Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, reviewed the EPA data and reiterated the warnings about not drinking the well water or cooking with it and ensuring there was plenty of ventilation while showering.

The EPA determined that the presence of the chemicals in the water was being caused by “migration from areas of gas production” and suggested three ways that migration might be occurring. They included compromised wellbores or poor wellbore casing, frack fluid flowing into porous sandstone formations, and the creation of new fractures or enlargement of existing fractures in the strata during the fracking process, allowing gas and frack fluids to migrate upward. The draft report did not attempt to determine which of the three mechanisms was responsible for the well contamination.

The most serious findings by the EPA came from its own deep monitoring wells. The water from those wells contained high levels of methane, benzene concentrations 50 times above Safe Drinking Water Act standards, and an array of synthetic chemicals “like glycols and alcohols consistent with gas production and hydraulic fracking fluids.”

The implications of the EPA findings could be vast for the gas industry and those who live near the gas fields. While drillers can rectify poorly constructed or compromised wellbores, if fracking can be proven to open up new fractures or widen existing ones, allowing gas and other chemicals to migrate upward and contaminate aquifers, public officials could decide to ban drilling altogether in some places. (Not of course, likely to happen in Texas, where the oil and gas industry wields such power.) In places like New York state, where gas companies want to drill near aquifers that supply New York and New Jersey with drinking water, public reaction against drilling is likely to be strong.

Recognizing the risks they face, the industry is fighting back. Editorials and guest columns on television and in newspapers and hundreds of industry web sites decried the study’s findings.

The Wall Street Journal, on Dec. 20, in an editorial titled “The EPA’s Fracking Scare,” pointed out alleged errors in the study and questioned the integrity of the EPA itself. “Nothing would shut down drilling faster, and destroy billions of dollars of investment, than media interviews with mothers afraid to let their kids brush their teeth with polluted water. So the EPA study needs to be carefully reviewed,” the editorial said. It went on to warn, “The agency is dominated by anti-carbon true believers, and the Obama administration has waged a campaign to raise the price and limit the production of fossil fuels.”

Encana essentially pooh-poohed the entire study. “The EPA found no domestic water wells that have any oil or gas impact,” Encana spokesman Doug Hock told Fort Worth Weekly. “They found traces of diesel range organics. And what was found on further investigation was that none of those diesel range organics were related to oil or gas. They also found methane. But there is a lot of methane near the surface there.”

Hock also derided the deep monitoring well findings. “The EPA dug two deep wells into a gas formation and found gas, which we think is normal,” he said.

He conceded that the production pits’ contaminants might affect shallow groundwater but insisted that they are not in proximity to the gas wells Encana itself has drilled. And, he said, “We’ve been working on remediation of those [pits] for some time.”

In a December press release the company claimed that many of the EPA’s findings from the monitoring wells are “conjecture, not factual, and only serve to trigger undue alarm.” Encana went on to suggest that some of the samples could have been compromised by sloppy collection and handling by the EPA.

Kim Feil, an anti-drilling activist from Arlington, said Encana’s reaction is par for the course. “I’m not even surprised that they [Encana] went so far as to say the EPA testers themselves probably caused the contamination they were reporting.”

The Encana release noted that the EPA’s findings have not yet been scientifically peer-reviewed and suggested they won’t hold up to scrutiny. The EPA responded to that charge by reiterating that the report is a draft, subject to a period of public questioning to be followed by scientific peer-review.

EPA spokesman Larry Jackson, in response to Encana’s charges, told the Weekly that “the deeper part of the drinking water aquifer used by Pavillion residents is highly contaminated with constituents that are best explained as resulting from gas production practices, including hydraulic fracturing … . The samples from the wells included not only petroleum-related compounds at very high concentrations, but also synthetic chemicals such as alcohols and glycols that do not occur naturally in groundwater, whether in proximity to a gas field or not. These chemicals are known to have been used in fracturing fluids in this field based on data provided by Encana.”

Richard Mylott, another EPA spokesman, said it’s important to note that “the draft report findings are specific to Pavillion, where … production conditions are different from those in many other parts of the country.”

Pavillion gas wells, for instance, are considerably shallower than those in the Barnett Shale, and they are vertical, not horizontal. Many in the gas industry suggest that even if the EPA findings hold up and a link is established between gas drilling and water contamination in Pavillion, it wouldn’t be applicable in areas of deeper drilling.

Officials with the Texas Railroad Commission, which oversees the state’s oil and gas industry, did not respond to an e-mail request asking whether the Pavillion study could affect drilling here. However, commission chairwoman Elizabeth Ames Jones is on the record as saying, “Hydraulic fracturing does not go on close to the surface here, and it would be impossible [for gas or drilling wastes] to migrate up from miles below the earth to the water table.”

Alisa Rich, owner of Wolf Eagle Environmental, which did the air studies for DISH and elsewhere, thinks that is nonsense. “Encana suggests that methane migrates in the Pavillion gas field naturally and leaves it at that. And yes, gas can migrate,” she said. “But most gas has to be stimulated to be released, particularly if the volume of gas increases substantially.”

That stimulation could be caused by underground tremors that open fissures in shale formations. But, Rich said, when water wells have historically never had methane contamination, and suddenly there are large volumes of methane coming up with the water near hydraulic fracking, “then there is a fairly logical hypothesis that can be made that that stimulation had an effect on the geology to cause those increases.”

Even with the deeper gas wells typical in the Barnett, stimulation through fracking could produce the same result, she said. “If someone fracks below an aquifer and that aquifer doesn’t have a confined bottom — if it’s contained in sandstone, for instance — the gas set free could very well migrate up and into that aquifer.”

Rich noted that it would be almost impossible for the man-made chemicals found in the water from Pavillion’s deep monitoring wells to have gotten there except through fracking.

Dozens of cases have been reported around the country of water wells getting contaminated from deep fracking. Amy Mall, a staff member of the National Resources Defense Council, keeps an ongoing list of such contamination reports. Of the 36 cases detailed on her blog, nine are in the Barnett Shale.

Don Young’s bumper sticker says it all.

“And those are only the cases where people made a public issue of it,” Mall said. “So often we don’t hear about water contamination because the gas companies responsible make a settlement with the affected well owner that includes a non-disclosure agreement.”

How many more cases are out there? AScientific American article published last October cited a Duke University study from earlier in 2011 that found “methane levels in dozens of drinking-water wells within a kilometer [3,280 feet] of new fracking sites were 17 times higher than in wells farther away.”

Calvin Tillman, the former mayor of DISH, at the epicenter of the Barnett Shale, said that he’s glad the EPA has finally gotten into the fray. “I think it’s a big step for a governmental agency to come out and show what everybody has been thinking,” he said. “No one ever had the smoking gun before, and we do. Hopefully that will help improve situations around the country where gas is being drilled.”

Sharon Wilson, coordinator for Earthworks’ Texas Oil and Gas Accountability Project and author of the BlueDaze: Drilling Reform web site, said she’s glad that the EPA’s Pavillion study was done. But, she said,  “None of this stuff is new to people who live in the gas patch. We know that gas drilling is contaminating our water and our air. The problem is that ordinary people cannot afford to bear the burden of proof against the richest industry on the planet.”

Wilson sees the EPA’s Pavillion study as a first step in shifting the burden of proof from the affected citizens to the industry, “where it should be. Private citizens shouldn’t have to spend millions of dollars to prove that industry polluted their water.” If the gas industry comes in and pollution follows closely on their heels, she said, “it should be on the backs of the industry to prove that they didn’t cause it.”

She cited the Parker County case, where Range Resources is accused of polluting water wells so badly that residents’ tap water became flammable. “The EPA simply shifted the burden onto Range by issuing an ‘imminent and substantial endangerment’ order and told Range they had to prove they had not polluted those wells.

“The industry claims to have a record of clean work,” she said. “What they really have is a record of pollution and non-disclosure agreements.”

Drilling itself is far from the only source of environmental troubles posed by the shale gas industry. There are two other areas where recent developments are undercutting the industry’s denials of environmental damage — and strengthening the resolve of activists. Both concern what drilling is doing to the stability of the ground itself.

 ********

The quake in Youngstown, Ohio, hit on New Year’s Eve, but its effects could reverberate far longer and further than the temblor itself.

The 4.0 magnitude quake originated directly below an injection well. The next day, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources shut down the well. It was the 11th earthquake originating below the well site since March 2011 and the strongest.

Injection wells have been suspected of causing earthquakes in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and North Texas, but the Youngstown well was the first to be outfitted with sensors to actually track that relationship.

John Armbruster, a seismologist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, was involved in interpreting the findings. “The well opened in December 2010, and the first earthquake occurred three months later,” he said. “In November 2011, after the ninth earthquake happened, Ohio officials asked the university for scientific help.”

Armbruster and his colleagues installed four seismographs in the area. “And then on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve when we recorded earthquakes, we were able to determine that their epicenters were about 3,000 feet directly below where the gas wastewater and chemicals were being injected,” he said.

His team at Columbia monitors earthquakes in New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Experience, he said, has drawn his team to “understand the connection between injection wells and earthquakes. Simple reasoning makes you ask if that connection is possible. And as a scientist I have to say this link is accepted.”

Not every injection well is likely to cause quakes, Armbruster said — it depends on the geology. The Youngstown well was operating “only one kilometer from where some earthquakes were waiting to happen. It was an unlucky well.”

On the other hand, he said, every such well should be watched. “If it was up to me, I would monitor every injection well closely, and at the first sign of a [small] earthquake, I’d have them shut down before there were larger ones.

“Right now we’re in a situation where you inject into the well, and if it cries out with earthquakes, then you react,” he said.

The injection wells are more likely to cause quakes than the gas wells themselves, the seismologist said, because the waste-disposal wells are drilled so much deeper.

He also noted another potential geological danger associated with gas drilling. In areas where there has been heavy drilling or where huge quantities of water have been removed from an aquifer, the land might subside.

“Try to picture Southern California’s Imperial Valley. They’ve sucked so much water out of the aquifer there for so long that the entire valley has sunk about 30 feet,” he said. “I have not studied the Fort Worth situation, but it’s not impossible that there might one day be potential geological problems with sucking so much gas and water from beneath the city. If it settled, let’s say, 20 feet, certainly that could potentially cause serious problems. Would floors crack? Walls crack?”

The issue hasn’t gotten much coverage, but it’s not new either. More than a decade ago the U.S. Geological Survey released a paper noting that more than 17,000 square miles in 45 states had been affected by land subsidence and pinpointing water extraction as a cause of 80 percent of that. But mining for hydrocarbons was also mentioned as a reason: Subsidence in the Goose Creek oilfield near Galveston was first noted in the mid-1920s, for instance.

Fracking for gas severely affects the underground pressure of both aquifers and gas-bearing shale. On average, it takes three to five million gallons of water to frack a well in the Barnett Shale, and then huge amounts of gas are extracted, changing the pressure levels in underground geologic formations.

“It’s certainly possible that you’re going to have subsidence problems in Fort Worth,” said Lynn Highland, a geographer with the U.S.G.S. She said it is very difficult to predict where it would occur because of the time and expense needed to study the underground geology of an area. “But when you take that much water out of the ground and that much gas, you’re changing the integrity of what’s going on with the geology,” she said. “And once you do that, let’s just say that homeowners quickly find out that they’re generally not covered by homeowner’s insurance when subsidence occurs.”

Mark Engle, a research geologist with the same agency, said that subsidence is already happening in the Fort Worth Basin, a region that’s been heavily drilled for oil and gas for a long time, with fracking only the latest new twist. “So the question is how much more will occur because of hydraulic water fracturing? There is no way around the fact that we’re removing the infrastructure of the geology.”

********

In January 2011, Encana asked the EPA to suspend public comment on the draft report because the company did not get all of the data the EPA had used in compiling it. Two weeks later, the Pavillion Area Concerned Citizens wrote to the EPA urging the agency to continue its investigation in the area. That sentiment was supported by both Earthworks’ OGAP and the Powder River Basin Resource Council.

In their letter, Gwen Lachelt, director of Earthworks’ OGAP, called the accusations that the EPA is withholding data “a political ploy to cover up the results and bring a halt to the study. We’ve seen this time and again with industry shirking responsibility and the government turning its back on the people who bear the impact of energy development in our country.”

“The people of Pavillion are living on a pool of bubbling, frothing, toxic chemicals,” said Powder River spokesman Thomas. “It’s a very dangerous situation. I strongly believe that all those affected should have the opportunity to leave if they want to leave.”

“Everybody says I should leave,” Meeks said. “I know I should leave. But where would I get the money to buy another place? Everything I’ve got is wrapped up in this place, and I couldn’t sell it because it’s worthless now. And I’m angry. I have nothing against oil and gas if it’s done right. But done the way it’s been done here, well, it’s a human-rights violation.”

Longtime Fort Worth activist Don Young, who sounded the alarm on gas drilling when it first began here, isn’t surprised by either the pollution left in the wake of the gas drilling at Pavillion or the industry’s howls.

“I’m glad the EPA is there, and I hope they keep their investigation going, but what the industry is doing, and has always done, is plant the seed of doubt in the public’s mind: ‘The water is not our problem. Air contamination is not our problem. Earthquakes are not our problem.’ And it’s been an effective campaign, even though it’s a lie.

“I’m glad to see the EPA is finally planting a seed itself, that there is a connection between the contamination and the drilling,” he said. “It’s too bad those people had to suffer like that before that connection was made.

“What I said years ago remains true today: We can’t drink natural gas.”

The Jobless Recovery

The Consequences of Economic Illiteracy

by MARK WEISBROT

 

The U.S. recession "officially" ended in June of 2009, but most Americans don’t feel like we are in a recovery. That’s because it’s been a miniscule recovery, with the size of the economy just barely bigger today than it was four years ago, when the recession started.

Since America is a rich country, it is not growth itself that matters most but employment and, of course, the distribution of income. And the employment numbers are just terrible.

The simplest measure is the percentage of the working-age population that is employed. That peaked at 63.4 percent in December 2006. It plummeted to a low of 58.2 percent last July and is hardly different now – 58.5 percent in the latest figures.

What this means is that we need about 10 million jobs to get back to full employment. There was a lot of happy talk earlier this month when the December job numbers were released. They showed 200,000 payroll jobs added in December, and the unemployment rate falling to 8.5 percent. Adding even 200,000 jobs a month is not very good for an economy that needs at least 90,000-100,000 jobs a month just to keep up with the growth of the working-age population.

And as my colleague Dean Baker pointed out, the latest jobs numbers have probably been over-optimistic. Realistically, he notes, at present trends of job growth we will not hit full employment until 2028. This would be an economic failure of disastrous proportions.

Looking at it from the unemployment side, the U.S. government has a broader measure of unemployment that includes people who are involuntarily working part-time and people who have given up looking for work. This is currently at 15.2 percent of the labor force, or 23.7 million people who need work.

To make matters worse, we have had record numbers out of work for more than six months – more than 40 percent of the unemployed over the last two years. Long-term unemployment is much more devastating for workers and their families. And recent research shows that even this measure underestimates the current long-term hardship in the labor market.

Although there has been some fear of the economy lapsing into recession again, the more likely scenario in the foreseeable future is slow growth with intolerable levels of unemployment, along with rising poverty and inequality, and accompanying social ills.

Of course there are many things that the government could do to restore full employment. The Obama Administration’s 2009 Recovery Act, or stimulus, was only about one-eighth the size of the lost demand from the bursting of the housing bubble. It saved an estimated 1.2 – 2.8 million jobs, not nearly enough. Obviously a much bigger stimulus, and one more focused on creating employment, is needed – but the politicians are afraid to talk about it. And the likely Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, promises to create much more unemployment through massive cuts in the federal budget.

Another way to reduce unemployment would be for the government to subsidize and encourage employers to allow for shorter hours, as an alternative to laying people off. Unemployment insurance funds, along with other money, could be used for this purpose. This has proved very successful in Germany, where unemployment has been reduced to 5.5 percent – lower than it was before the world recession.

Of course, so long as our political discussion is fixated on a non-existing “threat” from the federal debt, these solutions will be out of reach. The current net interest burden on the federal debt is 1.4 percent of GDP, about as low as it has been for more than 60 years.

The biggest burden we are carrying is the economic illiteracy of our leaders, for which Americans are paying a very steep price.

Obama’s War on Medical Marijuana

January 20-22, 2012

A Civil Liberty is a Civil Liberty

by NORM KENT

In the past few months, the Obama Administration has defrauded medical cannabis advocates by launching a full scale, ‘shock and awe’ attack against dispensaries in California. The legal actions constitute a complete reversal of the position Attorney General Holder had stated he would follow. The operation has been shameful and disgraceful, warranting censure, but it is not the focus of this article.

There are many responsible persons in the anti-prohibition movement who have suggested ‘regulation by medicalization’ was a false panacea from its inception. Flaws in the California system have allowed critics to expose that access to marijuana has not been legitimately reserved for those who are ill, but transparently available to anyone who wanted to get high, but that too, is not the focus of this article.

The reality is that the California system may not be a sham, but it is shamelessly flawed. Reformers need to own up to it. We can’t further a blatant lie and be true to ourselves.

I am entirely grateful that California has paved the way in leading the country to a path of legalization. I proudly hold a dual residency between California and Florida, and show my medical card from Cali to envious compatriots in Fort Lauderdale all the time. But I acquired my last card for fifty bucks by walking into a mobile RV that was parked at a metered spot adjacent to a medical marijuana festival, without ever documenting my medical history to a physician.

If you go to the doctor for an exam, you should at least have to pull your pants down, get your genitalia squeezed, and be asked to cough. I earned my card with a year of chemotherapy and cancer, but my partner got one too, and he is a fit 25-year-old college graduate, whose worst ailment in life has been an extended case of athlete’s foot.

I believe that the medical cannabis card is a ticket to freedom I should already have had. That is why I have fought in this movement for forty years, from the days Stuart Mott held parties for us in Washington, D.C., when Ramsey Clark was Attorney General. That was a time, I think, when some of us thought marijuana would be legal by 1980. We know in our hearts that the hand was never theirs to give and the arm is rightfully ours. I should not have to tell my government in 2012 that I want a license to use a medicine that kept me alive when I had cancer in 1999; that I used comfortably as a college student in 1969.

I am supportive of each and every person who wants to use marijuana medicinally or recreationally. The point I raise for your consideration is that many honorable reformers who wholeheartedly believed in unfettered legalization may have unintentionally compromised their principles when they enthusiastically endorsed medical marijuana initiatives.

By submitting to a regulatory authority supervising the dispensation of marijuana in a controlled environment, we did not stand our ground and insist that responsible adults be allowed to freely acquire cannabis without restrictions, regardless of whether they were ill or not. We instead accepted what the government gave us, because decent and honorable reformers saw the medical programs achieving two goals.

First, they were fulfilling a legitimate need while being responsive to a demanding public. We wanted cannabis accessible medically, and we grasped for it, at any price or cost.

Second, these noble experiments were excellent stepping-stones that we all hoped would logistically facilitate knocking the government out of the marijuana regulation business entirely. We chose medical because it was expedient and would push the needle our way.

Now we can all have our medical cards, but look at the hand we have dealt ourselves. Instead of using marijuana privately in our homes, we have told the government where they can find us. That is pretty ironic in and of itself, isn’t it?

Sadly, the reality now is that the process of medical regulation by state agencies is threatened by increased federal law enforcement. Worse, everyone is blaming the permissive flaws in the California system for creating stringent controls in their own.

This does not mean the cause was a mistake or the goals were not honorable. It means we may have to explore alternative avenues and new roads. California dispensaries were raided last month, Colorado ones this week. What does this tell you?

As I write this morning, there are proposals before the Los Angeles City Council to authorize a ban on medical dispensaries. Have we all sold our clients a bill of goods? Have we encouraged them to open up clinics and comply with state licensing laws only to see the cities shut them down while the federal government seizes their properties corporately and prosecutes them individually? What did Edison say: “Is this what God hath wrought?” Is this what we intended when we began the fight to allow patients to acquire marijuana medicinally?

Many in our movement saw this day coming years ago. Articles in the NY Times dating back to 2004 warned about the abuses inherent in California’s pioneering medical marijuana program. Shrewd reformers at the local and national level knew that these defects would eventually lead to a law enforcement backlash, which could potentially undermine the ability of patients to get their medicine. Sadly, we face that today from a hypocritical Obama administration. We can say we are surprised this particular president reversed his course. We cannot say we are surprised that this day has come.

Whether it is the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, the Drug Policy Alliance, or the Marijuana Policy Project, or Students for a Sensible Drug Policy, we have all had in common the goal of ending prohibition. None of us have ever named our group ‘The National Organization for the Administration of Sensible State Regulated Medical Marijuana.’

Last month’s ABA Health Lawyer Newsletter, published a marvelous article entitled ‘The Cannabis Conundrum: Medication vs. Regulation.”  Basically, it said we are dealing with an ideological dance between adversaries seeking to expand access to marijuana versus those seeking to control it. The article by Moira Gibbons reached a conclusion that:

“the ability to satisfy all stakeholders in the medical marijuana juggernaut seems largely illusory… but as traditional medications fail patients who have serious or debilitating illnesses, and no other viable treatment options are available, providing access to marijuana for medical purposes is humane and arguably a form of public health protection.”

In March of 1997, Thomas Szasz, the noted civil libertarian, writing in Liberty Magazine, warned us about the dangers of creating a therapeutic state. Here are his exact words:

“Drug prohibitionists were alarmed last November, when voters in Arizona and California endorsed the referendums permitting the use of marijuana for “medical purposes.” Opponents of drug prohibition ought to be even more alarmed: The advocates of medical marijuana have embraced a tactic that retards the repeal of drug prohibition and reinforces the moral legitimacy of prevailing drug policies.”

Medical marijuana does not now, nor ever has, equaled freedom. “Anyone committed to individual liberty must reject medical marijuana as counterfeit compassion,” wrote Sheldon Richman, a former senior editor at the Cato Institute two years ago.

Why should we require any free citizen, patients included, to have to explain to a doctor why they are responsibly consuming a natural herb they should otherwise be free to use as they wish anyway?

Why should we embrace a system, where we know in advance, some people are going to use a ruse to get their medicine? It has contributed to the very consequences we are dealing with today.

With the federal government targeting dispensaries, seizing properties, arresting the sick and innocent, we need to be legally on the offensive, nationally unified, and morally outraged.

Americans need to author their own drug policy, and not abdicate that right to physicians, the pharmaceutical lobby, or the government. Thomas Szasz was prophetic when he warned we were blinding ourselves by asking the government to adopt a “more rational policy.”

When we debate methods of regulation, supervision, or control of cannabis, we can easily become divided. When we advocate for responsible adult access and a corollary end to prohibition, we are united. There is a rational solution. All free Americans should be brothers and sisters in arms in a global struggle against prohibition.

Nearly one million Americans a year are still arrested and prosecuted for the use and possession of cannabis, whether it is medicinally or recreationally. If we end the injustices of prosecution for the possession of marijuana for any reason, we will not need to debate- for any reason- whether it should be medicalized and regulated; it will be free and unfettered. A civil liberty is a civil liberty regardless of why you exercise that right.