When Corporations Mutate Into A Super Race
Posted: March 12, 2012 Filed under: corporate money, corporatism, Economy, energy, Environment, Environmental Protection, Environmentalists, fracking, Regulation, toxic waste 12 CommentsWe all remember Mitt Romney’s public and awkward statement that ‘Corporations are people, too.”
But Romney was underplaying the reality of American life in 2012.
Corporations are not mere people. They have morphed into a Super Race, ready to conquer what’s left of our disintegrating democracy. If you think this is liberal hysteria or rank hyperbole, I give you Pennsylvania’s newly passed Act 13. Bad number. But the scope of this foolish and utterly destructive state giveaway is far worse.
Act 13 is a massive gift to the oil and gas companies, which overturn property rights, strips municipal communities of zoning law protection and turn environmental and health compromises into considerations we can no longer afford. It reduces the citizens of Pennsylvania to 3rd world colony status, ripe for exploitation and extraction. Welcome to the New World of Corporate Rule where natural gas extraction is the profitable prize and quality of life is a thing of the past.
And the reaction?
“Now I know what it feels like to live in Nigeria,” said recently retired Pittsburgh City Council President Doug Shields. “You’re basically a resource colony for multi-national corporations to take your natural resources, take them back to wherever they are at, add value to them, and then sell them back to you.”
Yup. This is the neoliberal dream. Steal, add value and then sell back at an exorbitant price tag. The whole world is nothing more than a resource colony so the corporate Super Race can turn a mind-boggling profit. On the backs of the natives. Water safety and/or depletion, health, wildlife? All expendable in this great push for growth and ever-increasing profit. Moral considerations? Please, haven’t you gotten the email? Corporations don’t do morality. They’re too big for that.
Fracking in SW Pennsylvania
Why did this happen in Pennsylvania? Because of the enormous layer of shale deposits known as the Marcellus formation, resting like a slumbering giant beneath the state’s surface. But there’s more! That would be the gargantuan amount of natural gas to be had at a stunning profit—as much as 70-99% some managers of earlier drill wells have boasted.
How could investors resist?
But then, there are the rising concerns of the fracking process itself, the public’s growing awareness of water and air pollution, the niggling problem of toxic wastewater disposal and those bothersome legal suits from citizens with lame health issues.
What to do, what to do?
Act 13 is the perfect response to investor skittishness. It removes all complaint and whining by simply supplanting existing law—the kind that protects the citizen—with corporate friendly law that recognizes the global reality—everyone is for sale and everything can be exploited.
To keep tempers in check, the best PR in the world is dished out, promises of jobs and prosperity, spinning dialogues about energy independence [at any cost] and patriotic flag-waving—how tearing up the earth, polluting our waterways and compromising the public’s health is good for America. After all, in times of crisis, sacrifices need to be made, even when it means overriding the civil rights of people and communities.
That is exactly what Act 13 addresses.
Courts in the Great State of New York upholding community rights to block fracking dreams is simply unacceptable. Act 13 revokes those rights. The Lakota people in South Dakota blocking TransCanada truck transports across Native territory? We can’t have that. Act 13 clearly empowers a corporation to seize property that impacts any stage of the drilling process. And those possible health considerations? Got it covered, boys and girls. Act 13 prohibits physicians from discussing medical impacts from chemical contaminations. The Halliburton Loophole in all its malicious splendor comes back to haunt us.
Marcellus Fracking Pit
This is what happens when corporations are declared ‘people.’ This is what happens when legislators sell their souls for 30 pieces of silver. I do not care if Republican Governor Corbett and his Republican dwarves truly believe this is good for Pennsylvania. This is a betrayal of American law and her people on a massive scale. The good citizens of Pennsylvania might look at the situation in Ohio, where Governor Kasich opened the state’s doors for business, any business, and Ohio became the dumping ground for fracking wastewater disposal and deep ground injection wells. We now know those earthquakes were not coincidental events. No wonder Republicans hate science!
Hattip to Alternet on this rant. I’d recommend reading the article ‘Fracking Democracy: Why Pennsylvania’s Act 13 May Be the Nation’s Worst Corporate Giveaway’ by Steven Rosenfeld in its entirety with the first link I provided. It’s a chilling, mind-blowing report.
Act 13 is expected to take effect on April 14th. We better pray [regardless of what state we live in] that the groups now amassing in Pennsylvania are able to halt or at least slow down this corporate monstrosity.
Because if not, we can say ‘adios’ to the shredded remnants of our Republic.
As for Pennsylvania? My heart goes out because I lived and worked in the state for over a dozen years and still have family in the area. The economy has been raked over the coals, so the promise of jobs and money injected into struggling municipalities and rural communities is a huge seduction. But we’ve seen this movie before. It does not end well. Here’s hoping that flesh and blood citizens get a chance to write a far better script for themselves and their future. Here’s hoping the rest of the country wakes up to what can only be called a corporate takeover.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
ecocatwoman
mablue2
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
peggysue, this was enough for me. I don’t think I can handle the whole article. Are there enough people paying attention? Are there enough well informed people? Those doom & gloom, desolate science fiction movies set in the future? They are looking more like science non-fiction to me. Maybe those authors & screenwriters actually have gazed into the future and were simply relating what they saw. This is beyond disturbing , it’s damn near paralyzing.
Oh I’m paying attention. We had earthquake coverage on our homeowners’ insurance when we lived in Seattle, but we dropped it when we moved back east. We’ve added it back. Effin’ fracking is causing quakes where there were never quakes before.
Well, thanks to your post I think I’ve learned a valuable lesson. I shared it, via email, with several friends, one of whom is a born again Christian. While we may agree on some issues, we diverge greatly on many others. Here’s her response to my email: hahaha….actually the future holds an incredible world when Jesus reigns for 1,000 years. But first, the 2nd coming. None of this will matter eventually because it will all be destroyed. And my response to that was this: Thanks. I’m happier than ever not to be a Christian.
And we sometimes wonder why we can’t talk to the “other” side. To quote G.W. – “if you aren’t with us, you’re against us.” I can’t imagine why anyone would worship a god who would blithely destroy “his creation.”
What a demented nut job — and these folks are true believers.
You have a great deal more patience than I do– I have cut off all contract with the religious insane.
Religious insanity in America runs in cycles — these idiots will keep on forcing their ways on everyone.
Makes you want to tear your hair out, doesn’t it?
My hairdresser is a dedicated Christian [I’m living in Born Again country now:0)]. But he said he never understood why evangelicals were not on the save-the-environment train. In fact, I remember several years ago that a number of evangelicals ‘had’ expressed concern over environmental degradation, being good stewards of God’s creation.
I don’t know what happened–it got lost in the noise.
What concerns me about this whole thing is how the Governor and legislators blithely sold off civil and community rights with this Act 13, and then pushed it through. There have been health problems in Pennsylvania around fracking wells. There have been contaminated water problems. We need energy but we can’t survive without water. They’ve been working on how to extract this gas for decades. But if you can’t drill successfully without injuring everything around the wells and treatment sites then you’re not there yet. The idea that we’re going to sacrifice the health of fellow citizens is just flat-out unacceptable.
I read an astounding article about early attempts in Colorado. I think it was back in the late 60s. They tried nuking the natural gas out. Only everything was so badly contaminated the companies had to shut the operations down.
I don’t know, I hope the concerned citizens in Pa. are able to block or slow this down in the courts. I watched a distressing video of a woman out in central Pa, rural country and she was in tears. She said, ‘We’re just collateral damage to these companies.’
This is ‘not’ who we are.
Collateral damage or to use the term wildlife agents use “incidental take.” And this is the PRO LIFE crowd that is on the “let’s drill, frack, extract, & poison the planet” train.
Peggy Sue,
I don’t understand what act 13 does. How can it take effect in states other than PA? I don’t have time to read a lengthy article right now. Could you please summarize it briefly?
Right now, Act 13 applies solely to Pennsylvania. At least that’s my understanding. But if the resident citizens, lawyers, environmentalist teams are unable to block this, Act 13 could easily become a model for other states and other eager-beaver politicians who can’t wait to get on the industry gravy train.
I cannot see how any of this is Constitutional. Yet the hair brain legislation being passed these days is totally off the charts. For the Governor and his legislative buddies, this is a massive sellout of the public interest. Even treasonous in my mind. It’s as if these corporations want to turn us all into a collection of company towns, where the industry sets the rules and standards. You don’t like them? Tough.
Btw, New Yorkers have so far preempted this sort of thing and the NY courts have ruled that communities can say ‘No’ to the gas and oil companies. One of the things I found out is that in Wyoming, for instance,a property owner has no right to what’s done ‘beneath’ his or her property. Those rights have been sold off to industry. So, I guess a lot of this is a cautionary tale–keep abreast of what the hell your state legislators are doing in your name [probably behind closed doors in the wee hours of the night].
I still don’t understand what the act actually does. Sorry. Does it allow gas companies to take people’s land without going through the government or the courts?
Yes, BB. It gives the corporations expanded seizure rights, complicates the whole complaint process by putting it through the public utilities board [if you want to be part of the money-for-seizure process, you better not complain]; it strips zoning law protection from individual communities, so locals do not have a say in any of this; and though the companies will disclose the chemicals involved, it prohibits physicians from disclosing, as in informing the public or testifying before the courts what chemical contamination might have occurred during any particular process. Neat way of avoiding legal accountability.
This is industry friendly at the public’s expense. They’ve had serious complaints in Pennsylvania with these wells and treatment sites around residential areas. This is a way of circumventing the law–you just rewrite it. The coal companies were famous for this sort of abuse when King Coal ruled the day. Now it’s natural gas.
Evidently voters went to the polls and voted for the political whores — the next objective is to vote the corporate whore out.
This is the same state that produced Santorium.
Don’t the voters realize that they voted for these guys — or do the big cities vote for the whores and the rural areas can go suck dirt?
How long do the corporations have free reign to do as they please and strip mine etc. — until the voters rise up and vote the whores out?? Or will the whores distract with words like gay — evil women etc. and then the votes vote in the whores again???
To think that some of my ancestors came from Pennsylvania — even named towns and counties way back in the colonial days.