The nexus of the security state and big business is just great news for all of us:
Gov. Ed Rendell will hold a news conference this evening concerning media reports that the state Office of Homeland Security has been keeping track of people who attended recent meetings opposed to Marcellus shale drilling, including a Pittsburgh City Council meeting and gatherings in Allegheny, Butler and Philadelphia counties.
Gene Stilp, a Harrisburg citizen activist and opponent of natural gas drilling, said the Philadelphia City Paper and the Harrisburg Patriot-News obtained leaked information about the monitoring efforts by state Homeland Security officials, which were supposedly done in the interest of public safety.
Mr. Stilp said word got out recently when the state office mistakenly sent an e-mail about its tracking efforts to an opponent of the drilling. One event that was monitored was a screening of the anti-gas drilling film “Gasland” in Philadelphia, as well as a Pittsburgh council meeting about gas drilling, he said.
“I am demanding that the state House and Senate hold hearings on this,” he said today. “This is not the way Pennsylvania government is supposed to run.”
James Powers, homeland security director, told the Patriot-News that public safety could be at issue, because there have been “five to 10” incidents of vandalism around the state related to natural gas, one in Venango County swhere a person fired shots at a natural gas tank. The tracking information was also sent to Marcellus gas “stakeholders,” he told the paper.
Because, you know, if you oppose corporations ruining your road, cracking your foundation, housing huge reservoir’s of toxic water evaporating near your house and spilling into your well water, well, the government needs to keep their eye on you because you might be a terrorist. And if you propose taxing these companies rather than just looting the land for resources and leaving behind “externalities” and super-fund sites for you to clean up, then you are socialist, and that is even worse.
This country is for corporations and the rich, and soon as the rest of you figure that shit out, the better.
This is becoming a very big deal where I live (in the northern panhandle). You can’t drive anywhere without seeing large stacks of pipe that is being used to transport water from the Ohio River inland so that it can be used in the drilling process. They’ve bought up right of ways everywhere to lay the pipe. When they are done with the water, apparently it will be kept in lagoons to evaporate (along with the benzene and whatever other shit they dredge up), but you can be sure that “mistakes will be made” and in no time a lot of residents will start developing cancer because a leak “no one could have predicted” will have spilled toxins into the earth, and it will contaminate well water every where.
On top of that, you have the asshole truckers doing 75 miles an hour on 40 mile an hour roads, terrorizing everyone who lives in the area and tearing up the roads. I probably don’t need to tell you this, but I remember all three times the back roads around my region were re-paved in the last 40 years, and the trucks are just ripping the roads to shreds.
Add in the odd explosion here or there, or maybe we can schedule something like a slurry spill, and you can see why the real priority is monitoring the activities of a few concerned residents.
You aren’t even safe living in the country, growing your own food, and drinking well water anymore.
Michael Moore and Al Gore are both fat, also too.
Cris
This always amazes me. Why does this happen? Reply-All?
DonkeyKong
“The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.” The Late Great George Carlin
R-Jud
I’ll have to tell Mom and Dad they might’ve been tailed. If Dad starts walking around the house naked, that should stop it.
Seriously, though, the Marcellus Shale thing is scary. It goes right through PA into southern NY. The entire Delaware watershed, among others, is potentially endangered by this.
My sister and her lab employees have been driving all over PA doing baseline water testing for homeowners who are near the planned drilling sites. She says that even if future tests come back with benzene and other excitingly toxic substances in them, the homeowners may not have a case– the exact composition of the fracturing fluid is considered “proprietary”, so Marcellus Shale will not have to disclose it in court without a whole bunch of appeals being filed.
Bob Loblaw
Oh, come now, Cole. We just need more voters like you. A few more cycles of crawling through broken glass to vote in the Mike Olivierios of the world, and things should shape right the fuck up.
Zifnab
Yeah, but only because someone plans to build a Community Center in downtown Manhattan.
licensed to kill time
I don’t know how many times I have read a Cole post and thought damn, he said everything I would have said only better. But it happens a lot. Nice rant.
DonkeyKong
Always thought that Carlin bit was a little over the top, too much marxist cartoon nihilism.
Now it goes down like a sobering shot of Jim Beam.
John Cole
@Bob Loblaw: NADER 2012!
Ash Can
I’m interested to hear what Rendell will have to say about this, and how he says it.
khead
Weird. John just described what’s gone on in the southern WV counties for years.
Welcome to WV!
BR
If you haven’t watched Gasland, well, you really should. See it here:
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/gasland/
John Arbuthnot Fisher
As someone who works in the energy industry, I can tell you that “stakeholder” is just what corporations call themselves in these matters to alleviate their “conscience” after they jerk off on a gigantic pile of money.
Bob Loblaw
@John Cole:
Why are you threatening to depress Democratic turnout, you firebagging piece of shit?!
Everybody Knows Ed Rendell is one of the Good Guys. He has a D next to his name on the ballot. He would never be caught using his government’s security apparatus to cover up corporate malfeasance and environmental destruction. This story is clearly a Republican counter-propaganda effort meant to compromise progressive enthusiasm before the midterm elections. I demand an apology posthaste.
wengler
I want to live in a country where industry at least has to pay for its own spies.
Bill Arnold
75 in a 40 is lack of enforcement.
I agree about trucks tearing up the roads – in the East near New York we have “parkways” which don’t allow trucks (bridges are too low, by design/Robert Moses the story goes).
Their surface tends to last a lot longer, at least until they are under construction and the heavy construction trucks mess them up.
John Arbuthnot Fisher
Also, too, it’s great when targeted contributions of $5,000 plus an envelope with another $5,000 can buy you an entire state homelany security apparatus. From multi-billion corporations, no less. The cheap price of political influence will never cease to amaze me.
El Tiburon
Cole, why do you hate America so?
Yes. And I think this encapsulates the overall disappointment with Obama: what has he done to change this dynamic in any real terms? I think this is what we all held out hope for; that Obama would be on the side of the American, not the Corporation.
Yeah, not so much.
John Cole
@khead: I’m well aware. I used to have to do flood duty down state when the mine towns would get wiped out by flash floods.
nancydarling
The gas companies are at work in NW Arkansas between Fayettville and Fort Smith. Here they are paying landowners to allow them to spread the used water on their farms. People are concerned because of the karst topography and the possibility of contaminating ground water over a wide area. Also, many people do not own the mineral rights to their land so the gas companies can come in and drill even if you don’t want them to. I can’t remember details but a year or so ago, I read a news story about problems with their method of disposal as the water had chemicals that are not allowed.
In 2005, Congress passed an exemption to the Safe Drinking Water Act for the gas companies. I haven’t been able to find a record of how my Congress critters voted. I would imagine they all voted yea.
People around already here blame Tyson for ruining some wells and streams. One of the reasons I relocated here was cheaper land (I have 23 acres) and abundant water. There is no safe place.
Speaking of canning, I have a big pot of plum tomatoes on the stove as I type. I’m making ketchup. In another bit of news about corporate legerdemain, the corn growers groups want to change the name of “high fructose corn syrup” to “corn sugar”. They think we are all stupid.
Comrade Mary
I love you, you big old hippie.
Mike
Hey, someone tell John Bone-air! I think we’ve found some more government workers who could use a pay cut!
Erik Vanderhoff
Someone please remind the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security that one cannot be a terrorist unless one deliberately targets civilian lives.
Oh, wait, this is America, where property has more value than people.
Polish the Guillotines
Out here on the left coast, as I sit not more than 7 miles from the San Bruno gas-tastrophe, PG&E fights to stick it to the little people for any damages that exceed their insurance coverage.
S. cerevisiae
Great rant, John but unfortunately the government knows about peak oil even if they don’t admit it. They know we will have to have the gas and the property owners are just collateral damage. The Carlin bit posted above said it all.
Tonal Crow
It would now appear that corporations have more — and better-enforced — 1st Amendment rights than individuals.
Only in Amerika.
ciotog
They probably have an incentive to do so, in that they’re paid by the load and not by the hour.
jo6pac
@John Arbuthnot Fisher:
Yep and that’s right after they drive a stake through the little peoples heart on the way out of town with the bag of free cash. On they’re way to distory another spot in Amerika.
Sad.
R-Jud
@Tonal Crow:
This has been true in this country since at least the 1870s. Corporations, even more so than very wealthy individuals, have first-class citizenship.
The Other Chuck
Poisoning the fucking water is lack of enforcement. Laws are for little people.
Edit: wow, it’s not even lack of enforcement. The gas companies lobbied for and specifically got the right to poison our water.
Glad I don’t get my water from wells. But maybe I should work on getting my degree and being glad in a few years I don’t live in America.
BR
@The Other Chuck:
No, apparently it’s not. At least according to Gasland (link above) there’s a loophole that Cheney had written into the energy bill that allows for an exemption from the clean water act for gas drilling and the like.
Davis X. Machina
22 East out of Pittsburgh towards Altoona is loaded with ginormous oil-field-looking vehicles, doing 35 up the hills and 70 down. I had a near-miss in Nantyglo this summer.
Roger Moore
@Cris:
Maybe it wasn’t accidental at all, but was a conscious leak by somebody who thought the activities were illegal and wanted the world to know. It’s at least as plausible an explanation as an accident.
Turgidson
“Show us on the doll where the invisible hand touched you”
I’ve never seen that tag before. I like it.
whetstone
So I don’t see any news stories about this incident, at least from a quick search. But let me put on my I-grew-up-in-a-rural-area hat on . . . now what are the odds that this is 1) ECOTERROR!!! 2) some dipshit shooting at a natural gas tank?
R-Jud
@Davis X. Machina:
Nant y glo is Welsh for “stream of coal”. Very appropriate for that part of PA, no?
arguingwithsignposts
@BR:
Thanks for the link. I will watch it some time soon when I want to be in a really pissed off, despondent mood (moreso than usual reading this blog).
BTW, Cole, this is some long-form shit you’re posting here. has someone replaced you with a New Yorker writer?
Davis X. Machina
@R-Jud: Pennsylvania has many an entry in the Place Name Hall of Fame — my personal favorite is Ohiopyle. Somewhere around there the watershed changes from Potomac-Chesapeake-Atlantic to Allegheny-Ohio-Gulf. The locals think it’s an Indian name, but pulē is Greek for ‘gate’, and I like to think of a surveyor with a little Greek marking up that corner of the state for turn-of-the-nineteenth century land speculators
cat48
Villago Delenda Est
@Erik Vanderhoff:
Of course, women’s health physicians are not considered “civilians”, so feel free to bomb yourself a few women’s health clinics where abortions might be performed on the premises.
lol
@El Tiburon:
I think your post does a lot to encapsulate the ridiculous expectations and standards the Empty Set Left holds Obama to.
We’re talking about a *state* agency, are we not?
JITC
My first thought upon reading this: Given that eco-terrorism IS a reality, how is this different than keeping an eye on people who attend, say, “pro-life” meetings? The potential for crazy extremist is in both populations.
But I answered myself almost immediately – the language of mainstream eco-activists is NOT violent. The language of mainstream anti-abortionists (or anti-illegal immigration groups, or anti-tax groups, etc.) is more and more violent.
I want the Department of Homeland security to be on top of home grown terrorists across the political spectrum. But this action screams of an attempt to be “fair and balanced” in the face of the report about right-wing extremist groups and their very real potential for violence.
lol
@Cris:
Address book offering up the wrong Gene in auto-complete.
Happens to me all the time but it usually results in me sending the email to someone’s personal email instead of work email or vice versa.
singfoom
Get used to it people. With Citizens United, SCOTUS has put us on a path where synthetic citizens, i.e. corporations (Our Masters) are more important than us real people.
Now if we could just get some mutation and some magic up in our corporate future dystopia, it’d be Shadowrun.
R-Jud
@Davis X. Machina:
How did the surveyor get this little Greek? Does he pay him?
Kidding. “Intercourse”, “Rough and Ready”, and “Two Lick” are a few of my favorites.
Favorite Pennsylvania towns, that is.
amorphous
Morgantown isn’t in the panhandle. ?
Glenndacious Greenwaldian (formerly tim)
Excellent rant, John.
Part of what keeps bringing me back to BJ is the cognitive dissonance brought on by the occasional common-sense, lefty rant from a formerly batshit insane wingnut Bushie. Freakish! :D
That said, it is very depressing to recall that in the early 60’s, when I was in mid grade school, already there was a lot of focus on pollution and the environment, and a lot of good has come of that, and yet here we are with this kind of blatant destruction for profit. But I think the corporatists and their enablers in the government have just gotten a lot more efficient about covering up what they are doing.
yuck. people are horrible. think if all this money going into filthy, disgusting, polluting, toxic methods of extracting fossil fuels was going into clean energy R&D. And tell me, where is Obama’s Manhattan project in that regard. There is no doubt that is what the U.S. needs.
Mnemosyne
Hate to break it to you, but it always has been. We had a good 40 or 50 years there where the capitalists got so freaked out by unions and the Great Depression that they backed off a little and let people pretend otherwise, but really we’ve just gone back to the status quo ante of the pre-FDR days.
That economic growth period from the 1940s to the 1960s was even more anomalous than people realize.
Galileo
USA! USA! USA!
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@amorphous: No. Use Google maps.
Laertes
Hi John. Love your blog.
I know you get this a lot, but these last two posts make me honestly wonder: how the hell did you ever ever ever self-identify as a conservative?
DS
Highly recommend the documentary Gasland, which is exactly about this. I hope people in NYC and Philadelphia enjoy drinking a delicious slurry of methane, benzene and ammonia because if they start drilling for natural gas in upstate New York about 10 million people are totally fucked.
Bob Loblaw
@Laertes:
He’s a white male who served in the armed forces and came of age during the Reagan years. Figure it out.
RalfW
I’m pretty sure that when Brooksie is mewling over at the Times about government overreach and conservative non-ideology, this is exactly what he doesn’t have in mind.
Taxes, ohhh, terrible. Regulation of gas industry, ohhh, double plus ungood. Spying on a few UUs, worried moms, and some young hippies, excellent.
Corner Stone
@R-Jud:
me: Your Honor? May I get a ruling?
Judge: She has clearly opened the door.
me: Thank you, your Honor.
gypsy howell
@R-Jud:
“You gotta go through Intercourse to get to Paradise” was a favorite saying around these parts when I was a kid.
I can’t tell you how many stolen PA road signs for Intercourse and Paradise turned up in friends’ rooms back then. Probably still.
frosty
@Davis X. Machina: After camping in the state park on the top of the hill overlooking the Yough, and winding down the road to Confluence, I decided Ohiopyle was actually a Native-American word meaning “Land of Smoking Brakes.”
slag
I attended a Critical Mass block party when I was in England once. Just checking it out. The number of cops there taking people’s pictures gave me the wiggins. Simply attending this event made people suspect in the eyes of the Feds.
I remember thinking at the time how glad I was to be an American where we didn’t do shit like that anymore. Haha!
khead
@John Cole:
Just being a bit of a wise ass. Some of the southern counties really are a mess though. Plus your comments about the truckers on the road reminded me of the coal trucks on lovely two lane roads.
But if you were in my (former) neck of the woods earlier in the decade cleaning up the mess after the flood(s) you have my thanks.
And my sympathies. Heh.
Honus
@Bill Arnold: My dad was a county road superintendent for years in the Northern Panhandle. I can’t count the times he told me “we’d never have to pave the roads if it weren’t for the trucks. If only cars use the road, it will last forever.”
All those Galtians who use the roads for freight need to ante up. And quit complaining about subsidizing rail. We’re subsidizing all the commerce that uses highways now, through both roads and oil.
Honus
@khead: No sympathy required. I’ve seen six feet or more of water on the Main Street of my town on the Ohio at least a half dozen times.
it’s always been fun. You move everything upstairs, shut off the gas, and go to the liquor store before the water comes up. Then you take a couple days off, stay drunk, and row around town, checking up on your elderly aunts who are living in their upstairs bedrooms for a day or two. When the water goes down, you clean up, hose everything off and get back to normal. The Salvation usually shows up about then to hand out pimento cheese sandwiches at the courthouse. The worst thing was in 1995 when the National Guard ran all around town in their Hummers, churning up the water and breaking windows, but they didn’t know any better and there hadn’t been a flood in 23 years.
Honus
@R-Jud: Maude, Wileyville, Hundred and Jane Lew
El Tiburon
@lol:
Did u read the block quote? That is what I was talking about.
sherparick
John, I will nominate you to Brad DeLong’s Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill.
groundhum
It’s more than the Post-Gazette article suggests.
Jason
The story about Homeland Security is interesting, but it’s a feature of the lax regulation environment in PA. In order to work for the dept. of the Penna DEP with regulatory power over the Shale, you have to have worked in the industry – not as a regulator, mind you, but in the industry. And it’s considered a good, growth position in a state agency that is not known for advancement opportunities short of management.
Also, not that the former head of Homeland Security – Mr. Tom Ridge – is now working as the “strategic advisor” to MSC. I’m sure he knows nothing of this coordinated attempt, under the State office’s capable Mr. Powers, to track possible terrorists and moviegoers. Mr. Powers himself was probably only distracted by the ITRR’s recent reports of Pedobear sightings.
Also, North Carolina? You’re next. Because I doubt New York State will even note the monumental fuckup PA has made in this whole deal, I’m sure we can write them off before drilling begins in earnest. So what if Big Ed is embarrassed by some halfwit Tommy Lee Jones disciple? Powers is easy enough to understand: the thrall of aggressive security, the power of energy orgs, these are par for the course. The long-term damage Rendell has helped inflict on this state hasn’t even entered the reckoning.