Wednesday, 15 September 2010

The Patterson-UTI Drilling Company LLC horizontal drilling rig in Chartiers Township, Pa., on April 9, 2010. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

As debate over natural gas drilling [1] in the Marcellus shale reaches a fever pitch, state and federal authorities are warning Pennsylvania law enforcement that "environmental extremists" pose an increasing threat to security and to the energy sector.

A confidential intelligence bulletin [2] sent from the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security to law enforcement professionals in late August says drilling opponents have been targeting the energy industry with increasing frequency and that the severity of crimes has increased.

It warns of "the use of tactics to try to intimidate companies into making policy decisions deemed appropriate by extremists," and states that the FBI -- the source of some of the language in the Pennsylvania bulletin -- has "medium confidence" in the assessment. A spokesman for the FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The advisory, a copy of which was obtained by ProPublica [2], doesn't cite the specific incidents causing concern. It is also unclear from accounts from state law enforcement officials whether the incidents in Pennsylvania posed a substantial threat, or what effect the advisory might have on public gathering and the debate over drilling in the state.

Pennsylvania State Police said there have been only a few isolated crimes involving drilling facilities.

"We haven't had any incidents of any significance to date where we have identified a problem, or any environmental extremists," said Joseph Elias, a captain with the Pennsylvania State Police Domestic Security Division, which was not involved in issuing the bulletin.

An aide to Gov. Ed Rendell -- speaking on behalf of the state's Homeland Security Office -- said the advisory was based on five recent vandalism incidents at drilling facilities, including two in which a shotgun was reportedly fired at a gas facility.

"All this security bulletin does is raise awareness of local officials. It doesn't accuse anyone of local activity," said the spokesman, Gary Tuma. "Where the professionals detect a pattern that may pose a threat to public safety, they have a responsibility to alert local law enforcement authorities and potential victims."

Anti-drilling activists in the state say that public hearings and other events have been peaceful and that they see no evidence of violent opposition. Given the lack of evidence about "extremist" crimes, they say, the bulletin casts drilling opponents as criminals and threatens to stifle open debate.

"It may very well be designed to chill peoples' very legitimate participation in public decision making," said Deborah Goldberg, an attorney with Earthjustice, a national group pressing for stronger environmental protections [3]. "If people who have concerns fear that they are going to be treated as a security threat they may very well be afraid to go and express their views."

The advisory lists a series of public hearings on drilling permit issues across the state as potential flash points. It also mentions a Sept. 3 screening of the anti-drilling film "Gasland" in Philadelphia that went off without incident. Language describes "environmental activists and militants" on one side of the debate and "property owners, mining and drilling companies" on the other.

Finally, the bulletin groups the public hearings and film screening with protest rallies for anarchist clubs focused on "evading law enforcement," and with a Muslim advocacy group's rally for the release of suspects in an alleged terror plot at Fort Dix, N.J.

The advisory was sent to state law enforcement and local government groups, as well as businesses with a specific concern addressed in the bulletin. It was not intended to be distributed to the public.

In issuing such an advisory, the government has to walk a fine line between the need to respect the fundamental rights of freedom of speech and the need to keep the public safe, said Nathan Sales, an assistant law professor at George Mason University and a former policy development staffer at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

"The question is how to accomplish the one with minimal consequences to the other," he said.

A pro-drilling group, the Marcellus Shale Coalition [4], characterized the vandalism in Pennsylvania as "directed at preventing our industry from safely delivering these resources to Pennsylvanians."

The group's president, Kathryn Klaber, said she supported civil debate over drilling, "but to the extent they go in the other direction, and potentially devolve in a manner that undermines our ability to keep our folks safe, then we will have a problem," she said.

Abrahm Lustgarten @'Propublica'

It is interesting to read the comments at the end of this article for their outrage in regard to the activities of the "fracking" companies and the lack of accountability as regards the destruction caused by these companies to residents in the vicinity of operations. There are concerns raised that residents immediately affected by "fracking" operations will be unable or too frightened to challenge such disastrous activity. Recent developments may see the disclosure of "fracking" chemicals but as yet the business keeps this a "business secret", further alienating residents capacity to complain and resolve issues. With this latest intervention by Federal authorities, people involved in challenging the "status quo" risk being labeled "environmental terrorists", all against a background of the most devastating environmental chaos perpetrated by "fracking" companies. So much for justice, truth, and the American way SuperMan...beeden

Tuesday, 14 September 2010

Conversation - Sea Shepherd’s Paul Watson

Paul Watson doesn’t care what you think. The captain of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has been putting himself between whales and harpoon ships for more than 30 years, preventing the killing of countless cetaceans. He’s been called a terrorist, a greater threat than Al-Qaeda, a liar. None of it bothers him.

“I am here to say things people do not want to hear and do things people do not want to see. I am here to piss people off – that is my job,” the 59-year-old Watson says in Ron Colby’s 2008 documentary Pirate for the Sea.

A Canadian, Watson was a co-founder of Greenpeace and instrumental in the campaign to ban the clubbing of Arctic fur seals. He has gained wider notoriety as a central character on the Animal Planet show Whale Wars, which chronicles Sea Shepherd’s skirmishes with Japanese whalers. He was also spoofed last year in a South Park episode called “Whale Whores.”

“Being lampooned on South Park is hardly something to complain about,” he says. “They brought the issue of the dolphin and whale slaughter by the Japanese to a very large audience. I could not really care less how I was portrayed.”

So where are you coming back from?

We got back from Antarctica about the seventh of March. We’re heading to the Mediterranean now to go against bluefin poachers. We took three ships down to Antarctica and lost one. For the first time we managed to save more whales than were killed, so that was a successful campaign. They have a quota of 935 minke whales, and they have 50 humpbacks on their permits. So 520 whales were saved, and 507 killed.

Let’s go back to your early days of eco-activism.

I was raised in an eastern Canadian fishing village right on the Maine border, called St. Andrews. I used to swim with these beavers in a beaver pond when I was 10. I went back when I was 11 and found there were no more beavers. I found that trappers had taken them all so I became quite angry and that winter I began to walk the trap lines and free animals from the traps and destroy the traps. So that was really my first venture into activism.

You’ve talked about a whale you made eye contact with as it bled to death after being harpooned. Tell me about the connection you felt with that whale...
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Michael Shapiro @'Earth Island Journal'

Study Finds CEO Salaries Increase With Layoffs

Executives of the top 50 job-cutting firms in the US earned 42 percent more than their peers in 2009, according to a report published by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

As the country's economy continues to struggle, and American workers earn less in weekly wages than they did in the 1970s (adjusted for inflation), executive salaries have remained substantially, disproportionately high. According to the IPS study, "Executive Excess 2010: CEO Pay and the Great Recession," after adjusting for inflation, the average CEO pay in 2009 is more than four times its average from the 1980s and approximately eight times what it was throughout the mid-20th century.

"Our findings illustrate the great unfairness of the Great Recession," said Sarah Anderson, lead author of the IPS study.

Almost three-fourths of the 50 firms surveyed in the study reported positive earnings after a period of mass firings - at least 3,000 workers per company between November 2008 and April 2010. Meanwhile, the layoff leaders received an average of $12 million in 2009, compared to the Standard & Poor's 500 average of $8.5 million. In some cases, CEO pay during layoff years surged well beyond that range.

Among the culpable layoff giants are Fred Hassan of Shering-Plough, who made $50 million after merging with Merck and firing 16,000 employees; William Weldon of Johnson & Johnson, who laid off 9,000 and received $25.6 million; Mark Hurd of HP, whose severance package of almost $50 million followed his cutting of 6,400 jobs and resignation amid sexual harassment claims; and Kenneth Chenault of American Express, who fired 4,000 and made $16.8 million - after receiving $3.4 billion in federal bailout funds.

To add a hypothetical insult to injury, the $598 million in combined layoff-leader compensation could provide average unemployment benefits to 37,759 workers for an entire year, or nearly a month of benefits to the 531,363 individual workers fired by their companies...

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Nadia Prupis @'truth-out'

Robots Taught How to Deceive

REpost: Rock Magic: When William Burroughs met Jimmy Page (Crawdaddy June 1975)

"...I felt that these considerations could form the basis of my talk with Jimmy Page, which I hoped would not take the form of an interview. There is something just basically wrong about the whole interview format. Someone sticks a mike in your face and says, "Mr. Page, would you care to talk about your interest in occult practices? Would you describe yourself as a believer in this sort of thing?" Even an intelligent mike-in-the-face question tends to evoke a guarded mike-in-the-face answer. As soon as Jimmy Page walked into my loft downtown, I saw that it wasn't going to be that way.

We started talking over a cup of tea and found we have friends in common: the real estate agent who negotiated Jimmy Page's purchase of the Aleister Crowley house on Loch Ness, John Michel, the flying saucer and pyramid expert. Donald Camel, who worked on Performance; Kenneth Anger, and the Jaggers, Mick and Chris. The subject of magic came up in connection with Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Anger' film Lucifer Rising, for which Jimmy Page did the sound track.
Since the word "magic" tends to cause confused thinking, I would like to say exactly what I mean by "magic" and the magical interpretation of so - called reality. The underlying assumption of magic is the assertion of will as the primary moving force in this universe -- the deep conviction that nothing happens unless somebody or some being wills it to happen. To me this has always seemed self -- evident. A chair does not move unless someone moves it. Neither does your physical body, which is composed of much the same materials, move unless you will it to move. Walking across the room is a magical operation. From the viewpoint of magic, no death, no illness, no misfortune, accident, war, or riot is accidental. There are no accidents in the world of magic. And will is another word for animate energy. Rock stars are juggling fissionable material that could blow up at any time . . . "The soccer scores are coming in from the Capital ... one must pretend an interest," drawled the dandified Commandante, safe in the pages of my book, and as another rock star said to me, " You sit on your ass writing -- I could be torn to pieces by my fans, like Orpheus."

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♪♫ Hitting Birth - Crackman

Penalty goal of the year!

Is Death the Price of Having a Job? In Some Corporations It Seems Like It

Their names probably won't mean mean anything to you, but these people ought to have some modicum of personal recognition: Jason Anderson, Aaron Dale "Bubba" Burkeen, Donald Clark, Stephen Curtis, Gordon Jones, Roy Wyatt Kemp, Karl Kleppinger, Blair Manuel, Dewey Revette, Shane Roshto, and Adam Weise. These are the 11 workers who were killed when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank into the Gulf of Mexico on April 20.

For months after the disaster, national media outlets featured extensive coverage of BP's calamitous well -- as they should -- showing us satellite pictures of the spreading plumes of pollution, footage of dead pelicans, estimates of the ecological horror on the ocean floor, analyses of the frantic efforts to stop the oil, commentaries on the astonishing arrogance of corporate executives, feature stories about the slick's impact on Gulf tourism, interviews with lawmakers demanding much tougher environmental protections, etc...

But what about those people? Most of the 11 were in their twenties and thirties. They had families and futures. Yet, aside from an occasional off-handed reference to the general body count, their fate had pretty much been dropped from discussion about the cost of our country's cavalier ethic of "drill, baby, drill." And what about the 17 other rig workers who were injured in the Deepwater explosion, many of them badly burned and maimed. There's barely been any media mention of the price they paid for the corporate rush to complete this well, much less any follow-up on their painful and costly ordeal.

I'm not pleading here for maudlin coverage of victims -- but for ACTION! Just as the Deepwater catastrophe is a screaming wake-up call and a vital teaching moment for environmental protection, so it is for the protection of America's workforce. Eleven people didn't merely perish in the Gulf on April 20; they were killed by a careless cabal of corporate greedheads and ideological boneheads. It's a case of institutional murder -- and it's a shockingly common occurrence in our country.

LITTLE-KNOWN STATISTIC: Each day, on average, 14 American workers are killed on the job. They're killed by explosions, trench cave-ins, electrocutions, falls, suffocations, fires, poisonings, manglings, and so forth. Another 50,000 to 60,000 workers die each year from cancers, black lung, and other diseases caused by their jobs.

This is murder, because nearly all of these deaths are preventable with proper equipment, work rules, and regulatory enforcement.

This is murder, because CEOs, boards of directors, and financiers know the deaths will occur, but continue to take shortcuts on worker safety and health in order to goose up their profits, secure in the knowledge that they can get away with it. Even if caught, they merely pay a minimal fine.

This is murder, because lawmakers and regulators (national, state, and local) turn a blind eye to its pervasiveness and constancy, insisting that each "incident" is an isolated event that should not interfere with the drive for corporate competitiveness. This is murder, because the media establishment only yelps when one occurs, then goes back to sleep as reform is stalled and the system drifts back to business as usual...

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Jim Hightower @'AlterNet'

Monday, 13 September 2010

Iraq combat over but U.S. troops still in danger

U.S. Staff Sergeant Kendrick Manuel swung his rifle over his shoulder and grumbled about being viewed as a "non-combat" soldier in Iraq.
"When NBC talked about the last combat troops are gone, they made it sound like everything is basically over," he said, after escorting a 19-truck convoy through a part of northern Iraq where roadside bombs and mortar attacks are still a danger.
"To us it was like a slap in the face, because we are still here ... we are still going in harm's way every time we leave out of the gate," Manuel said at a U.S. military base, Camp Speicher, near Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit.
On August 31, the U.S. military formally declared an end to its combat mission in Iraq, 7-1/2 years after the invasion that removed Saddam and led to sectarian warfare and a fierce insurgency in which tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed. More than 4,400 U.S. soldiers have been killed since 2003.
U.S. networks such as NBC showed what the U.S. military labeled the last combat brigade rumbling into Kuwait. Soldiers whooped and shouted on camera that the war was over.
Yet, there are still six brigades made up of 50,000 troops in Iraq, ahead of a full withdrawal at the end of 2011. Their focus is to assist and advise their Iraqi counterparts, not lead the fight against insurgents, but they remain heavily armed and face frequent threats.
On September 7, two U.S. soldiers were killed and nine wounded when an Iraqi soldier opened fire on them at an Iraqi commando base.
The hype around the change of mission, which allowed President Barack Obama to say he was fulfilling a pledge to start ending the unpopular war, set off complaints among some soldiers left behind who were no longer viewed as combat troops.
U.S. military convoys are still shot at and bombed, and bases are mortared, despite a change in the name of the U.S. mission from Operation Iraqi Freedom to Operation New Dawn.
"That doesn't really change a thing, it is still dangerous," said 22-year-old Specialist Byron Reed, on his second deployment in Iraq, as he prepared to escort a convoy to Camp Speicher from Balad air base in Salahuddin province.
Manuel said changing the mission's name meant little if any of his soldiers were to be killed by a roadside bomb.
"If a life is gone, it is gone," he said. "As long as we are going in harm's way, it (the war) is not over for us."
e failure of politicians to form a new government six months after an inconclusive election...

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Rania El Gamal @'Reuters'