The Scranton Times Tribune editorial entitled “Fracking still a big unknown” is ominous. This is especially so since Scranton PA, being the center of the coal region, has a wealth of experience to draw upon when it says: “But the state government must do much more to ensure that the industry does not emulate the coal industry, which created relatively short-term wealth and long-term environmental consequences that have yet to be resolved”.
Serious and costly and ugly, coal mining environmental issues are still “Yet to be resolved” more than 75 years after the coal industry left town.
If the state government needs “to do much more to ensure that the (gas) industry does not emulate the coal industry”, when does it begin to do that, when, at last count, more than 1,600 wells are now in operation, and thousands more drilling sites have leases signed and ready to go.
Dangerously coupled with this “big unknown” are the known facts of a Governor who is indebted to the gas industry, and the Marcellus Shale commission which he appointed is heavily weighted in favor of the industry.
In the coal region, the coal was privately exploited and the environmental damage was left to the government and others to fix and . . . it is still trying to fix. This mega trend of privatizing profits and passing costs on to the public has a pedigree born of corruption that needs to end. We need a constitutional amendment to get every private dollar out of every public official election in the country. The public should own the government. Individual campaigns are already part of the overall government operation that funds the mechanics and the supervision of the election process, and the public should also fund and budget appropriate expenditures for the selection process in every primary and general election. Only then will we own the government! The recent Supreme Court decision which gives Corporations equal to individuals insures that political speech now pits the thousands of 800# gorillas with little colonies of ants.
So I write my little comment here in Lancaster while Exxon buys full page ads in every national and regional newspaper in the country, funds foundations to develop talking points, pays for books to be written, funds self-serving university studies (actually buys universities), funds media spokespersons (”experts”) and gives millions to the politicians we supposedly “elect” which ensures their “access” to “our” representatives. Corporate “access” is for nothing less that private agendas, carefully packaged disingenuously and sanctimoniously as, “What is good for General Bull Moose, my friends, is good for the USA” Hogwash!. A private profit purpose does not automatically confer any public benefit and often works counter to the general public’s best interests. The examples are legion.
The speed of the Marcellus Shale development within our current and corrupt political structure almost insures that this will be another environmental disaster like the Pennsylvania coal industry. In the short term we probably cannot get a handle on it and can only pray and try to make the case for better knowledge and supervision that the Scranton Times Tribune has called for.
But for the long term, I ardently believe, we need to get every private dollar out of the entire election process. That is the major source of what has become absolute corruption. It may or may not have started out that way, or been intended by anyone, but absolute corruption is what it has become.
In light of the recent Supreme Court decision, it looks like a constitutional amendment will be needed, so why not begin that process today. We have a Convention Center that needs some business so let’s convene the first “constitutional amendment convention for the public funding of elections”, right here in Lancaster, to consider, take testimony for the why and how, solicit real expert opinions from people with a track record for the public interest, and write a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution that will insure that the public, the “We the people” that begins our original constitution, will own its own government and take the “For Sale” sign down for good!
…Maybe August would be a good time to convene [the first “constitutional amendment convention for the public funding of elections”] between the Democratic and Republican conventions, but this is the year to do it. The Occupy movement would certainly back this as well as sincere tea party people who really want to “take back their country” from the special interests who have bought it.
Mainstream Americans of both parties as well as independents would support this reform. This is not an anti rich or anti corporation movement but simply to reform a political system that has become so corrupt and so successfully corrupt that the real interests and real needs of the overwhelming majority of Americans is being buried is a sea of private interests.