The Corporate Tyranny Acid Test

Like rapidly growing numbers of Pennsylvanians, my wife and I now have a second full-time job. Lately, we’ve spent every free moment combatting frackers’ blitzkrieg, totalitarian assault on our communities.

“Totalitarian” is just the word. Give these drillers an inch, and you’ve lost a region you love. You simply surrender all say over safe air and water, traffic volume on roads, our rural landscapes’ charm , the dollar value of homes, or drug abuse and crime in your community. Any wonder PA’s finest citizens—some quite literally—are “up in arms”?

It’d be nice to say our U.S. and PA reps were battling at our side. In fact, they simply macadam roads for these liberty-trampling Huns. They ease their Nazi march with bills on forced pooling or eminent domain, or pulverize our last defensive bulwarks with bills gutting town supervisors’ sway. In a nation founded to fight “taxation without representation,” its tyranny’s imposed on us daily. Presumably for our own good.

The idea of dictating to people—never asking—what’s for their own good conjures up Leninist Russia. Our state and U.S. reps now strut like the vanguard of some glorious “clean gas” future, which we poor benighted proles must swallow whole, though we’ll hence build heroic statues to our wise “People’s commissars.” In fact, they’re just the vanguard of a deranged status quo, and their dangerous coup against our water, air, and lives must end as badly as the Bolsheviks’. Already, an independent Cornell study shows that “clean gas,” factoring in its extraction, is a dirtier greenhouse fuel than mountaintop coal. And for THIS we’re ceding basic rights?

Tyranny has a dismal history, and corporate tyranny might prove the worst of all. It simply hands our government’s command powers and planet-threatening technologies to those with vested interests against the common good. Support for a moratorium on fracking—ASAP—should be the acid test for which of our reps support corporate tyranny. And free citizens, who possess both polling booths and civil disobedience—and failing both, the Second Amendment—should then know what to do.

Note: The Cornell study I cited can be found at
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http://www.eeb.cornell.edu/howarth/GHG%20emissions%20from%20Marcellus%20Shale%20--%20with%20figure%20--%203.17.2010%20draft.doc.pdf