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Oklahoma Residents Taking Action Against Frackers But Is It To No Avail?

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Earthquake Capital of US

We have written previously about the fact that Oklahoma is now the earthquake capital of the US. It seems forcing all the waste products from fracking down deep wells has disturbed the earth enough to cause a lot of earthquakes there. In addition to jolting the nerves of Oklahomans, it is destroying their property. In 2014, there were over twice as many earthquakes recorded in Oklahoma as in California, making Oklahoma the most seismically active state in the contiguous United States by a substantial margin.

Residents of the town of Pawnee, which has suffered the most earthquakes, have filed a class action lawsuit against 27 energy companies. The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount of money for property damage plus emotional distress. The lawsuit claims that companies are showing “reckless disregard for public or private safety.”   [Read more…]

Trump’s Cabinet Picks: A Basket of Deplorables

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A Secy of Labor Who Doesn’t Believe in the Minimum Wage

By John Lawrence

Trump has chosen fast food executive Andrew Puzder as Secretary of Labor. Puzder is chief executive of CKE Restaurants, the corporation that owns Hardee’s and Carls Jr fast food chains. The corporation has 3300 locations in 42 states and 28 countries. Puzder has advocated replacing human beings with machines in fast food restaurants.

Puzder also is against the minimum wage altogether, let alone raising it to $15 an hour. He sees his job as executive of CKE as driving down the cost of labor and this means lowering the minimum wage and replacing workers with automated machines.   [Read more…]

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) Don’t Result in Better Crop Yields

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They Just Increase Amount of Poison We’re Exposed To

The controversy over genetically modified crops has focused on whether or not they were safe to eat. We have to ask ourselves what was the purpose for genetically modifying them in the first place. That was so they could be sprayed with Monsanto’s Roundup and they wouldn’t die. Only the weeds would die. But this leaves the crops, mainly corn and soybeans, with a nice coating of poison. It won’t kill them, but it might kill you.

The next promise of the chemical corporations was that the use of GMO sprayed with weed killers would lead to a significant increase in crop yields, but that hasn’t happened either. The promise was that GMOs would “feed the world”. Monsanto and others pointed to the fact that the world’s population was increasing so we needed a far more abundant food supply, and the only way to get there was by means of GMOs liberally sprayed with RoundUp, the main ingredient of which is glyphosate.   [Read more…]

Trump Reneging on His Campaign Promises to Voters

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His Supporters Have Been Snookered!

In a 60 Minutes interview with Leslie Stahl, Trump back pedaled on his major campaign promises and a lot else. When asked what his sit-down with President Obama was like he replied, “I found him [President Obama] to be terrific. I found him to be– very smart and very nice. Great sense of humor, as much as you can have a sense of humor talking about tough subjects, but we were talking about some pretty tough subjects.” So no more questions about his legitimacy to be President? No more wondering whether he was born in Kenya? I guess not now that he, Trump, is a member of the club.

The interview went on:   [Read more…]

The Internet of Things: Asking for Trouble

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A Hacker’s Wet Dream

By John Lawrence

Hackers are licking their chops over the latest push by high tech corporations including San Diego’s Qualcomm to create an Internet of Things in which everything is hooked up to the internet: your refrigerator, your thermostat, your security system, your car. It will be a hacker’s paradise. Already hackers have carried out a distributed denial of service (DDoS) taking Netflix, Twitter, Paypal and other major websites off the air. Hackers were able to direct an overwhelming amount of traffic to a company by the name of Dyn which acts as a switching hub for internet traffic.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is driven by corporate needs to find a new way to keep revenues flowing now that cell phones and computers seem to have reached their maximum growth capacity. So why not promote an internet in which all your household appliances are online? That way you can use your cell phone to set your thermostat, check on your refrigerator to see if you should pick up milk on the way home, check your cameras to see if the FedEx guy left a package etc.   [Read more…]

Nobody Saw a Trump Victory Coming! Here’s What’s Next for America

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Trump Astounded and Shocked Democrats — and Even His Own Pollsters

Hillary was a shoo-in.. or at least that’s what everyone thought. Hillary had a blue firewall and many paths to 270 electoral votes. Donald had a bunch of heavy lifting including an almost impossible flipping of one or two blue states.

Whaaa hoppened?! What happened was that angry, white rural voters went for the guy that was against free trade (much as Bernie Sanders was) and promised to bring their rust belt jobs back from China and other Asiatic places. You had only to look at the state by state maps to see solid red in rural areas even in blue states with the only blue being in the big cities.

It wasn’t enough for Hillary to win even though she came close, and unmistakably the popular vote by more than two million. According to an article by the New York Times, this 1.5 percentage point surpasses margins by Al Gore, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy .   [Read more…]

Government Agency Puts Out a Hit on Vegan Mayonnaise Manufacturer

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You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, Folks!

The American Egg Board, which is overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, put out a hit on an eggless mayonnaise start-up which had come up with a product called Just Mayo which contains no eggs. Perceiving this as a threat to the egg industry and the thousands of chickens it represents, Egg Board members exchanged emails asking, “Can we pool our money and put a hit on him?”

This was in reference to the founder of the eggless mayonnaise company, Josh Tetrick. They also suggested that “old buddies from Brooklyn pay him a visit.” Evidently, the $7 billion egg industry saw the vegan start-up as a threat to its profits, and was determined to stop it in its tracks at all costs. The Board’s president, Joanne Ivy, sent an email to her organization’s public relations consultants at Edelman. “It would be a good idea if Edelman looked at this product as a crisis and major threat to the future of the egg product business,” she wrote.   [Read more…]

The Dakota Access Pipe Line: The Latest Last Ditch Stand

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Oil Corporation Tramps on Indigenous Peoples’ Rights

Finally, there is an alliance of a major ethnic group – US Indians – and environmentalists who are taking a stand to prevent the furtherance of fossil fuel interests. Bill McKibben of 350.org says we must stop now insofar as building more fossil fuel infrastructure, which is what a pipeline represents, if we are to have a hope and a prayer of saving the planet from the effects of global warming.   [Read more…]

E.Y. Yip Harburg: Blacklisted Left Wing Songwriter

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Lyricist for “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”

E.Y. Yip Harburg (1896-1981) was born Isidore Hochberg on New York’s lower east side of Russian immigrant parents. His nickname, Yipsel, was later shortened to Yip. Unlike many of his contemporary songwriters like George and Ira Gershwin, with whom he was friends, Yip grew up in poverty and never forgot it.

He was known as “the social conscience of Broadway”. He wrote the words to over 600 songs including all the lyrics for the 1939 production “Over the Rainbow” starring Judy Garland. The music was composed by his collaborator, Harold Arlen. He wrote the words for the classic anthem of the depression, “Brother Can You Spare a Dime.”   [Read more…]

The Financialization of America: Wall Street Doesn’t Help Homeless

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The Business of America is No Longer Business – It’s Finance

The rich today are making money not from making things, but by manipulating money. This is being done in such a way that it is driving the inequality process. It is ruining the middle class while exporting their jobs. The tax structure of the US engineered by Ronald Reagan, Alan Greenspan and their Republican followers has incentivized the creation of great wealth in a few hands while driving the majority of people into poverty.

So-called trickle down economics has only spurted up. While the rich have many ways of escaping paying taxes, middle class people are stuck paying them to a larger and larger extent. The government needs money to operate, and, if the rich don’t pay their fair share, the middle class has to make up for it. US tax policy makes sure that it does.   [Read more…]

How Much More Extraction of Fossil Fuels Can We Do? Answer: Zero

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Keep It In the Ground

Bill McKibben of 350.org said recently, “If our goal is to keep the Earth’s temperature from rising more than two degrees Celsius—the upper limit identified by the nations of the world—how much more new digging and drilling can we do? Here’s the answer: zero.”

The goal of keeping earth’s temperature rise below 2 degrees C is already in danger even with the coal mines, oil wells and pipelines currently in operation and assuming there will be no new ones. That means that we shouldn’t be doing any more digging or drilling. It all has to stop – now – if the earth is to survive.   [Read more…]

Fossil Fuel Extraction Producing Earthquakes in Oklahoma

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Oklahoma Now Earthquake Capitol of US

The chickens are coming home to roost. A state that has thrived from oil wells is now being destroyed by them. The practice of forcing waste water from oil drilling down other wells has made Oklahoma the earthquake capital of the US.

Between 1978 and 2008 Oklahoma averaged about two magnitude 3 or above earthquakes per year. Then in 2014 the total zoomed up to 585, 3+ magnitude earthquakes, more than the number of 3.0+ magnitude earthquakes from the previous 30 years combined. In 2014, there were over twice as many earthquakes recorded in Oklahoma as in California, making Oklahoma the most seismically active state in the contiguous United States by a substantial margin.   [Read more…]

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