Frackers act like they fear us. We are enemy "extremists."
After my KTK diary last Monday regarding how frackers manipulated things to thwart Butte County California from voting this November on whether we wanted fracking or not in the county, I decided to dig a little deeper because I was beyond amazed that a law firm from Sacramento representing frackers interests could completely screw the pooch for Frack Free Butte County by simply lying. I'll give a quick recap of what happened:
They lied about a formatting error on the petitions that folks signed to put this on the ballot. Specifically they said some font size was wrong and so all the signatures were therefore invalid. Where did they come up with that?
Their claim turned out to be totally bogus. A Butte County Superior Court judge decided everything was perfectly fine and the issue should be on the November ballot. But by then 5 1/2 weeks had passed and the pro-fracking folks somehow convinced the Butte County Supervisors to get involved. The Supervisors ended everything by taking the frackers advise to do a 30-day study which pushed everything past the minimum 88 days before an election that is required to get the green light for a proposition to be included on the ballot. There was a green light and in plenty of time too. Our Supervisors created a needless stop sign because pro-fractivists wanted them to do so.
So we got screwed even though everything was perfectly done and in plenty of time.
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This tactic was so simple. It was too easy. I seemed to me like it was all planned in advance somehow. At each step of the way, something else happened that was completely abnormal in the normal process.
I don''t know how our county Clerk/Recorder so willingly capitulated to this Sacramento law firm without any actual evidence that what they were saying was true. She just acted on behalf of an out of the area law firm rather than following the wishes of the residents of her county.
I couldn't understand why our county Supervisors took up the matter after a judge had declared everything to be perfectly fine. This all seemed like a very simple, yet coordinated and manipulated thing. Turns out it most likely was and goes on all the time. Of course, you can't prove anything. To end Frack Free Butte County efforts entirely, was just too super simple.
What I've found out about in the last week of googling around a bit led me to articles explaining the thinking from frackers' perspective. They believe people who are against fracking are extremely bad people who are doing something akin to revolutionary stuff. We are considered to be very dangerous. Anyone who is against fracking is now called "an extremist" even if you just peacefully protest or collect signatures on a petition.
There were so many pieces of information I found on the internet, but the best overall article IMO was the one I'll provide a link to here:
http://www.earthisland.org/...
Fracking corporations even have their very own private security forces to deal with environmentalists and anti-frackers. The Institute of Terrorism Research and Response is just one of them.
I'll just blockquote bits from the article I linked to give you an idea how coordinated law enforcement, Homeland Security, the FBI, politicians and fracking companies are in dealing with "extremist" anti-fracking groups. It turns out that law enforcement, Homeland Security and the FBI are watching and have coordinated their efforts to stop anti-frackers. They pass on the intelligence they gather to fracking companies too. You might want to read the entire article.
After reading a good amount of this stuff, it became clear to me that happened in Butte County was the new normal. Of course The Butte County Board of Supervisors got in the way by doing something completely abnormal. They likely had that very simple plan ready to go to squash our efforts in letting the entire citizenry of our county have a vote on the matter before fracking got going in Butte County.
In Pennsylvania the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security distributed bulletins to local police chiefs, state, federal, and private intelligence agencies, and the security directors of the natural gas companies, as well as industry groups and PR firms regarding their surveillance of anti-fracking folks that were trying to get fracking stopped in their towns and local areas.
As reported in The Nation, the agricultural giant Monsanto contracted with a subsidiary of Blackwater, the private security firm, to gather intelligence on and possibly infiltrate environmental groups in order to protect the company’s brand name.
The US Army Counterinsurgency Manual that was offered as suggested reading for shale gas industry representatives includes an appendix on Social Network Analysis, defined as “a tool for understanding the organizational dynamics of an insurgency.” In an age of digital networks and online activism, this often means using data-mining software, cyber surveillance, and in some cases outright computer hacking to track opposition groups.
The anti-drilling movement is an “insurgency,” a PR specialist with Anadarko Petroleum says.
Earlier this year, a bill was introduced into the Pennsylvania legislature that would make it a felony to videotape farming operations in Pennsylvania – so-called “ag-gag” legislation that has already passed in Utah and Iowa, and has been introduced in several other legislatures. Many of the ag-gag bills draw on language crafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) “Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act.” (In recent years ALEC has received considerable support from the natural gas industry). Section D of the ALEC bill defines an animal or ecological terrorist organization in broad terms “as any association, organization, entity, coalition, or combination of two or more persons” who seek to “obstruct, impede or deter any person from participating” not only in agricultural activity but also mining, foresting, harvesting, and gathering or processing of natural resources.
Well that's the stuff. How about some fluff? What do you want to kibitz about?
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Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share part of the evening around a virtual kitchen table with kossacks who are caring and supportive of one another. So bring your stories, jokes, photos, funny pics, music, and interesting videos, as well as links—including quotations—to diaries, news stories, and books that you think this community would appreciate. Readers may notice that most who post diaries and comments in this series already know one another to some degree, but newcomers should not feel excluded. We welcome guests at our kitchen table, and hope to make some new friends as well.
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