Concerning Fracking and other matters

Dear Senator Brown: I am writing you about the technology of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (often referred to as “fracking”), a mining method for extracting gas from deep in the earth, first drilling down for a mile or more and then angling the drillbore horizontally into shale gas rock.

This method is much more complex than the older method of vertical drilling. Fracking just one well, with perhaps six or more bore holes, requires millions of gallons of clean water, sand, propellants, and chemicals, many of which are consider proprietary information and not available to the public or even to elected officials.

Last week’s Newsweek magazine contained a truly amazing piece, (“Rich America, Poor America,” Niall Ferguson, 1/23/12). Billed as a “conservative historian’s solution” to the issue of growing inequality in our nation, this piece stands out not because of any true “solution” that is offered here, but for the real peek at how the wealthy actually look at us and the world they live in.

The issue of inequality isn’t seen as a great mystery, most might point to the capitalist class structure of our nation and the ongoing class struggle. There, according to Ferguson, is where you’d be wrong. Not so, he says! The rising inequality has its source in the fact that the “upper class has gotten rich because of the financial returns on brain-power,” and they “produce a disproportionate number of the smartest children.”

If that formulation just slapped you in the face with its open arrogance, Ferguson is just getting started.

Traditional conservative and Midwest moderate Republicans are finally standing up to the reactionary Buckeye State GOP’ers whose anthem is “Gimme that ol’ time repression.” On January 25, 2012, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted addressed the Ohio Association of Election Officials and recommended that the state’s legislators should repeal the draconian House Bill 194. In this November’s presidential election, voters in Ohio will literally get to vote on who should vote in the state.

Husted urged lawmakers and election officials to start over after the 2012 election with a new bill on voting reform. HB 194 has been denounced by voting rights and civil rights organizations as it, among other things, eliminates some opportunities for early voting and doesn’t allow pollworkers to guide voters to the correct precinct.

One would think that if condemned to lose sanity it would be preferable not to be aware of what was happening. On the contrary, as in lucid dreaming, there is something empowering and even comforting in lucid derangement, particularly national as opposed to personal derangement.

We may be in the advanced stages of going loony as a society and a polity, and yet expanding one's awareness of how this process is proceeding is a form of enlightenment, even if the enlightenment is offered with some defeatist shading.

"The United States of Fear" is a collection of Tom Engelhardt's writings from his TomDispatch blog. It turns our world inside out any number of times, allowing us to glimpse with startling clarity the horrifying world outside our cave without ever quite persuading us that the real world can be real if it isn't on television, and not infrequently building into the presentation the understanding that there is no cure for what ails us.

Here's an example. According to Engelhardt we dwell in a "Postlegal America":