ThinkProgress Logo

Economy

Kasich Opens Ohio’s State Parks To Fracking While Oil And Gas Industry Gives Him Most Donations Of Any Ohio Politician

By Tanya Somanader on Nov 14, 2011 at 5:10 pm

Taking office with the promise to create jobs, Ohio’s GOP Gov. John Kasich has achieved little but dismal poll numbers in pursuit of a deeply unpopular agenda. Indeed, his attempt to demolish workers’ rights recently earned him an unprecedented rejection of a governor’s signature legislation within the first year in office.

But Senate Bill 5 represented only one pillar his misguided plan. On top of allowing guns in bars and passing corporate-friendly budget blows to Ohio’s vulnerable populations, Kasich is opening Ohio’s state parks to fracking — a method of natural gas drilling that contaminates water supplies with radioactive material.

Seventy percent of Ohioans oppose Kasich’s plan to drill on public lands. And for good reason, as one home in Cleveland, Ohio actually exploded after gas seeped into its water well. But Kasich remains obstinate in his support: “Ohio is not going to walk away from a potential industry.”

According to new report from the nonpartisan Common Cause, however, the oil and gas industry may have provided Kasich with plenty of reasons not to walk away. Kasich has taken $213,519 in contributions from the oil and gas industry, “the most of any Ohio politician.” Kasich’s spokesman Rob Nichols insisted that the fracking policy is solely for jobs, and that the industry has been “warned” to follow Kasich’s “environmental rules and regulations”:

“Over the next four years, shale is expected to create more than 200,000 jobs in Ohio and bring in nearly half a billion dollars in additional revenue to the state,” [Nichols] said. “While the governor has warned the industry that they better play by our environmental rules and regulations, we are glad to have the support of an industry that is poised to reinvigorate Ohio’s economy and put a whole bunch of Ohioans back to work.”

It’s unclear what rules and regulations Kasich actually plans on enforcing. Because of then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s request in 2005, the federal EPA was stripped of its power to regulate fracking. What’s more, Kasich appointed a Dubai oil and gas executive to run the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) — a move which will unlikely yield environmental regulation.

In naming his business-friendly directors for Ohio’s EPA and ODNR, Kasich said he wants to “exploit the wonders of our state.” And this willingness to exploit state lands and parks earned him the largest check in Ohio from the oil and gas industry. “We give campaign contributions to support those candidates who support good government and who support the development of reliable and plentiful energy supplies in Ohio,” said the Ohio Oil and Gas Association. “We do not support candidates who do not support those concepts.”

NEWS FLASH

Warren Olney Apologizes For Linking Penn State Sex Scandal With Gay Adoptions | Public radio broadcaster Warren Olney sparked controversy last week when he used the Penn State child sex abuse scandal to raise questions about the foster system and the fitness of gays and lesbians as parents on his popular To The Point radio program. Today, Olney apologized for the segment, saying, “we failed to point out explicitly that pedophilia and homosexuality are not connected, and that led some listeners to think we were buying into an infamous falsehood.” “We respect our listeners, and we want to respond. There is no connection between pedophilia and homosexuality, and we never intended to say or imply there is. But our failure to make that crucial distinction explicit was a serious oversight. We regret it, and we apologize.” Listen to it here. (HT: Scott Wooledge)

Related Posts

Climate Progress

Environmental Enforcement in Largest Drilling States is ‘Scant’ and ‘Puny,’ According to Greenwire Investigation

By Stephen Lacey on Nov 14, 2011 at 4:46 pm

An investigation into enforcement in the nation’s largest oil and gas producing states finds that companies have “little to fear from the inspectors and agencies regulating” the industry.  This comes days after a panel of experts released a report warning that poor regulatory oversight of natural gas fracking could risk “serious environmental consequences and a loss of public confidence.”

The investigation of state-level data, conducted by Greenwire, shows that only a very small fraction of violations are enforced with fines. And when companies are fined, the penalties are “puny.”

In Texas, 96 percent of the 80,000 violations by oil and gas drillers in 2009 resulted in no enforcement action. West Virginia, a state with 56,000 wells, issued 19 penalties last year. And Wyoming, the center of Rocky Mountain energy, collected $15,500 in fines in 2010.

Pennsylvania, the most aggressive about fining violators, sought penalties for more than a quarter of the violations found last year. It levied fines for 4 percent of the violations, with the penalties totaling $3.7 million. The largest of those was a $900,000 fine against a drilling company that contaminated the water of 16 homes.

That was less than the profits the company makes in three hours.

Some states don’t even track key enforcement data, so regulators don’t know which companies have already been fined repeatedly.

This comes at a time of intense debate over how — or if — federal regulators should do more to monitor natural gas fracking. With the industry growing at around 50% a year, states are struggling to keep pace with the rate of expansion. A recent panel composed of industry professionals, put together by the Department of Energy, recently recommended that the Environmental Protection Agency finalize rules for regulating the practice:

Read more

Health

Bachmann: The ‘Individual Mandate Was Newt Gingrich’s Idea, And Mitt Romney Implemented It’

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Nov 14, 2011 at 4:45 pm

On the same day the Supreme Court announced it would take up lawsuits against the Affordable Care Act, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) took aim at GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney and insurgent Newt Gingrich for their role in crafting one of the law’s key components — the individual mandate:

BACHMANN: Our candidate can’t be compromised. We have candidates that are compromised on the individual health care mandate, which is Obamacare. It was Newt Gingrich’s idea, and Mitt Romney implemented it.

Watch it:

In many ways, Bachmann is absolutely right. The concept of the individual mandate actually originated at the conservative Heritage Foundation, but Gingrich was an early and strong supporter. “I am for people, individuals — exactly like automobile insurance — individuals having health insurance and being required to have health insurance,” Gingrich said on Meet the Press in 1993. He supported it as recently as 2007, writing in a Des Moines Register op-ed, “Personal responsibility extends to the purchase of health insurance. Citizens should not be able to cheat their neighbors by not buying insurance.”

Romney himself pointed this out in a debate, saying, “Actually Newt, we got the idea of the individual mandate from you…and the Heritage Foundation.” And of course, as has been repeatedly noted, the groundbreaking universal health care program Romney implemented as governor of Massachusetts was very similar to President Obama’s Affordable Care Act and employed the individual mandate. Romney actively lobbied for the mandate
to be included in his reform. (HT: Christian Heinze)

Yglesias

Youth Decay

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 14, 2011 at 4:45 pm

Tyler Cowen wants to inculcate the value of hard work and discipline. My personal view about this is that I learned a lot about hard work and discipline from my parents, but I also learned a lot on the job. My editors at the American Prospect weren’t exactly cruel taskmasters, but there really is something different about working a regular job day-in and day-out that school just doesn’t prepare you for. And my sense is that this is pretty common, it’s in the workplace that you really learn to be a grownup. Which brings me to Mike Konczal’s chart of youth labor force participation:

I don’t think that this was caused by a collapse in values and discipline, but you can easily imagine it causing such a collapse.

Security

Gingrich Calls For A Covert War Against Iran That’s Probably Already Happening

By Ali Gharib on Nov 14, 2011 at 4:12 pm

Speaking about Iran at this weekend’s Republican foreign policy debate, the candidates seemed to only agree on one thing: President Obama wasn’t getting the job done. Instead, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich said the president should undertake “covert operations” to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions. At the debate, Gingrich said:

GINGRICH: There are a number of ways to be smart about Iran and relatively few ways to be dumb. And the administration has skipped all the ways to be smart. [...]

First of all, maximum covert operations to block and disrupt the Iranian program, including taking out their scientists, including breaking up their systems, all of it covertly, all of it deniable.

Second, maximum coordination with the Israelis in a way which allows them to maximize their impact in Iran.

Watch the video:

Long-shot candidate Rick Santorum also said he hoped the U.S. was undertaking “covert activity” to curb Iran’s program.

But, as the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus points out, “Some of the activities they suggested may be underway but not publicly acknowledged.” Publicly calling for covert activity, as Gingrich and Santorum did, may provide for a satisfying political punch because the administration is unlikely to defend its record. To do so could possibly hamper ongoing efforts and, more to the point, would destroy any of the deniability that Gingrich calls for. Announcing covert operations means that they, by definition, can never be carried out.

But media accounts help piece together what indeed seems like wide-ranging covert activity by the U.S. and Israel, working hand-in-hand. The New York Times reported in January that the U.S. and Israel had worked together to develop the powerful Stuxnet computer virus that destroyed some of Iran’s centrifuges, slowing down its nuclear work. And one imagines that when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that Israeli and American “security cooperation is unprecedented,” he could well have been talking about work on Iran issues. Former prime minister and current defense chief Ehud Barak also recently said: “I can hardly remember a better period of support, American support and cooperation and similar strategic understanding of events around us than what we have right now.”

Just this weekend, at least one massive explosion rocked an Iranian missile base outside Tehran, killing a major figure in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Force’s missile program. Speaking to Time magazine, a Western intelligence source fingered Mossad, Israel’s vaunted spy agency. As recently as this summer, nuclear scientists have been turning up dead in Iran, victims of likely assassins riding motorcycles and using either guns or so-called “sticky bombs” that adhere to the sides of vehicles. Others, too, have noticed the likely covert war against Iran’s nuke program, but not the GOP candidates. To do so might get in the way of their attacks, not on Iran but on the Obama administration. Maybe the administration isn’t being so “dumb” after all.

Alyssa

‘The Walking Dead’ Open Thread: Easy Ways Out

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 14, 2011 at 4:07 pm

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 13 episode of The Walking Dead.

I’ve been somewhat frustrated by this season of The Walking Dead, but I’ve appreciated the flashes back to the process of society going to pieces, which I admit I tend to find more interesting than the wandering around post-apocalypse bit (a preference I suspend in the case of The Passage, which does both). And tonight’s started off with a bang, the sight of military helicopters napalming the roads into cities in an effort to contain the walkers, with a preview of the conflict to come: is it easier and more moral to protect yourself and embrace a biting realism, or to struggle to build a fragile society under great pressure. “The boy’s hungry. We can spare one box,” Carol says, in the first act that will truly bind her to the group that will become her family. “It’s called operational security,” Ed spits back at her. “How long do you think this stuff is going to last if you keep running your mouth off to every damn person we meet?” In the world after the apocalypse, will we be Ed or Carol? Rick or Shane? Daryl or Merle?

There’s right in both sides. Shane’s probably correct about the danger of reminiscing, when he says, “You shouldn’t be talking about that stuff. It’s gone. That life, and everything in it…It’s like we’re old folks. Everyone in our stories are dead.” And he’s also probably correct, even if he doesn’t know it, that there’s something dangerous about letting the members of the group get comfortable, especially if Hershel isn’t going to let them stay. But as Rick tells Lori, Shane is also probably wrong that “My good intentions are making me weaker…He says it’s math, basic survival…Not much room in that equation for being soft.” There’s no question that’s true, but physical survival isn’t the only kind of survival.

Daryl, after his accident in the woods, sees a hallucination of his brother that’s a perfect dramatization of that dilemma. “You his bitch now?” Daryl imagines Merle telling him. “You a joke, that’s what you are. Playing errand boy to a bunch of pansy asses, niggers, and Democrats. You’re nothing but a freak to them.” He stumbles into camp having eaten raw squirrel, with zombie ears on a thong about his neck. But Carol tells him, feverish and recovering, that “You did more for that little girl in a day than her daddy did for her in his whole life…You’re every bit as good as them. Every bit.” There’s worth in doing the right thing. Even after the end of the world, you can still make a difference in a kid’s life. But whether or not you can make a difference in a zombie’s? Well, Hershel may believe you can, but it seems to me, at least, like it’s an open question.

NEWS FLASH

Coast Guard Official To Lead Policing Of Offshore Drilling | Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar named a Coast Guard official who played a key role in the response to the BP oil spill as director of the newly launched Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE). Rear Adm. James A. Watson IV will take over the agency that handles permitting, enforcement of environmental and safety rules, and other tasks, and he replaces Michael Bromwich, the former director who oversaw the restructuring of the agency after last year’s Gulf Coast oil spill. Watson worked as the federal on-scene coordinator during the BP oil disaster. “The safe and responsible production of oil and gas from our nation’s oceans is vital to our energy security,” Watson said. According to the Hill, Salazar previously had said the BSEE director needed to manage the intense politics that come with regulating oil drilling.

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Nov 14, 2011 at 4:00 pm

Yglesias

European Sovereigns Are The New Banks

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 14, 2011 at 4:00 pm

Everyone understands the classic bank run scenario. If everyone loses confidence in the future of a bank, everyone will withdraw their money and the bank will fail. Consequently, the mere suspicion that a bank is running into trouble can create a self-fulfilling prophesy. A firm that needs to roll over a large quantity of debt on an annual basis is in the same situation. For that matter, so can a country.

That said, we normally only think of this kind of panic as afflicting developing countries because rich countries borrow in their own currency. If the United States government faces a severe liquidity crunch of some kind, there’s always a Federal Reserve System ready to stand behind it. But one of the things we’ve seen during the current crisis is that the European Central Bank (presumably with the arm of Angela Merkel standing behind it) is unwilling to play this “lender of last resort” role. That’s a problem for Italy right now. But in many ways it’s a much more profound issue. Financial markets are done treating Italy — and today it looks like maybe even France — like a risk-free sovereign. But if the European Central Bank is genuinely committed to this no lender of last resort principle, that means that Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, and everyplace else are structurally more akin to Belize or Botswana than to the United States or United Kingdom. They’re all vulnerable to runs in a way countries backstopped by a lender of last resort aren’t.

LGBT

Cain’s Latest Misogynistic Rhetoric: Pizza With Vegetables Is ‘Sissy Pizza’

By Zack Ford on Nov 14, 2011 at 4:00 pm

In an interview with GQ, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain continues to show his disrespect for women and gays by distinguishing between a “manly man’s” pizza and “sissy pizza”:

Chris Heath: What can you tell about a man by the type of pizza that he likes?

Herman Cain: [repeats the question aloud, then pauses for a long moment] The more toppings a man has on his pizza, I believe the more manly he is.

Chris Heath: Why is that?

Herman Cain: Because the more manly man is not afraid of abundance. [laughs]

Devin Gordon: Is that purely a meat question?

Herman Cain: A manly man don’t want it piled high with vegetables! He would call that a sissy pizza.

In the same interview, he also compared Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) to the ice cream flavor “Tutti-frutti,” admitting, “I know I’m going to get in trouble.” Allegations of sexual assault aside, Cain regularly uses language that is misogynstic, whether he’s referring to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as “Princess Pelosi,” Katie Couric as “perky Katie,” or “joking” about whether Anita Hill will endorse him. And of course, he recently suggested that being gay “washes off.” Though Cain brushes all these comments off as jest, his jokes reinforce the inequality of women and the LGBT community.

Older

Newer

Switch to Mobile
ThinkProgress Signup Overlay Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress

Sign Up