As they drill for quick corporate profits deep inside our Earth, ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and other titans of the natural gas hydraulic fracturing industry are harming people’s health, the environment, and local economies across the country. They’re also fracking something essential to a properly functioning democratic society: the truth.
They’re hailing themselves both as exemplars of free-market success and as the “virtuous ones” in our society — the producers and makers, as contrasted to the mass of Americans that the far-right corporatists are now openly calling “moochers” and “takers.”
Fracking companies and political front groups are selling the public a self-serving narrative. They claim the current natural gas boom is a victory over those wimpy and undeserving producers of wind and solar power who are dependent on government subsidies to get up and running.
The shale gas boom, wrote the oil-and-gas-funded American Enterprise Institute this year, has occurred “away from the greedy grasp of Washington.” AEI’s laissez-faire fabulists snidely added that “surely Washington would have done something to slow it down, tax it more, or stop it altogether” had the bureaucrats realized that the private enterprise was making such progress. Indeed, crowed an industry PR group, “The free market has worked its magic.”
Sheesh — their bull goes deeper than their fracking gas wells. For three decades, the federal government has pumped more than $100 million into research for the frackers, finding ways to make the technique work. And, since 1980, the big bad government they now badmouth has paid frackers more than $10 billion in a subsidy written specifically for them. These oil giants are liars, fracking away at their own integrity.
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We’ve borne witness to a chaotic first few months in Trump’s presidency.
Over the last months, each executive order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core part of a strategy to make the right-wing turn feel inevitable and overwhelming. But, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to remember in Truthout last November, “Together, we are more powerful than Trump.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is pushing through executive orders, but — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in legal limbo and face court challenges from unions and civil rights groups. Efforts to quash anti-racist teaching and DEI programs are stalled by education faculty, staff, and students refusing to comply. And communities across the country are coming together to raise the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and protect each other in moving shows of solidarity.
It will be a long fight ahead. And as nonprofit movement media, Truthout plans to be there documenting and uplifting resistance.
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