Common Sense Commentary: The Fracking Industry Isn’t Honest About Government Support

The Mom & Pop Farm

The Fracking Industry Isn’t Honest About Government Support

By Jim Hightower, as published in the on-line blog “other words” of the Institute for Policy Studies

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.

 >>> Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow.  He has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks. Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower believes that the true political spectrum is not right to left but top to bottom, and he has become a leading national voice for the 80 percent of the public who no longer find themselves within shouting distance of the Washington and Wall Street powers at the top. He is a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, spreading the message of progressive populism all across the American grassroots. <<<