Yesterday, over 100 activists from Benton Harbor, other communities in Michigan and around the world participated in a demonstration against the exploitation and theft of land and resources from the people of Benton Harbor.

The action yesterday was the last day of a 5-day campaign to draw attention to the systemic violence being perpetrated by the Whirlpool Corporation and the City of St. Joseph against the disproportionately Black community in Benton Harbor.

The Professional Golf Association (PGA) was hosting a golf tournament for several days on land that had been stolen from the local community to construct a golf course near Lake Michigan.

As people gathered in a parking lot across from City Hall the police presence became noticeable, with some of the cops filming the crowd. Throughout the day there were cops from Benton Harbor, St. Joseph, the Sheriff’s Department and Michigan State police.

Once the crowd of over 100 gathered in the parking lot, Rev. Pinkney (BANCO) gave a few words about what the Occupy the PGA was all about. He also named those responsible for the theft of land and the exploitation of Benton Harbor.

After Rev. Pinkney spoke, people then moved to the steps of City Hall, where organizers told the crowd how the funeral procession was going to proceed. Before the funeral procession began a local musician led the crowd in a song and was followed by a supporter who read a poem about the systemic violence caused by Whirlpool.

The funeral procession began at City Hall in Benton Harbor and made its way west on Main Street. On this stretch on road there were numerous buildings boarded up and other visual messages about the poverty and exploitation that the people of Benton Harbor have endured for years.

Once the funeral procession got off of Main Street, it made its way along the golf course route, where at every spot that there was a gap between trees or shrubs, police on foot or in cruisers had a presence in order to prevent people from disrupting the golf tournament by running on the golf course.

The funeral procession also passed a large parking area where tour buses were shuttling golf fans, which bought tickets for the PGA tournament.

Once the funeral procession arrived in St. Joseph it became painfully clear the economic chasm between the residents of Benton Harbor and St. Joseph. The homes in St. Joseph were larger, fancier, with landscaped lawns and people out walking their dogs. Nowhere along this part of the route were African Americans among the residents, only those who marched. The clear evidence of racism and classism was not lost on those that walked in the funeral procession as we passed the Whirlpool Corporation in St. Joseph.

The funeral procession ended at what was left of a public park. This was the park that was significantly downsized so that the land could be used for the golf course. As Lake Michigan welcomed the participants one could not help but notice that there was orange fencing right up against the road that led to the park. The PGA wanted to make sure that even here there would be signs and visual messages letting people know that they were not welcomed. The police tape here said “Ticket Holders Only, NO Trespassing!”

Despite the constant harassment from police, the participants maintained good spirits as they shared food, conversation and relaxed under a pavilion in the park. Organizers stated that they would keep up the pressure on Whirlpool and invited those from out of town to maintain their solidarity and by helping to get the word out about the systemic violence being done in southwest Michigan.

On the first weekend in May, Newark mayor Corey Booker appeared alongside Fox News host Juan Williams and ultra-conservative Republican governors Chris Christie of New Jersey and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana to sing the praises of charters and school privatization, and the evils of organized teacher and parent power at the annual conference of the Alliance for School Choice.. It’s not a big step for Corey Booker, it’s the place he’s been all along, since his first late 1990s gig as a founding board member of the Bradley Foundation’s Black Alliance for Educational Options. What’s new is that in 2012 black Democrats with national profiles like Booker can appear in public spouting pro-corporate right wing dogma alongside such creatures, and hardly anyone notices. What has happened to Democratic party politics, to black politics?

To hear mainstream pundits like Andra Gillespie tell it, black politics and the black politician have been re-invented. The poster boys for this new generation of elected black Democrats are people like Newark’s Corey Booker, former DC mayor Adrian Fenty, and of course, President Barack Obama. Re-invention, the story goes, is a good thing because the re-inventors are “technocrats,” whatever that means, with access to funding, elite connections and crossover appeal that their predecessors lacked, all of which enabled them to get things done which previous generations of black politicians could not or would not.

Some other voices, however, say that the narrative of “re-invention” hides and conceals more than it explains or reveals. “What’s happened to black politics,” says Glen Ford, a veteran New Jersey journalist and co-founder of Black Agenda Report “isn’t re-invention. It’s hijacking. It’s colonization.”

In a groundbreaking 2002 article “Fruit of the Poisoned Tree”, and again at a recent speech at New York City’s All Souls Unitarian Church, Ford outlines the early career of Corey Booker, and Booker’s relation to the constellation of right wing forces orchestrated by the ultraconservative Bradley Foundation, which spent tens of millions of dollars in the 1990s creating astroturf movements for vouchers, school choice, and ultimately for charter schools, at the same that Bradley funded the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and platoons of racist and corporate ideologues like Charles Murray, Robert Bork, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Antonin Scalia.

Turning the axis of black politics rightward over the last decade was, Ford says, the project of a decade and an immense achievement for the right. For the last third of the 20th century the most left-leaning segment of the North American polity was black America — not Cambridge MA or Ann Arbor MI or San Francisco or even New York City — the rock and foundation of the US left was in New Orleans, Detroit, Newark, St. Louis, Washington DC and other black dominated cities. Funding black Republicans and cranky black academics did little to undermine that rock. The right had to incubate and raise its own crop of corporate-oriented black Democrats to turn that trick. Corey Booker was an early asset.

In Ford’s 2002 article and in the recent speech, he explains how, on the eve of his first run for mayor, Booker was granted a coming-out party at the right wing Manhattan Institute, a signal for the entire conservative universe that he was one of their own. Conservative deep pockets who never took interest in a Newark election in their lives wrote bags of checks. Every single corporate-media outlet in the tri-state area endorsed Corey Booker over his opponent. Thanks to his powerful conservative allies, newbie Booker greatly outspent the most powerful black politician in the state, losing only narrowly in his first mayoral run.

The second time Booker ran for mayor, feds timed their investigations and indictments of Mayor Sharpe James so that he was forced to resign only 3 weeks before the election, too late for another anti-Booker candidate to put together a coherent campaign. Booker also benefited from publicity that could not have been bought with tens of millions of dollars, a feature-length award winning documentary film that portrayed his opponent as a crook, which he was, and Booker as a kind of urban saint.

As one might expect from a product of the Bradley Foundation in office, Booker has faithfully pursued a right wing agenda devoted to dismantling public education, and turning over government assets such as Newark’s water system to favored private contractors. Interestingly, Booker’s full scale pursuit of privatization of his city’s garbage collection, watershed, parks and recreation and other services and assets are little known and rarely mentioned by media outside his home town. The recent Salon article on the “re-invention” of black politics manages to ignore the actual policy practices of the new black “elite displacers” – an empty description meant to apply to new black elite politicians replacing old ones — as well. Privatization and the cutting of government workforces are massively unpopular propositions among the people Booker and the rest of the black political class supposedly represent. Telling this part of the story would be a little too much information. If we had it we might actually begin to understand what the “technocratic leadership,” if there really is any such thing, which Booker and his colleagues bring to the table actually is.

We might not know much about Booker’s aggressive attempts at privatization, the time he rushed into a burning building has been breathlessly covered everywhere. The mayor of Newark some would have us believe, wears a cape. Corporate media seem to work very hard to make our elections are about feelings of safety, pride, fear or security, about images of youth and “technocratic” competence, whatever that is.

The right has decisively invaded the politics of black America, and owns the Democratic party outright. Barack Obama is effectively a center-right president, pursuing wars, prosecuting whistleblowers, shielding banksters, and using cruise missiles to dispatch suspected terrorists with an impunity the Bush-Cheney gang never enjoyed With black Democrats routinely shilling for imperial wars, austerity, school closings, privatizations, bailouts and kindly treatment for their campaign contributors, there are no outlets in the two parties for the real needs and desires of much of black America. The two party system has become people-proof and democracy-proof.

The new black politicians still do call liberally on the images of struggles past. Kasim Reed, for instance, the black mayor of Atlanta in his campaign lit called himself a “civil rights lawyer”. He forgot to mention he was a defendants’s civil rights lawyer, defending corporations that violate the civil rights of actual persons. The new black politicans drape themselves in kente cloth every now and then, and they remember King’s birthday and Black History Month. They come together to celebrate and congratulate each other frequently, at occasions like the Congressional Black Caucus’s annual legislative conference. But their politics, black politics haven’t been re-invented. They’ve been compromised. Hijacked. Colonized.

Black politics isn’t about addressing black unemployment, which is at levels not seen in seventy years. It’s not about the catastrophic fall in black family wealth that has resulted from the foreclosure epidemic, also disproportionately concentrated in black neighborhoods. Black politics isn’t about addressing the issue of black mass incarceration which has shredded our families and futures. Black politics isn’t about stopping the wave of foreign wars which King a generation ago called a demonic suction tube drawing resources away from programs for human needs. There is no room for any of these concerns in today’s black politics. All that’s left is re-electing the black president, protecting him and the first lady from insults and shoring up the careers of black mayors and congressmen. All that, and getting paid.

Black politics is over, at least until the day when enough of us walk out of the Democratic party to build something new, something that does not yet exist.

Social wedge issues such as abortion, birth control and sex education in public schools have taken center stage and sometimes dominated the political debate this year, but progressive experts on reproductive rights are concerned that women of color are rarely represented in the mainstream media’s coverage.

If elected president, presumptive Republican candidate Mitt Romney has vowed to defund Planned Parenthood, a move that the state of Texas is attempting. Moreover, Tennessee has passed legislation to severely limit what educators can teach in sex education classes, and states such as Arizona, Mississippi and Virginia have passed legislation that significantly restricts abortion access.

Conservative attacks on reproductive rights repeatedly make headlines. But women of color and low-income women who disproportionately depend on the services of Planned Parenthood and face challenges accessing reproductive care have not figured prominently in mainstream news coverage of the reproductive rights debate.

Experts on the topic say that because underprivileged women have the most to lose as lawmakers curb such rights, the media should focus on them in the discussion.

“Women who are poor and also women of color have disproportionately high rates of unwanted pregnancy,” says Heather Boonstra, a senior public policy associate of the Guttmacher Institute, a Washington, D.C., organization that advocates for sexual and reproductive health and rights.

“Some of that has to do with the basics in terms of obtaining health care and the kinds of social conditions in the women’s lives that make it hard for them to use contraception and use it consistently,” she says. “Poorer women — their lives have a lot of disruptions. Using and obtaining contraception, let alone affording it and getting it on a routine basis is harder.”

According to the institute, black women are three times as likely as white women to have an unplanned pregnancy, and Hispanic women are two times as likely. Among poor women, Hispanics have the highest rate of unplanned pregnancy. In addition, financial pressures related to the sluggish economy are likely leading more poor women to terminate pregnancies. The institute found that the number of abortion recipients who were poor jumped from 27 percent in 2000 to 42 percent in 2008, the first full year of the economic downturn.

Media outlets tend to ignore these findings and the financial pressures driving them, and simply report on abortion rates and laws without factoring in race and class. Including more women of color and their advocates in mainstream media stories would produce more comprehensive articles.

For instance, Boonstra says a primary reason that poor women have high rates of unintended pregnancies is because they lack access to long-acting forms of contraception, a privilege afforded women with higher incomes and private insurance.

Dependence exclusively on birth control methods that must be used daily or for every sexual encounter, such as pills and condoms, leads to a higher unplanned pregnancy rate among disadvantaged women. Yet pundits and reporters typically don’t mention the impact that current legislation to curb access to birth control, abortion and sex education will have on underprivileged women.

“I think that more African-American women need a turn at the mic to talk about how these issues are impacting the community,” says Janette Robinson-Flint, executive director of Black Women for Wellness, a Los Angeles organization that advocates for health needs of black women. “Major media outlets have a tendency not to have African-American women in anchor or decision-making positions.”

In 2010, the media extensively covered a suggestion by conservative groups, such as the Issues4Life Foundation, that abortion providers were influencing black women to terminate their pregnancies. In major cities, right-wing groups have erected billboards on which they contend that the high number of abortions black women have is tantamount to genocide.

Robinson-Flint says she was dismayed that the media focused on the controversial billboards without delving deeply into factors that lead black women to have abortions at five times the rate that white women do.

“They didn’t talk about the social justice issues,” she says of the flawed reporting. “They didn’t talk about poverty, unemployment, infant mortality, maternal mortality, any of the contributing factors.” She adds that in Los Angeles, for example, hospital closures have resulted in too few medical providers to meet the black community’s needs, contributing to lack of family planning.

Some states have no providers who perform abortions, and legislation pending in Mississippi would result in closure of the sole facility there. Such laws pose the greatest disadvantage to poor, underprivileged women, according to Boonstra, because they already struggle to cover the basic cost of an abortion. Fifty-seven percent of women pay for the procedure out of pocket, the Guttmacher Institute reports.

The institute’s overview of state abortion laws as of May 1 is available here.

Removing local abortion providers means that poor women also must pay for travel to a state that provides abortions and likely miss work or pay for child care if they are among the 61 percent of women who have abortions and are mothers. These costs may increase if women seek abortions in states that require them to endure a waiting period before terminating their pregnancies. Women in this predicament will likely have to miss more days of work and pay for extended stays in hotels, Boonstra says.

The abortion debate isn’t the only sexual health issue making headlines. Legislation to limit the type of sexual education taught in schools has also received major mainstream media coverage. Often omitted from this coverage is that youths of color deprived of sexual education classes may be especially vulnerable.

Black teens, for example, are twice as likely as whites or Latinos to develop a sexually transmitted infection, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2008. That figure was consistent even when factoring in income levels and numbers of sexual partners, an indication that these teens are not taught how to practice safer sex.

After a decline in teen pregnancy from 1990 to 2005, the rates rose in 2006 for all racial groups, particularly minorities. The Hispanic teen pregnancy rate rose by 126.6 percent that year, followed by blacks at 126.3 percent and whites at 44 percent.

“There’s plenty of research that shows abstinence-oriented sex education leads to more teen pregnancy and not less,” says Dominique DiPrima, host of Front Page, a Los Angeles radio show. DiPrima focuses largely on issues of concern to communities of color and women. She recently launched the Black Media Alliance, a coalition of African-Americans in media and broadcasting, to encourage the mainstream media to represent people of color more often as reporters, sources and decision makers.

“There needs to be more [discussion] in the media where women are talking with women and not in a defensive posture,” DiPrima says. “A lot of times, you see panels where there are no women. Not to say men should be excluded, but there [need] to be more places where women can have frank dialogue.”

DiPrima says the media rely too often on professional pundits rather than people of color, who are most likely to be affected.

The Black Media Alliance has had discussions with media outlets such as Clear Channel about racism and misogyny on air. DiPrima says she hopes that communities of color learn more about attacks on reproductive rights before pending legislation becomes law and it’s too late to act.

“I believe people are waking up and realizing that Republicans have gone so Neanderthal with their attacks on women,” she says. “They’re uniting women. I think it’s going to wake people up, and the end result may just be the opposite of what they’re planning for the country.”

Protestors, Disruptors, Petitioners unite as the Michigan House of Representatives Natural Gas Subcommittee recommends that the State lease all of our remaining public land – 5.3 million unleased acres – to drastically increase oil and gas extraction. And fracking, as one protestor’s sign attests, “is Good Bye Pure Michigan.”

On May 8, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) offered over 108,000 acres of state land in 23 counties to bidders interested in purchasing 5-year mineral rights leases for oil and gas drilling, including 23,400 acres in Barry County with nearly the entire Yankee Springs Recreation Area (just east of Gun Lake) up for bid.

Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor, Muskegon, and Kalamazoo residents attended and took part in the protest alongside people from Barry and Oakland counties there to voice their disapproval of the DNR’s offering of well-known recreation areas. Some drummed and chanted as bidders walked into the building to register. Others entered the auction room and stood up during the bidding process to make statements about the wrongness of auctioning off public land, the dangers of injecting known toxins into land, water, and ecosystems, and fracking’s excessive use of water. 

Though state auctions of mineral rights have occurred for decades, Mary Uptigrove of the DNR Mineral Management Division, when asked if the twice-yearly auctions usually drew much public attention, said she had never seen anything like the May 8 protest. “No, nothing like this, and I’ve been here for nine years.” Auctioneer Bob Howe of Sheridan Realty & Auction Co. agreed, noting that two years ago the MDNR had the largest auction ever in terms of money taken in, with a record $178 million for less acreage than the current May 2012 auction, which earned $3.5 million. The difference? Two years ago there was a frenzy of speculation, and our state legislators have obviously been hard at work, paving the way for the “natural gas renaissance [that] is upon us.”

The auctioneer progressed through the first few ‘A’ counties: Alpena, Antrim, and Arenac, rather quickly after some tense moments when over half of us who took seats around the perimeter of the room – 3-4 writers and videographers and about 20-30 members of the public – were forced to vacate our seats. Twenty-five minutes before the auction began, DNR staff claimed there was no room for anyone but registered bidders. I held up my press pass, explaining that I had called to verify that press would be allowed to attend this “open” meeting, but was again told to leave the room due to the 60-person capacity.

Many of us registered as bidders and re-entered the room. Others gathered outside the auction room’s open door (presumably to maintain the meeting’s “open” status) making noise. “But this is wrong,” one woman’s voice projected over the opening bids. “This is supposed to be a public meeting and they’re auctioning off public land. Isn’t there anything we can do to stop this?”

When Barry County came up to bid, protestors who had been in the building’s lobby moved into the walled courtyard outside the lower-level auction room, pounding on makeshift drums, chanting anti-fracking chants, and banging on the windows as the auctioneer prattled on and bidders continued to bid, though alertness levels definitely rose.

Amid continuous chanting and glimpses of protestors and their colorful signs through the windows (before one of the auctioneers pulled the blinds closed), a young man in a suit was the first to stand up. 

Walking to the windows and pulling back the blinds, he said, “What are they doing out there?” calling attention to the protestors.  “Wait,” he said as the one uniformed DNR officer in the room at that point pulled him away. “What are they doing?” As he was escorted out in front of the bidders’ tables, he called out, “What are you doing selling off Yankee Springs?”

A few moments later, a second young man in a dress shirt and tie strode in front of the auctioneer to say, “We don’t believe in the myth of safe fracking. Fracking will poison the water.”

More security came in stages as more protestors entered the room, forced to register as bidders in order to be admitted.  The auctioneer’s auction-calling and the “Ho!” and “Here!” bid acknowledgments from his assistants were accompanied by a steady stream of noise from the protestors outside, who were eventually observed but not interfered with by several Lansing police officers.

Debra Grodan Olson, a Michigan lawyer with strong ties to the Circle Pines Center in Delton registered as a bidder, hoping to save several 40-acre parcels up for bid near Circle Pines, an educational recreation and retreat center focused on peace, social justice, and environmental stewardship. In a late-night letter to Governor Snyder, Olson expressed “concern for the values – ecological, wildlife, water, riparian, property, and community – at stake and threatened by the leasing of mineral rights for state lands, wetlands, creeks, streams, and lakes” all treasured, she noted, “far beyond any return the state might expect from selling lease rights to these lands.” Her auction-day goal, knowing she was unable to save all of Yankee Springs, was to prevent the land and lakes near Circle Pines from being drilled under.

As the parcels within Yankee Springs Recreation Area went up for bid, it was clear that Olson’s presence made a difference. Bidder #124 (bidders were identified by numbered cards) routinely opened the bidding at $30 per acre – above the $12 minimum – and it was clear that he was willing to go up to $375 and $380 per acre whenever Olson or occasionally others cross bid.  In the end, he made an all-out sweep across Yankee Springs as more protestors rose.

One young man jumped up on an auction table, calling out as two DNR Officers approached him. “This theft of public land is a short term fix for the companies that created our energy crisis. The extraction process poisons our water and air. You will not succeed.”

Only one protestor was arrested for disrupting the auction, though his repeated verbal comment: “We’ve got every right to be here,” came in direct response to a bidder from the opposite side of the room who, conversing back and forth with the auctioneer, chuckled through a complaint: “If you keep these guys out of the room, we’ll be fine.”

The tension and excitement of Olson’s cross bidding came to an end as she packed up to leave, and the last few parcels went quietly unopposed at the $12 per acre minimum. All but one or two of two hundred eleven 40-to-160-to-200-acre parcels of Barry County’s public land went to two bidders – Rich Patterson of Meridian Land & Energy and Amos Fowler of Pteradon Energy – most of them for $12 to $30 to $60 per acre.

One of the last protestors to stand up for Barry County, a young woman, walked up the center aisle clapping her hands together in broad strokes as she chanted, “How about that Hal Fitch. How about that Hal Fitch.” I understood and appreciated her reference to MDEQ’s Director of Oil, Gas, and Minerals and her nod to the Department’s lack of protection of public land. But as we left Barry County and the drums subsided and the stand-up disruptions ceased, I gave in to grief.

One of the most beautiful places in the world – to me, anyway, after three years of hiking Yankee Springs’ trails – had fallen to the F-bomb of all F-bombs: Fracking. For three winters I had dedicated my Sundays to watching the snow fall over Deep Lake or drifting silently in the silver-green air of the Pine Grove. I had ushered in each spring with the Long Lake boardwalk where mounds of new soil bulge above the water and sprout with ferns and ivy and tiny new flowers.

No matter how much we cared or researched or hoped to stop public lands from oil and gas development, Yankee Springs and the equally treasured Lake Orion rec area in Oakland county were “won” by the oil and gas industry – along with land just as important to locals in 21 other counties.  It was tempting to believe that none of it – the shouting and the art and the bidders who tried to save the land – did any good. But of course it did.

One hundred people witnessed, made statements, and were escorted out by armed conservation officers. A few of us stayed to the bitter end, watching previously passed-on parcels go up for bid at $6 per acre instead of the first-round minimum of $12 (Talk about grief!).

There was a resurgence that kept us going when Oakland County’s recreation areas came up to bid. The drumming and chanting returned and more protestors rose at key moments. One dark haired young woman stood and said in a quietly penetrating voice: “This is my homeland. You are poisoning the water for our children and grandchildren. For your own children and grand children.” And as she willingly turned toward the door with her officer escort, she said, “Ban fracking now,” and it hung in the air.

Still, our outrage at the future damage to landscapes and ecosystems that comes with the distributed industrialization of fracking did not stop the industrializers from winning. So what next?

We form a people’s movement to ban fracking. We bypass Michigan legislators and the Big Greens – environmental organizations such as The National Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club and the Clean Water Action Council –groups that support frack reform bills which rely on what New York environmental activist and writer Robert Jereski terms “Regulationism: an undue faith in the promise of regulating a noxious processes that distracts from the need to stop it.”

In Michigan, reform bills call for a moratorium, but only within two specific geological layers,  the Utica and Collinwood shale layers; they call for a fracking panel to study the safety of hydraulic fracturing with industry funding and participation (green washing and junk science, anyone?). And in the greatest hypocrisy of regulationism, newly introduced House Bill 5565, touted as the bill that will finally require frackers to disclose the chemicals used in the fracking process (the industry has been exempt from regulation and disclosure of “trade secret” chemicals since 2005), HB 5565 actually devotes 2/3rds of its language to detailing the process the industry will use to continue to keep chemicals secret. (Section 61535 sets up conditions for withholding chemical identities.) What’s worse: the bill requires healthcare providers to sign a confidentiality statement, a “gag” order, before receiving chemical data needed to treat their patients (Section 61537).

And House Bill 5565 is touted as stronger regulation? Thanks, but no thanks. Who needs more regulation when it is clear that regulating the gas and oil industry, and fracking in particular, means more secrecy and exemption. “Safe fracking” is a myth which subjects us, reform bill after reform bill, to what Jereski (regulationism) refers to as “the tyranny of low expectation.”

About that Bypass: Let’s Ban Fracking – A Ballot Initiative to Ban Fracking in Michigan

At the protest on May 8, petitioners introduced the public to a new state-wide ballot initiative to ban horizontal hydraulic fracturing in Michigan. A ballot initiative drafted by the most grass roots of grass roots efforts, a committee of people from around the state who were galvanized by the Michigan DNR’s auction of entire recreation areas and by the Michigan Natural Gas Subcommittee’s recommendation that the State employ all sorts of unconventional oil and gas extraction methods on all remaining public land.

Germany, France, and Bulgaria did it, and so did Vermont, when that state’s legislators passed a ban on fracking on May 4. Now the Committee to Ban Fracking in Michigan (http://letsbanfracking.org) is hoping that Michigan will be the first to offer the people the chance to decide whether or not we will allow fracking and its industrializing force to spread across the Great Lakes State.

As the Committee’s Press Release states, “petitioners are required to submit 322,609 valid signatures from Michigan voters by July 9 to the Bureau of Elections in order to place the proposed amendment on the ballot in November.”

The petition reads: “A proposal to amend the Constitution by adding a new Section 28 to Article I to read as follows:

To insure the health, safety, and general welfare of the people, no person, corporation, or other entity shall use horizontal hydraulic fracturing in the State. ‘Horizontal hydraulic fracturing’ is defined as the technique of expanding or creating rock fractures leading from directional wellbores, by injecting substances including but not limited to water, fluids, chemicals, and proppants, under pressure, into or under the rock, for purposes of exploration, drilling, completion, or production of oil or natural gas. No person, corporation, or other entity shall accept, dispose of, store, or process, anywhere in the State, any flowback, residual fluids, or drill cuttings used or produced in horizontal hydraulic fracturing.”

To Sign or Circulate the Petition:

To find a location where you can sign the petition (it must be signed in person) or to contact a city, county, or area coordinator, go to the Let’s Ban Fracking website. Click on “Volunteer” to view a list of area coordinators. See “Events” for a list of signing events.

Note: This is not an online petition. Public pressure petitions gather signatures online, often linked to emails from environmental organizations that use strong words such as “Fracking must stop!” Online petitions serve only one purpose. They are sent to legislators to put pressure on them to respond with legislation.  Here in Michigan, where legislators have recommended that all 5.3 million acres of our remaining public land be “used” for oil and gas extraction, public pressure will fall on frack-hungry ears.

Author Bio:

Maryann Lesert is an author and Associate Professor of English at Grand Rapids Community College, researching fracking for an environmental writing project. She belongs to Ban Michigan Fracking (www.banmichiganfracking.org), an educational organization working toward local and statewide bans on hydraulic fracturing.

Hyperlinked Sources:

The U.S. House Energy & Commerce Committee Report, April 2011, “Chemicals Used In Hydraulic Fracturing.” PDF. 14 pgs. See List of 29 Known Carcinogens, Safe Drinking Water Act Contaminants, and Hazardous Air Pollutants, pg. 10.

http://house.michigan.gov/sessiondocs/2011-2012/testimony/Committee6-4-24-2012.pdf

The Michigan House of Representatives Natural Gas Subcommitee Report on Energy and Job Creation, April 2012. PDF. 26  pages. See; Conclusion & Recommendations, pgs. 20-22.

http://democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Hydraulic%20Fracturing%20Report%204.18.11.pdf

House Bill No. 5565, Introduced by Reps. Brown, Bledsoe, Lipton, Bauer, Tlaib and Byrum, April 24, 2012. A bill to amend 1994 PA 451, entitled “Natural resources and environmental protection act,”(MCL 324.101 to 324.90106) by adding sections 61506d, 61531, 61532, 61533, 61534, 61535, 61536, and 61537.

http://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2011-2012/billintroduced/House/pdf/2012-HIB-5565.pdf

Website for the Committee to Ban Fracking in Michigan.

http://letsbanfracking.org/

Educational Website for Ban Michigan Fracking.

www.banmichiganfracking.org

Next month activists in Ohio will be mobilizing at their state capitol to pass legislation to ban fracking. There are activist from Michigan who will be participating out of solidarity, since they know that Michigan is also a battle-ground on the issue of fracking.

Don’t Frack Ohio is a mass mobilization to stop fracking in Ohio. On June 17th we’ll take over the statehouse in Columbus to hold a people’s assembly to pass the legislation that Ohioans need to protect against the fracking industry.

From June 14th to 16th we’ll be meeting in Columbus to build a stronger anti-fracking movement in Ohio with trainings, strategy sessions and meetups led by local organizers and 350.org trainers.

Go to this link to sign up for the upcoming June action to ban fracking in Ohio.

Imagine that a democratic and popular media – a people’s media – had been on the beat in Chicago during the NATO summit and protests that concluded in that city two days ago to explain why many thousands had come downtown to demonstrate against the summit and why a significantly larger number of heavily equipped city, county, state, federal, and private police and security forces had been assembled to protect NATO’s delegates, that media would have noted from the outset that NATO is an aggressive and imperial killing machine. As the antiwar activist John La Farge noted on ZNet last week, “A look at some of [NATO’s] crimes might spark some indignation.” Further:

“Desecration of corpses, indiscriminate attacks, bombing of allied troops, torture of prisoners and unaccountable drone war are a few of NATO’s outrages in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere…While bombing Libya last March,” NATO refused to aid a group of 72 migrants adrift in the Mediterranean. Only nine people on board survived. The refusal was condemned as criminal by the Council of Europe, a human rights watchdog….”

“NATO jets bombed and rocketed a Pakistani military base for two hours Nov. 26, 2011—the Salala Incident—killing 26 Pakistani soldiers and wounding dozens more. NATO refuses to apologize, so the Pakistani regime has kept military supply routes into Afghanistan closed since November.”

“…the US-led unprovoked 2003 bombing, invasion and military take-over of Iraq—which NATO officially joined in 2004 in a ‘training’ capacity—resulted in over 665,000 civilian deaths by 2006, and 200,000 in the UN-authorized, 1991 Desert Storm massacre led primarily by the US with several NATO allies.”

NATO’s criminal record goes back to the last century, including the deadly NATO bombings of a Serbian passenger train and a Serbian television station in April of 1999.

Noting the absurdity of NATO’s claim to be a defensive and “humanitarian” alliance, a people’s media would have observed that NATO has served as a spear pointed by the world’s richest nations – the U.S. above all – at the Middle East and Southwest Asia, the world’s strategic energy heartland. It would have reported how NATO is threatening to create deadly future conflicts with nuclear Russia and China in pursuit of increased U.S. and Western control of petroleum resources. It would have reported the provocative nature (from a Russian perspective) of NATO’s new missile shield in and around Eastern Europe. And a people’s media would have reported how the U.S. and the West will clearly be retaining a central military presence – a de facto indefinite occupation – in Afghanistan long after 2014, when Barack Obama claims that the U.S. and NATO will have “withdrawn” from that nation. 

A people’s media would also have reported that NATO is a poverty and social injustice machine. It would have noted the massive global social opportunity cost of the massive taxpayer sums spent on so-called defense by the NATO powers. It would have reported on the absurdity of those nations accounting for more than three-fourths of the world’s massive military budget (U.S.$1.630 trillion in 2010) in a time of savage austerity and misery for billions of world citizens, including many millions even in the rich states. It would have noted that NATO militarism takes hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and Euros away from potential investment in meeting human needs each year and grants them instead to corporate masters of death and destruction like Chicago’s own Boeing Corporation, maker of the Muslim-killing Black Hawk Helicopter, the Predator Drone, and the B2 Stealth Bomber. Noting (perhaps) Martin Luther King’s observation that a nation courts “spiritual death” when it spends “more on military defense than on a social uplift,” a people’s media would have noted the tragic and outrageous nature of this misdirection of resources in a world in a “world’s richest nation” – the United States – where:

• a record-setting 1 in 15 citizens now live in “deep poverty” – at less than half the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty measure (less than $11,157 for a family of four).
• the total number of citizens living in official poverty recently reached a historic high of 46.2 million
• over 15 percent of the population (1 in 7 Americans) lives below the poverty line
• 1 in 6 citizens (50 million, a population twice the size of Texas) have no health insurance
• 14.5% of the citizen households are defined as “food insecure” (as facing difficulties putting enough food on the table)
• 1 in 3 citizens live either in official poverty or in “near poverty”: either officially poor or at less than 150 percent of the poverty level

Bringing it to the local level, a people’s media would have noted that the City of Chicago spent 14 million taxpayer dollars to host and celebrate a global killing machine in a city that was already home, even before the onset of the Great Recession, to 15 predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods with child poverty rates ranging from 55 to 71 percent and to 6 predominantly black neighborhoods where more than 4 in 10 children were mired in “deep poverty.”

A people’s media would have reported and reflected critically on the excessive, surreal level of militarized policing in Chicago. From at least Friday May 18^th through Monday, May 21st, 2012, that media would have noted, the downtown and South Loop of Chicago were placed under proto-totalitarian multi-dimensional para-militarized police-state occupation. (I’ll report from the scene that heavily armed, high-tech federal, state, county, city and private security forces were omnipresent and ubiquitous in the gleaming center of “global Chicago.” At almost every step in and around the city’s downtown and South Loop, I beheld black-clad, baton-wielding and vest-wearing agents of repression, high-speed police vans and cars speeding around corners and occasionally into crowds – an intimidating, vast “security” presence that seemed more than vaguely dystopian. Except for many thousands of militarized police, the Loop was nearly a ghost town by Friday morning. City, federal, state, and media helicopters hovered above the central business, hotel and restaurant district and swept the lakefront, monitoring real and potential protest. Police cars and vans swept around corners with sirens blaring to descend on real or imagined dissenters. Everywhere you looked, it seemed, men in paramilitary black were getting out of shining white vans and black SUVs.)

A people’s media would have noted how Chicago police repeatedly and needlessly initiated violence by clubbing protesters on Saturday and Sunday. That media would have reported and condemned how police vans dangerously brushed past and bumped protestors, sending one (Jacob Amico) to a local hospital. It would have reported how the police pulled over, harassed, and arrested a handful of live streamers trying to cover the protests.

A people’s media would have questioned and ridiculed the Chicago Police Department’s claim on the eve of the summit to have discovered horrible plots by a handful of “terrorist” anarchists to make and set off explosives in the city. It would have focused on the role that FBI infiltrators and agents provocateur played in trumping up the charges. It would have denounced the blatant violation of the alleged terrorists’ civil liberties by police, who broke down doors with guns drawn and searched residences without warrants and physically and verbally abused suspects, who were denied food, water and access to bathrooms. A people’s media would have noted that federal and local officials commonly manufacture these sorts of fabricated charges and conduct these kinds of pre-emptive raids prior to national security events in order (to quote an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild) “to spread fear and intimidation so you have fewer people our on the streets willing to protest and willing to risk violation of their constitutional rights.”

A people’s media would have commented with grave democratic concern on the chilling militarization of the domestic metropolitan policing demonstrated in a great American city. It would have noted the great lengths to which the city’s militaristic and corporatist mayor (President Barack Obama’s former right-wing chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel) went to prevent protesters from assembling in Chicago in the first place – the endless permit hurdles and protest penalties City Hall placed in the way of those who wished to express their Free Speech rights during the summit.

On the afternoon of Friday, May 18th, a people’s media would have interrupted normally scheduled programming to broadcast live coverage of a remarkable rally in Chicago’s downtown. In Daley Plaza, that media would have shown, 5,000 people crowded in to support the implementation of a “Robin Hood tax” on financial speculators in order to more adequately fund social programs that have come under relentless assault in recent years and decades.

The following day, a people’s media would have interrupted normally scheduled programming to broadcast live from the block in front of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s house on the city’s Northwest Side. Eight hundred marchers assembled there to demand that Emmanuel rescind his closing down of numerous mental health clinics across the city. Speakers drew a powerful connection between the dwindling of city services and the money that “Mayor 1%” was spending to wine, dine, guard, and chauffer NATO war-makers.

On Sunday afternoon, May 20^th, a people’s media would have interrupted normally scheduled programming to give extensive and appreciate coverage to the vast scale, rich diversity, brilliant pageantry, and splendid egalitarian and solidaristic spirit of the giant protest march that wound its way down Michigan Avenue to the heavily guarded hard perimeter of the summit at Michigan and Cermak Street (2200 South) on the afternoon of Sunday, May 21st. By my estimate, the march was at least 15,000 to 20,000 strong.

A people’s media would have observed that Sunday’s turnout reflected the futility of the authorities’ attempt to scare people away from the streets.

A people’s media would have given voice to dozens of marchers, letting activists tell readers and viewers why they opposed the summit and what positive developments they wanted to help create in Chicago, the U.S., and the world. Among other things, that media would have noted the wondrous and welcome nature of two interrelated developments: (i) a reinvigorated antiwar movement that (in accord with last year’s Madison rebellion and the Occupy Movement) speaks the language of class, connecting opposition to specific imperial wars and campaigns to the broader problem of Western militarism and connecting both to inequality and the profits system – to the domestic and global rule of “the 1%”; (ii) a reinvigorated left peace and anti-austerity movement that can (among other things) put large numbers of active citizens on the streets when the White House is occupied by fake-progressive/faux-populist (in fact militantly corporate and militaristic) Democratic Party – this in a solidly Democratic-run city.

A people’s media would have given extensive live coverage to the remarkable moment at the end of the massive Sunday march when 40 U.S. military veterans stood on a flatbed truck in a packed intersection several blocks from the summit site (McCormick Place). One by one, each ex-soldier told stories of their service, spoke passionately of their disillusionment with “the global war on [of] terror,” and then tossed the medals they had received into an empty street. One soldier blamed himself for “not doing my homework” on the U.S. imperial project before enlisting in the Armed Services. Another veteran tearfully apologized to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Another shouted that “our real enemies aren’t 7000 miles away with foreign sounding names. They are right here at home. They are the CEOs who take our jobs and homes away.” More than one ex-soldier at Michigan and Cermak dedicated the repudiation of their medals to “the 99 percent.” It was a moving and eloquent display.

A people’s media would have broadcast every word live of this remarkable demonstration on every channel available to it. It would have moved back and forth from the ardent faces and language of the courageous young ex-warriors to the cold and indifferent visages of the police, many of them mounted on horses. The people’s media would have showed how the silent, stoic agents of repression did not glance at the powerful scene on the makeshift stage and instead stared back at the crowd from behind their visors, gigantic batons (as big as baseball bats) in their hands, ready and eager to implement the order to disperse. A people’s media would have noted that two dangerous Long Range Acoustic Devices (each costing the city’s taxpayers $20,000) stood three blocks away, ready to unleash ear-splitting sonic screams against those taking too long to depart (fortunately the police did not use the LRADs for anything other than ordering dispersal). With the cameras panning out across the ominous face off at Michigan and Cermak, people’s media commentators would have noted the chilling proto-totalitarianism of it all and highlighted the contradiction between (a) NATO’s claim to be spreading and defending democracy and freedom and (b) NATO’s apparent need to be defended from the citizenry (including veterans of its bloody neo-colonial wars) with a militarized police presence that turned a major U.S. city center into an occupation zone.

Now, imagine how an authoritarian or even totalitarian corporate war media would have covered the NATO summit and related protests. It would have portrayed NATO as a noble defensive alliance dedicated to peace, freedom, prosperity and partnership. It would have brought in NATO officials and friendly, power-serving “experts” to praise to the body in precisely such preposterous terms. It would have mindlessly replicated policymakers claims that that the U.S. is “leaving Afghanistan” by 2014. Having depicted NATO (and the Afghan strategy) in such an Orwellian way as to make the protestors look like deluded, neurotic, and inherently dissatisfied n’eer-do-wells who just like to march around and make noise – to “be heard” – the authoritarian war media would have claimed that the city was being open, welcoming, and respectful towards protestors and their free speech rights. It would have given dutiful, fear-mongering headline coverage (replete with menacing front page mug shots of the falsely accused havoc-wreakers) to the FBI and police department’s fabricated anarcho-terrorist bomb scare (shades of Haymarket) and warning Chicagoans in advance to be on guard for dangerous anarchists. It would have had nothing of substance to say about the social inequality and opportunity cost of U.S. and NATO militarism and the domestic police state. It would have downplayed and even ridiculed the size of the demonstrations, mindlessly reproducing the CPD’s preposterous claim that the Sunday march was only 2,000 strong (!) and crowing that protest numbers were far less than anti-NATO organizers had hoped. Praising the police for being sensitive and keeping the city safe and under control, it would have had little to say about the content of protestors’ chants, banners, literature, issues, demands, analyses, and perspectives. It would have given wildly disproportionate attention to moments when the cops and the more volatile protestors tussled. It would have largely ignored the moving and striking medal-returning scene at Michigan and Cermak while spending long periods of live television and radio time on periods when cops and a relatively small number of black-clad anarchists battled physically at the end of the march.

Of course, you don’t really have to imagine these differences between (i) how a people’s media and (ii) how an authoritarian state-capitalist war media would have covered and commented on the NATO summit and protests. During the summit, you could in fact find some considerable amount of the first (people’s) sort of coverage and commentary on such relatively marginal and small, major resource-deprived Left and progressive outlets as Democracy Now!, Truthout, ZNet, AlterNet, FiredogLake In These Times,  Counterpunch, Socialistworker.org and Pacifica Radio. You could also find vast amounts of the second (authoritarian/Orwellian) sort of coverage and commentary in Chicago’s two corporate newspapers (the Sun Times and the Tribune) and on the radio stations WBBM (Chicago News Radio) and the city’s TV stations WBBM/CBS2, WMAQ/NBC5, WLS/ABC7 and WGN and in various national media outlets like CNN and the New York Times, which actually reported last Monday that only “hundreds of protestors took to the streets of Chicago on Sunday in opposition to the war [on Afghanistan] and to NATO” (Helene Cooper and Matthew Rosenberg, “Pakistan Rift Casts a Shadow on NATO Meeting,” New York Times, May 21, 2012, A6). There’s nothing speculative about my paragraph (two above) on how an authoritarian/totalitarian/ Orwellian/corporate/war media would have handled the NATO summit and protests. As some readers can probably tell, I constructed that paragraph precisely on the basis of a review of the sources mentioned in this paragraph.

Sadly, at present, “the 1%’s” authoritarian corporate media dwarfs people’s media in terms of audience, resources, and influence. This is a key component of the rising totalitarian peril in “democratic” America, where the unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire hold power through control of information and opinion as well as the massive deployment of raw force and surveillance.

Within the last 24 hours, numerous West Michigan news sources have reported on the newly released government documents related to the 2010 Enbridge oil disaster that caused nearly 1 million gallons of oil to contaminate the Kalamazoo River.

The Mlive reporter out of Kalamazoo states, “The 158 documents and 58 photos will provide the factual basis for the National Transportation Safety Board’s conclusion of what caused the spill.”

The Mlive story goes on to cite a spokesperson for the Natural Re­sources Defense Council, who made reference to what this new information could mean as it relates to the pipeline system that Enbridge will be responsible for in the Keystone Tar Sands Project.

Despite the limited discussion around the Keystone Tar Sands Project, much of the coverage was focused on the release of the documents, but not what they concluded.

In addition, the MLive story also includes a response from Enbridge, as did most of the other major media sources in West Michigan. The WOOD TV 8 story quoted an Enbridge executive who stated, “Safety has always been core to our operations. We have reviewed our processes and procedures since the Line 6B incident, and we have enhanced our focus on the safety and integrity of our operations even further.”

The only major news agency in West Michigan that framed the story differently was the Battle Creek Enquire. Their headline had a different tone with, Documents shed light on Enbridge spill response. The Battle Creek Enquire article just does a better job of framing the story, by reporting on what some of the documents say. The documents reveal that the response time by Enbridge was faulty and the alarm designed to go off when pipeline breaks occurred, wasn’t working.

The documents released are worth reading and they reveal other useful bits of information as well.

Lastly, it is important to point out that in none of the West Michigan news coverage of these new documents was their any reference to the company’s track record on oil spills and pipeline leaks. According to a report from the group Tar Sands Watch,

Between 1999 and 2010, across all of Enbridge’s operations there have been 804 spills that have released 168,645 barrels (approximately 26.81 million litres, or 7.08 million gallons) of hydrocarbons into the environment.159 This amounts to approximately half of the oil that spilled from the oil tanker the Exxon Valdez after it struck a rock in Prince William Sound, Alaska in 1988.

Reporting the track record of Enbridge on oil spills and pipeline leaks should have been a priority for reporters, but we have come to learn that such reporting has not been consisted with how they have covered this issue from the very beginning.

Native communities had been outright attacked in many cases before this, particularly in the northeastern part of the country, but Congress and Democratic President Andrew Jackson decided to take a different tactic.

The land, in what is now Georgia, South Carolina and Florida was inhabited by the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole and Chickasaw nations, who lived in relative harmony with each other. However, the growing slave labor plantation system was in need of expansion and the last thing that plantation owners wanted was any kind of alliance between Black slaves and Native communities, an alliance that some military strategist had seen before.

During the Seminole Wars in Florida, Andrew Jackson had seen the danger of runaway slaves finding sanctuary in Native communities, as several of the bravest Seminole fighters were Black Indian, as is well documented in Black Indians, by William Loren Katz.

Jackson wanted no part of any kind of a repeat with Black and Native resistance to the US plans for expansion, so his administration devised a plan of forced removal of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole and Chickasaw people to Oklahoma, a campaign, which began as early as 1831.

The pretext of this forced removal, according to Jackson administration, was to provide greater separation between Whites and Native people in order to avoid future conflicts. The White-owned newspapers in the area fed the perception that Native people were dangerous, based on how they were portrayed. In the book News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, the authors demonstrate that not only was there a disproportionate amount of news stories about Native people at that time, most of the stories framed Natives as violent and a danger to White settler communities.

The forced removal of what was known as the Trail of Tears began on May 23^rd, 1838, but the Cherokee were rounded up by US troops months before and interned in camps, where they were held until the long march west began.

Native men, women, children and their elders were forced to march by US troops who held them at bayonet point throughout. Most accounts note that there were inadequate provisions of food, clothing and medical care for the thousands that were forcibly removed.

The forced removal of the Cherokee Nation took them 1,000 miles west to Oklahoma, but along the way thousands died from starvation, disease or freezing to death during the winter months of the forced removal. Some estimates say that 55% of the Cherokee Nation died as a direct result of the Trail of Tears. (A Little Matter of Genocide, Churchill)

However, to those in power in the US, the loss of this many Native people was of little concern, especially considering the amount of land that was then appropriated by the federal government. The amount of land appropriated from the Indian removal of Native Nations in the southeast part of the country was roughly 25 million acres, which was then used by White Settlers.

In recent years the Trail of Tears has become a mild embarrassment to the US government, but much of the official landmarks have been sanitized in order to diminish the brutality of what is known as the Trail of Tears. Excellent examples of the misinformation of this history on those landmarks are well documented in James Loewen’s book, Lies Across America.

After World War II, the Genocide Convention laid out a legal framework for how we currently define genocide. Often, people think that genocide is only the outright killing of a people, but the legal definition includes the theft of a people’s culture, preventing a group of people to reproduce or the forced removal of people from their traditional lands. We know that thousands died in the process of the Trail of Tears, but we should never forget the loss of land, culture and heritage that came with this heinous campaign of violence against Native people in US history.

Many Native people resisted the forced removal and died in the process. It is important that we honor their resistance and never forget crimes committed like the Trail of Tears.

“The purpose of the Wilderness Act is to preserve the wilderness character of the areas to be included in the wilderness system, not to establish any particular use.”

- Howard Zahniser, chief author of the Wilderness Act

One of the activities I enjoy more than any other is waking up before dawn on a crisp, late-fall morning, loading up my backpack, grabbing my 30-06 and walking deep into a USFS Wilderness area in search of elk and deer.  Because of this, and many other reasons, as a backcountry hunter I’m adamantly opposed to HR 4089, the so-called “Sportsmen’s Heritage Act of 2012.

The folks at Wilderness Watch have put together a very detailed analysis of HR 4089 titled, “How the Sportsmen’s Heritage Act of 2012 (HR 4089) Would Effectively Repeal the Wilderness Act.”  The analysis describes in detail how the incredibly destructive provisions of HR 4089 would effectively repeal the Wilderness Act of 1964.  Make no mistake about it, if HR 4089 becomes law – and it has already passed the House with all but two Republicans and 20 percent of Democrats voting for it – Wilderness as envisioned in the Wilderness Act will cease to exist.  Here’s the intro to that analysis:

Introduction

On April 17, 2012, the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR 4089, the Sportsmen’s Heritage Act, supposedly “to protect and enhance opportunities for recreational hunting, fishing and shooting.”  But the bill is a thinly disguised measure to gut the 1964 Wilderness Act and protections for every unit of the National Wilderness Preservation System.

HR 4089 would give hunting, fishing, recreational shooting, and fish and wildlife management top priority in Wilderness, rather than protecting the areas’ wilderness character, as has been the case for nearly 50 years. This bill would allow endless, extensive habitat manipulations in Wilderness under the guise of “wildlife conservation” and for providing hunting, fishing, and recreational shooting experiences. It would allow the construction of roads to facilitate such uses and would allow the construction of dams, buildings, or other structures within Wildernesses. It would exempt all of these actions from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review. Finally, HR 4089 would remove Wilderness Act prohibitions against motor vehicle use for fishing, hunting, or recreational shooting, or for wildlife conservation measures.

According to some news reports, Senator Tester (D-Montana) is the guy the NRA and Safari Club are hoping will sponsor the bill in the Senate. They’ll need Democrat support and Tester is a target for obvious reasons, since he’s locked in a tight re-election campaign with Congressman Denny Rehberg (R-Montana).   In addition to the detailed analysis from Wilderness Watch more info concerning HR 4089 from the Animal Welfare Institute is contained in this action alert, where you can quickly send a note to your two US Senators.  According to the Animal Welfare Institute, other extreme provisions within HR 4089 include:

Amending the Marine Mammal Protection Act to permit the importation of polar bear hunting trophies from Canada for bears killed before May 15, 2008 — the date when polar bears were designated as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.  This would reward 41 hunters for bad behavior: they either killed bears who were off limits or wanted to get their kills in knowing the bears were about to be listed;

Requiring the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Department of the Interior to open nearly all public lands (including National Wildlife Refuges!) to recreational hunting, and directing them to do so without following the environmental review processes required under the National Environmental Policy Act; and

Eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to protect wildlife, habitat, and people from lead and other toxic substances released by ammunition waste under the Toxic Substances Control Act, thereby undermining the ability of the Agency to fulfill its obligation to protect public health and the environment.

During a recent interview on C-SPAN, the head lobbyist for the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance, one of the groups pushing the bill, admitted that most federal land is already accessible to hunters and anglers, and that this bill was simply a proactive measure in case something happens at a later date.  That just reaffirms what Representative Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) correctly noted during his speech against the bill:  “The problem this bill claims to solve actually does not exist.”

As an avid backcountry hunter, I couldn’t agree more.

This article by Ellen Cantarow is re-posted from TomDispatch. Editor’s Note: While this story deals with the consequences of fracking in Wisconsin and Minnesota, it should be of concern for people who live in West Michigan, where recent land auctions took place that could result in hydraulic fracking.

If the world can be seen in a grain of sand, watch out.  As Wisconsinites are learning, there’s money (and misery) in sand — and if you’ve got the right kind, an oil company may soon be at your doorstep.

March in Wisconsin used to mean snow on the ground, temperatures so cold that farmers worried about their cows freezing to death. But as I traveled around rural townships and villages in early March to interview people about frac-sand mining, a little-known cousin of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” daytime temperatures soared to nearly 80 degrees — bizarre weather that seemed to be sending a meteorological message.

In this troubling spring, Wisconsin’s prairies and farmland fanned out to undulating hills that cradled the land and its people. Within their embrace, the rackety calls of geese echoed from ice-free ponds, bald eagles wheeled in the sky, and deer leaped in the brush. And for the first time in my life, I heard the thrilling warble of sandhill cranes.

Yet this peaceful rural landscape is swiftly becoming part of a vast assembly line in the corporate race for the last fossil fuels on the planet. The target: the sand in the land of the cranes.

Five hundred million years ago, an ocean surged here, shaping a unique wealth of hills and bluffs that, under mantles of greenery and trees, are sandstone. That sandstone contains a particularly pure form of crystalline silica.  Its grains, perfectly rounded, are strong enough to resist the extreme pressures of the technology called hydraulic fracturing, which pumps vast quantities of that sand, as well as water and chemicals, into ancient shale formations to force out methane and other forms of “natural gas.”

That sand, which props open fractures in the shale, has to come from somewhere.  Without it, the fracking industry would grind to a halt. So big multinational corporations are descending on this bucolic region to cart off its prehistoric sand, which will later be forcefully injected into the earth elsewhere across the country to produce more natural gas.  Geology that has taken millions of years to form is now being transformed into part of a system, a machine, helping to drive global climate change.

“The valleys will be filled… the mountains and hills made level”

Boom times for hydraulic fracturing began in 2008 when new horizontal-drilling methods transformed an industry formerly dependent on strictly vertical boring. Frac-sand mining took off in tandem with this development.

“It’s huge,” said a U.S. Geological Survey mineral commodity specialist in 2009. “I’ve never seen anything like it, the growth. It makes my head spin.” That year, from all U.S. sources, frac-sand producers used or sold over 6.5 million metric tons of sand — about what the Great Pyramid of Giza weighs.  Last month, Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Senior Manager and Special Projects Coordinator Tom Woletz said corporations were hauling at least 15 million metric tons a year from the state’s hills.

By July 2011, between 22 and 36 frac-sand facilities in Wisconsin were either operating or approved. Seven months later, said Woletz, there were over 60 mines and 45 processing (refinement) plants in operation. “By the time your article appears, these figures will be obsolete,” claims Pat Popple, who in 2008 founded the first group to oppose frac-sand mining, Concerned Chippewa Citizens (now part of The Save the Hills Alliance).

Jerry Lausted, a retired teacher and also a farmer, showed me the tawny ridges of sand that delineated a strip mine near the town of Menomonie where he lives. “If we were looking from the air,” he added, “you’d see ponds in the bottom of the mine where they dump the industrial waste water. If you scan to the left, you’ll see the hills that are going to disappear.”

Those hills are gigantic sponges, absorbing water, filtering it, and providing the region’s aquifer with the purest water imaginable. According to Lausted, sand mining takes its toll on “air quality, water quality and quantity. Recreational aspects of the community are damaged. Property values [are lowered.] But the big thing is, you’re removing the hills that you can’t replace.  They’re a huge water manufacturing factory that Mother Nature gave us, and they’re gone.”

It’s impossible to grasp the scope of the devastation from the road, but aerial videos and photographs reveal vast, bleak sandy wastelands punctuated with waste ponds and industrial installations where Wisconsin hills once stood.

When corporations apply to counties for mining permits, they must file “reclamation” plans. But Larry Schneider, a retired metallurgist and industrial consultant with a specialized knowledge of mining, calls the reclamation process “an absolute farce.”

Reclamation projects by mining corporations since the 1970s may have made mined areas “look a little less than an absolute wasteland,” he observes. “But did they reintroduce the biodiversity? Did they reintroduce the beauty and the ecology? No.”

Studies bear out his verdict. “Every year,” wrote Mrinal Ghose in the Journal of Scientific and Industrial Research, “large areas are continually becoming unfertile in spite of efforts to grow vegetation on the degraded mined land.”

Awash in promises of corporate jobs and easy money, those who lease and sell their land just shrug. “The landscape is gonna change when it’s all said and done,” says dairy farmer Bobby Schindler, who in 2008 leased his land in Chippewa County to a frac-sand company called Canadian Sand and Proppant. (EOG, the former Enron, has since taken over the lease.) “Instead of being a hill it’s gonna be a valley, but all seeded down, and you’d never know there’s a mine there unless you were familiar with the area.”

Of the mining he adds, “It’s really put a boost to the area. It’s impressive the amount of money that’s exchanging hands.” Eighty-four-year-old Letha Webster, who sold her land 100 miles south of Schindler’s to another mining corporation, Unimin, says that leaving her home of 56 years is “just the price of progress.”

Jamie and Kevin Gregar — both 30-something native Wisconsinites and military veterans — lived in a trailer and saved their money so that they could settle down in a pastoral paradise once Kevin returned from Iraq. In January 2011, they found a dream home near tiny Tunnel City. (The village takes its name from a nearby rail tunnel). “It’s just gorgeous — the hills, the trees, the woodland, the animals,” says Jamie. “It’s perfect.”

Five months after they moved in, she learned that neighbors had leased their land to “a sand mine” company. “What’s a sand mine?” she asked.

Less than a year later, they know all too well.  The Gregars’ land is now surrounded on three sides by an unsightly panorama of mining preparations. Unimin is uprooting trees, gouging out topsoil, and tearing down the nearby hills. “It looks like a disaster zone, like a bomb went off,” Jamie tells me.

When I mention her service to her country, her voice breaks. “I am devastated. We’ve done everything right. We’ve done everything we were supposed to. We just wanted to raise our family in a good location and have good neighbors and to have it taken away from us for something we don’t support…” Her voice trails off in tears.

For Unimin, the village of Tunnel City in Greenfield township was a perfect target. Not only did the land contain the coveted crystalline silica; it was close to a rail spur. No need for the hundreds of diesel trucks that other corporations use to haul sand from mine sites to processing plants. No need, either, for transport from processing plants to rail junctions where hundreds of trains haul frac-sand by the millions of tons each year to fracture other once-rural landscapes. Here, instead, the entire assembly line operates in one industrial zone.

There was also no need for jumping the hurdles zoning laws sometimes erect. Like many Wisconsin towns where a culture of diehard individualism sees zoning as an assault on personal freedom, Greenfield and all its municipalities, including Tunnel City, are unzoned. This allowed the corporation to make deals with individual landowners. For the 8.5 acres where Letha Webster and her husband Gene lived for 56 years, assessed in 2010 at $147,500, Unimin paid $330,000. Overall, between late May and July 2011, it paid $5.3 million for 436 acres with a market value of about $1.1 million.

There was no time for public education about the potential negative possibilities of frac-sand mining: the destruction of the hills, the decline in property values, the danger of silicosis (once considered a strictly occupational lung disease) from blowing silica dust, contamination of ground water from the chemicals used in the processing plants, the blaze of lights all night long, noise from hundreds of train cars, houses shaken by blasting. Ron Koshoshek, a leading environmentalist who works with Wisconsin’s powerful Towns Association to educate townships about the industry, says that “frac-sand mining will virtually end all residential development in rural townships.” The result will be “a large-scale net loss of tax dollars to towns, increasing taxes for those who remain.”

Town-Busting Tactics

Frac-sand corporations count on a combination of naïveté, trust, and incomprehension in rural hamlets that previously dealt with companies no larger than Wisconsin’s local sand and gravel industries. Before 2008, town boards had never handled anything beyond road maintenance and other basic municipal issues.  Today, multinational corporations use their considerable resources to steamroll local councils and win sweetheart deals.  That’s how the residents of Tunnel City got taken to the cleaners.

On July 6, 2011, a Unimin representative ran the first public forum about frac-sand mining in the village.  Other heavily attended and often heated community meetings followed, but given the cascades of cash, the town board chairman’s failure to take a stand against the mining corporation, and Unimin’s aggressiveness, tiny Tunnel City was a David without a slingshot.

Local citizens did manage to get the corporation to agree to give the town $250,000 for the first two million tons mined annually, $50,000 more than its original offer. In exchange, the township agreed that any ordinance it might pass in the future to restrict mining wouldn’t apply to Unimin. Multiply the two million tons of frac-sand tonnage Unimin expects to mine annually starting in 2013 by the $300 a ton the industry makes and you’ll find that the township only gets .0004% of what the company will gross.

For the Gregars, it’s been a nightmare.  Unimin has refused five times to buy their land and no one else wants to live near a sand mine. What weighs most heavily on the couple is the possibility that their children will get silicosis from long-term exposure to dust from the mine sites. “We don’t want our kids to be lab rats for frac-sand mining companies,” says Jamie.

Drew Bradley, Unimin’s senior vice president of operations, waves such fears aside. “I think [citizens] are blowing it out of proportion,” he told a local publication. “There are plenty of silica mines sited close to communities. There have been no concerns exposed there.”

That’s cold comfort to the Gregars. Crystalline silica is a known carcinogen and the cause of silicosis, an irreversible, incurable disease. None of the very few rules applied to sand mining by the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) limit how much silica gets into the air outside of mines. That’s the main concern of those living near the facilities.

So in November 2011, Jamie Gregar and ten other citizens sent a 35-page petition to the DNR. The petitioners asked the agency to declare respirable crystalline silica a hazardous substance and to monitor it, using a public health protection level set by California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. The petition relies on studies, including one by the DNR itself, which acknowledge the risk of airborne silica from frac-sand mines for those who live nearby.

The DNR denied the petition, claiming among other things that — contrary to its own study’s findings — current standards are adequate. One of the petition’s signatories, Ron Koshoshek, wasn’t surprised. For 16 years he was a member of, and for nine years chaired, Wisconsin’s Public Intervenor Citizens Advisory Committee.  Created in 1967, its role was to intercede on behalf of the environment, should tensions grow between the DNR’s two roles: environmental protector and corporate licensor. “The DNR,” he says, “is now a permitting agency for development and exploitation of resources.”

In 2010, Cathy Stepp, a confirmed anti-environmentalist who had previously railed against the DNR, belittling it as “anti-development, anti-transportation, and pro-garter snakes,” was appointed to head the agency by now-embattled Governor Scott Walker who explained: “I wanted someone with a chamber-of-commerce mentality.”

As for Jamie Gregar, her dreams have been dashed and she’s determined to leave her home. “At this point,” she says, “I don’t think there’s a price we wouldn’t accept.”

Frac-Sand vs. Food

Brian Norberg and his family in Prairie Farm, 137 miles northwest of Tunnel City, paid the ultimate price: he died while trying to mobilize the community against Procore, a subsidiary of the multinational oil and gas corporation Sanjel. The American flag that flies in front of the Norbergs’ house flanks a placard with a large, golden NORBERG, over which pheasants fly against a blue sky.  It’s meant to represent the 1,500 acres the family has farmed for a century.

“When you start talking about industrial mining, to us, you’re violating the land,” Brian’s widow, Lisa, told me one March afternoon over lunch.  She and other members of the family, as well as a friend, had gathered to describe Prairie Farm’s battle with the frac-sanders. “The family has had a really hard time accepting the fact that what we consider a beautiful way to live could be destroyed by big industry.”

Their fight against Procore started in April 2011: Sandy, a lifelong friend and neighbor, arrived with sand samples drillers had excavated from her land, and began enthusiastically describing the benefits of frac-sand mining. “Brian listened for a few minutes,” Lisa recalls. “Then he told her [that]… she and her sand vials could get the heck — that’s a much nicer word than what he used  – off the farm.  Sandy was hoping we would also be excited about jumping on the bandwagon. Brian informed her that our land would be used for the purpose God intended, farming.”

Brian quickly enlisted family and neighbors in an organizing effort against the company. In June 2011, Procore filed a reclamation plan — the first step in the permitting process — with the county’s land and water conservation department. Brian rushed to the county office to request a public hearing, but returned dejected and depressed. “He felt completely defeated that he could not protect the community from them moving in and destroying our lives,” recalls Lisa.

He died of a heart attack less than a day later at the age of 52. The family is convinced his death was a result of the stress caused by the conflict. That stress is certainly all too real.  The frac-sand companies, says family friend Donna Goodlaxson, echoing many others I interviewed for this story, “go from community to community. And one of the things they try to do is pit people in the community against each other.”

Instead of backing off, the Norbergs and other Prairie Farm residents continued Brian’s efforts. At an August 2011 public hearing, the town’s residents directly addressed Procore’s representatives. “What people had to say there was so powerful,” Goodlaxson remembers. “Those guys were blown out of their chairs. They weren’t prepared for us.”

“I think people insinuate that we’re little farmers in a little community and everyone’s an ignorant buffoon,” added Sue Glaser, domestic partner of Brian’s brother Wayne. “They found out in a real short time there was a lot of education behind this.”

“About 80% of the neighborhood was not happy about the potential change to our area,” Lisa adds. “But very few of us knew anything about this industry at [that] time.” To that end, Wisconsin’s Farmers’ Union and its Towns Association organized a day-long conference in December 2011 to help people “deal with this new industry.”

Meanwhile, other towns, alarmed by the explosion of frac-sand mining, were beginning to pass licensing ordinances to regulate the industry. In Wisconsin, counties can challenge zoning but not licensing ordinances, which fall under town police powers.  These, according to Wisconsin law, cannot be overruled by counties or the state. Becky Glass, a Prairie Farm resident and an organizer with Labor Network for Sustainability, calls Wisconsin’s town police powers “the strongest tools towns have to fight or regulate frac-sand mining.” Consider them so many slingshots employed against the corporate Goliaths.

In April 2012, Prairie Farm’s three-man board voted 2 to 1 to pass such an ordinance to regulate any future mining effort in the town. No, such moves won’t stop frac-sand mining in Wisconsin, but they may at least mitigate its harm. Procore finally pulled out because of the resistance, says Glass, adding that the company has since returned with different personnel to try opening a mine near where she lives.

“It takes 1.2 acres per person per year to feed every person in this country,” says Lisa Norberg. “And the little township that I live in, we have 9,000 acres that are for farm use. So if we just close our eyes and bend over and let the mining companies come in, we’ll have thousands of people we can’t feed.”

Food or frac-sand: it’s a decision of vital importance across the country, but one most Americans don’t even realize is being made — largely by multinational corporations and dwindling numbers of yeoman farmers in what some in this country would call “the real America.”  Most of us know nothing about these choices, but if the mining corporations have their way, we will soon enough — when we check out prices at the supermarket or grocery store. We’ll know it too, as global climate change continues to turn Wisconsin winters balmy and supercharge wild weather across the country.

While bucolic landscapes disappear, aquifers are fouled, and countless farms across rural Wisconsin morph into industrial wastelands, Lisa’s sons continue to work the Norberg’s land, just as their father once did. So does Brian’s nephew, 32-year-old Matthew, who took me on a jolting ride across his fields. The next time I’m in town, he assured me, we’ll visit places in the hills where water feeds into springs. Yes, you can drink the water there. It’s still the purest imaginable. Under the circumstances, though, no one knows for how long.