And in case you think I'm being paranoid about these people being paid shills, consider what Greenpeace is saying about the situation:News.KGNU wrote:Harassment of signature gatherers for anti-fracking initiative
Posted: July 27, 2016 at 2:17 pm by KGNU, in Breaking News, Elections, Featured, Fracking, Morning Magazine
“What we’re seeing is people who are angry, swearing at us, clear up from trying to prevent other people from signing.”
The Yes for Health and Safety Over Fracking campaign behind initiatives 75 and 78 is reporting harassment of petitioner signature gatherers. The campaign says there have been at least ten separate incidents in several Colorado cities including Denver and Boulder, where local volunteers and paid circulators collecting signatures have reported being followed, yelled at, and physically threatened by unidentified people repeating oil and gas industry talking points.
Ballot initiatives 75 and 78 would respectively permit Colorado communities to pass restrictions on fracking near their neighborhoods and require that fracking wells are set back at least 2500′ from homes and schools. The campaign reports one case where an aggressive man lectured people who had already signed a petition, forcing them to cross their names out. Other canvassers reported being followed, yelled at, and threatened throughout the day by a man in a vehicle. There have been social media threats of violence, demeaning language used in public places, and, in one case, an 84-year old canvasser was followed, repeatedly called “crazy,” and physically taunted while trying to walk away. Such acts of intimidation represent a violation of Coloradans’ civil and constitutional rights.
Karen Dike of the Yes for Health and Safety of Fracking campaign says they have seen an escalation in the number of incidents of aggression towards signature gatherers “now what we’re seeing is people who are angry, swearing at us, clear up from trying to prevent other people from signing.”
Dike says one group of young men who were harassing a signature collector told her they were being paid to do it, although they did not identify who was paying them.
The Colorado Independent reports a media campaign urging people not to sign the petitions for initiatives 75 and 78. The Decline to Sign 30 second TV ads predict economic catastrophe following any restrictions on oil and gas development. The ads voiceover says that “Your signature is incredibly valuable, don’t just give it away to some petitioner on the street.”
Documents obtained by The Colorado Independent show that the “decline to sign” campaign is part of an orchestrated, multi-year effort by both Colorado-based and national energy giants. One of their front groups is Protect Colorado, which funded the TV ad and is actively seeking to thwart citizens from qualifying the two measures for the ballot.
So yeah, as you can see there is massive corruption at work here, and even though none of the harassers have been identified its not much of a leap to think they are paid industry thugs.Greenpeace wrote:Fracking Colorado: This is what (buying a) democracy looks like
In Colorado the oil and gas industry has their finger on the scale of democracy, and new reports from the Boulder Weekly and the Colorado Independent have revealed the full weight of the fracking industry’s influence. While nearly everyone has heard about the problem of “money in politics,” it is rare that the actual mechanisms of how corporations control elections and politics are revealed.
Ever wonder what it’s like to be a pawn in the oil and gas industry’s political ambitions? This pencil, hired by oil and gas front group Protect Colorado, summed it up:
“It feels like shit to fucking wear this thing, but it’s 25 bucks an hour.”
[snip image of ridiculous looking pencil costume with oil industry slogan signs]
And there are a lot of people taking the oil and gas industry’s money in Colorado these days.
Anadarko Petroleum and a group of fracking companies, most from outside Colorado, have pumped well over $75 million into PR firms and front groups in the state since 2014. These millions are primarily aimed at preventing Coloradans from voting for two ballot measures that would regulate the oil and gas industry. $75 million is a serious amount of money, even in a state that, according the Brennan Center, has one of the highest levels of secret political spending in the nation.
The largest single recipient of the fracking industry’s war chest is a PR firm called Pac/West Communications. Pac/West, known for creating independent sounding groups on behalf of large corporate clients, netted nearly $30 million from oil and gascompanies in 2014 alone. In return for the fracking cash, Pac/West built perhaps the best funded and most formidable political advocacy operations in any state.
Strategy of Fracking Industry Revealed
Mark Truax, a vice president of Pac/West Communications, revealed the depth and breadth of the oil and gas industry’s political strategy in a transcript released by Greenpeace and printed in full by the Boulder Weekly.
Mr. Truax’s presentation outlines a sophisticated plan to counter the popular cry for fracking regulations with a gusher of oil cash.
Here are some of the strategies Mark Truax outlines:“We then also elected a pro city council, a pro-energy city council 7-6 on the conservative count, my count is like 9-4 in our favor for Denver City Council. To try and push something through there, which the opposition was trying to do, is now very difficult.”
- Take over city councils
“We have scored 3.9 million Colorado voters in our databases, on their opinion of fracking. Everything we do then gets fed back in to this database. So that we can use it at a later time. We’ve knocked on 1.7 million doors, we’ve done 9 statewide surveys, we have done extensive phone research, and mail research, all of that information if I ever have contact it’s fed back in to that file.”
- Spend tens of millions of dollars to gather information on Colorado voters so it can manipulate election outcomes and keep setback and community rights initiatives off the ballot
To accomplish these political goals, Pac/West Communications, with funding from Anadarko Petroleum, created two tax exempt “charitable” groups, Protect Colorado and Coloradans for Responsible Energy Development (CRED).
- The transcript, which can be found in full here, also details Pac/West’s plans to change the constitution so citizens will no longer be able to put forward ballot measures in the future.
It was Protect Colorado that hired the pencil. As the following video shows, these industry front groups are focused on scare tactics and spreading misinformation about fracking regulations, not “education,” as front group spokesperson Karen Crummy often claims.
[youtube]https://youtu.be/hOH6-wqxbr8[/youtube]
On July 28, the Denver Business Post reported that Protect Colorado has a budget of $25 million for its 2016 effort.
Industry Funded Harassment
The oil and gas strategy to control the ballot process in Colorado does not stop with the plan Truax outlined in his 2015 talk.
In recent weeks, Coloradans have experienced an truly unprecedented attempt to stop a ballot measure from coming to a vote at all. Unlike normal ballot campaigns, where voters must decide whether to support or oppose a measure on election day, in Colorado the fracking industry is trying to strip voters of the right to decide altogether. The effort is called “decline to sign,” and the aim is to prevent regulations from appearing on the ballot, by preventing organizers from gathering enough preliminary signatures.
The effort includes more than just TV ads and pencils trying to scare people about regulations. The oil and gas industry has also unleashed an army of paid harassers, who have targeted volunteers trying to gather signatures for the ballot. As one signature gatherer describes, men surrounded an elderly signature gatherer and scared off people trying to sign their name.
The fight over fracking ballot measures in Colorado illustrates the lengths that corporations are willing to go to control politics. Will the fracking industry buy its preferred regulatory environment in Colorado? Will Coloradans be stripped of their right to vote on these ballot measures? While signatures for the ballot measure are due August 8, the questions about the role of fracking money in Colorado are likely to linger.
So now we know what the oil industry thinks of democracy. As far as I'm concerned, this should be treated with equal severity to voter intimidation. If you live in Colorado, seek out petitioners and please please please get your name on these petitions (Ballot initiatives 75 and 78) just to spite these motherfuckers. This is no longer merely about the environmental impact of fracking, this is about removing a cancer from our state and our society. I would prefer removing them at gunpoint and locking those responsible in prison, but I'll accept making their business completely unprofitable. We don't need the tax money of people who are seeking to destroy democratic processes for profit. And that is not an opinion.
