Showing posts with label Tom Corbett. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Corbett. Show all posts

Monday, June 13, 2011

School of Frack


My latest cartoon addresses the paradox I mentioned in a previous post: while Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett finds it impossible to tax fracking companies lest they flee the state, he finds it all too easy to cut funding for education and social services on the grounds that there's not enough money in the state coffers. Where, precisely, does he think state money is going to come from if not from taxes?

Then again, as my cartoon suggests, maybe this isn't a paradox. Businessmen such as Corbett aren't fond of public education, which they feel costs too much money at too little direct return to them. If they can manage to gut the education system, they'll get their wish: an under-educated workforce desperate to take any job business throws its way.

In other fracking matters, I've been asked to draw the cover art for an anti-fracking album that's being released. I'm thinking of drawing the "Stairway to Heaven" hermit with a gush of fracking water coming out of his lantern.

Monday, May 2, 2011

Jumping Ship


Here's my latest anti-fracking cartoon. This one pertains to the practice of "forced pooling," whereby landowners who have not sold their rights to the drilling companies can nonetheless have their lands drilled into from adjacent sites. (Remember, fracking wells move horizontally as well as vertically.) This practice obviously rigs the system in favor of the drillers; a real-life prisoner's dilemma, it pits landowner against landowner, with each individual thinking, "if I don't sell my land but any of my neighbors does, I'll be faced with the negative impacts of the drilling while my neighbors make off with the profits."

For what it's worth, Corbett has come out against forced pooling. But then, he's also come out in favor of college campuses leasing their lands to gas companies as a way of compensating for the budget cuts to education he himself proposed.

Monday, April 4, 2011

The Puppet Master


This whole business with the "independent" drilling inspectors has gotten me so worked up . . . I couldn't resist.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Wake Up and Smell the Poison

This morning, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that inspectors policing the drilling operations in the Marcellus Shale will no longer be able to do anything--issue permits, enforce regulations, cite violations--without approval of top Department of Environment officials. According to DEP spokespeople, this will bring "consistency" to the regulatory process. Yet oddly enough, such consistency is being sought only in regard to the Marcellus Shale; the same policy does not apply to any of the other regulatory protocols the DEP oversees.

Come on, people! This is a shameless ploy to strip independent inspectors of their power to regulate the shale drilling, and to place all decisions in the hands of political appointees whose jobs are dependent on an administration utterly sympathetic to the drilling industry. It's one step short of having the drillers issue their own permits and cite their own violations. My guess is, they wouldn't find themselves having committed any.

Tom Corbett's office denies having had anything to do with the policy change. And if you believe that one....

When are ordinary Pennyslvanians going to wake up and smell the poison?

Monday, March 28, 2011

My Maine Man


Inspired by my own analogy of a week ago, I came up with this cartoon to satirize Tom Corbett's position on a natural gas severance tax. For the record, his administration is now talking about some kind of monetary compensation for communities hard hit by the environmental effects of fracking, but he's still insisting that a severance tax is "off the table."

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

There He Goes Again

If he has his way, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett--he who refuses to impose a severance tax on multi-billion-dollar natural gas companies--is about to impose a huge severance tax on ordinary Pennsylvanians.

A severance tax is a tax on the use of public resources. In the case of natural gas extraction, for each unit of gas taken (or severed) from Pennsylvania's lands, the gas company pays a marginal tax.

Corbett (and the Republican-controlled State Senate) won't impose such a tax. They claim it would drive industry away. Forget the fact that every other state in the Union that possesses shale gas formations, including tax-averse Texas, imposes such a tax. Forget, too, that the gas companies are limited in where they can drill; there's no shale gas underneath Rhode Island, so drilling there would be like fishing for lobster in Arkansas. Facts be damned, Corbett, his campaign coffers swelled by industry dollars, has stood firm against a severance tax.

At the same time, Corbett's proposed budget would slash funding for public education at every level, from K-12 through college. The results of these proposed cuts would be catastrophic (I just read that the Duquesne public school district might close entirely), but that's Corbett and the Republican party: cut taxes, slash budgets and public services, and boost industry, and we'll live in a utopia.

But the thing is, such a program does not cut taxes. It raises them. In the case of Pennsylvania's public colleges and universities, Corbett's budget proposes a roughly 50% cut in state funding. The result, inevitably, is that public education in Pennsylvania will become more costly; the schools will have no choice but to raise tuition (or, what is in essence the same thing, to drastically cut services, which students will then have to pay for themselves). Thus the budget cuts effectively impose a severance tax: for each unit of education taken (or severed) from the public system, students and their families will have to pay an increased amount. To finance this additional tax burden, especially in these days of cuts to federal and state grant money, they'll have to take on the additional tax burden of bank loans. Or, what is equally likely, they'll have to forego college altogether.

You'll tell me this isn't about taxes. But it is. Pay now or pay later, services in a society cost money; you can either pay for those services through direct taxes of one sort or another, shared (in theory) equitably by the society that benefits from the services, or you can pay for them through higher costs. From the perspective of the taxpayer/consumer, what's the difference?

Corbett, in short, is not opposed to raising taxes. Rather, like all Republicans, he simply wishes to shift the burden of taxation from those most able to afford it--the corporate and the wealthy--to those least able to afford it: the middle classes and the poor. Thus the social benefits of public services, whether they be gas or education, will be disproportionately enjoyed by the rich, while the social costs (not only in terms of dollars but, as with gas extraction, in terms of environmental impacts) will be disproportionately borne by the poor.

But there's a bright side to all this. I'm sure all those kids who can't afford school can find really good jobs working on natural gas rigs.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Passing Gas


Here's my latest pictorial comment on newly inaugurated Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett and the natural gas industry he supports. If you're a Pennsylvanian (or New Yorker, or West Virginian, or Ohioan, or Texan, or just plain American) concerned about this issue, watch Josh Fox's film Gasland, check out the Marcellus Protest website or the blog "Fracked Again," and get involved!