Letters to the Editor Policy

Devil His Due

Give the Devil his due. Barak Obama and his minions have achieved in two short years the transformation of our Constitutional Republic into an unlimited Monarchy. By waging war in Libya based on a UN mandate, Obama has ignored his Constitutional obligation to obtain the consent of Congress to wage war. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution reserves that right to the Congress. And I don’t mean a chat with a few Congressional leaders. Additionally, our President (read: Monarch) has or is attempting to turn over command of our troops to foreign authorities. This is the most egregious violation of our sovereignty I have ever seen or could imagine. How do you like the idea of your son or daughter taking life and death orders from a foreign power? Not my grandchildren, thank you.

Next, the Executive Branch, through the Department of Justice (Eric Holder) has announced that the government will no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act because “they” do not believe the act is Constitutional. We have an equal branch of government, by the name of the Judicial Branch, which has the Constitutional authority to rule on such issues. The big deal of this is that it usurps the Judicial Branch. Next, by Executive Order, virtually all drilling for oil has ceased in the Gulf of Mexico but Obama is facilitating offshore drilling in Brazil where our money will go to purchase their oil and our oil workers will remain unemployed. This man, and his associates, is busy hijacking our country. We have no time to lose if we wish to stop this in its tracks.

Another thing, embedded in Obamacare (The Affordable Care Act) is over $100 billion dollars of funding of the act. No wonder Pelosi said “we have to pass it to see what is in it.” Funding legislation is a separate function of the House of Representatives. By surreptitiously including funding in the 2300 page piece of legislation, The Usurper and his cohorts are making the Legislative Branch irrelevant. Beyond that, the Executive Branch is also compromising the Legislative Branch by the use of the Regulatory Process. The EPA, by virtue of regulation, is controlling the generation of power and the drilling for oil and gas. OSHA controls the workplace. The list goes on. Our elected representatives are rapidly becoming just additional Federal employees with extraordinarily generous salary and benefits.

We are now reaching the point of no return. Our sovereignty is being handed over to the UN (read: Global Governance). Our Legislature is allowing itself to be irrelevant. The Executive Branch is treating our Constitution with distain. There are impeachable offenses and Articles of Impeachment should be drawn up immediately while we still have a chance of saving our Constitution and our country. Stand up and be counted, and I mean right now, or cower in darkness forever after. I’m not kidding. I have already asked my representatives to initiate Articles of Impeachment.

Sincerely,

Joe McCann

Elk Lake, PA

Classified As Hazardous Waste

The Board of Wayne/Susquehanna R.E.S.C.U.E. would like to offer the following with respect to the public comment for proposed draft regulations related to natural gas drilling in the Delaware River Basin:

The DRBC's mandate is to protect the integrity of the water supplies in the Delaware River Basin.

Our contention is that in carrying out this mandate, the DRBC should adhere to the precautionary principle which states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action. The evidence that we have reviewed strongly suggests that the gas drilling industry in Pennsylvania has not only failed to meet this burden of proof, but has in fact demonstrated that water contamination issues related to gas drilling are a very real and significant concern.

Environmental Protection Agency documentation has revealed that the wastewater produced by hydrofracturing contains radioactivity and other toxic materials at levels that are higher than can be safely handled at wastewater treatment plants. A recent review of these EPA documents states that the available evidence “unequivocally and definitively establishes that the danger to our health and our environment from hydraulic fracturing is much greater than previously understood; that government regulations have not kept pace with the natural gas industry’s expansion and that government on every level lacks the manpower to adequately police the industry.”

As such, our contention is that hydrofracturing wastewater should be legally considered and treated as “hazardous waste” throughout all four states of the Delaware Water Basin, and that proper disposal methods and locations should be in place for this waste prior to allowing permits for the hydrofracturing of shale gas wells in the watershed.

As residents of Wayne and Susquehanna counties, we've needed to look no further than Dimock, Pennsylvania for confirmation that the practical application of the current regulatory framework has failed to be an adequate safeguard against water contamination due to hydrofracturing.

The DRBC’s own hydrogeologist states that about 1 million gallons of wastewater is generated per well. The latest predictions are for 15,000 to 18,000 wells in our area, which would mean 15 billion to 18 billion gallons of frackwater without proper treatment facilities in place.

In light of these concerns, our question for the DRBC is a very simple one.

How can the commission responsibly allow gas drilling and hydrofracturing to go forward in the river basin without first making certain that we have the water treatment capacity necessary within the four contiguous states of the river basin to handle the wastewater?

For information about Wayne/Susquehanna R.E.S.C.U.E. and the wastewater from hydrofracking, visit our website www.rescue-nepa.org

Sincerely,

Joann Morsch

Secretary, Wayne/Susquehanna R.E.S.C.U.E.

The Month That Changed The World

There are dates that mark events so horrific that they are memorialized by a name. When the stock market crashed on October 28, 1932, it became forever known as “Black Monday.” The bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan on December 7, 1941, was, as Roosevelt said, “a date which will live in infamy.” And so it has. Say “9/11” and everyone recognizes it as the date two suicide pilots felled the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

Now another date may join that infamously tagged rank, March 11, 2011, “the month of the meltdowns.”

It was on March 11 that Japan was battered by four catastrophes. First, an Earth-shacking 9.0 magnitude earthquake off northern Japan's east shore. This generated a monster tsunami, a 30-foot wall of water that crashed ashore and raged one mile inland; the second disaster.

In the island nation of Japan, space is at a premium. To conserve land six nuclear reactors were built together in an interconnected complex. The tsunami knocked out the complex's power. The cooling systems of the six reactors failed. They quickly overheated threatening multiple meltdowns and the release of massive amounts of radioactive material; the third disaster.

Like a string of Chinese firecrackers, the power failure set off a series of explosions and fires in the reactors. Mass evacuations followed as fear of radioactivity spread over Japan.

Within days, 500,000 people were evacuated within a 12-mile radius from the failing reactors. Tens of thousands fled the capital city of Tokyo located only 140 miles south of the nuclear fires, essentially decapitating the nation.

The emperor made an unprecedented televised appearance urging citizens “never to give up hope.”

Ironically, it is not the reactors that pose the most serious threat but the spent fuel rods stored on the side of each reactor. It is a staggering large stockpile of nuclear waste: 600,000 spent fuel rods containing highly lethal uranium and plutonium weighing 1,760 tons. (Chernobyl had 50 tons.) The reactors are enclosed in steel and concrete domes. But the spent rods are kept in seven unprotected, open pools of water to dissipate their ferocious heat.

Explosions in the complex breached some of the pools causing a lose of water. The exposed rods quickly heated up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and spontaneously combusted. Clouds of radioactive smoke and steam boiled up over the stricken site.

Japan seemed to be moving inexorably closer to a Chernobyl-like catastrophe. The Chernobyl meltdown created a 1,000 square miles cordoned off dead zone. A Chernobyl-like solution in Japan would create an exclusion zone much larger. But the diminutive nation does not have the endless expanses of Siberia where the Chernobyl meltdown occurred.

The nation is also confronted with a fourth disaster, a financial meltdown.

Japan has been in the throes of a deep depression for 20 years. The government spent huge amounts of money to end the financial doldrums but succeeded only in accumulating a debt of $12 trillion.

Now the earthquake triggered disasters may cost Japan at least $275 billion, in time conceivably ballooning to several times that. The stricken nation has little room to borrow without creditors demanding a higher interest rate and exacerbating its debt.

However, there is another source of money. Japan holds almost $900 billion in U.S. Treasury Securities. Selling them at a discount would raise the urgently needed funds. But flooding the market with U.S. Treasuries would lower the price of all outstanding Treasuries. It would also make it more expensive for the U.S. to sell its Treasuries to finance an ever increasing debt.

The ramifications of what is transpiring in Japan are incalculable and worldwide. Like it or not we live in a global society. A drought in China affects the price of wheat on the world market. The fiscal crises in Greece and Ireland cause currencies reevaluations throughout Europe and the U.S. The Mideast wars and conflicts have their repercussions as nations reshuffle alliances and development estrangements.

What happens in Japan will also have worldwide implications. The consequences are a triple conundrum of what, when, and where. They are, in effect, infinite and unknowable. Japan is taking the world to a place where it has never been and doesn't want to go.

Sincerely,

Bob Scroggins

New Milford, PA

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