Goldenberg writes: "Two young children in Pennsylvania were banned from talking about fracking for the rest of their lives under a gag order imposed under a settlement reached by their parents with a leading oil and gas company."
Children protesting fracking. (photo: Flickr)
Children Given Lifelong Ban on Talking About Fracking
20 August 15
Two Pennsylvanian children will live their lives under a gag order imposed under a $750,000 settlement.
wo young children in Pennsylvania were banned from talking about fracking for the rest of their lives under a gag order imposed under a settlement reached by their parents with a leading oil and gas company.
The sweeping gag order was imposed under a $750,000 settlement between the Hallowich family and Range Resources Corp, a leading oil and gas driller. It provoked outrage on Monday among environmental campaigners and free speech advocates.
The settlement, reached in 2011 but unsealed only last week, barred the Hallowichs' son and daughter, who were then aged 10 and seven, from ever discussing fracking or the Marcellus Shale, a leading producer in America's shale gas boom.
The Hallowich family had earlier accused oil and gas companies of destroying their 10-acre farm in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania and putting their children's health in danger. Their property was adjacent to major industrial operations: four gas wells, gas compressor stations, and a waste water pond, which the Hallowich family said contaminated their water supply and caused burning eyes, sore throats and headaches.
Gag orders � on adults � are typical in settlements reached between oil and gas operators and residents in the heart of shale gas boom in Pennsylvania. But the company lawyer's insistence on extending the lifetime gag order to the Hallowichs' children gave even the judge pause, according to the court documents.
The family gag order was a condition of the settlement. The couple told the court they agreed because they wanted to move to a new home away from the gas fields, and to raise their children in a safer environment. "We need to get the children out of there for their health and safety," the children's mother, Stephanie Hallowich, told the court.
She was still troubled by the gag order, however. "My concern is that they're minors. I'm not quite sure I fully understand. We know we're signing for silence for ever but how is this taking away our children's rights being minors now? I mean my daughter is turning seven today, my son is 10."
The children's father, Chris Hallowich, went on to tell the court it might be difficult to ensure the children's absolute silence on fracking � given that their ages and that the family lives in the middle of a shale gas boom.
"They're going to be among other children that are children of people within this industry and they're going to be around it every day of their life, that if they in turn say one of the illegal words when they're outside of our guardianship we're going to have difficulty controlling that," he said. "We can tell them, they can not say this, they can not say that, but if on the playground....."
The court transcripts were released in response to an open records request by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, which first reported on the children's lifetime gag order. The newspaper has been fighting for the release of all documents in the Hallowich settlement.
Campaigners say the secrecy has helped the industry resist more stringent environmental and health controls � by burying evidence of water contamination and health problems associated with natural gas operations. The Hallowichs' lawyer, Peter Villari, told the court he had never seen a gag order imposed on children in his 30 years of practicing law, according to the released transcript.
During the proceedings, the attorney representing Range Resources, James Swetz, reaffirmed the company sought the gag order on the children. "I guess our position is it does apply to the whole family. We would certainly enforce it," he told the court.
Williams Gas/Laurel Mountain Midstream and MarkWest Energy were also defendants in the case.
However, once that gag order came to light, two years after the August 2011 proceedings, the company told reporters it did not agree with Swetz's comments. "We don't believe the settlement applies to children," a Range Resources spokesman told the Gazette. He went on to tell the paper that there was no evidence that the Hallowich family was affected by exposure to gas development.
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N.
"We" ARE listening! It's the ones in Washington that are running around with their fingers jammed firmly in their ears, screaming, "I can't hear you"!
So, what do we do about it?
I went ahead and taped a paper on my bathroom mirror in large letters FEAR
Underneath it is written
1. A meaningless world engenders fear
2. I am determined to see
3. I am determined to see things
differently
4. Above all I am determined to peacefully and diligently create a meaningful world despite interferrence.
This may sound goofy and simple but looking at it daily affects the unconscious and enables one to get over
the fear we are intentionally pounded and indoctrinated with everyday. As each individual changes, mass consciousness slowly changes and recovers. Thoughts and the actions behind them(with intent) are things. Similiar to the Hundreth Monkey, a short and interesting read. http://www.wowzone.com/monkey.htm
target practice for the moment a hoodie or a woman you don't like appears? agh what a subtle distinction. i feel much safer knowing that.
If you have a point, please sharpen it, taking into account that the murder rate is higher now than in 1963, and that in every other year of the war one is claiming, until 2011, the murder rate was even higher, sometimes radically.
Note also that murder and mayhem are the least common uses of nuclear weapons (two occasions); they've mostly been used for demonstration, product improvement, range practice and intimidation. Want one?
You haven't said where your statistics come from, and neither have I. But I'll tell if you will.
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf (scroll down to page 2)
Perhaps you will quibble with the first two, but surely you will accept the findings of the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics?
While I'm throwing fact out, here is another interesting one. Every year more people are murdered by "personal weapons" (hands and feet) than by long guns (shotguns,rifle s including so-called assault rifles. Ck the FBI UCR for that one.
And, the point is...if you are going to have a debate, you should first know the facts and not rely on someone's fevered imagination.
? 332,014 people DIED from guns between 2000 and 2010. That number is greater than the populations of U.S. cities such as St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. iii
? 31,328 people died from gun violence in 2010, or roughly 1 every 17 minutes. iv
? A gun in the home makes homicide three times more likely, suicide up to five times as likely, and accidental death four times higher than in non-gun owning homes.
? Access to firearms increases the risk of intimate partner homicide more than 5 times than in instances where there are no weapons, according to a recent study. In addition, abusers who possess guns tend to inflict the most severe abuse on their partners.vi
Gun Violence & Women
? 94% of female murder victims killed by men are killed by a man they knew. In other words,
females are 16 times as likely to be killed by a male acquaintance than by a male stranger. In 2010, 1,017 women, almost three a day, were killed by their intimate partners. viii
? Of females killed by men with a firearm, more than two-thirds were killed by their intimate
partners.ix
? In 2010, 52 percent of female homicide victims killed by men were shot and killed with a gun.
Female intimate partners are more likely to be murdered with a firearm than all other means
combined.x
? Women suffering from domestic violence are eight times more likely to be killed if there are firearms in the home.xi Souurce: www.futureswithoutviolence.org
IN A SHELL
Big fat-asses, greedy and ignorant with
compassion only to themselves.
How can intelligent people live in
and raise their children in such a
stupid country.
I'm hoping to find help with my sailboat, getting it out of here. I'm going to Mexico first.
Anyone want to join me?
sonomacountyiskillingme.org if you are interested...
Also, the thought of leaving behind loved ones and friends seems pretty chicken. Who will stand with them?
I often consider what it must have been like in Germany when the 3rd Reich gained power. The fascist ranks swelled so quickly it became difficult to get out. To think that Germany and Austria were pretty much the center of the intellectual universe, yet were taken over by armed thugs who then tried to conquer the world, and all in less than two decades. Let's see now...how long has it been since these nutjob NRA extremists took over congress? You can see how quickly this happens, and why we need to be active and vigilant now.
First, my family abandoned me long before social workers and society did; and I lost all of my friends for the same reasons...
And those reasons are the second point: why stand with those who will not stand up for themselves and others? Why do you think it's reasonable to stand to protect those who do not act to protect themselves and who do not even consider for a moment the possibility that everything they understand, because it comes from someone else, might just be wrong?
Do you really want to stand and fight for people who will not stand and fight for themselves?
Would a better option not be to inspire your loved ones to follow you to freedom?
I can't leave alone, a mistake I should have foreseen. But then again, I can't survive alone, so my fate is tied to the hope that someone out there will wake up enough to see what is coming and that my ship is a damn find option for escaping it.
And I know just what to do.
I sell guns to the Arabs
and dynamite to the Jews."
I actually know the tune to that ditty and it was in my mind the whole time I was reading the article.
True...so do not vote for them! Get them OUT!
http://shop.jpfo.org/cart.php?m=product_detail&p=24
While it is certainly true that the top fraction of a per cent wealthy in America encourage the rest of us to fight one another, in order to prevent us from attacking them out of the feeling that our relative poverty is unfair, and while it is certainly true that the police are a) becoming militarized and b) in too many cases behaving as if they can kill and injure as they wish (see
http://www.copblock.org/
for details)
This is not the time to stop fighting.
We might, however, want to rethink who we should fight with, and how, and for or against what.
This article is a masterpiece. The argument is impeccable, the writing absolutely fluid and and eloquent.
So perfectly done is this one, and the argument *SO* vitally important for every breathing human to *understand* that this could become the very manifesto that proponents of rational gun control could be pasting up on every cork board, telephone pole, op-ed page and serious website in the country.
Primo, Sir, absolutely Primo.
Americans don't want to take responsibility. And in failing to take responsibility, they accept the consequences.
What's the next stage after this collective weariness? We haven't really tried to do anything different. I mean really different like developing a huge wave of action and stop paying the banks.
Shame on American loss of moral values proselytism to kill Islamists to promote just 8 of his 10 commandments. Forgetting "Vengeance is mine: he said Drone yourself and frack the rest yankees.
That was one of the best articles I've read in a hell of a long time.
You are absolutely right. And guess what? I've had war declared on me by Sonoma County, California; the same county that declared war on a 13 year old latino child with a toy gun - sold by another industry that profits from guns, even if indirectly.
It isn't just the crazy people who have guns, who use them to kill.
I blame my situation (sonomacountyis killingme.org) squarely on President Obama. He is our leader, he is THEIR leader too. And they, our governments, including county governments, look to our president for how to behave. And when Obama wants someone dead, he orders a Seal Team into action, or a drone flown by a CIA-led gamer in the desert of America somewhere.
Our president has skipped the whole due process thing; so why shouldn't the county do the same thing.
Why is this happening? You hit the nail on the head - because it is more profitable for us to be sick, mentally ill, shooting each other, afraid, stupid, ignorant, and wanting to be popular.
Television IS the cause; but not as people imagine (or rather, not as people were told by the television.)
Television is a cultural normalizer. If you don't watch television, you aren't "normal."
I say let's all have a truce, say, on July 10th. I think its appropriate to ask for this,, considering I was born a few days after Bobby died in the kitchen, and a couple months after King bled off that balcony.