North Carolina Legislature Goes Down on Fracking Lobbyists

Currently, twenty states have laws requiring fracking companies to disclose which chemicals they're using.  North Carolina is not one of those states.  But it gets worse.

Some of North Carolina's skankiest energy industry prostitutes have introduced the Energy Modernization Act. What a nice name.  Who could be against something like that?

Under North Carolina's Energy Modernization Act, anyone who reveals which chemicals are being used for fracking operations is guilty of a felony.  This law, if passed, would also prohibit local communities from instituting their own stricter anti-fracking regulations, and it would limit the amount of water testing that can be done before a fracking operation is started.

The three Republican (of course!) legislators who introduced this bill are state senators Andrew Brock, Eldon Newton, and Bob Rucho.  This has to be the most blatant act of prostitution I've seen yet.  But the bar keeps getting raised (or lowered), and this record will soon be surpassed.

A reporter tried to talk with Andrew Brock, Eldon Newton, and Bob Rucho, but all three prostitutes were busy servicing their customers from the fracking industry and could not be reached.

Art Pope: the Biggest Douchebag You’ve Never Heard Of

Art Pope is sort of a one-man Koch Brothers.  He’s been using his inherited wealth to single-handedly take North Carolina from the 21st century back to the early 1800s.

Here’s some more information on Art Pope.

I’ve done several posts about North Carolina’s lurch to the Far Right, but I hadn’t realized the whole process was being financed by one person.  As Bill Maher said:  “North Carolina is going apeshit in a way no state ever has.  Take every crazy angry idea your drunk right-wing uncle mumbles at Thanksgiving, turn it into a law, and that’s North Carolina today.”

In an interview with the Raleigh News & Observer, Bill Maher talked about North Carolina’s backward mutation as an example of the devastating impact of Citizens United:

“It certainly had a huge impact the last election when you saw the kind of money spent — just by me!  But Obama won, so the people who were supposed to steal the election didn’t because the Democrats scared up enough of their own PAC money to scrape by.  But not at the local level, like in North Carolina. Look at Art Pope, one man was basically able to take over the entire state. And the sad thing is it wasn’t even all that expensive. It should have cost more than it did.”

Maher’s description of Art Pope:

“He’s super-rich, super-anti-union, anti-tax, anti-big government, thinks government should have absolutely no role in helping the less fortunate, who should earn their money the same way he did — by inheriting it from their dad.”

North Carolina’s legislature has been controlled by Republicans for awhile, but until this year the state had a Democratic governor who kept vetoing the nonstop tide of Tea Klux Klan legislation.  Now that North Carolina has a Republican governor — Patrick McCrory — well, as Bill Maher said, the state “is going apeshit in a way no state ever has.”