By Randy Shannon

South Heights Borough Council President Bob Schmetzer will represent concerned citizens before a panel of drillers and their paid Republican Party legislators at Beaver Lakes Country Club at 1:00pm on Tuesday May 15th.

Schmetzer chaired an April 21st public meeting  in Ambridge where scientific experts presented evidence of the dangers to the Ambridge Reservoir of hydraulic fracturing of shale.

Schmetzer has also alerted local communities to the risks to the Creswell Water Authority aquifer that will be caused by drilling. Site clearing around the aquifer is now underway.

The Brockway, PA Municipal Authority recently experienced loss of its Well No. 5 when the aquifer was pierced by a gas well. Water flow was halted for 29 hours and subsequent turbidity increased 500%.  Well casing requirements in PA are below standard quality that would avoid such leakages. This substandard practice saves money for the drillers, who pass it on to Republican politicians who control the DEP.

Continue reading Gas Drillers Send Republican Jim Christiana to Attack Concerned Citizens →

JP Morgan Debacle Reveals Fatal Flaw In Federal Reserve Thinking

by Simon Johnson

MIT professor; Co-author, ’13 Bankers’ and ‘White House Burning’; Columnist on fiscal affairs

Experienced Wall Street executives and traders concede, in private, that Bank of America is not well run and that Citigroup has long been a recipe for disaster. But they always insist that attempts to re-regulate Wall Street are misguided because risk-management has become more sophisticated — everyone, in this view, has become more like Jamie Dimon, head of JP Morgan Chase, with his legendary attention to detail and concern about quantifying the downside.

In the light of JP Morgan’s stunning losses on derivatives, announced yesterday but with the full scope of total potential losses still not yet clear (and not yet determined), Jamie Dimon and his company do not look like any kind of appealing role model. But the real losers in this turn of events are the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the New York Fed, whose approach to bank capital is now demonstrated to be deeply flawed.

Continue reading Smash the Banker Oligarchy →