Chevron Corp. (CVX) has agreed to acquire independent natural-gas producer Atlas Energy Inc. (ATLS) and its liabilities for $4.3 billion, joining its larger rival Exxon Mobil Inc. (XOM) in making a bet on natural gas.
-By Matt Jarzemsky and Matt Day, Dow Jones Newswires; 212-416-2240; matthew.jarzemsky@dowjones.com
Exxon’s acquisition of XTO nearly a year ago, some believe, has pressured Exxon’s stock because of a slump in natural-gas prices.
Chevron Vice Chairman George Kirkland said, however, “We are acquiring a company that has one of the premier acreage positions in the prolific Marcellus.”
The Marcellus shale, located in Appalachia and concentrated in parts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York, is one of the hottest shale plays in the U.S. It’s helped contribute to the surge in North American natural-gas supplies and the resulting price weakness. Strong U.S. gas production has sent gas stockpiles to record levels, pressuring prices for much of the last two years. Natural gas futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange are trading at their lowest level for this time of year since 2002.
I want to take this opportunity to congratulate the hundreds of thousands of progressives and others who demanded that Keith Olbermann be reinstated to his position at MSNBC. These people understand the enormously important role that the media play in contemporary American politics. They know the recent ascendancy of the Republican Party and right-wing politics had less to do with the leadership skills of Mitch McConnell or John Boehner and far more to do with the enormously powerful role played by Rupert Murdoch, Fox News and right-wing talk radio.
Progressives know there is something very wrong when a nation divided politically has one major network operating as a propaganda arm of the Republican Party and 90 percent of talk radio is dominated by right-wing extremists.
If there is a silver lining in the action of MSNBC against Keith Olbermann, it is that people will now pay more attention to the political role of corporate media in America. While commentators on Fox and right-wing radio have the backing of Rupert Murdoch, a major Republican contributor, and other conservative corporations, progressives understand that their position is extremely vulnerable. Keith Olbermann was suspended by General Electric’s MSNBC for a bogus reason. What will prevent the same thing from happening to Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and other progressives?
General Electric, NBC’s parent, is one of the largest corporations in the world with an anti-labor history of outsourcing jobs and with financial links to military and nuclear power industries. Surely we understand that GE is not going to provide the same backing for MSNBC commentators that Rupert Murdoch provides for his mouthpieces at Fox News.
What has not gotten a lot of attention in the midst of this controversy is that GE’s NBC Universal, one of the largest media conglomerates in the country, is in the process of merging with Comcast, the largest cable television provider in America. The new head of that company would be Stephen B. Burke, Comcast’s chief operating officer and a “Bush Ranger” who raised at least $200,000 for the 2004 reelection campaign of President George W. Bush.
As Vermont’s senator, I intend to do all that I can do to stop this merger. There already is far too much media concentration in this country. We need more diversity. We need more local ownership. We need more viewpoints. We do not need another media giant run by a Republican supporter of George W. Bush. That is the lesson we should learn from the Keith Olbermann suspension.
Rider Park is a treasure selflessly donated to the people of Lycoming County from the late Thomas J. Rider.
This park has been in existence for over twenty years. The park is used by schools to educate children and by colleges to demonstrate biodiversity. Mountain bikers, hikers, trail runners, cross country skiers, birders, gardeners, and many other clubs, organizations and individuals enjoy the park in every season.
Rider Park’s 868 acres of beautiful vistas and diverse forests are now threatened by development from the gas companies.
Stakes are already in place for two well pads. This would mean the destruction of forest and meadow, the construction of well pads and roads, the noise and pollution from over 8,000 heavy trucks going up and down the park road (2200 per well – in and out) carrying gravel, toxic chemicals, water, sand, etc, glaring flood lights in the night sky, pipeline construction and a possible compressor station.
The park as we know it would virtually cease to exist.
The current owner of Rider Park is the First Community Foundation Partnership of Pennsylvania (FCFPA). The Partnership is entrusted with stewardship of this much-loved and utilized land within our community. The Board of Directors, is scheduled to vote on signing the gas lease on November 8th.
The window of opportunity to save the park is extremely narrow.
Please join with the Friends of Rider Park today. There are several ways you can help.
1. Sign the “Save Rider Park” petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/7771100/petition.html
2. Visit the Friends of Rider Park website http://www.friendsofriderpark.com
3. Write a letter to your local newspapers
4. Send a letter or email directly to the FCFPA. Email: fcfpa@fcfpa.org Address: 330 Pine Street, Suite 401 Williamsport, PA 17701
5. Post the “Friends of Rider Park” website on your Facebook page, Twitter and other networking sites
6. Forward this message to everyone who may be concerned about this violation of public trust
Help STOP Rider Park from becoming an industrialized gas well drilling site.
The online Petition will be presented to FCFPA on November 8, 2010
Take Action Today!
Thank you
(Los Angeles) – We did it! We elected Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, and all of our statewide candidates, Kamala Harris pending. Across the country, the Republican and tea party candidates may have won, but in California, the two main expressions of tea party politics, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, were stopped in their tracks.
For the last six weeks, we ran a major campaign from Lancaster to Long Beach to elect Jerry Brown. We filled more than 14,000 volunteer shifts on the phones and knocking on doors. Our efforts resulted in 450,000 one-on-one conversations with voters on the most important issue of this election—Jobs.
“We learned here in California, that the antidote to the tea party is the labor, Latino, African-American, progressive White vote coming together,” said Maria Elena Durazo, Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO “If we do our job right, there are more of us than there are of them. Thanks to all of the sisters and brothers of LA Labor who did all the work and deserve this victory.”
This election showed us that neither of our two major parties has a credible vision for our economic future. And that’s why this is a moment of opportunity.
by David Korten
posted Nov 03, 2010
It is now the morning after. Republicans, as expected, are celebrating a sweeping victory. Democrats are licking their wounds. Meanwhile, record numbers of people are still contending with the hardships of unemployment and foreclosure with no relief in sight. And the nation braces for deepening political gridlock.
It is a moment of opportunity for America to set a new course and for a young President Barack Obama to establish his place in history as a path-breaking leader.
So how does electoral failure and political gridlock create a moment of opportunity?
Neither of our two major parties has a credible vision for the economic future of our nation.
We are a nation consumed by short-term thinking and fragmented political contests centered on narrowly defined issues. Neither of our two major parties has a credible vision for the economic future of our nation.
The Republicans offer only their standard prescription of tax cuts for the rich, a rollback of regulations on predatory corporations, and elimination of the social safety net—a proven prescription for further job loss and devastation of the middle class.
The Democrats have no identifiable program for economic recovery, let alone for adapting our economy to the dramatic demographic, environmental, economic, and political changes that rule out any chance of a return to pre-2008 business as usual.
Elections always yield a cascade of numbers that nerds such as I rummage among in search of meaning. Here are a few that I think help explain Tuesday’s results:
zero – The number of newly elected Republican senators in genuinely contested Senate races (excluding, therefore, those like North Dakota’s) who carried voters ages 18 to 29. Republicans may have picked up seats in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Wisconsin, and held them in Missouri, New Hampshire and Ohio, but young voters in those states voted Democratic. Even in Ohio, where Republican Rob Portman beat Democrat Lee Fisher by 18 percentage points, Fisher won the youth vote 49 percent to 45 percent. In the national exit poll on House voting, the Republicans lost the 18-to-29-year-olds by 17 points, and did better the older the voters got. Moral: There was absolutely a Republican wave on Tuesday, but it looks more like the wave of the past than the wave of the future. Then again, as Faulkner reminded us and as the Republicans continually hope, the past isn’t necessarily dead.
1 – The number of white Democratic House members in the next Congress who will come from the Deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina). Democrats still send nine members from this long-ago Democratic region to the House, but eight of them are African Americans from districts in which whites don’t make up a majority. Democratic strength in the white South began its downward plunge when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, but until Tuesday, there were still seven white Democrats in Congress from the Deep South. Now there’s just one, Georgia’s John Barrow.
24 – The gap, in percentage points, between the levels of support for Democrats and Republicans among white voters without college degrees who have union members in their household and white voters without college degrees who don’t. In Tuesday’s national exit poll on House voting, working-class whites voted overwhelmingly for Republicans – unless they lived with or were themselves union members, in which case they supported Democrats by a margin of 55 percent to 43 percent. Working-class voters from nonunion households backed Republican candidates 68 percent to 31 percent – a huge difference. It’s not because unionized UPS drivers and nonunion FedEx drivers, say, are two different species of human. It’s because the unions’ political education and mobilization programs are very effective.
ELLWOOD CITY, PA — After five months of negotiations, workers at Inmetco ratified their first union contract Monday.
Dave Alters, a member of the union negotiation team, said the three-year contract was ratified in a 42-22 vote, and that it calls for a 10 percent pay increase over the contract term and a signing bonus. The company’s employees voted last April in favor of representation under Teamsters Local 261, based in New Castle.
One reason the negotiations took an extended time was that this was the initial collective bargaining agreement, which forced both sides to start more or less from scratch in creating a new contract. Alters said there were few difficulties in negotiations.
What a difference two years make. In 2008, President Obama swept into office on a platform of hope and change. All across America, there was a ground swell of voices calling for an end to a political system that upholds the powerful special interests that ran America into the Great Recession. In 2010, an empire of big corporate interests fought back, riding a wave of anger and economic dissatisfaction.
There is no disputing the fact conservatives won and progressives lost on Tuesday. There is also no disputing that the frustration percolating across the country over politics in Washington swept in some obviously extremist candidates (Rand Paul Criticizes Civil Rights Act, Argues Businesses Should Be Able to Discriminate). Yet, given the historic level of discontent throughout the nation with Washington politics, it is frankly shocking that the wave against the party in power was not even larger. One thing that did not happen yesterday: Americans did not endorse a conservative Republican agenda. In fact, and paradoxically, exit polling shows that voters expressed even LESS approval of the Republican Party than the Democratic Party. Democrats retained the U.S. Senate and Sen. Harry Reid (Nev.), a symbol of much of what the Democrats accomplished in the last two years and who embraced Obama and the entire hope and change agenda, won re-election with the decisive support of Latinos (an almost unheard of 90 percent of the Latino vote).
What then did happen last night?
Big Money Interests Seize Back Control of the Political System
In 2008, on the heals of an economic collapse caused by tax cuts for the rich, deregulation of profiteering corporations and the financial implosion brought on by the collapse of the vast Wall Street Ponzi scheme, the people fought back for hope and change. Just two years later, the empire has returned with a vengeance. Unleashed by a conservative Supreme Court, independent groups flooded the system with a record amount of special interest money, more than quadruple the last midterm cycle. (In the end, it may exceed $ 1 billion.) These groups, backed by massive multinational corporations, greedy banks and self-interested investment firms vastly outspent progressives (Midterm Elections 2010: An Inside Look At The Outside Group Spending Surge Boosting The GOP).
Stop Gas Drilling in Rider Park
Inmetco workers ratify union contract
Beaver County Blue: Voice of the 17th CD of Progressive Democrats of America 
