What the frack!?! Oil and gas marauders are destroying our land, water, and communities all over America

What the frack!?! Oil and gas marauders are destroying our land, water, and communities all over America Edited by Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer, July 2012, High Tower LOWDOWN
Whether you’re religious or not, seeing flames coming out of your kitchen faucet would be enough to make you fall to your knees, fearing that a cosmic force of incomprehensible evil is loose on our land. In more and more areas across America, families are discovering to their astonishment that their “water” has turned combustible. Rather than metaphysical, however, the force behind this fiery phenomenon is all too human, and we can even put a name on it: Dick Cheney. His is, after all, the picture-perfect face of snarling political evil, and while you had probably hoped that we’d seen the last of him when he left office three years ago, his presence still looms–including in the form of flaming faucets. Those flames come straight from behind-the-scenes maneuvers that Cheney began right at the very start of his vice presidency to achieve a personal legislative goal, which he finally did by inserting this arcane bit of language into the 2005 Bush-Cheney energy policy bill: “Paragraph (1) of section 1421(d) of the Safe Drinking Water Act (42 U.S.C. 300h (d)) is amended… [to exclude] the underground injection of fluids or propping agents (other than diesel fuels) pursuant to hydraulic fracturing operations related to oil, gas, or geothermal production activities.” With that, Dick Cheney fracked us. …  Among the cancer-causing and environmental toxins mixed into fracking fluid are acrylamide, benzene, naphthalene, ethylbenzene, toluene, and xylene. In addition, the deep-earth contaminants brought to the surface in wastewater include arsenic, lead, chromium, barium, and strontium (plus radium-226 and other radioactive materials). … In heavily fracked locations–from Pennsylvania to Wyoming –repeated “no-drink” warnings have been issued by the EPA and other agencies because of such sickening by-products as methane and fracking fluid migrating into water wells. … Both the injury and insult of fracking diminishes who we are and what our country represents. That’s why this is everyone’s fight, whether or not your water faucet has yet caught on fire.