I can't believe this got by me, but Pennsylvania's legislature has passed a bill allowing corporations who hire more than 250 workers in-state to keep 95% of the taxes their employees pay. Yes, you read that right -- and it's all to attract software developer Oracle to Pennsylvania, apparently. How many times must I tell these pimps! Taxes pay for things -- for roads, for schools, for cops, for firemen, for better things than, in Mr. Denvir's words, "private jets or monogrammed bathroom fixtures" for corporate bigwigs. And as soon as corporations withhold money from their employees, they owe it to our government, as part of the contract we, and they, have with our government -- or, more precisely, with each other. Gov. Corbett, shockingly, hasn't decided whether or not he'll sign the bill -- which means he's afraid of the backlash he'll get. Let's do our job and keep him afraid. His number is 1.717.787.2500. You can call Oracle, too, at 1.650.506.7000.
Elsewhere in the Keystone state, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) just issued a permit to Chesapeake Energy to frack within one mile of the Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Station. We know a lot about fracking's effects on the water table -- you know, sets water on fire, turns it brown, makes people sick -- but we know less about fracking's effects on the ground. We do know that fracking not only drills downward into the earth, but laterally underground, so that a fracking effort might actually drill much closer to a nuclear power plant than you'd think if you observed the whole effort from above. Does any of that sound like a good idea to you? And wouldn't it be fundamentally conservative to delay doing such a thing until we know what its effects would be on the millions of folks who live nearby? CREDO helps you tell the DEP to withdraw their permit to Chesapeake, and forbid new fracking permits near nuclear power plants.
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