Summary: As they drill for quick corporate profits deep inside our Earth, such natural gas frackers as ExxonMobil and Halliburton are not only causing enormous harm to people's health, the environment, and local economies all across the country – but they're also fracking something essential to a properly-functioning democratic society: truth. They are hailing themselves both as exemplars of free market success and as the "virtuous ones" in our society – the producers and makers, as contrasted to the mass of Americans that the far-right corporatists are now openly calling "moochers" and "takers." The current natural gas boom, the frackers exclaim, in a self-serving narrative fabricated by their PR departments and political front groups, is a victory over those wimpy and undeserving producers of wind and solar power who are dependent on government subsidies to get up and running. The shale gas boom, wrote the oil-and-gas-funded American Enterprise Institute this year, has occurred "away from the greedy grasp of Washington." AEI's laissez-faire fabulists snidely added that "surely Washington would have done something to slow it down, tax it more, or stop it altogether" had the bureaucrats realized that private enterprise was making such progress. Indeed, crowed an industry PR group, "The free market has worked its magic." Sheesh their BS goes deeper than their fracking gas wells! First, magicians don't perform "magic," they do illusions. Second, for three decades, the federal government has pumped more than $100 million into research for the frackers, finding ways to make the technique work. And, since 1980, the Big Bad Government they now badmouth has paid frackers more than $10 billion in a subsidy written specifically for them These oil giants aren't the virtuous ones, they're liars, fracking their own integrity.
