Welcome to PA FRACK-U

Way back in April of 2011, I began writing for Raging Chicken Press, and my first post concerned the relationship between Governor Corbett’s plan to butcher funding for Pennsylvania State System of Higher Educations schools (PASSHE), the campaign donations that left him beholden to Big Gas, his own ideologically motivated aims to convert state-supported higher education into private-for-profit enterprises, and the give-away he was clearly preparing for the extraction corporations. Then I wrote:

“Fact: You [Governor Corbett] received more than $800,000 in donations from drilling corporations for your gubernatorial campaign. Fact: in delegating some of the state’s most critical environmental decisions over to Alan C. Walker (appointed to head the Department of Community and Economic Development), CEO of Bradford Energy and Bradford Coal—a corporation who donated $184,000 to your campaign—you have effectively put a fox in charge of the henhouse as ProPublica reported:

Walker’s ties to the energy industry are deep. He is listed on state disclosure forms as an executive of the Pennsylvania Coal Association and he has served as chairman of the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry…[L]ike many energy companies, his, too, have run into problems with the state. In 2002, three of Walker’s coal companies notified Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection that they had run out of money and were going to stop treating the 173 million gallons of polluted water they produced each year and released into tributaries of the Susquehanna River. The state eventually got a court injunction to force them to continue treating the wastewater as required by state and federal law.”

“Why, Governor Corbett, should we believe that your investment in natural gas extraction has to do with anything other than an ideology that seeks to maximize private profit of a public good—all the while padding the pockets of your political and business allies? Why shouldn’t we think you endorse a new suggested slogan for Pennsylvania: PA, Inc.—like OH, MI, and WI only dirtier, poorer, and dumber?”

“This brings us directly to your proposal to lacerate the funding of PASSHE. In addition to refusing to tax gas extraction—and in the same week you drastically reduced funding for health services for the poorest of Pennsylvania citizens—you offered $833 million in tax breaks to corporations who do business in a state which already taxes fewer than 30 percent of corporate enterprises: “Governor Corbett announced that Pennsylvania’s corporate tax will allow corporations to follow federal accelerated bonus depreciation rules adopted as part of the tax cut compromise in December. The rules allow companies to write off or “expense” 100% of equipment purchases made in the last quarter of 2010 and all of Tax Year 2011…Bonus depreciation goes to investment in other states not just Pennsylvania. Companies do not have to purchase equipment in the state to take advantage of the provision. Thus the bonus may lead to no new investment in the state” (Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center). In other words, such a give-away will not benefit Pennsylvanians. Nonetheless, to finance this generous gift to your corporate allies, you propose devastating education—leaving local school districts and their taxpayers to foot the tsunami-sized bill coming their way, undermining education at the K-12 level, and insuring that students are under-prepared for college.”

“To add insult to injury, you also propose cutting state funding to the very colleges and universities that middle and working class families have depended on for generations to educate their children, the PASSHE. Ninety percent of PASSHE students are Pennsylvanians. Hence, the perversity of your reasoning on this matter can hardly be overdrawn: You insist that PASSHE universities have failed to “live within their means,” and that the evidence of this is found in rising tuitions—but you fail to acknowledge that state funding for PASSHE has already been cut to less than one third of total funding. It is, moreover, false to claim that PASSHE has failed to “live with its means.” In fact, three PASSHE universities, West Chester, Millersville, and Bloomsburg made Kiplinger’s prestigious list of the 100 best state universities in the United States. Their criteria: “the best education at the best price” (apscuf.wordpress.com). Facts: “In FY 2010-2011, PASSHE will receive nearly $8.3 million less in state funds than it did in FY 2001-2002.Tuition increases have been below the rate of inflation in four of the last six years…Controlled for inflation, the System will operate with 13% fewer dollars from all sources per student in FY 2010-11 than it did in FY 1999-2000. Despite fiscal challenges, PASSHE continues to offer the lowest-cost baccalaureate degree programs in the state. However, the combination of flat state funding and low tuition increases has created historic shortfalls for the universities, which, if continued, could translate into viability issues” (www.passhe.edu).”

Since that time, PASSHE faculty have been functioning without a contract, and without virtually any good faith effort of the state to negotiate with the fourteen campus faculty union, APSCUF. Indeed, as I predicted in April of 2011, the governor’s clear goals-following Scott Walker of Wisconsin-is to break the back of the union:

“Much like your apparent aims in effectively selling off Pennsylvania’s environment and resources to natural gas interests, your aim in undermining PASSHE funding is to see the end of the state university system in Pennsylvania, to see, in other words, a fully privatized, for-profit, university system. But the only way to accomplish this—much like what are perhaps your models in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin—is to destroy the one real obstacle in your way—the public sector unions. Unlike Governor Scott Walker who committed a political blunder in seeking to destroy collective bargaining rights for state workers in Wisconsin through legislation, you have in fact executed a far more insidious strategy of starving public sector unions like APSCUF (The Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties) by starving their institutions of funding. One way to force the state universities to either privatize or close is by cutting the funding that supports their central missions—a mission instantiated by their faculties who, through the power of collective bargaining, are the bedrock of the excellent education offered by the PASSHE. As you surely must know, what such devastating cuts will mean is that the dream of higher education for thousands of Pennsylvanians will come to a grinding halt next year. We can only gather that you regard this as an acceptable casualty in the drive to corporatize higher education in the state.”

What SB 367 represents is the selling off of the environment, the selling off of PASSHE campuses-and the extortion of PASSHE schools under the ideologically motivated pretense that the state’s economic condition cannot support higher education.

The governor’s pitch could not be more perverse: Now that your funding has been gutted, we have offered you a way to re-coup-FRACKING on PASSHE campuses. All you have to give up is the safety of your campuses and the health of your campus communities.

Combined with the state’s efforts to break the back of the union that represents the faculty which instantiates the very heart and soul of PASSHE-including millions of students-SB 367 can only be understood as the cynical, unvarnished pitch to genocidal profiteering under the guise of governance we have yet seen.

I have been a professor at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania for 20 years. I know of no day I have struggled more to keep myself from crying before I have to go to class than this one.

Wendy Lynne Lee

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