Just about everyone who has followed he local and national news on horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, knows that oil and gas corporations are putting immense resources into campaigns, lobbying, advertising, front groups, faux grassroots groups, and just about anything you can imagine, all in opposition to any new regulations, especially at the federal level of government.

Before going on, consider that fracking should not be viewed in isolation from the more extensive process of which it is one part. The Secretary of Energy Advisory Board’s extensive review of the evidence, released by the Shale Gas Production Subcommittee 90-Day Report on August 18, offers its assessments and recommendations. Here’s one that applies to how we should think about fracking as a multi-stage process:

Labor Day has come and gone, but the real battle over whether workers are actually honored and valued in Ohio will be decided on Election Day in November. To understand what’s at stake, one must begin with the concept of American exceptionalism -- the notion that America has its own unique political ideology embracing individualism and entrepreneurship.

The reality is that what makes America different from other western European democracies is simply its lack of a mass Labor Party or a Democratic Socialist Party. The Democratic Party is arguably the second most pro-corporate party in the western world, and President Barack Obama reminds us of this daily. Obama’s numbers have hit record lows with only 26% of the population having any faith in his economic policies.

In a time that cried out for infrastructure development and large scale jobs programs, Obama instead spent his political capital and three quarters of a trillion dollars in taxpayers’ capital bailing out the financial corporations that had wrecked the system and the large corporations known for investing in machines and people overseas, not American workers.

Are you tired of trying to figure out if there’s any real difference between Republican and Democratic politicians, and whether there’s a difference between liberals and progressives, libertarians and anarchists, independents and moderates, or tea partiers and neoconservatives?

Are you fed up with being forced to chose between the lesser of two evils when electing a president, and are you afraid to cast a vote of conscience because the worser of two evils might get elected?

If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, perhaps you might want to consider aligning yourself with others who share your concerns and whose political views extend across the spectrum.

The one thing we all have in common is that we are voters and we are sick and tired of our government being controlled by corporations and special interest groups who could care less about our happiness, our health, our families, our jobs, or our futures.

What would you call a political philosophy that focuses on the rights and interests of all voters? What terms would you use and how would they be defined?

Here are a few ideas:

What entitlement! I hit the gas, power off to my destination. No one asks me whether the trip is serious or banal, necessary or foolish, conscious or impulsive. I just go, ripping up the miles as though they were daydreams. The engine purrs. My name is Everyman, and I have the power of gods.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not addicted or anything. I can get off oil whenever I want to. On the other hand, I may be willing to sacrifice 740,000 acres of pristine boreal forest in Northern Canada — part of one of the largest intact ecosystems left on the planet — along with, oh, 166 million birds, and all the remaining caribou in Alberta, before I do. Tough call.

“The tar sands are a huge pool of carbon, but one that does not make sense to exploit. When other huge oil fields or coal mines were opened in the past, we knew much less about the damage that the carbon they contained would do to the Earth’s climate system and to its oceans.

YOU MAY have heard something about a budget crisis in Washington this summer. Were you aware that in the midst of it the House of Representatives passed a military spending bill larger than ever before?

U.S. military spending across numerous departments has increased dramatically during the past decade and now makes up about half of federal discretionary spending. Yet the Defense Department has not been fully audited in 20 years, and as of 2001 it could not account for $2.3 trillion out of the $10 trillion or so it had been given during that time. More recently, President Obama has been waging his “days, not weeks” war in Libya for months without a dime appropriated by Congress, relying instead on the loose change lying around at the Pentagon.