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August 13, 2014 01:28 PM UTC

Selling Fracking--With Xenophobia?

  • 27 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

There's a new "guerilla marketing" campaign underway in Colorado on behalf of the oil and gas industry, produced by a group calling itself Friends of Safe Energy, which has no filing we can find in the Colorado Secretary of State's website either as a political committee or a business. The campaign is circulating well-produced viral videos like the one you see above–so well produced, in fact, it's a dead giveaway that this is not a "grassroots" effort of any kind. In addition to the videos, the campaign is putting up wheatpaste posters like this cluster we found on East Colfax in Denver today:

putinwheatpaste

It's easy to see what they're getting at, but this campaign openly deceives on crucial details–like the fact that the United States is already a net exporter of petroleum products, or that more of our imported oil comes from Canada, Venezuela and non-OPEC nations today than either the Middle East or Russia.

Also, we're pretty sure that money spent on imported petroleum does not ipso facto go to fund terrorists getting ready to execute a fair-skinned hostage.

This campaign's ability to nail just about every xenophobic Arab stereotype in only one minute of video shows you've got an ad agency that really managed to think outside the proverbial box. Perhaps only for the purpose of offending people, but in the right focus group, that's more than enough. Perhaps at some point we'll find out who paid for this campaign, and whether they like having their names publicly linked with it.

In the meantime, just sit back and enjoy the jingoism we guess.

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27 thoughts on “Selling Fracking–With Xenophobia?”

  2. What a coincidence: The Sheikh wants to export his oil; the frackers want to export their gas!

    Those posters seem to have just had the "Stay Rich" part added. That was absent when I first saw them–which made the message especially confusing.

  5. Meh. The extremist right wing/O&G alliance would be stark naked without its neverending assortment of strawmen and boogeymen. Same old fear and smear tactics: Villify whatever/whomever threatens your obscene, environment-choking payday. Nothing new; just the SOS, regurgitated with higher production values.

    1. I think this video brings up something uncomfortable for liberals. Foreign energy does enrich our enemies. We still import thousands of barrels from the Middle East and Russia every year. Why not deprive them of the capital flow and develop American energy? Democrats say buying American is good for everything else. Why not energy?

      1. Not uncomfortable in the least. We'll go toe-to-toe with you dissembling scoundrels any time over this.

        Why not invest instead in increasingly viable domestic clean renewables and common-sense conservation efforts, hmm? Why do your ilk so vehemently denigrate and go to such extraordinary lengths to squelch such options at every turn? Actually, we already know… (cough— Koch! — cough)

      2. Only in the fantasy world of two-dimensional low info GOP land.  Guess who the companies are working with Putin to develop Russia's gas and oil?  Oh. Nevermind.  

        1. Its an internationally fungible commodity on a global market being developed by partnerships of multinational companies with subsidiaries in nations on continents across the planet.  

      3. Moderatus:  "we still import thousands of barrels……"   Uh, the country uses somewhere around 16-18 million barrels per day, last time I checked, which is some time ago. "Thousands" as a figure is really irrelevant. The bulk of our oil imports come from Canada and Mexico. We're getting very little from the Middle East or Russia. Oh, and don't blame Democrats here. The Bureau of Land Management continues to do the quarterly lease sales that were mandated by an energy act, I believe, in 2005. No change under Obama. 

        I actually find the paste poster and excerpt from the video to be funny. I doubt it will make anyone "uncomfortable." Now all we need is a rewind of the great country singer, Ray Stevens, bringing back "Ahab the Arab."

        Regards,  Conservative Head Banger 

      4. I am more interested in clean and infinite energy.

        Oil and gas are not clean energy, and are definetely finite. 

        How about some work on solar – especially when Colorado gets 300 days of sunshine a year. Every house in Colorado should be set up for solar to help become self-sufficient in energy needs.

        Why the fuck do I care about Russia? Why the fuck do I care about Middle East? Let them deal with their own problems and finding ways to stab at each other in the back. The lead actor was badly made up – spray-on tans? Come on. These people have real skins, and are described as olive. Tans are not olive.

        Who are you fooling anyway?

         

      5. I am all for developing American energy as fast as we can…as long as it doesn't involve the burning of hydrocarbons…

        Wind energy,yes… Solar energy, yes…Bio energy, yes…Tidal energy, yes…

                                                        and….   conservation

        We need to stop subsidizing O&G to the tune of billions of dollars per year. We need to bill the Big 5 for our Navy and Air Force expenses, and backcharge them 2 trillion dollars for Iraq and Afghanistan…then see if they can compete.

        1.  At the time of the introduction of the automobile to New York City, there were over a million horses on the island of Manhattan. That’s a lot of republican refuse, and was a near calamity.

           This country, today, has yet to hit an important milestone, which is viewed by many to be a focal turning point of technology, as was the retirement of the horse drawn big apple (with smaller, associated right wing road apples)

           It is a million electric cars on the road, which as is the nature of change, will rapidly bring the new era of personal, alternatively fueled cars.  

  6. The video is made by "Help Me Colorado". This person has several other videos on his/her youtube channel, all with the same message. I don't want to post a link, because I don't want to drive traffic to his/ her site.

    I think youtube has a  policy against racial stereotypes. Worth looking into.

  7. They're really hitting all the right keys.  First, they had ear-ringed Latino guy w/ his sock puppet playing cards w/ the Flat Earth Society, and now this…..

      1. As much as I'd like to write a diary in these dumbasses, it will have to wait a day or two. Moddy – you still owe me an answer. (Did you think I'd forgotten?). In case you've forgotten, you proclaimed once that Hick was "good on energy." I asked you if that meant you supported his signing of SB13-252. (20% renewable standard on the rural electrics). Nothing but crickets   

  9. Have been doing my own guerilla marketing of the few facts I have. Particularly galling is the treatment of this country as a third world exploit. Where are the Pols of any stripe to manage the voracious stripping of national resources?(60% of US mineral extraction companies owned by foreign interests) Statoil of Norway is openly sucking North Dakota dry, for the benefit of their citizens. Legal of course. Same outfit that started expansion of shipping rail road tankers.

    Norway provides cradle to grave health care and education, for their citizens. Easy to envy, harder to incite  xenophobic invective.  

      Democratic responses, anyone? We might need that oil later on, or if present consumption trends continue, it won’t matter much anyway. Dismay with the rapid export of refined petroleum products as footnoted above by Col Pols.

     Economics; what if USA energy costs were to decline (severance tax on distillate petrolum export as a disincentivewhy your price at the pump no longer follows older supply & demand market forces), and accompanied by a slight tariff incentive (a return to centuries old practice of protecting US workers) which would begin to restore a semblance of manufacturing base (Adam Smith was right). This would easily catapult our American economy to record levels(compared to the present anemic, mainly service sector,) of real job growth, Balance of trade, and give breathing room to redefine our over all consumption of the world’s finite resources.

     

  10. What's the connection?

     

    THE NEWS COMMENTER
    http://www.thenewscommenter.com/news/help-me-stay-rich-colorado/162909

    Dana Milbank
    WaPo 8-13-14
    Republicans embrace their phoniness
    http://wapo.st/1t0FE7y

    Shane Goldmacher
    National Review
    NRCC Launches Fake News Sites to Attack Democratic Candidates

    “The National Republican Congressional Committee, which came under fire earlier this year for a deceptive series of fake Democratic candidate websites that it later changed after public outcry, has launched a new set of deceptive websites, this time designed to look like local news sources.

    The NRCC has created about two dozen of these new faux news sites targeting Democrats, both challengers and incumbents, and is promoting them across the country with localized Google search ads.”

     

    1. The connection will turn out to be money, I think. My hunch is Koch $$, either through AFP-Colorado,or Generation Opportunity. The latter would make sense as the medium is very millenial-friendly.

      One of the videos which "Help Me" made is also homophobic – "The Oligarch" starts with a zoom in shot of a photo with Putin and some other bare chested man in a cuddly pose. So there's that.

      But I looked into it this afternoon, and couldn't find anything other than "Help Me"s youtube channel. The person putting up the flyers in Denver will get caught, eventually – City sanitation workers really don't appreciate folks mucking up public surfaces with random flyers. It's considered to be vandalism.

      The fake news sites are more worrisome. It's too fricking Orwellian.

       

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