Wealthy CEO Network Behind Fake Anti-Fracking Ads

DeSmogBlog
Tue, 29 Apr 2014 15:02:34 +0000
Corporate-accountability, Fracking, Home-depot, Job-creators-network, Whole-foods

The online version of the Post Independent, the local daily newspaper in heavily-drilled Garfield County, Colorado, is prominently displaying black-and-white banner ads that read, “Blowing the Lid off Fracking Colorado.”

Readers are led to believe the ads are anti-fracking, but click on them and you're taken to a pro-fracking website, JobCreatorsNetwork.com, that boasts about all the wonderful jobs and economic benefits that drilling and fracking create.

Members of Job Creators Network include the wealthy CEOs of major companies like Home Depot, Whole Foods Market, Staples and Best Buy. Members also reportedly have ties to groups like the Cato Institute and the U.S.Chamber of Commerce.

Despite this, the Job Creator's Network website complains that “Today, small business are under fire” from “confiscatory taxes and suffocating regulations…stifling energy costs…”

The network holds it meetings and events in tony locales, like Scottsdale, Arizona and Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.

According to Little Sis, a free online database that details the connections between powerful people and organizations, Job Creators Network members give overwhelmingly (87%) to Republicans, and the group's biggest donor, Bernard Marcus of Home Depot, has given over $3 million to U.S. politicians.

Far from being anti-fracking as the banner ads lure readers to believe, the JobCreatorsNetwork is not just pro-drilling, but anti-regulation, pro-Keystone XL pipeline, pro-coal, pro-offshore drilling and, of course, in favor of cutting corporate tax rates.

“Fracking Colorado,” the group the CEOs target in their ads, is a grassroots group that supports a moratorium on horizontal hydraulic fracturing until it is assured the practice will not harm health, safety, air, land, water or water security.