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For Immediate Release
November, 07 2012, 11:22am EDT
Contact:
Sam Schabacker, Food & Water Watch, 720-295-1036
Michael Bellmont, Our Longmont, 303-678-9740
Longmont Makes History as First Colorado City to Ban Fracking
Despite Half-Million Dollars Spent by Oil and Gas Industry to Oppose Measure, Question 300 Wins With Nearly 60 Percent of Vote
Longmont, Colo.
Today is a historic day for the city of Longmont, Colorado. Nearly 60 percent of Longmont voters approved an amendment to the city's charter to prohibit hydraulic fracturing, more commonly known as fracking, and disposal of waste products connected with the process within city limits.
For more than six months Longmont and its citizens have been of threatened, bullied and out-spent by the oil and gas industry. Longmont's victory over this highly industrialized and dangerous oil and gas extraction process signals to communities throughout the state and the nation that they can and will prevail over state officials who answer to the oil and gas industry rather than to their constituents.
According to Michael Bellmont, a member of Our Health, Our Future, Our Longmont (Our Longmont), "We have shown that Big Oil money does NOT always win and that our constitutionally guaranteed right to health, safety, and protection of property is NOT for sale. We proved that ordinary citizens with very little money but a lot of determination, intelligence, passion and boot leather can prevail."
Over 100 volunteers worked in hot summer days to gather the necessary signatures to place the measure on the ballot. Over 8,200 signatures were submitted, well over the 5,700 required to move the measure to today's ballot. Also, more than 200 citizens contributed the funds necessary to carry out the Yes on 300 campaign. The opposition raised over a half-million dollars to oppose Question 300. All of their funds came from the oil and gas industry and their trade associations. Not one Longmont resident contributed.
"The people of Longmont have made history: they have chosen to ban fracking," said Sam Schabacker, a Longmont area native and Mountain West Regional Director for Food & Water Watch, the national consumer group who supported Our Longmont's efforts. "Longmont residents were not frightened away or fooled by the oil and gas industry's attempt to buy the election, to the tune of $500,000, through deceptive and threatening TV commercials, full-page newspaper advertisements and multiple mailers. Hopefully this citizen-led effort will inspire other communities to stand up and protect their health, safety and property against the risky practice of fracking as well.
Our Health, Our Future, Our Longmont, a group of concerned citizens from throughout Longmont, believes that Longmont has a right to protect the public health, safety, and welfare of our community. By protecting the health, safety, and welfare of our citizens, we will preserve our economic vitality, our home values, our water, parks, wildlife, lakes, trails, streams, open space, recreational areas and our quality of life for ourselves and future generations.
Food & Water Watch mobilizes regular people to build political power to move bold and uncompromised solutions to the most pressing food, water, and climate problems of our time. We work to protect people's health, communities, and democracy from the growing destructive power of the most powerful economic interests.
(202) 683-2500LATEST NEWS
DHS ‘100 Million Deportations’ Claim Was No Joke. Bovino Had ‘Master Plan’ to Purge Nearly a Third of the Country
This month, a GOP senator accused an immigration researcher of “hyperbole” for saying the Department of Homeland Security was advocating “ethnic cleansing” with its calls to expel 100 million people.
Mar 26, 2026
When the official social media account for the US Department of Homeland Security made a post glorifying the idea of “100 million deportations," it was dismissed by many as a joke, while those who said it amounted to a call for ”ethnic cleansing“ were accused of ”hyperbole.“
But the man who once led President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign says he was always dead serious about purging nearly a third of the country’s population.
On Tuesday, The New York Times published an interview with Gregory Bovino, the former “commander-at-large” of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, who was unceremoniously demoted back to his old post in El Centro, California this January, after immigration agents’ rampage across Minnesota—which included the public executions of two American citizens—ignited nationwide backlash.
Bovino, who is retiring this week at the age of 55, told the Times he had few regrets about his tenure leading the efforts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which were marked by rampant racial profiling, large indiscriminate roundups, violations of civil liberties, and violent attacks on peaceful protesters.
But he wishes he had gone much further. According to the Times:
Mr. Bovino said he had a master plan that was in motion before his exile back to El Centro. It would have neutralized protesters, he said, and made it possible to deport 100 million people.
That is a goal that the Department of Homeland Security has widely promoted. If it sounds extreme, that’s because it’s nearly 10 times the estimated number of undocumented people in the country. It is also more than a quarter of the entire US population.
As Common Dreams reported back in late December, when DHS posted a meme about "100 million deportations," that number bears striking significance, since it was close to the number of people living in the US who identified as non-white on the 2020 census—about 96 million.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, it's also approximately the number of foreign-born people and their children, which was about 97.2 million as of 2024.
There are about 47 million foreign-born people living in the US, meaning that such a policy would also entail the deportation of around 53 million US-born citizens.
While Bovino and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have lost their jobs, it's unclear whether the new head of DHS, Secretary Markwayne Mullin, will join the push to expel 100 million people from the US.
The Times provided little exposition about how precisely Bovino planned to carry out what would be by far the largest campaign of forced displacement in American, if not world, history.
However, the article demonstrates that the idea was not simply a troll post by a social media intern, but a sincere objective for a man who answered directly to the Secretary of Homeland Security and was elevated to the position of America’s most powerful immigration enforcer.
Bovino's admission of this goal was of particular note to David J. Bier, an immigration researcher at the Cato Institute and a prominent critic of Trump's immigration policy. He discussed the "100 million deportations" goal earlier this month during a Senate Budget Committee hearing.
DHS's post came up after Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) attempted to discredit Bier by reading off supposedly "hyperbolic" posts he'd made on social media, including one accusing Republicans of thinking "they can troll their way into us accepting ethnic cleansing."
Bier responded that his post was "in regard to a Department of Homeland Security post about 100 million deportations. That is what DHS has tweeted from their account."
As Kennedy attempted to shout over Bier, the researcher said: "100 million deportations would be ethnic cleansing. You would be removing one-third of the country."
"And you don't think this is hyperbolic?" Kennedy interrupted, smirking. The senator brought up another of Bier's posts in which he claimed Trump was carrying out a "population purge agenda," adding sarcastically, "No hyperbole there!"
“When I talk about ‘population purge,’ I’m talking about the fact that they’re trying to deport US-born citizens, people born here,” Bier responded. “They are trying to deport them as well. So it’s not a ‘mass deportation' agenda. It’s also an agenda intended to reduce the population of the United States, including US-born citizens. So these are not ‘hyperbolic’ statements.”
Kennedy ignored Bier's argument, instead derisively asking "what planet" he was from and saying he triggered his "gag reflex." It is not clear if Kennedy was aware of Trump's frequent calls to "denaturalize" American citizens or his administration's efforts to eliminate the constitutional provision of birthright citizenship.
The Houston-based immigration attorney Steven Brown said that Bovino’s apparent “master plan” was “exactly what Bier testified about, since 100 million deportations would expel ”one-third of the US population and would necessitate citizens being deported to accomplish.“
Jessica Riedl, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, called the idea "just dangerously insane," and something out of "white supremacist fan fiction."
"These are the armed fanatics who were given police power in our cities," she added.
Noting that many of the commenters who replied to his posts expressed support for the idea, Bier warned that "DHS's 100 million deportations ethnic cleansing agenda is spreading throughout the right-wing echo chamber as it is intended. It is only a matter of time before this extremism becomes standard rhetoric for GOP candidates."
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Poll Shows Mills Attack Ad Left Platner With 2-to-1 Lead in Maine Senate Race
As the latest poll results were released, the Maine governor launched her second ad against her Senate primary opponent, again attacking him for comments he made online 13 years ago.
Mar 26, 2026
Days after Maine Gov. Janet Mills released her first attack ad against her rival in the Democratic Senate primary, Graham Platner, focusing on comments he made about sexual assault victims online 13 years ago, Emerson College Polling conducted the latest survey of likely primary voters regarding their support for the two candidates.
Between March 21-23, the polling group surveyed 1,075 Maine Democrats and found that 55% expressed support for Platner, while just 28% supported Mills—giving the first-time political candidate, oyster farmer, and combat veteran nearly a 2-to-1 advantage.
When asked about a hypothetical general election matchup with Republican Sen. Susan Collins, respondents gave both Democratic candidates an edge over her, but Platner had a more comfortable lead.
Forty-eight percent supported him over Collins, while 41% backed Collins and 12% said they were undecided or supported another candidate. Mills had the backing of 46% of voters compared to Collins' 43%, and 11% were undecided.
The poll was consistent with numerous other surveys that have been taken since Mills entered the race last October, at which point it came to light that Platner had written offensive messages on Reddit in the past and had gotten a tattoo while in the Marines that resembled a skull-and-crossbones that appeared on the uniforms of Nazi guards during World War II.
Platner said his views had evolved since he wrote the posts and said he had not been aware that the symbol was associated with Nazis; he then got the tattoo covered up and continued holding rallies in cities and towns across the state—often addressing overflow crowds—where he has been speaking out against oligarchy, pushing for Medicare for All, demanding a billionaire's minimum tax, and condemning the Trump administration's "authoritarian overreach" with its mass deportations agenda.
Polls taken in the weeks after the controversies broke suggested the negative stories about Platner's past weren't sticking. The University of New Hampshire (UNH) found in late October that 58% of voters backed Platner compared to 24% who supported the governor.
He was 20 points ahead of Mills in a poll by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee weeks later, and in February UNH found Platner had widened his already significant lead, with 64% of Maine Democrats supporting him and 26% backing Mills. He also had an 11-point lead over Collins compared to Mills 1-point lead.
Despite the evidence that the attacks on Platner's Reddit history were doing little to damage his chances of winning, Mills made his comments the focus of her first attack ad earlier this month—a move that was panned at a local Democrats meeting days later in Hancock County, with attendees telling the governor directly that the ad was "odious" and "underhanded" and demanding to know: “Do you believe in a Maine and a country where a person can be redeemed? Where they can change and become a better version of themself?”
At the meeting, several voters also expressed disapproval of Mills' record of vetoing drug pricing and labor rights legislation and her opposition to a red flag gun control law.
On Thursday, as the latest Emerson College poll results were released, Mills released a second ad that, like the first one, focused on Platner's 2013 comments about sexual assault.
"Since her last attack ad, he has only climbed in the polls against both Mills and Collins," said journalist Ryan Grim of Drop Site News. "All these ads do is tell voters that the Democratic establishment is still a closed-off world where you are not welcome if you previously held different views or said something offensive on the internet. Nobody wants that world."
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Trump's Illegal Iran War to Push US Inflation Sharply Higher, OECD Projects
"Every single one of this administration's policies is doing what it can to raise prices," said one critic.
Mar 26, 2026
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on Thursday released a report projecting that President Donald Trump's unconstitutional war with Iran will sharply increase inflation in the US this year.
According to OECD, the disruption in energy markets caused by the war means that "inflation pressures will persist for longer," with inflation in G20 nations "now expected to be higher in 2026 than previously projected."
OECD projects that inflation in the US, which was previously seen coming in at 2.6% in 2026, will instead rise to 4.2% this year thanks in large part to the war, which has spiked prices for oil, gasoline, diesel fuel, and fertilizer.
The report also warns that these numbers could get even worse if the Iran conflict drags on and the Strait of Hormuz remains shut for a prolonged period.
"Further disruptions to trade in the Persian Gulf could also have negative effects on a broader range of products in global supply chains," OECD writes. "For example, ongoing constraints to fertilizer supply could increase global food prices, with potentially serious impacts on household finances and inflation expectations. Furthermore, reduced supply of sulphur, helium or aluminium could impede production in a range of industries."
More ominously, the report finds that "prolonged disruptions to energy supply and growth, or lower-than-expected returns from net AI investment, or rising losses in private capital markets, could all trigger more widespread risk repricing in financial markets," with the result being a higher risk of default across "multiple credit products" and an evaporation of economic liquidity.
Asa Johansson, director of policy studies at OECD, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the organization's forecast is "highly uncertain" at this point because "we don’t know the breadth and the duration of this energy shock" caused by the war.
Tahra Hoops, director of economic analysis at Chamber of Progress, expressed astonishment at the Trump administration's economic mismanagement in launching the Iran war, which came at a time when polling has consistently shown that affordability is the top concern for US voters.
"Every single one of this administration's policies is doing what it can to raise prices," wrote Hoops, "for a political goal that they have yet to coherently articulate, let alone have any chance at achieving."
Phillips O'Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, argued that the OECD's inflation forecast was yet another nail in the Republican Party's chances of retaining control of Congress this year.
"It’s going to be so much fun watching the GOP run on 'affordability' in 2026," O'Brien wrote.
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