Mammon category archive

Eerily, Google preceded this on YouTube with an ad hawking reverse mortgages.

A company that cares only for its own self is incapable of serving the public good.

Nothing particularly new here, but Cenk sums it up very nicely.

Dream on.

A ProPublica review of U.S. Department of Labor investigations shows that oil and gas workers — men and women often performing high-risk jobs — are routinely being underpaid, and the companies hiring them often are using accounting techniques to deny workers benefits such as medical leave or unemployment insurance.

Really, folks, it is a scan. Public responsibilities are public responsibilities that should not be farmed out to folks who don’t care about the public good.

When public responsibilities are turned over to private corporations which care only about how many CEO country club memberships they can afford, the corporations get their country club memberships and the public gets the shaft.

Via Informed Comment.

Dry-gulched.

Facing South looks at the struggle between Dollar Tree and Dollar General to take over Family Dollar; they point out that, in their labor practices, these outfits nothing other are mini-Walmarts. A snippet.

. . . there has been surprisingly little discussion of how these companies operate. For example, there’s the matter of their labor practices. Dollar General, Family Dollar and Dollar Tree are not often mentioned alongside Wal-Mart, yet they are also low-paying, non-union employers that have been involved in numerous wage and hour controversies. The dollar stores, whose outlets have much smaller staffs than those at Supercenters, have mainly been accused of improperly denying overtime pay to so-called store managers and assistant managers who spend most of their time on non-managerial tasks such as stocking shelves and unloading trucks. Family Dollar, for instance, fought one such case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it lost and finally had to pay a $33 million judgment.

And this surprises you how?

Scientists from Duke University, Ohio State, Stanford, Dartmouth, and the University of Rochester found eight clusters of drinking-water wells that were contaminated as a result of gas well integrity problems including poor casing and cementing. One of the contaminated clusters was in Texas and seven were in Pennsylvania,

“People’s water has been harmed by drilling,” said Robert B. Jackson, professor of environmental and earth sciences at Stanford and Duke. “In Texas, we even saw two homes go from clean to contaminated after our sampling began.”

“Gas well integrity problems” is fancy talk for slap-dash shoddy we-don’t-care-screw-the-people make-my-pile-and-get-out-of-here behavior. It’s the Buccaneer Petroleum way.

Addendum, Distinction without a Difference Dept.

Proponents of fracking are trying to spin this to mean that fracking’s okay because it’s all the wells’ fault, saying, in effect, that fracking didn’t set your water on fire, that nasty fracking well set your water on fire.

This is brilliant.

Via the Daily Banter.

Jim Arnold, a former Superintendent of Schools in Georgia, believes that teachers, and through them education, are being screwed.

A nugget:

While every parent wants their child to have an individualized educational experience, governors, legislators and federal policies insist that all children be subjected to the same inane standards and testing. It would seem their intent is to drive away as many teachers as possible and make the profession even more unattractive than it currently is.

Enrollments in education programs are dropping nationwide, due in large part to the attacks on the profession through opposition to due process, denigration of the profession, low pay and increasing expectations. Doing more with less has ceased to become a temporary circumstance and now is a way of life for teachers.

It would seem that 12 years of a failed test-and-punish system would be enough for anyone to recognize it simply doesn’t work.

President George the Worst’s “No Child Left Behind” has been just as successful as his stewardship of the economy, but those who have been enriched by it–testing companies, flocks of superfluous administrators, E-school theorists who have never led a primary or secondary school class, computer sales persons–continue to tinker with it rather than admit that it and their theories and their iPads and e-learning have not only failed to improve learning, but have done damage.

Meanwhile, for-profit charter schools circle like carrion crows to pluck clean the bones of the public school system so as to pay for their CEOs’ country-club memberships and private jets.

Funny or Die has found Eric Cantor’s cover letter for his resume.

It’s too true to be funny.

The Tampa Bay Times’s John Romano considers the minimum wage. A nugget:

The minimum wage debate is not a simple one. Neither side has a monopoly on the facts.

Supporters of raising the minimum wage could cite studies from California-Berkeley and MIT that suggest higher pay means a healthier economy. Critics could produce their own studies that warn a higher minimum wage could result in a smaller workforce.

Meanwhile, a generation of workers tries to decide whether it’s better to skip the electric or water bill this month.

Moore, 27, has been working at a Burger King in Hillsborough County for nearly a year. He took classes to get necessary food service certifications and was promoted to a shift manager two months ago. He gets up at 4 a.m. six days a week to catch a 4:30 a.m. bus in his slacks and tie so he can reach Burger King by 5:15 to begin setting up for the day.

His hourly pay?

It is Florida’s minimum wage of $7.93 an hour, he said, the same pay he was getting when he was hired.

Meanwhile . . . .