Titans of Industry category archive

The Baltimore Sun takes a long and relatively balanced look at fracking’s effects on the fracked.

A nugget:

In neighboring Bradford County, scene of the most intense drilling in the state, Sherry Vargson said she’s been waiting more than two years for the state to tell her how her water became contaminated. She calls her decision in 2006 to allow drilling by another Oklahoma-based company, Chesapeake Energy Corp., “the biggest mistake of my life.” Though the one-time lease payment of $19,000 helped pay off her son’s college loan, she said she and her husband had to sell their dairy herd on their 197-acre farm to make way for a well and pipeline that has yielded only about a $1,000 a year in royalty checks, she said.

Water from their kitchen tap fizzes like seltzer water, and she can ignite a foot-long flame by holding a match to the faucet when it’s on. The state says her water is safe to drink despite the methane, Vargson said, but she’s not reassured. Her dog and cat steer clear of it.

It’s pumping construction and other money into local economies–for now–and pollution into daily life.

Short-term boom, long-term poison.

Related:

Read about life on a fracking site.

And food “science” may not be your friend.

Via Sfgate.

How dare someone hold them accountable? How dare they they, I say!

BP has announced that it will square off against the federal government in court next week to fight “excessive” claims arising from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

In a combative statement, the oil giant said it had been open to a settlement in the civil trial, set to start on Monday in a federal court in New Orleans. But it had failed to reach a deal with federal government lawyers.

Their logic boils down to “We should not pay because reasons.”

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer editorializes:

The good news is that appalled state and federal officials were lightning fast in investigating and prosecuting the case of Ben Lupo, owner of Hardrock Excavating and other fracking-related companies in the Mahoning Valley. Lupo was charged last week with a criminal violation of the federal Clean Water Act for allegedly telling an employee to dump liquid fracking waste and oil-laced mud into a stormwater drain leading to a tributary of the Mahoning River. He faces up to three years in prison and a quarter-million-dollar fine if convicted.

Follow the link for the bad news. It doesn’t apply only to Ohio.

Another parable of who’s doing the taking and who’s doing the making (emphasis added):

A prominent Silicon Valley clean-energy startup has been ordered to pay back wages and penalties for bringing in workers from Mexico and paying them about $2.66 an hour in pesos, the U.S. Department of Labor announced Tuesday.

Sunnyvale-based Bloom Energy, which makes fuel cells and sells energy to clients including AT&T, Adobe, Coca-Cola, eBay, Google and Wal-Mart, was ordered by a judge to pay $31,922 in back wages and an equal amount in damages to 14 welders who were brought in to work alongside domestic workers refurbishing power generators.

The workers in question were welders.

If you’ve ever been around welders, you know that welding is, indeed, a skilled trade. MIG welding is a little easier than arc welding, but, in either one, expert welders work magic with their torches.

Randy Moyer, who trucked brine from wells to treatment plants and back to wells, now suffers from dizziness, blurred vision, headaches, difficulty breathing, swollen lips and appendages, and a fiery red rash that covered about 50 percent of his body. The Portage resident believes he’s sick from the chemicals in fracking fluid and from radiation exposure. He cites unsafe and unregulated working conditions on well sites, no oversight about safety clothing, breathing masks, or chemical suits. The sites are treated like any other construction site, all that’s needed is a hardhat and goggles. But when working with radiation and toxic chemicals from deep underground, adverse health effects are never far behind.

Watch a bit of the interview.

The accompanying story is here.

Via the Beaver County Times.

State Farm is . . . where?

“An amazing chain of incompetence.”

Addendum, the Next Day:

Sign the petition.

E. J. Montini connects the dots:

In 1911 a fire killed 146 workers at in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York. There were stories of trapped workers leaping out of windows to their deaths. That event had a lot to do with the rise of unionism in the United States.

Now, in order for Americans to get the cheap goods they demand on shopping days like Black Friday the ugly, unsafe labor conditions were moved to countries far way and into factories whose laborers we don’t care much about.

According to an Associated Press report from Dhaka, “When the fire alarm went off, workers were told by their bosses to go back to their sewing machines. An exit door was locked. And the fire extinguishers didn’t work and apparently were there just to impress inspectors and customers.”

In the Baltimore Sun, Robert Reich points out that fining Buccaneer Petroleum for its wild well misses the point. A nugget:

Likewise, the people responsible for the deaths and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico weren’t BP’s rank-and-file employees or its shareholders. They were the executives who turned a blind eye to safety while in pursuit of their own rising stock options, and who conspired with oil-services giant Halliburton to cut corners on deep-water drilling when they knew damn well they were taking risks for the sake of fatter profits.

They’re the ones who should be punished. Failure to punish them simply invites more of the same kind of criminal negligence by executives more interested in lining their pockets than protecting their workers and the environment.

Read the rest for examples of other pillows of industry who got off Scot-free.

Via C&L.

This ain’t chicken feed. Just started out that way:

Lawyers in a closely watched pollution lawsuit targeting an Eastern Shore chicken farm and the Salisbury-based poultry company Perdue presented radically different previews of the case Tuesday as the trial began in U.S. District Court in Baltimore.

The lead lawyer for the Waterkeeper Alliance told Judge William M. Nickerson that water samples taken on and around Alan and Kristin Hudson’s 293-acre farm near Berlin offer “very compelling” evidence that waste from their two chicken houses was getting into nearby ditches, which ultimately drain to the Chesapeake Bay. Levels of disease-causing bacteria and other pollutants were “off the chart,” said Jane F. Barrett, director of the University of Maryland environmental law clinic, which is representing the environmental group.

Defense lawyers claim that it’s all conjecture, there’s no proof, no one saw anything, yadda-yadda-yadda you know the drill.

A question for you: Ever driven by a chicken factory farm on a hot summer day?

Since corporations are people, my friends, why isn’t BP itself in the dock?

The employees were merely its henchmen. It’s the Mr. Big.

Oil giant BP has agreed to pay the largest criminal penalty in U.S. history, totaling billions of dollars, for the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a person familiar with the deal said Thursday.

The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record about the deal, also said two BP PLC employees face manslaughter charges over the death of 11 people in the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that triggered the massive spill.

Details and a look back at the events of the spill at the link.

There is still a possibility that BP will be brought up for “gross negligence,” but a nice violent criminal felony such as manslaughter would be more satisfying and more appropriate.

After the trial, BP could go the slammer and then, to borrow a phrase from a parole officer I once knew (our sons went to different schools together), Enron could make a woman of it.

Addendum, the Next Day:

I still say, make them share a cell with Enron.

BP has received the biggest criminal fine in US history as part of a $4.5bn (£2.8bn) settlement related to the fatal 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Two BP workers have been indicted on manslaughter charges and an ex-manager charged with misleading Congress.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) said BP must hand over $4bn. The sum includes a $1.26bn fine as well as payments to wildlife and science organisations.

As part of the agreement, BP will also plead guilty to 14 criminal charges.