Titans of Industry category archive

So much so that they served a cease and desist order on Comcast in Houston to keep it off the air. C&L has the story.

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Learn more here.

“Biostitutes.” Heh.

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:

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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.