Titans of Industry category archive

Via DelawareLiberal.

Chiquita had paramilitaries on the dole.

Chiquita claims it was paying protection money, not employing the paramilitaries.

A judge in the United States has dismissed an attempt by banana producer Chiquita to halt multi-million-dollar compensation cases being brought by at least 4,000 Colombians.

They allege they or their relatives were tortured or killed in banana-growing areas by paramilitaries paid by the company.

Chiquita, which is based in the US, has admitted paying paramilitaries.

All seriousness aside, ample evidence demonstrates that, with many corporations, when you have revenue on the one hand, there is no other hand.

Facing South reports. A nugget:

Anyone who spent time talking to residents of coastal communities along the Gulf of Mexico following last year’s BP oil disaster inevitably heard concerns about the widespread spraying of chemical dispersants to break up the oil slick.

Residents worried that, rather than easing the ecological impact, the chemicals would in fact make the disaster worse by spreading the oil throughout the water column. They were also concerned about the toxicity of the dispersants, which are themselves petroleum-based.

As it turns out, science is justifying their fears.

Follow the link for facts, figures, and citations.

The Scholastic Book Club becomes the Scholastic Propaganda Club. From McClatchy:

A division of Scholastic partnered with a coal industry trade group to produce an energy curriculum for fourth-graders – a poster and related materials – that extols the virtues of coal but neglects to mention the strip mining that degrades the landscape and removes entire mountaintops, the pollution of air and water associated with coal, or its role in global warming. The American Coal Foundation posted an online announcement about its joint project with Scholastic, which sent the “United States of Energy” package, free and unsolicited, to 66,000 teachers on its mailing list, and emailed it to 82,000 more.

In this case, schools got what they paid for – a biased, incomplete and frankly embarrassing promotional product parading as education.

I guess, if you’re going to sell out, you might as well go all the way.

In a world where everything is marketing . . . .

That is, in Disney World:

According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Disney Enterprises Inc., submitted three applications for the trademark two days after bin Laden was killed.

In the application, the trademark would cover clothes, footwear, toys, games, Christmas ornaments, snow globes and other items.

This is absurd and sick-making, not only due to the greed, but also due the disrespect to the military and to the pure icky cynicism it betrays.

Via Le Show.

The Miami Herald editorializes:

Under questioning from Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, BP America Chairman and President Lamar McKay defended as a “standard business expense” the decision to seek a tax write-off for the costs associated with the spill, which would generate $11.8 billion in tax savings. Considering that much of the cost involves compensation for victims and legal expenses associated with the spill, it’s wrong to ask taxpayers to pick up any of it. This is no ordinary cost of doing business like paying for insurance or the copy machine — there’s nothing “standard” about it.

“Surely, the Gulf oil spill was the result of wrongdoing, and yet you want to claim that as a tax credit,” Sen. Nelson said.

BP, he added “may be entitled to this under the law, but that doesn’t make it right .?.?.” Exactly.

Reading the opening of the editorial is worth clicking the link.

Even as Governor Corbett continues giving Pennsylvania away to the gas companies, the gas companies give back–in kind:

A Duke University study has found that methane levels in private water wells are, on average, 17 times higher in wells that are within 1,000 feet of a natural gas drilling site.

The researchers sampled sampled the water from 68 wells in northeastern Pennsylvania and New York, and found methane in 85 percent of the wells.

When they fingerprinted the methane itself — comparing the chemistry of the methane in the water wells with that of the gas from natural gas wells in the region — “the signatures matched,” said Robert B. Jackson, Nicholas Professor of Global Environmental Change at Duke, one of the study’s authors.

If any of you watched the CSI episode in which a homeowner’s tap water burst into flames–that part at least was not fiction. It has happened, just not quite so spectacularly.

The local rag discusses the stealth downsizing of groceries:

A carton of Tropicana orange juice squeezed down from 64 ounces, a full half-gallon, to 59 ounces. A “pint” of Haagen-Dazs ice cream isn’t a pint anymore, but 14 ounces – 12.5 percent less. A large box of Kleenex dropped from 280 tissues to 260. A pound of coffee, 16 ounces, dropped 25 percent to 12 ounces, and some brands have started to slim that further, down to 11-ounce bags.

“You’re seeing it across the board,” said Ann Gurkin, a food, beverage and tobacco analyst for Davenport & Co. in Richmond.

“It’s one way to raise prices” that consumers don’t notice as much, she said. “You’ve seen both package changes and you’ve seen prices going up. I think it’s both.”

The article goes into grreat detail and is worth the five minutes if you haven’t caught on to this already.

Meanwhile, when shopping, read the labels, while admiring our corporate betters’ skill at packaging three-card monte in packaging.

Persons purporting to represent Buccaneer Petroleum and the feds promise to do the right thing.

Naturally, it was a hoax.

From Facing South:

First, a representative from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announce a ban on toxic dispersants, as well as a free health care plan for spill and cleanup victims. Then a BP co-presenter expressed regret for his company’s past actions, and said the oil giant would foot the bill for the new health care plan.

Alas, it turned out too good to be true. The officials were imposters, and the scene was a clever piece of political theater organized by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a leading critic of energy industry pollution and advocate for stronger environmental health standards.

Facing South investigates the aftermath of Buccaneer Petroleum’s wild well. A nugget:

An investigation by Facing South finds that people across the region from Louisiana to Florida — cleanup workers as well as coastal residents who weren’t directly involved in the cleanup — are reporting unusual health problems that they blame on the oil spill and the chemical dispersants that were deployed in unprecedented amounts.

Marylee Orr, executive director of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, says she fields a couple of calls a day from people who say they were exposed to BP oil and/or chemical dispersants and who now report an array of health problems, including respiratory and gastrointestinal disorders, blurred vision, rashes and other skin conditions, bleeding from the rectum and ears, and bloody urine.

Excerpt: “In my opinion, nothing that’s being caught in these waters today is safe for human consumption.”

Via Facing South.

What Brendan said.

Also, questions surround the filming of Buccaneer Petroleum, the Sequel:

US interior secretary Ken Salazar has rejected claims that BP has reached an agreement to restart drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

Media reports have said that the UK oil giant will resume work in July at 10 sites in the Gulf.

Mr Salazar told reporters on Monday: “There is no such agreement, nor would there be such an agreement.”

But BBC business editor Robert Peston understands BP has been told privately it should be able to resume soon.

Barbara Ehrenreich, writing at the Guardian, considers the personhood of Walmart in the light of the sex discrimination lawsuit against Walmart:

But Walmart’s defence against a class action charging the company with discrimination against its female employees – Dukes v Walmart – throws a new light on the biology of large corporations. The company argues that with “seven divisions, 41 regions, 3,400 stores and over one million employees”, the experiences of individual employees are just too variable to allow for a “class” in the legal sense to arise. Walmart, in other words, is too big, too multifaceted and too diverse to be sued.

So if Walmart is indeed a person, it is a person without a central nervous system, or at least without central control of its various body parts. There exist such persons, I admit, but surely, when the supreme court declared that corporations were persons, it did not mean to say “persons with advanced neuromuscular degenerative diseases”.

(snip)

So if Walmart is a life form, it is an unclassifiable one. It eats, devouring town after town. It grows without limit, sometimes assuming new names – Walmex in Mexico, Asda in the UK. Yet in its defence in the Dukes v Walmart suit, Walmart claims to have no idea what it’s doing. This could be a metaphor for capitalism or a sign that a successful alien invasion is in progress. The only thing that’s for sure is, should the supreme court decide in favour of Walmart, we’ll have a lot more of these creatures running around: monstrously oversized “persons” who insist that they can’t control their own actions.

In the article, the writer shares some of experience in working for Walmart for a few months.

Apparently, Walmart is a shape-shifter.

Facing South reports on the Gulf of Petroleum:

SkyTruth, a West Virginia-based nonprofit, analyzed recent satellite imagery of the spill that was first reported on March 18. Assuming the thickness of the 2,427 square-kilometer slick was only 1 micron or one-millionth of a meter, the organization concludes the slick held at least 640,728 gallons of oil.

“That would make it a major spill (more than 100,000 gallons), and a heckuva lot more than the 4 gallons in total that was reported to the National Response Center,” SkyTruth states on its blog.

Following last April’s explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, BP and the U.S. government claimed the well was leaking about 1,000 barrels of oil a day. But SkyTruth’s analysis of satellite imagery concluded the flow rate had to be at least 5,000 barrels a day and probably far more, leading the government to revise its own estimate upward.

The United States puts more persons in jail for more reasons than anyone else, including China and Russia, in both total numbers and percentage of population.

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Diversity, Inc., examines the American Legislative Exchange Council, which lobbies for laws requiring tougher prison sentences. It’s supporters include include outfits such as the Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group who (surprise, surprise) run prisons for profit.

ALEC is comprised of nine task forces, each responsible for developing what it describes as “model legislation”—essentially, a wish list of laws addressing subjects they would like to see passed in states. Over the past several decades, private-prison operators like CCA and GEO Group have worked with ALEC to ensure the passage of some of the nation’s toughest laws that have lined their pockets and enriched their shareholders.

(snip)

When private prisons were actively courting state lawmakers, companies such as CCA and GEO as well as their lobbyists gave $3.3 million to state-level candidates in the 2002 and 2004 election cycles, favoring states with some of the toughest sentencing laws, according to a 2006 report authored by Edwin Bender, director of the National Institute on Money in State Politics, which tracks state campaign funding and lobbying.

“Companies favored states that had enacted legislation to lengthen the sentence given to any offender convicted of a felony for the third time,” Bender says. “Private-prison interests gave almost $2.1 million in 22 states that had a so-called ‘three-strikes law,’ compared with $1.2 million in 22 states that did not.”

Read the whole thing and consider the effects when the only motive is the profit motive.

Here’s a link to the ALEC website (I couldn’t get it to work).

They brook no questions, for what they say goes. Facing South reports:

A dozen weary Steelworkers trekked from Mississippi to Ohio last week, hoping to insert a few uncomfortable questions into the clubby confines of their company’s shareholders meeting.

Approaching their 10th month on strike, the workers from Omnova Solutions wanted to ask the CEO just how the company had found enough money to grant the CEO a 90 percent pay increase — boosting his take-home to $3.5 million a year — while they were asked to forget about seniority and choke down benefit givebacks that amount to a 15 percent pay cut.

The strikers didn’t get the chance. Prepared for their arrival, the company, which makes vinyl-coated wall coverings used in hotels, denied access to most of the strikers, although they carried proxies from other shareholders.

In the olden days, these folks were called “Robber Barons.”

Trouble on oiled waters.

The U.S. Coast Guard is investigating reports of a potentially massive oil sheen about 20 miles north of the site of last April’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion.A helicopter crew and pollution investigators have been dispatched to Main Pass Block 41 in response to two calls to the National Response Center, the federal point of contact for reporting oil and chemical spills, said Paul Barnard, an operations controller for Coast Guard Sector New Orleans.

Via Bob Cesca.

What Brendan said.