Titans of Industry category archive

May cause suicidal thoughts.

When you listen to the fine print in those prescription drug ads, you understand why the announcer is talking double-talking double-fast.

“Wake up, America, you are being lied to. The beaches are not clean; they are not safe . . . .”

The Nation has more. An excerpt (emphasis added):

For the scientists aboard the WeatherBird II, the recasting of the Deepwater Horizon spill as a good-news story about a disaster averted has not been easy to watch. Over the past seven months, they, along with a small group of similarly focused oceanographers from other universities, have logged dozens of weeks at sea in cramped research vessels, carefully measuring and monitoring the spill’s impact on the delicate and little-understood ecology of the deep ocean. And these veteran scientists have seen things that they describe as unprecedented. Among their most striking findings are graveyards of recently deceased coral, oiled crab larvae, evidence of bizarre sickness in the phytoplankton and bacterial communities, and a mysterious brown liquid coating large swaths of the ocean floor, snuffing out life underneath. All are worrying signs that the toxins that invaded these waters are not finished wreaking havoc and could, in the months and years to come, lead to consequences as severe as commercial fishery collapses and even species extinction.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the most outspoken scientists doing this research come from Florida and Georgia, coastal states that have so far managed to avoid offshore drilling. Their universities are far less beholden to Big Oil than, say, Louisiana State University, which has received tens of millions from the oil giants. Again and again these scientists have used their independence to correct the official record about how much oil is actually out there, and what it is doing under the waves.

Video via Steven D.

Facing South explains.

Facing South reports on the Buccaneer Petroleum oil spill commission. A nugget:

William K. Reilly, a Republican who co-chairs the commission with former Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), spoke about the findings of the commission’s 380-page final report Monday at Duke University in Durham, N.C. The former head of the Environmental Protection Agency under George H.W. Bush and president of the World Wildlife Fund, Reilly now heads the private equity firm Aqua Partners International and serves on the board of several corporations, including the Houston-based oil company ConocoPhillips. He also chairs the advisory board for Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, which assisted the commission’s work on Gulf restoration.

Reilly confessed that he started his work on the commission with prejudice, thinking the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster was likely the result of an isolated screw-up by BP given the company’s troubled safety history. But the commission instead found that the disaster was the consequence of what Reilly repeatedly criticized as the oil industry’s “culture of complacency.”

“We have just paid a huge price for the inattention and complacency,” he said.

This should be interesting:

A Mississippi power company has sued Norfolk Southern Railway Company for millions of dollars, claiming the railroad uses a monopoly over coal deliveries to inflate costs.

Hattiesburg-based South Mississippi Electric Power Association said Norfolk Southern is the only railroad company that delivers coal from the Appalachias to Plant Morrow, the utility’s main electricity generating station located in Purvis, Miss.

Contract negotiations for the utility’s new delivery contract are under way.

The first Federal regulatory body of any consequence was the Interstate Commerce Commission, which was created because of railroads’ abuse of their customers in the late 19th century.

On the railroad, there is a truism that every safety rule–and there are hundreds–resulted from an injury.

The caterwaulings of the right wing to the contrary, US history shows us that every Federal regulatory agency was created in reaction to abusive practices by business.

It will be interesting to see how this case plays out. Given that freight railroads run on diesel, I suspect that fuel prices have played a lot in the price increases over the years. Nevertheless, even when I worked for the railroad (and I loved working there–all railroaders love the railroad, even though they may hate their employer), I never saw a railroader with angel wings.

I’m betting that this is as much as negotiating tactic as anything else and that the case never goes to trial.

MarketWatch rounds up the 15 most hated companies in the US.

A couple of the ones on the list are companies that I loathe because of having personally experienced consistent lousiness from them (Best Buy and United Air are in that category–I have told my Best Buy story elsewhere in these pages).

BP, Bank of America, and some others made the list for general overall evilness.

A few, such as GM and Dell, are there for past sins. Dell, with which I have had uniformly positive dealings with (I have three Dells right now and have owned at least seven over the years) made the list because of covering up a defective laptop part in the early 2000s.

And, though I grew up Ford (young whippersnappers will have no idea what that means) and it pains me to say thia, my little yellow GMC truck is one damned fine vehicle.

Facing South reports on the current status of Buccaneer Petroleum’s wild well. Just because it ain’t news doesn’t mean it ain’t still doing damage.

A nugget:

Many questions remain unanswered about the long-term health and environmental effects of the crude oil and the unprecedented amount of dispersant, chemicals BP used to break down the thick crude. Both BP and the government have committed funding for continued study of these issues.

Study of the oil’s fate and its impact on the marine environment will likely continue for months and years to come, but many independent scientists have produced preliminary research seemingly at odds with a rosy government report and official statements in August that said that at least half of the oil released was “completely gone from the system” and the rest was being quickly degraded.

Eight months after the spill, the safety of Gulf seafood is still being debated among toxicologists, some of whom allege that the Food and Drug Administration’s seafood testing process is flawed, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The FDA’s process does not certify that the products tested are free from contamination, but screens for contamination that reaches “levels of concern.” Cancer-causing chemicals found in crude oil have been detected in Gulf seafood, but according to the FDA have been found at levels that the agency considers to be safe.

Remember RLS?

Three years ago, television was blanketed with ads for something to combat Restless Leg Syndrome. Now, RLS is a very real thing–I know someone who has had it–but the ads implied that it was more common than hinky bankers.

It isn’t.

It is, in fact, relatively rare and prescription medicine is even more rarely indicated.

Karen Stabiner, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, considers the recent spate of news of drugs’ being decertified, which seems to indicate that many of Big Pharma’s Big Remedies are based primarily on sound research with marketing department focus groups. A nugget:

In 2009, all 50 states failed to meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Healthy People 2010 overweight target of no more than 15 percent of the population. And yet we spend billions on supplements designed to keep us healthy in spite of ourselves. We want an effortless fix – longevity in a capsule with a doughnut chaser.

The Booman analyzes Buccaneer Petroleum’s track record, as wikileaked.

Read this. I’m can’t begin to figure out how to excerpt or summarize it.

I betcha won’t be able to finish it.

Corporate version:

GE is seeking $25 million in tax credits from the state of Massachusetts. If the company gets the money, it might cut no more than 150 jobs at its Lynn plant and “could’’ keep employment steady at 3,150.

This corporate giant already receives billions of dollars in government contracts, including $1.8 billion in military work at the Lynn plant. Despite that infusion of taxpayer money, 600 workers were laid off anyway this year.

Last year, GE reported $11 billion in profits on $157 billion in revenue. But the company pays zero federal income tax, because it reported losses on its US operations. It received a $139 billion federal bailout for its GE Capital unit. Now, it wants a state bailout, too.

Really can’t blame GE for trying to milk the system. It stinks, but it’s whatchamaycallit “low hanging fruit.” Politicians have proven themselves pushovers for corporate welfare demands.
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The Boston Globe looks as efforts to assess the effects Buccaneer Petroleum’s blow-out:

More than 4,000 oiled birds, among other wildlife, have been collected since the April 20 disaster. More than half were dead; those alive are being rehabilitated and released. There are also thousands of other birds being collected, dead and alive, with no visible signs of oil, and scientists are studying whether those that died did so because of the spill or from natural causes.

Scientists know they are seeing a tiny fraction of the damage; most of the harm is believed to have been done offshore and deep in the ocean.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Your friendly neighborhood chop shop at work:

The third and current foreclosure involves her primary residence, a 650-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-bath home that Wells Fargo is attempting to foreclose on after buying the loan from Washington Mutual, Eisenhauer says. At her March 1 Rule 120 hearing, the administrative procedure held to determine whether a house can be foreclosed on and sold, she claims that Wells Fargo “showed up with a forged document.”

She and her attorney, Erich Schwiesow of the law firm Lester, Sigmond, Rooney and Schwiesow in Alamosa, argue that the first page of the promissory note clearly did not match the rest of the document, in part because it didn’t have the same fax stamp. In addition, they claim, the initials and signature on the document do not match Eisenhauer’s handwriting.

“It was clear it was manufactured,” Schwiesow says, adding that a local judge agreed and denied authorizing the sale of the property. Wells Fargo initially filed a motion asking the judge to reconsider the decision, but dropped that motion this week..

John Cole comments on priorities.

Via Eschaton.

Surprise, surprise.

BP and its contractors missed and ignored warning signs before to the massive oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, showing an “insufficient consideration of risk” and raising questions about the know-how of key personnel, a group of technical experts concluded.

In a 28-page report released late Tuesday night, an independent panel convened by the National Academy of Engineering said that the companies failed to learn from “near misses” and that neither BP, its contractors nor federal regulators caught or corrected flawed decisions that contributed to the blowout.

Those failures would be unacceptable in companies that work with nuclear power or aviation, said Donald Winter, a professor of engineering practice at the University of Michigan and chairman of the 15-member study committee.

In other news, the sun rises in the east.

Buccaneer Petroleum’s new CEO, Bob Dudley, has taken to complaining that BP got a bad rap for bespoiling the waters of the Gulf of Mexico (and, likely, any place ultimately touched by the Gulf Stream). At MarketWatch, Jim Jelter pops his bubble (emphasis added). A nugget:

Was BP hung out to dry in Washington by a bunch of clueless politicians? Yes. Did the spill result in knee-jerk regulatory reaction? Yes. Did it cost BP shareholders dearly? Yes. But none of that would have happened if there had been no Deepwater Horizon blowout on the Macondo well. Whose well was it? BP’s.

As for the “leak,” it turned out to be the biggest offshore oil spill ever in U.S. waters, gushing 185 million gallons into the Gulf of Mexico over nearly three months. That’s 17 times more oil than the Exxon Valdez dumped into Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989.

The persistent awesomeness of Buccaneer Petroleum continues to persist. From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Just three days after the U.S. Coast Guard admiral in charge of the BP oil spill cleanup declared little recoverable surface oil remained in the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana fishers Friday found miles-long strings of weathered oil floating toward fragile marshes on the Mississippi River delta.

The discovery, which comes as millions of birds begin moving toward the region in the fall migration, gave ammunition to groups that have insisted the government has overstated clean-up progress, and could force reclosure of key fishing areas only recently reopened.

Read the full story. Not while you are eating.

Via Bob Cesca.

If a person did it, it would be called “money laundering” (emphasis added):

Google’s income shifting — involving strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” — helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries.

(snip)

The U.S. corporate income-tax rate is 35 percent. In the U.K., Google’s second-biggest market by revenue, it’s 28 percent.

Google, the owner of the world’s most popular search engine, uses a strategy that has gained favor among such companies as Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp. The method takes advantage of Irish tax law to legally shuttle profits into and out of subsidiaries there, largely escaping the country’s 12.5 percent income tax.

Bloomberg links to an interactive graphic on Google’s tax strategy.