Titans of Industry category archive

The Boston Globe reports on the pharma teams. A nugget:

Drug companies say they hire the most respected doctors in their fields for the critical task of teaching about the benefits and risks of their drugs. But an investigation by ProPublica uncovered hundreds of doctors on company payrolls who had been accused of professional misconduct, were disciplined by state boards, or lacked credentials as researchers or specialists.

A review of physician licensing records in the 15 most populous states and three others found sanctions against more than 250 speakers, including some of the highest paid. Their misconduct included inappropriately prescribing drugs, providing poor care, or having sex with patients. Some of the doctors had even lost their licenses.

Not doctors. Sales persons.

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Coast Guard Capt. Hung Nguyen, co-chairman of the Marine Board panel investigating the cause of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent oil spill, interrupted the normal proceedings Tuesday to blast rig owner Transocean for its objections to supplying subpoenaed documents.

Nguyen posted enlarged copies of International Safety Management Code audits that he said the board wasn’t able to get from Transocean and instead needed to get from the rig’s flag state, the Republic of Marshall Islands. He said that Transocean twice refused to comply with subpoenas for those documents, contending they were “overly broad, unduly burdensome, irrelevant and not reasonably calculated to lead to admissable evidence.”

The story goes on the point out how Transocean’s lawyers protested that the Coast Guard (I’m paraphrasing here) was not deferring to their right to tie things up in preliminary motions, injunctions, and other out-of-the-public-eye manuevering until hell freezes over.

The Buccaneer Petroleum sea food diet.

See food. Don’t eat it.

Earlier this month, a white truck from Alabama carrying live blue crabs from Louisiana pulled up to the rear of United Crab & Seafood, a worn takeout joint in a Maryland Eastern Shore suburb roughly five miles northwest of Baltimore. The delivery irritated John Ernst, United’s 54-year-old managing partner, causing him to wince, curse and eventually, laugh at the misfortune that has befallen him since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded last spring.

“Sent a whole truck up with 20 boxes,” Ernst scoffed. It’s a paltry shipment compared to the usual 75 boxes that Ernst said he received every day before the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico halted the steady flow of Louisiana blue crabs that were the lifeblood of United’s business.

Quibble: “Five miles northwest of Baltimore” is not on the Eastern Shore. Baltimore and environs is on the Western Shore, meaning the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

Apparently, BP does not have any database folks who can do something like, you know, run a report. Something like

use ‘gulf_mexico_database’

select from damages_table where ‘status’ = ‘completely_trashed’

Louisiana’s legislative auditor and some lawmakers say BP is putting the state at a disadvantage by keeping secret the data it is collecting on public sector claims and economic losses caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

A BP statement said the information is on the company’s internal data base and for security reasons cannot be shared.

Meanwhile,

Video via Brendan.

Matthew Lynn at Bloomberg reports that an official from a bank has warned his staff that rich persons are difficult customers. In a way, there’s nothing new here. “Rich” and “demanding” are words that seem coupled.

But, apparently, it’s getting worse. Lynn theorizes

In the past, most fortunes were built in association with ordinary people. Factory owners were aware of the shop-floor workers on whom their wealth depended, and that shaped the view of themselves. Carmaker Henry Ford doubled his workers’ average pay to $5 a day in 1913 and shortened their working hours. The Cadbury family of chocolate makers in the U.K. built a small town for many of the company’s workers in Bournville, near Birmingham, in the 19th century. That made them more human.

The growth of the financial-services industry and the bonus culture has changed that. The investment bankers and hedge-fund managers who make up most of the new rich elite don’t have much contact with ordinary people. They assume their wealth is entirely the result of their own brilliance. And they cut themselves off from normal life.

It is an industry that mints billionaires and also breeds arrogance, selfishness and snobbishness.

The Seattle Times chronicles Buccaneer Petroleum’s life on, and recent tumble over, the edge of disaster.

At a celebration of BP’s centennial last October, CEO Tony Hayward boasted to guests that the oil company “lives on the frontiers of the energy industry.”

But this week, in the first major sign that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill may have caused lasting damage to the company’s long-term strategy of embracing projects with high risks, BP was frozen out of a potentially lucrative license to drill for oil off the coast of Greenland.

(snip)

To help cover the costs of the spill, BP has begun shedding assets around the world, with a goal of raising $30 billion. Analysts say that cleanup, fines and lawsuits could cost BP more than that, although the company appears to have avoided some worst-case environmental scenarios, like oil washing up the East Coast.

By selling mostly land-based assets, BP is signaling that it intends to remain a deep-water driller.

They have been playing petro-roulette for a long time.

Bloomberg reports on another reason to take your the life insurance benefits in a lump sum, rather than to use those vouchers the insurance company wants to send you. This lady took the vouchers and got taken:

The next year, Williams, then 19, told New York-based MetLife that a cousin had taken $48,900 by forging her name on 12 checks. Williams, of Rougemont, North Carolina, sought reimbursement. The insurance company and Pittsburgh-based PNC Bank NA, which processed MetLife checks, refused to cover Williams’s losses — each denying responsibility — federal civil court records show.

Had Williams’s money been in a bank, instead of an account managed by an insurer, federal and state law would have required the bank to verify signatures on checks and cover losses. Williams’s predicament spotlights the uncertainties people face by accepting so-called retained-asset account checkbooks from insurers.

The entire article, which is detailed and thoroughly researched, is worth a read.

Facing South rounds up some interesting statistics.

Out of sight, out of mind:

A massive, 22-mile-long underwater plume of oil droplets flowed to the southwest of the BP’s failed Macondo well at the end of June, and the threat it poses to natural resources of the Gulf of Mexico remains uncertain, scientists who mapped the plume said.

The finding confirms that plumes of oil from the failed well have existed deep beneath the surface, and that the oil is not seeping from natural fissures on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute scientists who authored the peer-reviewed article published Thursday in the online research magazine ScienceXpress.

This is good news:

The Obama administration announced yesterday that it is requiring environmental reviews for all new deepwater oil drilling.

That means an end, at least for now, to the kind of exemptions that allowed BP to drill its blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico with little scrutiny.

Oil does not magically disappear, however much Buccaneer Petroleum would like you to think it does.

It’s still out there and it’s still poison.

The Boston Globe, on Tony Hayward’s $18,500,000.00 severance pay for performance package from Buccaneer Petroleum:

Hayward’s exit package speaks to a broader problem. Corporate CEOs are rewarded handsomely in good times. In bad times, they’re rarely penalized to the same degree. In any sane accountability system, overseeing the degradation of a major arm of the Atlantic Ocean would disqualify Hayward from a golden parachute many times larger than the average worker’s lifetime earnings.

Buccaneer Petroleum’s approach to drilling: They thought they were playing with Tinker Toys and Erector Sets.

From the St. Petersburg Times:

Testimony of survivors and experts continues to paint a picture of corporate recklessness on the part of Transocean, the owner of the rig, and BP. Transocean, according to a September 2009 audit, had not completed 390 repairs to the rig, including many that were “high priority.” It also is accused of not properly maintaining the rig’s blowout preventer, the device that is supposed to shut down an unstable well and that catastrophically failed on Deepwater Horizon. Transocean’s upkeep of the rig sounds like an experiment in what it could get away with.

Meanwhile, there are a plethora of allegations that BP pushed workers to speed the completion of drilling using cost-cutting methods. The rig rental was costing about $1 million a day and work was 43 days behind schedule. On the day of the explosion, BP managers didn’t bother with a time-consuming “cement bond log” test that would have discovered problems in the cementing of the well. The company also did not use 21 “centralizers” to position the well before cementing — the recommended number — and instead used just six. And there are other examples where the company chose the less expensive and more risky option. It may not be that any one of these actions alone led to the blowout, but the combination was deadly.

Is in employees’ pockets. From MarketWatch:

Roughly once a week in July alone, some of the 150 million Americans covered by the more than 700,000 employer-sponsored retirement plans received notice that their hard-earned money ended up in the wrong pocket.

Read the whole thing, then tell me again why Social Security should be privatized.

Does Tony Hayward still want his life back?

Will he get it back, and will he like it when he does?

Tune in next time for the continuing story of
As the Well Wilds.

In some areas of the upper Potomac (I think they meant “Delaware”–ed.) near Delaware City and New Castle, concentrations of benzene, vinyl chloride and chlorinated benzenes are so high that exposure poses an immediate health threat. Elevated levels of these industrial byproducts significantly increase the risks of cancer. Sustained exposure could kill.

I haven’t worked up the nerve to finish the story yet. I’m about halfway through.

This is why regulation is bad. Without regulation, we wouldn’t know about this sort of stuff and would have one less thing to worry about.

Plus all that glowing in the dark would cut down on the cost of lighting.

His business is broken, courtesy Buccaneer Petroleum’s wild well.

Via The Green Miles.

Then back up again:

Leo Lindner, a drilling fluid specialist for M-I Swaco, told the panel investigating the causes of the explosion that BP decided to mix two chemicals the company had a surplus of — two chemicals that aren’t usually mixed — and pump them into the well to flush out the drilling mud.

They wanted rid themselves of them without having to worry about hazmat rules.