Fuckwads
The privatization tools of the state-run Philly schools commission.
The mayor announced yesterday a FOUNDATION to collect money to buy school supplies for Philly kids. But it won’t be for public schools, oh no. It will also include Catholic schools and for-profit charters. I mean, WTF?
All because he’s either too incompetent or too corrupt to get the money we’re owed from the governor.
Kane brings criminal charges over fracking spill
‘So these guys were all like, ‘Whoa, we can’t believe you’re bringing criminal charges against us for a spill when we said ‘Oopsie!”
Oh dear, Attorney General Kathleen Kane is creating a “hostile business environment”! Maybe if the business environment is a little less friendly, these companies will be a little more careful about the poison they so frequently “accidentally” spill:
Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane’s decision to prosecute a major Marcellus Shale natural-gas driller for a 2010 wastewater spill has sent shock waves through the industry. But environmentalists Wednesday hailed the prosecution of the Exxon Mobil Corp. subsidiary as a departure from the soft treatment they say the industry has received from Pennsylvania regulators. “We have been very concerned about enforcement in the Marcellus, and we welcome the attorney general’s taking an active role,” said Myron Arnowitt, Pennsylvania director of Clean Water Action.
Kane’s office announced charges Tuesday against XTO Energy Inc. for discharging more than 50,000 gallons of toxic wastewater from storage tanks at a gas-well site in Lycoming County.
XTO in July settled federal civil charges over the incident by agreeing to pay a $100,000 fine and deploy a plan to improve wastewater-management practices. The consent decree included no admissions of liability. The Fort Worth, Texas, drilling company, which Exxon acquired in 2010, said it had worked cooperatively with federal and state authorities to clean up the spilled waste, known as “produced water.” XTO excavated and removed 3,000 tons of contaminated soil from the site.
“Criminal charges are unwarranted and legally baseless because neither XTO nor any of its employees intentionally, recklessly, or negligently discharged produced water on the site,” XTO said in a statement. Kane’s office said it did not need to prove intent to prosecute the company for crimes.
XTO is charged with five counts of unlawful conduct under the Clean Streams Law and three counts of unlawful conduct under the Solid Waste Management Act.
Industry leaders said the prosecution of a company for what they called an inadvertent spill creates a hostile business environment. “The incident has been fully addressed at the state and federal levels, and this action creates an untenable business climate that will discourage investment in the commonwealth,” Kathryn Z. Klaber, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, said in a statement. The Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry also protested.
The rise of the new New Left
I’m not used to the Daily Beast having articles that make me think, but here it is. Just read it, it’s too long to excerpt.
What turns presidents into hard core defenders of the security state?
Seven possible explanations from the ACLU.
I think they missed this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MRykTpw1RQ
Five years after the crash
And no one’s learned anything. I wonder if that’s because no one went to prison the last time?
Several big life insurers are going to have to set aside a total of at least $4 billion because New York regulators believe they have been manipulating new rules meant to make sure they have adequate reserves to pay out claims.
The development stems from contentions by insurance companies that states’ regulations are forcing them to hold too much money in reserve. Many of them have engaged in secretive transactions to artificially bolster their balance sheets, often through shell companies in other states or countries. Regulators, who want to be sure companies have enough real liquid assets to pay all claims, have struggled to find a solution that all 50 states can agree on, and decided to test a new framework of rules.
On Friday, New York State plans to drop out of that agreement, according to a letter from Benjamin M. Lawsky, the financial services superintendent, to his fellow state insurance regulators. In the letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times, Mr. Lawsky said the test, which started in 2012, showed that the new framework did not work and was, in fact, making the “gamesmanship and abuses” in the industry even worse.
The move appears to be another attempt by Mr. Lawsky to address the much broader potential problem of the life insurance industry’s use of the secretive transactions. He has derided them as “financial alchemy” because they seem to create surplus assets out of thin air. In June, Mr. Lawsky called on other state insurance regulators to join him in blocking any more of these transactions. But other regulators said they wanted instead to keep pursuing a test of the new regulatory framework. The test covers a narrow segment of the life insurance business, but state regulators, through the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, are committed to extending the framework to all parts of the life insurance industry over the next few years.
Lopsided trade
Imagine. The coal companies cause a lot more damage than they’re worth:
There’s a new study out today that presents the first real effort to compare the environmental damage from mountaintop removal mining to the energy benefits from the coal that’s produced. Here’s what’s reported in the press release from Duke University:
To meet current U.S. coal demand through surface mining, an area of the Central Appalachians the size of Washington, D.C., would need to be mined every 81 days.
That’s about 68 square miles — or roughly an area equal to 10 city blocks mined every hour.
A one-year supply of coal would require converting about 310 square miles of the region’s mountains into surface mines, according to a new analysis by scientists at Duke University, Kent State University and the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies.
Creating 310 square miles of mountaintop mine would pollute about 2,300 kilometers of Appalachian streams and cause the loss of carbon sequestration by trees and soils equal to the greenhouse gases produced in a year by 33,600 average U.S. single-family homes, the study found.
Here’s the abstract of the study, which appears online today in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE:
While several thousand square kilometers of land area have been subject to surface mining in the Central Appalachians, no reliable estimate exists for how much coal is produced per unit landscape disturbance. We provide this estimate using regional satellite-derived mine delineations and historical county-level coal production data for the period 1985-2005, and further relate the aerial extent of mining disturbance to stream impairment and loss of ecosystem carbon sequestration potential. To meet current US coal demands, an area the size of Washington DC would need to be mined every 81 days. A one-year supply of coal would result in ~2,300 km of stream impairment and a loss of ecosystem carbon sequestration capacity comparable to the global warming potential of 33,000 US homes. For the first time, the environmental impacts of surface coal mining can be directly scaled with coal production rates.
Anonymous outing
Links between Congress members and defense contractors!
Safety is such a relative term
As someone mentioned in the comments, we really are back to the days of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”:
In interviews, six USDA inspectors working in the pilot plants raised health concerns. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they believed their jobs would be in jeopardy otherwise.
Several said company and government workers are yelled at, threatened and shunned if they try to slow down or stop the accelerated processing lines or complain too aggressively about inadequate safety checks. They also warned that the reduction in the ranks of government inspectors in the plants has compromised the safety of the meat.
“We are no longer in charge of safety,” said an inspector with more than 15 years of experience. “That’s what the public needs to know.”
Yes, from the same people who keep telling us they’re keeping us secure, a nation where the food isn’t safe to eat. Progress!
Isn’t that nice
The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.
Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart that shows the US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.
The disclosure that the NSA agreed to provide raw intelligence data to a foreign country contrasts with assurances from the Obama administration that there are rigorous safeguards to protect the privacy of US citizens caught in the dragnet. The intelligence community calls this process “minimization”, but the memorandum makes clear that the information shared with the Israelis would be in its pre-minimized state.
The deal was reached in principle in March 2009, according to the undated memorandum, which lays out the ground rules for the intelligence sharing.