Category: Corporate Statism

Frack water

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

I had no idea it took that much water to frack a single well:

WILKES-BARRE — Pennsylvania has a vast supply of contaminated water flowing daily from its abandoned mine works; 300 million gallons a day by the state’s estimate.


The natural gas industry needs vast quantities of water to unlock gas from the Marcellus Shale; between 2 million and 10 million gallons to stimulate a well a single time.


Using the state’s latest natural resource boom to clean up the legacy of the last one seems like a natural pairing, and it’s one state and environmental regulators as well as the natural gas drilling industry are taking seriously.


At the suggestion of the Governor’s Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission last year, the state Department of Environmental Protection is in the process of establishing an approval process for the use of acid mine drainage in hydraulic fracturing.


It is tailoring that process to address concerns that could discourage the industry from using mine water.


The Susquehanna River Basin Commission, which permits drillers to withdraw water from within the Susquehanna’s watershed, began encouraging drillers to use acid mine drainage when fracturing by reducing or eliminating permit fees for “lesser-quality waters,” including water contaminated by mining and public wastewater.

It has since gone a step further in requiring companies that apply to withdraw fresh water from sources close to mine water to explain as part of their applications why they are unwilling to use the mine water instead.


“They’re going to have to justify to us why they’re not using that impaired water,” commission spokeswoman Susan Obleski said.


Acid mine drainage refers to the outpouring of water that has run its course through mine workings, where it has picked up minerals — often sulfides — and has often acquired an acidic pH.


Its use in hydraulic fracturing could have two environmental advantages: It could reduce the amount of higher-quality water withdrawn from rivers and streams for use in drilling and the treating the water for use in drilling could reduce the amount of mine water flowing elsewhere.

Credit

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

I’ll never forget the time I was turned down for a job after acing the interview — because of my credit rating. God knows, a good credit rating is necessary to write ad copy:

The credit reporting industry likes to argue that credit checks reveal something about an individual’s character or ability to act responsibly. But two recent newspaper reports underscore just how dubious a proposition this is: this weekend, the New York Times scrutinized the destructive toll out-of-control medical bills can take on credit, while the Columbus Dispatchtrained its sights on the frequency of credit reporting errors. 

The Columbus Dispatch has launched a four-part investigation exploring the prevalence of errors in credit reports and the fiendish difficulty of getting them corrected. In fact, theDispatch finds, “Americans are left virtually powerless to erase the mistakes.”

During a yearlong investigation, The Dispatch collected and analyzed nearly 30,000 consumer complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general in 24 states that alleged violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act by the three largest credit-reporting agencies in the United States — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.


Industry observers say it is among the most comprehensive reviews ever conducted of complaints against credit-reporting agencies.


The complaints document the inability of consumers to correct errors that range from minor to financially devastating. Consumers said the agencies can’t even correct the most obvious mistakes: That’s not my birth date. That’s not my name. I’m not dead.


Nearly a quarter of the complaints to the FTC and more than half of the complaints to the attorneys general involved mistakes in consumers’ financial accounts for credit cards, mortgages or car loans. Houses sold in bank-approved “short sales,” at less than the value of the mortgage, were listed as foreclosures. Car loans that had been paid off were reported as repossessions. Credit cards that had been paid off and closed years earlier showed as delinquent.

As Demos demonstrated in our report, “Discrediting America,” credit reporting errors can have a devastating impact. The Columbus Dispatch found something similar, powerfully documenting “the plight of thousands who, through no fault of their own, have been denied the chance to buy a home or a car, take out a loan for college, rent an apartment, land a job, join the Armed Forces, receive medical care or even open a checking account.”


Even if no error occurred, bad credit may have more to do with unavoidable medical expensesthan any underlying character flaw, suggests the New York Times report. Because a growing portion of medical providers’ revenues come directly from patients, the Times finds, doctors and hospitals are turning over more debt to collection agencies, and turning it over more quickly.

FICO, which produces one of the most popular credit scores used by lenders, said it viewed different types of collection agency accounts — medical-related or otherwise — as equally damaging. For someone with a spotless credit history, “it wouldn’t surprise me if their score dropped by 100 points or more [due to a late medical bill],” said Frederic Huynh, a principal analytic scientist at FICO. And the blemish does not entirely disappear for seven years.

Moonlighting

~ susie

The rules never apply to the 1%, of course. And after all, they keep telling us no one’s rigging energy prices, nope, not here, must be your imagination. Ryan Chittum at CJR reports:

Reuters unloads another outstanding scoop on the sketchy doings of Chesapeake Energy Aubrey McClendon, reporting that the CEO ran a hedge fund inside Chesapeake from 2004 to 2008 that bet on natural gas.

While Reuters notes up high that insider trading isn’t illegal in commodities, McClendon’s moonlighting as a fund manager was never disclosed to investors and perhaps not even to the company’s overly friendly board of directors.

In Chesapeake’s case, McClendon would have been aware of major decisions that could affect natural gas prices before that information became public. Accounting for 5 percent of U.S. natural gas production, Chesapeake holds tremendous sway over markets. On January 23, the company announced sharp output curbs in response to low prices. In response, U.S. natural gas futures surged by 8 percent the same day.

“If the company needs to make an operating decision which might move the market against the CEO’s positions, there’s a risk that will influence the decision-making at the top of the company,” said Jeff Harris, former chief economist at the market’s U.S. regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and now professor of finance at Syracuse University.

Another potential problem is known as “front-running.” That’s when a trader buys or sells a commodity in advance of a client’s or his company’s orders. In theory, McClendon’s first-hand knowledge of Chesapeake’s own plans to trade would enable him to profit by trading ahead of Chesapeake – a move that could raise costs for the company.

 

I’d imagine the CFTC is going to want to take a very close look at this latest McClendon mess. And you’d have to guess Chesapeake shareholders would like to have known that the guy they were paying $112 million to run their company in 2008 was also “engaged in ‘near daily’ communications and ‘exhaustive’ calls to help direct the fund’s trading.”

This story follows closely on the heels of another one Reuters helped turn into a major headache.

After The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette very good scoop in late March that McClendon was borrowing against his share of Chesapeake’s wells, Reuters expanded the story in a major way, reporting that the CEO had borrowed more than a billion dollars against the assets from lenders that included a private-equity fund that was purchasing Chesapeake assets. Chesapeake’s top lawyer said that the company’s board was “fully aware” of the deals, something the directors themselves later disputed (check out the company’s snippy PR response too.)

Bank of Coal

~ susie

I’m really happy that these kind of public actions are becoming more common, because for too long, Americans have been operating on automatic pilot and now, thanks to a crushing recession, extreme weather and the Occupy movement, they’re actually beginning to connect the dots. This action by Rainforest Action Network raises awareness as to how intertwined our problems are. When we learn how banks are heavily invested in the things that destroy the environment, we understand why it’s been almost impossible to save our planet:

CHARLOTTE, NC — The much-politicized Bank of America stadium received a facelift today when five people with Rainforest Action Network skillfully unfurled a 70-foot by 25-foot banner off the top of the building, rebranding the stadium the “Bank of Coal.” Just days before the bank’s annual shareholder meeting, the act was intended to call attention to the bank’s role as the leading financier of the coal industry, one of the main concerns for bank critics.

The advocates, all trained climbers with safety gear, hung from the outside of the stadium more than 100-feet above the ground.

In the past two years alone, Bank of America has pumped $6.74 billion into the U.S. coal industry according to Bloomberg data. The Bank of America Stadium is where President Obama will accept the Democratic Party’s nomination to a second term in early September, and, to many, symbolizes the cozy relationship between banks and government highlighted throughout the Occupy protests.

“Today, Rainforest Action Network has taken our message to extraordinary heights because the risk that coal poses to our health and our climate is nothing less than extraordinary. It’s past time Bank of America take a leadership role in transitioning our economy away from this dangerous and outdated industry,” said Todd Zimmer, a lifelong Charlotte resident and organizer with Rainforest Action Network.

Today’s action kicks off a week of events leading up to Bank of America’s annual shareholder meeting on May 9 where organizers predict more than 1,000 people plan to protest the company.

Not only is coal burning responsible for one third of U.S. carbon emissions — the main contributor to climate change — but it is also a major public health risk. In 2012, one in every four children living in Charlotte will develop asthma or other respiratory problems, while 3,000 North Carolinians die prematurely every year, all due to air pollution.

There are four coal plants in the Charlotte area. Duke’s Riverbend plant, which Bank of America finances, is within 12 miles of Uptown Charlotte.

Who could have guessed

~ susie

What a surprise. File this one under the Department of Duh, because anyone who’s been following the history of Taser use (524 Taser-related deaths so far) has figured out there can’t be that much smoke without some fire.

The electrical shock delivered to the chest by a Taser can lead to cardiac arrest and sudden death, according to a new study, although it is unknown how frequently such deaths occur.


The study, which analyzed detailed records from the cases of eight people who went into cardiac arrest after receiving shocks from a Taser X26 fired at a distance, is likely to add to the debate about the safety of the weapons. Seven of the people in the study died; one survived.


Advocacy groups like Amnesty International have argued that Tasers, the most widely used of a class of weapons known as electrical control devices, are potentially lethal and that stricter rules should govern their use.But proponents maintain that the devices — which are used by more than 16,700 law enforcement agencies in 107 countries, said Steve Tuttle, a spokesman for Taser — pose less risk to civilians than firearms and are safer for police officers than physically tackling a suspect.


The results of studies of the devices’ safety in humans have been mixed.


Medical experts said on Monday that the new report, published online on Monday in the journal Circulation, makes clear that electrical shocks from Tasers, which shoot barbs into the clothes and skin, can in some cases set off irregular heart rhythms, leading to cardiac arrest.


“This is no longer arguable,” said Dr. Byron Lee, a cardiologist and director of the electrophysiology laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. “This is a scientific fact. The national debate should now center on whether the risk of sudden death with Tasers is low enough to warrant widespread use by law enforcement.”


The author of the study, Dr. Douglas P. Zipes, a cardiologist and professor emeritus at Indiana University, has served as a witness for plaintiffs in lawsuits against Taser — a fact that Mr. Tuttle said tainted the findings. “Clearly, Dr. Zipes has a strong financial bias based on his career as an expert witness,” Mr. Tuttle said in an e-mail, adding that a 2011 ificant risk of cardiac arrest “when deployed reasonably.”


However, Dr. Robert J. Myerburg, a professor of medicine in cardiology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, said that Dr. Zipes’s role in litigation also gave him extensive access to data from medical records, police records and autopsy reports. The study, he said, had persuaded him that in at least some of the eight cases, the Taser shock was responsible for the cardiac arrests.

There are a lot of problems with Tasers that Taser International would rather we didn’t talk about. One of them is that the voltage can go a lot higher than the manufacturer says it can. Then there’s that interesting habit the company has of suing medical examiners who list Tasers as the cause of death – or otherwise persuading them.

They don’t spend much money on lobbying, so I guess the legal threats do the trick.

Why May Day?

~ odd man out

From Adbusters, a reminder of why our problems aren’t going to be solved by electing a new president from among the Republicrats:

…The fact that most of us are too busy being exploited to realize we’re being exploited – too busy greasing the cogs of our economic system to notice how the fruits of our labor never fail to float up and out of our reach – is why we’re striking, as is the fact that most aren’t able to do anything about this exploitation even when we do notice it. While some of us are lucky enough to have jobs and careers that give real meaning to our lives, allowing us to take full advantage of our talents and fulfill our destiny, most of us have jobs devoid of meaning and dignity, yet full of the feeling that we are fulfilling someone else’s destiny. Our recognition that the ruling class’s seat at the top of the pyramid is prepared and propped up by the working class is why we’re striking. Our knowledge that it’s actually the CEO who is the most dependent among us, and that the ones truly indispensable to our society are not bankers, lobbyists and politicians, but workers, teachers and engineers, is why we’re striking…

The publishing mafia

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

That would be Amazon.

Mr. Bissinger wrote the e-book for Byliner.com, one of a number of fledgling companies trying to make a go of it by publishing long-form works — not as long as a traditional book, but longer than most magazine articles — for digital readers. Mr. Bissinger thought the e-book, priced at $2.99, would be a great way to pay tribute to the relationship while also helping Mr. Miles, by giving him a third of the proceeds.


But the plan hit a pothole after Apple, which had been looking to get into shorter works in a digital format, decided to include e-books in a promotion that it does with Starbucks. It selected Mr. Bissinger’s digital sequel as a Pick of the Week, giving customers a code they could redeem online for the book. (Mr. Bissinger said he still received a royalty of $1.50 for each copy sold.)


Amazon interpreted the promotion as a price drop and lowered its price for “After Friday Night Lights” to exactly zero. Byliner withdrew the book from Amazon’s shelves, saying it did so to “protect our authors’ interest.”


Mr. Bissinger, who has built a franchise on journalistic excellence and rhetorical intemperance — see his Twitter account — managed to choose his words carefully when talking about how his e-book ended up as a bug on the windshield of Amazon’s relentlessness on pricing.


That may have a little something to do with the fact that he has a great big book, “Father’s Day,” being released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in just two weeks. It would be a bad time to stick his finger in the eye of a company that sells more books — including his — than any other company in the world.

Don’t worry, it’s all going to be okay

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

I’m so reassured when the USDA and the beef industry tell me I don’t have to worry about getting a horrible brain-wasting disease because their random inspection actually caught one of the potential carriers:

There appears to be no risk to humans from the dairy cow discovered in California this week to have “mad cow” disease. That’s according to the US Department of Agriculture and the beef industry.

Mad cow, known scientifically as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), is believed to be carried by animal feed made from cattle brains or spinal cord. Such feed is now banned in the US and other countries, but cases of BSE have continued to appear around the world.

The World Health Organization has called for the exclusion of the riskiest tissues (eyes and intestines as well as brains and spinal cord) from all animal feed to protect against the spread of mad cow disease.

Stanley Prusiner, who received the 1997 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering the protein associated with BSE has said the US should ban poultry waste in cattle feed as well.

“Unfortunately, the United States still allows the feeding of some of these potentially risky tissues to people, pigs, pets, poultry, and fish,” warns Michael Greger, director of public health and animal agriculture at The Humane Society of the United States.

“Cattle remains are still fed to chickens, for example, and the poultry litter (floor wastes that include the feces and spilled feed) is fed back to cows,” he writes on his Huffington Post blog. “In this way, prions – the infectious proteins that cause mad cow disease – may continue to be cycled back into cattle feed and complete the cow ‘cannibalism’ circuit blamed for the spread of the disease.”

Part of the problem, according to critics, is that only a tiny fraction of slaughtered cows (40,000 out of 35 million a year) are tested for BSE.

In this week’s instance, the cow (which was to be rendered into products other than meat for human consumption) had been unable to stand – a “downer” cow. This raised suspicions, so the cow was tested for BSE. This showed that the current inspection system works, say beef industry supporters.

According to the USDA, the infected animal discovered this week had “atypical BSE,” which means it most likely did not get the disease from eating infected cattle feed. Still, the USDA is tracking feed sources as a possible cause.

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