Author: southwerk

I am a 53 year old teacher. I have double major in Speech and Criminal Justice resulting in a Bachelor's degree from Northeastern State University in Oklahoma and a law degree.

Is Donald Trump Right About Oreo Cookies?

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

Is Donald Trump Right About Oreo Cookies?

Way back in July of 2015, it was decided in a corporate board room to move another factory to Mexico. This one didn’t make refrigerators or cars, it made cookies.

Oreos.

It employed 600 Americans and as far as can be told, it generated a profit, not that it mattered. Moving a factory to Mexico can be deducted directly from a corporation’s taxes. So, basically all Americans pay to be de-industrialized.

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Is Donald Trump Right About Oreo Cookies?

Lately, the destruction of these American jobs, these lives, has attracted some attention because Donald Trump has been talking about it.

From USA Today – http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2015/11/19/fact-check-donald-trumps-oreo-boycott/76066018/

Donald Trump says he’s “never eating another Oreo again” because its parent company is “closing a factory in Chicago and they’re moving to Mexico.” Some Oreo production is moving to Mexico, but a downsized Chicago plant will remain. And there will still be three plants in the U.S. making Oreos.

Trump also has overstated the number of job losses in Chicago. The parent company projects 600 employees in Chicago will be laid off, not 1,200, as Trump has said.

So, the company will still make oreos at two plants in the United States and while 600 jobs will be lost, it won’t be 1200 like Trump claims.

So, should we continue to eat oreos?

It seems to me that the “Donald” is mostly right about this. They are closing a part of a factory in Chicago and moving the jobs to Mexico. The fact that they didn’t entirely close the factory and move all the jobs to Mexico might mitigate against his claims. But the simple fact is that there is no impediment to the destruction of those remaining jobs and that factory at any time. It may well be just a matter of time before the company moves all production to Mexico. Why not? They can take if off their taxes and the public pays the bill. Isn’t that the smart move?

When I was a boy, my father worked at a factory and he supported our family with that one job. That world’s disappearance is not an accident, was not inevitable and did not have to happen. But powerful people decided that policies beneficial to capital (money, financial interests) were more important than policies beneficial to workers. And over the past forty or fifty depending on where you start counting, the jobs have been disappearing, the salaries decreasing and the factories torn down.

America has been diminished in a real and fundamental way. The ability of a nation to make things, to create, is much more important that the glittering mansions and skyscrapers devoted to a besotted financial class.

Impoverishing millions of Americans to make financial speculators rich is wrong and will never be right, no matter how it is defended by venal and bought politicians.

So, I’m going to side with Donald Trump on this issue. I will not eat or buy an oreo even though the company still retains a couple of factories in the United States. In principle, he is right on this issue.

James Pilant

Below is an article I used for reference. It is a good one. You might give it a read. jp

 

This article is from the web site, In These Times – http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18259/oreos-union-busting

I may have to give up one of my longest-standing indulgences: the dunking of an Oreo cookie in cold milk (whole is preferred). I don’t do this lightly, as I have been dunking those deliciously wicked rounds of chocolate and what I choose to believe is cream since I’ve been three.

Why give them up? Because this week, Irene Rosenfeld, the head of Mondolez (the food conglomerate based in Illinois that has Nabisco in its portfolio), a woman touted for breaking the glass ceiling upon becoming the head of Kraft Foods and then its spin off, announced that rather than invest $130 million in modernizing the plant in Chicago, where Oreos have been lovingly produced for the past 100 years, she will instead move the jobs to a new factory in Mexico. The result: a loss of 600 well-paying and community-sustaining jobs on Chicago’s Southwest Side.

NFL Admits Link between Football and Degenerative Brain Disease

On By southwerkIn business ethics

This is from the Guadian – http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/mar/14/cte-nfl-link-football-brain-disease-senior-official-acknowledges and is followed by my comments.

An NFL official has acknowledged a link between football and a degenerative brain disease for the first time.

Jeff Miller, the NFL’s senior vice president for health and safety, spoke about the connection during an appearance Monday at a congressional committee’s round table discussion about concussions.

Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) asked Miller: “Do you think there is a link between football and degenerative brain disorders like CTE?”

Miller, who was referring to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), began by discussing the work of Boston University neuropathologist Dr Ann McKee, who has found CTE in the brains of 90 out of 94 former pro football players.

“Well, certainly, Dr McKee’s research shows that a number of retired NFL players were diagnosed with CTE, so the answer to that question is certainly ‘yes,’ but there are also a number of questions that come with that,” Miller said.

Schakowsky repeated the question: “Is there a link?”

“Yes. Sure,” Miller responded.

Will football as we now understand it continue?

hmlbr30I think that this kind of admission reflects a conclusion that the NFL has already reached, and that is, that the game cannot continue in its current form.

I believe right now they are busy looking at new ways the game can be played and at fairly immediate rule changes to limit the damage to players and the league’s bottom line.

They don’t have a choice. The evidence that repeated impacts are destroying the players brains is accumulating very quickly and looks very solid.

I am very impressed that they didn’t choose the tobacco defense of deny and stall or decide to fund some “climate denying” style web sites and organizations. Of course, that kind of thing would have only worked for a while and I suspect that stalling the inevitable when they have other and better choices such as re-designing the game struck them as painful and revenue threatening. They’d rather play ball and make money. That makes sense to me.

James Pilant

The Media Is Clueless

On By southwerkIn business ethics

The Media Is Clueless

Basic business ethics requires that you perform a business function with competence. Yet, our American media simply doesn’t understand the American people.

The success of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are in the minds of our media incredible beyond all bounds of rationality, and they continue to write long serious stories about how both of them will explode and crash any time now -basically the same articles they’ve been writing for months.

(Now understand clearly, it is not hard to see that Trump and Sanders are very different phenomenon. The only reason I’m talking about them both at the same time is that the media doesn’t get either one.)

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The Media Is Clueless

I’ve been reading much of the discourse about the two candidates since the beginning and the old fabled beltway, villager, very serious people analysis is failing and they are astonished; aghast that their establishment alternatives (always very limited in number) are not the public’s choice. And therefore, according to them, the American people are just stupid. 

Well, there is stupidity here and it’s a mile deep but it is not the American peoples’ problem. It is the gross incompetence of a complacent, servile media. It is the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of our ruling class whose servitude to the intellectually shallow concept (more of a puddle, actually) of Neoliberalism has wrought havoc on the lives of millions with little discernable gain unless you are a billionaire. 

Why are the media and the ruling class unaware of the anger of the American people? Because they live in an economic bubble. They literally don’t know anyone who makes less than $250,000 a year. And that means, they don’t know anyone who has to work three jobs. They don’t know anyone with a terminal degree doing adjunct work making an average of $22,500 a year. They have never met someone who works a job where their schedule is created by a computer for the company’s convenience so they can’t hold a second job, get an education or have any kind of home life. 

In short, they are ignorant of the lives of the great mass of the American people. They walk this land like tourists, living in nice hotels, eating in nice restaurants and keeping the locals at a safe distance. 

I don’t know how you can live in this country and not know that things have gone badly wrong. The economic statistics by themselves are staggering in their implications. The United States has a huge underclass, a seeming flood of the homeless and mentally ill and a real continuous problem with people not having enough to eat.

And if that isn’t enough to get your attention, we have a brand new study showing that white males with less than a college education have diminishing life spans due to suicide, drug and alcohol abuse. These people are dying but apparently unless they throw themselves under the wheels of a press bus, our media elites are not going to consider the implications.

It takes a lot of willful stupidity for the media act and treat us the way they do. I think they’re paid to be stupid. I think that our media outlets find the stories of the lives of real Americans and the real suffering that people have to be unpleasant and not worth covering. Furthermore and most importantly, the elected officials they idolize, the decisions they respect, are all corporate just like them. That’s why there was little coverage of the Flint, Michigan water crisis until the ugly facts became overwhelming and, dare I say it, that people began to die (legionnaire’s disease). 

I don’t expect them to get any better. But there are a few writers who seem to have some grip on the situation. 

Here’s Jeb Lund writing in the Guardian – 

Anger is pretty easy to miss when it’s something pretty difficult to feel. When you sit at the center of the world and are unlikely to ever lack for the basic materials of self-sufficiency, the idea of blind, gnawing resentment – let alone of feeding that resentment even with irrational aims – is ineluctably beyond your ken.

It’s harder still to understand that there are millions of people in America whose ambitions for a life of steadily improving conditions cratered sometime around nine years ago and have never recovered. If you can hardly imagine that you could follow the Horatio Alger script to the letter and still find yourself sinking in quicksand, you’re never going to understand why someone would be so contemptuous of the pieties of a system that only pays attention to you when doing soft-focus interviews in search of a journalism award or a campaign ad.

And anger isn’t something so easily ratiocinated. When your job is explaining world events, irrational phenomena lie fundamentally outside your brief. Explaining things with, “Well, people are angry!” is like surrender; it’s explaining badly resolved story lines in a TV show with, “A wizard did it.” Journalists learn to see the world in terms of the push/pull of conflicting ideologies and the necessary stratagems within a needlessly complicated governmental system; they’re necessarily going seek their explanations for seeming irrationality in the more elegant realms of philosophy and economics and political science.

He’s right. 

We are being ill served by our news media and the ruling elites that have created this giant economic nightmare.

Perhaps this election will not just change politics but upset the mindset of the blindingly stupid who write our news and create our policies.

James Pilant

Mozzarella without Mozzarella?

On By southwerkIn business ethics1 Comment

Mozzarella without Mozzarella?

Please read the following excerpt from a Salon article entitled: The only thing missing from McDonald’s new mozzarella sticks is mozzarella cheese.

One of the main ingredients in mozzarella sticks is, well, mozzarella. I mean, it’s right there in the name. Which explains why McDonald’s patrons who purchased the chain’s newest menu item have been extra disappointed to find their mozzarella cheese sticks sorely lacking in mozzarella cheese.

 Using the hashtag #Wheresthecheese, disappointed customers have been posting photos showing cheese sticks that look like hollow breaded encasings. The mozzarella cheese filling that comes to mind when you think of traditional mozzarella sticks is nowhere to be found. On its website, McDonald’s features pictures of mozzarella sticks filled with rich, gooey, “100 percent real and melty mozzarella cheese.” Contrast those with the sad, empty food sticks people report receiving in real life: …
Sometimes, you don’t realize that there is problem with a business or corporation for many months. The pollution, the deaths, the injuries, etc. don’t form a pattern and causation is often tricky. But when you come down to the simple and the mundane, you can see the business ethics problem before your eyes and in this case taste it.
Real cheese is expensive compared to milk by-products, etc. But we don’t have to worry about substitution in this case. According to the numerous pictures which can be found of which a single sample can be found here. there isn’t any cheese.
Should we let the market take care of this or should the government act? Well, it seems to me that McDonalds is likely to get clobbered on social media and there probably will be consequences in terms of their profits. On the other hand, the product is advertised as full of real cheese, and we have laws about false advertising.
Abraham LincolnThere is story that Abraham Lincoln used to tell about a settler who got in a fight with a bear. His wife didn’t want to be seen as taking sides because she didn’t know who was going to win, so she’d shout, “Go bear!, go husband!” I don’t have a dog in this fight, so “Go government!, go consumers!. Whoever gets them first is fine with me.
James Pilant

Wheelchair Ethics

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

Wheelchair Ethics

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Wheelchair Ethics

I write regularly about business ethics and when you read the horrible things that one international corporation or another has done each week, (sometimes each day), you get depressed about the fate of human kind but sometimes they get it right.

And here is an example. Perhaps, this should have been done earlier. Perhaps, it could have been done better. But it is being done.

Here is another step, a good step, in the acceptance of the disabled as full participants in society. Please read – (Full article)

Lego is releasing a new toy collection featuring a mini-figure in a wheelchair set for release later this year, a company executive told ABC News today.

Photos of the Lego character in a wheelchair emerged online from the Nuremberg toy fair in Germany and the London Toy Fair in the U.K. this week, and took the Internet by storm.

The Danish toy giant has created the Lego “City” set, which “features a mini-figure scale wheelchair,” Michael McNally, senior director of brand relations for Lego, told ABC News. “It will be available starting in June.”

Perhaps, I will try more often to highlight businesses who succeed in by performing ethically and morally?

James Pilant

The Ethics Sage Explains Ethical Behavior

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics1 Comment

Rules for Ethical Behavior in Life and the Workplace

(This is a guest column by Steven Mintz, the Ethics Sage. This is a great privilege for me. He is allowing me to post this before it appears anywhere else. You see it here first!)

The Ethics Sage
The Ethics Sage

Have you ever taken something from your employer’s workplace thinking nothing was wrong with “borrowing” office supplies for your home or using company software on your home computer? Surveys consistently show that about 20% of workers take something from their employer that doesn’t belong to them and use it for personal purposes. Well, not only are these people engaging in “asset misappropriation” but they become untrustworthy employees.

So, where do we draw the line between a minor offense that may be excusable and one much more significant that warrants a strong response from management? Well, folks, it doesn’t work that way. There is no materiality test on what is right and what is wrong. Taking something that belongs to your employer is no different than taking something from your neighbor’s house without their permission. Would you go to your neighbor’s medicine chest and take some pharmaceutical item? Of course not so why do the same where your employer is concerned?

Many people do not understand what ethics is. Ethics are not like a spigot that you can turn on and turn off. The ancient Greeks knew that ethics requires practice – practice doing the right thing so that it becomes habitual. Good ethics is dependent upon repetitive acts. It becomes part of your DNA. It’s almost as if you don’t have to think about what the right thing to do is. It becomes instinctive.

Here are some questions to ask yourself as you deliberate about what action you should take.

  1. What is the nature of my ethical dilemma (i.e. taking something that doesn’t belong to me; a conflict of interest; or how I treat someone else).
  2. Who are the stakeholders potentially affected by my actions? (i.e. my employer; a co-worker; a friend or family member).
  3. What are the potential consequences of my action? (e.g. potential harms and benefits of my intended action).
  4. Am I potentially violating any party’s rights? (e.g. employer’s right of loyalty; confidentiality; fair-treatment of others).
  5. Reflect on your intended action. How would you feel if your intended action made the front pages of tomorrow’s paper? Would you be proud of your action? Could you defend it?

Some ethical decision-making rules are:

  1. Ethics are not relative to the situation; they are based on long-standing norms of society. Ethics/ethical behavior is based on certain immutable traits of character (i.e. virtues) such as honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, respect, responsibility.
  2. The ends do not justify the means. The way in which you get to your goal is just as important as getting there. If not, you might rationalize an unethical action by saying it accomplishes your goal.
  3. The rights of one party affected by my action directly influences my ethical obligation to that party. My employer has a right to expect me not to divulge confidential information so I have an ethical obligation to act accordingly.

What if you make a mistake; do something you later regret; and want to acknowledge your mistake? Here is my advice in that regard.

  1. Admit your mistake in no uncertain terms; don’t rationalize your misbehavior.
  2. Seem genuinely remorseful for your actions; you’re not admitting it because you got caught.
  3. Promise never to do it again; make amends to those harmed by your actions.
  4. Take steps to change any behavioral patterns that led to your mistake.

We all do things that we regret later on. It’s how we handle the next step that counts most. The problem in business is many try to cover up their actions and their misdeed becomes much worse. One lie begets another until they are sliding down the proverbial “ethical slippery slope” and there is no way to reverse course and seek the moral high ground.

I like to think of ethics as what we do when no one is looking. There is a difference between what you have a right to do and what the right thing to do is. Moreover, under pressure a person’s true character is revealed. You can’t always control the situation you find yourself in, but you can control how you react to it.

Dr. Steven Mintz, aka Ethics Sage, is a Professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He blogs at www.ethicssage.com.

“Politicizing” Crisis?

On By southwerkIn Capitalism

“Politicizing” Crisis?

Rick Snyder is upset that Hilary Clinton is “politicizing” the Flint water crisis. He is upset at her cruel, cruel words. He did not comment on the even crueler words of Bernie Sanders calling upon him to resign. It is wrong to politicize events beyond the control of elected officials such as natural disaster but the Flint water disaster is natural only if you consider the Governor and his decision making natural and I do not. For at every single turn from the decision to change Flint’s water to the lies told the public about the water and finally the refusal to take action until weeks after the city declared a state of emergency, the responsibility rests in the hands of Governor Rick Snyder.

Snyder set up a system where bankrupt municipalities were seized and run as feudal provinces by a direct appointee of the Governor. The Governor’s choice to run the city decided to save a few million dollars by changing the source of the city’s water. When the city residents and the city officials complained, they were ignored. When the complaints grew in size and seriousness, the people of Flint were deliberately lied to. The agencies of the state government tasked with protecting the citizens concealed evidence and lied about the danger. Only when the evidence became overwhelming did the Governor take action.

And now, now at the last moment when the damage is done – when thousands of children have been exposed to forbidden levels of lead in their water, Rick Snyder is now doing something for the people of Flint, years too late to cure the results of his own decision making. And when he gets called on his actions, on his decisions and often his lack of them, he says we shouldn’t politicize the issue.

It is a political issue. It is the result of political decisions by Rick Snyder and the city managers he appointed. And when you have a political issue, you solve it by political means.

Hilary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are not politicizing crisis. They are talking about a political crisis, a crisis of judgment in government. It is fair game. No lead laden meteorite struck Flint. No storm commingled sewage and fresh water. The city manager appointed by Governor Rick Snyder decided to use a contaminated water supply to save money. That’s politics.

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“Politicizing” Crisis?

Like the Wizard of Oz, Snyder is asking us to ignore that man behind the curtain. But that man failed to act when his citizens were being harmed by lead contaminated water. That man is very much the center of this story. And whether or not the Governor now gets it and is now delivering clean water and testing kits is irrelevant.

It was the willingness to consider democracy an unfortunate obstacle in the way of an efficient government that is at the root of the problem. Flint could have continued with its elected government, that government, an elected government responsible and living among their own citizens, were hardly likely to have poisoned their children to save money. But the State acting through the office of the Governor seized control of the city and ran it with only one priority in mind, to squeeze as much money as humanly possible out of the municipality.

Snyder was imposing a corporate ethos on a city in a democracy. The bottom line is everything in a corporate environment. In a city, the lives and health of children get higher priority. When those priorities collided, which one prevailed? The corporate ones.  — “So the water tastes bad? Get used to it.”

This is the United States and the people are supposed to have redress of grievances. Their local government rendered irrelevant and ignored, the people of Flint had nowhere to turn.

And this may be the future of all us. The corporate ethos is invading every part of law and decision making. If the bottom line is all that matters – if, as in this case, avoiding bankruptcy was the only goal, then of what importance are your lives, your jobs and the welfare of your families?

Take a look at the children of Flint. Their ordeal is just beginning. The consequences of lead poisoning are permanent and incurable.

James Pilant

Please read below from the New York Times –

During Sunday’s debate, Clinton said “every single American should be outraged” by the water crisis, adding that “if the kids in a rich suburb of Detroit had been drinking contaminated water and being bathed in it, there would have been action.”

Following a speaking engagement at a Martin Luther King Day event in Flint, the Republican governor said her tactic doesn’t help solve the problem.

“We’re going to keep working on putting solutions in place,” Snyder told The Detroit News. “And what I would say is politicizing the issue doesn’t help matters. Let’s focus in on the solution and how to deal with the damage that was done and help the citizens of Flint and make Flint a stronger community.”

Crisis Mode 2016

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

Crisis Mode 2016

The New Year comes with the threat of a serious economic crisis. The plunge in oil prices is causing market instability all over the world with the China’s strange excuse for a stock market on the front line. But we are also in a continuing economic crisis as the middle class shrinks and its finances worsen. 

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Crisis Mode 2016

But I’m not the only one that believes this. Here’s Will Hutton writing in the Guardian: 

There has always been a tension at the heart of capitalism. Although it is the best wealth-creating mechanism we’ve made, it can’t be left to its own devices. Its self-regulating properties, contrary to the efforts of generations of economists trying to prove otherwise, are weak.

It needs embedded countervailing power – effective trade unions, law and public action – to keep it honest and sustain the demand off which it feeds. Above all, it needs an ordered international framework of law, finance and trade in which it can do deals and business. It certainly can’t invent one itself. The mayhem in the financial markets over the last fortnight is the result of confronting this tension. The oil price collapse should be good news. It makes everything cheaper. It puts purchasing power in the hands of business and consumers elsewhere in the world who have a greater propensity to spend than most oil-producing countries. A low oil price historically presages economic good times. Instead, the markets are panicking.

They are panicking because what is driving the lower oil price is global disorder, which capitalism is powerless to correct. Indeed, it is capitalism running amok that is one of the reasons for the disorder. Profits as a share of national income in Britain and the US touch all-time highs; wages touch an all-time low as the power of organised labour diminishes and the gig economy of short-term contracts takes hold. The excesses of the rich, digging underground basements to house swimming pools, cinemas and lavish gyms, sit alongside the travails of the new middle-class poor. These are no longer able to secure themselves decent pensions and their gig-economy children defer starting families because of the financial pressures.

Capitalism has grown inside the protective cover of the modern nation state and the international accords sought by those states to protect themselves from war and instability. It would seem that Neoliberals are contemplating a world in which the nation state is reduced to the same level of just another corporation, in which national laws including those specifying what are acts of criminality are just matters to be negotiated.

I have been sensing unease in the literature over the last few weeks. It is making me uncomfortable. The financial press seems bewildered by economic events that appear without precedent. (The financial press’ view of history never seems to run more than a couple of decades.) Could we be running into another economic crisis? Well, yes, there is almost certainly going to be some kind of downturn in the next twelve months but at what level? The Fed’s silly decision to raise interest rates is going to cause an economic slowdown. But even more troubling is the Royal Bank of Scotland’s predictions for the year. They compare the current situation to 2008. That is very bad indeed. 

Andrew Roberts, Bank of Scotland’s “head of European economics, rates & CEEMEA research,” stated that progress in automation and technology are set to “wipe out” up to half of employment in developed countries, and that the global economy has “far too much” debt, to the point where it may hinder global economic output. Roberts sees the majority of 2016 being used to sell profitable positions entered after the 2008 subprime mortgage collapse and the resulting quantitative easing-driven boom that has seen equities, as measured by the Dow Jones, gain about 90 percent since January 1, 2009.

In economics and banking “speak” this is roughly equivalent to screaming out obscure Bible verses while clutching a “The End is Near” sign. 

It seems to me that capitalism can be a positive force in society but that kind of capitalism is not one based on pure financial exploitation or an absence of patriotism or on the opportunity to evade taxes. A positive capitalism is one that creates value not in derivatives but in actual goods and services. A positive capitalism is one in which companies will not seek out their nation’s enemies as profit making opportunities. And finally, a positive capitalism recognizes the contributions of the community in its success and pays its share of taxes to maintain the common welfare. 

James Pilant

Patterns of Corruption

On By southwerkIn business ethics

Patterns of Corruption

This post is particularly aimed at other professors who teach business ethics. I was on YouTube and found a film by Adam Curtis called The Great British Housing Disaster and it is a business ethics masterpiece. Here’s a piece of if  –

The very banality and consistency in the greed and incompetence of the malefactors here is amazing and in my experience, I have found that attitude commonplace in this country as well.

The film tells the story of how Britain decided to build a great deal of housing in a very short period of time and how that gave opportunity for unscrupulous contractors to build sub-standard housing. It takes you through the whole process from politics at the national level to the local and then, architects, contractors,workers and regulators. We are shown the building process and we see, in this case literally, the “concrete” results of the corruption.

I like the film because it’s well done and because it’s historical. I don’t want to be too topical,  too current, when teaching. When all the students have decided already what they think, it makes teaching more difficult. If you give them history and ethics, you have the opportunity of showing how corruption and incompetence follow particular patterns, and you see these patterns over and over again. If you watch the patterns, you can see the corruption as it develops in many other situations.

Now obviously I do teach on some current events but I prefer to use a film and a subject original to the students so they all begin at the same place.

For those of you who don’t teach, it’s a very fine piece of documentary film making and it is the first work listed in Wikipedia for Adam Curtis. So, it is kind of a preview of his later career.

James Pilant

Fracking Lawsuit

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics2 Comments

Fracking Lawsuit

Can the lawsuit be an effective tool against corporate misconduct? It has been, continues to be and will be again. But what about fracking? Can lawsuits affect the practice? And I want to focus here on one aspect of fracking, and that is the disposal of waste water by injecting it deep into the earth apparently near fault lines.

Here is a brief quote from an article in Think Progress – found here: Oklahoma Residents Sue Energy Companies Over Earthquake Damage | ThinkProgress
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/01/12/3738417/oklahoma-earthquake-residents-lawsuit/

This week, a group of 14 homeowners in Edmond, Oklahoma filed a lawsuit against 12 energy companies, claiming that the companies’ fracking operations have contributed to this uptick in earthquakes. Specifically, the lawsuit targets the companies’ wastewater disposal wells, claiming that the injection of fracking wastewater into these wells “caused or contributed” to earthquakes and constituted an “ultrahazardous activity.”

In the lawsuit, filed in Oklahoma County court, the residents focus on two earthquakes — of 4.3and 4.2 magnitude — that struck Edmond on December 29 and January 1. The plaintiffs say they suffered damage from the earthquakes, and that the energy companies were “negligent, careless, and reckless” in their treatment of the earthquake risks surrounding wastewater injection.

i010We have questionable behavior on the part of the energy companies and a lawsuit alleging that behavior has caused harm. This works for society with most industries. Ford and General Motors have to build their cars with the knowledge that they can be sued for misconduct. Obviously, this threat hanging over their heads doesn’t always stop them from making foolish and lethal decisions but my experience is that we live in a much, much safer world because companies have to worry about being sued.

So, why do I have doubts that this will work? These aren’t “regular” companies. These are energy companies. They are the primary political powers in a number of states and the reach of their think tanks, political action committee, etc. is very difficult to measure, so enormous is the money and influence being deployed. No, these aren’t regular corporations.

I think they’ll follow the path blazed by the firearms industry and create restrictive law protecting them from lawsuits. The first legislative acts I expect to see will force those that sue and lose in court to one of these companies to pay all court costs. It may be more difficult and take more time, but in the long term they will simply seek and almost certainly get a blanket restriction on lawsuits in the “national” interest. Expect to see a giant legislative preamble talking about energy independence and the need to protect “innovation.”

James Pilant