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.
If you live in Oklahoma you may have already seen this document. It’s entitled Fast Facts on Earthquake Insurance. It is provided for free by the Office of Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner John D. Doak. I was unaware of Mr. Doak and his work (I don’t live in Oklahoma.), but after reading his press releases recommending that residents of the state buy earthquake insurance and how to get the best deal while avoiding being scammed – I am impressed with the man. He makes good sense.
Oklahoma Adapts!
But I write about Business Ethics and while insurance sometimes has business ethics elements, my focus here is on fracking.
The necessity of the citizens of the State of Oklahoma to buy earthquake insurance is almost totally man-made. These are induced earthquakes.
There is an injustice here that bothers me. You see part of the cost of hydraulic fracking is the necessity of disposing of the waste water, and the industry has solved this by injecting it deep into the earth. And this causes earthquakes, lots of earthquakes. (Here’s another little quote:)
Before fracking Oklahomans experienced a couple of earthquakes a year on average and last year they had 842.
So, the industry saves itself a great deal of money by disposing of the waste water in an earthquake producing fashion while citizens of the state bear the brunt of the damage. That strikes me as unfair. The industry makes billions while the citizens of the State live on ground that is becoming more and more unsteady and dangerous.
In other words, the industry shifted the cost of their operation from themselves to the citizens in the form of earthquake damage and such necessary changes as the having to buy earthquake insurance.
And there is one further thing that bothers me.
Someone is going to die. It is inevitable. You shake the ground and buildings collapse and burn. Someone is going to die.
That’s not fair either.
In the past industries saved money by polluting the air and water instead of safely disposing of their waste products. Isn’t this just the same thing in a different format? Instead of talking about air, instead of talking about the water, we’re talking about the integrity of the earth itself.
(It is a great privilege to have my friend, Jason Michael McCann, post an article on my blog! I hope you all appreciate his thoughts as much as I do. Jason’s original post on his blog can be found here – The Future of the Corporation | Random Public Journal http://randompublicjournal.com/2016/01/03/the-future-of-the-corporation/)
Already we stand on the precipice of a post-nation state future. Globalisation of private corporate interests has successfully unshackled the international market from the controls of individual governments and so has positioned the legal entity of the Corporation above the law. In the twenty-first century the transnational corporation has become a law unto itself, governed only by the imperative to increase the value of its shares for its wealthy private stakeholders. So successful has been this corporatist revolution against the bourgeois state that is has now arrogated to itself the right to sue the state when the actions of the latter undermine the corporation’s interests – a move which has cemented the subjugation of democracy to the whims of global corporations.
Jason Michael McCann
Above we have used the word Revolution, because a revolution is precisely what we have witnessed. It is no longer in the realms of conspiracy theory that the Corporation has become the new order of the world, but conspiracy fact. Years of secretive negotiations, across the developed world, between corporately sponsored governments and the corporations themselves have borne fruit in the creation of globalised treaties granting effective domination of the world’s economy to unelected and legally unaccountable super-boards-of-management. Now these new Lords of the Philistines play the tune to which elected governments must dance, regardless of the thoughts and better interests of the people who have elected them. Democracy has lost its teeth.
We the people, the newly dehorned electorate workers of the world, must think carefully about this new direction of global social evolution. Until recently we have each been, within the social contract, an asset of the state in which we have had a meaningful vote. Today the very governments we elect have become the clients of a new superstructure of suzerains over which no one has control save for the profit principal. Our multinational corporate overlords, with an overwhelming share of the world’s wealth, can now buy and sell the resources and assets of any nation – and this includes us for we too are state assets.
One does not need a crystal ball to see that this trajectory is leading to somewhere very dark. Whether it is the economy, the environment, or human rights, individual states and international bodies of states the likes of the United Nations have been rendered powerless in a post-nation state reality. Of course there is the chance that we are worrying over nothing. Corporations may discover that what’s best for people and the environment is best for business, but we have seen precious little evidence of this in the past. Our most likely path into the future is one of a dystopian hell where human and workers’ rights exist only on the statute books of pacified nations, and where the wonders of nature are broken down in ledger books to crude cash value.
Did TransCanada Just Kill the Trans Pacific Partnership?
Democracy is a precious thing. It is easy to see that throughout history, autocrats of all types have attempted to end or limit government by the people whenever possible. Corporations are not different in this respect. They often and quite publicly prefer the autocratic and the certain over the will of the people and its variability.
Did TransCanada Just Kill the Trans Pacific Partnership?
As time has gone by the United States has entered into treaties like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. This agreement like many other trade agreements limits the sovereignty of participating nation states and gives power to international tribunals that are not answerable to the people.
These tribunals have not gained a great deal of public attention. That’s probably wise. The idea that a band of unknown bureaucrats can contradict the will of the people as a community, a county, a state or even a nation is a wonderful selling point if you’re a corporation but probably less than persuasive for the citizens who don’t realize that a big chunk of democracy (control over their lives) just went away.
One of the big chunks of democratic power that was given away was the right of governments to be not be sued by foreign corporations.
And while this has not been well known, it is about to be. You see, TransCanada had a stake in the building of the Keystone Pipeline and since the United States government said no, they are suing for more than fifteen billion dollars.
That will put the rest of us on notice that we can be sued if we obstruct international corporate profit making.
This is unlikely to make passage of the Trans Pacific Partnership easier for once people realize that even mundane decisions in the public interest can be reversed and penalized with money damages, they may decide that free trade agreements carry too high a price.
You may think at this point that I’m being an alarmist. TransCanada has yet to win any money and perhaps you don’t even believe that these international tribunals every really sue anybody. Well, what about Australia?
Let’s say you are a tobacco company and you don’t want people to regulate your product. You can use “free trade agreements” on your behalf. (This is from the Huffington Post –
Absent state intervention on their behalf, tobacco companies found a new way to fight efforts to regulate tobacco marketing. They take advantage of an “investor-state” dispute options being built into more free trade agreements between countries, which allows companies to directly challenge regulations they believe discriminate against foreign products. Unlike fighting laws in domestic legislatures or through WTO disputes, which are more formal and predictable, investor-state conflicts are decided by a panel of international arbitrators with no appeal, making them more attractive to multinational corporations.
So when Australia tried to put limits on how cigarettes were sold, the tobacco companies used the free trade agreements and used them well. –
(Further down in the same article -)
PMI has used that tactic to challenge Australia’s proposed “plain” packaging rules, which would eliminate bright colors and branding on packs and cartons, and Uruguay’s plan to require 80% of cigarette packs be covered in warning labels. The company argues that these restrictions on its trademarks and branding are akin to expropriation (which would require the country to pay the restricted company for selling its product unbranded) and violate trade deals between Australia and Hong Kong, where PMI has a subsidiary, and Switzerland and Uruguay.
What kind of democratic decisions could be challenged in the United States under these agreements and who could bring these law suits? Any decision that could affect profitability could be challenged. That would include things as mundane as zoning laws all the way up to federal legislation. Any corporation or citizen of a nation participating in the TPP could sue should they believe their operations are being damaged.
For example, Fayetteville, Arkansas could re-zone an area residential. If property there was owned by a foreign corporation say, one from Vietnam, an international tribunal might very well find that this act amounts to an expropriation of the company’s property and force the community to re-zone and pay damages for its “illegal” act.
Over time as the number and complexities of these “free trade agreements” grows, the city will have to become increasingly lawyered up to stay aware of the effect of city decisions on possible litigants all over the world.
Sound good? If you don’t like what you’re hearing, maybe you should do something to let your representatives from the President down to local government know that maybe we shouldn’t be weakening democracy to protect the profitability of foreign corporations.
For many, the Keystone XL pipeline was a catalyst for environmental action, and when the State Department denied developer TransCanada’s permit application in November, it was a signal that the environmental movement had triumphed over corporate and fossil fuel interests. So when the tar sands company announced this week thatit was filing a claimagainst the United States for $15 billion, under provisions in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), many were outraged.
But TransCanada’s heavy-handed use of the Clinton-era agreement might be the rallying point activists need to stop another, perhaps even more far-reaching, federal action: the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP is a massive, Pacific Rim trade agreement that would apply NAFTA-like provisions — including prohibitions on interfering with private investment — to the relationships between the United States and 11 other countries, including Japan, Malaysia, and Vietnam.
It might be the rallying point activists need to stop another, perhaps even more far-reaching, federal action: the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP is a massive, Pacific Rim trade agreement that would apply NAFTA-like provisions — including prohibitions on interfering with private investment — to the relationships between the United States and 11 other countries, including Japan, Malaysia, and Vietnam.
The Sheriff walked tall into the town meeting, a gun strapped to his hip. He tells the meeting that strangers have come into our town and our county. They’ve threatened my life. My wife has had to leave town because of the threats and now they’re threatening my elderly parents.
Yesterday, a county sheriff asked his fellow citizens for help. Sheriff David Ward asked for help because of these strangers that have come to town.
Now, I ask you – Is he just talking to his citizens or all of us? Because we can listen right now or we can wait till later when a whole bunch of heavily armed hooligans march into your town and demand you cooperate in whatever “protest” or “seizure,” they’ve got on their very small minds.
And if you don’t cooperate, they and their friends on the Internet are going to make you. And right smack in the middle of everyone of these tragicomedies is law enforcement – men and women tasked with defending your life and liberty confronted with heavily armed strangers.
What are you going to do?
I’ll tell you what you should do. First, protect and back your law enforcement. Because it is right and because they back you and they’re part of your community. Second, you have a responsibility as a citizen to make sure that justice is served, that people even heavily armed people have to obey the law.
Someday, every one of you may find yourselves in a community where thirty or forty armed men come in and demand you cooperate. And then you get to choose whether you have the guts to back your law enforcement or you’re gonna hide. What’s it going to be?
We spend a lot of money on a lot of things in this country, but how much are we willing to pay for justice?
Is it not written in Amos 5:24 that – But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream?
Evil men have committed evil acts. Are we willing to seek justice, even if it costs thirty-two million dollars?
There are 13,000 untested rape kits in the State of Florida. It is estimated by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement that it could cost anywhere between nine and thirty-two million dollars to test all the kits some of which have been stored in police departments for years.
Every rape kit needs to be checked and checked as quickly as possible. Why? Here’s an excerpt from the article found in the Guardian –
Testing old rape kits usually leads to a torrent of new prosecutions. Several law enforcement agencies have found that the rape kits point to serial rapists.
After Detroit processed a backlog of 11,000 rape kits, police identified more than 100 serial rape suspects.
In 2000, the City of New York initiated the process of inventorying and testing all previously unsubmitted SAKs without regard to the status or facts of the case (forklift approach). Testing of 17,000 SAKs resulted in over 2,000 DNA matches and 200 cold case prosecutions across New York City. Those offenders are now serving more than 900 years in prison. Similar results have been reported in Michigan where the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office identified 188 potential serial rapists and obtained 15 convictions. In Houston, Texas, testing of 6,663 untested SAKs resulted in 850 matches in the federal DNA database and the prosecution of 29.
Many rapists are serial rapists. Testing a large number of rape kits from a single geographical area often pulls up the same name many times. A serial rapist can rape hundreds of women during their criminal career. Testing rape kits connects the dots in eminently prosecutorial format.
As a criminal justice professional, these kits are a tool to rid society of many of these repeat offenders.
This is a worthy goal and it is worth thirty two million dollars.
“Greed, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance, these are the words that best describe the reality of Wall Street today,” Sanders told supporters in midtown Manhattan. “To those on Wall Street who may be listening today, let me be very clear. Greed is not good. In fact, the greed of Wall Street and corporate America is destroying the fabric of our nation.”
Sanders says that greed is “destroying the fabric of our nation.” But as a business ethics professional, I can tell you, greed in the form of unregulated capitalism is destroying the fabric of the world.
Over the past decade, the world has been subject to commercial attacks, an oil spill in the gulf that devastated an area larger than many states, fires related to palm oil production in Indonesia and other countries as large as dozens of American counties, dam failures in Brazil that released 60 million cubic meters of iron ore tailings into the water system, in Japan – radioactive contamination made several once thriving communities uninhabitable(1) and I can go on and on.
But let me close this litany of disaster with Volkswagen, the poster child for necessity of regulation with criminal penalties. Volkswagen inserted software in 11,000,000 cars designed to evade pollution controls by running one way under tests conditions and another on the road. There is no way that Volkswagen could have believed that they would never be caught. The pollution produced by an automobile is not always measured under test conditions. There had to be an underlying belief that the company is so well placed, so influential, employs so many people – that it will not be prosecuted and will get to keep most or all of the money.
As we have seen with the virtual non prosecution of General Motors in the United States, they may have good reason for that belief. Assessed a 900 million dollar fine after 124 deaths were traced to a below specs ignition switch, General Motors escaped criminal penalties in spite of having continued their wrong doing for 10 years after first detecting the problem.
Pure capitalism, unregulated greed, whether referred to as Neo-liberalism or free market fundamentalism is dissolving the fabric that binds us together as human beings. It is not just an economic malady but a moral evil which must be addressed.
James Pilant
(1) In case, you wish to challenge me on the corporate responsibility for Fukushima and say it was a “natural” disaster – I would respond that building a nuclear reactor to an American design on low land near the coast on an earthquake fault in Japan is malfeasance.
If I had a class this morning (the semester doesn’t start for a couple of weeks) I’d be prepping this for use sending out an e-mail with links and practicing a few opening lines. This is a perfect ice breaker for any business ethics class. –
What are the business ethics of building one of the great wonders of the ancient world?
The follow up questions virtually write themselves:
Should a virtually bankrupt nation devote enormous resources to a tourist attraction?
Is the Colussus a part of the Greek national heritage and if so, does that justify the projected expenditure of 283 million dollars?
Is this commercially viable?
Is the channel navigable for the big cruise ships?
What kind of power would the thing need and how much would it cost to maintain it?
The last one was destroyed by an earthquake. Does the present of a fault line call into question the whole idea?
If your students are like mine, there is always going to be a division between those who want to discuss the morality of the idea as opposed to those who want to discuss profitability followed by a smaller group who want to talk about history, beauty and whether or not the people proposing this are just crazy. My heart is with the last group. They are the most fun.
One of my teaching methods is to keep the class lively by providing new, interesting and often amusing topics sometimes illustrated with pictures and video. Often, I’ll just cruise the web for a few minutes in the morning before going to school looking for something to get them motivated and in the mood to learn.
Well, I thought I’d just float the idea past some of you who teach like me.
The selection that I have posted at the bottom of this page is from the Guardian and it tells of a 4.2 magnitude earthquake is almost certainly related to the practice of fracking in that state.
This is a business ethics issue. In the past, companies have polluted severely damaging the water, the air and often the top soil. But this is new. We have companies whose disposal of fracking waste water by injecting it deep into the earth is undermining the stability of the land itself.
It’s a new kind of pollution. What do you even call it? – Foundational pollution? Instability pollution? Deep earth interference? Or maybe – earthquake enabling? That large bodies of water could cause earthquakes has been known for some time. The mental leap from the idea that moving water into a man-made reservoir could destabilize fault lines to the idea that directly injecting fracking waste water deep into the earth could cause similar instability is not big.
I have a strong suspicion that the risks were already understood back at the beginning of the Bush administration when Dick Cheney’s energy task force created a package of protective laws for the fracking industry many of which simply prevented the collection of information.
Should energy companies be liable for damages caused by earthquakes which result from the injection of waste water into known fault lines? That’s a good question that I am sure will be before the courts in the next decade. I am so confident of this that I am also confident that ALEC will have legislation preventing these kinds of lawsuits up on state legislative agendas before the end of 2017.
Inflicting earthquakes upon citizens of this country is wrong. It’s understandable if there was no perceivable risk but this is hardly likely to be the case since finding an oil company without highly reputable geologists is highly unlikely.
It appears to me that this problem is easily solvable. We do not allow the industry to inject waste water near known fault lines and to stop injecting should evidence of a fault line develop.
We have discovered how to play havoc with the pillars of the earth. Could anything be more arrogant than this Frankenstein like willingness to play God?
A 4.2 magnitude earthquake struck north Oklahoma City early on New Year’s Day, the latest in a series of temblors in the area in recent days that has prompted state regulators to call for more restrictions on oil and gas operators.
No injuries and only minor damage were reported with the quake, which struck at 5.39am on Friday near Edmond, about 16 miles north-east of Oklahoma City, according to the US Geological Survey.
…
The Oklahoma Corporation Commission issued a statement on Friday saying its Oil and Gas Division staff were taking action in response to the earthquakes in Edmond and that details should be available on Monday.
“The issue is extremely complex, as the initial review of the data for the area in question has not identified any oil and gas wastewater disposal wells that are both high volume and in the state’s deepest formation, a combination that researchers have identified as being at the highest risk for inducing earthquakes,” the commission release stated.
By means of one of those routine IT e-mails, I got one of those announcements that I had to change my e-mail. A continuing unpleasant duty is changing the password every so often, and I often joke with my students that due to the frequent changes and the large number of passwords each faculty member has to master -that half the passwords on campus are written on something underneath or attached to the computers themselves. (I keep a word file with mine.)
Anyway, so I attempted to change my password and when I did, it said I wasn’t finished. There was an error. My security question was wrong. The question is – what is your mother’s middle name? And the answer was wrong. How was it wrong? My mother’s middle name is four letters long and there must be five.
That’s right. The IT people have decided all on their own that names less than five letters long areinvalid. I am certain that my mother’s middle name appears on her birth certificate and I am certain as an attorney that under the laws of Oklahoma, the United States and under the law of nations, that name is valid. It also appears to me that under the customs of this nation, the name, a relatively common one, is acceptable to one and all.
Yet, it is invalid.
I like to think of IT people as normal people. Their children are apparently named things like John! or Ann&* or Jo^87 and they are probably a little more fascinated with Dr. Who than the average American but I still like to think that a human heart beats within them.
So, let us try reasoning with them.
TO Those in the Information Technology Department.
“People name their children sometimes on a whim and other times after a relative. Sometimes, they even name them after themselves. Many of them have pre-computer era names. They are all letters, and at the current time, whatever your insistence, while they do have a capital letter and a “small” letter, they do not have a number, a special character like an _ or a space.”
“Your insistence that people follow arbitrary rules that you have developed in an apparent cultural isolation chamber is unwise. People are likely to become angry and disillusioned that you are making important decisions in their lives just because you can. I do understand that you have reasons for these ideas. It is highly likely that if we use letters from the Cyrillic alphabet or perhaps even Japanese phonetic symbols, it will make our passwords and names more difficult to predict for those trying to break into the system. And yet, we must remember that computers are here to facilitate our work and that they are here to serve us.”
“And so are you.”
“So, let us who create the product at our joint enterprise continue with our and our relatives’ too short names and we will leave you in peace to do whatever it is that you do in your department.”
I call it a perfect paragraph and in terms of business ethics, it is. The lessons of the 2007 financial crisis that would have made an intelligent man cautious about financial innovation have not been learned. The one lesson that has sunk in, is that if your institution is big enough and influential enough not only will the government prevent its failure, you will keep your job and with a little luck your bonus.
The Ethic Sage’s analysis is correct. There is going to have to be more government regulation. If not, we risk another global catastrophe.
The financial crisis and its aftermath created a hole in the moral ozone that is supposed serve as a check on excessive, risky behavior by investment bankers. It is a breach that, in my opinion, is irreparable absent any dramatic steps to better control the risk appetite of some in the financial services industry. This saddens me because the last thing we need is more government regulation. Unfortunately, it may be necessary because the very ethical standards that are supposed to protect the public under capitalism have broken down. Adam Smith in his iconic The Wealth of Nations stated that: By pursuing his own interest he [the capitalist] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. His theory no longer describes the way our free market economy works and its breakdown explains, in part, the economic gap in our society.
As always, I recommend you to go to The Ethic Sage’s blog and read the entire post. Further, you should favorite the site and read it regularly. I do.
Evil men have committed evil acts. Are we willing to seek justice, even if it costs thirty-two million dollars?
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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