Author: Tom Sullivan

I’ll have a Black Friday without you
by Tom Sullivan

Traditional anti-consumerism boycotts of Black Friday have company this year.

In the wake of the grand jury decision not to charge Officer Darren Wilson in the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, activists are encouraging black consumers to turn to economic activism and boycott the busiest shopping day of the year.

Under the title “No Justice, No Profit,” the boycott aims to capitalize on the purchasing power of the black community, which Al Jazeera points out is about $1 trillion, and prove, in a language businesses will understand—money—that injustice doesn’t come without consequence.

Dacia Polk of the Justice for Michael Brown Leadership Coalition explained the boycott to St. Louis Public Radio, saying:

“There will be no business as usual while those who are supposed to protect and serve us,” she said. “Until this nation begins to place value on black lives, there will be no value placed on this business because black lives matter.”

Protesters are urged to avoid large retailers and to support instead local, black-owned businesses. Hashtags: #BoycottBlackFriday, #BlackOutBlackFriday #HandsUpDontSpend, #NotOneDime, and #BrownFriday.

Walmart, the crown jewel of the low-wage economy, is still in the running for “worst corporation in the world.” Again this year, the home of low, low wages faces Thanksgiving and Black Friday protests from community activists and its own employees — I’m sorry Associates:

OUR Walmart first burst onto the scene two years ago, when it used Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, to launch an unprecedented, nationwide strike against Walmart. The group originally demanded that Walmart pay all employees a base salary of at least $25,000 per year, but has since joined with striking fast food workers in demanding at least $15 per hour.

[snip]

As with OUR Walmart’s first major action in 2012, this year’s Black Friday protests will not be a typical strike. Many of those picketing Walmart — perhaps even most — will be outside supporters of the OUR Walmart campaign, not store employees themselves. Those employees who do walk off the job will likely do so for just one day. Yet OUR Walmart has said that their prior work stoppages are legally protected strikes, and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has agreed. Strikes over wages and working conditions, or over an alleged ULP (unfair labor practice), such as illegally retaliating against workers, are protected by federal law.

Besides fringe benefits like missing Thanksgiving and Christmas with families, Associates also miss meals:

This year’s protests by Walmart workers will kick off on Thanksgiving with a 24-hour fast by 12 protesters. The fast, which is protesting the hunger suffered by some Walmart workers who can’t afford food, will be staged outside a Los Angeles store.

One of the workers participating in the fast is Richard Reynoso, an overnight stocker at the Duarte, California store. Reynoso is one of those workers who cannot afford to purchase three meals a day. As a result, he only eats once a day on his lunch break.

“Sometimes all I have money for is a can of tuna and crackers,” he said.

But progressives need to be careful. Even as living wage advocates demand higher wages from big-box retailers, such protests can pit them against the very communities they hope to help. Those everyday low prices enable the Waltons’ clientele in poorer neighborhoods to stretch their limited incomes. Perhaps a new slogan?

Walmart: We make poor affordable

Shift minions getting all uppity
by Tom Sullivan

So, what? Do these uppity, chronically stressed workers think The Economy exists to serve people instead of the other way around? Employees — I’m sorry, Associates — are supposed to genuflect and cross themselves at the sound of their master’s voice, and ask how high when Job Creators says jump. What are those Left Coast socialists smoking?

Politico:

Meet your new union reps: the statehouse and City Hall.

San Francisco’s new law, which its Board of Supervisors passed Tuesday by unanimous vote, will require any “formula retailer” (retail chain) with 20 or more locations worldwide that employs 20 or more people within the city to provide two weeks’ advance notice for any change in a worker’s schedule. An employer that alters working hours without two weeks’ notice — or fails to notify workers two weeks ahead of time that their schedules won’t change — will be required to provide additional “predictability pay.“ Property service contractors that provide janitorial or security services for these retailers will also need to abide by the new rule.

What’s worse, these subversive notions have a way of spreading east from the Left Coast like viruses. Call out the dragoons.

Speaking of predictability, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce is predictably miffed about the “Retail Workers Bill of Rights.” For struggling hourly workers, taking classes, caring for families, and raising children (and managing day care logistics) is something The Economy expects you to fit in between work shifts at multiple, part-time, low-paying, no-benefits service jobs where shift schedules vary a lot. But that’s just the way it is and the way The Economy likes it. With labor unions weakened and workers disempowered, setting working conditions once governed by collective bargaining agreements now falls to local Democrats. That is, if you can find any that aren’t Republican lite.

And go figure, labor-friendly measures such as the Retail Workers Bill of Rights are popular. HuffPost:

With Congressional Republicans opposing a minimum wage hike and other legislation aimed at low-wage work, labor unions and their progressive allies have found much more success on the local level. Despite the drubbing that Democrats took in the midterm elections earlier this month, binding ballot initiatives on the minimum wage passed easily in four red states. A measure that will require many employers to provide their workers with paid sick days also passed in Massachusetts.

Politico continues:

Increased unpredictability in work schedules is driven by technology. When store foot traffic had to be measured manually and work schedules were typed out, employers found it cumbersome to alter work schedules too frequently. But just as computers created vast new producer efficiencies through just-in-time store inventories, so, too, did they create vast new staffing efficiencies through just-in-time work scheduling. Trouble is, getting moved around at the click of a mouse is more disruptive to human beings than it is to refrigerators and automobiles.

“Efficiency” is like “shareholder value” that way. When they start hearing it, flesh-and-blood consumable resources better update their resumes, stock up on antacid, and learn to get by with even less sleep.

Earlier this year, 32-year-old Maria Fernandes of Newark, NJ died of asphyxiation while catnapping in her car between shifts of her four part-time jobs. The Economy did not attend her funeral.

No indictment
by Tom Sullivan

Still processing last night’s Ferguson, MO press conference by St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch. CNN’s legal expert, Jeffrey Toobin, called the decision to announce the grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson at night “clueless.” Grand jury documents are available in several places including here.

If nothing else, McCulloch’s color commentary on public and social media reaction to the killing was unnecessary and inappropriate. Ben Casselman at FiveThirtyEight observes, “Grand juries nearly always decide to indict.” Unless the cases involve police officers.

Former New York state Chief Judge Sol Wachtler famously remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” The data suggests he was barely exaggerating: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.

Casselman continues:

… But newspaper accounts suggest, grand juries frequently decline to indict law-enforcement officials. A recent Houston Chronicle investigation found that “police have been nearly immune from criminal charges in shootings” in Houston and other large cities in recent years. In Harris County, Texas, for example, grand juries haven’t indicted a Houston police officer since 2004; in Dallas, grand juries reviewed 81 shootings between 2008 and 2012 and returned just one indictment. Separate research by Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip Stinson has found that officers are rarely charged in on-duty killings, although it didn’t look at grand jury indictments specifically.

Meanwhile, Ferguson, MO caught fire and protests erupted across the country after the presser:

In Seattle, Los Angeles, Oakland, Denver and elsewhere, protesters blocked intersections with “die-ins,” throwing themselves on the pavement, some outlining their bodies with chalk, to symbolize Brown and other unarmed people who died in encounters with police. They lay on the ground for four-and-a-half minutes to represent, they said, the four-and-a-half hours Brown’s body was left in the street after he was shot and killed. Choruses of “hands up, don’t shoot” and “black lives matter” rang out as protesters shut down bridges, freeways and major thoroughfares.

There was a poetry and a sad sort of symmetry to many of the protests that found their way to major highways. Brown died on a neighborhood street, not far from his home, after defying Wilson’s orders to stop walking in the middle of it, as Wilson testified before the grand jury.

One has to wonder what sort of dynamic led from asking two men to walk on the sidewalk into a deadly shooting. For now, it’s back to the transcripts to look for answers.

Never say inevitable

by Tom Sullivan

Hillary Clinton’s New York troops are figetting, waiting for a formal declaration, yet still organizing. Meanwhile, writes Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker, their “candidate” remains silent. On the Keystone pipeline. On NSA reform.

But, despite the clear remarks about Ferguson and immigration, Clinton’s views on many crucial issues remain opaque. She seems to be repeating the same mistake that she made in 2008, when the inevitability of her candidacy overwhelmed its justification.

At the Ready for Hillary festival, Mitch Stewart, one of Obama’s top organizers in the 2008 contest, suggested that Clinton needed to be careful to develop a message and stick to it. He noted that she had failed to do that in the 2008 primaries. “Every six weeks, there seemed to be a new slogan, and there was nothing people could wrap their arms around,” Stewart said.

Mainstream Democratic candidates have a thing for repeating mistakes. Like the many that ran away from their president and their own brand a few weeks ago and lost big. Like Al Gore did in 2000. Eight years we endured George W. Bush.

Paging George Santayana. Or at least a campaign adviser who knows who the hell he is.

Cesspits of bad behavior

by Tom Sullivan

In business today, too often integrity is an afterthought.

The San Francisco Chronicle quotes from the blog, Both Sides of the Table, by investor Mark Suster, “I believe that integrity and honesty are very important to most venture capital investors. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that they are required to make a lot of money.”

In a piece that might be titled, “The Real Jerks of Silicon Valley,” Alyson Shontell examines how many rising stars in Silicon Valley tend to be “–holes”. (The construction pops up frequently in the piece.) The rogues gallery is expansive, including Uber’s Travis Kalanick. He’s had a particularly bad week. Still,

“Sometimes,” one acquaintance said of Kalanick, “–holes create great businesses.”

What’s remarkable is how acceptable this has become, even expected. Shontell quotes Atlantic’s Tom McNichol:

The ease with which people can possess astonishingly contradictory qualities is one of the mysteries of human nature; indeed, it’s one of the things that separates humans from, say, an Apple computer. Every one of the components that makes up an iPad is essential to the work it produces. Remove one part and the machine no longer performs its job, and not even the Genius Bar can fix it. But humans are full of qualities that are in no way integral to their functioning in the world. Some aspects of personality have little or no bearing on whether a person performs well, and not a few people succeed in spite of their darker qualities.

Andre Spicer at the Washington Post observes the same on Wall Street:

There is something in the culture of banking that lends itself toward making otherwise fairly good people do bad things. That’s the finding of a new study published in the journal, Nature. And it may simply confirm the suspicions of many following endless news of bankers being outed for bad behaviour.

Economists at the University of Zurich, Michel Maréchal, Alain Cohn and Ernst Fehr found that bankers are more likely to lie and cheat when primed to think of themselves as bankers than as “everyday people”. Members of other professions did not exhibit the same bad behavior. There’s something wrapped up in the banker identity that makes them “such cesspits of bad behavior.”

Cheating was also not simply the result of people thinking that everyone else was doing it and so it was OK. What seemed to prompt bankers to cheat on this test was when they thought of themselves as bankers.

What is more, it is not just that people who identify as bankers tend to lie and cheat more than the general population. In fact, the study showed that this behavior was expected of them by others. This can be seen when participants were asked how often they thought bankers would cheat on this test (when compared to other interest groups). Respondents tended to think that bankers would cheat more than prison inmates on the test. This says something for what expect of the people we trust with our money.

In the end, says Spicer, changing the perception of what it means to be a banker might be required:

… Things like “Greed is good” and associations with winning at any cost might be downplayed. Other characteristics, such as being trustworthy and having integrity could be played up. Over time this would hopefully lead to bankers thinking about their collective identity in a different way. And the result would, hopefully, be that when they are faced with a situation where no one is looking, they do the right thing — like the rest of the population usually does.

Pie in the sky. Hopefully, right (twice). When the financial incentives are so high — in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and in corporate boardrooms elsewhere — enforcement lax to nonexistent, and punishments limited to slap-on-the-wrist fines for the company and not individuals, who is going to play up trustworthiness and integrity?

When the country can be suckered into chasing phantom felons at the ballot box (a high risk, low reward crime) while firms and CEOs who took the world to the brink of collapse defraud homeowners, investors, and courts get bailouts and walk, and with Congress controlled by “a weird amalgam of straight up feudalists and insane libertarians,” don’t hold your breath for a cultural Road to Damascus experience anytime soon.

The other dispossessed
by Tom Sullivan

This week the president presented his new immigration plan for undocumented immigrants. The right will hate it as much as the left will insist it is the decent and humane thing to do.

But Democrats might consider that, unless they widen their focus, doing the right thing for undocumented immigrants and other left-leaning voting groups will further alienate a neglected bloc of voters they very much need to pay more attention to: the white working class. Democrats lost them in 2014 by 30 points.

At PoliticsNC, Thomas Mills explains:

For workers, wages have been stagnant for more than a decade and for most of the past 30 years. For a while, easy credit gave a sense of improving lifestyles, but that illusion came crashing down in the recession. Working class families got hit the hardest and have yet to recover. They’ve also not seen much offered in assistance.

However, their neighbors, some who don’t work and some who are in the country illegally, keep getting help. They want something for themselves. Instead, they see affirmative action programs give minority families and businesses a hand up, or as they see it, an unfair advantage. They see the president offering residency and the benefits of this country to undocumented workers, while they’ve been hard-working, law-abiding citizens who aren’t sure they can offer their own children a better quality of life.

Republicans understand these reactions and have exploited them. Democrats, in contrast, make the case for why the policies are the right thing to do. In short, Republicans appeal to emotions while Democrats appeal to morality and reason. In politics, emotion wins almost every time.

Democrats are losing working-class whites faster than demographics and a younger base of voters can shift the balance in their favor, writes Mills. Plus, they hate welfare, as Kevin Drum says. So while the left’s focus on helping disadvantaged classes feels like (and is) a good and moral thing to do, the struggling white, middle-class worker — feeling pretty dispossessed himself — looks on and feels ignored.
The GOP will at least give him a lip-service tax cut and somebody to blame: the undeserving poor and their benefactors, the Democrats.

Kevin Drum writes:

It’s pointless to argue that this perception is wrong. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not. But it’s there. And although it’s bound up with plenty of other grievances—many of them frankly racial, but also cultural, religious, and geographic—at its core you have a group of people who are struggling and need help, but instead feel like they simply get taxed and taxed for the benefit of someone else. Always someone else. If this were you, you wouldn’t vote for Democrats either.

Complaining that polls show progressive policies are widely popular doesn’t win elections. Especially when a frustrated populace complains that there’s no difference between parties and Democrats in leadership go out of their way to reinforce it. The buzzword solution seems to be populism, but it’s one thing to say and another to communicate effectively when it’s virtually a dead language, and Democrats’ leading 2016 contender doesn’t speak it.

An old anecdote about George H.W. Bush comes to mind:

“Colleagues say that while Bush understands thoroughly the complexities of issues, he does not easily fit them into larger themes,” Ajemian wrote. “This has led to the charge that he lacks vision. It rankles him. Recently he asked a friend to help him identify some cutting issues for next year’s campaign. Instead, the friend suggested that Bush go alone to Camp David for a few days to figure out where he wanted to take the country. ‘Oh,’ said Bush in clear exasperation, ‘the vision thing.’ The friend’s advice did not impress him.”

Promising a laundry list of policies, however popular, will not impress a dispossessed white, working class failed by a rigged system unless they fit into a vision of a fairer economy and a more secure quality of life.

Compassionate at birth
by Tom Sullivan

Genesis 4

9 And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?

One of the takeaways from the Genesis account of Cain’s murder of his brother is, yes, you are. And we are wired that way, suggest experiments involving young children. Cognitive scientist Paul Bloom, author of Just Babies told Inquiring Minds last week that a basic sense of morality likely developed via Darwinian evolution:

“I think all babies are created equal in that all normal babies—all babies without brain damage—possess some basic foundational understanding of morality and some foundational moral impulses,” says Bloom on the Inquiring Minds podcast.

The question is how much of our moral sensibility is innate and how much is acculturation? By studying babies before they receive instruction and language, Bloom and other researchers hope to get at that answer. Using simple puppet plays , researchers find that babies and toddlers exhibit a sense of fairness, and a preference for “helping” characters. They avoid “hindering” ones.

Interestingly, as the toddlers get a little older, this sense of fairness seems to morph into pure egalitarianism—at least when it comes to distributing other people’s stuff. “There’s a lot of research suggesting that when it comes to divvying up resources that strangers possess, they are socialists—they like to share things equally,” says Bloom.

When asked to hand out treats to other people or to stuffed animals, 3- and 4-year-old children will divide resources equally, if at all possible. Even if they know that one person deserves more of a resource than another because she worked harder for it, they will still opt for equal distribution. In a study of 5-to-8-year-olds, when it was impossible to divide resources equally—for example, if the children were given five erasers to distribute to two people—they would even throw the extra eraser in the trash instead of giving more to one person than the other.

“But this compassion and this helping, it all pertains to the baby’s own group,” says Bloom. They are less naturally generous with out-group members.

By our natures, we strongly value those around us over strangers. And to the extent that you and I don’t, to the extent that you and I might recognize that somebody suffering, I don’t know, from the Ebola virus in Africa, is a life just as valuable as those of our closest friends and family, that’s an extraordinary cultural accomplishment. And it’s something that’s not in the genes. It’s not what we’re born with.

What strikes me is how this research echoes something paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey said about Turkana Boy in speculating about the development of compassion in early Man:

Bipedalism carried an enormous price, where compassion was what you paid your ticket with. You simply can’t abandon somebody who’s incapacitated because the rest will abandon you next time it comes to be your turn.

There but for the grace of God. Compassion has an evolutionary advantage, Leakey suggests. Perhaps it is what helped us rise above the law of the jungle.

The irony is that a libertarian-leaning conservative posted the Mother Jones article on Bloom — “Science Says Your Baby Is a Socialist” — to a Facebook forum as a tweak to lefties (socialist babies, I suppose). In fact, it would seem that a movement that sneers at being your brother’s keeper in organizing human society is hardly an accomplishment, cultural, political, or evolutionary.

What kind of people are they?
by Tom Sullivan

Walmart is a store my wife refuses to set foot in. We have that luxury. Then again, there are plenty of Walmarts in rural areas heavily frequented by poorer shoppers who don’t. Then again, Walmart does not seem to have learned what Henry Ford knew: unless you actually pay your employees a decent salary, they won’t be able to buy your products. Walmart’s (and others’) answer is to cheapen everything, customers and employees included. Can’t afford to shop elsewhere? Tough luck.

Since 2000, Public Eye has staged a counter-event to the World Economic Forum to highlight bad corporate actors. Walmart is in their sights again:

Walmart workers in 10 countries joined a global day of action on Wednesday to demand better wages and treatment for employees, as a public interest group nominated the retailer for a Lifetime Award as “worst corporation in the world”.

Organizers with the group OUR Walmart estimated that about 300 protesters would march on Walmart’s headquarters in India and block the gate. Another 200 people were expected to protest at the company’s headquarters in Mexico City. Workers in Argentina, Brazil and Canada were also expected to participate.

Public Eye has nominated Walmart for “worst corporation in the world.” They will have company:

In 2005, Walmart received a Public Eye award in the labor category for “lack of respect for human and labor rights along its supply chain in places such as Lesotho, Kenya, and Thailand”. This year, Public Eye will give a lifetime achievement award to one of its previous winners. Goldman Sachs and Chevron are also among those nominated. Consumers can submit their votes over the next two months.

In an op-ed awhile back, I explored how Sam Walton, the pickup-driving, underdog owner of a small, American-flag-draped chain of five-and-dime stores from Bentonville, AR, went from being Everyman Sam to selling cheap, plastic crap from China as the downtown-killing Prince of Darkness. How many stores did that take? Can you be too successful? How big is too big?

The best I could figure it was when he took his company public. In privately held or closely held companies, one man (or woman) with a vision is its guiding light. He/she has as much of himself/herself invested as money. How the company comports itself is a direct reflection of its founder’s character, and those with any moral compass take the reputation of their firm personally. But once the company goes public, once it is sold to nameless, faceless absentee-landlord investors, that connection is broken. It’s no longer personal. The visionary loses control, the soul and any morality he/she brought to the company is lost, and like a great white shark, its eyes go black and dead. All that remains is appetite and instinct.

Like Walmart, the thing that’s wrong with business today is not the corporation per se, but the disconnected, amoral nature of the public corporate “person”. Writing about megabanks, Matt Taibbi puts it more bluntly:

… what we’ve found out in the last years is that these Too-Big-To-Fail megabanks like Goldman no longer see the margin in being truly trustworthy. The game now is about getting paid as much as possible and as quickly as possible, and if your client doesn’t like the way you managed his money, well, fuck him – let him try to find someone else on the market to deal him straight.

The Public Eye protest in Miami was mostly rained out, but a few people showed up nevertheless:

“I’m standing with protesters all over the world today to send a message to Walmart and the Waltons that we need better pay,” said Emily Wells, one of the protesters. Wells makes $9.50 an hour and relies on food stamps to make ends meet. “As the richest family in America and one of the richest in the world, we all know the Waltons can afford to pay $15 an hour to the workers that make them richer every day.”

Maybe. But that’s not the new business model.

If corporations are people it’s legitimate to ask, what kind of people are they?

Not gonna go there with Uber

by Tom Sullivan

We’ll spare you the easy Uber jokes and get right to it. The ridesharing service is not having a good week after a couple of Buzzfeed articles hit social media. It seems Uber executives might like to surveil both customers and critics. The WaPo has this:

The controversy stemmed from remarks by Uber Senior Vice President Emil Michael on Friday night as he spoke of his desire to spend $1 million to dig up information on “your personal lives, your families,” referring to journalists who write critically about the company, according to a report published Monday night by Buzzfeed. The same story said a different Uber executive once had examined the private travel records of a Buzzfeed reporter during an e-mail exchange about an article without seeking permission to access the data.

That combination of vindictiveness and willingness to tap into user information provoked outrage Tuesday on social-media sites, spawning the hashtag “#ubergate” on Twitter. Critics recounted a series of Uber privacy missteps, including a 2012 blog post in which a company official analyzed anonymous ridership data in Washington and several other cities in an attempt to determine the frequency of overnight sexual liaisons by customers — which Uber dubbed “Rides of Glory.”

Our daily interaction with tech companies means “we have never been more extortable,” according Chris Hoofnagle, a UC Berkeley law professor specializing in online privacy.

In an earlier Buzzfeed article, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick made it seem Obamacare was an enabler for services such as his. Jonathan Chait writes:

This weekend, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick appeared at a dinner in New York and, in a few words, fatally undercut the premise of the Republican Party’s economic philosophy. Kalanick told reporters that Obamacare had been a crucial element in his firm’s success. “It’s huge,” he said, according to BuzzFeed. “The democratization of those types of benefits allow people to have more flexible ways to make a living. They don’t have to be working for The Man.”

The destructive power of this blunt statement works in two ways. The first, of course, is that it rebuts the Republican indictment of Obamacare, opposition to which is a matter of holy writ within the party. Of all the grounds for Republican hatred of Obamacare, the most deeply held is the belief that it amounts to onerous regulation that holds back capitalistic dynamism. That belief is not only foundational on the right, but nebulous enough that, even as conservative predictions about Obamacare’s cost and functionality obviously fail, the deeper suspicion that it is invisibly rotting away the foundations of capitalism can linger without any real evidence.

Anyway, that’s management’s pitch, if not the Republicans’, but no cause for celebration. How is that benign-sounding “sharing economy” working for Uber’s independent contractors (the company prefers partner-drivers)? “It’s like owning my own business; I love it,” says one. Except that’s a lie drivers feel they must tell or be “deactivated” for low customer ratings:

Gabriele Lopez, an LA Uber driver, also lies. “We just sit there and smile, and tell everyone that the job’s awesome, because that’s what they want to hear,” said Lopez, who’s been driving for UberX, the company’s low-end car service, since it launched last summer.

In fact, if you ask Uber drivers off the clock what they think of the company, it often gets ugly fast. “Uber’s like an exploiting pimp,” said Arman, an Uber driver in LA who asked me to withhold his last name out of fear of retribution. “Uber takes 20 percent of my earnings, and they treat me like shit — they cut prices whenever they want. They can deactivate me whenever they feel like it, and if I complain, they tell me to fuck off.”

A sweet bunch. Uber recently hired Obama campaign guru, David Plouffe, “king of dishing out liberal kool-aid,” to help with marketing. In another race to the bottom, it seems everyone from left to right is being played by this democratized, naked capitalism. It’s a heads we win, tails you lose business model. Just the way they like it.

My well doesn’t want your fracking waste water
by Tom Sullivan

Fracking continues to gain in unpopularity. During the recent election, candidates and campaigners told me one sure way to flip voters from the opposition — especially rural voters — was to inform them the Republican supported fracking.

There’s trouble at t’drill in Bakersfield, CA. “Errors were made.” (video at KNTV link):

State officials allowed oil and gas companies to pump nearly three billion gallons of waste water into underground aquifers that could have been used for drinking water or irrigation.

Those aquifers are supposed to be off-limits to that kind of activity, protected by the EPA.

Nah. Never happen where you live, right?

“This is something that is going to slowly contaminate everything we know around here,” said fourth- generation Kern County almond grower Tom Frantz, who lives down the road from several of the injection wells in question.

According to state records, as many as 40 water supply wells, including domestic drinking wells, are located within one mile of a single well that’s been injecting into non-exempt aquifers.

Kern County community organizer Juan Flores told reporters, “No one from this community will drink from the water from out of their well. The people are worried. They’re scared.”

But there’s nothing to see here, little people:

The trade association that represents many of California’s oil and gas companies says the water-injection is a “paperwork issue.” In a statement issued to NBC Bay Area, Western States Petroleum Association spokesman Tupper Hull said “there has never been a bona vide claim or evidence presented that the paperwork confusion resulted in any contamination of drinking supplies near the disputed injection wells.”

However, state officials tested 8 water supply wells within a one-mile radius of some of those wells.
Four water samples came back with higher than allowable levels of nitrate, arsenic, and thallium.
Those same chemicals are used by the oil and gas industry in the hydraulic fracturing process and can be found in oil recovery waste-water.

“We are still comparing the testing of what was the injection water to what is the tested water that came out of these wells to find out if they were background levels or whether that’s the result of oil and gas operation, but so far it’s looking like it’s background,” said James Marshall from the California Department of Conservation.

Marshall acknowledged that those chemicals could have come from oil extraction, and not necessarily wastewater disposal.

I know, right? What a relief.