Great Moments In Corporate Citizenship

The West, Texas fertilizer plant carried only $1 million in liability insurance, reports AP:

Tyler lawyer Randy C. Roberts said he and other attorneys who have filed lawsuits against West Fertilizer’s owners were told Thursday that the plant carried only $1 million in liability insurance. Brook Laskey, an attorney hired by the plant’s insurer to represent West Fertilizer Co., confirmed the amount Saturday in an email to The Associated Press, after the Dallas Morning News first reported it.

“The bottom line is, this lack of insurance coverage is just consistent with the overall lack of responsibility we’ve seen from the fertilizer plant, starting from the fact that from day one they have yet to acknowledge responsibility,” Roberts said.

Roberts said he expects the plant’s owner to ask a judge to divide the $1 million in insurance money among the plaintiffs, several of whom he represents, and then file for bankruptcy.

He said he wasn’t surprised that the plant was carrying such a small policy.

“It’s rare for Texas to require insurance for any kind of hazardous activity,” he said. “We have very little oversight of hazardous activities and even less regulation.”

A $1 million policy is not gonna do squat for West, Texas or the 14 families who lost a loved one, or those 200 injured people. But I guess the glorious free hand of the market will be there for them, right? That and federal disaster aid, of course!

By the way, maybe in addition to all of the prayers and moments of silence, the Texas House and Senate might want to pass a few regulations to help ensure something like this doesn’t happen again. After all, taxpayers all around the country are going to be footing the bill for the negligence of a Texas business — and the failure of Texas legislators to adequately regulate their dangerous industries. So yes, Gov. Rick Perry, as long as we all have to pay for it, you can take your “states rights” and shove it, you arrogant phony cowboy.

And since we’re talking about this, Texas is starting to look an awful lot like Bangladesh and China. Except in those places, the evil business owners are arrested.

Look At The Label & Remember

Next time you see “Made in Bangladesh” on your clothing, remember this picture:

This is the factory in Bangladesh which supposedly made clothing for Wal-mart, Dress Barn, Benetton, and others, where workers were ordered inside despite the sudden appearance of large cracks in the building, and a hundred or more died as a result:

The cracks that suddenly appeared on Tuesday afternoon in the Rana Plaza building were large enough to send workers fleeing into the street.

They made the television news that night, but the building’s owner, Mohammed Sohel Rana, told reporters the sudden appearance of cracks was “nothing serious”.

He did not say that police had ordered him to shut the factory. Nor did he mention that the top four floors of the building, in Savar, north of Dhaka, were constructed illegally without permits.

I know the New York Times‘ Nicholas Kristof has been trying to convince us that outsourcing our manufacturing to poverty-stricken countries like Bangladesh is a good thing because jobs and blah blah. Pretty sure he’s not saying such things with anything close to a straight face any more, though. As NPR notes:

The collapse comes just five months after 112 workers were killed in a fire in another apparel factory in Bangladesh that had supplied Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club.

I’d like steal a phrase (and documentary title) and say this is the high cost of those low prices. But actually, it’s not even low prices anymore; Benetton ain’t cheap. I’ve seen “Made in Bangladesh” on clothes I’ve purchased at higher-end stores, too. This seems to be “the way it’s done” these days. Clothing manufacturing has been outsourced to desperately poor countries where people work in Triangle Shirt Waist Factory conditions. I certainly didn’t ask for that, and I have no control over it. Even if I don’t buy a $10 T-shirt from CostCo, my clothes are still made overseas under specious conditions. At least if they were made in the U.S. I’d have some, tiny shred of confidence that the workers weren’t abused in the process (though the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion has even put that to the test). It’s damn hard to avoid it.

I really don’t want people dying to make my stuff. I don’t get why that’s so hard for Wal-mart and Dress Barn and Macy’s and The Gap and everyone else to understand.

Horrible People, Pilot Flying J Edition

More details have emerged in the fraud case against Pilot Flying J, the family business of Gov. Bill Haslam which is run by his brother. The company headquarters was raided by the FBI on Tuesday. And man, is this turning out to be a big ol’ shitpile.

The allegation is that the company intentionally reduced monthly rebates due trucking company customers to increase the company’s profitability on monthly P&L statements — and thereby increase sales commissions, which were based on those figures. According to the FBI affidavit, the practice was shockingly commonplace and widespread, involving a wide array of employees — account executives, regional supervisors, executive management; it was even openly discussed in a meeting attended by Pilot’s President Mark Hazelwood and CEO Jimmy Haslam III. This was no whispered back-room deal done under the cloak of secrecy — unless you’re a Pilot Flying J customer, of course. Nope, as layed out in the FBI affidavit, it was business as usual, even something discussed in sales meetings. Everyone, save customers, seemed to know about it.

Even more shocking is the incredible hubris on display in recorded conversations. “Fuck ‘em early and fuck ‘em often,” says John Freeman, Pilot’s VP of sales on page 50 of the affidavit. What a swell guy.

On Page 52 we hear Arnold Ralenkotter, Pilot regional sales director, joking with Brian Mosher, Director of National Sales, about ripping off what Ralenkotter called “a fuckin’ Russian mafia guy” in Illinois named “Pav”:

MOSHER: How’d it end up?
RALENKOTTER: Well, we agreed to the across-the-board deal. And we didn’t change a thing.
MOSHER: He doesn’t fuckin’ have a clue. He doesn’t have a clue.
RALENKOTTER: But he slid that, he slid the, you know, the Love’s offer letter, where they kinda lay it all out? Walked out of there, I said don’t change a thing. Let him believe whatever the hell he wants.
MOSHER: He didn’t have any fuckin’ clue.
RALENKOTTER: Dumbass.

Mosher and the rest treated customers like the enemy. If you were a smart negotiator, they’re all like, “How dare you! You gonna mess with me? I’m gonna mess with you.” But if a customer didn’t understand Pilot’s complicated pricing program, they’re like “Stupid rubes! You deserve to get ripped off!” Indeed, these guys seemed to take special pleasure in preying upon — no, relishing — customers’ ignorance about pricing and rebates:

SCHIMMEL: Let me ask a question. Even though, do we have an idea of what percentage of people out there truly know, have an understanding of discounts? I mean …
MOSHER: I would tell you it’s, I’m gonna say way less than 50%. I’m thinking it’s 25% or less, that really, really know on a day-in-day-out basis. Now, again, that depends, right? Because if you’re sending that customer a daily price fetch, he doesn’t have to know, all he has to do is save his e-mails, okay? Because he can go back and recalculate this stuff. (Laughter.) But the guy that doesn’t– huh?
WELCH: Some of’em. (Laughter.)
MOSHER: Some of ‘em, some of ‘em don’t know what a spreadsheet is. I’m not kiddin’. So, again, my point is this: Know your customer. Know what you’re sending him, know what his preferences are, know how sophisticated he is, okay? If the guy’s sophisticated and he truly has gone out and gotten deals from the other competitors and he’s gettin’ daily prices from us, don’t jack with his discounts, ’cause he’s gonna know, okay? But the guy that’s just sayin’ “Cost-plus, cost-plus, cost-plus, I need cost-plus.” “Why do you need cost-plus and what do you know about cost-plus? How’s cost-plus compare to retail-minus over the last three months?” “I don’t know, but Love’s is sayin’ it, so I need it.” Solution: Tell him we can do it. Tell him we can do it on a rebate.

What despicable people. I wonder if Gov. Haslam regrets his decision to keep his Pilot Oil holdings out of his “near-sighted” trust, under the reasoning that,

… Tennesseans are “very familiar” with his relationship with Pilot, a privately held company with annual revenues of $20 billion.

Yes, we are very familiar, indeed. Grab the dang popcorn, peeps.

When Pigs Fly

This will happen when monkeys fly out of Rick Santorum’s armpit:

The report calls on Republicans to counter the party’s image as an arm of business. It says Republicans should “blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare. We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file workers are left unemployed. We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.”

Yes, you should! Why don’t you? Maybe because it’s really hard to blow a whistle with the same mouth you’re using to fellate corporate interests and Wall Street bankers?

It gets better:

Beyond that, however, there are no policy details. Indeed, the authors point out that they are not a policy committee, in a section calling on the GOP to “embrace and champion” comprehensive immigration reform without further specifics.

In addition, an extensive set of “inclusion” proposals for minority groups, including Latinos, Asians and African Americans, appears to mimic similar, failed outreach efforts by various RNC chairs over the last 30 years.

Of course there are no policy details. The Republican Party hasn’t had a new idea since Ronald Reagan. Conservatism by its very nature is the antithesis to new ideas. These are the same people who don’t believe in science, in evolution, in a living, breathing Constitution. They are cemented in the past, indeed that is the very definition of being conservative.

It’s hard not to look at this RNC “report” as nothing more than another canon fired in the war between establishment Republicans and the Tea Birchers. The RNC’s report is getting a lot of national attention today, and that’s no coincidence: conservatives just spent the weekend grumbling about how they want segregation back and cheering tired old Telepromptr jokes at the CPAC freak show. The Teanuts are the Neanderthals of conservatism, trying to drag the Republican Party back to the swamp. Reince Priebus has thrown this post mortem out as a warning to those rabble rousers that they’d better step in line or get thrown under the bus. Good luck with that!

Fun fact: remove all of the vowels from Reince Priebus and you get RNC PR BS. Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humor?

First Draft Tuesday

I have posted a rant about Big Food, Badvertising, and corporate idiocy over at First Draft today: Capitalism Has Failed. Catch me over there.

A Few Words On The Whole Foods-John Mackey Thing

God, liberals, what can I say. Sometimes we annoy the hell out of me.

This is the second time the interwebs is in high dudgeon over something said/written by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey. Mackey, who is hawking a book (Conscious Capitalism, and no, I haven’t read it) used the word “fascism” to describe the Affordable Care Act. This got liberals all upset, especially since they well remember his 2009 Wall Street Journal op-ed proposing eight “free market” reforms that he thought would fix our healthcare problems better than Obamacare.

Let me interject here and say, Mackey is an unabashed Libertarian. I do not agree with Libertarianism. At all. I think his “eight reforms” — stuff like tort reform, selling health insurance across state lines, and removing government coverage mandates — are horrible ideas, many already proven failures. He also wrote that if only everyone would just eat a vegetarian, low fat diet, all of our healthcare woes would magically go away. This was an astonishingly simplistic, insensitive and childish thing to say about a really complicated national issue. But hey, one of my biggest problems with Libertarians is their juvenile belief in magical thinking.

Anyway, that was around three years ago. This time, people seem to be hung up on Mackey’s use of the word “fascist.” The thing is, I said the same thing myself back in 2009. Put aside all of the totalitarian/nationalistic baggage the word carries, and consider its economic definition. Aren’t we always told that fascism is the merger of state and corporate power? So how is a government requirement that private citizens buy a product from a private, for-profit corporation without also offering a “public option” not fascism?

Mackey now admits his choice of words was poor. I watched him on CBS This Morning say we needed a new term, one that doesn’t allude to authoritarian regimes.

This made me laugh. Mr. Mackey, I believe the word you’re searching for is “corporatism.” Funny that wouldn’t occur to the CEO of a big corporation. Ah well. Libertarians, what can I say? They always wear blinders. I have to wonder: if Obamacare mandated that everyone buy organic food, would Mackey have a problem with that?

Mackey is entitled to his opinions, as are we all. I don’t agree with him on everything. But it seems a shame that he stuck his foot in his mouth on the Obamacare “fascism” stuff, because really liberals should be behind a big chunk of what he’s saying now.

Again, I haven’t read his book, but I’ve read several interviews he’s given about it. And basically what he seems to be telling his fellow corporate CEOs is, stop being such selfish, greedy dicks.

For example:

“I really don’t think shareholders should come first, I think it’s fundamentally a bad strategy,” Mackey said yesterday at a Captains of Industry series interview with Norman Pearlstine, chief content officer of Bloomberg News. “Happy team members result in happy customers, happy customers result in happy investors. If you put shareholders first, you won’t get there.”

The event at the 92nd Street Y in New York was sponsored by Bloomberg Businessweek.

Mackey, 59, a self-styled “conscious” capitalist and longtime nonconformist, has written a new book in which he criticizes companies that focus solely on maximizing profit. The book, “Conscious Capitalism,” was released this week.

In the book, Mackey and his co-author, Raj Sisodia, a Bentley University marketing professor, discuss ways to create value and lift people from poverty. Mackey’s bottom line: making money need not be a zero-sum game.

I agree with that 100%. And I’m not a Libertarian. I also agree with this:

Mackey tells Inskeep that companies must have a higher purpose than just making money.

For example, when Whole Foods decided it wanted to stop selling overfished species of cod and octopus at its seafood counters, it didn’t just abruptly cut off its suppliers. Instead, the company gave its suppliers three years to come up with a better way of fishing; during that time, the seafood stayed for sale — but with a label of “unsustainable.”

In the end, Whole Foods, working with the Marine Stewardship Council (we’ll have much more on them later), was able to find one supplier of sustainable cod.

I agree with that approach. I also find it a little strange that Mackey doesn’t recognize the flaw in his magical Libertarian ideology: why aren’t all corporations like Whole Foods? Why isn’t everyone focusing on the big picture, why aren’t they all doing the right thing, instead of just focusing on profit? Does Mackey not get that a health insurance company doesn’t make money off of certain groups of people? Like, really, really sick people? That Libertarianism requires a whole set of presuppositions that don’t exist in the real world?

I guess not. But c’mon, liberals. Let’s join in the conversation here, instead of calling for boycotts over the misuse of a word like “fascism” — especially when a lot of us were saying the same thing two years ago.

So no, I’m not boycotting Whole Foods. Nor am I nominating John Mackey for sainthood. Remember this? Remember when Mackey created an online sockpuppet to bash rival Wild Oats in online stock forums? At a time when he was trying to buy that company? Hilarious. Also, not nice. John Mackey, you’re kind of a dick, too. Something else I can say about most Libertarians.

By the way, this reminds me of the one bumper sticker I want to see. It goes something like this:

Who Is John Galt? And Why Is He Such An Asshole?

Ha ha. Love that one. So, boycott Whole Foods if you want to, but I won’t. But I will ask my fellow liberals to stop reacting in such a knee-jerk way to the use of loaded words like “fascism” and whatnot. Please. This makes us no better than the Teanuts who call for the fainting couches every time a liberal says a mean joke about Sarah Palin.

The Car Pooling Corporation

Hah. A California man is challenging the state’s corporate personhood law in a very unusual way:

San Rafael’s Jonathan Frieman is now fighting a ticket he received for driving alone in the carpool lane, saying that he did have a passenger at the time he was pulled over. That passenger was his corporation papers, which he carried with him in the passengers seat.

Frieman sees the ticket as a chance to legally comment on the definition of a corporation as being a person.

He got the ticket back in October, but he claims he wasn’t really driving alone because he had his corporation papers with him and a corporation is a person under the law.

This is brilliant. Maybe we should all try this. Though I can see a judge throwing his argument out of court. I’m reminded that last year, the City of Los Angeles approved a resolution ending corporate personhood; perhaps Frieman should have tried his stunt in Southern California.

When Government Gets Out Of The Way Of Business

You know what happens when government gets out of the way of business? People die:

Massachusetts regulators in 2004 proposed a formal reprimand for a company now linked to a deadly meningitis outbreak, but they never delivered it after the company protested the reprimand could be “fatal to the business.”

The sanction by the Board of Registration in Pharmacy was included in a proposed consent agreement that was meant to resolve complaints against the New England Compounding Center in Framingham. The complaints included a failure to meet accepted standards for making the same steroid that’s been connected to the outbreak.

The agreement was among documents released this week by the state Department of Health that provide more details about past incidents at NECC, which was shut down in the wake of the fungal meningitis outbreak that has reached 17 states, sickening 312 people, 24 of whom have died. Compounding pharmacies like NECC custom mix solutions in doses or forms generally not commercially available.

[...]

The case ended without disciplinary action as part of a different consent agreement reached with the board in 2006.

The 2006 consent agreement was signed under Gov. Romney. Of course it was! But to learn a lesson from this case one needn’t finger-point, play the “blame game,” “politicize a tragedy” and do all of that other stuff Republicans say is wrong when it makes their side look bad but which they’re only too happy to indulge in when it serves them. Nope, we don’t even have to go that far, not here. Because the whole “get government out of the way of business” thing is the Republican Party mantra, it’s the central plank of their platform, it’s the very heart of Republicanism. It is an article of faith among Republicans that government is the problem, not the solution, it’s in the way of job creation, economic growth, prosperity, you name it.

Indeed, it is the key message of this campaign ad by Dr. Steve Dickerson, the Republican who will probably end up being my state senator, much to my chagrin. In his ad he tells us he’s not just a doctor but also a “small businessman,” and by virtue of this experience he knows that the government needs to get out of the way of small business. He says that, right in his ad. And there are 24 people who are dead now and hundreds more who are sick, all across the country, because some people in government decided to get out of the way of a business which by all rights should have been put to death eight years ago.

What’s that old joke? I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one? Yeah, that’s funny, sad and true, all at the same time.

Here’s the problem with that “get the government out of the way of business” stuff. Events always unfold proving that wrong. Always. There will always be a business whining about government regulations and government oversight, how it’s hurting them and how if it hurts them it hurts us because jobs and free markets and argle bargle blah blah. But what hurts us worse is when they unleash their contaminated medicine on the public, or their contaminated peanut butter, or when they ignore workplace safety laws. People die when that happens. Or, when they treat the economy like their personal casino. Or when a “small business” treats the public waterways like their personal sewer.

When family members die because a business did wrong the first thing people say is, “why didn’t the government prevent this from happening?” And when digging for the answer to that question, nine times out of ten you’ll find somewhere along the chain of events a Republican who felt that government was just too much in the way.

KitchenAid Flunks Social Media

KitchenAid, purveyor of crappy kitchen appliances made in China (and a division of Whirlpool, last seen shipping American jobs to Mexico), made a huge social media boo-boo last night. One of their social media team members sent this Tweet under the company profile:

Ha ha that’s so funny, joking about the president’s dead grandmother! Hilarious! I almost forgot to laugh!

Needless to say, there’s probably a job opening in the social media division of KitchenAid today.

Dump The Dinosaur

Three days without phone/DSL service for the third time this year has me wondering what our Corporate Overlords are smoking. When a repair technician did show up (after 5 pm, thank you very much, when I’m cooking dinner and running to the vet to pick up the dog) he told me he doesn’t even work in the residential service unit, but the residential crews are so backed up, the business teams are working 12 hours of overtime to help them catch up.

This, and the 15-20 minutes of time you have to wait on hold to request service in the first place makes me wonder why the hell AT&T hasn’t, you know, hired more people? I mean, it’s not like we don’t have 8.3% unemployment? Hello? Randall Stephenson may have screwed up on that T-Mobile deal but he still gets $22 million a year; surely he knows that in this day and age, cutting people off from their communication for three days inspires them to look for alternatives.

And then I saw this:

AT&T, which has a total workforce of 252,330 people, has been in negotiations for months with labor unions to cut costs in its landline business, which has declined rapidly in recent years.

Oh! Is feature, not bug. I guess land lines are a communications dinosaur and they’d just as soon we all dumped ours. Sucky service and lame excuses are the m.o. they use to shove customers out the door. In short: AT&T doesn’t want your landline business. They want your cell business.

Okay, AT&T, I got the memo. Readers, please let me know in comments how y’all handle your communications. I only have AT&T so I can get DSL with another (local) company anyway, whom I love. Mr. Beale is still convinced with need a landline phone number, though the only people who call it are his mother and Rachel From Cardholder Services offering me some kind of credit card scam. Rachel calls me a lot and I’d be thrilled to be rid of her, while my mother in law can call our cell phones. We do use the phone line for things like alarm monitoring and on-demand movies, but surely you can get some kind of basic phone service that covers those uses, right?

And what about high-speed cable internet? Anyone use that? Hate Comcast? Love it? Let me know.