Years after Enron, business is still behaving badly

This is a good opinion piece on how ethics was the word-du-jour at the turn of the 21st century after the bankruptcies & crises of Enron, Tyco, WorldCom etc., but nowadays, it seems that the ship has not sailed much since then.

The corporate behaviour & corporate governance were supposed to improve & become much more ethically driven in the new century. However, that dream is not coming to fruition. Unscrupulous business leaders are abound & ethics & morality are out the window at most corporations around the world. Why is this so?

Here, the author of this opinion piece & I differ, as to the reasons of these unethical practices in the business world. Mr. Stern, the author of this opinion piece, takes the secular view that punishments have been feeble & lacking for those unethical business leaders, & if the punishments become stronger, then businesses would become much more ethical.

However, those punishments can only be made tougher by the judiciary branch of the government. Ironically, that branch is indirectly controlled by those same unscrupulous business leaders, who are supposed to be severely punished for their unethical practices. Business leaders make friends, lobby, & perhaps, fund the political leaders who they think will further their views & agendas in the political fields. Those political figures then pick & choose the judiciary, who are then supposed to be making new rules & punishments. Since, everyone is connected politically, nobody is going to stab anyone in the back.

Problem is that ethics & morality are arbitrarily measured in the secular world. Everyone has a different yardstick to measure them. One's ethics on a matter can be quite different from another's. This creates huge differences of opinion. For instance, one would think that a living wage for all employees should be ethically driven idea & every senior manager should lobby for it in its organization. However, that can reduce the net profits, which in turn, can affect the Earnings-Per-Share (EPS) firgures, which in turn, will reduce the value of the shares. I don't think that wealthy shareholders & institutional shareholders would be very happy with that.

Ethics & morality can only be same, when everyone, in a specific society, believes in a religion. Religion sets the same bar for ethics & morality for everyone in the society. Ethics & morality cannot exist without religion, regardless of what that religion is. Essentially, all religions preach the same basic values, so the same basic ethical guidelines would come to fruition when the society, & the business people, look to religion for their ethical compass, instead of human made laws.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/11/enron-business-behaving-badly-volkswagen-sports-direct

Respect, integrity, communication and excellence. Those were Enron’s core values, which, the energy company said, guided its behaviour as a “global corporate citizen”. We know how that story ended: bankruptcy, court cases and (unusually for the business world) custodial sentences. The once-mighty accountancy firm of Arthur Andersen was also brought down.

Over a decade later bad corporate behaviour – the stuff we find out about, anyway – continues to make front page news. That dependable, “clean diesel” Volkswagen turns out not to be so clean after all. Thomas Cook takes an age to come up with a decent and civilised response to human tragedy. And now Sports Direct is revealed to be conducting business in a brutal fashion. Boardroom practices at the company may be comically bizarre, but life in their Shirebrook warehouse is not funny at all.

The public have noticed. A survey (pdf) this week for the Institute of Business Ethics found that 39% of people think business is behaving unethically. The three biggest causes for concern are tax avoidance, executive pay and exploitative labour practices. Two-fifths of the public have given a vote of no confidence in British business. That is, potentially at least, a lot of customers.

Why, apart from the headline-grabbing scandals, is business seen in such a poor light? To some extent this represents a failure of the “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) movement. Bad CSR deserves to fail and be seen for what it is – a flimsy public relations exercise. Good companies don’t need CSR programmes. They think hard about their activities and the impact they have on the world. They worry about how they make their money. Good companies make sustainable profits, and don’t externalise the costs of doing business on to the world around them.

But why does bad corporate behaviour still exist? The chances of getting found out are much higher than in the past. Everyone carrying a smartphone is equipped with a vital tool of investigative journalism.

Fearlessness, or shamelessness, may have something to do with the “risk/reward relationship”, as it is called in the financial world. The rewards for breaking the rules can be high. But the punishments are often feeble – fines (merely another cost of doing business) and loss of reputation (cushioned by a healthy bank balance and lifetime financial security).

Very few business leaders have ended up behind bars on account of their actions. “You’re going to jail!” screamed angry protesters at Dick Fuld, the former chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers, in 2008. But he isn’t going to jail. He is going to his midtown Manhattan office to work for his new business, Matrix Advisors.

Perhaps bad corporate behaviour is explained by the fact that, whether they realise it or not, some senior executives are still coming to terms with the post-financial-crisis world. Deep down they fear it could all go wrong again, any time. They are in a hurry and are cutting corners. They also seek extravagant pay packages to cushion their ultimate, inevitable fall.

So, yes, sanctions have to get tougher, and the fear of punishment for wrongdoing has to increase sharply. One encouraging sign is that some responsible business leaders have had enough of the opprobrium brought on their heads by others. Simon Walker, director general of the Institute of Directors, said this week: “IoD members share the public’s outrage… I urge people to remember that Sports Direct is categorically not a representative of British business.”

He is right about that. And we as customers cannot complain if we continue to shop with businesses that at other times we might denounce loudly as unethical. We are all in this together.

My friend Steven Gauge has written a lovely play about taking up rugby again in middle age, called (perhaps inevitably) My Life as a Hooker. In one scene he is nervously running out on to the pitch for the first time in decades, and confesses to a team-mate that he is probably a bit rusty about the rules. Don’t worry, his fellow paunchy sportsman tells him: “Just cheat until you get caught.” This would have made a more accurate mission statement for Enron. Sadly, it appears to be the guiding ethos for too many people in business today.

Private companies profit from pay-to-play phone calls in US prisons

This is one of the examples of what happens when ethics & religion are disconnected from the general public's everyday life. Ethics is a by-product of faith & religion, regardless of which religion one believes in. But, then the general public is told that religion & ethics has no room in their daily lives.

Businesses do make a big show of conducting their businesses with ethical principles, but then everyone's ethics is different. A robber thinks that the society has done him/her wrong & is liable to pay reparations to him/her. In the same vein, the owner of a company thinks he/she has worked hard to build this business, & hence, cutting costs & increasing profits, at the expense of increasing social misery is all ethical. He/she thinks that as long as he/she is following the minimum law required of him/her, he/she is all good.

Here, the companies are extracting, or a better word would be, "extorting" money out of criminals, alleged & proven, alike. Now, some may think that since these people are criminals, & perhaps, don't have any morals & ethics, of themselves, it's all right to "extort" money out of them for their phone calls to their families. If that's the case, then perhaps, the Pope Francis should not make a habit of visiting prisons on his continental tours.

Regardless, however, as I've blogged in my prior blog posts, most criminals don't want to become criminals in the first place. Their extraneous circumstances made them criminals. Every human wants to put food on the table, clothe themselves & their families, & put a secure roof over their heads. But the unending greed of wealthy individuals to hoard as much money as they can, while keeping the government officials in their pockets, too, leave the poor out in the cold. Then, some people out of that poor public resort to violence & wrong means to support themselves & their families.

Heck, one can see the corruption of these phone companies in that they are offering latest tablets & signing bonuses (or in other words, "bribes") to prison individuals to secure these lucrative phone contracts. Is that exactly ethical or moral from any point of view?

Furthermore, the discrimination at all levels; racial, ethnic, linguistic, & regional etc. creates more misery for members of that poor public. For instance, several laws in US are considered quite harsh for African-Americans, e.g. getting arrested for not paying parking tickets or even sleeping out in park benches. The people who are getting those tickets or fines are not exactly earning 6-figure salaries but struggling to pay for their food, clothes, & rent.

Coming back to this article, these companies are earning exorbitant profits from the misery of people who are put in the so-called prison & justice system. They are essentially making money off of someone else's misery. Those people are of poverty-ridden backgrounds themselves & every nickel & dime they need to spend to talk to their loved ones, who may help them in not becoming further violent, are not going towards their loved ones' food, clothes, & rental payments.

To add insult to injury, company CEOs are actually fighting government laws, which is doing something good for a change, to keep "extorting" the poor.

So, who is the real criminal here? The one who might have been forced by his/her extraneous circumstances to forgo all ethics & morals & resort to violence or someone who is making a 6-figure salary (investors included) & has a complete control of his/her decision to not "bribe" government officials & not only reduce these calling fees but help the government come up with laws in support of reducing such high calling fees?

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https://www.rt.com/usa/312403-prison-phone-call-fees/

Private phone companies are making a pretty penny by nickel-and-diming prison inmates & their families, sometimes to the tune of $2 a minute for in-state phone calls. Yet the exorbitant fees keep taxpayers from footing the bill.

The prison phone industry has been booming since the 1990s. It’s grown to a $1.2 billion-a-year industry dominated by a few private companies, as people made some 500 million calls totaling more than 6 billion minutes both to & from prisons & jails in 2014 alone, the New York Times reported.

RT’s Lindsay France called Global Tel*Link (GTL), which contracts with Los Angeles County, to set up an account to call a fictional friend at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility.

“The nice lady on the phone told me that first off, I’d be hit with a nearly $5 sign-up fee, a possible service fee, possible facilities fee depending on where I wanted to call into,” France said. “And when my fictional friend or loved one gets out and I ask for a refund on the money left inside my account, I get hit with a fee then too.”

On top of those fees, France learned that there was no way to determine the per-minute rate of a call until it had been made & paid for.

Anthony Graves spent 18 years on death row accused of a crime for which he was later exonerated. He struggled to maintain communication with his support network at home by phone.

“That was very expensive. It was like 15 dollars for 20 minutes, 30 minutes. So very expensive all the way around. It’s like I said, at the end of the day everyone’s making a dollar now,” he told RT. “The whole rehabilitation thing is going out the window with private industries coming in and making a lot of money.”

Graves isn’t alone in paying such a high price to keep in touch. The Prison Policy Initiative reported that a call from California’s La Verne City Jail to an in-state number requires a connection fee of $12.59 & a per-minute charge of $1.15, amounting to nearly $30 for a 15-minute call.

After a decade of complaints from prison-rights groups & families of inmates, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is slowly attempting to rein in the telecom companies.

In August 2013, the FCC instituted interim requirements for interstate long-distance calls, capping rates at $0.21 per minute for debit & pre-paid calls & $0.25 per minute for collect calls. A revised version of the rules went into effect last February. Typical commercial rates ‒ those not involving the prison system ‒ cost a mere $0.04 per minute, according to the NY Times.
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Those rules didn’t affect the cost of in-state calls, however, which the Prison Policy Initiative says comprise 92% of prison phone calls. The agency began focusing on lowering the cost of all calls between prisoners & their loved ones last fall, noting that “the cost of in-state calls remains high, calling fees have mounted, and payments to prisons unrelated to the cost of providing service have escalated, driving up rates.”

The same month that the FCC rules went into effect, Securus Technologies & GTL both offered incentive-laden contracts to one Georgia county, France reported. Securus offered a little over a million-dollar signing bonus for a five-year contract with 110 free tablet computers thrown in, while GTL proposed $1.5 million upfront for a seven-year deal & threw in 150 tablets.

In response to the offers ‒ & knowing that more FCC regulations were likely in the pipeline ‒ the jail’s administrator told the companies: “Since it is highly likely that the FCC will be eliminating all inmate phone commissions in the near future, in lieu of a (MAG) Minimum Annual Guarantee, please discuss alternatives” that “would provide to supplement the loss of jail phone revenues.”

In October [2014], the FCC opened up comments on “a comprehensive, market-based approach to achieving just, fair & reasonable rates for all inmate calling – local, in-state long-distance and out-of-state long distance.” It is also looking at banning so-called “site commissions,” which are payments that prisons demand of the inmate calling service providers & are often used by prisons to pay for services & facilities not related to the cost of hosting calling services. The agency is also seeking to impose permanent rate caps on all of those services, replacing the current, interim ones.

Prison phone call providers are fighting the FCC’s rules, saying that the rate caps have forced them to lose money on those calls.

“We think some of the new rates are below our cost,” Richard Smith, president & CEO of Dallas-based Securus, told Time last February. He said his company handles 120 million calls per year at an average rate of $3.50 per call, & that, while some inmates may have paid $17 per call, those cases were “outliers” made by inmates he believed were pushing an agenda.

“This is a public policy issue,” Smith added, noting that vendors like Securus will end up paying prisons less in site commissions, which totaled $460 million in 2013 ‒ money that cash-strapped facilities will have to make up elsewhere. “Taxes are going to go up,” he said.

Prisoner advocates argue, however, that there’s another public-policy issue involved ‒ that of recidivism.

“If you are an inmate and you have strong ties to your family, the less likely you are to reoffend,” Diane Goldstein, an executive board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, told RT. “If you are an inmate that has rehabilitation opportunities inside prison and you get an education and you walk out with a skill the less likely you are to reoffend.”

Paranoia quote 3

A great line from the movie, "Paranoia," highlighting the cold hard truth of our modern times.

IMDB          RottenTomatoes          Wikipedia

How a corporate cult captures & destroys our best graduates

Although, this opinion piece by George Monbiot is good, & I would love to agree with it completely but it has a few major flaws.

Yes, students are one of the most idealistic people of any nation. They see the problem from an innocent point of view &, without any conflicts of interests or any politics, they try to find the best resolution to the problem. But with the same vein, they try to resolve every problem in a very straight-forward way, without thinking how the systems are structured or controlled or influenced. Merely protesting against the government on the streets won't help much if your demographics is not influential enough in the hallowed halls of the political powerhouses. For instance, we can see what did Egyptian youths & students achieve after protesting for weeks on end. Or students protesting against rising tuition fees around the world have not been able to convince post-secondary institutions to lower tuition fees.

So, at the same time, it is very true that students want to see the world develop in the noblest of forms; without any discriminations & prejudices. But at the same time, they also want to achieve success in their careers & life. They all want to climb high in the corporate world based on their merits & hard work. They all want to work for large, international, world-renowned companies.

The primary reason for this is how the labour market works. If these graduates get in a large, international, world-renowned company at the beginning of their careers, they can build their careers from that point, onwards & upwards. Other companies will look at their resumes & CVs & will be immediately impressed with their work experience, which they achieved at the large company. Those graduates may even build strong & influential networks by working in large multinational companies. For example, a graduate working in McKinsey or Bain or Boston Consulting Group or Deloitte or KPMG or General Electric or Phillips or Honda or Toyota or Google or Facebook etc will be able to transfer between different companies, in the same industry or even in different industries, very easily, due to how his/her work experiences will be looked upon by his future employers. A management consultant from McKinsey gets the doors flung open for him/her at other management consulting firms or even at non-consulting firms, like Google or General Electric.

Besides, the work experiences being favourably looked upon & networks being built, the salaries at these firms are good, too. But, I will not discuss the finance part of the argument, since, not every graduate chases the biggest pay packet. For many, salary comes second to experience.

Working for non-profits may elate a graduate for a short while, but, unless, they are willing to spend their whole life in the same company or stay within the non-profit sector, their experiences will most likely be considered not as important as a graduate's who has worked in a major consultancy firm. Is it unfair? Definitely. Should this be changed? Definitely. But who is willing to change it? There are not enough principals of the consultancy firms in this world who will look at a resume or CV of a person working at a non-profit agency & be immediately impressed.

Heck, even in personal lives, telling someone that one is working at such & such multinational consultancy firm or tech firm or other international company not only seem impressive but helps a lot in other ways. For instance, in Asian, South Asian, South American, & African societies, the measure of success of one's life is how big & well-known the employer of that person is. It doesn't even matter if that particular person is a janitor in that company. Parents & family members proudly boast that their family member is an employee of such a well-known international company. They don't care if that company is making weapons of mass destruction or destroying the environment or even killing the very soul of the society.

So, I agree with the argument that smart students should not be courted by large firms right before their graduations; when they may have not seen the world enough to make the right decision to choose the right career path for themselves. I also agree with the argument that students who want to work in such places where they can achieve their ideals, whatever they might be. But I disagree with the point that universities are failing in their duty of care by letting their graduates go for work for major "soulless" companies. Regardless of how much or how little universities market these companies to their intelligent students, those students will chase the large multinational companies because they know they will be able to travel the world, receive large pay packets, & most important of all, gain the work experience which will propel their careers in the stratosphere (assuming they don't screw up somewhere to derail their careers).

Everyone wants to go for the highest purposes of humankind but when push comes to shove, those noble ideas & meanings are pushed aside. It's not the fault of the universities or the companies or the young graduates, but the structure of the whole labour market is to blame. It rewards networks, not merits. It rewards experience gained at a multinational company, not the experience gained at a non-profit agency. It casts aside those who want to pursue highest purposes of humankind for the ones who are selfishly chasing money & careers.
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/city-corporates-destroy-best-minds

To seek enlightenment, intellectual or spiritual; to do good; to love & be loved; to create & to teach: these are the highest purposes of humankind. If there is meaning in life, it lies here.

Those who graduate from the leading universities have more opportunity than most to find such purpose. So why do so many end up in pointless & destructive jobs? Finance, management consultancy, advertising, public relations, lobbying: these & other useless occupations consume thousands of the brightest students. To take such jobs at graduation ... is to amputate life close to its base.

I watched it happen to my peers. People who had spent the preceding years laying out exultant visions of a better world, of the grand creative projects they planned, of adventure & discovery, were suddenly sucked into the mouths of corporations dangling money like angler fish.

At first they said they would do it for a year or two, “until I pay off my debts”. Soon afterwards they added: “and my mortgage”. Then it became, “I just want to make enough not to worry any more”. A few years later, “I’m doing it for my family”. Now, in middle age, they reply, “What, that? That was just a student fantasy.”

Why did they not escape, when they perceived that they were being dragged away from their dreams? I have come to see the obscene hours some new recruits must work – sometimes 15 or 16 a day – as a form of reorientation, of brainwashing. You are deprived of the time, sleep & energy you need to see past the place into which you have been plunged. You lose your bearings, your attachments to the world you inhabited before, & become immersed in the culture that surrounds you. Two years of this & many are lost for life.

Employment by the City has declined since the financial crash. Among the universities I surveyed with the excellent researcher John Sheil, the proportion of graduates taking jobs in finance & management consultancy ranges from 5% at Edinburgh to 13% at Oxford, 16% at Cambridge, 28% at the London School of Economics & 60% at the London Business School. But to judge by the number of applications & the rigour of the selection process, these businesses still harvest many of the smartest graduates.

Recruitment begins with lovebombing of the kind that cults use. They sponsor sports teams & debating societies, throw parties, offer meals & drinks, send handwritten letters, use student ambassadors to offer friendship & support. They persuade undergraduates that even if they don’t see themselves as consultants or bankers (few do), these jobs are stepping stones to the careers they really want. They make the initial application easy, & respond immediately & enthusiastically to signs of interest. They offer security & recognition when people are most uncertain & fearful about their future. And there’s the flash of the king’s shilling: the paid internships, the golden hellos, the promise of stupendous salaries within a couple of years. Entrapment is a refined science.

We have but one life. However much money we make, we cannot buy it back. As far as self-direction, autonomy & social utility are concerned, many of those who enter these industries & never re-emerge might as well have locked themselves in a cell at graduation. They lost it all with one false step, taken at a unique moment of freedom.

John Sheil & I sent questions to 8 of the universities with the highest average graduate salaries: Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, the LSE, the London Business School, Warwick, Sheffield & Edinburgh. We asked whether they seek to counter these lavish recruitment drives & defend students from the love blitz. With one remarkable exception, their responses ranged from feeble to dismal. Most offered no evidence of any prior interest in these questions. Where we expected deep deliberation to have taken place, we found instead an intellectual vacuum.

They cited their duty of impartiality, which, they believe, prevents them from seeking to influence students’ choices, & explained that there were plenty of other careers on offer. But they appear to have confused impartiality with passivity. Passivity in the face of unequal forces is anything but impartial. Impartiality demands an active attempt to create balance, to resist power, to tell the dark side of the celestial tale being pummelled into the minds of undergraduates by the richest City cults.

Oxford University asked us, “isn’t it preferable that [the City] recruits bright, critical thinkers & socially engaged graduates who are smart enough to hold their employers to account when possible?”. Oh blimey. This is a version of the most desperate excuse my college friends attempted: “I’ll reform them from within.” This magical thinking betrays a profound misconception about the nature & purpose of such employers.

They respond to profit, the regulatory environment, the demands of shareholders, not to the consciences of their staff. We all know how they treat whistleblowers. Why should “bright, critical thinkers & socially engaged graduates” be dispatched on this kamikaze mission? I believe these universities are failing in their duty of care.

The hero of this story is Gordon Chesterman, head of the careers service at Cambridge, & the only person we spoke to who appears to have given some thought to these questions. He told me his service tries to counter the influence of the richest employers.

It sends out regular emails telling students “if you don’t want to become a banker, you’re not a failure”, & runs an event called “But I don’t want to work in the City”. It imposes a fee on rich recruiters & uses the money to pay the train fares of nonprofits. He expressed anger about being forced by the government to provide data on graduate starting salaries.

“I think it’s a very blunt & inappropriate means [of comparison], that rings alarm bells in my mind.”

Elsewhere, at this vulnerable, mutable, pivotal moment, undergraduates must rely on their own wavering resolve to resist peer pressure, the herd instinct, the allure of money, flattery, prestige & security.

Students, rebel against these soul-suckers! Follow your dreams, however hard it may be, however uncertain success might seem.


A fully referenced version of this article can be found at Monbiot.com

Here's how much corporations paid US senators to fast-track the TPP bill

Since, Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is already well on its way to being passed ... & going to destroy North American labour market, I won't say much here. What I liked about this article was the facts & figures of how much each of the Senators in the American Senate received money from corporations which wanted TPP to pass so desperately. (Hint: the money they received is more than an average, middle class, American may make in a year).

On a side note, you should realize that if corporations are so desperate to want to get TPP passed, then it is definitely not going to be something good for the average Joe & Jane on main street.

Getting back to the main topic, as always, I would ask the reader that would you call this a democracy? Does this happen in a transparent & democratic government where Senators (one of them is 81 years old) receive such lucrative "gifts", while signing on a trade partnership, which will only going to kill any & all kinds of labour movements? Is this trade partnership going to help that single mother who is juggling multiple jobs to raise her little family while the rich Senators get more rich by voting for a trade partnership that will destroy her job & not raise her minimum wage? What about that poor student who is trying to brighten up his future by working part-time & getting a degree?

As I always say, political corruption exists everywhere. The primary difference is that it happens all out in the open in so-called "corrupt" countries (i.e. developing countries), whereas, in developed countries, those same "corrupt" practices are first made "legal". Since, the same "corrupt" practices become "legal", government officials are free to indulge in them as much as they want, & the governments of North America & Europe get the blessing of Transparency International (the organization, which is a joke in my view, similar to UN, World Bank, IMF etc.)

As the spokesperson for anti-corruption group, Represent Us, says in the end of the article that “how can we expect politicians who routinely receive campaign money, lucrative job offers, & lavish gifts from special interests to make impartial decisions that directly affect those same special interests? As long as this kind of transparently corrupt behavior remains legal, we won’t have a government that truly represents the people.”
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http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/may/27/corporations-paid-us-senators-fast-track-tpp

A decade in the making, the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is reaching its climax & as Congress hotly debates the biggest trade deal in a generation, its backers have turned on the cash spigot in the hopes of getting it passed.
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Fast-tracking the TPP, meaning its passage through Congress without having its contents available for debate or amendments, was only possible after lots of corporate money exchanged hands with senators. ...

Those impressive majorities follow months of behind-the-scenes wheeling & dealing by the world’s most well-heeled multinational corporations with just a handful of holdouts.

Using data from the Federal Election Commission, this chart shows all donations that corporate members of the US Business Coalition for TPP made to US Senate campaigns between January & March 2015, when fast-tracking the TPP was being debated in the Senate:

- Out of the total $1,148,971 given, an average of $17,676.48 was donated to each of the 65 “yea” votes.

- The average Republican member received $19,673.28 from corporate TPP supporters.

- The average Democrat received $9,689.23 from those same donors.

The amounts given rise dramatically when looking at how much each senator running for re-election received.

Two days before the fast-track vote, Obama was a few votes shy of having the filibuster-proof majority he needed. Ron Wyden & 7 other Senate Democrats announced they were on the fence on 12 May, distinguishing themselves from the Senate’s 54 Republicans & handful of Democrats as the votes to sway.

- In just 24 hours, Wyden & 5 of those Democratic holdouts – Michael Bennet of Colorado, Dianne Feinstein of California, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Patty Murray of Washington, & Bill Nelson of Florida – caved & voted for fast-track.

- Bennet, Murray, & Wyden – all running for re-election in 2016 – received $105,900 between the 3 of them. Bennet, who comes from ... Colorado, got $53,700 in corporate campaign donations between January & March 2015 ... .

- Almost 100% of the Republicans in the US Senate voted for fast-track – the only two non-votes on TPA were a Republican from Louisiana & a Republican from Alaska.

- Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, who is the former US trade representative, ... received $119,700 from 14 different corporations between January & March, most of which comes from donations from Goldman Sachs ($70,600), Pfizer ($15,700), & Procter & Gamble ($12,900). ...

- 7 Republicans who voted “yea” to fast-track & are also running for re-election next year cleaned up between January & March. Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia received $102,500 in corporate contributions. Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, best known for proposing a Monsanto-written bill in 2013 that became known as the Monsanto Protection Act, received $77,900 – $13,500 of which came from Monsanto.

- Arizona senator & former presidential candidate John McCain received $51,700 in the first quarter of 2015. Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina received $60,000 in corporate donations. Eighty-one-year-old senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who is running for his 7th Senate term, received $35,000. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who will be running for his first full six-year term in 2016, received $67,500 from pro-TPP corporations.

“It’s a rare thing for members of Congress to go against the money these days,” said Mansur Gidfar, spokesman for the anti-corruption group Represent.Us. “They know exactly which special interests they need to keep happy if they want to fund their reelection campaigns or secure a future job as a lobbyist.

“How can we expect politicians who routinely receive campaign money, lucrative job offers, & lavish gifts from special interests to make impartial decisions that directly affect those same special interests?” Gidfar said. “As long as this kind of transparently corrupt behavior remains legal, we won’t have a government that truly represents the people.”

The hidden PTSD crisis in America's jails

A good article highlighting something which us, in the general public, never think about: corrections officers in prisons are also subjected to daily abuse & stress, which leads them to suffer from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).

The main problem is the prison system. It's the same system all over the world; if a person is convicted for a crime, then he/she is thrown in a jail cell for a determined amount of time or for life. Now, if the prison system stops at that point, even then, it will not create a huge problem. It becomes a huge problem when the government officials starts listening to prison-industrial complex lobbyists, & in pandering for their constituents' votes, start broadening the definition of crime.

That's when several things start to happen:
1. Any kind of crime, major or minor, is considered huge.
2. Judges & the state prosecutors are rewarded for prosecuting as many people as they can.
3. More convicted criminals can be shown by politicians, to the general public, as the proof that their tough-on-crime stance is working.
4. As more people get convicted, even for minor offences, prisons start to fill up fast.
5. Prison-industrial complex start to get "free" labourers in the form of convicted prisoners, which is another form of slavery.
6. Governments & businesses start to pay the companies involved in the prison-industrial complex in the form of subsidies & for products made from prisoners' labour.
7. So, now, those prisons become like a business unto itself. And, as every business' primary responsibility is to lower its costs & increase its profits, those prisons start to be judged with the same metrics. That's where, the problem starts to snowball into a giant problem with very adverse consequences for the whole society.

As prisons become like businesses, they start to treat all prisoners as the same. So, even a hardened criminal is treated the same as first-time offender. In that case, a first-time offender might have benefited a lot with more of a rehab approach, instead of being locked up with a hardened criminal. But, since, rehabs cost money & prisons don't want to invest in something which cost money, that first-time offender never gets any rehab treatment, to the point, that he/she becomes a hardened criminal him/herself.

So, now, the society has to tolerate a hardened criminal, if he/she is ever released. Since, he/she is a hardened criminal now, he/she will most likely commit the offence again, which will result him/her in receiving a much harsher sentence. That will only help in overcrowding of the prisons.

Furthermore, as prisons are not allowed or discouraged from investing in prisons, prisoners increase (which also is creating overcrowding in American prisons), but the number of prison guards / corrections officers don't increase, accordingly. The ratio of prisoners to corrections officers gets all skewed, with as much as, 50 or more prisoners are handled by one corrections officer. Imagine, if that's how many children are being taught by one teacher. That would be considered unthinkable in North American education system.

Of course, handling so many criminals, many of whom themselves might be suffering from several physical & mental health problems, for which they don't receive any kind of treatment, by one corrections officer, is only going to cause those corrections officers huge stress. Since, stress is the root cause of many other health problems, those officers also become prone to several physical & mental health problems.

Further compounding the problem is the macho culture of prisons, where showing any kind of weakness is considered almost fatal by both prisoners & corrections officers. So, of course, corrections officers suffer in silence with these physical & mental issues. They take out their pent-up frustrations & anger on prisoners, which is wrong & unjustifiable, & cause more rifts in general society, when it sees how police are treating prisoners.

So, the main issue to resolve here is breaking up the prison-industrial complex:
1. Prisons need to be under governments' control, where governments should invest in rehab treatments of prisoners.
2. Government should help in the reintegration of prisoners after they are released from prisons, reducing the chances of them committing a crime again. After all, if they commit a crime again, they will go to prison once again, & the taxpayers will pick the tab anyway. So, why not invest in making those prisoners a tax-paying citizen, instead of tax-consuming prisoner?
3. Politicians should not be pandering for votes on their crime-reducing capabilities. Let objective data on crimes dictate those policies, since all data nowadays keeps saying that crimes are continuously decreasing. Politicians may also not focus on this issue if they are not receiving any money from prison-industrial complex.
4. Reducing the ratio of prisoner to corrections officers by either reducing the prisoner population or increasing the number of corrections officers or both. This may not be required if politicians don't unnecessarily expand the definition of crime & treat every crime the same way. Minor offences are treated by rehab approach & major offences are processed through the prison system.
5. Changing the macho culture may never happen but it is certainly a desirable option. It will be very hard to do since organizational cultures don't change so easily, especially, considering it's the prison system we are talking about.
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http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/20/corrections-officers-ptsd-american-prisons

Michael Van Patten’s 18-year-old son came home to find his dad crouching on the kitchen floor, gun in hand, a nearly empty bottle of gin by his side, tears running down his cheeks. Trevor grabbed the weapon, ran up to his room, shut the door & didn’t speak to his dad – or anyone – about the incident for 13 years.

For Michael, this was the build-up of nearly 3 decades working as a corrections officer at the Oregon state penitentiary. “The only way I knew how to deal with it was to eat a bullet.”

There is little awareness of how the culture of endemic violence in prisons affects the correction officers who interact with prisoners. But with over 2 million prisoners & around half a million COs, it is a widespread & underreported problem.

Corrections officers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder at more than double the rate of military veterans in the US, according to Caterina Spinaris, the leading professional in corrections-specific clinical research & founder of Desert Waters Correctional Outreach, a nonprofit based in Colorado.

This in turn inevitably affects prisoners. While there is no hard data on guard-on-inmate assaults, interviews with current & former corrections officers revealed that COs occasionally take out the stress of the job on inmates.

In 2011, Spinaris did an anonymous survey of corrections officers, testing them for indications of PTSD: repeated flashbacks of traumatic incidents, hyper-vigilance, insomnia, suicidal thoughts & alienation, among others. She found that 34% of corrections officers suffer from PTSD. This compares to 14% of military veterans.

The suicide rate among corrections officers is twice as high as that of both police officers & the general public, according to a New Jersey police taskforce. An earlier national study found that corrections officers’ suicide risk was 39% higher than all other professions combined.

“Right now, we’re about where the military was 10, 15 years ago when it comes to them dealing with PTSD,” Van Patten tells me. Nearly 20 of his fellow officers have committed suicide since he started working in corrections. He nearly became a statistic himself.

Van Patten was assaulted when he was helping a nurse give a rectal exam to an inmate suspected of packing drugs. As he was reaching down to grab the inmate’s ankles to flip him over, the inmate came down on Van Patten’s back, dislocating his skull from his spinal vertebrae. Van Patten couldn’t walk for 5 months, nor could he hold his newborn child.

...

Most of his job, around 95% as he estimates, is pretty mundane. Every day he does a cell count, keeps an eye on inmate’s activities, fetches someone toilet paper. This goes on for 8 or, often, 16 hours straight – sometimes without a lunch break, depending on the day.

It’s the other 5% that leads to the extraordinarily high rate of PTSD: dealing with inmate violence, coming home with faeces smeared all over his uniform, trying to stop suicide attempts.

Van Patten said the biggest stress factor is not knowing when crisis situations may arise. This leads to permanent hyper-vigilance, “because we go into a place where we have control, but yet we don’t have control, because the inmates let us run the prison. If they wanted to, they could take it. They’re compliant until they choose not to be,” he said.

As soon as a CO enters a prison, he or she goes into battle mode. “We put on our armour. When you walk through the first gate, it clicks. And so does your back,” says Michael Morgan, an ex-officer at Oregon state penitentiary. “You’re in the pressure cooker” for at least 8 hours – the duration of one shift.

Corrections wisdom dictates that you deal with trauma by not dealing with it at all. “They teach us to leave it at the gate,” said Morgan. “Eight and the gate” is the unofficial motto.

But even off-duty, the guards are always on edge. At an interview over lunch, Jeff Hernandez, another CO at Oregon state penitentiary, requested to swap places at a restaurant so he could sit facing the entrance of the room. This is a common quirk among those working in corrections.

COs say working in prison has significant long-term effects on your personality. Van Patten said the job changed him within 6 months. He became more cynical, withdrawn & aggressive.

“You almost become non-human, robotic, emotionless,” said Charles Ewlad, the warden at Riverhead correctional facility at the eastern end of New York’s Long Island. When he first started, “people came to work hammered every day. That was the deal.” This is no longer the status quo, though substance abuse is still a widespread coping mechanism.

“I went to work every day & I put this persona on,” Van Patten said. He has seen inmates show up at recreational activities with a 9-inch shank sticking out of their eye, others hang themselves, & still others cut their arteries & bleed to death.

“I didn’t know how to release the stuff I kept dreaming about. You’re doing tier count & you’re watching a human being die in front of your eyes because he’s coughing up lungs & screaming with his eyes for help & there’s nothing you can do,” Van Patten said. “Even though he’s an inmate, he’s still human; you’re still human.”

On the first day of work, his son Trevor – who also works as a corrections officer – remembers seeing the remains of a prisoner who was beaten to death by other inmates. “You see people smashing pumpkins on Halloween. Imagine all of the orange being red. And then all the orange on the outside being white. That’s what it looked like on first image. That’s a human being.” An hour after that he was eating lunch, then went back to work.

‘When I was struggling, nobody helped me’

In the years & months leading up to his attempted suicide, Michael suffered from all the typical symptoms of PTSD: insomnia, cold sweats, phantom violence while asleep. He worked out obsessively & self-medicated with alcohol.

He didn’t even know what PTSD was at the time. That’s partly because it’s not something that COs talked about. The culture is tough & macho, and any sign of vulnerability, especially a mental health diagnosis, carries stigma.

“Officers can never be weak. Inmates can never be weak. It’s its own world,” said Brian Baisley, the head of the medical evaluation unit at Riverhead.

...

Jeff Hernandez, the CO at Oregon state penitentiary, recalls one incident where an officer working on the notoriously difficult intensive management unit had a breakdown & burst into tears on the job. “I know from talking to several people there really still is an undercurrent of ‘You never should have done that on the unit’,” he said.

...

PTSD is considered taboo partly because many fear a diagnosis will have negative repercussions on their career prospects.

“They won’t get diagnosed because of the stigma,” Michael Van Patten says. Many are afraid that they will be put through a “fit for duty” test with a state psychologist as a result, & will be decertified.

Some corrections officers at Oregon state penitentiary & Riverhead in Long Island do not think prison is a rehabilitative solution, merely a punitive one. “There’s got to be a better way to do things than put, say, James here in a corridor with 30 inmates for 8 hours,” says Charles Ewlad, warden of Riverhead.

“We’re doing time too, we’re just getting paid for it,” says Brian Dawes, head of the American Correctional Officer Intelligence Network. The national average annual wage for a CO is $44,910, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In California this can go up to $100,000.

In 2013, Van Patten decided to go public within his department about his attempted suicide, out of concern over the recent slate of staff suicides. “I finally thought that I’d been around there long enough, that someone had to break the ice.”

He recorded a video of himself speaking to his son Trevor about the incident. That was the first time they ever spoke about it together. The film was screened at the annual in-service training.

Jeff Hernandez remembers feeling shocked when he saw the video in that context: “I was not prepared because his personality has never been where I could even consider the possibility of him trying to do something like that.”

But some COs still feel the stigma of having mental health issues. Michael Morgan, the ex-CO, was diagnosed with PTSD. He said that when he reached out to the state’s mental health emergency hotline & the department during his extended breakdown, they were dismissive of him once he said that he wasn’t feeling suicidal.

...

Morgan’s mental health struggles started when he was pulled over in 2010 for driving while drunk. He spent 32 hours on the other side of the bars for the first time while he was waiting to be arraigned. “I pretty much hit rock bottom,” he said. “When I was struggling, nobody helped me.”

A year later, he got a decertification notice based on multiple charges. ...

“There were times when I got off a 12-hour shift that I would go out in my truck & I would turn the radio up as far as it would go for 5 to 10 minutes, just to feel something different that I could say: ‘OK, I can feel this rather than the other sensation’.”

It was during this period that Morgan ended up in the psychiatric ward. He was driving in the car with his wife when he pulled over, put on the emergency brake & told his wife to call the police on him: “I didn’t feel in control & I knew that that’s not a good thing.”

Morgan was diagnosed with PTSD on the psychiatric ward. Although this seal caused him a lot of anxiety, it actually helped him in his appeal to the decertification panel.

Once he submitted his medical paperwork, instead of firing him they transferred him from security to a non-security job under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

He is now the co-facilitator of a mental health training program at Oregon state penitentiary &, along with Michael Van Patten, is making an example of himself to raise awareness of PTSD.

“But,” Van Patten said, “you can’t change a culture over night.”

"Where Apple makes its money" by Martyn Turner

"Where Apple makes its money" - Martyn Turner, The Irish Times, Dublin, Ireland

Canadian mining company spied on opponents & activists in Brazil

Canada may fly the flag of "a peaceful nation" or relatively better than its Anglo-Saxon counterparts in US & UK, around the world, but Canadian companies are famous in developing countries, in South America & Africa, for unethical business practices.

Be it Kinross, or Goldcorp, or SNC-Lavalin; they have all been exposed or sued in the past decade for unethical practices, ranging from bribery scandals in Africa to destroying the environment, of the surroundings where their operations are based, in South America.

Ironically, these Canadian companies are also considered some of the best companies in Canada, because of their management team, environmental stewardship, & overall business management. They return good money to their shareholders & investors love them.

It is one thing to be actively destroying your own backyard (Canadian companies being involved in Canadian oilsands in Alberta & destroying the environment there), but it is very wrong to be destroying the environment of a developing country, & then digging your heels that we are not destroying the environment in the face of clear evidence.

Most of the companies from the Western developed countries, in one way or another, exploit & destroy the developing countries. They all have long ethical codes of conducts, but they are written in such a way, that they support unethical business practices. So, besides the mining & energy companies, other companies, for example, Nestle is famous for robbing small villages & communities of their precious clean water resources to sell that water to the millions around the world.

Honesty & fairness in the developed world are only for their own citizens, & only rich business & political elites among them; not for everyone else around them. Talking about spreading democracy, freedom, free speech etc. are all smoke & mirrors for the ignorant billions of people around the world.
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http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/may/13/canadian-mining-company-spied-on-opponents-and-activists-in-brazil

... Paracatu is the epicentre of Brazil’s mining production, in the north of the state of Minas Gerais, which generates almost one-third of Brazil’s total mining production.

The exploitation of gold started in Paracatu as early as 1722. ... Since the 1990s the hunt has moved from the river banks to underground deposits. ...

Booming gold prices

In 2005, Canadian company Kinross – which is listed in the New York Stock Exchange & owns gold mines in Chile, US, Russia & Ghana, among other countries – took over the mining concession in Paracatu. During a period in which gold prices rose to historical new heights in global markets, Kinross invested $1.86bn in the site, tripling annual production to the current 15 tonnes & making Paracatu the most productive gold mine in Brazil. As the gold in Paracatu takes the form of a powder & not grain or nuggets, the company had to greatly intensify mining activities to keep production up. Today as many as 160 dynamite explosions are carried out daily to dig the Morro do Ouro, the Golden Hill, as locals refer to the area where the main deposits are found.

As a consequence, the local geography has been profoundly transformed. As you approach the mining area we witness an immense crater that covers 615 hectares, half the size of Heathrow’s airport, & resembles a lunar landscape. The only signs of life are the imposing bulldozers & the high-wheeled vehicles that transport the rocks to the plant. There, toxic chemicals, including cyanide, are employed to separate out the gold powder, which is later molten in ingots & transported by helicopter to São Paulo for export around the globe.

Arsenic health risks

While the visual impact seems hard to deny – in addition to the mining area, two large dams the size of an extra Heathrow airport are used for toxic waste disposal – many argue that the mine poses a threat to the local environment & to the health of the 90,000 Paracatu residents. Not only is dynamite used to access the gold reserves as close as 200 metres from the urban area, the precious metal is mixed in the rock with arsenic, a carcinogenic.

Arsenic is commonly found in gold mines, but in Paracatu it is of particular concern. For each tonne of rock removed only 0.4 grams of gold is recovered & 1kg of arsenic is released into the air & groundwater, according to Márcio José dos Santos, a geologist & local activist.

“Nobody knows how much arsenic is going to the city. The northeasterly wind here means that the arsenic travels in the air from the mine to the urban area. People are inhaling the toxic dust & consequently are inhaling arsenic,” explains José. Sergio Ulhoa Dani, a local physician & also an opponent of the mine, argued in a recent scientific article that “the potential damage of arsenic in a gold mine like the one in Paracatu could impact 7 trillion people”.

Many in the city wonder if their life is at risk, while the word “cancer” has become a taboo. Data from Paracatu’s city council shows that the cancer mortality rate in the town is similar to the rest of the country. Critics argue that statistics from the local government are unreliable. As Paracatu lacks medical institutions, patients must go to hospitals located hundreds of kilometres away to receive treatment & so are not counted in the city’s official data.

Opponents face harassment & threats

The attitude of the company is also under scrutiny. According to documents seen by The Guardian & interviews with former employees, several Kinross’ employees worked as an intelligence unit to track any potential activity against the mine or the company’s reputation.

In an interview with the Guardian, Gilberto Azevedo, general manager of the mine, denied any risk to the health or the environment. “We monitor everything. People have nothing to fear, because we have everything under control. We regularly make environmental & biological tests, & we have hired external sources to carry studies. They all show there is no risk.”

He also underlined the economic importance of the company’s activity for the region. In 2014, Kinross paid about $10m in taxes & currently employs 3,300 people in the mine, about 8% of the active population in the city.

However, tension is perceptible. As we drive through the public roads bordering the concession, an armed guard who had been following the car for an hour brings us to a halt & questions us.

Dozens of documents & internal emails seen by The Guardian show that in 2012 & 2013 Kinross had a policy in Paracatu of regularly monitoring potential opponents, including the former mayor Almir Paraca – known for being outspoken against the mine – & several union leaders.

“They monitor social movements, politicians, neighbourhood associations & their representatives, environmental activists, union leaders... They even monitor what some Kinross’s employees do at their free time. The main goal is to hide or repress any action, demonstration or reference against the mining company or their interests”, said one of the sources, knowledgeable of Kinross’ policies because of his/her former post at the company.

And at least 2 local activists – Rafaela Xavier Luiz & Evane Lopes - have had to leave the city in recent months after they received death threats, which they argue were linked to their opposition to the mine.

“We have nothing to do with this. Kinross is a company that dialogues with the community,” says Azevedo, when asked if the enterprise was in any way involved in the threats to activists. Kinross also denied it monitored activists or opponents.