OBOF TYMHM & MORE Vol 15 - No 2

OPINOINS  BASED  ON FACTS (OBOF)

&

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)

YEAR ONE

YEAR TWO

YEAR THREE

YEAR FOUR

YEAR FIVE

 

OBOF YEAR FIVE INDEX
OBOF TYMHM	Jan. 07, 2015
OBOF TYMHM Vol 15 - No 1	Jan. 19, 2015
OBOF TYMHM Vol 15 - No 2	Feb  03, 2015

 

 

Agenda

 

1.  Hello folks.

2.  Courts will decide fracking Co. resp.

3.  Living within their means.

4.  The Wall Street threat.

5.  Super Bowl sickness.

 

 

 

HELLO FOLKS

From Floyd

 

Finally, the good Lord is willing and has said that it is time to get out a posting.  It is just going to be this way.  I can't seem to get these out on a regular basis.  I will get them out as often as I can, physically and mentally.  So, check in once in a while.  You might see something new of interest.  So good, to talk with you again.

~~~

 

 

Court Will Decide if Fracking Companies Can be Held Responsible for Earthquakes

 

 

Published: January 27, 2015 | Authors: Emily Atkin | ClimateProgress | News Investigation

 

 

 

From Floyd:

 

This article has a very good and telling chart in it.  I have not had good luck with posting such things in the past, but I am going to include it here.  If it doesn't show up just forget it.

 

 

 

Could Oklahoma's fracking companies soon “become economic and legal-liability pariahs” as Oklahoma nearly doubles earthquake count? If one woman’s lawsuit is successful, it could set a legal precedent for future earthquake claims against oil and gas companies in Oklahoma.

 

Oklahoma’s highest court is about to make a decision that could really shake up the way fracking companies do business in the state.

In the coming months, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court will decide whether two oil companies should be held financially responsible for injuries suffered by a woman during a 2011 earthquake thought to have been caused by drilling activity. If the woman’s lawsuit is successful, it could set a legal precedent for future earthquake claims against oil and gas companies in Oklahoma.

 

In other words, oil and gas wells in Oklahoma would “become economic and legal-liability pariahs,” attorney Robert Gum said in comments reported by the Tulsa World.

 

First, the back story. The lawsuit in question was brought by Sandra Ladra, a woman who lives in a small town called Prague. Ladra claims that on Nov. 5, 2011, she was sitting at home watching television with her family when a 5.6 magnitude intraplate earthquake struck, causing big chunks of rock to fall from her fireplace and chimney. Some of the rocks fell onto Ladra’s legs and into her lap, causing what the lawsuit describes as “significant injury.” Ladra was taken to the emergency room and treated.

 

Then, two years later in March 2013, scientists from the University of Oklahoma, Columbia University, and the U.S. Geological Survey published a peer-reviewed study in the journal Geology, linking the 2011 earthquake to a process called wastewater injection. During that process, companies take the leftover water used to drill wells and inject it deep into the ground.

 

The Geology findings were disputed by Oklahoma Geological Survey, which asserted that the Prague earthquake was more likely the result of natural causes. But at the same time, more studies across the country found connections between wastewater injection and earthquakes, including one which linked approximately 2,500 small Oklahoma earthquakes to the process.

 

Wastewater injection is used in both conventional drilling and fracking, but is much more prolific during fracking because of the vast amounts of wastewater produced. Scientists increasingly believe that the large amount of water that is injected into the ground after a well is fracked can change the state of stress on existing fault lines to the point of failure, causing earthquakes.

 

To be sure, it’s not definitive that earthquakes have been caused by fracking wastewater injection. Thus far, the research has lacked data on sub-surface pressure, which is rarely accessible but could take the science further than merely noting correlations between the timing of earthquakes, the timing of wastewater injection, and the location of faults. But it is indisputable that Oklahoma has seen a rise in earthquakes since the fracking boom began — right now, the state averages about 10 small earthquakes per day. According to the Oklahoma Geological Survey, “[n]o documented cases of induced seismicity have ever come close to the current earthquake rates or the area over which the earthquakes are occurring.”

 

over which the earthquakes are occurring.”

<img src="http://d35brb9zkkbdsd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Eathquakes-638x221.jpg" alt="Eathquakes-638x221" />

CREDIT: OKLAHOMA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY

 

In the wake of all that information, people who were injured in the 2011 Oklahoma quake began filing lawsuits against the companies thought to be responsible: Tulsa-based oil and gas company New Dominion LLC, and Cleveland, Oklahoma-based Spess Oil Co. In other states, similar lawsuits were filed, including two seeking class-action status against energy companies in Arkansas and Texas, the Tulsa World reported.

 

Ladra’s lawsuit was originally dismissed by a lower court — but not on the merits of her claim. A Lincoln County judge found that the case lacked jurisdiction, which in Ladra’s case meant that it was filed in the wrong court. That judge agreed with the oil companies that the case should have instead been filed with the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, as the oil companies were operating under permits issued by that commission.

 

Ladra’s attorney’s disagreed. The lawsuit claims the oil companies had knowledge that wastewater injection could cause seismic activity, and that knowledge represented “wanton or reckless disregard for public or private safety.” Because of that alleged disregard and negligence, Ladra’s attorneys claim the companies should be liable for at least $75,000 in personal injury costs and punitive damages.

 

Attorneys for both sides can at least agree on one thing: that the fact that the Supreme Court decided to take up the case means the earthquake issue is significant. “I think the court has recognized that it’s just potentially a very, very significant issue for the state, both for the economy and the industry as it relates to these wells and for the safety of the citizens,” Gum, who represents the oil and gas companies, told the Tulsa World. Scott Poynter, who represents Ladra, said the same. “I think the Supreme Court sees this is a current issue and it’s a very important issue.”

~~~

Living within their means?   Family of Senator Joni Ernst received $460,000 in federal aid

 

by Jen Hayden

 

 

From Floyd:

 

Why am I including this article?  It is not to ridicule the Senator family.  As is stated in the article, her father and family have worked very hard over the years.  KEEP IN MIND.  The only reason is very clearly stated in the last paragraph of the article.

~

 

Senator Joni Ernst, the newly elected senator from Iowa, gave the Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday.  In her response, she spoke glowingly of her family's humble beginnings:

 

They had very little to call their own except the sweat on their brow and the dirt on their hands.  But they worked, they sacrificed, and they dreamed big dreams for their children and grandchildren.

 

And because they did, an ordinary Iowan like me has had some truly extraordinary opportunities because they showed me that you don’t need to come from wealth or privilege to make a difference.  You just need the freedom to dream big, and a whole lot of hard work.

 

To be clear, there can be no doubt farmers work hard.  It's a work day that really never ends. But what Joni Ernst failed to mention is that her family did not succeed alone.

 

They had a whole lot of federal help along the way:

 

Ernst’s father, Richard Culver, was given $14,705 in conservation payments and $23,690 in commodity subsidies by the federal government–with all but twelve dollars allocated for corn support.  Richard’s brother, Dallas Culver, benefited from $367,141 in federal agricultural aid, with over $250,000 geared toward corn subsidies.  And the brothers’ late grandfather Harold Culver received $57,479 from Washington—again, mostly corn subsidies—between 1995 and 2001.  He passed away in January 2003.

The farm subsidies weren't the only payments her family benefited from:

 

A construction company owned by GOP Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst’s father received more than $200,000 in county contracts while she served as auditor of Montgomery County, Iowa, despite a strict conflict of interest code governing the provision of contracts to family members of county officials.

 

A new review of records — as well as an analysis of the Code of Iowa — by Salon reveals that the nature of the contracts and how they were promulgated, may have violated relevant county standards.

So, Joni Ernst can talk about other American families "living within their means" and having to use bread bags to cover her only pair of shoes, but she's willfully ignoring the assistance the U.S. government gave to her own family.  No doubt her family worked hard, but they didn't exactly succeed by pulling themselves up alone.  We, the American taxpayers, certainly gave them a hand-up (not a hand out) when they needed it.

 

Something Ernst would do well to remember as she works to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and the very subsidies that saved her family more than once.

~~~

Wall Street’s Threat to the American Middle Class

 

It's nice that presidential aspirants are talking about rebuilding America’s middle class.  But in order to do so, they have to take direct aim at Wall Street, the ones that finance their campaigns.

 

  Authors: Robert Reich

 NationofChange  Op-Ed

Published: January 27, 2015   

 

Presidential aspirants in both parties are talking about saving the middle class.  But the middle class can’t be saved unless Wall Street is tamed.

 

The Street’s excesses pose a continuing danger to average Americans. And its ongoing use of confidential corporate information is defrauding millions of middle-class investors.

 

Yet most presidential aspirants don’t want to talk about taming the Street because Wall Street is one of their largest sources of campaign money.

 

Do we really need reminding of what happened six years ago? The financial collapse crippled the middle class and poor — consuming the savings of millions of average Americans, and causing 23 million to lose their jobs, 9.3 million to lose their health insurance, and some 1 million to lose their homes.

 

A repeat performance is not unlikely. Wall Street’s biggest banks are much larger now than they were then. Five of them hold about 45 percent of America’s banking assets. In 2000, they held 25 percent.

 

And money is cheaper than ever. The Fed continues to hold the prime interest rate near zero.

 

This has fueled the Street’s eagerness to borrow money at rock-bottom rates and use it to make risky bets that will pay off big if they succeed, but will cause big problems if they go bad.

 

We learned last week that Goldman Sachs has been on a shopping binge, buying cheap real estate stretching from Utah to Spain, and a variety of companies.

 

If not technically a violation of the new Dodd-Frank banking law, Goldman’s binge surely violates its spirit.

Meanwhile, the Street’s lobbyists have gotten Congress to repeal a provision of Dodd-Frank curbing excessive speculation by the big banks.

 

The language was drafted by Citigroup and personally pushed by Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase.

 

Not incidentally, Dimon recently complained of being “under assault” by bank regulators.

 

Last year JPMorgan’s board voted to boost Dimon’s pay to $20 million, despite the bank paying out more than $20 billion to settle various legal problems going back to financial crisis.

 

The American middle class needs stronger bank regulations, not weaker ones.

 

Last summer, bank regulators told the big banks their plans for orderly bankruptcies were “unrealistic.” In other words, if the banks collapsed, they’d bring the economy down with them.

 

Dodd-Frank doesn’t even cover bank bets on foreign exchanges. Yet recent turbulence in the foreign exchange market has caused huge losses at hedge funds and brokerages.

 

This comes on top of revelations of widespread manipulation by the big banks of the foreign-exchange market.

Wall Street is also awash in inside information unavailable to average investors.

 

Just weeks ago a three- judge panel of the U.S. court of appeals that oversees Wall Street reversed an insider-trading conviction, saying guilt requires proof a trader knows the tip was leaked in exchange for some “personal benefit” that’s “of some consequence.”

 

Meaning that if a CEO tells his Wall Street golfing buddy about a pending merger, the buddy and his friends can make a bundle — to the detriment of small, typically middle-class, investors.

 

That three-judge panel was composed entirely of appointees of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

 

But both parties have been drinking at the Wall Street trough.

 

In the 2008 presidential campaign, the financial sector ranked fourth among all industry groups giving to then candidate Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee. In fact, Obama reaped far more in contributions from the Street than did his Republican opponent.

 

Wall Street also supplies both administrations with key economic officials. The treasury secretaries under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush – Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson, respectfully, had both chaired Goldman Sachs before coming to Washington.

 

And before becoming Obama’s treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner had been handpicked by Rubin to become president of Federal Reserve Bank of New York. (Geithner is now back on the Street as president of the private-equity firm Warburg Pincus.)

 

It’s nice that presidential aspirants are talking about rebuilding America’s middle class.

 

But to be credible, he (or she) has to take clear aim at the Street.

 

That means proposing to limit the size of the biggest Wall Street banks;  resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act (which used to separate investment from commercial banking); define insider trading the way most other countries do – using information any reasonable person would know is unavailable to most investors; and close the revolving door between the Street and the U.S. Treasury.

 

It also means not depending on the Street to finance their campaigns.

~~~

Super Bowl Sickness

 

Authors: Thomas Magstadt

NationofChange

February 3, 2015

 

Thank goodness it’s over. The Super Bowl, that is. How to explain it?

Sick is the word that springs to mind. A national sickness. An epidemic that causes its victims to go temporarily insane in the first month of every year.  And so soon after another bout of mass insanity misleadingly called “Christmas” or  “the holidays” even though it’s mostly about shopping and retail sales.

 

Some say it’s proof that America has lost its way. A grossly overhyped, overpriced, and over-the-top spectacle that makes us look stupid in the eyes of the world.

 

But let’s not get carried away here. Let’s be fair.

Just the facts, okay?

 

An estimated 184 million Americans were expected to watch Super Bowl XLIX, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation.  Some 43 million people planned to host Super Bowl parties across the U.S.  About 13 million people were expected to watch the game at a local bar.

More facts:

1.                 A “Massively Important Event”

Jerry Weiers, mayor of Glendale, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb, received two free tickets to the Super Bowl by the CEO of Modell’s Sporting Goods. Mitchell Modell reportedly made the gesture after hearing Weiers had not been offered seats. Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton said nobody offered him a ticket, but he denied feeling snubbed. “My job is not to go to a football game,” Stanton said. “My job is to make sure my city does the very best job hosting this massively important event.”  I can’t help but wonder how the good mayor would characterize something like the assassination of President Kennedy, the end of the Cold War, or 9-11…

2.                 Viewership

The Super Bowl is the most-watched American television broadcast of the year. It beats “The Big Bang Theory” by 100 million viewers give or take a few million and makes “American Idol” look utterly anemic. Super Bowl XLV in 2011 became the most-watched American television program in history with an average audience of 111 million viewers (until recently the final episode of M*A*S*H owned that record).

3.                 Players’ Salaries

Relative to other major sports, NFL players are underpaid. That’s right: underpaid.  They’re not exactly treated like Wal-Mart employees, of course, but they rank fourth, not first, among major sports. So maybe we should feel sorry for them?  Maybe not. 

 

On average NFL football players earn well over $400,000 a year. Many are paid more. A lot more. Take Matt Ryan, the star QB for the Atlanta Falcons, for example. As of June, 2014, Ryan, had earned $43.8 million playing pro football.  His five-year $103.75 million contract before included a $28 million signing bonus and a $12 million option bonus paid last March. Simply put, this 29-year-old earns more in a single year than most Americans will earn in a lifetime.

 

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, high school graduates (many of whom will have watched the game in a rented apartment or double-wide manufactured home), can expect to earn $1.2 million over the course of a lifetime. If you have a bachelor’s degree, you will probably earn a million dollars more – or about one-tenth as much as Matt Ryan makes in a year.

4.                 Ticket prices

The face value of Super Bowl tickets ranges from $800 to $1,900. That’s the good news, believe it or not. The bad news: Good luck trying to get one at face value.  Asking prices immediately after AFC and NFC Championship games were relatively cheap –  around $2,900. From there they rose to an average list price of $6,500, with the “cheap” seats going for a mere $4,200.

 

As Super Bowl Sunday approached, the prices climbed higher until the least expensive ticket on secondary market sites such as TiqIQ sold for $7,100, “while StubHub alerted the media that the ‘current average list price for the Super Bowl is $9,484.37, which is up 282.43% since last year at this time ($2,480.06).’”

Many sites had no tickets available, full stop.  StubHub had fewer than 300 seats on offer with asking prices ranging as high as $40,000.  The NFL’s official Ticket Exchange by Ticketmaster site listed 109 tickets for sale, with individual seats starting at $6,500. Anyone interested in a pair of seats together would have to pay at least $7,800 per ticket.

 

Why, you ask, can’t a fan get a ticket in the nosebleed seats at the low-low price of $800? Call it monopoly capitalism or corruption. Either way, it sucks and it’s sickening.

 

Money (the magazine”:

 

StubHub accused a handful of unnamed large ticket sellers in control of most of the Super Bowl ticket inventory of colluding with each other and manipulating the marketplace. “A consolidation of supply has allowed sellers to manipulate the marketplace and made it near impossible for any last minute fans to attend the game,” StubHub global head of communications Glenn Lehrman said…

 

But, hey, if you want free tickets, consider getting into politics.

5.                 The Business of America…

…is business. At no time is the tawdry side of corporate capitalism – the money-worshipping manic side of American commercialism – more conspicuously on display than during the Super Bowl. Not only “commercialism” but also commercials. Remember Budweiser’s Bud Bowl and the Clydesdales?  (Me neither.)  Here’s a fact to ruminate on: The average cost of a 30-second ad during Super Bowl XLVII in 2013 was about $4 million or a little over $133,000 per second.

 

The corporate greed is so rapacious that even greedy corporations are repelled.  General Motors and Dr. Pepper, for example, have dropped Super Bowl advertising entirely. In Super Bowl XLVI, NBC set a record, reportedly selling 58 spots worth $75 million during the game. The highest priced ad sold for a cool $5.84 million.

6.                 Like Davos, Only Different

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week 2,500 plutocrats gathered to talk about the fate of the planet, which they largely own. The Super Bowl is like Davos with a halftime show and commercials. Typically, there are hundreds of private jets landing at the airport in a city hosting the Super Bowl, so many that it creates a traffic jam on the runways after the game when all the billionaires want to get out of town at the same time. I have it on good authority that it’s a major headache for airport workers, air traffic controllers, and pilots. One private-jet pilot told this writer that at the 2012 Super Bowl in Indianapolis he’d had to stay at a Super Eight by the freeway 20 miles from the airport and pay $386 for one night.

 

What does it say about a society that people are eager to shell out an estimated $14 billion in celebration of a brutal game (brain damage; broken bones) but cannot agree that every man, woman, and child in America deserves affordable health insurance?

 

It’s enough to make an otherwise healthy person sick.

~~~

As usual, if the good Lord is willing and the creek don't rise I'll be with you sometime in, hopefully, not to distant future.

God Bless You ALL & God Bless the United States of America

 

 

Floyd