Harold Simmons, the Shady Mega-Billionaire Pouring Money into Rick Perry's Coffers

Most Americans have never heard of Harold Simmons, despite his fantastic wealth, because he wisely keeps his head low. 

By Joe Conason, AlterNet
Posted on August 31, 2011


Like so many Republican officials of the tea party persuasion, Rick Perry despises the Environmental Protection Agency—a feeling he has expressed repeatedly in speeches, lawsuits, legislation and even a book titled “Fed Up!” Perhaps that is only natural for the governor of Texas, a “dirty energy” state where the protection of air, water and human health rank well below the defense of oil company profits for most politicians.

But Perry has at least one other reason for smacking down those bureaucrats so eagerly. When environmental regulators do their job properly, that can mean serious trouble for Perry’s largest political donors.

The outstanding example is Harold Simmons, a Dallas mega-billionaire industrialist who has donated well over a million dollars to Perry’s campaign committees recently. With Perry’s eager assistance—and despite warnings from Texas environmental officials—Simmons has gotten approval to build an enormous radioactive waste dump on top of a crucial underground water supply.

“We first had to change the law to where a private company can own a license, and we did that,” Simmons boasted in 2006, after the Texas Legislature and the governor rubber-stamped initial legislation and approvals for the project. “Then we got another law passed that said (the state) can only issue one license. Of course, we were the only ones that applied.”

Most Americans have never heard of Simmons, despite his fantastic wealth, because he wisely keeps his head low, generally refusing press interviews and avoiding media coverage. Last year, a local monthly in his hometown published the headline “Dallas’ Evil Genius” over a scathing and fascinating investigative profile that examined not only the peculiar history of litigation between Simmons and his children (who no longer speak to him), but his political machinations, corporate raiding and continuing corporate penchant for pollution.

In D magazine, reporter Laray Polk explained how Simmons and a company he owns—innocuously named Waste Control Systems—manipulated state and federal law to allow him to build a nuclear-waste disposal site in West Texas. But construction has been delayed for years in part because the site appears to overlay the Oglalla Aquifer, an underground water supply that serves 1.9 million people in nine states, raising obvious concerns over radioactive contamination. In the Simmons profile and subsequent posts on the Investigative Fund website last year, Polk explored the controversy over the proposed WCS facility, including strong objections by staff analysts at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality who found evidence that atomic waste might indeed leach into a huge pool of drinking water.

Now reporters for The Los Angeles Times have revived, advanced and updated the WCS story with much additional detail, including interviews with the Texas environmental officials who oversaw the approval process for the facility. For a period last summer, that process appeared to have been slowed down to allow serious consideration of the scientific data collected by the commission’s staff.

In other words, the regulators were trying to do their job, which meant expensive delays and perhaps an eventual ruling against the nuclear waste site. That would have protected the Oglalla Aquifer and cost Simmons hundreds of millions in lost investment and profit. But then Perry’s appointees on the commission voted by two to one to issue licenses for the WCS site.

This year, officials on another Texas commission appointed by Perry—who oversee low-level radioactive waste in the state—voted to allow the WCS site to accept nuclear waste from 34 other states in a highly controversial decision later ratified by the state Legislature and signed by Perry himself. Not long after that, according to The Los Angeles Times’ report, Simmons gave $100,000 to Americans for Rick Perry, an “independent” committee supporting his presidential candidacy. (Back in 2004, Simmons was a major contributor to another “independent” political committee, the notorious Swift Boat Veterans group that distorted Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s war record in a series of TV ads.)

According to a spokesman for WCS, the Texas governor’s happy and lucrative relationship with Simmons did nothing to help the company except to turn the billionaire into “an easy target. ... It made the state redouble its efforts to be thorough.” But the Texas officials who opposed the approval on principle have since quit their jobs with the state. As one of them told the L.A. Times reporters, “This is a stunningly horrible public policy to grant a license to this company for that site ... . Something had to happen to overcome the quite blatant shortcoming of that application. ... The only thing I know in Texas that has the potential to do that is money in politics.”

As for the Texas official (and Perry appointee) who overruled his own scientists and approved the deal, he left state government, too—to work as a lobbyist for Simmons. He says that no undue influence led to the favorable outcome for his new employer.

Texas must be the only place on earth where anyone would believe that.

'Fracking': Rock Fracturing's Relation to Quakes

Monday, August 29, 2011 by The San Francisco Chronicle

by David R. Baker 

 

The earthquakes that rattled Blackpool, England, in April and May wouldn't have attracted much notice in California. The strongest rated a mere 2.3 in magnitude.

As fracking has spread, most complaints have focused on the threat of groundwater contamination. But some opponents have also asked whether the process - which, after all, involves breaking subterranean rocks - could cause earthquakes as well. But their possible connection to "fracking" raised eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic.

The epicenter of one of the quakes lay less than 500 meters from a well used for hydro-fracturing, the process of pumping pressurized water and chemicals deep underground to crack rocks and release oil or natural gas. The company fracking the well halted operations and started studying the possible link.

As fracking has spread, most complaints have focused on the threat of groundwater contamination. But some opponents have also asked whether the process - which, after all, involves breaking subterranean rocks - could cause earthquakes as well.

The question is particularly pertinent in seismically active California, where the use of fracking appears to be growing. Fracking projects have been reported in Santa Barbara County and the Sacramento Valley.

Last week's 5.8 temblor in Virginia even prompted a round of speculation in the blogosphere that fracking could be to blame. There are, however, no fracking wells near the quake's epicenter or in any of the surrounding counties, according to the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy.

Mild tremorsScientists say fracking does cause tiny earthquakes, but they're too small to be felt on the Earth's surface. The process can also cause quakes large enough to be noticed on the surface, but only if done near a fault line. And even then, the resulting tremors are likely to be mild.

"You're not going to get a really big earthquake," said Mark Zoback, a Stanford University geophysics professor who has studied the issue. "To get a big earthquake, you'd need a really big fault. When these oil fields are being developed, the companies are very aware of where the faults are. They don't want to do something stupid."

Some of the quakes that critics have blamed on fracking may have been caused by a related process - the disposal of the water used in fracking.

Similarity to air hockeyMany, but not all, fracking operations inject the wastewater deep underground. As the quantity of water builds up over time, it can change the pressure along a fault line, making the fault more likely to move.

"It's a little bit like an air hockey table," said Cliff Frohlich, associate director of the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas, Austin. "You pump air into an air hockey table so that when you push something, it will slip."

Frohlich was part of a team of researchers who studied a series of small quakes that struck near Dallas in 2008 and 2009, in an area where natural gas companies had used fracking. The epicenter turned out to be within a kilometer of a water disposal well, under the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. The largest quake measured 3.3.

"These earthquakes were not cases where frack jobs got out of hand," he said. "In a way, it was good news for the companies. If it's disposal that causes the quakes, you've got lots of options."

Those options include treating the water on the surface or shipping the water to a disposal well that isn't near a fault.

In July, Arkansas officials placed a moratorium on new disposal wells in a portion of the state shaken by hundreds of quakes, the largest of which reached magnitude 4.7. Four wells that had been used to dispose of water from fracking operations were shut down.

As fracking becomes more common in California, environmentalists want state officials to keep a close eye on any link to tremors.

Locating faultsA state bill that would force companies to disclose the chemicals they use in fracking originally contained a clause that would have required the companies to report whether the wells they planned to frack were near known fault lines. The clause, however, was taken out as a compromise with the oil and gas industry, said Renee Sharp, California director for the Environmental Working Group. She'd still like to see the state adopt that requirement.
"At least we'd know what was going on, so there'd be the possibility of really studying this issue," Sharp said.

Zoback says seismicity related to fracking and disposal wells is a manageable problem, one that shouldn't derail the growing production of gas from shale rock formations. Oil and gas companies need to identify faults near potential well sites, stay away from the faults, monitor for quakes during operations and stop work if quakes occur.

"I think we can replace coal with natural gas - I'm kind of militant about this," said Zoback, who recently served on a U.S. Department of Energy committee that recommended ways to protect the environment during fracking operations. "We've got to develop shale gas in an environmentally responsible way, and that means air and water quality, and it means not causing earthquakes."

Our Corporate Military

An Irrational, Authoritarian Institution
By KEVIN CARSON

Nicholas Kristoff, in a New York Times op-ed ("Our Lefty Military," June 16), lauds the "astonishingly liberal ethos" that governs the military internally — single-payer health insurance, job security, educational opportunities, free daycare — in support of Gen. Wesley Clark's description of it as "the purest application of socialism there is."

For me — an avowed libertarian socialist as well as a market anarchist — at least two howlers stand out here. First, when I think of "socialism," I think of all the liberatory things originally associated with that term back in the days of the early working class and classical socialist movement in the nineteenth century: 

Empowerment of the working class, worker control of production, and all the rest. Last I heard, the U.S. military isn't set up as a worker cooperative, with enlisted men electing officers, managing their own work, or voting on whether or not to go to war. Taking orders from a boss "because I said so" isn't my idea of socialism.

Second, the primary external mission of the U.S. military is to keep the world — or rather the corporate pigs who claim to own it — safe from anything remotely resembling worker empowerment. To me, that's pretty unsocialistic. For the past sixty-odd years since WWII (a lot longer, actually), the primary focus of American national security policy has been to protect feudal landed oligarchs from land reform, protect Western-owned corporations from nationalization, act as collector of last resort for the company store known as the World Bank, and enforce the draconian "intellectual property" protectionism which is the central bulwark of global corporate power today. Kristoff's "socialist" military's primary mission is keeping the world firmly in the hands of its corporate rulers.

Aside from that, I think Kristoff has it exactly backward: The military is almost a parody of American corporate culture. It's riddled with hierarchy, with Taylorist/Weberian bureaucratic work rules and standard operating procedures, and all the irrationality that goes with them. The only difference is, the pointy-haired bosses wear a different kind of uniform. If you've ever seen the movie "Brazil," or read Dilbert on a regular basis, you get the idea.

Kristoff has one point on his side: The differentials between production workers and senior management are a lot lower in the military than in present-day Corporate America. But that just means the military is structured more along the lines of old-style bureaucratic "Organization Man" capitalism of the sixties (as described by J.K. Galbraith), in which CEO salaries were typically only fifty times that of a production worker, rather than the current pathological model of cowboy capitalism where it's more like five hundred.

The military, like the large corporation, is plagued by enormously high overhead costs (the cost of training a soldier), and enormously wasteful capital outlays. The military, like an oligopoly corporation, can afford to be so wasteful because it doesn't bear the full cost of its own activities.

Corporate America's prevailing management accounting system, invented almost a century ago by Donaldson Brown of DuPont and GM, equates consumption of inputs to creation of value. You know, like the Soviet centrally planned economy. Administrative costs like management salaries, along with wasteful capital expenditures, are incorporated — through the practice known as "overhead absorption" — into the transfer price of goods "sold" to inventory. And in an oligopoly market, the corporation is able to pass those costs — plus a profit markup — on to the customer through administered pricing. The military shares that pricing system, with its incentives to maximize costs (Paul Goodman called "the great kingdom of cost-plus"). Ever hear of those $600 toilet seats? But in the case of the military, the administered pricing is called "taxation."

In short the military, like the large corporation, is a giant, bureaucratic, irrational, and authoritarian institution which can only survive through parasitism — enabled by the state — on the working class.

Factory Farms Produce 100 Times More Waste Than All People In the US Combined and It's Killing Our Drinking Water

"Factory farms are dangerous to the environment; they are ticking time bombs of manure just waiting to be spilled into public waters." 

By Jill Richardson, AlterNet
Posted on May 25, 2011

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently delivered a major victory to factory farms. Under a 2008 EPA rule, any confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) "designed, constructed, operated, and maintained in a manner such that the CAFO will discharge" animal waste must apply for a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit under the Clean Water Act. The livestock industry ridiculed the notion that a farm must apply for a permit to discharge manure whether it intended to discharge it or not. And while, when phrased that way, it might sound ridiculous to you too, the details of the case betray a different story.

David Kirby, author of Animal Factory, The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment, tells story after story in his book of factory farms discharging waste irresponsibly -- sometimes on purpose, and sometimes not. As Karen Hudson, whose story is told in the book, says, "Factory farms are dangerous to the environment; they are ticking time bombs of manure just waiting to be spilled into public waters."

The simple fact is that factory farms produce over 100 times more waste than all American humans produce combined. In the past, a pastured cow might disperse waste over an acre or more; how can farmers responsibly deal with the waste of 1,000, 5,000, or even 10,000 or more animals when they are crammed in tightly together? And, unfortunately for the farmers, they are often working under contract for major meat or dairy conglomerates who own the animals and leave the farmer with a tiny profit margin (or none at all) -- plus all of the liability, dead animals and manure. Therefore, in addition to simply disposing of manure responsibly, they also need to dispose of it cheaply if they are to stay in business.

In Karen's story, the CAFO in question perhaps did not intend to discharge manure. The farmer, if given the choice, may not have decided to apply for a permit. In February 2001, heavy rains coupled with melting snow and ice raised the levels of the nearby megadairy's manure lagoon to just inches below the rim. Panicking, the farmer, David Inskeep, decided not to hire tankers to haul away his cows' waste, as investigators had ordered him to do. Instead he ran hoses from the lagoon to a nearby ravine over a mile away and pumped two million gallons of "a foamy, brown-yellow stew" into it. The 10-foot-high berm that dammed the ravine gave way, and the result was "the worst livestock spill in Illinois history."

The permits in question in the recently decided case would require farmers like Inskeep to make a plan for how to handle animal waste, and to follow that plan or face penalties. A version of this law has been in place for decades, but the details of the law have changed several times in the last few years. The major question of the case is: Can a CAFO be held liable for failing to apply for a permit?

Under a 1976 rule, all large CAFOs (those with more than 1,000 cattle or equivalent amounts of other species) and some medium-sized CAFOs were required to have permits to discharge waste. If a CAFO discharged waste without a permit, it faced civil or criminal penalties. The only permissible, unregulated pollution was "agricultural stormwater discharges," when a storm carried animal waste into navigable rivers.

This changed in 2003, when a new rule required all CAFOs to apply for permits or to ask the EPA for a "no potential to discharge" determination to become exempt from needing a permit. Additionally, the 2003 rule required all CAFOs to design and implement a "Nutrient Management Plan" (i.e. a plan to responsibly deal with animal waste). So long as the farmer followed his or her Nutrient Management Plan, any pollution of waterways was to be included in the "agricultural stormwater discharges" exemption.

After some legal wrangling, both by industrial farming interests and by environmental groups, the rules were changed again in 2008. The 2008 rule only requires CAFOs to apply for a permit if they are "designed, constructed, operated, and maintained in a manner such that the CAFO will discharge." Unless a CAFO can prove it does not meet that criteria (and thus does not need a permit), a discharge of manure would result in penalties both for the discharge itself and for failure to have a permit.

The recent court decision ruled that the EPA has no right to require CAFOs to apply for permits unless they actually discharge waste. Once a CAFO discharges waste, however, the court decided that the EPA can then require it to apply for a permit.

The industrial farming groups -- the National Pork Producers Council, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the Oklahoma Pork Council, United Egg Producers, the North Carolina Pork Council, the National Chicken Council, the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association, Dairy Business Association Inc., and the National Milk Producers Federation -- also challenged the EPA's right to force CAFOs to design and implement Nutrient Management Plans and to penalize them if the plans are not followed and waste is discharged into waterways. On this issue, the court sided with the EPA.

What is the impact of this decision? Could it perhaps have no impact at all, as the CAFOs exempted from applying for permits are those that are not polluting? Sadly, this is likely not the case. By forcing CAFOs to apply for a permit, the EPA was forcing them to create a plan to manage the large amounts of waste their animals would inevitably generate. Without planning ahead for responsibly disposing of manure, how many CAFOs will wait until the last minute, like Inskeep, and then dump millions of gallons of manure into the environment? Even though the EPA will still be able to penalize them once they do, the damage to the environment will already be done.

These are not hypothetical scenarios. Just ask Rick Dove, an ex-Marine who serves as a Riverkeeper on his beloved Neuse River in North Carolina. After retiring from the Marines, he lived his dream of becoming a small-scale commercial fisherman on the river briefly -- until enormous hog operations moved in, each producing as much waste as a town of 20,000 people, and their waste killed the fish.

Dove has seen hog farmers oversaturating their "sprayfields" -- cropland intended to absorb the unfathomable amount of manure generated by the hogs -- resulting in contamination of local waterways, but he has also seen the farmers illegally dumping the manure directly into the rivers. And then he's seen the Neuse turn red, green, yellow, orange, and black with various types of algae blooms that precede fish kills that kill millions or even a billion fish at a time.

In addition to irresponsible spraying or dumping of manure, there are the many lagoon spills that occur. In these cases, farmers likely have no intention of dumping manure into the environment, but it happens all the same. Kirby says that when writing his book, "there were so many lagoon spills that my editor had me take some out." And because such spills are accidents, farmers won't necessarily apply for permits ahead of time, since they don't intend to discharge manure.

The losers in this story are not just "tree-hugging" environmentalists or even fishermen. In far too many cases, the losers are drinkers of water -- which is all of us.