Legal Issues – Specific Litigation – Page 3 – education and deconstruction.com

The Riverkeepers

PLEASE NOTE: This is not a sponsored post.

The Book of the Week is “The Riverkeepers, Two Activists Fight to Reclaim Our Environment as a Basic Human Right” by John Cronin and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., published in 1997.

Riverkeeper is an environmental organization that, over the course of decades, has brought legal actions to minimize pollution of a few major rivers across the United States. Unsurprisingly, litigation and political shenanigans perpetrated by polluters, go together.

It is always local residents who are hurt the most from egregious acts of pollution (usually spread by big corporations) because: they can’t afford expensive legal costs, and are usually dying of cancer or are suffering serious health problems (never mind what the pollution does to plants and animals) by the time they are compensated (if they ever are) for damages inflicted by the defendants.

The authors began with a story of how wealthy political donors took an unlikely side against a utility project (because it happened to be proposed for their neighborhood). Beginning in early 1962, Riverkeeper attempted to stop Con Edison from building an electricity-generating reservoir (the Storm King project) that would make waterfront properties an eyesore in Westchester and Putnam counties, and kill many striped bass.

In the second half of the 1960’s, propaganda wars raged on both sides, but public opinion was against Con Edison. Stakeholders included: the federal government, five utilities, two state agencies, Scenic Hudson (an environmental group), the Fishermen, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and local residents.

And the insults and injuries just kept coming, even after the first Earth Day in 1970– with offenders like Exxon and local governments responsible for pollution levels in Quassaic Creek, Croton Landfill, and three cities in Connecticut.

Even worse, there was lack of regulatory action from politically entrenched government agencies such as the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Both feared retaliation from the NRA, whose gun clubs were polluting waterways with lead and other toxins. The NRA simply closed the gun clubs rather than clean up, and remained a political powerhouse.

In another story, in 1976, the Hudson river’s commercial fisheries were closed by local politicians after General Electric dumped an excessive amount of PCB’s in the river. Not only were local residents poorer in various ways for the outrageous crime, but so were hundreds of people trying to make a living through fishing.

In the early 1990’s, environmentalists saw “joy in Mudville” as New York City Democratic mayor David Dinkins express interest in actually helping enact legislation that would protect the city’s drinking water (as testing had shown that it contained as much as 2% sewage in it– after going through a treatment plant), whose source was upstate entities that controlled the watershed.

The attendant political hostility was such that a reviewer said of Pat Robertson’s 1991 book, The New World Order, “These ravings would hardly be worth mentioning had they not played such an important role in fueling the ideological underpinnings of the antienvironmental movement and the zealotry of its followers.”

The environmentalists’ dreams were dashed by 1995, when Republican Rudy Giuliani engaged in excessive deregulation. Daily, too many sociopathic political hacks around this country are slowly, indirectly, poisoning America via the discharge of: millions of gallons of raw sewage into waterways, pesticides onto golf courses, dirty water from storms, and innumerable toxins contained in everyday products into the air, water and earth.

Nevertheless, through the years, there have been a few isolated incidents of pollution reduction of environmentally conscious philanthropists, and a few legal triumphs when defendants were actually compelled to comply with hopeful-sounding federal laws: the Coastal Zone Management Act, Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, to name just a few.

Grassroots groups need the higher authority of FEDERAL LAW to minimize pollution resulting from extremely consequential egregious acts because: 1) The polluters are politically entrenched at all government levels; 2) The polluters argue vehemently that pollution should be regulated locally. BUT, the enforcement of state laws has been lax because monster corporations divide and conquer, pitting state governments against each other when, for instance– deciding where to locate a plant or keep one open– by waving an economic carrot or stick.

Those big donors claim they will create jobs and grow the tax base of the area. Or, they’ll threaten to relocate, if their wrongdoing isn’t condoned by local politicians, who are also usually greedy and power-hungry.

However, along the lines of local enforcement, the authors recounted how a law officer showed that community policing concepts can minimize pollution, and keep local areas clean, on a small scale. He arrested small business owners for illegal disposal of garbage, debris, toxins and wastewater, etc.

If law-abiding citizens look around– and entities more powerful than themselves are allowed to get away with that kind of polluting– they feel they have license to do the same. The excuse “Everybody does it” allows everyone to contribute to the lawlessness, and there goes the neighborhood.

Read the book to learn of the other main influences and people (hint: one was Rachel Carson and her scary book) that and who have shaped the regulatory environment of the environment in the United States through the decades.

In honor of Earth Day (April 22), here is a little ditty:

THINGS CAN ONLY GET WETTER

sung to the tune of “Things Can Only Get Better” with apologies to Howard Jones.

We’re on a path to LOSE it all.
Acts of pollution affect us all.
It’s compromise we have to realize.
Greedy, selfish polluters shouldn’t keep us from natURE and health, unless we tolerate their smears and lies.

And I’m sure you care. Me, too.
But laws are hard to alter.
We spew toxins and sewage all day.
Things can only get wetter.

Woe, woe, woe, woe, woe, woe
Woe, woe, woe, woe, woe, woe

Reg-u-la-tors on political STRINGS run the show,
propagandize with no regrets.
Litigation takes forever, is a minefield. Taxpayers lose every time.
Where are the ethical philanthropists?

And I’m sure you care. Me, too.
But laws are hard to alter.
We spew toxins and sewage all day.
Things can only get wetter.

Woe, woe, woe, woe, woe, woe
Woe, woe, woe, woe, woe, woe

And I’m sure you care. Me, too.
But laws are hard to alter.
We spew toxins and sewage all day.
Things can only get wetter.

Woe, woe, woe, woe, woe, woe
Woe, woe, woe, woe, woe, woe

Woe, woe, woe, woe, woe, woe
Woe, woe, woe, woe, woe, woe…

Misfire

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “Misfire, Inside the Downfall of the NRA” by Tim Mak, published in 2021. This volume told the all-too-frequent story of alpha-male executives with hubris syndrome, who use their employer as their personal piggy bank, and bankrupt them. That of the National Rifle Association (NRA) was just the latest in a series of such scandals in recent decades.

As it began to go belly up, the NRA had 76 people on its board of directors, a few of whom were celebrities. They received no salary, but took ridiculous advantage of their expense accounts, and at the same time, and, in an obvious conflict, some were tasked with overseeing the NRA’s finances.

A power vacuum that started in the late 1980’s allowed Wayne LaPierre to assume the most powerful executive position in the organization by 1991. His colleagues– the NRA’s officers, and executives of its outside communications agency — manipulated him in order to form a cult of personality around him. This way, they, too, could partake of all the first-class travel, shopping and host of other aspects of a luxury lifestyle through their outsized salaries and expense accounts.

After the Sandy Hook elementary-school shooting in December 2012, the NRA became even more sociopathic, throwing up distractions in its messaging. It was already aggressively– as it had been since 1977– defeating every bit of firearms-restriction-legislation it possibly could using not only its money, but also its ability to influence politicians and voters through its network of priceless, powerful contacts; even to its own financial and reputational detriment. It argued that politicians should seek to improve America’s mental health system, and that everyone in the country had a right to own a firearm for the purpose of self-defense!

Countless, cowardly politicians have caved under pressure to the NRA’s demands; they voted against even weak proposed laws that would restrict gun acquisitions and gun usage, that would hardly have made a dent in sales of firearms, because they wanted to get reelected. As is well known, the NRA was a monster-sized lobbyist and political donor. It had a mean-spirited cancel-culture: publicly shaming its ex-employees on social media if they criticized it, even years after their employ.

Beginning in April 2019, a decades-long power struggle resulted in an orgy of litigation between and among the NRA, its communications agency, and its law firm, whose main go-to executive had become besties with LaPierre. That executive, too, was availing himself of the benefits derived from financial crimes of excess typical of these kinds of organizations.

Read the book to learn all about it. Wayne LaPierre has been just one (of those countless who are actually caught!) of a few poster boys whose financial crimes borne of excessive greed have been exposed, but sooo few organization leaders such as he, are punished for their misdeeds. Here are a few others, who were actually punished (and the year in which they went to jail):

2005, Dennis Kozlowski

2005, Bernie Ebbers

2006, Jack Abramoff

2007, Richard Scrushy

2012, Bernie Madoff

And here is the song they sing when caught:

I TOOK IT EASY

sung to the tune of “Take It Easy” with apologies to the Eagles.

Well, I got out on BAIL.
You can’t put me in JAIL.
I got SEVen sins on my mind.
Whistleblowers betrayed me.
Prosecutors flayed me.
My lawyers are close friends of mine.

I took it easy.
I took it easy.

Don’t believe the evil liars who say I’m guil-ty.

I live it up while I still can.
I hid my assets. Then it hit the fan.
I found a place to make my millions.
I took it easy.

Well I’m STILL your leading male.
I’m just too great to fail.
My claques, flacks and sycophants all aGREE.
I DID nothing wrong.
I’ll delay this CASE so long you’ll give up on punishing me.

Come on, payyy me,
my bonus and sa-alary.
I have no doubt that friends in high places are gonna SAVE me.

TaxPAYERS lose. I win.
You’ll never catch ME again.
So eat your heart out. Look at ME grin.
I took it easy.

Well, I got out on BAIL.
You can’t put me in JAIL.
I got NO remorse on my mind.
No matter how much you hover,
you’ll NEVER recover, all the money you say is not mine.

I took it easy.
I took it easy.
Don’t believe the evil liars who say I’m guil-ty.
Come on, payyy me,
my bonus and sa-alary.
I have no doubt that friends in high places are gonna SAVE me.

Oh, I got it easy.
YOU’RE the one who’s slea-eazy…

Here We Are

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “Here We Are, American Dreams, American Nightmares” by Aarti Shahani, published in 2019.

In the mid-1990’s, according to New York State, the Manhattan electronics store co-owned by Shahani’s father, was a front for Colombia’s Cali drug cartel. The indictment had thirteen counts.

After 9/11, the U.S. federal government agency Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) was established for the purpose of finding and deporting immigrants, both illegal and those in special circumstances, with no statute of limitations.

Shahani’s uncle Ratan (in the latter category– he had a green card) “… missed his [ICE deportation] flight and spent more nights in detention, on the taxpayer dime…” The financial institution with which he had an account– Broadway National Bank– had laundered $123 million through various accounts. It “…paid a fine of $4 million, and no bank executive served a single day in jail.”

One question Americans might want to ask, however, is how much IS the “taxpayer dime” when it comes to funding illegal immigrants? Is the actual dollar value a nickel a month per American?? Or a thousand dollars a day per American??

Of course, it is impossible to fully account for the qualitative impacts, good and bad, that illegals have on society as a whole. More specifically, they might make undocumented (excuse the pun) positive economic, cultural, social or athletic contributions, but partake of limited resources such as healthcare and education that diminish quality thereof for citizens. (For more info, see this blog’s posts: The Opposite of Woe, Call Me American, full circle (sic), Patriot Number One, The Snakehead, Where the Wind Leads, The Fox Hunt, and Scorpions For Breakfast.)

Anyway, this suspenseful story recounted a series of traumatic events of an immigrant family from India, interspersed with vignettes of the family’s hardships (due to the author’s father’s naivete; plus swindlers, errors and bad luck) that led the author to become an activist. She ended up delivering lectures to audiences consisting of “lawyers, journalists, social workers, congressional staffers, city council members and families in crisis.”

Read the book to learn all about it.

Fatal Subtraction

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “Fatal Subtraction, How Hollywood Really Does Business” by Pierce O’Donnell and Dennis McDougal, published in 1992.

“I asked myself whether this uncanny similarity and anticompetitive market was the result of coincidence or conspiracy. Thanks to my populist tendencies and a healthy distrust of powerful institutions, I opted for the sinister explanation.”

Politics? Big Tech? Medical, legal, music, sports or oil industry?

The above quote happens to refer (in various ways) to all of the major Hollywood movie studios, just after their most lucrative years. The skyrocketing size of the home video market in the 1980’s made movie studios richer and richer, what with cable TV, VCRs and global distribution. They retained the best entertainment law firms on an ongoing basis so that whenever any powerless parties who felt wronged, tried to hire those firms to bring legal actions against them, there were conflicts of interest.

In 1988, Art Buchwald and Alain Bernheim– respectively a seasoned humorous newspaper writer and lecturer who dabbled in the movie industry, and a producer– sued Paramount Pictures Corporation for thirteen causes of action; among them, breach of contract in connection with the movie Coming to America starring Eddie Murphy. They were fortunate in that they were able to hire a big firm and could afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire topnotch attorneys to fight a years-long legal battle.

The crux of the dispute involved the boilerplate contracts almost everyone in Hollywood was compelled by their agents to sign, in order to get work. The studios engaged in cartelizing behavior, so the powerless creative personnel were at their mercy at contract-signing. Only a tiny percentage of powerful elite stars reaped a ton of money for all movies they did, regardless of financial success. The agents claimed they were getting great deals for their less powerful talent, but that was a lie. For, starting in the 1950’s, the contracts evolved pursuant to the studios’ shady accounting practices, in a way that cheated screenwriters especially.

By the dawn of the 1990’s, big-name actors were allowed to behave like prima donnas, basically enjoying excessive expense accounts and reaping outrageously generous compensation from gross movie revenues. The movie idea originators and writers received net profit participation– i.e., the crumbs after all expenses had been deducted. The studios’ definition of “profit” was topsy turvy so when it came time to pay lowly workers, they claimed their movies were losing money!

O’Donnell and his legal team argued that certain provisions in Buchwald’s and Bernheim’s contracts were unconscionable, and therefore legally unenforceable. On principle, the studios’ oligopoly was economically bad not just for his clients, but for society (See this blog’s post “Wikinomics / Courting Justice”).

Read the book to learn every last detail of the case.

One for the Earth

The Book of the Week is “One for the Earth, Journal of A Sierra Club President” by Susan D. Merrow with Wanda A. Rickerby, published in 1992.

The Sierra Club, founded in May 1892, began with about one hundred members. Its original goal was to prevent the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California from becoming further polluted. Sadly, through the decades, the need for such an organization has grown exponentially. The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, a group that began using the Club’s name, actually helped raise more funds than otherwise for the Club, but took public stances with which the original group disagreed.

Beginning in May 1990, Merrow was appointed president of the Club for a year’s term. She had acquired previous experience teaching adult education classes and lobbying the Connecticut state government on environmental matters. Her new job– for which she received no salary, only reimbursement of expenses– required constant travel. Volunteers did the bulk of the Club’s work. Her and her employer’s major frustration with the then-federal government was that it was regressive in connection with all kinds of energy issues.

The Club’s lobbyists were awfully busy contacting politicians about: incinerators, recycling, composting and source reduction, increasing gas mileage and decreasing emissions in newer cars, advocating for stopping oil drilling in the Arctic, reducing pollution on land and in the sea and in the air, and arguing for stricter waste-disposal laws, etc., etc., etc.

It might be recalled that a year prior, the Exxon Valdez oil spill left about 380,000 birds dead, and resulted in severe health issues for many animals and plants, including hundreds of species of mollusks, fish and coral-reef animals, dolphins and whales. The then-legal case that might compensate injured parties (Alaska and the United States) for the disaster was still pending. However, in April 1990, Exxon suggested that it pay $100 million to settle the civil and criminal charges against it. Tens of studies done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) showed grievous (and probably irreparable) harm that (if a dollar value had to be put on it) was estimated at $1.1 billion.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, astute people knew that the Clean Air Act that was then working its way through the Congressional-passage process would become diluted by profiteers aided by propagandists. In autumn 1990, the Bryan Bill– mandating the manufacturing of more fuel-efficient cars– was stalled too, by lobbyists in the oil and auto industries, and by other presidential supporters.

The First Gulf War wreaked environmental destruction (now forgotten by Americans) consisting of “… soot from 600 burning oil wells… cloud over farmland and villages in Turkey and Iran… rain filled with toxic chemicals, polluted both the air and water. Severe respiratory illness, cancer, and ruined crops…”

On a diplomatic mission, the author visited staffers at three different magazines: Good Housekeeping, Sports Illustrated, and Seventeen. She hoped to get articles published for targeted readers of their respective, widely different demographic groups in whose interest it was to save the earth.

One concept the author conveyed was that protecting the habitat of one species, aids in the survival of all of the other species in that habitat. So ensuring a safe environment for the bobolink helps: “…lichens, apple trees, ladybugs, sumac, earthworms, chipmunks, monarch butterflies, white birches, wild blueberry bushes, goldenrod, red foxes– even humans.” The flip side is that one negative consequence leads to another when the food chain is disrupted (See this blog’s post, Rat Island).

Read the book to learn what happened to the Johnston-Wallop bill, and much more about the author’s trials, tribulations and triumphs.

Serpent on the Rock

The Book of the Week is “Serpent on the Rock” by Kurt Eichenwald, published in 1995.

This volume contained an egregious error. It appeared in an anecdote about a member of the Belzberg family, Canadian Orthodox-Jews. In the late 1970’s, Belzberg was acquiring a large quantity of stock of the retail brokerage named Bache, so one of Bache’s executives met with him, to find out his intentions.

As the meeting ended, the author wrote that Belzberg shook hands with the Bache executive. That was obviously a fictionalized detail of the story, because Orthodox Jews do not shake hands with, or touch others, except for close family members.

Anyway, in the second half of the 1970’s, tax shelters became trendy in the securities industry. In the 1980’s, Bache (with a shady reputation in the first place) sold tax shelters in the form of limited partnerships of various kinds (oil and real estate were the most common) and reaped fat fees of as much as 8%. On a bunch of them, printed marketing communications illegally contained material omissions and misstatements.

Bache’s clients were clearly unsophisticated, because anyone with a minimal knowledge of finance should have seen that the objectives of the investment were contradictory: “income, growth and safety” (!)

Brokers dispensed with the printed prospectuses (which contained disclaimers required by law), and focused on verbally selling the money-losing financial instruments to their clients. They lied about the projected financial returns (14 to 15%, when they were pretty sure there would actually be disastrous losses). They called the investments “safe”– a word that should NEVER be used on Wall Street. The proper lingo should be “low-risk” and only when that’s the truth. The limited partnerships were “high-risk.”

One man, Jim Darr, became particularly powerful in the Direct Investment Group, and engaged in a boatload of excessively greedy, unethical activities and white-collar crimes that made him fabulously wealthy. In 1983, he flew all the way to a small thrift bank in Arkansas to get a home loan of $1.8 million to purchase a mansion in Connecticut. At that time, there were plenty of local lenders he could have approached.

Another sleazy character, Clifton Harrison, after pulling his last act of unbelievable thievery, gave the excuse, “I’ve just been borrowing some money against future fees.” Read the book to learn more about the various individuals who shaped Bache’s history, and what became of them.

ENDNOTE: The above shenanigans happens every few years in the United States. The line from the movie “That Thing You Do” describes it perfectly: A very common tale, boys, a very common tale. Here is a brief elaboration of the last forty years:

Steps of the American Politico-Economic Cycle

An extremely pro-business president comes to power.
Excessive deregulation ensues.
Shady financial instruments and money-making vehicles spike in popularity (tax shelters, savings and loan associations, goodwill valuations, junk bonds, derivatives, dot-com stocks, stock-options-repricing, subprime mortgages, payday lenders, for-profit colleges, the PACE program, etc., etc., etc.)
Out-of-control greed ensues.
Profiteers of all political persuasions dispense with ethical behavior.
The bubble bursts. A financial crash ensues.
Lawsuit time!
The impoverishment rate accelerates for the middle class and the poor.
Election time. “It’s the economy, stupid.” Whether true or not (usually not!), campaign-propaganda convinces voters that the president is solely responsible for their personal financial situations.
The reelected president, or one from the same party, continues some of the same hog-wild policies, or the new president reverses what he can. Re-regulation ensues.
Time for another round of Survival Roulette (See this blog’s post, “Blind Ambition”).
Opposition-propagandists pull strings to reverse what the new president reversed. They make voters impatient for improvement, even though undoing the damage takes years and years.
Election time. Repeat steps 1-12.

The Real Cost of Fracking / The Buffalo Creek Disaster / A Trust Betrayed – BONUS POST

The first Bonus Book of the Week is “The Real Cost of Fracking, How America’s Shale Gas Boom is Threatening Our Families, Pets, and Food” by Michelle Bamberger and Robert Oswald, published in 2014.

Through the decades, monster-sized American corporations have mastered the game of political machinations, public relations and propaganda in doing tremendous harm to Americans (and getting away with it!), and in defending themselves against environmental-damage lawsuits, and premises-liability, personal-injury and wrongful death lawsuits. These corporations tend to be energy companies. See the following posts in this blog for several other examples (in no particular order):

Klondike

The Law of the Jungle

Sons of Wichita

Fateful Harvest

The World According to Monsanto

Superpower: One Man’s Quest…

The Oil Road

In the Name of Profit

Killers of the Flower Moon, and

Let the People In (see boldfaced paragraphs)

American companies that do fracking is the same story. The authors loosely define fracking as “unconventional drilling” for gas and oil, and hydraulic fracturing. The fracking industry has successfully convinced landowners (through omissions, half-truths and outright lies in their pitches) that they (the owners of small farms) could make big bucks from leasing their land for the purpose of fracking (when it turned out to be the other way around, most every time).

There are three major reasons it takes so long for the public to catch on to companies that damage the earth and people and can destroy communities and/or a way of life:

The companies put political pressure on the EPA and state-politicians to shut up;

The companies have the damaged parties sign non-disclosure agreements; and

The companies pay hush money to, or threaten any other parties who might give them bad publicity.

“Proving proximate cause for illness is complex because the water, soil and air have multiple chemicals of varying toxicities, and [have] hardly any pre- and post-drilling testing of air, and water, soil, people and animals.”

The consequences of fracking have far-reaching potential to contaminate the nation’s food supply, when cows, chickens and other food-animals are exposed to fracking toxins.

Sadly, Pennsylvania is only one of several states that has sold out to the pro-fracking interests. The authors had hours of discussions with those very adversely affected by the litany of unpronounceable toxins very likely produced by fracking. Beginning in September of 2009, those owners of small farms developed the following health problems: rashes, burning eyes, sore throats, headaches, nosebleeds and unpleasant gastrointestinal symptoms.

The victims’ farm animals and pets had trouble reproducing, or they died. Air pollution resulted from dust, dirt and noise from heavy earth-moving vehicles and tanker trucks. In spring 2010, one family’s only water supply was terminated by the fracking company.

In addition, the family lost their livelihood breeding horses and dogs. They couldn’t afford to buy bottled water for the horses. The fracking company graciously offered to incinerate the horse’s corpse. One of their dogs also died even though it was drinking bottled water and was barely two years old. The suspected reason was that it drank wastewater that was poured on the family’s property.

Further, tests sufficiently specific to provide evidence of proximate cause between:

the family’s health problems, their animals’ deaths, and the drop in their property’s value due to contamination; and

the fracking company’s toxic practices

were prohibitively expensive.

Also, apparently, the company wasn’t legally required to disclose which toxins were produced by its operations, because it didn’t– when the leasing documents were signed with the landowners.

In central Arkansas, fracking wastewater was recycled when it was injected into deep wells, causing small earthquakes. Other states that allowed fracking at the book’s writing included: Ohio, Texas, Louisiana, Colorado, North Dakota and New York.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional details on fracking, its adverse effects, of the complicated laws governing (or not governing) land in Pennsylvania and New York State at the book’s writing, and the authors’ suggestions for how to regulate the oil and gas industry to strike a balance between extracting needed fossil fuels and public health and safety; and sensible energy policy.

The second Bonus Book of the Week is “The Buffalo Creek Disaster, The Story of the Survivors’ Unprecedented Lawsuit” by Gerald M. Stern, published in 1976.

“If the government ever did knock on my door, I’d probably expect harm and harassment instead of help.”

-The [Caucasian] author’s attitude when he was a federal civil-rights attorney, personally visiting unannounced, helpless black families in Southern States, to inquire whether they required assistance with registering to vote, or with being protected, during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s.

In West Virginia coal country in the 1950’s, one dam overflowed. Then two more dams were built. The construction of the third dam– built cheaply– was subpar pursuant to civil engineering standards. The dam-builder was the Buffalo Creek Mining Company. Its holding company Pittston Company knowingly allowed a burning pile of coal waste-products to obstruct the stream, so that sooner or later, a tidal wave would flood the area.

In February 1972, it happened. More than 125 people drowned and hundreds were left homeless in a valley when the third dam broke, causing a stream to overflow in Middle Fork Hollow.

The possible causes of action in the ensuing class action suit included involuntary manslaughter and criminal negligence, but “psychic impairment” was a relatively new concept that had yet to be commonly litigated. It was known as “shell shock” in WWI. The new label for it after the Vietnam War was “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (PTSD).

In April 1972, the author and his public-interest law firm, Arnold & Porter began to represent people harmed by the flood. They had to take the case on contingency, a rarity, only because those survivors couldn’t afford to pay the lawyers with any other fee structure. There occurred the usual frustrations, uncertainties and wrenches in the works that complicated the case, making it more expensive and time-consuming. Just a few included:

the fact that the wife of and daughter of, and the rival himself of the recently elected United Mine Workers Union’s president were murdered;

Once the lawyers decided whom to sue and in which court, it was hard to guess which of three judges would be assigned to the case (bringing up the cliche, “good to know the law, better to know the judge”);

At that time, there was a limit of $110,000 that could be awarded to each personal injury / wrongful death victim in the state of West Virginia; and

The disaster occurred less than two months prior to the West Virginia gubernatorial election.

Read the book to learn of the slew of additional details on the case and the fate of the stakeholders.

Yet one more largely similar disaster case was documented in the third Bonus Book of the Week, “A Trust Betrayed, The Untold Story of Camp Lejeune and the Poisoning of Generations of Marines and Their Families” by Mike Magner, published in 2014.

Like the fracking and coal-country stories, this story involved contaminated water, too. However, it was not a monster-sized corporation’s, but the United States government’s, negligence and secrecy that harmed people.

This story also differed in that the residents of the community were fluid– living there only months or a few years, compared to the fracking and coal-country victims. So they didn’t immediately connect the harm done to them with their drinking water, and communication among them was more scattered.

At the dawn of the 1980’s, an under-resourced water-testing lab at Camp Lejeune (where U.S. Marines were stationed) in North Carolina began to get an inkling that wells that provided drinking-water contained toxins such as THM’s, TCE, PCE, pesticides, PCB’s, VOC’s and benzene.

New federal clean-water laws were going into effect, so the Navy had to comply. The water was supposed to be tested regularly for grease, oil and suspended solids. If results showed contamination above a certain level, the lab was supposed to tell the EPA, but it didn’t handle cleanup.

The lab’s five (alarming) test-results between October 1980 and February 1981, were sent to Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Atlantic Division, where they disappeared into a black hole; not necessarily because there was a cover-up at that time, but merely due to bureaucracy– the lab workers thought the Navy knew what they were doing and would do the testing and regulating.

Camp Lejeune’s base commanders didn’t want to know whether individual wells were polluted. They hoped the base had sufficient clean wells to dilute the water from the contaminated ones. Shutting down any of the wells would produce a water shortage for the whole base during the summer, when demand for water was highest. Besides, water-testing was expensive.

Starting in the 1960’s and for decades thereafter, the military families and employees who lived in a certain geographic area on the base saw a disproportionate number of miscarriages, birth defects, and in later years, cancer. The suspected sources of pollution (or legal-defense scapegoats) included a dry cleaners, fuel tanks and a pumping station that exuded gallons and gallons of fuels and chemicals (through spills, leaks and inadequate safety practices) all the time.

In spring 1985, the crisis started to hit the fan, when the Navy was compelled to notify the residents that their drinking water might be unsafe (when in reality, for decades, it definitely had been).

Read the book to learn lots of additional details of what happened then (hint: the usual federal and state inter-agency (and military-branch) fighting, finger-pointing, report-writing, excuses for delays in the form of follow-up-research, and all manner of bureaucratic secrecy and shenanigans; after which the victims and taxpayers were the ones who paid the price).

Loyalties – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Loyalties, A Son’s Memoir” by Carl Bernstein, published in 1989.

Born in 1944 in the D.C. area, the author suffered the anguish of having parents who believed in Communism and were punished for it. They celebrated the following holidays: Passover, May Day, Paris Commune Day, July Fourth, and the anniversary of the Russian Revolution– October Division.

In March 1947, president Harry Truman signed the “Loyalty Order” which was a law that required all government employees take the Loyalty Oath. The Oath treated people as though they were already guilty, for starters.

FBI head J. Edgar Hoover was secretly feeding Truman information (which would help him get reelected in 1948) on his political enemies in exchange for enforcing the Loyalty Order. As is well known, Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy had whipped up a false frenzy of fear that lots of people who believed in Communism were plotting to overthrow the American government. So part of the excuse Truman could use for terrorizing (mostly wrongly accused) Americans, was that they were members of a political party (Communist) that was illegal.

The author asserted that Hoover’s real motive in holding hearings (from 1948 to 1950) in connection with people who refused to take the Loyalty Oath (different and separate from HUAC’s hearings) was to eliminate the government union– whose members were the accused. Such progressive community organizers were fighting for civil rights, etc. They were a bee in Hoover’s bonnet. The hearings trampled on due process in a variety of ways, a few of which included:

the accused weren’t told whom their accusers were (the finger-pointers remained anonymous) and the latter weren’t allowed to be confronted, either;

the accused weren’t allowed to have an attorney present; and

the accusation alone served as evidence (!)– no proof was needed for the accused to be subjected to punishment meted out by the Loyalty Review Board, an FBI committee.

Read the book to learn of the ideological tenor of the times that shaped the social circles of the author’s parents–their trials and tribulations, and the emotional trouble these caused the author.

Ranger Games

The Book of the Week is “Ranger Games, A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime” by Ben Blum, published in 2017.

Alex Blum discovered his calling early in life: becoming a soldier in the Rangers, an elite fighting force of the U.S. military. Beginning in 2001, he attended high school in the Denver area, with a few others who trained with him after graduating.

Rangers training was fraught with the usual extremes: sleep and nutrition deprivation for days; at irregular intervals for no reason– expletive-laden tirades by commanders; team-oriented missions that, for an individual’s smallest infraction– punished the entire group with prolonged, exhausting physical activity in wet, dirty, painful conditions, etc., etc., etc.

Blum successfully completed his training, but was subjected to undue influence by a particular spellbinding commander who was also a pathological liar, who later led Blum and several other impressionable young men to commit a bank robbery in Tacoma, Washington.

Even though most members of the group were in the military, the ringleader acquired the following black-market weapons to do the crime: two AK-47’s, a Springfield XD 9mm pistol bearing an underslung flashlight, and a 9mm Glock 19 with a red laser light. These were used to terrorize the bank employees, and unsurprisingly, the employees all exhibited symptoms of PTSD after the robbery. The volume of black-market firearms can only grow bigger and bigger if left unchecked, spurring more and more episodes such as this one.

A high-profile court case resulted, that raised numerous issues regarding military training, law, criminal justice, psychology and sociology in the United States. In the aftermath, the author– Blum’s cousin– a mathematician turned journalist, took an interest in the case for various reasons. His extended family’s reputation was harmed, he was curious as to how his cousin (a good boy from a good family, of course) could do such evil, and he sought to help his cousin turn his life around.

A huge body of knowledge has been gleaned on the major aspects of why Blum did as he was told, without questioning its morality, let alone criminality. In the American criminal justice system, there have been endless debates over insanity, brainwashing, and how to test whether a criminal defendant knows the difference between right and wrong.

Throw in the fact that the defendant underwent special-operations military training, and the debates never end. Only after years of extensive, frank discussions between and among the author, other family members, fellow defendants and attorneys was Blum himself able to make shameful, honest admissions about specific aspects of his behavior.

Blum’s story is reminiscent of numerous pop-cultural stories; his legal defense is similar to that in the 1995 movie, “Murder in the First” in that society played a role in Blum’s situation. But there have been plenty of documented real-life episodes too, similar to his in some ways. Tara Westover’s wasn’t, but her book “Educated” pondered how people can ascertain and agree on the Truth. It isn’t easy.

The following quote from Bertrand Russell can never be repeated too often: “There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.”

There was the real-life case of the man who called himself Clark Rockefeller– spellbinder and pathological liar– a similar character to Blum’s commander. The author also brought up Donald Trump, whose behavior was excused with the cliches “boys will be boys” and “that’s just the way he is” at the book’s writing. Yet “…past demagogues across the world had been greeted at first as clowns.”

Anyway, a government sending people to fight a war wants to win it, of course. The author wrote that after WWII, a psychological study showed the following:

Combatants fight for their buddies– the psychological bonding between them prompts them to sacrifice their lives for others on the team, not their country. They don’t really care about teaching the enemy about their own country’s values.

Petitionary prayer is perceived to work.

Hating the enemy doesn’t work– it’s hard to harm people one doesn’t know, even if one has been taught to hate specific ethnic groups. And individuals who harbor so much anger that they don’t care whether they harm innocent strangers of any ethnicity– one would hope would be weeded out in the military application process.

Without question, Blum’s military training involved the first idea in the above list. Blum appeared as a guest on Dr. Phil McGraw’s TV show, which suggested two different reasons why Blum helped commit the crime. Perhaps he had a genetic predisposition (it runs in families– an internal cause) for engaging in evil behavior that is triggered in certain situations; or brainwashing or peer pressure (societal, external stimuli alone) made him do it.

Read the book to learn of the psychological growth experienced by the author and his cousin, the fallout for family members, and about the former’s detailed research results on the whole traumatic episode.

Father Son & Co.

The Book of the Week is “Father Son & Co., My Life at IBM and Beyond” by Thomas J. Watson Jr. and Peter Petre, published in 1990.

Curiously, the word “mainframe” never appeared in this volume. Not even once.

Born in 1914, Watson Jr. (hereinafter referred to as “Jr.”), who grew up in Short Hills, New Jersey, was the oldest of four siblings. His father (Watson Sr., hereinafter referred to as “Sr.”), who played well with others, executed a financial turnaround of Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (renamed IBM in 1924).

Sr. instituted a corporate culture of “investiture socialization”– training, educating, and fostering cooperation among employees and rewarding them for performing well. They had air-conditioned offices and factories (rare for the 1930’s) in Endicott, in upstate New York. Their corporate campus afforded them the use of a country club that offered free concerts, a dining room, two golf courses, a shooting range, and library.

Top management encouraged even the lowest-level workers to make suggestions for improving working conditions. On one occasion, an anonymous complaint that reached Sr.’s desk alleged that a heating system in a plant was being renovated too early in spring, making the work environment freezing, and there was one toilet for fifty employees. Jr. was sent to personally investigate. He wrote that he began remedying the situation within one day.

The first half of the twentieth century is obviously a bygone era in employment. The non-union IBM was competing with other employers that provided labor-union: benefits, compensation and job security for their workers.

Sr. was practically the only corporate executive in America in the Depression years who agreed with FDR’s policies. One hard and fast rule under the “cult of personality” which Sr. developed, was that alcohol was prohibited in all IBM offices at all times, including lunchtime off-campus, and even special occasions.

IBM initially sold scales and meat slicers business-to-business, but switched to leasing of, and tech support for, electric typewriters and punch-card machines. That last product automated all accounting functions and processing of sales data.

In 1940, Sr. testified at a Congressional hearing on “technological unemployment”– the unfortunate, economically adverse situation in which people are thrown out of work when processes get automated. Sr. argued that his company was good for the economy, as it stimulated consumerism.

During WWII, IBM contracted with the War Department to manufacture machine guns, and keep tabs on a slew of battle-related statistics: “… bombing results, casualties, prisoners, displaced persons, and supplies.”

IBM found that the most cost-effective way to run its international business through its subsidiary, World Trade, was to assemble machine-parts in various countries so as to force interdependence among them and share the wealth. Immediately after WWII, though, there were disastrous financial losses in Europe especially, until infrastructure could be rebuilt.

By then, the company had about 22,000 employees, most of whom worshipped Sr. His photo hung on the walls of their offices. Nevertheless, at the time, he was smart enough to listen to IBM’s vice president of engineering. The latter was virtually the only manager who had the foresight to raise the alarm early, on the coming obsolescence of the medium of punch-cards, which took up scads of storage space but allowed instantaneous data-viewing. The technologically superior, compact medium of magnetic tape stored data which were invisible until viewed on a monitor. It was unclear how long the transition from punch-card to tape would take, but entrepreneurs were already making inroads on the extremely expensive experimentation required.

In the 1950’s, the U.S. government commissioned IBM and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to do a joint defense project called SAGE. In 1957, the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik showed SAGE to be “… a costly fantasy, the SDI of its day. Before long, we found ourselves vastly overarmed, faced with the danger of mutual annihilation.”

In 1967, in the wake of racial tensions in America, IBM built a plant in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York City. It was part of a social program that was modestly successful; suggested by a task force comprised of white business leaders who assisted a black community board with economic development.

The author admitted that IBM had become a monopoly of sorts by the 1970’s. “The [anti-trust case against IBM] dragged on for twelve years, until the Reagan administration finally dropped it in 1981… the natural forces of technology etched away whatever monopoly we may have had.”

Read the book to learn about the role played by IBM with regard to other major negative and positive economic trends driving America over the course of more than half a century, plus more biographical information on the author and his family.

ENDNOTE: Alarmists on both sides of the economic spectrum shouldn’t have nearly as much fodder with which to propagandize, if they heed the lessons from this book, lessons that smack of deju vu all over again :

Some people might say Moore’s Law has run its course in the United States (See the post, “Moore’s Law / Elon Musk”).

Microsoft learned the most lucrative lessons from IBM in preparing its own legal defense against the Justice Department’s antitrust accusations.

The national healthcare system of the United States can only improve in the coming decades– eliminating one major cost for employers that was seriously hampering their bottom line.

The way IBM began to do business internationally decades ago, is still in existence. And

supply and demand will compel Americans to find solutions to seemingly overwhelming problems, such as those relating to energy, environmentalism and education.

Of course, there will always be leaders who, grateful for term limits, lacking courage– adopt the attitude of the character Linus in the “Peanuts” comic strip: No problem is ever so big or so complicated that it can’t be run away from.