philly

Phil Mickelson - Exxon-Mobil Man

He's more than just a golfer [which, by the way is not a fucking sport]. He's a spokesperson for golf-centric companies like Calloway/Titleist and then there are the non-golf money streams. Rolex. Charles Schwab. Ford. And last night I saw a commercial, starring him, for Exxon-Mobil. Blech. Now that's just nasty.

If you didn't know it already, the former CEO of Exxon-Mobil just received a $400M retirement package "including pension, stock options and other perks, such as a $1 million consulting deal, two years of home security, personal security, a car and driver, and use of a corporate jet for professional purposes." Now ain't that some shit.

Today, prices for crude oil hit $70 for the first time since Hurricane Katrina.

Phil Mickelson's silky swing, oiled by Exxon-Mobil. :)

Product Purchasing Changes

Lady and I have been making more and more conscious decisions about spending our money in the time we've been together. Where to shop. What to buy. Who to buy from. Who not to support. Decisions like not buying Nike. Not shopping at Wal Mart. Shopping at local stores whenever possible as opposed to chains.

Lately, we've been purchasing things that are of the more healthy nature. Organic when we can, even though it is usually more expensive. And now, with the products we use, Lady took steps to research what we're putting on our faces, what we're washing our hair with, what we're absorbing on a daily basis. She found SafeCosmetics.org and we've made some changes already.

We're not just throwing out everything in the house though. We're not rich enough to do that and we're not wasteful enough to do that even if we were rich enough. We're replacing things as we run out of them along the way. Changes will be made in the shampoos we use, body wash, facial soap, lotion, hand soap...

Take a click over to this tool and enter in a product or two that you use right now. Your shave cream. Your shampoo. Your toothpaste. Your hand soap. Your deoderant. Your contact lens solution. See what's inside there. See which carcinogens you're absorbing. Skeeves you out don't it? Every single product isn't listed, but this is a pretty good start. They have tons of the major brands and their various lines of products.

One alarming thing that Lady learned was that there are no regulations on what the companies put on the labels of their products. 'Not tested on animals' doesn't mean jack shit. They can flat out lie. 'Natural' on a bar of soap doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means. There is no governmental regulation on the usage of words like that as there are with food and the FDA. There are rules via the FDA as to what is 'organic' or 'light' but no such agency oversees products that can be just as harmful as a Big Mac. Stuff that you use and ingest/absorb every day.

Be aware of the shit that you put on your body. Take steps to cut back on the bad stuff. Be an informed consumer [and an informed voter while you're at it!]. I know this is going to be a long learning process for me/us, but you gotta start sometime and there's no time like the present.

One of the biggest coverups in products is the ingredient "fragrance" which can be almost anything. It can be rat shit, it can be otter musk, it can be patchouli, it can be vanilla. Just about every company uses it in their ingredients list. It's a way to get around disclosing some potentially nasty stuff.

Oh Comcast

Damn you! I'm on the phone with you... again.

It just never ends.

Wal Mart and Medicaid in PA

The Inky's got a story today on how one in six of th 48,000 Wal Mart employees in PA are on Medicaid, the state medical assistance program. Wal Mart is the largest employer in the U.S. let alone PA and their lack of proper health coverage [*I don't have any healthcare coverage right now temping] is costing us PA residents $15M a year.

Wal Mart, an employer of 1.3M nationwide raked in $11.2B in PROFIT in 2005. Do some math. If they were to take that full $11.2B and redistribute it to the full 1.3M [that's including the execs and managers and other white collar employees] it would result in $8,615 in extra money. Take away the execs and other already well-paid employees, and that numer rises a little across the board for those on state assistance. Now the crazy thing is, many of these people are employed "full time" as Wal Mart calls it. Wal Mart's version of "full time" employment is thirty-four hours per week. Extrapolate that against a normal forty-hour work week and over a year's time, you're short 312 hours! That's 7.8 weeks in real full-time employment.

"Wal-Mart is making billions in profits, while pushing people onto medical assistance at a time when 100,000 people in Pennsylvania were in jeopardy of losing benefits," said Jonathan Stein, general counsel at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia. "The situation only makes life difficult for other poor people who could only look to Medicaid."

Swelling state medical assistance rolls and higher health-care costs compelled Gov. Rendell last year to limit some services and increase some fees for many of the 1.8 million Pennsylvanians on medical assistance.

Wal-Mart, the largest employer in the state, has a total of 7,577 of its employees, or 15.8 percent, on medical assistance in Pennsylvania. The company's workforce is more than double the number of workers at the next-largest retailer, Giant Food.

Giant Food has about 19,000 total workers.

Good god I hate Wal Mart.

Pentagon Pays Halliburton 99.5%

So, everyone knows that the administration is in cahoots with Halliburton. That's just a given. But in the past few years, the Pentagon has at least witheld a large amount of the reimbursements that auditors have felt out of line in Halliburton's cost-plus [meaning the more they spend, the more they make] budgets. This NY Times piece takes a look at the latest.

The auditors took a look at what Halliburton's been up to and decided that a quarter billion dollars, that's $250M, were potentially bullshit. And in the past, the Pentagon has for the most part agreed.

In 2003, the agency's figures show, the military withheld an average of 66.4 percent of what the auditors had recommended, while in 2004 the figure was 75.2 percent and in 2005 it was 56.4 percent.

But not this time around. This time, the Pentagon decided to withhold all of 3.8% of what the auditors thought should be withheld and pay Halliburton 99.5% of the $2.41B no-bid contract.

Remember way back when... When Veep "I'll shoot you in the face" Cheney said that we'd be greated as liberators and there would be parades with flowers for the U.S. troops? Remember when the Repugs said that the cost of the war to the American taxpayers would be something like $1.8B and that the war would be financed in large part by the profits from the oil we were there to steal protect? Remember when the cost of the entire war was going to be something like the 1991 war in Iraq, something like $50B-$60B? Now Halliburton is getting $2.41B for one year? One single company? As of 12.30a, February 27, 2006, the Cost of the War is $243B and growing. A good article on the costs of the war via this AlterNet article. Beware, it mentions the "V" word.

And on a related note, d'ya hear what Mr. Conservative Billy Buckley has to say these days?

One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.... Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough.

Oof.

Fuck You Comcast

Those fuckers told me that I'd have my discounted/promotional digital silver cable package for a full year, those fuckers lied. After I disconnected Comcast when they refused to simply give me the same package I had before moving, they called me back to offer me the promotional rate for a full year: $45 for digital silver + HBO and $30 for broadband internet. Then I get the bill and the cable has now doubled.

I called customer service around midnight [no hold time when you call that late] and the rep tells me that the promotional rate was for only six months. So the chump as fuckwad who told me he was giving me a full year off lied to me to get me back on Comcast. Fuckers. Right when Bill Maher comes back on. Arg.

Lee Scott, CEO Walmart: A Dick

The NY Times has a story on an internal website that Lee Scott, CEO of evil evil big box Walmart, keeps called Lee's Garage. How homey. He used to pump gas at his pop's Kansas gas station. Now, he makes a bajillion dollars a year, but he's so in touch with his roots and what it's like to have nothing and just want the basic things like healtcare. Riiiight.

Let's forget, for just a moment, how evil Walmart is on providing healthcare to its workers when they're working there. Let's take it a step further for this multi-multi-multi billion dollar multi-national corporation and how it doesn't care for you when you're there and then shits on you when you leave. One store manager popped in a question on the site as to why:

the largest company on the planet cannot offer some type of medical retirement benefits?

And Scott's response:

Quite honestly, this environment isn't for everyone. There are people who would say, 'I'm sorry, but you should take the risk and take billions of dollars out of earnings and put this in retiree health benefits and let's see what happens to the company.' If you feel that way, then you as a manager should look for a company where you can do those kinds of things.

He could've just pulled a Dick Cheney and said "Go fuck yourself" or just shot him in the face.

Defending the internal corporate spin was a spokesperson:

Mona Williams, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said Mr. Scott responded so sharply because of the manager's sarcastic tone. The question, she said, indicated the manager failed to understand how competitive retailing is and would not be able to convey that to his subordinates.

Yes, the manager's peon mind couldn't possibly fathom how competitive retailing is. It's not like he's a manager of a multi-million dollar big box and isn't briefed on just how competitive the industry is. That manager probably pumps gas at his dad's gas station and won't amount to much in the end anyways.

Drug Companies are Evil

What does a drug company who discovers that their already existing colon cancer treating drug - Avastin - is also good in fighting lung and breast cancer? Hike up the fucking prices of course! Who the fuck wants to cure people anyway? This NY Times article takes a look at the $100K a year price Genetech plans to charge.

That price, about double the current level as a colon cancer treatment, would raise Avastin to an annual cost typically found only for medicines used to treat rare diseases that affect small numbers of patients. But Avastin, already a billion-dollar drug, has a potential patient pool of hundreds of thousands of people — which is why analysts predict its United States sales could grow nearly sevenfold to $7 billion by 2009.

Doctors, though, warn that some cancer patients are already being priced out of the Avastin market. Even some patients with insurance are thinking hard before agreeing to treatment, doctors say, because out-of-pocket co-payments for the drug could easily run $10,000 to $20,000 a year.

Until now, drug makers have typically defended high prices by noting the cost of developing new medicines. But executives at Genentech and its majority owner, Roche, are now using a separate argument — citing the inherent value of life-sustaining therapies.
...
Because Genentech is a leading developer of cancer therapies, some doctors also fear that the company's pricing plans for Avastin — around $8,800 a month — may encourage other companies to charge more for their own oncology drugs. That could potentially drive up the overall cost of cancer treatment to unsustainable levels, they say.

Nice eh?

So these fuckers cite one reason for the higher price as the doseage must be higher. But...

Dr. Leonard Saltz, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, noted that Genentech had not tested the Avastin at the dose level for colon cancer in large-scale trials of lung and breast cancer. As a result, no one really knows whether the lower dose might turn out to be equally effective in lung and breast cancer, he said. Besides costing less, he said, a lower dose might have fewer side effects.

Why bother testing! Just tell them more juice will create a bigger bang and you need that bigger bang or else they'll die.

Good thing that my insurance... oh wait, I don't have insurance.

Chuck Pennacchio wants universal health care

As both a moral and economic imperative, every American must have access to high quality basic care. Years of "safety net" programs have not eliminated the uninsured; in fact, more people lose employer-based coverage each year. It’s time for an American-style single-payer health insurance system. We can get better health outcomes for less money with universal health care and administrative simplification. Our talented, creative and caring medical professionals should be free to treat patients; they should not have to struggle with duplicative paperwork. Savings and waste reduction from a single payer system will make payments to hospitals and caregivers fair and reliable, and will make fraud easier to spot.

I like that.

Big Oil to get $7B From the Government

From this NY Times article:

New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.

Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.

Uhhh so when gas prices go higher, they get to not pay the royalties associated with pumping oil and gas from federal lands?

Exxon-Mobil: $10.13B PROFIT

So, I just saw this AP story [via WaPo] on how Exxon-Mobil just broke last quarter's record-setting profit margin. In Q3 2005, they made $9.92B on the back of the hurricanes that hit the Gulf Coast region. Jacking gas prices and claiming they just had to do so to survive as a company. Greedy fuckwads.

Well, I don't know how they did it again, but they made a $10.13B profit in Q4 2005. A solid $210M increase, nearly a QUARTER OF A BILLION DOLLAR increase in profit.

Stock prices rose $1.79 with the news.