In 2004 AT&T was found to have been overcharging the federal government for the E-Rate program that was meant to bring technology into classrooms. The FCC launched an investigation. The matter was resolved and a $500,000 settlement reached, but then CompTel, a trade association made up of AT&T competitors, filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to look at all the investigation files.

But AT&T felt, passionately, that turning over these materials would violate the corporation’s “personal privacy.” One of the exemptions to FOIA—exemption 7(C)—provides that records may be withheld if their release would represent an unwarranted invasion of “personal privacy.” But since this exemption has only ever been invoked to protect human privacy rights, never corporate ones, AT&T had to persuade the courts to extend the right to “personal privacy” to corporations as well as people.  Hence FCC v. AT&T ending up before SCOTUS.

During the oral argument, the chief justice spent the better part of the hour poking fun at AT&T’s claim that the adjective personal means the same thing as the noun person, such that the statute’s treatment of corporations as “persons” means that corporations are also somehow capable of getting “personal.” As he explained at argument, that claim makes no sense. “I tried to sit down and come up with other examples where the adjective was very different from the root noun,” he observed at the time. “It turns out it is not hard at all. You have craft and crafty. Totally different. Crafty doesn’t have much to do with craft. Squirrel, squirrely. Right? I mean, pastor—you have a pastor and pastoral. Same root, totally different.”

The unanimous opinion issued by the court continued in the same vein, referring to citations in  Webster’s that “[t]he noun crab refers variously to a crustacean and a type of apple, while the related adjective crabbed can refer to handwriting that is ‘difficult to read,’ ” and goes on to observe that “corny can mean ‘using familiar and stereotyped formulas believed to appeal to the unsophisticated,’ which has little to do with corn, (‘the seeds of any of the cereal grasses used for food’).”

The opinion ends with

“The protection in FOIA against disclosure of law enforcement information on the ground that it would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy does not extend to corporations. We trust that AT&T will not take it personally.”

Louisiana DEQ has a grand total of eight spill responders for the entire state, relying on industry to self-report, clean-up, and monitor their spills.  State law requires notification within 24 hours (that’s how “prompt” is defined in regulation), and that the discharger take “reasonable” actions in response to the discharge.  State response actions are covered by a response fund.  The response fund is financed by a $0.02/barrel tax, and is capped at $7 million (roughly the amount spent in two days during the BP Macondo spill).

Most oil spills are small. But there are a lot of them in Louisiana—4,000 a year, which is more than any other state. And even when they are relatively large, they’re as likely as not to go unpenalized. The state’s average fine is 93% less than the federal government’s average fine for spills in Louisiana.

Bloomberg’s researchers (Ken Wells, Aaron Kuriloff and Charles R. Babcock) found that the state fines oil companies for oil spills less than 1 percent of the time over the last five years.

In 2009, Louisiana punished oil companies for fewer than one in 100 spills, the data show. Fines are measured in thousands of dollars, not millions. They take years to collect and are seldom levied against even repeat spillers. A small gas station operator was penalized for faulty paperwork while the state’s biggest oil producer paid no fines in more than a dozen spills since 2002, according to state records.

Louisiana has never pressed criminal charges for oil spills, because, as state regulators see it, oil is a valuable product that no company would willfully or negligently spill:

“Oil is a valuable product,” said Rodney Mallett, DEQ press secretary. “Rarely will someone knowingly or deliberately discharge oil.”

Hilcorp Energy Co., the state’s largest oil producer, has had thirteen (documented) spills since 2002.  The largest incident, in December 2002, totaled 1,000 barrels, creating a “dead zone” in 7 acres of cypress forest in the Atchafalaya Basin about 130 miles west of New Orleans.

Bloomberg reports that Hilcorp faced a fine of about $32,000—but Louisiana let it off the hook with no penalty.  Bloomberg is good to juxtapose those numbers with how much the company makes in Louisiana: It produced half a billion dollars worth of oil in the state last year alone.

Bloomberg also gets some very good on-the-record quotes, including this one from a former state oil inspector:

From 1982 to 1997, Kerry St. Pe recommended fines in “hundreds and hundreds of cases” as a DEQ inspector in southeastern Louisiana, he says.

“But in terms of actual penalties that were levied based on my investigations, I can count them on one hand,” said St. Pe, 60, a marine biologist who now heads the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program in southeastern Louisiana. He said the main reason was “political pressure to the contrary,” which he described as a sense that vigorous enforcement in the field was being discouraged in Baton Rouge, the state capital.

“When oil companies see it’s cheaper to pollute than to prevent spills, it creates a culture of noncompliance,” St. Pe said.

And it gets an excellent kicker from St. Pe:

“Corporations are like children,” he says. “If you allow your kids to have all the candy they want, you’ll get them fat and all keyed up on sugar. And when you then try to discipline them, you wonder why they won’t listen. It’s the same with these corporations. In Louisiana, they virtually get everything they ask for, so why should they behave?”

Edward R. Morrow warned that television would become a vast wasteland, and I came across a quote that sums up my experience with cable TV.  In 1961 the Federal Communications Commission Chair Newton Minow addressed the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters.

I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you’ll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

Nearly 50 years later that statement still holds true.

The “Information Is Beautiful” blog has an interesting infographic on the same subject:

Putting aside the fact that there is a direct correlation between increased health care availability and reduced abortion rates, Rep. Obey presumes a couple illogical points:

• A person has a right to be an idiot.
• Being an idiot is a self-reported state.

People do not have a “right” to be an idiot, no more than they have a “right” to exceed the speed limit if they are late for a meeting or to shout “Fire!” in a public building.  To be an idiot is to act outside of commonly acceptable behavior.

I doubt that very many people would willingly identify  themselves as an idiot.  Idiocy is conferred upon a person by others.  It is a classification based upon societal norms, conferred upon someone by others.  A person is only an idiot if they are identified as such by others.

A better response would have been to say “Members have a right to be ignorant in their own minds and, for purposes of decorum it is best not to identify such people.”

We, as a society, acting through our elected representatives, have determined that universal access to electricity is in the best interest of the country.  So in 1935 Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act to subsidize universal access to electricity among the rural and poor areas of the country.  We still have subsidized loan programs and grants for electrical infrastructure in rural areas.

We have determined that universal access to basic telephone service is an essential need of all Americans.  Our elected representatives passed the Telecommunications Acts of 1934 and 1996 to subsidize phone service to acheive that end.  We all pay $4-$5 per month on our phone bills to support basic telephone service for all households and schools.  We, as a society, have determined that it is in everyone’s best interest that poor folks can dial 911, and we, as a society, pay a monthly fee to subsidize universal access.

We have even determined that universal access to basic cable television is an essential need of all Americans that is worth subsidizing at the federal level.  And in 2007 Senator Ted Stevens sponsored the Universal Service for Americans Act that would have subsidized broadband internet to acheive near-universal access.

But many people, and their elected representatives, do not consider universal access to basic health care as an essential need of all Americans.

What does it say about us, that we value universal access to Fox News and broadband internet porn as more important than universal access to basic health care?

Far east a dark hatted wheelchair
Claims arcane control of the winds
Chimeric chants, undisclosed locations
Connect secret dots, read foreign entrails
The fog sweeps in.

Pour water down a chained man’s throat till death’s smell starts
Chant three times, talk in circles, claim circumspect
A mumbled rendition
The storm will soon abate
The fog thickens.

Farther east, storm tossed on a raging sea
A father’s son slept on a boat
Woken by fearful fishermen, spoke
“Be still” and laid back down
The seas calmed.

The wind shifts, the mists recede, the seas calm
The dark hat tosses bones, chants three times thrice again
The angler summons, opaque shadows coalesce
I count the receding waves
The clouds gather for the next storm.

Long-Legged Fly

That civilization may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
(Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.)

That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
(Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.)

That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope’s chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
(Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.)

W.B. Yeats