What did Winston Peters know?

Peters has a long history of parsing his words carefully and reading the detail in the law and applying it. Sloppy thinkers, careless with the details and facts, tend to not understand the often subtle points upon which Peters’ arguments rest. Peters' enemies deliberately ignore them. In this case, to them, a donation is a donation is a donation, never mind that Peters made it very clear he was talking about his party and himself. No one asked him about a legal fund for an electoral petition.

Peters can credibly say Owen Glenn did not give NZ First money because he didn’t.
Peters can credibly say Owen Glenn did not give Peters money because he didn’t.

Peters has more trouble when asking people to believe that he did not know about the source of the contribution to the legal fund……but then looking back over Peters’ history, it is possible that he deliberately set things up so that he would not know.

If it was Peters' intention to not know, he probably didn’t. That would be typically Peters.

Palast on the Exxon Valdez Disgrace

The US Supreme Court has reduced Exxon's liability for the Alaskan oil spill 20 years ago by 90% - from US$5 billion to US$500 million. The reason given was that they did not profit by the spill.

Greg Palast details how Exxon profited for years by destroying evidence of small spills and illegally not maintaining both the means to prevent a spill and the capability to respond to any spill. Extracts:

...
In today's ruling, Supreme Court Justice David Souter wrote that Exxon's recklessness was ''profitless'' - so the company shouldn't have to pay punitive damages. Profitless, Mr. Souter? Exxon and its oil shipping partners saved billions - BILLIONS - by operating for sixteen years without the oil spill safety equipment they promised, in writing, under oath and by contract.
...
In 1971, Exxon and partners agreed to place the Natives' specific list of safeguards into federal law. These commitments to safety reassured enough Congressmen for the oil group to win, by one vote, the right to ship oil from Valdez.

The oil companies repeated their promises under oath to the US Congress.

The spill disaster was the result of Exxon and partners breaking every one of those promises - cynically, systematically, disastrously, in the fifteen years leading up to the spill.
...
Forget the drunken skipper fable. As to Captain Joe Hazelwood, he was below decks, sleeping off his bender. At the helm, the third mate would never have collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his Raycas radar. But the radar was not turned on. In fact, the tanker's radar was left broken and disasbled for more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was just too expensive to fix and operate.

For the Chugach, this discovery was poignantly ironic. On their list of safety demands in return for Valdez was "state-of-the-art" on-ship radar.
...
* Several smaller oil spills before the Exxon Valdez could have warned of a system breakdown. But a former Senior Lab Technician with Alyeska, Erlene Blake, told our investigators that management routinely ordered her to toss out test samples of water evidencing spilled oil. She was ordered to refill the test tubes with a bucket of clean sea water called, "The Miracle Barrel."

* In a secret meeting in April 1988, Alyeska Vice-President T.L. Polasek confidentially warned the oil group executives that, because Alyeska had never purchased promised safety equipment, it was simply "not possible" to contain an oil spill past the Valdez Narrows -- exactly where the Exxon Valdez ran aground 10 months later.

* The Natives demanded (and law requires) that the shippers maintain round- the-clock oil spill response teams. Alyeska hired the Natives, especiallly qualified by their generations-old knowledge of the Sound, for this emergency work. They trained to drop from helicopters into the water with special equipment to contain an oil slick at a moments notice. But in 1979, quietly, Alyeska fired them all. To deflect inquisitive state inspectors, the oil consortium created sham teams, listing names of oil terminal workers who had not the foggiest idea how to use spill equipment which, in any event, was missing, broken or existed only on paper.
...

One more example of corporate criminals getting away with serious crimes while the victims of their negligence and the consumers of their products end up paying for their mistakes.

Hypocrisy is ugly

There have been so many "up is down" moments over the past few days, it's damned hard to keep up.

Homepaddock reported this morning how Federated Farmers Dairy Chair, Frank Brenmuhl, said:

"Townies should not expect dairy farmers to donate $15 million so that the price of dairy foods sold in NZ can be reduced.

“They want … and they want … but they do not want to pay.” he said."

Mr. Brenmuhl appears to have no sympathy for Kiwis upset about the volatility of dairy prices, driven by market conditions and political decisions made far from these shores.

Meanwhile, over at the Hive, the very same Frank Brenmuhl is signatory to a letter about the proposed Emissions Trading System (ETS).

[UPDATE1: The Hive has deleted the post containing the letter referred to. I did not make a copy.][UPDATE2: The letter has now been reposted on the Hive and the link repaired.]

The letter makes some good points about the ambitious ETS expressed from a viewpoint that doesn't see any reason at all for New Zealand to provide any leadership on greenhouse gas emissions or be any sort of positive example to the world. Lowest-common denominator is the general tone. Business will abandon New Zealand, disaster, calamity and so on. Oh well. Nothing new there from NZ business when asked to ante up.

Most fun of all, included in this letter, signed by Frank Bremuhl, is this statement:

The reported back Bill fails to provide any safety valve to protect against a high and volatile price of carbon, in an international carbon market that lacks liquidity and where the price of carbon reflects political decisions made in Europe, rather than the least cost emissions abatement.

"lacks Liquidity" means too many people are making too much carbon and there aren't enough CHEAP carbon credits to go around and allow people to continue to do nothing. As more people continue to not do enough to reduce emissions, the price COULD go sky high. But that would only happen if people don't respond to the market signals those carbon prices are sending. That couldn't happen, right? Markets are supposed to be wonderful.....until it's YOU who have to pay, I guess.

Putting these two statements supported by Mr. Brenmuhl alongside each other, he clearly wants to be protected from the volatile price of carbon when the cost is to him, but sees no reason why there should be "any safety valve to protect against a high and volatile price of"......let's say: milk? - when he's the guy raking in the cash.

You'd laugh if it wasn't so pathetic.

"Your price is too high, let the taxpayer pay. My price can be whatever I get can away with and stop your whining!"

Nice one, Frank. I'm thinking maybe I should add a new label to cover stuff like this, but "stupid people" will do for now.

"Leveraged buyouts"

This video from the US about "leveraged buyouts" and their consequences has a familiar ring to it. There is no capital gains tax in New Zealand, so that part wouldn't apply, but the rest is obvious enough. Would the same device - placing the debt on the company purchased - apply here? If it does, I wonder how much of the "investment" made in NZ is of this low and potentially destructive quality?

One of the saddest things I've ever seen....

I was climbing through the web of interconnected videos on Youtube a couple of days ago and came across a video from the Child Foundation about the horrendously deformed Samoan baby born a few months back. The video of the baby is horrific to watch. I was left thinking "Oh.....my....God...." and I'm not religious in any way, shape or form. The father was lauded as courageous for sneaking in to feed the infant after medical staff had refused it sustenance and advised that it was unlikely to survive. If anything, the video confirmed for me they were right.

Then I looked at the comment. Thousand of comments. This video has, at writing, been viewed 746,434 times. A huge proportion of the comments are of the "What was the father THINKING!" variety. I left one or two myself.

People pointed out that money that would be spent on this child could have helped a much larger number of less seriously deformed children. People said that the life of that child would be so limited as to be meaningless. People said that even with the life-threatening defects aside (spina bifida, skull with no top, seriously deformed spine with meninges protruding...and more), if the baby could be surgically altered to look more "normal", the years of pain required would be many and long....and pointless if the baby can't think. People said helping the baby to live was far more cruel than letting it go. People said a lot of much more cruel things, too.

I have to say, I agree with all of that (but for the harsh words and abuse directed at the family by some commentators). As a parent, I can understand wanting to rescue your newborn child from death. But it would be to save an idealised child a new parent imagined....not the sad, wee, warm, broken thing revealed in this video. I would not have saved this baby.

You might disagree and I can understand perfectly valid reasons for making that decision. They are almost enough to make me agree. Then I watch this video. No.

The latest news is that the baby has had major surgery and survived. More surgery is scheduled.

Have a look at this video. See if you think a "life" was saved when it's over.