The Supreme Court awarded more than $700,000 in damages over comments by the South Australian treasurer and police minister that they would not negotiate. Justice Timothy Anderson said video footage should have prompted the state to compromise. Now the government has been ordered to pay the group’s legal bills after the judge was told the protesters had offered to settle before the trial. Seven protesters who were awarded more by the court than their settlement offers will get extra money for their legal bills.

Do these ministers have to pay from their own pocket or their corporate masters? No, it comes from the public funds …

http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/what-bp-isnt-saying/1185

Likewise, this important information was not included in BHP Billiton’s 4,600-page environmental impact statement for the proposed open pit mine at Olympic Dam.
http://cranswick.net/MashersSeismicityAnticipatedOlympicDam/

Makes you wonder at where the mindset is of executives that make decisions without a concern for the re-action to the massive movement of materials; even if it was concern for shareholders investments as the company is wound up to part pay for restitution. BP may have got away with it in Papua New Guinea, but highly unlikely here.

LG Electronics has agreed to pay affected customers $331 to cover the unexpected increase in their power bills, but has not agreed to refund the purchase price of the fridge.

It is the third time LG Electronics has been caught making false claims about the environmental credentials of its products; in 2008 it had to repay $3 million after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission ruled it had inflated the energy-efficiency star rating of five models of air-conditioner.

ACCC deputy chairman Peter Kell would not comment on an investigation, but said consumer laws due to be introduced this year would give regulators greater powers to police claims.

The new legislation – the biggest since consumer law in the 1970s – would give the ACCC the power to force companies to substantiate environmental, health and other claims, as well as the power to enforce harsher penalties.

From April 1 2010 a new star rating labelling system and energy rating calculation will be introduced for all fridges.

The Good Guys said it had received a manufacturer’s recall notice from LG for the L197NFS fridge on February 26 and said the company would offer customers a full refund and would pursue the matter with LG Electronics.

The 82-year-old gardening celebrity – arrested during a protest against Gunns’ pulp mill outside State Parliament last year – pleaded not guilty to the charge of refusing to obey a police order to move away from Parliament House and will fight the charge in a test case.

While this may appear a minor matter, it has the ability to become significant proof of corporate government in action; what we largely are unable to prove – of collusion between corporations and politicians and senior bureaucrats – may well come out in the trial, that corporations actually make policy that politicians rubber stamp to keep the necessary funding in place for re-election.

I have two concerns, the first being the competence of Cundall’s solicitor – Roland Brown, also defending at least another 10 persons – and the political persuasion of the Magistrate hearing the matter.

While outside the Court, Peter Cundall had another swipe at Gunns and the politicians who approved plans to build Australia’s biggest pulp mill in the Tamar Valley, he said ‘when you get a situation where a major proponent of a major pulp mill can actually donate to the main political parties and then cooperate in preparing that legislation for Parliament and passing that through, that is corrupt and I’m fighting against that’.

The big problem is that the law will do all it can to protect the law, so to mount a defence will require some mitigation and or prove that the Police direction was a misapplication of the system of law, to address the charge that Cundall and another 56 anti-pulp mill protesters were arrested out the front of Parliament House for in November 2009.

Of course the law’s position will be that the case relates to unlawfulness of people being at Parliament House to protest, that they were told to move on and did not do as directed.

But for the population, the real issue is what it is, government enacting policy at the direction of corporations that use the law to enforce what is not for the greater good, but based merely on making money. Tasmanian Forestry have long undersold the value of old growth to Gunns who make massive profits and the Golden Rule applies, ‘those that have the gold make the rules’, but will the people stand for it. Cracks are appearing everywhere in the façade of ‘respectability and impartiality’ of government bureaucrats and politicians.

In a different tangent to my ‘value added’ products (where a company with an association with another company markets their products through another organisation to boost profit margins; i.e cardboard tubing manufacturer sells their product through Boral who add about a 100% margin), this addresses the planned failure of products.

Mind you, its not just corporations but governments that do it as well, from requiring ‘diplomas’ or ‘work cards’ for certain jobs to to increasing paperwork costs to the already over-taxed public. [high school ID not OK for car licence Learning Permit, need birth certificate, but high school ID OK to obtain copy of birth certificate ($18 thank you)]

In this day and age of growing awareness of embodied energy and the ‘global economic crisis’ (read less disposable income), people must be getting more than a little concerned with energy costs (electricity and fuel for the car) and how many household products ‘aren’t made the way they used to’.

This is an article published by Sharon Beder titled ‘Is planned obsolescence socially responsible ?’ [Engineers Australia, November 1998, page 52]

In the 1930s an enterprising engineer working for General Electric proposed increasing sales of flashlight lamps by increasing their efficiency and shortening their life. Instead of lasting through three batteries he suggested that each lamp last only as long as one battery. In 1934 speakers at the Society of Automotive Engineers meetings proposed limiting the life of automobiles.

These examples and others are cited in Vance Packard’s classic book The Waste Makers.

By the 1950s planned obsolescence had become routine and engineers worried over the ethics of deliberately designing products of inferior quality. The conflict between profits and engineering objectives were apparent. The fear of market saturation seemed to require such methods to ensure a prosperous economy, yet the consumer was being sold inferior products that could have been made more durable for little extra cost.

In an editorial in Design News toward the end of the fifties, E. S. Safford asked whether engineers should resist the philosophy of planned obsolescence if their management commissioned a ‘short-term product’ and argued that they should not: “Planned existence spans of product may well become one of the greatest economic boosts to the American economy since the origination of time payments.”

What was required, he argued was “a new look at old engineering ethics”. Instead of trying to build the best, the lightest, the fastest and the cheapest, engineers should be able to apply their skills to building shoddy articles that would fall apart after a short amount of time, all in the interests of the market.

The editorial prompted a wide response. Several engineers wrote in to add their agreement. According to Packard, “the majority of engineers and executives reacting to the editorial, however, seemed angry and bewildered. They appeared to have little enthusiasm for the ‘new ethics’ they were being invited to explore.”

They objected because planned oblescence gave engineering a bad name, because it cheated customers who were not informed of the death-date of the product, and because it directed creative engineering energies toward short-term market ends rather than more lofty and ambitious engineering goals.

Today when protecting the environment is such a priority goal, the question of product life and durability is again a critical question. Clearly the rate at which modern societies turn over equipment, automobiles, white goods and other items has a cost both in terms of resource use as well as waste and pollution.

Yet our economic systems still seem to rely on the consumption that this constant turnover requires.

In August this year the business magazine Fortune reported on how planned obsolescence is becoming “increasingly sophisticated”. In a column, Paul Lukas describes how “many manufacturers, no longer content to spur repeat sales simply by making consumer goods that break down or wear out, now offer products that tell the consumer when they’re breaking down or wearing out.”

For example, Gillette’s new shaving cartridge has a blue stripe that fades indicating it needs replacing, whether it does in fact or not. In InfoWorld magazine columnist Ed Foster suggests that the computer industry often makes relatively recent computer systems obsolete by discontinuing parts or accessories for them.

In 1994 Management Accounting invited readers to respond to a case study in planned obsolescence. The accounting people whose responses were published were opposed to redesigning a durable quality product to have a shorter life.

However they weren’t so much concerned about the ethics of planned obsolescence so much as the possible outcomes for the hypothetical company cited in the case study, which had a solid reputation for high quality products.

They warned of the poor public and customer relations that could follow and questioned the wisdom of large investment in redesign of a good product rather diversification of products.

There is a fundamental ethical question involved in designing a death-date into products that goes beyond that of informing consumers. It is about the social responsibility of creating products that have short lives and therefore increase the burden on the planet. The role of engineers in product design is often central. Should engineers be aiming to design more durable commodities?

Sharon Beder’s Publications can be found at http://www.uow.edu.au/~sharonb

You see, instead of taking unsold items to sample sales or donating them to people in need, H&M and Wal-Mart have been throwing them out in giant trash bags.

And in the case that someone may stumble on these bags and try to keep or re-sell the items, these companies have gone ahead and slashed up garments, cut off the sleeves of coats, and sliced holes in shoes so they are unwearable.

This unsettling discovery was made by graduate student Cynthia Magnus outside the back entrance of H&M on 35th street in New York City.

Just a few doors down, she also found hundreds of Wal-Mart tagged items with holes made in them that were dumped by a contractor. On December 7, she spotted 20 bags of clothing outside of H&M including, “gloves with the fingers cut off, warm socks, cute patent leather Mary Jane school shoes, maybe for fourth graders, with the instep cut up with a scissor, men’s jackets, slashed across the body and the arms. The puffy fiber fill was coming out in big white cotton balls.”

The New York Times points out that one-third of the city’s population is poor, which makes this behavior not only wasteful and sad, but downright irresponsible.

Wal-Mart spokeswoman, Melissa Hill, acted surprised that these items were found, claiming they typically donate all unworn merchandise to charity. When reporters went around the corner from H&M to a collections drop-off for charity organization New York Cares, spokesperson Colleen Farrell said, “We’d be glad to take unworn coats, and companies often send them to us.”

After several days of no response from H&M, the company made a statement today, promising to stop destroying the garments at the midtown Manhattan location. They said they will donate the items to charity.

H&M spokeswoman Nicole Christie said, “It will not happen again,” and that the company would make sure none of the other locations would do so either.

Hopefully that’s the final word.