Weighed Down
Lead
We’ve been talking about lead in these pages for awhile now - past decades of a powerful lead industry in America show up in our water, soil, and the walls of our homes.
It didn’t have to be this way - in the 1930s, the lead industry was on the ropes. The ‘women’s pages of newspapers’ were calling attention to lead poisoning in children, and the metal’s toxicity was well known. But, thanks to a plucky band of lead company executives, we ended up with lead in fuckin everything:
First, the [Lead Industries A]ssociation mounted an “intensive drive” to get cities to add requirements to their building codes saying that only lead pipes could be used to connect people’s homes to the water system. Secondly, it worked to convince plumbers to become lead advocates as well, urging them to keep cities dependent on complex lead work or risk losing their plumbing jobs to simple handymen.
They ran ads like these:
Within six short years, lead pipes were required in building codes in two states and 33 major cities. The cost of fixing them now runs into the tens or hundreds of billions - many cities simply can’t afford to fix what the lead industry wrought.
The problem doesn’t end there, though. A new Wall Street Journal investigation has uncovered more than 2,000 lead-covered cables spanning thousands of miles across the country:
The Journal’s investigation reveals a hidden source of contamination—more than 2,000 lead-covered cables—that hasn’t been addressed by the companies or environmental regulators. These relics of the old Bell System’s regional telephone network, and their impact on the environment, haven’t been previously reported.
The lead cable issue perfectly encapsulates the problems with the loose regulatory fabric under our new judicially-sourced regime. Not only did EPA not take steps to clean up thousands of lead-covered cables, it didn’t even know they existed to pose a threat.
The agency should have, or someone should have, because there are records:
To track the underwater cables, the Journal collected more than 40,000 pages of records from federal and state government offices, including applications to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to install the cables that were approved more than a century ago. Removing Army Corps-approved cables at any time would routinely require a permit or be noted in the original paperwork, officials say. The Journal tally of abandoned lead cables is sure to be an undercount.
What happened? How did this fall through the cracks? Deregulation had something to do with it:
With the breakup of the Bell System’s monopoly in 1984, regional phone companies became independent competitors that consolidated over time to form the backbone of modern carriers AT&T and Verizon. Tracking the current owners of old cables isn’t a simple task after decades of deals, and the companies themselves in many instances denied their ownership. The Journal provided lists of cable locations to major telecom providers, which declined to detail cable locations.
A thing you can do when you have definitely not installed and do not own any lead cables toxifying the groundwater and soil, is deny ownership, and refuse to say where any of the cables you definitely do not own are located.
For this tactic to work, you shouldn’t have previously stated your lead cables are dangerous:
“Underground cable presents real possibilities for overexposure” for workers removing them, AT&T said in a 2010 presentation about employee safety at an industry conference. “Some older metropolitan areas may still have over 50% lead cable,” it added.
You can issue a press release to thread that needle, though (emphasis mine):
In its statement, the company said: “For decades, we have managed legacy lead-clad cables in compliance with applicable laws and regulations, and we have followed industrywide best practices to maintain this legacy infrastructure in a way that’s safe for all based on established science.”
There were no laws, because everyone lost track of the cables, even EPA! So, congrats to AT&T for not undertaking expensive toxic cleanup efforts despite knowing the cables posed a threat to the people living near them. Even when courts find telecoms liable(-ish) little is being done:
AT&T’s contractor has cited logistical issues including that removal could “disrupt nesting birds (bald eagles, Peregrine falcon, osprey),” according to an email reviewed by the Journal.
Lake Tahoe, where the cleanup is supposed to be happening, has lead levels more than 2,500 times the EPA limit in areas near the cables no one can seem to remove. Elsewhere, EPA hasn’t done much of anything to address the problem, nor is it clear that it even could:
The agency doesn’t have a comprehensive program to identify hot spots with lead in soil or surface water, though it does have a program to examine lead in sediment periodically.
The lead cable debacle is the confluence of decades of regulatory and corporate rot. Phone companies in the thirties installed miles of dangerous cabling to prop up a grasping lead industry. By the eighties, many people had forgotten about the abandoned cables, and they’ve been left to leech dangerous chemicals into the soil and water for decades.
If you’re a business and struggling financially (or simply greedy) one easy solution to get liabilities off your books is to ignore or abandon them. We’re left with a countryside dotted with dangerous, vacant mines, wells, and lead cables. There’s no one to hold accountable, because companies can deny ownership, or file bankruptcy, or close up shop before anyone notices. The EPA is up against a Supreme Court subsidized by mining and oil magnates. Evidence of the rapacious profiteering of our ancestors is going to be with us for generations - inside our walls, the pipes that carry our water, and the dormant cables at the bottom of the lakes we fish, swim, and drink from.
College Admissions
Aren’t we lucky to live in a country that has solved racism? According to the Supreme Court, college admissions can’t consider the race of an applicant because racism is over. What if there were a protected class that received special admissions consideration, but the judges who now write our laws pretended it didn’t exist because they play golf with the parents of said children?
I’m speaking, of course, about rich kids. On the heels of the terrible Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, a new study dropped showing just how big of an advantage wealth grants families in the college application process:
For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in.
Just a mild advantage, you know. The idea that college admissions isn’t skewed towards legacies, athletes, and rich kids is controversial only to opinion writers and pundits whose job it is to preserve the myth of meritoracy. Everyone knows rich kids have advantages, but perhaps having it meticulously quantified will force shame upon college administrators (probably not.)
Said administrators can still claim they’re making progress towards economic diversity because the data is historical:
Representatives from several of the colleges said that income diversity was an urgent priority, and that they had taken significant steps since 2015, when the data in the study ends, to admit lower-income and first-generation students. These include making tuition free for families earning under a certain amount; giving only grants, not loans, in financial aid; and actively recruiting students from disadvantaged high schools.
Convenient! It’s true that some of the country’s wealthiest schools have started offering free tuition for families outside the top decile, but they can afford to do so because they’re essentially hedge funds who happen to employ professors (often on a gig basis.) The issue is, such concessions are made after admission, which can still be skewed towards the wealthy even in ‘blind’ admission systems.
Why? Because wealthy families can pad their kids’ transcripts with expensive extracurricular activities, send them to tutors and camps and get them impressive-sounding internships. Like a resume name experiment, it can be obvious to an admissions officer when a child is wealthy. They’re also more likely to be athletes, because hiring private coaches and being able to afford elite travel teams is status quo if you can afford it:
One in eight admitted students from the top 1 percent was a recruited athlete. For the bottom 60 percent, that figure was one in 20. That’s largely because children from rich families are more likely to play sports, especially more exclusive sports played at certain colleges, like rowing and fencing. The study estimated that athletes were admitted at four times the rate of nonathletes with the same qualifications.
What does entry to an elite college gain these already rich kids? It turns out Ivy admission isn’t meaningfully linked directly to income but it does provide a big leg up when applying to graduate schools:
For outcomes other than earnings, the effect was even larger — it nearly doubled the estimated chance of attending a top graduate school, and tripled the estimated chance of working at firms that are considered prestigious, like national news organizations and research hospitals.
Good to know that the children of the rich will continue to manage our money and supply what amounts to journalism these days. Where the rich and a small sliver of the poor succeed in getting into elite schools, everyone else is shit out of luck:
Children from middle- and upper-middle-class families — including those at public high schools in high-income neighborhoods — applied in large numbers. But they were, on an individual basis, less likely to be admitted than the richest or, to a lesser extent, poorest students with the same test scores. In that sense, the data confirms the feeling among many merely affluent parents that getting their children into elite colleges is increasingly difficult.
The steps elite schools are taking to ‘address’ perceptions of inequality may seem earnest - hundreds of millions allocated for tuition and grant programs, promises to better balance admissions (not by race!!), et cetera. But much of it remains lip service because the administrators, admissions staff, and professors are all members of the same elite class the schools exist to perpetuate. Innate bias is real, and we should not expect to see Harvard’s intake department suddenly flush with middle-class hires. These schools spend untold millions on huge fundraising operations to grow their multibillion dollar endowments, but will certainly not dedicate similar resources to diverse race and class hiring.
There are some great schools available for those seeking a top notch (if expensive) education without the distraction of billionaire kids in every one of your classes. The University of California system forbids legacies, and M.I.T. stands out as the only Ivy that didn’t statistically preference by class. There are lots of excellent places to send your special little angel to get a valuable degree. A byproduct of the class divide at the heart of college admissions is the families least likely to get into the best schools are the most motivated to do so, despite the fact it barely impacts their child’s future earning potential. Competition for coveted spots at elite colleges is literally killing kids, so maybe it’s time we focused on something other than the name atop a diploma, especially since it’s more closely associated with class than achievement.
Kylian Mbappe
Something…interesting is happening this year in the world of international soccer. The Saudi domestic league has splashed out unthinkably huge contracts for big European names such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema, and N’Golo Kante. The Saudis offered Messi a massive deal worth an estimated $1.5 billion dollars, but he choose Miami to sunset his career.
The Saudi government has spent billions buying European soccer clubs and attracting talent to its own domestic league. Unlike some investment groups who face pressure to turn profits or at least avoid staggering losses, Gulf states flush with petrodollars can instead run their sports clubs like hobby projects for sportswashing, money laundering, or both. Manchester City - owned by the UAE - is one of the winningest clubs and the dominant force in the Premier League while also dodging constant accusations and penalties of financial malfeasance.
One important question is - who is this for? The Saudi Pro League is not readily available on television in most countries, and time differences would make it difficult for Western fans to watch the star-studded league in anything resembling real time. The thirty five million people living in KSA might enjoy watching Ronaldo play other stars backed by no-name local talent, and maybe the league becomes popular in the Middle East and Asia, who knows.
Despite many pundits ascribing shrewd motives to the various Saudi investment vehicles behind their sport spending extravaganza, it’s worth remembering the country is run by a 37-year-old who inherited one of the most profitable companies on the planet and might just be spending absurd amounts of money on hobby projects because he can? His other grand visions are a giant, impossible city in a desert, building luxury resorts on sea-level archipelagos, and ski resorts.
Perhaps it’s worth asking whether the murderous nepo baby in charge of twelve-figure investment funds has a clue what he’s doing? When the Saudis aren’t losing billions via Softbank’s bad bets or their own investment moves, they’re wasting money on golf tours no one watches.
Anyhow, all of this leads us to the peculiar situation of Kylian Mbappe. Arguably the hottest young talent in global soccer, Mbappe has been the top scorer at Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) every season he’s played for them, with Messi and Neymar as teammates. PSG is owned by the Qatari wealth fund, and despite once counting three of the top players on the world the club has struggled to find international success. Mbappe is one year away from the end of his contract, which means he’s still eligible for ‘transfer fees’ or money another club would pay to PSG to buy him. At the end of his contract next summer, Mbappe could go to a team of his choice, leaving PSG with no way to recoup the €180 million they spent to acquire him from Monaco in 2017.
Saudi team Al Hilal have offered PSG three hundred million Euros for Mbappe, with an additional €700 million in wages to the player for a One. Year. Deal. The billion dollar package conveniently richly reimburses PSG for one of its stars, piles up enough cash to maybe entice the superstar to spend one year in the desert, and gives him an out at the end of the season to head elsewhere, likely to Real Madrid, his club of choice.
Seven hundred million dollars for a maximum of thirty-four club league games and some other small number of club tournament appearances is…a lot. It dwarfs Ronaldo’s salary, and makes even Messi’s offer look like a joke. It’s also like, quite obviously a giant money laundering play, helping the Qataris out of their current standoff with their second-most-expensive superstar who’s currently in danger of being benched if he doesn’t play ball (literally).
Mbappe, as of this writing, has not accepted the offer or talked to the Saudis, which should indicate just how unpleasant the prospect of playing in extreme heat in an authoritarian regime is to a top athlete. His impressive fortitude has spawned some incredible memes, but as a soccer fan the whole thing feels pretty gross. The worst possible outcome for everyone involved is the Saudi Pro League gaining in legitimacy and using its effectively unlimited supply of money to enrich a small number of players, playing for the enjoyment of their brutally oppressive masters. The Saudis have further upended a broken European soccer market because they can, and Mbappe is simply the most egregious example.
Also, one has to wonder how the quality of life for the average Saudi citizen is improved by their rulers spending significant chunks of the country’s GDP on sports and attractions for foreign tourists rather than addressing its stunning wealth gap, which sits level with Zimbabwe.
Johnson & Johnson
J&J, or whatever subsidiary they’ve created to try and dodge massive liability in various lawsuits, has come up with a new, bold legal strategy to defend itself from claims its talc products gave people cancer. It’s suing researchers who helped uncover the problem:
Johnson & Johnson has sued four doctors who published studies citing links between talc-based personal care products and cancer, escalating an attack on scientific studies that the company alleges are inaccurate.
The claims are flimsy at best, and experts say it will be extremely difficult to prove that any of the doctors in question were attempting to harm J&J rather than, you know, trying to find out why people were getting cancer.
More broadly, this aggressive maneuver is an attempt to intimidate researchers who might dare link their products to disease or illness. J&J’s pharmaceutical division spends billions a year on drugs to treat illness, but its legal team is happy to go after anyone who dares question whether their products are safe.
Short Cons
Irish Times - “Gardaí have recovered gold bars worth an estimated €400,000 amid claims it had been stolen from a vault belonging to the National Party. National Party leader Justin Barrett contacted gardaí alleging that gold was stolen from the vault, and that two members of the party had been expelled.”
The Atlantic - “One of the most overlooked features of the Biden administration has been its willingness to challenge the efficiency fetish. The merger guidelines are its most frontal assault to date.”
Reason - “A federal judge on Friday permanently banned Arizona from enforcing a new law restricting how closely people may film police, finding that the law violates a core First Amendment right to record law enforcement officers.”
Atlanta Journal Constitution - “A lawsuit filed by 30 North Carolina residents has accused New York-based brokerage and investment bank Oppenheimer & Co. and two of its Atlanta-based managers of hiding the truth about a massive Ponzi scheme being run by its employees.”
Forbes - “Cigna, the healthcare and insurance giant, was hit with a lawsuit on Monday that alleges the company systematically rejects claims in a matter of seconds, thanks to an algorithmic system put in place to help automate the process…”
Guardian - “Residents of coastal Louisiana are facing growing risks from flooding and extreme weather, with options for home insurance vanishing as insurers leave the state. But the fossil fuel industry operating nearby has no such worries.”
NY Times - “The corporate dirty war that ensued — in Nottingham and at newly unionized Starbucks cafes across the country — draws a sobering picture of employee rights casually crushed and labor laws too weak to help.”
Bloomberg - “An online economics forum known for sexist, racist and abusive commentary included posts that originated at many prominent US universities as well as the Federal Reserve, according to a new study.”
WSJ - “The U.S. Senate Finance Committee is investigating former Apollo Global Management Chief Executive Leon Black’s tax strategies and dealings with the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, pressing the private-equity billionaire for information on Epstein’s high-price tax advice.”
Intercept - “As Hollywood executives insist it is “just not realistic” to pay actors — 87 percent of whom earn less than $26,000 — more, they are spending lavishly on AI programs.”
Know someone thinking of ruining their kid’s lives by pressuring them to get into an Ivy League school? Send them this newsletter!