Why did those coin counting machines vanish from your TD Bank?

TD Bank's US branches dropped their free Penny Arcade coin counting machines from service last summer. Unless you were paying attention, you may have missed why. On the occasion of its customers receiving a class action settlement card in the mail, I caught readers in Maine up with what happened and how the settlement works in Saturday's Portland Press Herald. (Hint: you may have been shortchanged.)

Jack DeCoster, Maine's most infamous businessman, gets jail sentence

Austin "Jack" DeCoster, Maine's most infamous businessman, is going to jail for his egg company's role in a 2010 salmonella outbreak that may have sickened as many as 54,000. For many of those who've followed his sordid career, the biggest question is why it took so long.

As I detailed in Tuesday's Portland Press Herald and, in 2011, in Down East and the Portland Phoenix, DeCoster has repeatedly violated all manner of laws and regulations: labor, environmental, workplace safety, public health, immigration, contract, and animal safety. Here's the nut from the Press Herald piece:

"Over the past half-century, Jack DeCoster’s companies have paid millions in fines and damages for everything from faking trucking logs and knowingly hiring illegal immigrants to environmental contamination, animal cruelty, workplace safety problems, and the exploitation of workers, including the alleged rapes of female employees by supervisors and the terrorizing of workers housed in squalid, crowded, cockroach-infested company trailers at his Maine farms."

He's always had enablers, though. As recently as 2011, his local state legislators -- Dale Crafts and Jeff Timberlake -- were trying to pass a law to weaken labor protections on his Maine farms; it almost passed because a number of people gave false legislative testimony in regards to his recent record in the state. (I learned while reporting at the time that there's no penalty for lying to Maine lawmakers, even for attorneys and lawmakers, because nobody does so under oath.)

I'd link to the articles I wrote at the time, but the new owners of Down East and the Phoenix no longer make their archives available online. (And, while on the topic: what happened to the Phoenix archive? Is it damaged? Do the owners care?)

Jack and his son, Peter (who also got three months), have the right to appeal the sentence, but have already plead guilty to charges. Their company is paying almost $7 million in fines for their role in the outbreak.

Jack DeCoster, Maine legislators, and faulty testimony

As I reported a few weeks ago in the Portland Phoenix, the infamous egg magnate Austin "Jack" DeCoster has some friends in the Maine state legislature, which has been considering a law to help out his companies. That initiative may get voted on as early as today.

I have a magazine piece about all this in the forthcoming issue of Down East, but readers won't see that until after the legislature votes on L.D. 1207, an act that will free Mr. DeCoster's companies from the worry that their workers might one day unionize. The Down East article sheds light on the question many have about Mr. DeCoster: how does he keep getting away with it? [Update: 5/24/2011: the Down East story is now online.] But there are a couple timely details to report straightaway.

First, when members of the legislature's Labor Committee met to consider the bill, they received a remarkable amount of erroneous testimony. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Dale Crafts (R-Lisbon), a labor attorney hired by the company to "investigate" its own record, and two company officials told the legislators that the company had had a clean record in Maine for ten to fifteen years, and suggested, stated, or implied that no significant problems had been turned up by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA).

A few minutes on Google reveals this not to be the case. In reality, DeCoster's Maine operations have been fined by OSHA multiple times over the past decade for serious and repeat violations of workplace safety and other issues. These include $344,210 in June 2002 for a range of serious workplace safety infractions; $108,500 in August 2004 for "willful, repeat and/or serious violations"; and $150,000 in August 2008 for a "disregard for basic, commonsense safety procedures and employee protections [that] is as astonishing as it is unacceptable."

This, of course, leaves aside far more serious transgressions by Mr. DeCoster's companies in other states, including responsibility for a salmonella outbreak that sickened over 1900 people and triggered the recall of more than half a billion eggs. It also ignores fines for animal cruelty and law suits by neighbors over the past decade here in Maine.

I gather that it's not illegal to give false testimony before the legislature, which means legislators ought to spend a few minutes on the Internet checking out what they've been told.

[Update, 5/23/2011: As a result of this report, Sen. Rector says he is withdrawing his support for the bill.]

Things to watch and read, the March 10 edition

I've been hunkered down with my book manuscript of late, giving public officials in Eastern Europe and Portland, Maine a much needed break from my pedantic questioning. But I still procrastinate from time to time -- this early morning for instance -- and occasionally find things worth sharing. This week those include:

How to Make a [BBC] News Report: Spot-on satire from a BBC-4 comedian. If only U.S. news reports were structured as intelligently as the ones he's mocking. [Update: For comparison, here's an Onion parody of the much stupider CNN structure.]

If Harvard and Disney Had a Showdown, Who Would Win? Disney, apparently, by a long shot. Today's New York Times has a disturbing report about how Harvard has retaliated against the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood after the non-profit advocacy group won a major victory over Disney for erroneous claims about the merits of the conglomerate's "Baby Einstein" videos. Sure looks shameful, and Harvard ain't talkin'.

Wikileaks on Life Support: Wikileaks, a non-profit clearing house for leaked internal documents exposing corruption, malfeasance, and criminal behavior, has been in crisis this year for lack of money and is trying to raise funds. My colleague Andrew Marshall has some background over at his informative Qwerty 2009 blog.

A Better Shit Bag: As Nick Wadhams writes from Nairobi, many people in the developing world have no indoor plumbing and "go" in a plastic bag, which is then usually thrown out on the street. Now a Swedish organization, PeePoople claims to have a better bag. (No, it's not satire.) Puts America's problems in perspective, perhaps.

Synchronized Olympic Pee Breaks: During the gold medal hockey game between the US and Canada last month, residents of Edmonton, Alberta weren't going to miss any action just to go to the bathroom. The water utility there published an amusing graph of the unusual water use pattern that evening and the correlations with events in the game, which you can see over at The Vigorous North.

My coffee is cold; must be time to get back to work....

Chase Bank: scum of the Earth?

Surprise, surprise, JP Morgan Chase isn't keeping up their side of the bargain with their credit card customers.

If you've ever taken Chase up on one of their a low interest, life of the loan balance transfer offers, you may be in for a surprise with your next statement, even if you have excellent credit and have never missed a payment: the bank is increasing the monthly minimum payment from 2% of the balance to 5%.

In effect, they're forcing you to rapidly pay back their low interest loan (which probably isn't in your best interest) or -- if you can't afford the new payment -- into default. There is no option to "opt out."

For a taste of how this is effecting ordinary customers' lives, read through some of the complaints collected by ConsumerAffairs.com. Meanwhile, Chase last year handed out $8.6 billion in executive bonuses while collecting $25 billion in TARP funds. Apparently none of this is illegal, but it should be.

I, for one, am taking my banking elsewhere, never to return.