Regulatory Capture
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SEE NEUTER AGY CAPT 2 6 25
no merri
formaT fail bak 720
promote to primary on trump swamp things, epa pruitt
sci corrupt:
note rev door omb, dod, nasa (staffer mccarthy svbank)
see epa 3 swamp things, rev dr
SEE VOUGHT CFPB SECURITY 5M$
koch added on neuter cfpb
see cfpb
see dismantle?
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1019 i'm considering enlarging this to neuter, eg not appting ppl eg FEC (acting means no confirmation) but all kinda falls under general idea of dereg?
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rev door a proxy? related to sci supp 3
key to regulatory capture?
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omg
an 725
Trump official bills CFPB $5 million for his security detail while gutting agency’s consumer work
A top Trump White House official who has incessantly bemoaned wasteful government spending has reportedly billed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau nearly $5 million for his security detail as he guts the agency's ability to fight for Americans scammed by predatory corporations.
Government Executive on Wednesday obtained a memo from the CFPB's deputy chief financial officer showing that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the consumer bureau "are entering into an interagency agreement to pay the costs" of Russell Vought's security.
Vought currently serves as both OMB director and acting director of the CFPB—a longtime target of Trump, congressional Republicans, and corporate forces.
"The memo spelled out that the agreement was 'on a fast track,' despite the funding not being included in the bureau's fiscal 2025 budget," Government Executive noted. "The $4.7 million will cover Vought's security through December, meaning it will draw from both fiscal years 2025 and 2026."
Earlier this year, Vought described the consumer agency's budget—around $820 million for 2025—as "excessive in the current fiscal environment." An OMB spokesperson did not respond when Government Executive asked why CFPB is footing Vought's security bill.
David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, wrote sardonically that Vought—who has helped turn the consumer bureau into a shell of its former self—is "finally getting things done that matter at CFPB."
"And when I say that, I mean his security detail," Dayen added. "At heart, these guys are all kleptocrats."
Don Moynihan, a professor at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, wrote that Vought is "simultaneously stopping CFPB from protecting American consumers from scams, while also charging it $5 million for his security team."
While the Trump administration's effort to dismantle the bureau entirely has been held up in court, Vought and Republicans in Congress have succeeded at slashing the consumer agency's budget and grinding its enforcement work to a halt. A pair of advocacy groups noted in a memo released in late May that the Vought-led CFPB has quietly dismissed more than 20 public enforcement actions against corporate wrongdoers.
Supporters of the CFPB, which was established in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, have described the agency as a "model of efficiency," touting the fact that it has returned tens of billions of dollars to consumers since its creation.
But that's done nothing to slow the Trump administration's assault on the bureau.
The Prospect's Maureen Tkacik and James Baratta wrote earlier this month that for close to half of 2025, the CFPB's roughly 1,500 staffers "have been locked out of their offices and agency computers, while attorneys and judges deliberate over the degree to which Trump's wrecking crew is legally allowed to assassinate the bureau."
"In the meantime, formal entries into the CFPB's consumer complaints database have soared, suggesting that the business of junk fees, predatory terms, and routine swindles is booming," the pair wrote. "All told, 2.5 million complaints have flooded into the CFPB over the past six months, roughly a quarter of the total complaints the agency has recorded since its inception in 2011, with reports of everything from being shut out of bank accounts after a hurricane to scammers impersonating ICE officials who convince consumers to buy them gift cards in order to help them avoid deportation."
"The ability to force financial scammers to return ill-gotten gains to millions of customers is an awesome authority in a political system that makes it so difficult to materially improve people's lives," they added, "so Vought has unsurprisingly dedicated special effort to destroying that power."
A report released earlier this week by the nonprofit Better Markets notes that the Trump administration's regulatory rollbacks at the CFPB have cost American consumers billions in savings and left them more vulnerable to corporate misconduct.
"The magnitude of the rollback and its costs for American consumers is staggering," said Brady Williams, legal counsel at Better Markets. "The Trump CFPB has aligned itself with industry interests, abandoning its mission to protect consumers."
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raw 6 25
a legal expert sounded the alarm over President Donald Trump's nomination of a MAGA influencer to lead an obscure but important federal agency.
The president nominated far-right podcaster Paul Ingrassia to head up the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which was set up by Congress after Watergate to protect whistleblowers and other federal workers from unlawful employment practices, as well as enforcing the Hatch Act that forbids political activity in the federal workplace, wrote former prosecutor Barbara McQuade for MSNBC.
"Picking Paul Ingrassia to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel is not like putting the fox in charge of the hen house," McQuade wrote. "It’s more like setting fire to the whole farm."
"The nature of the work demands an experienced investigator who is scrupulously apolitical," she added. "Ingrassia is anything but."
The 30-year-old Ingrassia has been an attorney for only three years and previously worked at the far-right Claremont Institute, where Trump's infamous legal adviser John Eastman came from before hatching the 2020 fake elector scheme. McQuade said the president's nominee was woefully unqualified for this new role.
"Ingrassia doesn’t have the legal experience for the role," she wrote. "But he has something more important, at least for this administration. Early in Trump’s second term, Ingrassia served as the president’s liaison to the Justice Department, where he referred to himself as Trump’s 'eyes and ears,' according to NBC News. He was reassigned to the Department of Homeland Security after he reportedly clashed with DOJ officials by pushing to hire candidates with 'exceptional loyalty' to Trump, reports ABC News."
ALSO READ:FBI silent as far-right podcaster demands Trump execution and Kash Patel torture
He urged Trump to pardon all of the Jan. 6 rioters and called for $1 million in reparations to each of their families, and he advocated for the president to identify all the judges and prosecutors in those cases and call for their resignations, she wrote.
"His views on the Jan. 6 riot are extreme, even by MAGA standards," McQuade wrote. "Ingrassia also urged Congress to make Jan. 6 a national holiday to place 'the day’s events in their proper historical context: as a peaceful protest against a great injustice affecting our electoral system' [and] referred to former Vice President Mike Pence as a traitor who belongs in 'the ninth circle of hell.'"
"All private citizens are entitled to express their opinions, but someone who is either as delusional or sycophantic as Ingrassia is, in my opinion, simply unfit to lead an agency that is tasked with enforcing nonpartisanship," McQuade added.
Trump fired Hampton Dellinger, Joe Biden's appointee as OSC head, in February, and while a court found his dismissal was unlawful, he dropped his legal challenge when an appeals court declined to reinstate him, and the president moved to neuter the agency after its oversight found 13 senior administration officials in his first term had violated the Hatch Act.
"Like the U.S. attorney position, the head of the Office of Special Counsel must be confirmed by the Senate. For the sake of our federal workforce and the important work they do for our country, let’s hope this nomination meets the same fate as [U.S. attorney nominee Ed] Martin’s
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the intercept klip
aFTER SUCCESSFULLY LOBBYING for the rollback of new rules applied to Wall Street in the wake of the financial crisis, lobbyists for Silicon Valley Bank immediately began pressing their case further to the federal authority that insures bank deposits in the event of another crisis, according to lobbying disclosures reviewed by The Intercept. The lobbying effort managed to exempt banks the size of Silicon Valley Bank from more stringent regulations, including stress tests aimed at uncovering the type of weaknesses that led to the bank’s implosion Friday. Two of the bank’s top lobbyists previously served as senior staffers for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who himself pushed for the repeal of significant pieces of the landmark Wall Street reform legislation known as Dodd-Frank.}:
The meltdown of Silicon Valley Bank represents the second-largest bank collapse in American history and the first since the 2008 financial crisis. Over 90 percent of the bank’s deposits exceed the amount federally guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, meaning that those people may either never see their money again or lose substantial amounts.
Silicon Valley Bank President Greg Becker himself pushed for weaker banking regulations, telling Congress to lift “enhanced prudential standards … given the low risk profile of our activities,” as The Lever reported.
A chief culprit, economists say, is legislation President Donald Trump signed into law in 2018, which rolled back key parts of the Dodd-Frank banking regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. That 2018 legislation, called the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, passed with strong support from the Republican Party and critical support from some Democrats. Among those leading the charge was McCarthy, then House majority leader.
“We’re going to move this Senate bill directly to the president’s desk to ensure these reforms help the economy to grow further by making community banks stronger,” McCarthy said of the legislation in 2018. “This is going to free up a great deal of capital and this will help a lot.” two former staffers for McCarthy are registered lobbyists for Silicon Valley Bank, according to the disclosures, one of whom lobbied on the Dodd-Frank repeal law that experts say made the current crisis more likely.
Other Silicon Valley Bank lobbyists worked for political figures across both parties, including former President Bill Clinton; former Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wy.; former Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.; Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn.; former Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa.; and former Rep. Jay Inslee, now governor of Washington state.
Brian Worth served as coalitions director for McCarthy from January 2011 to May 2014, when McCarthy was House Republican whip. Since March 2017 Worth has been a partner at the Franklin Square Group, where he’s worked as a lobbyist for Silicon Valley Bank. Wes McClelland served as a policy adviser and senior policy adviser for McCarthy from April 2011 to September 2015 and joined Franklin Square last January, where he has also lobbied on the bank’s behalf.
Franklin Square is the only lobby group that Silicon Valley Bank has used in over a decade and has lobbied on the bank’s behalf every year from 2009 to 2023. The only other lobby shops the bank has employed are DLA Piper from 2009 to 2010 and McGuireWoods from 2010 to 2011.
A spokesperson for McCarthy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Worth lobbied on the repeal law beginning on October 1, 2017, right up to its passage on May 24, 2018. Then, starting on July 1, 2018, Silicon Valley Bank began lobbying the FDIC — the very same federal agency responsible for insuring bank deposits and was tasked with implementing critical portions of Dodd-Frank.
Though Franklin Square has lobbied on behalf of Silicon Valley Bank since 2009, the 2018 filing represents the first time it had ever lobbied the FDIC.
Beginning on April 20, 2022, McClelland also began lobbying the FDIC for Silicon Valley Bank, which both he and Worth continued right up until the bank’s last lobbying filing this year.
The lobbying disclosures do not provide any more detail about the work. Neither Worth nor McClelland immediately responded to requests for comment.
“This was a 100 percent avoidable problem,” economist Dean Baker told The Intercept in an email, pointing to the Dodd-Frank repeal bill. “That bill raised the asset threshold above which banks have to undergo stress tests from $50 billion to $250 billion. SVB would have been required to undergo regular stress tests before the revision; among the stresses you look at are sharp rises in interest rates, which is apparently what did in SVB. Presumably, if its books had been subject to this test, the risk would have been detected and they would have been required to raise more capital and/or shed deposits.”
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eurasia rev
Before the financial collapse come the aggressive anti-regulation lobbyists. These are often of the same ilk: loathing anything resembling oversight, restriction, reporting and monitoring. They are incarnations of the frontier, symbolically toting guns and slaying the natives, seeking wealth beyond paper jottings, compliance and bureaucratic tedium.
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), for a period of time the preferred bank for start-ups, is the bitter fruit of that harvest. Three days prior to the second-largest failure of a US financial institution since the implosion of Washington Mutual (Wamu) in 2008, lobbyists for the banking sector had reason to gloat. They had the ears of a number of GOP lawmakers and were pressing the case that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell had little reason to sharpen regulations in the industry.
As a matter of fact, the converse case was put: the financial environment was proving too stringent, and needed easing up. This effort built on gains made during the Trump administration, which saw the passing of the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act. Then House majority leader Kevin McCarthy was particularly keen on winding back elements of the Dodd-Frank banking measuresintroduced in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In 2018, he got much of what he wished for.
Lobbyists for SVB were particularly aggressive in that endeavour, and even went so far as to seek exemptions from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the body responsible for insuring bank deposits in times of crisis and institutional oversight. Two former staffers for McCarthy so happen to be registered lobbyists for SVB, a fact that shows how the US revolving door between politics and business continues to whirr at some speed. The SVB lobby list also includes figures who found employment under former President Bill Clinton, former Senator Mike Enzi (R-My), former Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and former Senator Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), just to name a few.
The crisis duly came. On March 9, startups and venture capitalists made a run on SVB as its share price took a tumble. SVB had sold its available-for-sale (AFS) portfolio for US$21 billion at a US$1.8 billion loss. In a patch-up, capital raising response, SVB then announced that it would sell US$2.25 billion in new shares.
By the next day, the FDIC had placed SVB into receivership. The corporation promised that insured depositors would have access to their insured deposits on March 13; uninsured depositors would have to wait a bit longer, expecting an “advance within the next week.” But given that 90% of the bank’s deposits exceeded the amount guaranteed by the FDIC, the prospects for adequate recovery proved uncertain, at least till the FDIC, Federal Reserve and US Treasury promised protection for them.
Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo proved rather green in suggesting that the financial system, as things stood, would be resilient enough to hold off any contagion. “Federal regulators are paying attention to this particular financial institution,” he told CNN, “and when we think about the broader financial system, we’re very confident in the ability and the resilience of the system.”
This is bound to be misplaced. It’s certainly not the view held byformer FDIC head, Sheila Blair,who argues that there are other banks in the system with large amounts of uninsured deposits and unrealised losses. “These banks that have large amounts of institutional uninsured money … that’s going to be hot money that runs if there’s a sign of trouble.”
David Sacks of Craft Ventures is also of the view that immediate intervention at the government level was required. “Where is Powell?” he wondered. “Where is [US Secretary of the Treasury Janet] Yellen? Stop this crisis NOW.” SVB, he proposed, should be placed with a top four bank. “Do this before Monday open or there will be contagion and the crisis will spread.”
Questions are being asked whether the anti-regulatory bug has gotten to the various authorities and agencies. Mike Novogratz, founder of Galaxy Digital, pondered whether all banks were now being treated like hedge funds. “Seems like a policy mistake.”
Economists such as Peter Schiff are even more damning, claiming that the entire US banking sector is set for a cathartic clean-up that will be greater than that following 2008. US banks were holding “long-term paper at extremely low interest rates. They can’t compete with short-term Treasuries.” In such an environment, depositors, in the pursuit of higher yields, would initiate mass withdrawals, resulting in a tidal wave of bank collapses.
Blame for the SVB debacle has been extensive. “This was a hysteria-induced bank run caused by VCs [venture capitalists],” opined Ryan Falvey, a fintech investor based at Restive Ventures. “This is going to be remembered as one of the ultimate cases of an industry cutting off its nose to spite its face.”
The oversight advocates are bound to agree. Dennis Kelleher, CEO of the non-profit Better Markets, is certainly one. “SVB’s stunningly quick collapse should put an end to the nonstop attempts by banks, lobbyists and their political allies to weaken capital and other financial regulations that protect depositors, consumers, investors and financial stability.”
This is likely to prove to be a flight of fancy. The banking lobbyists have destructive form and staying power. In 2019, the International Monetary Fund published a working paper noting that bank lobbying, in general, produced “regulatory capture, which lessens the support for tighter rules and enforcement. This, in turn, allows riskier practices and worse economic outcomes.”
As the great financial crisis showed, financial regulation is often the antidote to banditry. The pillaging and frontier types will always resist such tendencies. Again, they have been found wanting, and again, the harmful consequences of their ideas are going to prove deep and extensive.
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lever
Eight years before the second-largest bank failure in American history occurred this week, the bank’s president personally pressed Congress to reduce scrutiny of his financial institution, citing the “low risk profile of our activities and business model,” according to federal records reviewed by The Lever.
Three years later — after the bank spent more than half a million dollars on federal lobbying — lawmakers obliged.
On Friday, California regulators shut down the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a top lender to venture capital firms and tech startups, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation took it over, following a bank run by its customers. The bank reportedly did not have a chief risk officer in the months leading up to the collapse, while more than 90 percent of its deposits were not insured.
in 2015, SVB President Greg Becker submitted a statement to a Senate panel pushing legislators to exempt more banks — including his own — from new regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Despite warnings from some senators, Becker’s lobbying effort was ultimately successful.
Touting “SVB’s deep understanding of the markets it serves,our strong risk management practices,” Becker argued that his bank would soon reach $50 billion in assets, which under the law would trigger “enhanced prudential standards,” including more stringent regulations, stress tests, and capital requirements for his and other similarly sized banks.
Becker insisted that $250 billion was a more appropriate threshold.
“Without such changes, SVB likely will need to divert significant resources from providing financing to job-creating companies in the innovation economy to complying with enhanced prudential standards and other requirements,” wrote Becker, whoreportedlysold $3.6 million of his own stock two weeks ago, in the lead-up to the bank’s collapse. “Given the low risk profile of our activities and business model, such a result would stifle our ability to provide credit to our clients without any meaningful corresponding reduction in risk.”
Two months later, SVB added former Obama Treasury Department official Mary Miller to its board, noting she had previously helped oversee “financial regulatory reforms.”
Around that time, federal disclosure records show the bank was lobbying lawmakers on “financial regulatory reform” and the Systemic Risk Designation Improvement Act of 2015 — a bill that was the precursor to legislation ultimately signed by President Donald Trump that increased the regulatory threshold for stronger stress tests to $250 billion.
Trump signed the bill despite a report from Democrats on Congress’ Joint Economic Committee warning that under the new law, SVB and other banks of its size “would no longer be subject to nearly any enhanced regulations.”
The bill was supported in the Senate by 50 Republicans and 17 Democrats, including Virginia Sen. Mark Warner (D), for whom Becker held a fundraiser at his Menlo Park, California, home in 2016, according to an invite obtained by The Sunlight Foundation and OpenSecrets. The bank’s political action committee also donated a total of $10,000 to Warner’s campaigns in the 2016 and 2018 election cycles.
In 2019, when the Federal Reserve proposed regulations implementing the deregulatory law, financial watchdogs warned that its regulations on Category IV institutions — as SVB was later classified due to its size and other risk factors — were far too weak.
“The proposal to significantly weaken enhanced prudential standards for Category IV firms could be disastrous,” Better Markets, a nonprofit advocating for stricter financial regulations, wrote in a comment on the Federal Reserve’s proposal. “Moreover, these are not small or insignificant firms. Recall that the smallest among this class of banks is over twice the size of the $50 billion dollar banks that automatically required enhanced prudential regulation under the Dodd-Frank Act as originally enacted.”
The final rule guaranteed that Category IV institutions are “not required to conduct and publicly report the results of a company-run stress test” and “reduces the required minimum frequency of liquidity stress tests and granularity of certain liquidity risk-management requirements,” according to Federal Reserve officials at the time.
In 2021, SVB passed the threshold of $100 billion under management, triggering some additional scrutiny as a Category IV bank but remaining exempt from the more frequent and detailed analyses that regulators perform to determine whether banks above $250 billion of assets have sufficient capital to withstand a crisis.
a press release Friday from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation noted that as of December 2022, SVB had $209 billion in assets under management — keeping it below the $250 billion threshold for which the bank had lobbied.
SVB is the biggest bank to collapse since Washington Mutual failed in 2008 during the financial crisis, and the second-biggest bank failure in U.S. history.
Prior to Becker’s 2015 push, SVB had pressed Federal Reserve officials to limit regulatory scrutiny of mid-sized banks, arguing that “we are very concerned that the regulatory requirements for covered companies will end up trickling down to smaller financial institutions.”
In 2019, Becker was elected to serve on the board of directors at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Becker left the board on Friday.
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bloomberg
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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he’s been in touch with the Biden administration and is hopeful that US officials will make an announcement on Sunday to address the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. }:
“Well, I have talked with the administration, from Jay Powell and Janet Yellen,” McCarthy said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” “They do have the tools to handle the current situation, they do know the seriousness of this and they are working to try to come forward with some announcement before the markets open.”
“I’m hopeful that something can be announced today to move forward,” the California Republican said. “Silicon Valley Bank has a lot of assets. It’s just where the capital is currently at. So it is attractive for someone to want to purchase it. It’s just the timeline of where to move forward.”
McCarthy didn’t specify the nature of any announcement that regulators might be preparing.
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say it ain't so barney; mccarthy staffers lobby?
svb signature silvergate crypto fail
~ Eliz, manchin sinema trump regs water down fair to sm bank BS
https://www.alternet.org/dodd-frank/
https://theintercept.com/2023/02/15/congress-bank-lobbying/
lee fang
DURING THE STATE of the Union last week, President Joe Biden asked Congress to pass legislation cracking down on hidden and often predatory fees charged by banks in the form of overdraft and late penalties, adding heft to regulatory action launched by his administration last year.
But the legislation may not stand much of a chance with a Republican House, where the Financial Services Committee, which oversees banking policy, is now chaired by Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., and staffed by former lobbyists.
Over the last few weeks, McHenry’s hires to run the committee are mostly former lobbyists who served the very banks, lenders, and brokerages seeking to combat Biden regulations. Staffers often play a pivotal role in determining the strategy and policy behind any change in the law.
larry Seyfried, just months ago, worked as a registered lobbyist and vice president of congressional relations at the American Bankers Association, the bank trade group that is leading the charge against Biden’s crackdown on junk fees. Seyfried was hired by McHenry as the director of member services and coalitions for the House Financial Services Committee.
The American Bankers Association, earlier this week threatened to file a lawsuit to stop the Biden administration from capping certain bank fees at $8 each, claiming such regulations would increase borrowing costs and force banks to cut services to certain types of customers.McHenry, in turn, has threatened to use his new perch on the committee to investigate the primary regulatory agencies charged with enforcing the fee mandate, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.Several GOP lawmakers on the committee have proposed legislation to rein in the CFPB’s authority.
The committee also recently hired Will Anderson, a former lobbyist for the Business Roundtable, a trade group that represents Wells Fargo & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Bank of America Corp., and other large financial corporations. Anderson will serve as the staff director for the subcommittee on capital markets, which oversees the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory agencies.
Last year, disclosures show Anderson lobbied Congress and the SEC on behalf of the Business Roundtable on a variety of financial regulations. Now he will work from the inside.
Other committee staffers have similar potential conflicts of interest. Kathleen Palmer, a GOP congressional staffer for the Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Monetary Policy, is a former lobbyist for JPMorgan Chase & Co. Matt Hoffmann, the staff director of the committee for McHenry, previously worked as a lobbyist for the BGR Group, a large firm with many clients with interests directly impacted by the committee, including Credit Suisse Group and MetLife.
The so-called reverse revolving door, in which lobbyists for highly regulated interest groups temporarily take jobs in government with influence or oversight over policy impacting their former employers, is a vexing issue.
Related
As the Revolving Door Spins, Lobbyists Hired for Top Jobs in Congress Yet Again
Policymakers need expertise to devise thoughtful policy, and former lobbyists are often well equipped to understand highly technical issues for specialized industries. David Hanke, the recently hired director of the new select committee to probe competition between the U.S. and China, for instance, previously worked as an attorney advising on semiconductor issues, a key concern shaping U.S.-China tensions. He was also registered to lobby.
But the burrowing of corporate lobbyists deep inside powerful roles in the congressional and federal bureaucracy also presents the potential for entrenched corruption.
The advantages for burrowing are so high that many corporations with a stake in government policy write the incentives into employment contracts. Banks and defense contractors extend special bonuses as a reward for executives to leave and enter government. In public service, they are well positioned to reward their former corporate employers. After a stint in government, most return to the private sector.
For example, Northrop Grumman, the defense giant, paid out bonuses to executives who went on to work as congressional staff. One former Northrop Grumman lobbyist received up to $450,000 in bonus and incentive pay as he left the firm to work on the committee that oversees Pentagon policy. Former Northrop Grumman executives worked to advocate for higher military spending and for lawmakers who specifically encouraged spending on Northrop Grumman-built weapons systems, including the RQ-4 Global Hawk drone.
Newly hired congressional staff across the aisle present other potential conflicts of interest. Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., the chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, recently announced the lead staffer on the committee will be Courtney Taylor, who previously worked as senior vice president at the lobbying firm ML Strategies. Disclosures show Taylor has previously lobbied for a range of clients, including the Environmental Defense Fund, Shell, and the American Wood Council, a trade group for the wood products industry.
In Congress, the most important staffer for each member is the chief of staff, who oversees each lawmaker’s operations. Tucker Knott, the new chief of staff to Sen. Ted Budd, R-N.C., previously worked as a lobbyist for Pfizer. Hank Dixon, the chief of staff to newly elected Rep. Sydney Kamlager, D-Calif., comes to the job after working as vice president of corporate affairs at oil firm Talisman Energy and before that, as a D.C. lawyer for Shell. Rep. Dan Meuser, R-Pa., recently hired Tim Costa as his chief of staff. Costa previously worked as a lobbyist at the firm Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC for several health care clients, including Walgreens.
As Truthout reported, several former fossil fuel lobbyists have been hired for key committees overseeing energy and land use policy. Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., who controls the gavel of the Natural Resources Committee, hired a former lobbyist for Taylor Energy, the Louisiana firm responsible for an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Rep. Pete Stauber, R-Minn., also a member of the same committee, hired Shawn Rusterholz, a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group for the oil majors such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp
note mccarthy has joined the trolls gubmint
aha recall conservatives hard-wired to be sensitive to threat/fear, amplified by soc media bubble, boost by troll caucus [all built on libtard/ koch fdn]
conserv all want to get rid of income tax/also trumpistas? b/c they think they will be rich someday?
recall the gubmint is evil, so starve the beast
self-ish me vs we; if gubmint corrupt if not evil or even just inept no pt in wasting $ on it
8 22
https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/gop-rumors-irs/
An official from the U.S. Treasury Department confirmed Friday that, contrary to the unrelenting barrage of lies repeated by GOP operatives for over a week, the Internal Revenue Service is not going to hire 87,000 new agents to harass working people at their homes.
Not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that was passed through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process last week and signed into law by President Joe Biden on Tuesday, choosing instead to condemn the package's relatively modest but popular tax reforms.
Despite analysts' predictions that the 98.2% of U.S. households with annual incomes of $400,000 or less will receive the same tax bill or a slight cut as a result of the IRA, [plus study for free file] far-right lawmakers have sown disinformation about how the law's provision of roughly $80 billion in new IRS funding over 10 years—money intended to help the agency crack down on rich tax cheats—poses a threat to every American.
Last week, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) went so far as to claim that Democrats are "using the power of the federal government for armed robbery!" Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has made :{similar allegation:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}:s.
It's not just fringe members of the GOP who are spreading such falsehoods. One day before Boebert's tirade, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), the highest-ranking Republican in the lower chamber, tweeted, "Democrats in Washington plan to hire an army of 87,000 IRS agents so they can audit more Americans like you."
On Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—currently a top contender, along with former President Donald Trump, to be the Republican Party's 2024 nominee for the White House—called hiring 87,000 IRS agents "a middle finger to the American public," making clear that he would prefer more "might at the border."
Where does this oft-repeated number of IRS agents come from?
"The 87,000 figure does exist, buried within a May 2021 Treasury Department report when the Biden administration was pushing a bigger spending bill with the same $80 billion IRS funding," Reuters noted Friday. "The report estimated the money could fund 86,852 full-time hires through 2031."
But the actual net increase in staff would be much lower, as the IRS expects more than 50,000 aging Baby Boomer employees to retire over the next half-decade.
In addition to an unspecified number of new revenue agents—there were 8,321 in fiscal year 2021—the agency is looking to hire tens of thousands of new information technology specialists and customer service personnel who can create a user experience more akin to online banking, Natasha Sarin, Treasury counselor for tax policy and administration, told Reuters.
There are 2,100 special agents in the IRS Criminal Investigation branch who are authorized to carry firearms, but right-wing assertions that all 87,000 new hires would be auditors, criminal enforcement agents, or armed are "deeply dangerous nonsense—and false," said Sarin.
"The speed and voracity with which [Republicans] are coming at this is really a testament to how important these resources are going to be—because there are many wealthy tax evaders that stand to lose a lot," Sarin continued.
The GOP's intentionally misleading attacks come after a decade of budget cuts approved by congressional Republicans left the IRS with 16,000 fewer employees in 2021 than it had in 2010.
As ProPublica has documented, the IRS now audits low-income taxpayers at the same rate as the top 1%, but that is a direct result of years of austerity, which have undermined the agency's ability to audit the rich.
The IRA's boost in IRS funding aims to rectify this injustice and to begin closing an estimated $600 billion annual "tax gap"—the difference between taxes paid and owed—by strengthening enforcement against the complex avoidance strategies used by the wealthy, especially those with murky sources of income.
New information technology hires will develop "tools to identify more high-end audit targets," Reuters reported. "To target wealthy taxpayers and handle sophisticated audits, Sarin said the IRS needs mid-career individuals with accounting and often tax law experience."
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the increase in IRS funding will raise $204 billion in additional revenue over 10 years, while the Treasury projects that the real revenue impact will likely be $400 billion over a decade—a substantial portion of the IRA's climate and healthcare spending.
Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen instructed IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig—a scandal-plagued Trump appointee who spent decades battling the agency—to submit an $80 billion spending and hiring plan within six months. Yellen previously directed the agency not to use any new resources to increase audits of people making less than $400,000 per year.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/oil-executives-recording-trump-access-812511/
oil executives have been reveling in all of the access and influence they now have because President Donald Trump is in office. A recording of a meeting of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) obtained by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting shows executives bragging about how they can affect change in both Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency regulations after their former lawyer, David Bernhardt, was nominated to be the number two official at Interior.
“We know [Berndardt] very well, and we have direct access to him, have conversations with him about issues ranging from federal land access to endangered species, to a lot of issues,” Dan Naatz, IPAA’s political director said, in an hour-long recording of a June 2017 meeting
...ed in 'Dozens' of Planning Meetings With Members of Congress and White House Staff
Bernhardt is now up for a promotion: he is Acting Secretary of the Interior and is Trump’s nominee to replace former Interior chiefRyan Zinke.
“It’s really a new thing for us,” Barry Russell, CEO of IAPP said, bragging about his upcoming meetings with Trump officials. “For example, next week I’m invited to the White House to talk about tax code. Last week we were talking to [EPA] Secretary [Scott] Pruitt, and in about two weeks we have a meeting with [Interior] Secretary Zinke. So we have unprecedented access to people that are in these positions who are trying to help us, which is great, "
russell also laughed recalling a meeting with then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt where Pruitt’s staff wrote down Russell’s criticisms of the EPA.
“Scott Pruitt, he came from Oklahoma, and we have a lot of friends in common and I thought that’s what we were going to talk about, we did that for about three minutes,” Russell said. “And then he started asking very technical questions about methane, about ozone… And what was really great is there was aboutfour or five EPA staffers there, who were all like, ‘Write that down, write that down,’ all the way through this. And when we left, I said that was just our overview.”
This prompted the audience to laugh at how easy it was for Russell to influence policy.
“So it’s really a new world for us and very, very helpful,” Russell concluded.
On the recording, the executives also discussed a “wish list” they drafted and gave to the administration detailing EPA regulations they wanted rolled back, including removing fracking regulations that protect water sources; limits on methane gas releases; restoration of publicly-owned land harmed by the oil industry and regulations to protect migratory bird populations. Each of those requests was granted.
Nada Culver, senior counsel for the Wilderness Society environmental group, told Reveal: “The IPAA’s wish list was granted as asked, in the executive order, and in the actions taken by the Department of the Interior. It pains me to say it.”
And, of course, with Bernhardt’s confirmation hearings approaching, groups like IAPP stand to gain even more as their access and influence within the Trump Administration grows.
==
trump mofo, reg capture:
https://theintercept.com/2020/08/12/cfpb-coronavirus-predatory-payday-loans
ON JULY 30, Chair Maxine Waters opened the House Committee on Financial Services hearing with a frustrate and ominous message: “I would like to welcome Director Kraninger to what I hope will be her last appearance before this committee as CFPB director.”
Kathy Kraninger was being called to account for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s failure to protect consumers during the coronavirus pandemic. In separate House and Senate hearings, committee members levied their sharpest criticisms against the agency’s plan to deregulate small-dollar lending by repealing key consumer protections on predatory products like payday and auto title loans. The final rule decided on by the agency tore out the heart of the policy by rescinding provisions that required lenders to assess a borrower’s ability to repay their loan.
small-dollar lenders, such as Speedy Cash and TitleMax, intentionally design high-cost, low-quality products to make it almost impossible for borrowers to repay their loans under the original terms. Finance fees and average annual interest rates of 400 percent prevent most borrowers from repaying payday loans in full, with borrowers ending up in debt five months out of the year for what was deceptively marketed as a two-week loan. Other loans within this industry are just as harmful. Ninety percent of auto title loans are re-borrowed, and 20 percent of borrowers have their vehicles repossessed. This rule makes it easier for lenders to trap borrowers in cycles of debt.
Payday lenders are well known for taking advantage of the precarious conditions experienced by working-class and poor people — and which disproportionately affect Black and brown people. The average loan amount borrowed from a storefront payday lender is about $1,000. Contradicting the assumption that these lenders profit primarily from unpredictable crises such as a pay cut or medical emergency, a majority of borrowers — 69 percent — rely on payday loans to cover recurring expenses. People use these higher-cost loans to live day-to-day: buying groceries, paying bills, and making their rent or mortgage payments.
The CFPB’s rule makes this form of racial capitalism even more punishing by paving the way for predatory lenders to prey on marginalized borrowers and extract lucrative profits.The economic stimulus payments that Congress approved under the CARES Act appeared to help people make it through the early months of the pandemic, and new applications for small-dollar loans declined during March and April. Now, with Congress’s failure to extend benefits, loan applications are rising steadily along with eviction fears, job losses, and coronavirus infection and death rates. In one survey, 36 percent of lower-income households applied for some type of small-dollar loan in June and July. Black and brown households applied for these loans at a rate three times higher than did white households.
Near the end of the House Committee on Financial Services hearing, Illinois Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García described CFPB’s final rule as a scary example of how the agency is working on behalf of predatory lenders instead of consumers. “I represent a working-class, immigrant district. There are a lot of payday lenders in my district,” said García. “My community was hit hard by the last crisis and many people never recovered. … That’s why the CFPB was established during the last crisis to give ordinary people, like my neighbors in Chicago, their own voice. … But that’s not what we see from watching the bureau today.”
THE CFPB first revealed its proposed rule to regulate the small-dollar lending industry at a 2016 field hearing in Kansas City, Missouri. Up to that point, regulators had allowed the industry to escape federal oversight. Then-Director Richard Cordray, an Obama appointee, had led the agency in conducting extensive research on the industry’s harms to borrowers.
The CFPB’s decision to reveal its proposed rule in Kansas City was far from random. Kansas City and its white, wealthy suburbs were swimming with payday and other small-dollar lenders hungry for people’s money. Lenders sold payday loans with 1,000-percent interest rates nationwide out of their call center based in Overland Park, and local investors helped bankroll these lenders.
A multibillion-dollar payday lending enterprise overseen by a man named Scott Tucker was located just a few miles away in Leawood, with businesses that had names like Cash Advance and OneClickCash. Tucker put together the seed funding for his payday lending business in the 1990s, about the same time as the industry’s rapid nationwide expansion. By his early 30s, he had already developed several financial schemes and defrauded investors out of $100,000 — credentials he used to pitch investors.
Tucker grew his payday lending business into a nationwide enterprise over the next few decades. He worked hard to keep his illegal enterprise under the radar, including paying off local officials through campaign donations, creating a near-impenetrable multistate maze of shell companies, using the internet to expand his business, and exploiting Native tribes for sovereign immunity. His relationships with payday lenders were hard to pin down. Tucker had succeeded in keeping his name out of states’ earlier lawsuits against the payday lenders from which he was profiting, including in Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Washington.
Related
Trump Nominee for CFPB Admits in Hearing She Has No Background in Consumer Protection or Financial Regulation
A 2011 investigative report revealed the sources of Tucker’s wealth, publicly chaining him to the payday lenders whose affiliations he had worked so hard to suppress. The Federal Trade Commission filed suit against Tucker in 2012, and Tucker and his attorney were arrested on racketeering and other charges in 2016. Tucker was sentenced to 16 years in prison, and the FTC won their largest penalty at the time with a judgment for $1.3 billion in 2018. The FTC returned $505 million to the people Tucker had defrauded. The judge presiding over the decision estimated that Tucker had victimized 1 percent of the U.S. population through predatory loans and fraudulent activity.
Tucker wasn’t even the only person from Kansas City running a payday loan enterprise. Numerous Kansas City-area moguls have been sued in recent years, including Timothy Coppinger, Frampton T. Rowland, Richard Moseley Sr., Richard Moseley Jr., and Josh Landy. The initial rule stopped them from abusive practices, such as charging unaffordable payments that forced repeat borrowing and created debt traps.
trump was elected to the presidency a few months after the Kansas City field hearing. Since that time, his appointees, Interim Director Mick Mulvaney and current Director Kathy Kraninger, have hacked away at rule-making and used bureaucratic malaise to whittle away at the agency’s commitments to oversight and enforcement. One of Mulvaney’s first actions as interim director was to announce that the agency would reconsider the small-dollar lending rule. The Trump appointees even manipulated the agency’s research to make payday lenders appear less harmful. When the CFPB announced its final rule in July of this year, it hammered a nail into the coffin of the Cordray-era rule-making that steadfastly sought justice for borrowers defrauded by lenders like Tucker.
The CFPB announced the rule’s final fate as eviction moratoriums and expanded unemployment benefitswere expiring— along with any remaining hope that America could rally the collective spirit needed to fight the coronavirus. Other federal regulators followed in lock step with the CFPB. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation subsequently announced proposed rules that would allow payday lenders to circumvent state interest rate caps. Moreover, Trump’s executive orders on payroll taxes and student loans defer payments instead of canceling them. By extending these payments into the future, Trump’s executive orders actually operate a lot like payday loans: taking advantage of people’s precarious conditions by offering immediate relief while their debts accumulate with no way of repaying them. Mutually reinforcing policy decisions effectively deploy predatory lenders and their 400-percent interest rates as first responders to the pandemic. Not willing to throw out life vests, Trump’s government encourages people to drown in debt.
Congress must act with urgency to protect borrowers from predatory lenders and to stave the flow of Black and brown income into white pockets, like Tucker’s. The Democrats’ HEROES Act, if passed, would initiate another round of economic stimulus payments that would likely reduce reliance on payday loans by giving people the money they need to live. Some states are stepping up in the CFPB’s absence. Policymakers in Virginia recently passed legislation to cap interest rates at 36 percent and ensure that borrowers can repay their loans. Wisconsin issued emergency guidance warning payday lenders not to raise interest rates and threatening to revoke licenses.
The House and Senate hearings provided a necessary public accounting of the CPFB. However, without federal intervention, people will have little choice but to rely on predatory lenders and their high-cost debt for surviving the pandemic. And they’ll have fewer protections, thanks to the CFPB’s final rule that promises to widen racial economic inequality during a pandemic instead of narrowing it.
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/cfpb-director-facing-calls-to-resign-over-new-rule-exposing-consumers-to-predatory-debt-traps-in-middle-of-recession/
consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Kathy Kraninger is facing calls to resign after her agency finalized a rule Tuesday that critics say will further expose vulnerable people to “debt traps” set by payday and car-title lenders.
Kraninger, who was nominated by President Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate in 2018, “just stamped an official seal of approval on one of the worst practices of payday lenders—and now there’s nothing stopping the industry from ruining families with 400% interest rates in the middle of a recession,” said Jeremy Funk, spokesperson for consumer watchdog group Allied Progress.
“For the sake of all U.S. consumers,” Funk added, “the director needs to step aside.”
The final rule—which has been in the works for more than a year—rolls back Obama-era regulations requiring payday and car-title lenders to verify that borrowers have the ability to repay before approving high-interest, short-term loans. Last June, Kraninger delayed implementation of the safeguards, which were previously set to take effect on August 19, 2019.
according to the Payday Loan Debt Trap Tracker, Kraninger’s decision to delay the regulations cost consumers nearly $6 billion in fees.
“A truly shameful thing that right in the middle of the economic distress from this pandemic, the current CFPB leadership would choose to roll back the heart of the payday lending reform rule,” tweeted former CFPB director Richard Cordray, who helped develop the Obama-era regulations. “Protecting consumers again takes a back seat to catering to the financial industry.”
The American Banker reported Tuesday that Kraninger’s rollback is “projected to save the payday lending industry more than $7 billion a year.”
BREAKING: In a direct attack on consumers,@CFPBDirector and Donald Trump just killed protections for payday loan borrowers in the middle of a global pandemic and economic downturn. Disgraceful.https://t.co/kGmCqiFqpE
— Allied Progress (@AlliedProgress) July 7, 2020
In an August 2019 memo obtained by the New York Times, then-CFPB staffer Jonathan Lanning accused President Donald Trump’s political appointees of manipulating the bureau’s payday lending research to justify gutting the Obama-era borrower protections. Lanning left the CFPB later that same month.
Mike Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending, said in a statement that “there is never a good time to enable predatory loans carrying 400% interest rates, but this is the worst possible time.”
“The pain caused by the CFPB gutting the payday rule will be felt most by those who can least afford it, including communities of color who are disproportionately targeted by payday lenders,” Calhoun added. “Payday and car-title lenders pull borrowers into financial quicksand. The CFPB’s own research shows that four out of every five payday loans are reborrowed within two weeks—because borrowers can’t afford to repay the initial loan.”
“Taking out a payday loan makes a person more likely to lose their bank account, rack up overdraft fees, and file for bankruptcy,” said Calhoun. “With today’s action, the politically appointed leadership of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is actively facilitating harm to consumers at a time of crisis and uncertainty.”
Advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) urged Congress to pass legislation capping interest rates nationwide to stop payday lenders from taking advantage of the CFPB’s new rule.
“With regulators throwing open the doors to predatory lender, Congress must step in to prevent profiteering and stop payday and car-title lenders from burying people in high-interest debt,” AFR senior policy counsel Linda Jun said in a statement. “Predatory lenders will do nothing but prolong the human misery stemming from this crisis.”
==
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/05/01/epa-wheeler-fossil-fuels-clean-power-plan-senators-court
no lnx many
PA Has Been Captured by Fossil Fuel Interests, Democratic Senators Tell Court
Read time: 6 mins
By Dana Drugmand • Friday, May 1, 2020 - 14:40
EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Trump administration is run by fossil fuel allies determined to do polluters’ bidding, U.S. senators are telling the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. The group of Democratic senators calls out this extensive fossil fuel industry influence in a recent friend-of-the-court brief filed in a lawsuit challenging the Trump EPA’s replacement of the Clean Power Plan meant to regulate carbon emissions from power plants.
Trump’s EPA replaced the Obama-era Clean Power Plan with what it calls the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, which requires only minimal emissions reductions by individual power plants rather than a systemic approach to cleaning up climate pollution from the power sector. The American Lung Association, which recently reported nearly half of Americans are breathing unhealthy air, is leading the legal challenge to the rule, with support from a coalition of states and cities, environmental and public health organizations, and over 70 Democratic members of Congress.
Five Democratic senators — Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York — submitted a legal brief that specifically points to the fossil fuel industry’s role in infiltrating the EPA and dictating the agency’s policymaking. The senators describe top EPA officials’ ties to the industry it is tasked with regulating and explain how fossil fuel interests have captured the agency. Within this context, the senators argue that no court could possibly conclude that EPA is engaged in reasoned, unbiased decision-making.
“With former fossil-fuel industry lobbyists and lawyers at the helm, EPA has decided to do nothing about [greenhouse gas] emissions,” the senators write. “The ACE Rule is not the product of reasoned decision-making by EPA that in any serious way grapples with the evidence of harms from climate change.”
Fossil Fuel Ties at EPA
The senators’ brief points out how former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, former top EPA official Bill Wehrum, and current EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler are all closely connected to the fossil fuel industry.
Before he was head of the EPA (Feb. 2017 — July 2018), Pruitt was the attorney general for Oklahoma, a state heavily dependent on the oil and gas industry. “Pruitt’s political career was largely underwritten by the fossil-fuel industry,” the senators’ brief notes — the fossil fuel sector poured over $1.25 million in donations to his political campaigns.
As Oklahoma attorney general, Pruitt took up fossil fuel companies’ campaigns against environmental regulations and sued the EPA, the agency he would later lead, 14 times, which included suing to stop the Clean Power Plan. In nearly all of these lawsuits there was at least one industry co-litigator that contributed to Pruitt’s campaign or political action committee (PAC).
In addition to suing EPA, Pruitt sent barely edited form letters to federal regulators that came to him directly from oil and gas lobbyists. The senators’ brief mentions one example where a lobbyist from Devon Energy drafted a letter saying EPA was overestimating air pollution caused by natural gas drilling and sent it to Pruitt, who then copy and pasted it verbatim onto official letterhead and sent it to Washington.
Before coming to EPA, Pruitt also served as chair of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). Fossil fuel interests contributed more than $5 million to RAGA’s political arm during the 2014 and 2016 election cycles, the senators’ brief notes. And as DeSmog previously reported, Republican attorneys general fighting the Clean Power Plan (including Pruitt) took in over $2.4 million from polluting interests in those election cycles. Republican attorneys general even met privately with fossil fuel companies like Murray Energy and Southern Company at a 2015 RAGA summit, just one week before 27 Republican attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the Clean Power Plan.
The process of repealing and replacing the Clean Power Plan began under Pruitt’s leadership at EPA, and continued with his successor Andrew Wheeler. Wheeler was a top lobbyist for dirty energy interests, including coal company Murray Energy. In lobbying for Murray, Wheeler earned nearly $3 million for his lobbying firm. Repealing the Clean Power Plan was at the top of Murray CEO Bob Murray’s wish list that he circulated among the new Trump administration.
Another chief architect of the Clean Power Plan replacement was Bill Wehrum, former head of EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. He resigned in June 2019 amid a congressional investigation into his contact with former industry clients. Prior to assuming his EPA position, Wehrum was an attorney representing fossil fuel companies and trade groups. His clients included big names like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Koch Industries, the American Petroleum Institute, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, Duke Energy, Dominion Resources, and Utility Air Regulatory Group (UARG). “Wehrum met with UARG and several electric utilities to discuss replacing the [Clean Power Plan] just weeks after he assumed his duties as Assistant Administrator,” the senators’ brief points out.
Furthermore, the brief notes that Pruitt, Wheeler, and Wehrum have all questioned the well-accepted influence of human activity on climate, a view that aligns with the interests of the fossil fuel industry.
'Rampant cronyism, conflicts of interest, and corruption'?
The senators argue that the ACE rule is “arbitrary and capricious” as EPA “rejected well-established scientific and economic research” and “instead embraced self-serving proposals from the fossil fuel industry that will not significantly reduce emissions.” EPA’s obligation to regulate greenhouse gas emissions stems from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling and subsequent 2009 “endangerment finding” where the agency itself concluded (based on thorough scientific input) that these greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare.
The ACE rule likely illegally ignores this endangerment finding. “Given its 2009 endangerment finding, the agency needs to explain how a rule that results in essentially zero [greenhouse gas] emission reductions comports with the direction given to it by Congress,” the senators write.
They also argue that EPA is essentially “captured” or run by fossil fuel interests, meaning the agency has “effectively delegated its authority to the fossil fuel industry.”
EPA declined to comment. “EPA does not comment on pending litigation,” an agency spokesperson said.
The senators conclude by questioning EPA’s ability to make unbiased decisions when polluting interests are involved: “The record of this case, and of other regulatory matters of which this Court may take notice, indeed raise the question whether this EPA is even capable of fair decision-making in matters involving the interests of the fossil fuel industry, or whether rampant cronyism, conflicts of interest, and corruption leave EPA under present leadership unable to conform itself to the strictures of [federal administrative law].”
==
cfpb designed to ctr predatory? captured?
NB aha: fire/banks have been hosing up foreclosures (recall that house appreciation only real source of wealth/battery/buffer since wages flat 30 yrs, AA ppl predatory/redlined) MNUCHIN, 500k homeless, often medical bills? CDS on debt again?
no lnx
Vulture capitalists are picking us dry: Why consumer debt buyers are on the rise
The great recession laid waste to the U.S. economy. Now debt collectors are feasting on the carrion
JIM HIGHTOWER
MARCH 22,2015
==
https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2020/02/10/fox-henhouse-koch-backed-opponent-consumer-financial-protection-bureau
Conservative Foundations Finance Push to Kill the CFPB
by Alex Kotch | February 13th, 2020
==
black lung mnsh? niosh? zat?
Smith pulled up to another mine, which was also closed but had no guards in its weed-choked parking lot. This Solid Energy mine, along with the Rockhouse mine he drove by earlier, was operated byMassey Energy, now a defunct company with deadly mine disasters in its history and a CEO who went to prison for conspiracy to violate mine safety laws.
Smith got out and walked up to a rusted fence with a padlock. A ball cap shaded his face. Sunglasses hid his tears.
“It’s [been] eating at me for the last two years,” he said, “that I’m going to die over this. … Of all the things that could’ve killed me while I did work there, the rockfalls and all that stuff, I lived through all of that. And I find out years later I’m going to die over black lung. And it’s heartbreaking.”
Smith then mentioned his wife and two daughters and wondered what will happen to them when he’s gone. He wondered about the grandchildren he may never see. His voice breaking again, he talked about the excitement of being a young miner, about the hope and promise of good pay and good lives.
“We was all young and strong and stout and they took advantage of us. Every one of us is either crippled or dead. We was all young men,” he said, crying softly.
Back at his house in a narrow valley — a holler — in Canada, Ky., Smith pointed to a family cemetery on a knoll at the edge of the lawn he has so much difficulty mowing. It features a single gravestone with bright flowers and the names of his parents. Behind it, Smith told us, in the shade, is the burial plot he has picked out for himself. He’s 46 years old.
NPR’s Adelina Lancianese, Barbara Van Woerkom, Katie Lawrie and Cat Schuknecht; Elaine McMillion Sheldon of FRONTLINE; Benny Becker and Jeff Young of Ohio Valley ReSource; and Ellen Smith of Mine Safety and Health News contributed to this story.
https://www.texasobserver.org/rick-perry-exports-his-pay-to-play-politics-to-ukraine/
11/13/19
it appears that Rick Perry exported his pay-to-play politics from the Texas governor’s mansion to the notoriously corrupt
Ukrainian oil and gas sector,where, as President Donald Trump’s energy secretary, he has played an outsized role in opening up the industry to private investors.
As the Associated Press reported on Monday, two of Perry’s longtime political patrons won what could be an immensely profitable drilling contract on a sprawling patch of land owned by the Ukrainian government.
Per the AP, Perry traveled to Ukraine to attend the inauguration of President Volodymyr Zelensky in May. During the trip, Perry urged Zelensky to appoint all new members to the advisory board of the country’s massive state-owned natural gas company, Naftogaz,helpfully giving him a list of recommended energy advisors. At the top was Michael Bleyzer, a silver-maned Ukrainian-American who has made a name for himself in Houston as an eccentric oil and gas investor. He also happens to be a longtime benefactor of Perry’s political career.
In the meeting with Zelensky, the energy secretary emphasized his friendship with Bleyzer. A week later, Bleyzer and his business partner Alex Cranberg, also a longtime Perry backer, filed a bid to drill on a government-controlled plot. They were ultimately awarded the contract despite offering several million dollars less than the only other bidder.
The revelations that Perry engaged in what looks to be a classic example of political cronyism should be unsurprising to those familiar with Governor Goodhair’s tenure.
Since 2017, Perry has played the role of international salesman for the American energy industry, particularly as an enthusiastic hawker of liquified natural gas, which he famously dubbed “freedom gas.” But as one of the Trump administration’s so-called “three amigos” who have led the United States’ diplomatic efforts in Ukraine, Perry is now embroiled in the impeachment inquiry into the president. He refused to comply with House Democrats’ subpoenas for documents related to his meetings with the Ukraine president and has declined to testify before committee members leading the impeachment investigation. Reports of his donors’ receiving a lucrative drilling contract in Ukraine now only heightens the scrutiny on Perry.
The revelations that Perry engaged in what looks to be a classic example of political cronyism should be unsurprising to those familiar with Governor Goodhair’s tenure. Over his 12 years running Texas, he developed a reputation as a brazen purveyor of pay-to-play politics, shamelessly installing his biggest political donors in powerful positions of public trust.
Of the 4,000 jobs that he filled during his gubernatorial career, more than a quarter of them went to political donors—many of them woefully unqualified. From 2001 to 2010, those appointees gave Perry more than $17 million, about 20 percent of his total haul, according to Texans for Public Justice.
In turn, those donors were treated kindly by the Perry government. In 2011, Texas billionaire Harold Simmons, who had pumped $1.2 million into Perry’s coffers, got his radioactive waste dump permit greenlit by Perry’s appointees on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality despite objections from some staffers.
Perry also used massive economic development slush funds to shovel money back to his donors. In 2010, the Observerfound that 20 of the 55 companies that received grant money from Perry’s Texas Enterprise Fund—a state warchest for corporate economic incentives—had contributed to either his campaign or the Republican Governors Association that he helmed. Those companies had a combined $2.2 million in political contributions and received a windfall of $175 million in taxpayer-financed incentives. More than $16 million from his new Emerging Technology Fund was given to Perry’s major donors. These programs have notoriously little accountability when it comes to job-creation metrics, often falling far short of original promises. One $30 million grant went to an energy group that never existed.
In hindsight, it was a small miracle that Perry made it this long without getting stuck in the swamp.
Bleyzer and Cranberg—currently embroiled in Perry’s latest scandal—have deep ties to Texas and Perry. In 2009, then-Governor Perry appointed Bleyzer to the advisory board for the Emerging Technology Fund, his new tax-incentive fund for startup ventures. The following year, Bleyzer cut Perry’s campaign a $30,000 check.
Cranberg—an energy investor, longtime GOP mega-donor, and University of Texas at Austin graduate—was appointed to his alma mater’s board of regents by Perry in 2011.That same year, Perry’s campaign paid $16,000 to Cranberg’s company for use of his private luxury jet. During his controversial tenure on the board of regents, Cranberg was seen as “the ringleader of a bloc of regents” who were influenced by outside interests that aimed to “stage an attack on academic research” and coordinate an ouster of UT’s president, the Texas Tribunereported in 2011. Perry’s former campaign manager Jeff Miller is now a lobbyist for Cranberg’s company and has visited Perry’s Energy Department at least a dozen times, according to the AP.
Perry’s office said he is only doing his job as a booster for American energy interests. “What he did not do is advocate for the business interests of any one individual or company,” Shaylyn Hynes, the Energy Department press secretary, told the AP. Bleyzer and Cranberg also denied any wrongdoing.
In hindsight, it was a small miracle that Perry made it this long without getting stuck in the swamp. He was almost able to slip out the back door while he was still in good standing as a member of the federal civil servantry. Last month, just as the Ukraine heat was turning up, he announced that he was resigning in December.
Helping two political pals secure a massive contract in Ukraine is another example of the pay-to-play approach that served Perry so well in Texas; this time, it’s at a global level. Perry has talked about his aspirations for Ukraine to become “the Texas of Europe.” On the corporate cronyism front, he may just have succeeded.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-08-31/perry-s-friends-in-texas-discover-donations-dovetail-with-state-contracts
Business
Perry’s Texas Friends Find Donations Dovetail With Contracts
Alison Fitzgerald
When Texas billionaire Harold Simmons wanted to build a radioactive waste dump, one data point that would loom large in the permitting process wasn’t required on the application: He is a major donor to Governor Rick Perry.
“Everybody was aware that this was an important item for the people that were seeking the license as well as for the governor’s office,” said Larry Soward, a Perry-appointed, Republican member of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality at the time of Simmons’s permit application.
Simmons, who has donated more than $1.2 million to Perry’s campaigns, was granted the permit over the objections of some TCEQ staffers concerned the site threatened the Ogallala Aquifer, a water source for much of the plains.
At least three commission employees resigned in protest and Soward voted against the permit. Meanwhile, a state employee who advanced the permit became a lobbyist for the company a month after it was approved.
The permit process for the site, run by Simmons’s company Waste Control Specialists LLC, a subsidiary of the publicly traded Valhi Inc., is one example of how Perry’s donors’ close ties to the governor can influence government grants, appointments and permits.
Perry’s Aug. 13 entry into the 2012 Republican presidential primary is casting new light on his record and adversaries are using it to challenge his candidacy.
Political Attacks
“As Americans look past his swagger, they’ll see he represents more of the same lobbyist-run politics as usual that they despise,” said Rodell Mollineau, president of American Bridge 21st Century, a Washington-based Democratic opposition research group. Perry spokesman Mark Miner didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Jim Henson, project director at the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said it isn’t unusual in the Lone Star State for governors to favor business allies.
“Perry’s accumulated a long list of these stories,” said Henson. “It’s always discomforting to look at these things, when somebody is on one spreadsheet for campaign donations and then shows up again on another spreadsheet for government contracts or political appointments,” he said.
Waste Control Specialists spokesman Chuck McDonald said no favoritism was shown and the review was more rigorous to avoid any appearance of impropriety.
“Since the owner of the company is a well-known, longtime, multi-decade contributor to all conservative office holders, that made everybody want to make sure that the process was thorough and complete,” McDonald said.
Perry Record
Perry has a public record of rewarding his political donors with jobs and state contracts. He has appointed about 4,000 people -- including many donors -- to commissions, boards and other posts, according to Texans for Public Justice, an Austin-based, nonpartisan group that tracks state political donations.
Last week, Perry named James Lee, president of JHL Capital Holdings, to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Lee, who served on Perry’s 2011 inaugural committee, has donated more than $190,000 to Perry’s campaigns during the last decade, according to Texans for Public Justice.
The governor also appointed Dan Friedkin, chief executive officer of The Friedkin Group, chairman of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission. Friedkin is the third most generous individual donor to Perry, contributing more than $750,000 during the last decade.
Business Grants
In addition to appointments, the governor controls two business development funds to lure companies to Texas, help them grow, and develop new industries. The funds are administered by the governor’s office and Perry has final approval of all awards.
The Texas Enterprise Fund has distributed more than $400 million in grants to 71 companies since 2004, according to a state auditor report. Perry donors have been recipients, including an April 2006 $500,000 grant to Sanderson Farms, whose Chief Executive Officer Joe Sanderson has given Perry $165,000 in campaign contributions.
Simmons, chairman of Contran Corp., a holding company that owns Waste Control Specialists, is the governor’s second largest individual donor.
In addition to giving more than a million dollars to the governor’s campaigns, Simmons, 80, donated at total of $600,000 to the Republican Governors Association when Perry served in its leadership in 2007, 2008 and 2011, according to data compiled for Bloomberg by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based group that tracks political money. As Perry faced both a primary and general election challenge last year, Simmons gave the RGA $1.1 million, funds the organization used to help re-elect its members.
Swift Boat Group
Simmons has been a Republican political benefactor for years. He donated $4 million to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that questioned Democratic nominee John Kerry’s Vietnam war service in the 2004 presidential election. Last year, he gave $1 million to American Crossroads, a group founded with help from former Bush adviser Karl Rove, according to the center.
Simmons’ expansion into radioactive waste storage began in Texas in 2003, when his company urged state lawmakers to pass legislation allowing a private company to build and run a low-level disposal site that would be owned by the state, according to McDonald. Perry signed it into law on June 20, 2003.
Three Applications
A year later, Waste Control Specialists, which ran an existing hazardous waste site in Andrews County in West Texas, applied for three permits to dispose of radioactive waste.
The plan was to build three facilities on the 1,300-acre site in Andrews County. One facility would take waste from federal government national labs and military bases; another would take waste from nuclear plants, hospitals and other sites in Texas and Vermont, as part of a joint disposal agreement; and a third site would dispose of radioactive “by-products” from anywhere.
The permits had to be approved by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, whose three commissioners were all appointed by Perry.
Environmentalists raised concerns because the site was near the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides water for drinking and agriculture from Texas to Nebraska. The engineers and geologists reviewing the application for the commission said it didn’t address those water contamination concerns. Glenn Lewis, part of the TCEQ team that reviewed the permit, called the initial application “laughably deficient.”
Texas Water Board
According to Lewis, the initial maps from the Texas Water Board -- where five of the six members were appointed by Perry - - showed the proposed disposal site was on top of the aquifer. Waste Control Specialists drilled 560 borings and 450 monitoring wells mapping the water and shared the data with the water board. In 2006, the water board changed the maps, moving the Oglalla’s boundaries away from the Waste Control Specialists’ site.
The new maps didn’t resolve the issue for the commission’s engineers and geologists, who were still unsure the facility could prevent radiation contamination of groundwater.
On Aug. 14, 2007, the review team wrote a memo explaining their concerns that concluded, “Issuance of a license for the proposed facility cannot be recommended.”
Two months later, the executive director of the agency, Glenn Shankle, drafted the first permit and recommended commission approval. Two agreed, and Soward voted no.
Permit Opposition
In an interview, Soward said he hadn’t concluded the facility shouldn’t be located in Andrews County. He was opposed because of outstanding questions about the geology and the process.
“There was an overriding issue out there that the agency had somehow improperly handled the applications,” Soward said. “I thought this whole matter should be subject to a very open and involved contested case hearing to shine the brightest possible light on these issues.”
Three members of the technical review team, including Lewis, resigned or took early retirement to protest the permit approval. Soward, who had served as a deputy to Perry when the governor was agriculture commissioner, didn’t seek another appointment to the commission and said he is no longer close to Perry.
Shankle said he never saw the staff memo that recommended against permit approval, and he said he was wasn’t pressured by the governor to advance the permit. He began talks with Waste Control Specialists about a job during the permitting process. The commission approved the permits six months after he left, he said. A month later, he became a lobbyist for the company.
“We agreed that we would not come to an agreement about whether I was going to work with them until after the commission decided on the permit. There was no influence whatsoever in this matter,” Shankle said in an interview.
==
FEC understaff deadlock, thus drop ball fail eg am 1st superpac ukraine
no lnx twt
Ellen Weintraub is the the FEC Chair. She lets us know that a Trump lackey, GOP FEC Commissioner Caroline Hunt, took the unprecedented step of suppressing the FEC’s weekly Digest because Weintraub most recently included a “Draft Interpretive Rule Concerning Prohibited Activities Involving Foreign Nationals".
==
no lnx
https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/coal-proponent-attacked-federal-regulator-being-run-radical-environmentalists-now-hes
In a familiar “fox guarding the henhouse” move, the Trump administration has dispatched former coal association president and conservative commentator Christian Palich to a federal coal mine regulator he previously claimed was “unaccountable” and filled with “unelected” and “radical environmentalist bureaucrats.”
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Palich, the former president of the Ohio Coal Association, has described himself as a “leading, national voice” on energy issues. He has appeared in the media to praise President Donald Trump for rolling back environmental regulations and has also tweeted anti-environmental propaganda, including that climate change is “junk science” and the Sierra Club wants to “kill jobs & destroy families for a phony cause.” From 2017 to early 2019, he worked as an official at the Environmental Protection Agency.
On July 30, Media Matters first reported that Palich had recently begun working as a senior adviser for the Department of the Interior. E&E News subsequently reported that Palich is specifically working at the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE or OSM), which is under Interior’s jurisdiction.
OSMRE’s stated mission is to clean up “millions of acres of pre- Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) abandoned mine lands and the return of post-SMCRA mined lands to productive and beneficial use.” Palich has participated in weekly meetings with Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and other senior Interior Department officials since June, according to publicly released secretarial calendars.
In addition to his record of climate denialism, Palich has previously fought directly against the agency where he’s now working.
Palich frequently attacked OSMRE during the debate and drafting of the Stream Protection Rule, which the agency worked on for much of the Obama administration. The administration finalized the rule in late 2016, which was intended “to prevent or minimize impacts to surface water and groundwater from coal mining.” Congress and the Trump administration then reversed the regulation, giving coal companies “a freer hand in dumping mining debris in streams.”
In 2015, Palich complained that it’s “unfortunate the unelected bureaucrats at OSM have ignored the concerns of state regulators and Congress in order to promote a continued radical anti-coal agenda."
In a January 2016 interview, he said that all Ohio miners “are at risk because of what the Office of Surface Mining is doing” and claimed that the rule was being pushed “against the will of the people.”
In a February 2016 tweet, he shared a FoxNews.com op-ed by right-wing commentators John Yoo and Dean Reuter and commented: “All great points & being in the #coal industry we see everyday just how unaccountable @EPA, @OSMRE, & @Interior are.”
Palich wrote a July 21, 2016, Columbus Dispatch op-ed claiming that the Stream Protection Rule “is a rule in search of a purpose - one that is more about politics than environmental protection - and from a federal agency that has clearly lost its way.”
He also claimed that OSMRE wrote the stream rule to create more jobs for itself. In the Dispatch op-ed, he wrote that it “will do more to pad a bureaucratic agency’s budget than protect streams.” And after the rule was revoked in February 2017, Palich tweeted that it “would have made 64% of coal reserves uneconomic & destroyed 280,000 jobs in mining sector. Only creating more bureaucrat oversight jobs.”
He added in February 2017 that the rule was “devised by radical environmentalist bureaucrats” and “was never about the environment and was always about carrying out the Obama Administration's nonsensical war on coal."
In 2017, the administration nominated coal consultant and climate denier Steven Gardner to head OSMRE, prompting criticism from environmental groups. Like Palich, Gardner has also been a vocal critic of OSMRE. He withdrew his nomination in September 2018, citing a long “back and forth with the Office of Government Ethics over the conditions for an ethics agreement.”
The Interior Department also recently appointed William Perry Pendley as the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management. As a right-wing commentator, Pendley attacked his current agency and has argued that the federal government should sell its public lands.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15032019/air-pollution-trump-epa-science-advisers-health-risk-fossil-fuel-chemical-tobacco-industry
For two years, the Trump administration has been planting seeds of change in the Environmental Protection Agency—installing allies of regulated industries onto its elite panels of science advisers. That effort now has borne fruit in dramatic fashion.
The EPA's new science advisers, sweeping aside decades of research on the grave health risks of fine particle air pollution, have launched a drive to force the agency to give greater weight to a handful of contrarian studies that dispute the harmful effects of soot.
Particulate matter is the pollution caused by combustion, a mixture of solid and liquid droplets that forms in the burning of fossil fuels or wood. The health risks of particulate matter have been an underpinning of the EPA's cost-benefit analysis of a number of air pollution regulations, including those meant to address climate change, like the Obama administration's Clean Air Act.
The science is well-established—the World Health Organizationestimates that there are 4.2 million premature deaths a year due to fine particle pollution, making it one of the leading environmental health risks globally. But allies of the fossil fuel industry have vigorously disputed the validity of fine particle pollution studies since they first emerged in the 1990s.
Significantly, the health damages from particle and other pollution coming from the combustion of fossil fuels have also been used by the EPA to justify controls on carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Controlling climate change has important co-benefits, the agency has reasoned. The Trump administration and its industry allies oppose this logic.
More Weight for 'Discordant' Claims?
The latest scientific dispute centers around the EPA's draft assessment of the science on particulate matter (PM), a comprehensive review that the agency is required by law to conduct every few years to update the state of the science on several key pollutants. EPA released its draft review last fall.
It affirmed the agency's previous findings that the science points consistently and overwhelmingly to a "causal relationship" between PM pollution and premature deaths. The assessment concludes the greatest risk is due to particles less than 2.5 microns in width, and that PM2.5 is associated with a range of cardiovascular and respiratory effects.
For the first time, the EPA concluded that the evidence was strong enough to show a "likely" causal relationship between long-term PM2.5 exposure and cancer, as well as nervous system effects. The EPA concluded, as it has in the past, that there is evidence of health risks even at extremely low levels of PM exposure.
Now, in a harshly worded draft review, the Trump administration's science advisors are blasting those findings as based on "unverifiable opinions" and lacking in scientific support.
The advisers are members of a seven-member panel called the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee. Although it is clear the members are not unified in their critique—individual members attached separate letters—the document calls for "substantial revisions" to EPA's assessment of PM, including giving more weight to what it called the "discordant" evidence among the 2,800 published studies cited in the EPA's 1,900-page science assessment.
"Substantial discordant and conflicting evidence remains ignored or unresolved," the Trump administration-appointed CASAC wrote, "leading to repeated assertions that the literature shows consistent and coherent positive associations when in fact it shows a mixture of positive and negative results."
When asked for comment on the critique, a spokesperson for the EPA said by email: "We appreciate the work of the CASAC and we will review the report."
Who Are New Committee Members Listening To?
The CASAC, now chaired by Louis Anthony "Tony" Cox, Jr., a Denver-based consultant, offers a few examples of the studies it wants to see the EPA give more weight to. Among them are studies that are authored, in fact, by Cox himself—whose clients have included theAmerican Petroleum Institute, the tobacco industry and the chemical industry.
Other studies mentioned by the CASAC are by S. Stanley Young, a former pharmaceutical industry statistician based in Raleigh, N.C., who is an adviser to the HeartlandInstitute, a conservative think tank that has led a years-long campaign to discredit climate science. Young is now also an EPA science adviser.
The CASAC also pointed to the work of James Enstrom, a Los Angeles epidemiologist who for years has questioned the health risks of particulate matter. A former tobacco industry researcher, Enstrom was a plaintiff in a 2016 lawsuit brought by the fossil fuel industry-funded Energy and Environment Legal Institute that challenged the makeup of the previous CASAC.
Many of the environmental scientists who were appointed to EPA's advisory panels had received funding from EPA at some point in their careers, which the Enstrom suit said was a conflict of interest. In 2017, Trump's first EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, made the same argument when he replaced scientific experts from the existing science advisory boards with new appointees—including a number of industry allies and consultants, like Cox and Young.
'CASAC Itself Lacks Necessary Expertise'
One scientist who was among those removed from the CASAC last year, H. Christopher Frey, an environmental engineer at the University of North Carolina, said the harsh science critique from the Trump administration-appointed committee comes amid "numerous major changes to the [air quality standards] review process that collectively undermine its quality, integrity and credibility."
"Most astonishing is the arrogant and insulting tone of this letter toward EPA scientific staff," Frey, a former chairman of the CASAC, said in an email to InsideClimate News. Frey dismissed as "patently absurd" the document's assertion that the EPA's approach on particulate matter was unscientific. "The statement is ironic given that the CASAC itself lacks necessary expertise," he said.
In fact, the CASAC recommended that it be given access to additional technical expertise in order to complete its review of EPA science on particulate matter. Two members of the CASAC called for the EPA to reconstitute a 20-member special review panel on particulate matter that EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler disbanded in October, just prior to the start of the peer review. That panel included experts in the science of particulate matter and health effects—expertise that is now missing on the CASAC. Although much of the science on the health risks of particulate matter is from large human studies, there are no epidemiologists on the current CASAC.
In one striking passage of its draft peer review, the CASAC said it is unable to reach consensus on the link between particulate matter and mortality—the "causality determination of mortality from PM2.5 exposure." Some members "are of the opinion that, although uncertainties remain, the evidence supporting the causal relationship between PM2.5 exposure and mortality is robust, diverse, and convincing," the document said. But other committee members think EPA should provide a better justification for its determination that there is a causal relationship between PM exposure and premature death.
Daniel Greenbaum, president of the Boston-based Health Effects Institute (HEI), a research institute that has conducted major studies on air pollution, said that he was surprised at that passage.
"Given that there is more than a decade worth of work now looking at the epidemiology, the toxicology, and a number of other things to see whether or not PM can contribute to mortality, there's pretty robust literature that says that," said Greenbaum. HEI has offered its own critiques of some aspects of EPA's assessment—for example, it does not agree with EPA's conclusion on nervous system effects. But HEI does not dispute EPA's fundamental conclusion on mortality risk. "By most standards, people would say that the evidence has strengthened over the last 20 years," Greenbaum said.
But Greenbaum noted that the committee's review document is only a draft. The CASAC has set a conference call for March 28 to discuss the document and the next steps before submitting its final recommendations to Wheeler.
OMG
https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/saudis-and-the-us-team-up-to-kill-european-union-effort-to-create-a-dirty-money-blacklist/
United States and key ally Saudi Arabia saw their lobbying efforts pay off on Friday after the European Commission’s proposed dirty money blacklist—which included the oil-rich kingdom and several American territories—fizzled.
“The Americans fell on us like a tonne of bricks,” an anonymous Brussels official told the *Financial Times*.
The effort “to protect the integrity of the E.U. financial system,” the commission said last month, included blacklisting 23 territories that had “strategic deficiencies in their anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing frameworks.” They included American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico as well as Saudi Arabia.
However, as the Wall Street Journal reported Friday, “European governments, under pressure from Washington and Riyadh, have refused to endorse” the list.
“The rejection of the governments is a farce at the expense of security,” declared Sven Giegold, Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Germany, in a statement quoted by *Bloomberg*. “France and the U.K. want to remove Saudi Arabia and other countries from the list. Spain is protecting Panama. The United States is exerting massive pressure because four U.S. jurisdictions,” he said.
“Governments must ask themselves whether they are on the side of autocrats or their citizens!” he added in a tweet.
As Politico reported, the list, which would need the backing of the European Parliament and Council of the E.U. to go into effect, “is politically sensitive because it has teeth. E.U. banks that handle payments connected to the blacklisted countries and territories would have to conduct ‘enhanced due diligence’ on any cash that moves to and from the E.U. and the blacklisted jurisdictions.”
Politico also noted the “intense backlash and behind-the-scenes lobbying from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.”
The proposal drew ire from the U.S. Treasury Department, which denounced the commission’s methodology, and its head, Secretary Steven Mnuchin, wrote to the commission to denounce the effort, as FT reported.
U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, even acknowledged that “we had to spend our energy killing this bad idea.”Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, for his part, also wrote to E.U. leaders about the “surprising and unexpected” list, and warned of its damage to “trade and investment flows between the kingdom and the European Union.”
==
https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/10/02/climate-science-deniers-trump-admin-happer-wehrum-rollins-wynn-simmons
readfearn
here are five folks spearheading the United States government who think that when it comes to climate change, they know better than all of the world’s main scientific institutions.
There’s Donald Trump himself, of course, who famously tweeted that climate change was a hoax invented by the Chinese, and said that a cold snap in the weather overturns a century or more of scientific inquiry.
Then there’s energy secretary Rick Perry, whose fuzzy logic on the science sees him unconvinced that CO2 is the key driver of climate change.
Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior, is similarly confused and non-committal about the impacts of burning fossil fuels, as is former coal-lobbyist-turned-EPA head Andrew Wheeler. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson said in 2015 that climate change was “irrelevant,” that temperatures were driven by natural cycles and, since then, hasavoided questions about the role of human activity in climate change.
OK, so there are more than five (with Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and Jeff Sessions among those who have denied the science in the past), but these five are well positioned to influence the energy and climate policies of the nation.
Wheeler, for example, is driving through cuts to national efficiency standards for motor vehicles and is relaxing pollution rules on coal power plants. Zinke and Perry are aggresively promoting fossil fuel growth with Trump as the climate-wrecker-in-chief. Carson heads an agency that has a role in promoting (or not) climate change adaptation and resilience for homes and properties, particularly after natural disasters.
Remembering not only do these five reject the advice of the world’s major science academies, but also the expertise of the scientists working in their own government agencies.
But while these five might be relative household names with their views well reported, DeSmog presents five lesser-known climate science deniers inside the administration who are also in positions to gut federal action on climate and promote fossil fuel-friendly policies, backed by their own convictions that climate change just isn't much of a problem.
Will Happer
Will Happer, emeritus professor from Princeton University, was once in the running as Trump’s science advisor but has now been appointed to the National Security Council, specializing in emerging technologies.
After news of Happer’s appointment became public, Science, republishing E&E News, characterized the 79-year-old physicist as a “vocal critic of mainstream climate science.”
But Happer is more than a mere critic — he has acted as an enabler and activist against action on climate change for well over a decade.
For years, Happer was chairman at the George Marshall Institute and then, when that was shuttered, he founded the CO2Coalition with former Exxon director, the late Roger Cohen. Both groups took fringe positions on the science of climate change, with Happer claiming that adding more fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere will be good for humans.
In 2015, Happer was caught in a sting by Greenpeace when he offered to write a report on the “benefits” of CO2 for a fake oil client and then hide the funding, which would be directed to the CO2 Coalition. Since then, that group has received funding from the foundation of Trump backer and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer.
In December 2016, Happer attended a conference organized by conspiracy theorist G. Edward Griffin. Now he’s on the National Security Council.
Late in 2017, the Trump administration nixed climate change from a list of global threats to the U.S. in the National Security Strategy.
It's safe to say Happer won't be leading any pushes to add it back in.
Bill Wehrum
Bill Wehrum is the U.S. government’s most senior official on air pollution, as the assistant administrator in the Office of Air and Radiation at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Wehrum is a long-serving lawyer for the coal industry, as well as petrochemical and petroleum industry groups (such as Koch Industries).
Wehrum’s office is also tasked with looking at regulations to tackle power plant pollution and climate change and recently proposed the Affordable Clean Energy rule as a replacement for Obama's Clean Power Plan.
But as the New York Times reported, Wehrum has been delivering big time for his former fossil fuel industry clients by proposing the new rule, which EPA's own analysis shows would increase premature deaths from pollution.
One former EPA director, Bruce Buckheit, told the New York Times: “They basically found the most aggressive and knowledgeable fox and said, ‘Here are the keys to the hen-house.'”
Over a decade earlier, Wehrum was in the same position at EPA as he is now and back then argued against granting California a Clean Air Act waiver to set more stringent pollution standards for vehicles.
Back in power at the EPA, he ran the agency's midterm review of auto emissions standards, which this year recommended rolling back the stricter standards proposed by the Obama administration.
Under question during his confirmation hearings, Wehrum claimed that CO2 emissions as a main driver of climate change, which the government’s own scientists confirm, was to him an “open question." [vid]
Brooke Rollins
Rollins was an aide to Texas Governor Rick Perry before spending 15 years leading the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), which she left in early 2018 to become assistant to the president in the Office of American Innovation (OIA), based in the White House (some wonder what the OIA actually does).
During her time at TPPF, Rollins promoted the work of the organization’s Kathleen Hartnett White, a climate science denier and fossil fuel evangelist whose controversial nomination to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality was ultimately withdrawn.
In August 2018, Rollins appeared at the Heartland Institute’s energy conference alongside that think tank’s new president Tim Huelskamp.
At the conference, Rollins nodded as Huelskamp suggested American schoolchildren’s heads were being “filled with mush” about the dangers of CO2.
When asked if the inner-workings of the White House were as chaotic as some media had claimed, Rollins replied: “Is there chaos? Yes. But I would say it’s like the chaos of my home — having four children in five years.”
Home life was like a “goat rodeo,” she said, and working in the White House wasn’t “much different.”
While at TPPF, Rollins wrote that Trump should exit the Paris climate agreement.
What she's actually doing in her role with OIA remains unclear, but the fact that she appeared at the America First Energy Conference, hosted by a climate science denying think tank, indicates she isn't likely straying from her previous positions on climate and energy.
Todd Wynn
Todd Wynn is director of the Interior Department’s Office of Intergovernmental and External Affairs after spending years in pro-fossil fuel industry think tanks, many with Koch network connections.
On Wynn’s CV is his time working at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the corporate bill mill where he led that group’s energy task force.
In that position, he fought against state renewable energy mandates and federal regulation of fracking fluids.
Lisa Graves, co-director of DocumentedInvestigations.org, has described Wynn as an “aggressive fossil fuel insider.”
In his new position with the Department of the Interior, Wynn is responsible for “strengthen[ing] relationships between state and local partners and external stakeholders” with Secretary Zinke's office, which, by the looks of it, has already been quite cozy with fossil fuel stakeholders.
An investigation by HuffPost alleged Wynn may have violated an ethics pledge by continuing to liaise with former associates while in his new job.
“Wynn has been a rising star in the influential network of fossil fuel-funded think tanks that push policies and produce pseudoscientific research to muddle the debate on climate change,” the HuffPost report detailed.
Wynn has himself questioned the role that fossil fuel emissions have on warming the planet, suggesting in 2010 that it was “absolutely ridiculous” to claim CO2 was driving climate change.
Daniel Simmons
Who better to lead the Trump administration's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy than a man who once asked for that same office to be closed while barracking for fossil fuels? Daniel Simmons is just that guy.
As reported by DeSmog and others, Simmons spent years working for so-called “free market think tanks,” including the Institute for Energy Research, before joining the Trump transition team and then securing the nomination for the role, located in the Department of Energy.
Simmons has a history of working at organizations that attack programs aimed at encouraging the development of clean energy industries like solar and wind power. But in 2015, the American Energy Alliance (AEA), where he was working, attacked the office Simmons now heads, writing disapprovingly that its role was to “promote and subsidize 'clean energy' as determined by government bureaucrats.”
The office, AEA wrote, “aims to control multiple sectors of the economy, from energy production and transmission to manufacturing and construction.” Cutting the office entirely could “save” the administration more than $9 billion. Simmons himself has claimed that the costs of the Paris climate agreement target of keeping global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius would be greater than any benefits.
Perfect man for the job? In the Trump administration, the answer is yes.
==
https://theconversation.com/epa-staff-say-the-trump-administration-is-changing-their-mission-from-protecting-human-health-and-the-environment-to-protecting-industry-96256
reg capture
Environmental Protection Agency made news recently for excluding reporters from a “summit” meeting on chemical contamination in drinking water. Episodes like this are symptoms of a larger problem: an ongoing, broad-scale takeover of the agency by industries it regulates.
We are social scientists with interests in environmental health, environmental justice and inequality and democracy. We recently published a study, conducted under the auspices of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative and based on interviews with 45 current and retired EPA employees, which concludes that EPA AdministratorScott Pruitt and the Trump administration have steered the agency to the verge of what scholars call “regulatory capture.”
By this we mean that they are aggressively reorganizing the EPA to promote interests of regulated industries, at the expense of its official mission to “protect human health and the environment.”
...
==
cell phone FCC
hy, after such acrimony, Carlo was allowed to make one last appearance before the CTIA board is a mystery. Whatever the reason, Carlo flew to New Orleans in February 2000 for the wireless industry’s annual conference, where he submitted the WTR’s final report to the CTIA board. According to Carlo, Wheeler made sure that none of the hundreds of journalists covering the event could get anywhere near him.
When Carlo arrived, he was met by two seriously muscled men in plain clothes; the larger of the two let drop that he had recently left the Secret Service. The security men steered Carlo into a holding room, where they insisted he remain until his presentation. When summoned, Carlo found roughly 70 of the industry’s top executives waiting for him in silence. Carlo had spoken a mere 10 minutes when Wheeler abruptly stood, extended a hand, and said, “Thank you, George.” The two muscle men then ushered the scientist to a curbside taxi and waited until it pulled away.
In the years to come, the WTR’s cautionary findings would be replicated by numerous other scientists in the United States and around the world, leading the World Health Organization in 2011 to classify cell-phone radiation as a “possible” human carcinogen and the governments of Great Britain, France, and Israel to issue strong warnings on cell-phone use by children. But as the taxi carried Carlo to Louis Armstrong International Airport, the scientist wondered whether his relationship with the industry might have turned out differently if cell phones had been safety-tested before being allowed onto the consumer market, before profit took precedence over science. But it was too late: Wheeler and his fellow executives had made it clear, Carlo told The Nation, that “they would do what they had to do to protect their industry, but they were not of a mind to protect consumers or public health.”
This article does not argue that cell phones and other wireless technologies are necessarily dangerous; that is a matter for scientists to decide. Rather, the focus here is on the global industry behind cell phones—and the industry’s long campaign to make people believe that cell phones are safe.
As happened earlier with Big Tobacco and Big Oil, the wireless industry’s own scientists privately warned about the risks.
That campaign has plainly been a success: 95 out of every 100 adult Americans now own a cell phone; globally, three out of four adults have cell-phone access, with sales increasing every year. The wireless industry is now one of the fastest-growing on Earth and one of the biggest, boasting annual sales of $440 billion in 2016.
Carlo’s story underscores the need for caution, however, particularly since it evokes eerie parallels with two of the most notorious cases of corporate deception on record: the campaigns by the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries to obscure the dangers of smoking and climate change, respectively. Just as tobacco executives were privately told by their own scientists (in the 1960s) that smoking was deadly, and fossil-fuel executives were privately told by their own scientists (in the 1980s) that burning oil, gas, and coal would cause a “catastrophic” temperature rise, so Carlo’s testimony reveals that wireless executives were privately told by their own scientists (in the 1990s) that cell phones could cause cancer and genetic damage.
Carlo’s October 7, 1999, letters to wireless-industry CEOs are the smoking-gun equivalent of the November 12, 1982, memo that M.B. Glaser, Exxon’s manager of environmental-affairs programs, sent to company executives explaining that burning oil, gas, and coal could raise global temperatures by a destabilizing 3 degrees Celsius by 2100. For the tobacco industry, Carlo’s letters are akin to the 1969 proposal that a Brown & Williamson executive wrote for countering anti-tobacco advocates. “Doubt is our product,” the memo declared. “It is also the means of establishing a controversy…at the public level.”
Like their tobacco and fossil-fuel brethren, wireless executives have chosen not to publicize what their own scientists have said about the risks of their products. On the contrary, the industry—in America, Europe, and Asia—has spent untold millions of dollars in the past 25 years proclaiming that science is on its side, that the critics are quacks, and that consumers have nothing to fear. This, even as the industry has worked behind the scenes—again like its Big Tobacco counterpart—to deliberately addict its customers. Just as cigarette companies added nicotine to hook smokers, so have wireless companies designed cell phones to deliver a jolt of dopamine with each swipe of the screen.
This Nation investigation reveals that the wireless industry not only made the same moral choices that the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries did; it also borrowed from the same public-relations playbook those industries pioneered. The playbook’s key insight is that an industry doesn’t have to win the scientific argument about safety; it only has to keep the argument going. That amounts to a win for the industry, because the apparent lack of certainty helps to reassure customers, even as it fends off government regulations and lawsuits that might pinch profits.
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Central to keeping the scientific argument going is making it appear that not all scientists agree. Again like the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries, the wireless industry has “war gamed” science, as a Motorola internal memo in 1994 phrased it. War-gaming science involves playing offense as well as defense: funding studies friendly to the industry while attacking studies that raise questions; placing industry-friendly experts on advisory bodies like the World Health Organization; and seeking to discredit scientists whose views depart from the industry’s.
Funding friendly research has perhaps been the most important component of this strategy, because it conveys the impression that the scientific community truly is divided. Thus, when studies have linked wireless radiation to cancer or genetic damage—as Carlo’s WTR did in 1999; as the WHO’s Interphone study did in 2010; and as the US National Toxicology Program did in 2016—industry spokespeople can point out, accurately, that other studies disagree. “[T]he overall balance of the evidence” gives no cause for alarm, asserted Jack Rowley, research and sustainability director for the Groupe Special Mobile Association (GSMA), Europe’s wireless trade association, speaking to reporters about the WHO’s findings.
A closer look reveals the industry’s sleight of hand. When Henry Lai, the professor whom Carlo tried to get fired, analyzed 326 safety-related studies completed between 1990 and 2005, he learned that 56 percent found a biological effect from cell-phone radiation and 44 percent did not; the scientific community apparently was split. But when Lai recategorized the studies according to their funding sources, a different picture emerged: 67 percent of the independently funded studies found a biological effect, while a mere 28 percent of the industry-funded studies did. Lai’s findings were replicated by a 2007 analysis in Environmental Health Perspectives that concluded industry-funded studies were two and a half times less likely than independent studies to find a health effect.
One key player has not been swayed by all this wireless-friendly research: the insurance industry. The Nation has not been able to find a single insurance company willing to sell a product-liability policy that covered cell-phone radiation. “Why would we want to do that?” one executive chuckled before pointing to more than two dozen lawsuits outstanding against wireless companies, demanding a total of $1.9 billion in damages. Some judges have affirmed such lawsuits, including a judge in Italy who refused to allow industry-funded research as evidence.
Even so, the industry’s neutralizing of the safety issue has opened the door to the biggest, most hazardous prize of all: the proposed revolutionary transformation of society dubbed the “Internet of Things.” Lauded as a gigantic engine of economic growth, the Internet of Things will not only connect people through their smartphones and computers but will connect those devices to a customer’s vehicles and home appliances, even their baby’s diapers—all at speeds faster than can currently be achieved.
Billions of cell-phone users have been subjected to a public-health experiment without informed consent.
There is a catch, though: The Internet of Things will require augmenting today’s 4G technology with 5G, thus “massively increasing” the general population’s exposure to radiation, according to a petition signed by 236 scientists worldwide who have published more than 2,000 peer-reviewed studies and represent “a significant portion of the credentialed scientists in the radiation research field,” according to Joel Moskowitz, the director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped circulate the petition. Nevertheless, like cell phones, 5G technology is on the verge of being introduced without pre-market safety testing.
Lack of definitive proof that a technology is harmful does not mean the technology is safe, yet the wireless industry has succeeded in selling this logical fallacy to the world. In truth, the safety of wireless technology has been an unsettled question since the industry’s earliest days. The upshot is that, over the past 30 years, billions of people around the world have been subjected to a massive public-health experiment: Use a cell phone today, find out later if it causes cancer or genetic damage. Meanwhile, the wireless industry has obstructed a full and fair understanding of the current science, aided by government agencies that have prioritized commercial interests over human health and news organizations that have failed to inform the public about what the scientific community really thinks. In other words, this public-health experiment has been conducted without the informed consent of its subjects, even as the industry keeps its thumb on the scale.
“The absence of absolute proof does not mean the absence of risk,” Annie Sasco, the former director of epidemiology for cancer prevention at France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research, told the attendees of the 2012 Childhood Cancer conference. “The younger one starts using cell phones, the higher the risk,” Sasco continued, urging a public-education effort to inform parents, politicians, and the press about children’s exceptional susceptibility.
For adults and children alike, the process by which wireless radiation may cause cancer remains uncertain, but it is thought to be indirect. Wireless radiation has been shown to damage the blood-brain barrier, a vital defense mechanism that shields the brain from carcinogenic chemicals elsewhere in the body (resulting, for example, from secondhand cigarette smoke). Wireless radiation has also been shown to interfere with DNA replication, a proven progenitor of cancer. In each of these cases, the risks are higher for children: Their skulls, being smaller, absorb more radiation than adults’ skulls do, while children’s longer life span increases their cumulative exposure.
The wireless industry has sought to downplay concerns about cell phones’ safety, and the Federal Communications Commission has followed its example. In 1996, the FCC established cell-phone safety levels based on “specific absorption rate,” or SAR. Phones were required to have a SAR of 1.6 watts or less per kilogram of body weight. In 2013, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised the FCC that its guidelines “do not account for the unique vulnerability and use patterns specific to pregnant women and children.” Nevertheless, the FCC has declined to update its standards.
The FCC has granted the industry’s wishes so often that it qualifies as a “captured agency,” argued journalist Norm Alster in a report that Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics published in 2015. The FCC allows cell-phone manufacturers to self-report SAR levels, and does not independently test industry claims or require manufacturers to display the SAR level on a phone’s packaging. “Industry controls the FCC through a soup-to-nuts stranglehold that extends from its well-placed campaign spending in Congress through its control of the FCC’s congressional oversight committees to its persistent agency lobbying,” Alster wrote. He also quoted the CTIA website praising the FCC for “its light regulatory touch.”
The revolving-door syndrome that characterizes so many industries and federal agencies reinforces the close relationship between the wireless industry and the FCC. Just as Tom Wheeler went from running the CTIA (1992– 2004) to chairing the FCC (2013–2017), Meredith Atwell Baker went from FCC commissioner (2009–2011) to the presidency of the CTIA (2014 through today). To ensure its access on Capitol Hill, the wireless industry made $26 million in campaign contributions in 2016, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and spent $87 million on lobbying in 2017.
Neutralizing the safety issue has been an ongoing imperative because the research keeps coming, much of it from outside the United States. But the industry’s European and Asian branches have, like their US counterpart, zealously war-gamed the science, spun the news coverage, and thereby warped the public perception of their products’ safety.
The WHO began to study the health effects of electric- and magnetic-field radiation (EMF) in 1996 under the direction of Michael Repacholi, an Australian biophysicist. Although Repacholi claimed on disclosure forms that he was “independent” of corporate influence, in fact Motorola had funded his research: While Repacholi was director of the WHO’s EMF program, Motorola paid $50,000 a year to his former employer, the Royal Adelaide Hospital, which then transferred the money to the WHO program. When journalists exposed the payments, Repacholi denied that there was anything untoward about them because Motorola had not paid him personally. Eventually, Motorola’s payments were bundled with other industry contributions and funneled through the Mobile and Wireless Forum, a trade association that gave the WHO’s program $150,000 annually. In 1999, Repacholi helped engineer a WHO statement that “EMF exposures below the limits recommended in international guidelines do not appear to have any known consequence on health.”
Two wireless trade associations contributed $4.7 million to the Interphone study launched by the WHO’s International Agency for Cancer Research in 2000. That $4.7 million represented 20 percent of the $24 million budget for the Interphone study, which convened 21 scientists from 13 countries to explore possible links between cell phones and two common types of brain tumor: glioma and meningioma. The money was channeled through a “firewall” mechanism intended to prevent corporate influence on the IACR’s findings, but whether such firewalls work is debatable. “Industry sponsors know [which scientists] receive funding; sponsored scientists know who provides funding,” Dariusz Leszczynski, an adjunct professor of biochemistry at the University of Helsinki, has explained.
The FCC grants the wireless industry’s wishes so often that it qualifies as a “captured agency.”
...
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The Trump administration has recruited officials to fill its top energy and environmental staff positions from fossil fuel lobbying groups, Koch brothers-funded think tanks, and climate-denying lawmakers’ offices, according to a new database from the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Launched Monday, the project tracks political appointments to energy and environment positions and their past affiliations. Of the more than 100 political staff working on energy and environmental issues, close to one-third have ties to the fossil fuel industry and petrochemical billionaires Charles and David Koch, according to the tracker.
Their industry ties often put them at odds with the stated missions of their agencies, especially for appointees working to address air and water pollution and protect federal lands, raising questions about the policy goals of their bosses?—?Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.
Influx of anti-regulation political appointees turns EPA’s mission on its head
Trump’s EPA viewed as most anti-environment in a generation.
“These staffers are tasked with making decisions about the air we breathe and water we drink, yet many of them have worked for industries and organizations that have been fighting for years to undo environmental protections and prolong the life of dirty energy,” Erin Auel, research associate for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said in a statement. ThinkProgress is an editorially independent news site housed within the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
The website, DirtyDeputies.org, will maintain a running list of political appointees for energy and environment and their previous employers. It will allow users to sort the political appointees by their special interest affiliations. The public is invited to submit tips on any of the appointees or new staff who have been hired.
“It’s not surprising that the Trump administration is the next stop on the career paths of old hands in the big oil, Koch, and climate denial networks,” Kevin Connor, director of the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit group that researches business and government corruption, said in an email to ThinkProgress. “This kind of capture of the federal regulatory apparatus is something they’ve been preparing for, and something that will have real consequences for public health and the environment, as we’ve seen play out on the state level.”
“This kind of capture of the federal regulatory apparatus… will have real consequences.”
Given the backgrounds of the officials filling these high-level positions, “we should be prepared for them to be particularly extreme in their abdication of responsibility to the public, in favor of their masters in polluting industries,” Connor warned.
David Bernhardt, one of political appointees listed in the Dirty Deputies tracker, is awaiting confirmation by the full Senate to become the second-highest ranking official at the Department of the Interior. Bernhardt, who runs the natural resources department at lobbying and law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, has spent the last several years working on behalf of oil and gas companies and large agribusiness to weaken environmental protections.
“A vote for Bernhardt is a vote for the Koch brothers and big industry and a vote against public lands, people and health,” Randi Spivak, public lands program director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement.
Doug Matheney now works as a top assistant to Perry after previously serving as the state coordinator for the Count on Coal initiative. He also worked as a coordinator for the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity.
The database also lists Mandy Gunasekara, who joined Pruitt’s staff at the EPA in March as a top adviser. Gunasekara worked as the National Association of Chemical Distributors’ senior director of legislative affairs where she lobbied for reforming the Toxic Substances Control Act. She also previously worked as a staffer for Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), a position in which she handed a snowball to Inhofe on the Senate floor. The Republican senator argued the existence of the snowball in winter disproved global warming.
Matt Kasper, research director at the Energy & Policy Institute, emphasized that the Trump administration’s appointed staffers now represent the mainstream of Republican ideology. “The Republican Party has adopted positions that deny the science behind climate change, wants to gut the EPA in order to prevent it from carrying out its mission, and prevent further air and water safeguards,” Kasper told ThinkProgress.
According to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the tracker will help increase transparency of the political appointees who are “pulling the strings on Trump’s dirty energy agenda.”
DOE
The future Donald Trump administration's energy agenda is revealed in a memo prepared by Trump's energy transition head Thomas Pyle, titled "What to Expect from the Trump Administration." The document, obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), was sent by Pyle on November 15th, just days before the Trump campaign announced Pyle's appointment as head of his Department of Energy transition team.
Pyle is the President of both the American Energy Allianceand the Institute for Energy Research. Both organizations have received cash from numerous fossil fuel funders including ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy and Koch Industries. From 2001 to 2005, Pyle was Director of Federal Affairs for Koch Industries.
The memo outlines fourteen policies to be expected from President-elect Trump, which collectively amounts to a fossil fuel industry wish list and which would be devastating for attempts to slow climate change.
The agenda includes withdrawing from the 2015 Paris Climate agreement, eliminating the Clean Power Plan, increasing the leasing of federal lands for exploitation of coal, oil and gas, expediting the approval of pipeline projects including the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipeline and rolling back federal fuel economy standards.
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Influence peddling in America is a $9 billion a year industry. It’s as big as Major League Baseball or NASA’s Mars spacecraft program, changing from direct meetings with lawmakers to a vertically integrated set of businesses that work every stage of government decision making – including the shaping of public opinion.
Many have charted the size, scope, and growth of the influence peddling industry. There’s the definitive, 25-part Washington Post series on the emergence of modern mega-lobbying firms. Ross and Amter’s definitive history of the chemical lobby *The Polluters*. *Merchants of Doubt*,by Oreskes and Conway, that laid bare the growth of the lobbyist-funded think tank industry. There are also definitive books by then-reporter Jeff Birnbaum’s, including *The Money Men: The Real Story of Fund-raising’s Influence on Political Power in America* – though Birnbaum later joined the influence business himself.
The point is that as a growth industry, influence peddling needs to find new ways to grow to accommodate the ever-expanding ranks for former staff and public officials who want to make big money after their public “service.”
So it was only a matter of time before previously sleepy public offices, such state assembly offices, state public utility commissions, and writers of obscure cost-benefit analyses became part of the influence peddling playbook. That’s particularly true now that the big shifts in the energy industry are under way. Rooftop solar on people’s homes has been declared a “mortal threat” by the lobbying arm of the utility industry, which has launched a very concerted effort to penalize their customers for buying less of their product.
Regulatory Capture in State Agencies
In many states, commissioners have been lured to ally themselves with the industries they are charged with regulating. There is a term for this, created by Nobel Prize winner Economist George J. Stigler over 50 years ago: “Regulatory capture.”
The financial crisis of 2007-2009 can be explained partly as a problem of regulatory capture. Regulators were so enamored by Wall Street’s risk prevention mechanisms and their way of life that they failed to recognize the enormous risks that were being taken right under their noses until it was too late.
In Virginia, the State Corporation Commission (SCC) is charged with regulating Dominion Resources, a monopoly utility and the Commonwealth’s most powerful corporation. Yet last October, two senior staff members of the SCC wrote a comment letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency about the federal Clean Power Plan (CPP). The CPP is intended to reduce carbon pollution. Although it gives states wide latitude in cutting the pollution and independent studies show it will save money and create clean energy jobs, the staffers attacked the CPP as “arbitrary, capricious, unsupported, and unlawful.” They are thought to have taken Dominion’s 2013 Resource Plan as the basis for their frontal assault.
Death Spiral
Utilities nationwide have captured Public Utility Commissions, in whole or in part, just like Dominion has enveloped its own in Virginia. This effort is seems to be encouraged by theEdison Electric Institute (EEI), the utility industry trade group based in Washington, DC.
In January, 2013, EEI released a man-the-battle-stations white paper that said solar panels on residential or commercial roofs that are not utility-owned or utility-purchased would lead to a death spiral for the utility industry. Since then, the effort to smother the solar baby in its cradle has been stepped up.
New Captured Regulators Initiative
With renewable portfolio standards, net metering and the CPP, the next two years will decide how many clean energy jobs and energy efficiency savings Americans will see. The stakes are high.
The Checks and Balances Project has noticed that in a number of states, utility commissioners are acting almost as consultants to the utilities they are charged with overseeing. The range of favoritism is wide – from casual remarks to open assistance to help a regulated utility shop for a favorable state judge. There seems to be an emerging trend, which is why we are launching a systemic look to see what’s going on in state public utility and state corporation commissions. Where the influence is going, so should the oversight accountability.
We’re launching our Captured Regulators initiative by asking questions about these officials:
- Arizona Commissioner**Bob Stump**
- California Commissioner**Mike Florio**
- Wisconsin Commissioner**Ellen Nowak**
- Florida Commissioner**Art Graham**
Are there public utility commissioners, public service commissioners or state corporation commissioners in your state that you think are captured by the utility industry? Or commissioners you have questions about like Audrey Zibelman of New York or Virginia’s Mark C. Christie?
If so, tell us more. Send us an email to tips@checksandbalancesproject.org.
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http://www.sciencecorruption.com/ATN167/00244.html
The scandals of a do-nothing Reagan EPA culminated in the weeks 9-to-25 March 1983 with the resignation of administrator Anne Gorsuch-Burford, John A Todhunter (over dioxins), John Hernandez (over lead), Rita Lavelle (Superfund cleanup), Robert M Perry (General Counsel), and 15 other high-ranking EPA officials; "Taking the axe for the Reagan Administration".
1983 Mar 25: Following the March 25 1983 resignation of the EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch Burford the EPA became paralysed by on-going scandals.
The first term of the Reagan Presidency was consumed by public rage at the lack of any reasonable regulatory activity by the Federal Government agencies, mostly because they were stimied by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which was part of the White House's Office of Managment & Budget (OMB).
Over this five-to-six year period, a group of about 20 top EPA officials were forced to progressively resign... mostly because they sought to block measures to clean up toxic waste dumps under the Superfund laws, but some through obvious corporate bribery.
[The OIRA was run by Jim Tozzi who excelled in blocking any meaningful regulatory activity by the main agencies. Tozzi later helped establish the lobby group MBS /Federal Focus Inc, and in the 1990s he joined forces with Thorne Auchter andGeorge Carlo in a number of ventures for Philip Morris and the cellphone industry. Tozzi's staff at the OIRA also left the White House at the end of the Reagan Presidency to set up the EOP Group, which lobbied for the tobacco and chemical industries withSteve Milloy and Bonner Cohen (both associates of Carlo also).]
1983 April 19: While the 1980 CERCLA Act gave Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) primary responsibility for identifying, investigating, and cleaning up hazardous waste sites, it also authorized the establishment of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Register (ATSDR) to assess the presence and nature of health hazards to communities living near Superfund sites, to help prevent or reduce harmful exposures, and to expand the knowledge base about the health effects that result from exposure to hazardous substances.
After two years of Reagan Administration stalling, the ATSDR was created as an agency under the Department of Health and Human Services on April 19, 1983
| Reagan Administration regulatory resignations |
|---|
Four young budget examiners working for Tozzi in the OMB.OIRA's environmental branch also chose to leave shortly after (during the Bush Administration). **The creation of the EOP Group lobbyfirm:** [In White House-speak **EOP = Executive Office of the President**] **Michael O'Bannon** and **Ernest Robson** initially joined Tozzi's lobby shop (MBS), but they left in 1992. Later they joined with **Joseph Hezir, David Gibbons** and Assistant Secretary of Energy, **Jan Mares,** to open the **EOP Group** — the only lobby firm besides Tozzi's to specialize in lobbying the OMB.
|
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Regulatory_lapdogs
Regulatory lapdogs are supposed to be "watchdogs" but have fallen over to becoming tools of the industries which they are supposed to oversee. Cases are evident within the Bush regime of
- FCC [1]
- "On June 27, 2005, in a 6 to 3 decision (National Cable & Telecommunications Association vs. Brand X Internet Services) the United States Supreme Court ruled that giant cable companies like Comcast and Verizon are not required to share their cables with other Internet service providers (ISPs). The Court opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, was fashioned to serve corporate interests. Instead of taking up the question of whether corporate monopolies would destroy the open-access architecture of the Internet, it used sophistry and legally- suspect arguments to obscure its constitutional duty to protect media diversity, free speech, and the public interest." [2]
- United States Supreme Court
- "By deferring to the FCC instead of exercising its own judicial discretion in determining what really was reasonable, the Court mooted the point of having an independent, ultimate court of appeals in the first place. This is to provide checks and balances on the activities of the other two branches of government, and to settle controversial, politically significant cases with far-reaching social consequences. Instead, it abandoned its constitutional charge to protect the First Amendment right of all Americans to freedom of speech in cyberspace from encroachment by big business acting in tandem with federal government." [3]
- House Ethics Committee [4] [5]
- Reform Groups Call for Overhaul of House "Effectively Dead" Oversight Process
- allegations of threats & bribery on the House floor during the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill Vote Scandal, 2003
- Westar Energy Bribery Scandal
- did U.S. Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.), who had a key role in writing the Medicare prescription drug law, break House ethics rules when negotiating a lucrative job with the drug industry's top lobbying group.? [6]
- Texans for a Republican Majority [7]
- 17 March UPI [8] notes:
- illegal use of campaign funds,
- misuse of a federal agency for political purposes,
- conflicts of interest,
- and strong-arm tactics against lobbyists and campaign contributors.
- J. Steven Griles, Deputy Secretary of the Interior
"With key positions in the hands of industry veterans, the administration has been able to pursue one of its most effective stealth tactics -- steering clear of legislative battles and working instead within the difficult-to-understand, yawn-producing realm of agency regulations. It's a strategy that has served Bush well, especially in his push to give the energy industry -- which donated $ 2.8 mm to the 2000 Bush campaign -- access to some of the nation's last wild lands." [9]
"By using stealth tactics to pursue a corporate agenda, the Bush administration is undermining the very landscape of democracy. The White House has also been darkly brilliant at using the courts to do its dirty work -- through methods such as "sweetheart suits," the practice of encouraging states and private groups to file lawsuits against the federal government, and then agreeing to negotiated settlements that bypass environmental laws without any interference from Congress or the public. [10]