reg capture bak
<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">formaT fail bak 720</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">promote to primary on trump swamp things, epa pruitt</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">sci corrupt:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> note rev door omb, dod, nasa</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see epa 3 swamp things, rev dr</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">koch added on neuter cfpb</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">rev door a proxy? related to sci supp 3</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">key to regulatory capture?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">trump mofo, reg capture:</font></p><p><a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/08/12/cfpb-coronavirus-predatory-payday-loans"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://theintercept.com/2020/08/12/cfpb-coronavirus-predatory-payday-loans</font></a></p><div data-reactid="217" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; box-shadow: white 0px 1px 0px, rgb(17, 17, 17) 0px 4px 0px; text-transform: uppercase;">ON JULY 30,</span> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Chair Maxine Waters opened the House Committee on Financial Services <a href="https://financialservices.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=406821" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">hearing</a> 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.”</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Kathy Kraninger was being called to <a href="https://twitter.com/RealBankReform/status/1289186647242833920" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">account</a> for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s failure to protect consumers during the coronavirus pandemic.</span> In separate <a href="https://financialservices.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=406783" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">House</a> and <a href="https://www.banking.senate.gov/hearings/07/10/2020/the-consumer-financial-protection-bureaus-semi-annual-report-to-congress" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Senate</a> hearings, <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">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.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" em="em"><b>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</b>. 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</span><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" em="em"> </span><a href="https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201403_cfpb_report_payday-lending.pdf" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" em="em" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box" outline="outline" none="none" text-decoration-line="text-decoration-line">five months</a><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" em="em"> </span><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" em="em">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</span><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" em="em"> </span><a href="https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/201605_cfpb_single-payment-vehicle-title-lending.pdf" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" em="em" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box" outline="outline" none="none" text-decoration-line="text-decoration-line">re-borrowed</a><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" em="em">, and 20 percent of borrowers have their vehicles repossessed. This rule makes it easier for lenders to trap borrowers in cycles of debt.</span></font></p></div><div data-reactid="228" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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 <a href="https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/Supplemental_Report_060116.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">average loan amount</a> borrowed from a storefront payday lender is about $1,000. Contradicting the assumption that these lenders profit primarily from <a href="https://www.pewtrusts.org/-/media/assets/2015/10/emergency-savings-report-1_artfinal.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">unpredictable crises</a> such as a pay cut or medical emergency, a majority of borrowers — <a href="https://www.pewtrusts.org//media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_assets/2012/pewpaydaylendingreportpdf.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">69 percent</a> — 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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>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 <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">extract</span> lucrative profits. </b>The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/13/irs-is-launching-new-online-tool-people-track-their-1200-tax-stimulus-payments/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">economic stimulus</a> payments that Congress approved under the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/3548/text?q=product+actualizaci%C3%B3n" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">CARES Act</a> appeared to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/us/politics/coronavirus-hunger-poverty.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">help</a> people make it through the early months of the pandemic, and new applications for small-dollar loans <a href="https://morningconsult.com/2020/07/31/online-small-dollar-loans-data-pandemic/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">declined</a> during March and April. Now, with Congress’s failure to extend benefits, loan applications are <a href="https://morningconsult.com/2020/07/31/online-small-dollar-loans-data-pandemic/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">rising</a> steadily along with <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/21/893406577/as-protections-expire-millions-of-americans-face-threats-of-eviction" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">eviction fears</a>, <a href="https://www.epi.org/blog/over-three-months-in-job-losses-remain-at-historic-levels-more-than-one-in-five-workers-are-either-on-unemployment-benefits-or-are-waiting-to-get-on/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">job losses</a>, and coronavirus <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386938" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">infection and death</a> 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 <a href="https://prosperitynow.org/sites/default/files/resources/REVISED%20FINAL%20Brief_Prosperity%20Now%20Survey%20of%20Lower-Income%20Households.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">applied</a> for these loans at a rate three times higher than did white households.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Near the end of the House Committee on Financial Services <a href="https://financialservices.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=406821" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">hearing</a>, 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</b>. “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.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; box-shadow: white 0px 1px 0px, rgb(17, 17, 17) 0px 4px 0px; text-transform: uppercase;">THE CFPB</span> first revealed its <a href="https://www.regulations.gov/contentStreamer?documentId=CFPB-2016-0025-0001&contentType=pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">proposed rule</a> 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<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. Then-Director Richard Cordray, an Obama appointee, had led the agency in conducting <a href="https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201403_cfpb_report_payday-lending.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">extensive research</a> on the industry’s harms to borrowers.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The CFPB’s decision to reveal its proposed rule in Kansas City was far from random. Kansas City and its white, wealthy suburbs were <a href="https://www.thepitchkc.com/news/article/20566194/how-kcs-wealthiest-enclaves-became-a-shadowy-nexus-of-predatory-lending" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">swimming</a> with payday and other small-dollar lenders hungry for people’s money<b>. Lenders sold payday loans with 1,000-percent interest rates nationwide out of their call center based in Overland Park, and local investors helped <a href="https://money.cnn.com/2018/01/18/news/economy/cfpb-lawsuit-payday-lenders/index.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">bankroll</a> these lenders.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A multibillion-dollar payday lending enterprise overseen by a man named <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/1-3b-award-upheld-against-racecar-driver-scott-tucker-over-n943311" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Scott Tucker</a> was located just a few miles away in Leawood, with businesses that had names like Cash Advance and OneClickCash. Tucker put together the <a href="https://www.thepitchkc.com/news/article/20566194/how-kcs-wealthiest-enclaves-became-a-shadowy-nexus-of-predatory-lending" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">seed funding</a> for his payday lending business in the 1990s, about the same time as the industry’s <a href="https://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/quarterly/2009-vol3-1/fdic140-quarterlyvol3no1-afs-final.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">rapid</a> nationwide <a href="https://www.finhealthnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/2016-Financially-Underserved-Market-Size-Study_Center-for-Financial-Services-Innovation.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">expansion</a>. By his early 30s, he had already developed several <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/250964-scott-tucker-grand-jury-indictment.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">financial schemes</a> and defrauded investors out of $100,000 — credentials he used to pitch <a href="https://www.thepitchkc.com/how-kcs-wealthiest-enclaves-became-a-shadowy-nexus-of-predatory-lending/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">investors</a>.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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, <a href="https://publicintegrity.org/business/race-car-driver-scott-tucker-drew-an-elaborate-facade-around-his-payday-loan-businesses/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">including</a> paying off local officials through campaign donations, creating a near-impenetrable multistate maze of shell companies, using the internet to expand his business, and <a href="https://nativefinance.org/news/scott-tucker-nears-trial-for-payday-loan-rent-a-tribe-scheme/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">exploiting</a> 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’ <a href="https://publicintegrity.org/business/payday-lending-bankrolls-auto-racers-fortune/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">earlier lawsuits</a> against the payday lenders from which he was profiting, including in Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Washington.</font></p><p class="p1" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;" /></div><div class="PromoteRelatedPost-promo" data-reactid="229" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-top: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); padding: 20px 0px 10px; margin: 7px 40px 20px 0px; float: left; width: 400px;"><a class="PromoteRelatedPost-promo-link" href="https://theintercept.com/2018/07/19/cfpb-director-nominee-kathy-kraninger/" data-reactid="230" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; display: flex; flex-direction: row;" /><div class="PromoteRelatedPost-promo-link-thumbnail" data-reactid="231" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding-right: 20px; position: relative; z-index: 1;"><a class="PromoteRelatedPost-promo-link" href="https://theintercept.com/2018/07/19/cfpb-director-nominee-kathy-kraninger/" data-reactid="230" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; display: flex; flex-direction: row;" /><a class="PromoteRelatedPost-promo-link" href="https://theintercept.com/2018/07/19/cfpb-director-nominee-kathy-kraninger/" data-reactid="230" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; display: flex; flex-direction: row;" /><a class="PromoteRelatedPost-promo-link" href="https://theintercept.com/2018/07/19/cfpb-director-nominee-kathy-kraninger/" data-reactid="230" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; display: flex; flex-direction: row;" /><a class="PromoteRelatedPost-promo-link" href="https://theintercept.com/2018/07/19/cfpb-director-nominee-kathy-kraninger/" data-reactid="230" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; display: flex; flex-direction: row;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">
</font></a></div><div class="PromoteRelatedPost-promo-link-text" data-reactid="233" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><h6 class="PromoteRelatedPost-promo-link-eyebrow" data-reactid="234" kern="kern" padding-bottom="padding-bottom" px="px" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; font-kerning: normal;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Related</font></h6><h4 class="PromoteRelatedPost-promo-link-title" data-reactid="235" kern="kern" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 22px; margin: 0px; font-kerning: normal;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Trump Nominee for CFPB Admits in Hearing She Has No Background in Consumer Protection or Financial Regulation</font></h4></div></div><div data-reactid="236" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> 2011 investigative report <a href="https://publicintegrity.org/business/payday-lending-bankrolls-auto-racers-fortune/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">revealed</a> 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 <a href="https://consumerist.com/2016/10/03/operators-of-scammy-payday-lender-ordered-to-pay-1-26-billion/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">filed suit</a> against Tucker in 2012, and Tucker and his attorney were <a href="https://money.cnn.com/2016/02/10/news/payday-lending-scott-tucker-arrest/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">arrested</a> 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 <a href="https://news.bloomberglaw.com/white-collar-and-criminal-law/scott-tucker-13-billion-payday-lending-judgment-upheld" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">judgment</a> for $1.3 billion in 2018.</span> The <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">FTC <a href="https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2018/09/28/ftc-sends-505m-in-checks-to-tucker-s-payday.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">returned</a> $505 million to the people Tucker had defrauded. The judge presiding over the decision <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/1-3b-award-upheld-against-racecar-driver-scott-tucker-over-n943311" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">estimated</a> that Tucker had victimized 1 percent of the U.S. population through predatory loans and fraudulent activity.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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 <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/09/ftc-action-halts-payday-loan-scheme-bilked-tens-millions" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Timothy Coppinger</a>, <a href="https://shawneemissionpost.com/2016/02/11/richard-moseley-sr-arrested-on-charges-related-to-161-million-fraudulent-payday-loan-operation-47329" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Frampton T. Rowland, Richard Moseley Sr.</a>, <a href="https://shawneemissionpost.com/2014/09/24/federal-authorities-file-suit-4-northeast-johnson-county-men-payday-loan-schemes-31960" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Richard Moseley Jr.</a>, and <a href="https://www.thepitchkc.com/news/blog/20859633/josh-landy-richard-moseley-jr-named-in-payday-lawsuit-from-consumer-financial-protection-bureau" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Josh Landy</a>. The initial rule stopped them from abusive practices, such as charging unaffordable payments that forced repeat borrowing and created debt traps.</font></p></div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">trump was elected to the presidency a few months after the Kansas City field hearing. Since that time, his appointees, Interim Director <a href="https://theintercept.com/search/?s=mick+mulvaney" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Mick Mulvaney</a> and current Director Kathy Kraninger, have <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/01/cfpb-once-defended-consumers-thanks-trump-it-now-helps-companies-prey-them-instead/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">hacked away</a> 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 <a href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-statement-payday-rule/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">announce</a> that the agency would reconsider the small-dollar lending rule. The Trump appointees even <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/29/business/cfpb-payday-loans-rules.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">manipulated</a> 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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The CFPB <a href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-issues-final-rule-small-dollar-lending/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">announced</a> the rule’s final fate as eviction moratoriums and expanded unemployment benefits<a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/07/30/coronavirus-unemployment-crisis-national-emergency/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;"> were expiring</a> </b>— 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 <a href="https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2020/nr-occ-2020-97.html?source=email" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">rules</a> that would allow payday lenders to circumvent state interest rate caps. Moreover, <b>Trump’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/09/heres-what-is-actually-trumps-four-executive-orders/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">executive orders</a> on payroll taxes and student loans defer payments instead of canceling them</b>. 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 <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/coronavirus-updates/2020/04/a-payday-loan-chain-is-defying-state-shutdowns-to-collect-debts-in-a-pandemic/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">predatory lenders</a> and their 400-percent interest rates as first <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-payday-lenders-target-consumers-hurt-by-coronavirus-11591176601" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">responders</a> to the pandemic. Not willing to throw out life vests, Trump’s government encourages people to drown in debt.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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’ <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/6800/text" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">HEROES Act</a>, 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 <a href="https://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?201+sum+SB421" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">legislation</a> to cap interest rates at 36 percent and ensure that borrowers can repay their loans. Wisconsin issued <a href="http://www.wdfi.org/_resources/indexed/site/fi/banks/20200318_EmergencyGuidance-PaydayAndLicensedLenders.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">emergency guidance</a> warning payday lenders not to raise interest rates and threatening to revoke licenses.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The <a href="https://financialservices.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=406783" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">House</a> and <a href="https://www.banking.senate.gov/hearings/07/10/2020/the-consumer-financial-protection-bureaus-semi-annual-report-to-congress" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Senate</a> 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.</font></p><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“For the sake of all U.S. consumers,” Funk added, “the director needs to step aside.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">according to the Payday Loan Debt Trap Tracker, Kraninger’s decision to delay the regulations cost consumers nearly $6 billion in fees.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The American Banker reported Tuesday that Kraninger’s rollback is “projected to save the payday lending industry more than $7 billion a year.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">— Allied Progress (@AlliedProgress) July 7, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/05/01/epa-wheeler-fossil-fuels-clean-power-plan-senators-court</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx many</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">PA Has Been Captured by Fossil Fuel Interests, Democratic Senators Tell Court</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read time: 6 mins</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Dana Drugmand • Friday, May 1, 2020 - 14:40</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fossil Fuel Ties at EPA</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">'Rampant cronyism, conflicts of interest, and corruption'?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">EPA declined to comment. “EPA does not comment on pending litigation,” an agency spokesperson said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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].”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">cfpb designed to ctr predatory? captured?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.salon.com/2015/03/22/vulture_capitalists_are_picking_us_dry_why_consumer_debt_buyers_are_on_the_rise_partner/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Vulture capitalists are picking us dry: Why consumer debt buyers are on the rise</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The great recession laid waste to the U.S. economy. Now debt collectors are feasting on the carrion</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JIM HIGHTOWER</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MARCH 22,2015 </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2020/02/10/fox-henhouse-koch-backed-opponent-consumer-financial-protection-bureau</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conservative Foundations Finance Push to Kill the CFPB</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">by Alex Kotch | February 13th, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">black lung mnsh? niosh? zat?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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 by Massey 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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Smith got out and walked up to a rusted fence with a padlock. A ball cap shaded his face. Sunglasses hid his tears.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.texasobserver.org/rick-perry-exports-his-pay-to-play-politics-to-ukraine/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">11/13/19</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">it appears that Rick Perry exported his pay-to-play politics from the Texas governor’s mansion to the notoriously corrupt </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Perry also used massive economic development slush funds to shovel money back to his donors. In 2010, the Observer found 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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In hindsight, it was a small miracle that Perry made it this long without getting stuck in the swamp.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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 Tribune reported 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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-08-31/perry-s-friends-in-texas-discover-donations-dovetail-with-state-contracts</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Business</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Perry’s Texas Friends Find Donations Dovetail With Contracts</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alison Fitzgerald</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Political Attacks</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Waste Control Specialists spokesman Chuck McDonald said no favoritism was shown and the review was more rigorous to avoid any appearance of impropriety.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Perry Record</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Business Grants</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Simmons, chairman of Contran Corp., a holding company that owns Waste Control Specialists, is the governor’s second largest individual donor.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swift Boat Group</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Three Applications</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The permits had to be approved by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, whose three commissioners were all appointed by Perry.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Texas Water Board</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Permit Opposition</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">FEC understaff deadlock, thus drop ball fail eg am 1st superpac ukraine</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/9/28/1888560/-FEC-Chair-Releases-Its-Digest-To-Public-After-Trump-Lackey-Tries-To-Suppress-It</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx twt</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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".</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/coal-proponent-attacked-federal-regulator-being-run-radical-environmentalists-now-hes</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In addition to his record of climate denialism, Palich has previously fought directly against the agency where he’s now working. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.” </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.” </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.” </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.” </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.” </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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." </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.” </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15032019/air-pollution-trump-epa-science-advisers-health-risk-fossil-fuel-chemical-tobacco-industry</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The science is well-established—the World Health Organization estimates 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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More Weight for 'Discordant' Claims? </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"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."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Who Are New Committee Members Listening To?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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 the American Petroleum Institute, the tobacco industry and the chemical industry.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">'CASAC Itself Lacks Necessary Expertise'</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">OMG </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/saudis-and-the-us-team-up-to-kill-european-union-effort-to-create-a-dirty-money-blacklist/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> 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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The Americans fell on us like a tonne of bricks,” an anonymous Brussels official told the Financial Times.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">However, as the Wall Street Journal reported Friday, “European governments, under pressure from Washington and Riyadh, have refused to endorse” the list.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Governments must ask themselves whether they are on the side of autocrats or their citizens!” he added in a tweet.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Politico also noted the “intense backlash and behind-the-scenes lobbying from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/10/02/climate-science-deniers-trump-admin-happer-wehrum-rollins-wynn-simmons</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">readfearn</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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, has avoided questions about the role of human activity in climate change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Will Happer</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In December 2016, Happer attended a conference organized by conspiracy theorist G. Edward Griffin. Now he’s on the National Security Council.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Late in 2017, the Trump administration nixed climate change from a list of global threats to the U.S. in the National Security Strategy. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It's safe to say Happer won't be leading any pushes to add it back in.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bill Wehrum</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Wehrum is a long-serving lawyer for the coal industry, as well as petrochemical and petroleum industry groups (such as Koch Industries).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.'”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Brooke Rollins</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In August 2018, Rollins appeared at the Heartland Institute’s energy conference alongside that think tank’s new president Tim Huelskamp.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the conference, Rollins nodded as Huelskamp suggested American schoolchildren’s heads were being “filled with mush” about the dangers of CO2.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Home life was like a “goat rodeo,” she said, and working in the White House wasn’t “much different.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While at TPPF, Rollins wrote that Trump should exit the Paris climate agreement. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Todd Wynn</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In that position, he fought against state renewable energy mandates and federal regulation of fracking fluids.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lisa Graves, co-director of DocumentedInvestigations.org, has described Wynn as an “aggressive fossil fuel insider.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An investigation by HuffPost alleged Wynn may have violated an ethics pledge by continuing to liaise with former associates while in his new job.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Daniel Simmons</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Perfect man for the job? In the Trump administration, the answer is yes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://theconversation.com/epa-staff-say-the-trump-administration-is-changing-their-mission-from-protecting-human-health-and-the-environment-to-protecting-industry-96256</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">reg capture</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> 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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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 Administrator Scott Pruitt and the Trump administration have steered the agency to the verge of what scholars call “regulatory capture.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">cell phone FCC</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As happened earlier with Big Tobacco and Big Oil, the wireless industry’s own scientists privately warned about the risks.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SUBSCRIBE TO THE NATION FOR $2 A MONTH.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Get unlimited digital access to the best independent news and analysis.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Billions of cell-phone users have been subjected to a public-health experiment without informed consent.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The FCC grants the wireless industry’s wishes so often that it qualifies as a “captured agency.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Influx of anti-regulation political appointees turns EPA’s mission on its head</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump’s EPA viewed as most anti-environment in a generation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“This kind of capture of the federal regulatory apparatus… will have real consequences.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">DOE</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pyle is the President of both the American Energy Alliance and 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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read the memo here.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Regulatory Capture in State Agencies</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Death Spiral </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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 the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), the utility industry trade group based in Washington, DC.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New Captured Regulators Initiative</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We’re launching our Captured Regulators initiative by asking questions about these officials:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Arizona Commissioner Bob Stump</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">California Commissioner Mike Florio</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Wisconsin Commissioner Ellen Nowak</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Florida Commissioner Art Graham</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If so, tell us more. Send us an email to tips@checksandbalancesproject.org.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.sciencecorruption.com/ATN167/00244.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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".</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1983 Mar 25: Following the March 25 1983 resignation of the EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch Burford the EPA became paralysed by on-going scandals. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> 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). </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> 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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[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).]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> 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 </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Reagan Administration regulatory resignations</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">James G Watt the Secretary of the Interior (resigned Nov 1983)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Anne Gorsuch Burford the head of the EPA (resigned Mar 1983)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thorne Auchter the Director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), — later both Tozzi and Carlo's partner (resigned Mar 1984)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jim Tozzi the head of the Reagan White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OMB/OIRA), — both an Auchter and a Carlo partner — (resigned May 1983)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rita Lavelle, EPA Assistant Administrator for Solid Waste and Emergency Response (ie Superfund). She was jailed in 1984 for perjury during a Congress hearing into corruption in her agency division.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">John Todhunter, EPA Administrator and Head of Office of Pesticides and Toxic Substances (fired in 1983)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Eighteen others were forced to, or chose to, resign.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Four young budget examiners working for Tozzi in the OMB.OIRA's environmental branch also chose to leave shortly after (during the Bush Administration). </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The creation of the EOP Group lobbyfirm:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[In White House-speak EOP = Executive Office of the President]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Michael O'Bannon - from Dept of Interior and OIRA (joined Tozzi in MBS, then left to manage the EOP Group)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ernest Robins - OIRA (joined Tozzi's MBS and then the EOP Group)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Joseph Hezir - OMB/OIRA (joined EOP Group)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Gibbons - OIRA (joined EOP Group)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jan Mares - Assistant Secretary of Energy, - (brought in later to front the EOP Group)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jonathon Gledhill - OMB & OIRA (later joined EOP Group)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Regulatory_lapdogs</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">EPA</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bush regime environmental record</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">FDA</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">FCC [1]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"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]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">United States Supreme Court</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"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]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">House Ethics Committee [4] [5]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Reform Groups Call for Overhaul of House "Effectively Dead" Oversight Process</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">allegations of threats & bribery on the House floor during the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill Vote Scandal, 2003</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Westar Energy Bribery Scandal</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Texans for a Republican Majority [7]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">17 March UPI [8] notes:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">illegal use of campaign funds,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">misuse of a federal agency for political purposes,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">conflicts of interest,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">and strong-arm tactics against lobbyists and campaign contributors.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thomas D. DeLay's "Transgressions"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">J. Steven Griles, Deputy Secretary of the Interior</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"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]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"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]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Related SourceWatch articles</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bush administration financial misconduct and lack of accountability</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bush regime environmental record</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cheney Energy Task Force</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Government-industry revolving door</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Health Care</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mad cow disease</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">regulatory capture</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Category:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">United States</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>