Category Archives: ProPublica

Obama Just Blew A Chance to Crack Down on Coal

by RonnieDonahue Posted on December 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on Grist and is published here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On Friday, the Obama administration quietly passed up an opportunity to make the coal industry clean up its act.

The EPA issued a final rule on the disposal of coal ash, a byproduct of coal burning that contains toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, and selenium. Up until now, disposal of coal ash hasn’t been regulated by the federal government at all. Now it will be regulated, but not very strongly.

“Your banana peel that you throw away has stronger protections when it winds up in a dump than coal ash does,” says Mary Anne Hitt, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, who is highly critical of the new rule.

More than 100 million tons of coal ash are produced annually in the US, and much of it is simply dumped into open pits. In recent years, there have been large coal-ash spills into rivers in Tennessee and North Carolina.

Groups like the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council wanted EPA to declare coal ash “hazardous waste” and thereby subject it to more stringent federal regulation. Pesticides, for example, are in that category and so they must be disposed of “in a way that prevents releases … to the environment.” That means in a leakproof container meeting various requirements.

Coal ash will instead be categorized as “solid waste,” also known as garbage, and its disposal will be held to a lower standard. The rule does include requirements about where and how coal ash is stored that are intended to prevent leaching into groundwater. It has to be placed “above the uppermost aquifer,” and protected with a geomembrane and a two-foot layer of compacted soil. But environmentalists say that’s not strong enough. Also, old coal-ash dumps won’t have to be cleaned up or improved unless problems are discovered. And the EPA’s new rules won’t even be enforced by the federal government; enforcement will be left to the states.

Greens are disappointed. “We believe coal ash meets all the qualifications of being hazardous,” says Hitt. “It’s tied to cancer among other problems.”

NRDC legislative director Scott Slesinger issued a statement saying, “The EPA is bowing to coal-fired utilities’ interests and putting the public at great risk by treating toxic coal ash as simple garbage instead of the hazardous waste that it is.”

The climate angle

While most of enviros’ complaints focus on the risk to water, air, and surrounding communities, this decision also has bad implications for climate change.

Coal-burning power plants are the biggest source of US greenhouse gas emissions, and the coal industry’s ability to belch CO2 and conventional pollutants without paying for the damage they cause has made coal power cheaper than renewables.

President Obama is said by his fans to be doing everything he can to address greenhouse gas emissions. With Republicans in Congress blocking legislative action, Obama has supposedly put coal in a vise with the EPA’s new regulations on mercury and forthcoming regulations on CO2 emissions from power plants. The centerpiece of Obama’s Climate Action Plan is using his authority under existing laws to limit power-plant pollution or make coal uneconomical by requiring the industry to pay for cleaning up after itself.

But here Obama has passed up a prime opportunity to raise the cost of using coal. Indeed, industry’s complaints about earlier, stronger proposals from the EPA were that they would hobble the coal industry. Exactly — and that would have been a good thing.

“One of the reasons that coal has been such a fixture in our electric sector is they have huge loopholes that they don’t have to deal with pollution the way other sectors of the economy do,” says Hitt. “This is another one of the egregious loopholes that the industry has secured for itself.”

And make no mistake, this weak rule comes from the White House, not apolitical bureaucrats at EPA. As a ProPublica investigation in July demonstrated, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which is part of the White House Office of Management and Budget, used its review of the proposed regulation to weaken it. From the story:

The EPA sent OIRA its proposed new rules in January 2013. The agency submitted five options from which it would choose the final rule. In its draft, the EPA indicated it would likely pick one of two options, which it listed as “preferred.” Both set relatively tough standards on power companies.

In the weeks leading to OIRA’s completed review of the coal ash limits, a number of utility industry lobbyists and lawyers met with the office. While OIRA makes public a list of attendees and documents given to the office’s representatives at meetings, it does not disclose the substance of their discussions. …

When the rule on coal ash effluent emerged from OIRA, three more options had been added, a diluting of the two options the EPA favored. OIRA’s draft dropped the tougher of EPA’s preferred rules and identified those new, less demanding options as favored.

The office also recast the EPA’s scientific findings. The agency initially stated that using ponds for storing the most toxic form of coal ash, the emissions captured in the smoke stack’s final filter, did “not represent the best available technology for controlling pollutants in almost all circumstances.” Revisions made during OIRA review recommended eliminating this conclusion, giving no explanation why.

Why do the coal and utility industries have such influence in a Democratic administration? What was Obama afraid would happen if he cracked down on them? That he’d be accused of fighting a “war on coal”? That his approval ratings would tank in coal country? That Democrats would lose Senate races in Kentucky and West Virginia? What, exactly, did he have to lose?

Obama has rewarded his enemies, screwed over his friends, and blown one of his precious few chances to help move us to a clean energy future.

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Obama Just Blew A Chance to Crack Down on Coal

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Frackers can now frack faster on some public lands

by merinenty Posted on December 15, 2014

Frackers can now frack faster on some public lands

By on 15 Dec 2014commentsShare

As Congress moves to wrap up its year, a lot of important, must-pass legislation is moving quickly through the chambers. That creates the opportunity for politicians to sneak their pet projects into massive bills that most members don’t want to hold up or oppose. This year, that’s meant bad news for the environment — first in the federal budget (aka the Cromnibus bill) and now in the Defense Authorization Act of 2015.

The defense bill — which Congress passed last week and President Obama will soon sign  — is full of this kind of pork. Over at DeSmogBlog, Steve Horn digs into how a seemingly non-defense-related plan to expedite fracking on public lands ended up squirreled away inside the 1,616-page legislation.

Buried on page 1,156 of the bill as Section 3021 and subtitled “Bureau of Land Management Permit Processing,” the bill’s passage has won praise from both the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) …

Streamlined permitting means faster turn-around times for the industry’s application process to drill on public lands, bringing with it all of the air, groundwater and climate change issues that encompass the shale production process.

All that needed to happen to clear the way for this faster permitting was a small tweak to how some already-passed legislation was worded. Congress had already enacted a “pilot” program for permitting fracking on public land in the Bakken Shale region; with a few quick word changes in the Defense Authorization Act, that “pilot” program was expanded to all areas that the Bureau of Land Management oversees nationwide.

(Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan (D) submitted a bill last week to ban fracking from all federal lands, but in a Congress soon to be controlled by frack-happy Republicans, it doesn’t stand a chance.)

The defense bill contains other unpleasant anti-environmental provisions too. For instance: Michael McAuliff writes at The Huffington Post that Arizona Sens. Jeff Flake (R) and John McCain (R) succeeded in adding approval for a foreign-owned copper mine in their state that would not only be on public land but also stands to destroy a Native American burial ground.

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Frackers can now frack faster on some public lands

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How the CIA Spent the Last 6 Years Fighting the Release of the Torture Report

by CatharineCruz Posted on December 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

The Senate began investigating the CIA’s detainee program nearly six years ago. It completed a draft of its report two years ago. Today, the Senate Intelligence Committee has finally released the report’s blistering executive summary. (The full report remains classified.) What took so long? It’s a tale of White House indecisiveness, Republican opposition, and CIA snooping.

More coverage of the CIA torture report.


“Rectal Feeding,” Threats to Children, and More: 16 Awful Abuses From the CIA Torture Report


No, Bin Laden Was Not Found Because of CIA Torture


How the CIA Spent the Last 6 Years Fighting the Release of the Torture Report


Read the Full Torture Report Here


5 Telling Dick Cheney Appearances in the CIA Torture Report


Am I a Torturer?

It’s January 2009. Obama takes office. Within days, he shuts down the CIA’s detainee program. But he says he’d rather not dwell on the past.

January 11, 2009: President-elect Barack Obama tells George Stephanopoulos he’s not interested in a broad investigation of Bush-era intelligence programs, saying, “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

January 22, 2009: Obama issues an executive order banning the use of torture.

However, the Senate Intelligence Committee wants to investigate. Lawmakers say they expect to conclude their inquiry sometime between August 2009 and March 2010.

February 27, 2009: On the condition of anonymity, Senate officials tell reporters that the intelligence committee plans to probe the CIA’s detainee program. The Associated Press reports that the review will take six months to a year.

March 5, 2009: The panel votes 14-1 to proceed with the investigation. Committee chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and vice chair Kit Bond, R-Mo., formally announce the investigation. The press release says the review should take one year.

Then Obama signals he might reverse course and prosecute CIA employees involved in torture. The Senate investigation starts going off the rails.

April 16, 2009: Attorney General Eric Holder releases four of the Bush administration’s legal opinions sanctioning “enhanced interrogation.” Obama says he will not prosecute the CIA employees who acted on the Justice Department’s orders and “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

April 20, 2009: Feinstein asks Obama to “withhold judgment” on CIA prosecutions until the committee review is finished. “This study is now underway, and I estimate its completion within the next six to eight months,” she writes to the president. “A study of the first two detainees has already been completed and will shortly be before the committee.”

The same day, then-CNN White House correspondent Ed Henry tells “Lou Dobbs Tonight” the report should take six to eight months to complete, but “obviously a lot of people are looking for it to happen a little bit quicker since this has been going on for a long time.”

April 21, 2009: Obama suggests he might be open to prosecutions. “With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws and I don’t want to prejudge that,” Obama says. “I think that there are a host of very complicated issues involved there.”

Mid-2009: The CIA creates a secure facility where congressional aides will be allowed to view the documents related to the investigation. Feinstein later says the CIA provided a “stand-alone computer system” that was “segregated from CIA networks.”

Aides start sorting through six million pages of documents. The process is initially slow because the CIA hires contractors to read each document before giving it to the committee, to ensure the Senate aides don’t get access to sensitive documents unrelated to the detainee program. “This proved to be a slow and very expensive process,” Feinstein later says.

August 24, 2009: Holder opens a “preliminary review” into potential prosecutions.

The next week, Feinstein tells “Face the Nation” she wishes the Justice Department would wait for the committee to complete its report.

“We’re well along in that study,” Feinstein says. “And I’m trying to push it along even more quickly.”

September 26, 2009: Republicans on the committee withdraw from the panel’s review. They say the Justice Department’s concurrent investigation will make CIA employees afraid to answer the committee’s questions.

“Had Mr. Holder honored the pledge made by the President to look forward, not backwards, we would still be active participants in the committee’s review,” Bond says in a statement.

Feinstein says the committee’s investigation will continue without the Republicans’ support.

Senate aides notice some fishy things happening at the CIA. The committee blows past its projected deadline.

February 2010: Around this time, about 870 documents disappear from the computers in the CIA facility where congressional aides are conducting the investigation, Feinstein later alleges.

May 2010: Another 60 documents allegedly go missing. As Feinstein tells it, CIA personnel first deny that the documents are missing, then blame the IT contractors, then blame the White House. The White House says it did not tell the CIA to remove the documents.

May 17, 2010: The CIA apologizes for removing the documents, Feinstein later says.

At some point in 2010: According to Feinstein, around this time, aides discover the “Panetta Review” – an internal report written for then-director Leon Panetta that acknowledges “significant CIA wrongdoing.”

She says “some time after” aides find the Panetta Review, those documents disappear from the computers too.

The committee keeps working. The Justice Department closes its inquiry without pursuing prosecutions. In 2012, the committee starts hinting at the report’s findings. New ETA: Soon. Real soon.

June 30, 2011: After a preliminary review, the Justice Department’s special prosecutor clears CIA employees of wrongdoing in 99 cases of alleged detainee mistreatment. He recommends that the Justice Department investigate just two cases of detainee deaths.

April 27, 2012: Reuters reports that the committee has found “no evidence” that CIA torture led to any significant intelligence breakthroughs. At this point, the report is still being finalized.

April 30, 2012: Feinstein and Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., issue a press release saying the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” did not help the government find Osama bin Laden. They say the committee will complete its review “soon.”

August 30, 2012: Attorney General Eric Holder announces he is not prosecuting any CIA employees for detainee deaths.

September 6, 2012: The New York Times reports that the committee’s review is “nearing completion.”

In December 2012, the committee votes to start the declassification process. Now lawmakers just need the CIA to provide its comments on the report, and then the committee can vote again about which parts should be released.

December 13, 2012: The committee votes 9-6 to approve the report for the declassification process. Feinstein says the report is more than 6,000 pages long.

Committee co-chair Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., votes against approving the report. He says the report contains “significant errors, omissions, assumptions and ambiguities – as well as a lot of cherry-picking.”

But the report isn’t declassified right away — the first step is to send the report to the White House, the CIA and other federal agencies for their comment. “After that is complete in mid-February, the committee will vote again on how much of the report should be declassified,” the New York Times reports.

The CIA does not like the report.

January 30, 2013: Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., expresses his disappointment that CIA director nominee John Brennan has not yet reviewed the committee’s report.

February 7, 2013: Brennan reads the 300-page summary of the committee’s report in time for his confirmation hearing. He tells the panel, “I must tell you that reading this report from the committee raises serious questions about the information that I was given at the time.”

He adds, “I don’t know what the facts are or what the truth is. So I really need to look at that carefully and see what CIA’s response is.”

February 15, 2013: Comments are due to the committee. Neither the CIA nor the White House submit a response by the deadline.

March 7, 2013: The Senate confirms Brennan as CIA director. An anonymous senior intelligence official tells the Wall Street Journal that the agency objects to most of the committee’s report.

March 26, 2013: Brennan is now responsible for assembling the CIA’s response. Anonymous former senior CIA officials tell the Washington Post that an early draft is “highly critical” and finds “loads of holes” in the committee’s report.

May 7, 2013: Anonymous former officials tell the Washington Post that the CIA is still assembling “a defiant response.”

May 10, 2013: Brennan meets with President Obama and shows him the CIA’s response, the Intercept later reports. White House photographer Pete Souza snaps this photo, which reportedly shows Brennan holding the response:

Pete Souza

June 2013: The State Department sends a classified letter urging the committee not to declassify the report. In the letter, then-assistant secretary of state Philip Goldberg warns that if the committee reveals the CIA’s cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies, it could endanger American diplomats and harm foreign relations.

June 27, 2013: The CIA officially responds to the report. The 122-page secret rebuttal reportedly lists errors and criticizes the committee for failing to interview any CIA employees. A committee aide says the panel tried to interview those involved, but the CIA did not cooperate.

The same day, Udall issues a statement accusing intelligence officials of leaking “inaccurate information” critical of the committee’s report. Udall alleges that the CIA and the White House “repeatedly rejected requests to discuss the Committee’s report with Members or Committee staff.”

But the committee thinks the CIA hasn’t properly considered one important piece of evidence – the agency’s own internal report, which allegedly acknowledges CIA wrongdoing. Lawmakers push forward.

Between June 27, 2013, and January 15, 2014: The committee concludes the CIA’s official response is at odds with the Panetta Review, which found evidence of wrongdoing. At some point during this period, congressional aides take printed copies of the Panetta Review out of the secure CIA facility where they have been assembling their research, without the CIA’s permission.

July 19, 2013: Feinstein says she’s leading a push to declassify at least the 300-page executive summary of the report.

Chambliss says he disagrees with the report’s conclusions, but he thinks both the summary and the CIA’s response should be released. He adds that the report is flawed because it relied too heavily on documents. “The folks doing the report got 100 percent of their information from documents and didn’t interview a single person,” he says.

White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden says the Obama administration still wants to address some “factual questions,” but the administration thinks “some version of the findings of the report should be made public.”

July 25, 2013: The New York Times predicts the report will be partly declassified “in the next few months.”

November 26, 2013: Nothing has happened. The ACLU files a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the committee’s report and the CIA’s response to the report.

Late 2013: Feinstein asks the CIA to give the committee “a final and complete version” of the Panetta Review.

December 17, 2013: Udall publicly discloses the existence of the Panetta Review in a congressional committee hearing. The committee asks the CIA to hand it over.

January 6, 2014: Udall writes to President Obama, asking that the White House compel the CIA to respond to remaining information requests. He also asks for “a public statement from the White House committing to the fullest possible declassification of the Committee’s study in the most expedient and responsible manner possible.”

Early January 2014: The CIA refuses to give the committee the Panetta Review, arguing that the documents are privileged.

The CIA accuses Senate aides of hacking into the agency’s computer networks. The Senate committee accuses the CIA of hacking into its computer networks. The brawl goes public.

January 15, 2014: As Feinstein later recounts, on this day, Brennan calls an “emergency meeting.” He tells her that the CIA searched the committee’s “stand alone” computers for copies of the Panetta Review. He believes committee aides may have obtained the documents through illegal means. Feinstein says the documents were made available on the committee’s computers.

January 17, 2014: Feinstein writes to Brennan and asks him to end his investigation of the Senate committee, citing separation of powers.

Sometime during this chaos: The CIA’s inspector general files a crimes report with the Justice Department about the CIA spying on the Senate.

The CIA’s general counsel files a crimes report with the Justice Department about the Senate spying on the CIA.

March 4, 2014: McClatchy first reports on the feud.

Udall sends another letter to the White House. “As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal CIA review and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the committee’s oversight responsibilities and for our democracy,” he writes. “It is essential that the committee be able to do its oversight work – consistent with our constitutional principle of the separation of powers – without the CIA posing impediments or obstacles as it is today.”

March 5, 2014: Brennan denies allegations that the CIA spied on committee members. “I am deeply dismayed that some members of the Senate have decided to make spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts,” Brennan says.

March 11, 2014: Feinstein tells the whole story on the Senate floor. She accuses the CIA of violating “the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the C.I.A. from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”

March 12, 2014: The president says he will not “wade into” the dispute between the committee and the CIA.

March 19, 2014: Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, writes to Brennan and Holder to notify them that the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms will investigate charges that the CIA accessed the committee’s computer network.

March 31, 2014: The Washington Post details the main conclusion of the committee’s report: that the CIA repeatedly and deliberately lied to Congress about torture.

The committee votes to declassify the summary of the report.

April 3, 2014: The report is now more than 6,200 pages, and the executive summary is 481 pages. The committee votes 11-3 to declassify the executive summary and conclusions.

Now it’s up to the CIA to complete its declassification review. The White House says the process will be expedited. Feinstein anticipates it will take just one more month.

April 11, 2014: McClatchy publishes the report’s findings. Among them: torture was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence, the CIA repeatedly misled the Department of Justice, and CIA employees used “interrogation techniques” that had not been approved by CIA headquarters or the Justice Department.

Feinstein says she is opening a new investigation to find out who leaked the findings. “If someone distributed any part of this classified report, they broke the law and should be prosecuted,” she says. “The committee is investigating this unauthorized disclosure, and I intend to refer the matter to the Department of Justice.”

Udall writes to President Obama, asking that the White House oversee the declassification process instead of the CIA.

July 31, 2014: CIA acknowledges that, despite Brennan’s earlier denial about what he called “spurious allegations,” the agency did in fact spy on Senate investigators. An internal agency review found that CIA officers created a false online identity to access to computers used by the investigators and read their emails. The review also said that when CIA officers were first asked about the spying, they showed a “lack of candor.”

August 5, 2014: Release of the report is put on hold after the Senate objects to CIA trying to redact evidence that the agency had misled investigators. “I have concluded the redactions eliminate or obscure key facts that support the report’s findings and conclusions,” said Feinstein.

December 9, 2014: The Senate Intelligence Committee releases the executive summary of the report. It concludes the CIA mislead the public, Congress, and the White House both about the severity of treatment and about effectiveness of torture.

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How the CIA Spent the Last 6 Years Fighting the Release of the Torture Report

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Elizabeth Warren: The Feds Are Far Too “Cozy” With Wall Street

by MaricruMusselma Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

Pointing to recently leaked audio recordings between officials at the Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs bankers, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is slamming regulators for being far too timid and compliant when it comes to laying down the law with big banks.

“Well, ultimately this report tells us exactly what we already knew — that the relationship between regulators and the financial institutions they oversee is too cozy to provide the kind of tough oversight that’s really needed,” Warren said in an interview with NPR.

“We can keep making the rules tougher and tougher, but it won’t make an ounce of difference if the regulators won’t enforce the rules that are there,” she added. “If the regulators back down or back off whenever the banks tell them to, then it’s the banks—and not the regulators—who are running the show.”

While the secret recordings, which were captured by former bank examiner for the Federal Reserve Carmen Segarra, do not expose any flagrant wrongdoing by either side, they do reveal an uncomfortable, wholly inappropriate eagerness to please Goldman Sachs. And let’s keep in mind Segarra’s secret tapes were recorded in 2012, at least four solid years after the financial crisis.

After This American Life and ProPublica jointly released the tapes last week, Warren and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) have also called for a federal investigation into the dealings of the New York Federal Reserve.

The New York Fed has since “categorically rejected” the accusations, but Warren tells NPR the public needs more individuals like Segerra who are willing to speak up against institutions deemed “too big to fail.”

“We need to look at whether or not we’ve got the right tools to protect the kind of people who will speak up. But, but what we’ve got to start with is we’ve got to expose what happened here, we’ve got to look at what the available tools are, but we’ve got to give the message loud and clear to the Fed: Um, this isn’t gonna work — you work for the American people, you don’t work for the big banks.”

Originally posted here – 

Elizabeth Warren: The Feds Are Far Too “Cozy” With Wall Street

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America Spends $68 Billion a Year on 17 Major Intelligence Agencies. So Why Do We Keep Getting Caught Off-Guard?

by ClarkBasham Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

What are the odds? You put about $68 billion annually into a maze of 17 major intelligence outfits. You build them glorious headquarters. You create a global surveillance state for the ages. You listen in on your citizenry and gather their communications in staggering quantities. Your employees even morph into avatars and enter video-game landscapes, lest any Americans betray a penchant for evil deeds while in entertainment mode. You collect information on visits to porn sites just in case, one day, blackmail might be useful. You pass around naked photos of them just for… well, the salacious hell of it. Your employees even use aspects of the system you’ve created to stalk former lovers and, within your arcane world, that act of “spycraft” gains its own name: LOVEINT.

You listen in on foreign leaders and politicians across the planet. You bring on board hundreds of thousands of crony corporate employees, creating the sinews of an intelligence-corporate complex of the first order. You break into the “backdoors” of the data centers of major Internet outfits to collect user accounts. You create new outfits within outfits, including an ever-expanding secret military and intelligence crew embedded inside the military itself (and not counted among those 17 agencies). Your leaders lie to Congress and the American people without, as far as we can tell, a flicker of self-doubt. Your acts are subject to secret courts, which only hear your versions of events and regularly rubberstamp them—and whose judgments and substantial body of lawmaking are far too secret for Americans to know about.

Continue Reading »

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America Spends $68 Billion a Year on 17 Major Intelligence Agencies. So Why Do We Keep Getting Caught Off-Guard?

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How to Discriminate Against Pre-Existing Conditions in Two Easy Tiers

by MaryannHickey Posted on September 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Via ProPublica, here’s an editorial published yesterday in the American Journal of Managed Care:

For many years, most insurers had formularies that consisted of only 3 tiers: Tier 1 was for generic drugs (lowest co-pay), Tier 2 was for branded drugs that were designated “preferred” (higher co- pay), and Tier 3 was for “nonpreferred” branded drugs (highest co-pay)….Now, however, a number of insurers have split their all-generics tier into a bottom tier consisting of “preferred” generics, and a second tier consisting of “non-preferred” generics.

Hmmm. What’s going on here? In some cases, this new non-preferred tier is reserved for higher-priced medicines. That’s pretty easy to understand: insurers are trying to motivate their patients to choose cheaper drugs when they’re available. That’s the same reason copays are lower for generics compared to brand name drugs.

But it turns out that sometimes all the generic drugs for a particular disease are non-preferred and therefore have high copays. What are insurance companies trying to motivate in these cases? Charles Ornstein takes a guess:

The editorial comes several months after two advocacy groups filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights of the United States Department of Health and Human Services claiming that several Florida health plans sold in the Affordable Care Act marketplace discriminated against H.I.V. patients by charging them more for drugs.

Specifically, the complaint contended that the plans placed all of their H.I.V. medications, including generics, in their highest of five cost tiers, meaning that patients had to pay 40 percent of the cost after paying a deductible. The complaint is pending.

“It seems that the plans are trying to find this wiggle room to design their benefits to prevent people who have high health needs from enrolling,” said Wayne Turner, a staff lawyer at the National Health Law Program, which filed the complaint alongside the AIDS Institute of Tampa, Fla.

If all your HIV drugs are expensive, then people with HIV will look for another plan. Technically, you’re not discriminating against anyone with a pre-existing condition, but you’re sure giving them a reason to shop around someplace else, aren’t you?

At the moment, this practice appears to be confined to just a few insurers and a few classes of drugs. But if it catches on, it will prompt everyone to follow suit. After all, you can hardly afford to be the insurance company of choice for chronically sick people, can you? This is worth keeping an eye on.

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How to Discriminate Against Pre-Existing Conditions in Two Easy Tiers

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Why Gun Control Groups Have Moved Away From an Assault Weapons Ban

by MattDowning Posted on September 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

The morning after the Sandy Hook shootings, Shannon Watts, a mother of five and a former public relations executive, started a Facebook page called “One Million Moms for Gun Control.” It proved wildly popular and members quickly focused on renewing the federal ban on military style assault weapons.

“We all were outraged about the fact that this man could use an AR-15, which seemed like a military grade weapon, and go into an elementary school and wipe out 26 human beings in less than five minutes,” Watts said.

Read our profile of Moms Demand Action.

Nearly two years later, Watts works full-time as the head of the group, now named Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, is a significant player in a coalition financed by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. But while polls suggest a majority of Americans still support an assault weapons ban, it is no longer one of Watts’ top priorities.

“We’ve very much changed our strategy to focus on public safety measures that will save the most lives,” she told ProPublica.

It’s not just that the ban proved to be what Watts calls a “nonstarter” politically, gaining fewer votes in the Senate post-Sandy Hook than background check legislation. It was also that as Watts spoke to experts and learned more about gun violence in the United States, she realized that pushing for a ban isn’t the best way to prevent gun deaths.

A 2004 Justice Department-funded evaluation found no clear evidence that the decade-long ban saved any lives. The guns categorized as “assault weapons” had only been used in about 2 percent of gun crimes before the ban. “Should it be renewed,” the report concluded, “the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

With more information, Watts decided that focusing on access to guns, not types of guns, was a smarter approach. She came to the same conclusion that other gun control groups had reached even before the Sandy Hook shootings: “Ultimately,” she said, “what’s going to save the most lives are background checks.”

While many gun control groups still officially support the assault weapons ban—”we haven’t abandoned the issue,” as Watts said—they’re no longer actively fighting for it.

“There’s certainly a lot of public sentiment around high capacity magazines and assault weapons,” Dan Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said in an interview this summer. “It’s easy to understand why people feel so passionate about it.”

But, he said, “when you look at this issue in terms of the greatest opportunity to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people and prevent gun violence, background checks are a bigger opportunity to do that.”

Bloomberg’s umbrella group, Everytown for Gun Safety, has also deemphasized an assault weapons ban. A 10-question survey the group gave to federal candidates to measure their stances on gun policy did not even ask about a ban.

“We acknowledge that assault weapons put the ‘mass’ in mass shootings,” Erika Soto Lamb, the group’s communications director, said. But “we feel like it’s a more productive use of our time, effort, money, voices, and votes to focus on the policies that are going to save the most lives.”

The most common criticism of the weapons ban – which was signed into law Sept. 13, 1994 — was that it focused too much on the cosmetic “military-style” features of guns, like pistol grips or folding rifle stocks, which made it easy for manufacturers to turn banned guns into legal guns by tweaking a few features. During the ban, some manufacturers added “PCR” to the name of these redesigned guns, for ” politically correct rifle.”

But the more profound criticism of the ban is that “assault weapons,” a politically charged and imprecise term, have never been the weapons that contribute the most to American gun violence. Gun rights groups have pointed out for years that the campaign against assault weapons ignores the data. (The National Rifle Association did not respond to our requests for comment.)

While assault weapons do appear to be used more frequently in mass shootings, like the ones in Newtown and Aurora, Colorado, such shootings are themselves rare events that are only responsible for a tiny fraction of gun homicides each year. The category of guns that are used in the majority of gun murders are handguns.

Despite this data—and perhaps because many Americans do not have an accurate understanding of gun violence statistics—an assault weapons ban has continued to have broad public and political support.

In January 2014, a Rassmussen poll found that 59 percent of likely voters still favored an assault weapons ban, even after the measure failed in the Senate in April 2013, along with the rest of the White House’s push for tougher gun laws.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the author of the original ban, has repeatedly re-introduced it, most recently in 2013, after the Sandy Hook shootings. Obama made the policy part of his post-Sandy Hook platform for gun violence prevention, though the White House’s central focus was on passing universal background checks.

Experts say that a smarter way to approach the assault weapons ban might be to focus on the ammunition, not the design of the guns themselves. The 1994 gun ban included a ban on magazines with more than 10 rounds of ammunition. Unlike “assault weapons,” high-capacity magazines were used in as much as 26 percent of gun crimes before the ban. Limiting magazines to a smaller number of rounds might mean shooters, particularly in mass shooting situations, could not hit as many victims as quickly.

But even this focus on banning high-capacity magazines, rather than guns, suffers from a lack of data. “It is not clear how often the outcomes of gun attacks depend on the ability of offenders to fire more than 10 shots (the current magazine capacity limit) without reloading,” the 2004 evaluation concluded.

There is some evidence that the ban was preventing violence outside the US: Mexican politicians have long blamed the end of the assault weapons ban for contributing to drug-related violence in Mexico. In a 2013 study, three American academics found that the end of the ban brought about “at least 238 additional deaths annually” in areas of Mexico near the US border.

Meanwhile, as gun control groups have moved their focus away from gun bans, Americans are buying fewer assault weapons than they did when a ban seemed imminent, Bloomberg News reported last month.

Source article:

Why Gun Control Groups Have Moved Away From an Assault Weapons Ban

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Some Fracking Companies Illegally Use Diesel Fuel, In Violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act

by Obediah Ousley Posted on August 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

A new report charges that several oil and gas companies have been illegally using diesel fuel in their hydraulic fracturing operations, and then doctoring records to hide violations of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.

The report, published this week by the Environmental Integrity Project, found that between 2010 and July 2014 at least 351 wells were fracked by 33 different companies using diesel fuels without a permit. The Integrity Project, an environmental organization based in Washington, DC, said it used the industry-backed database, FracFocus, to identify violations and to determine the records had been retroactively amended by the companies to erase the evidence.

The Safe Drinking Water Act requires drilling companies to obtain permits when they intend to use diesel fuel in their fracking operations. As well, the companies are obligated to notify nearby landowners of their activity, report the chemical and physical characteristics of the fluids used, conduct water quality tests before and after drilling, and test the integrity of well structures to ensure they can withstand high injection pressures. Diesel fuel contains a high concentration of carcinogenic chemicals including benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene, and they disperse easily in groundwater.

FracFocus is an online registry that allows companies to list the chemicals they use during fracking. At least 10 states, including Texas, Colorado and Pennsylvania, mandate the use of the website for such disclosures.

The report asserts that the industry data shows that the companies admitted using diesel without the proper permits. The Integrity Project’s analysis, the report said, then showed that in some 30 percent of those cases, the companies later removed the information about their diesel use from the database.

“What’s problematic is that this is an industry that is self-reporting and self-policing,” said Mary Greene, senior managing attorney for the environmental organization. “There’s no federal or state oversight of filings with FracFocus.”

The FracFocus website currently has no way to track changes to disclosures. The Integrity Project noticed the changes when it compared newer disclosures to those in older FracFocus data purchased from PIVOT Upstream Group, a consulting firm in Houston.

Energy In Depth, the communications and research arm of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, published a lengthy response to the Integrity Project’s report and criticized it for including diesel use that occurred prior to a 2014 Environmental Protection Agency rule clarifying the types of chemicals considered “diesel fuels.”

Energy In Depth said the Integrity Project was “retroactively changing the definition of diesel fuel in order to malign more operations for engaging in an activity (a “diesel frack”) that did not occur.”

The EPA first listed kerosene as a type of diesel fuel in May 2012 when it released a draft version of the rule finalized this year. Kerosene is also listed as a type of diesel fuel in the definition of the Toxic Substance Control Act, which controls the production, use and disposal of chemicals.

In its response, Energy In Depth also pointed out that in some cases companies may have provided incorrect data to the FracFocus website and were seeking to correct it, not skirt the law.

“We no longer use the contract completions crews that used very small trace amounts of kerosene and a hydrocarbon distillate on five wells more than three years ago,” said John Christiansen, director of external communications at Anadarko Petroleum Corp., one of the companies listed in the report. “Since 2011, there has been no re-occurrence, and we remain in compliance with EPA regulations,” he said in an email to ProPublica.

The report found that six companies had changed disclosures for wells; Pioneer Natural Resources accounted for 62 of the changes. Tadd Owens, vice president of governmental affairs at Pioneer said most of these changes were made because of “coding errors” while submitting data to FracFocus.

“We did use trace amounts of kerosene in 2011 prior to when the EPA issued guidance. The rest of the wells on the list are coding errors and we have an ongoing internal quality control process to identify them,” he said.

For many years fracking industry groups insisted their member companies never used diesel fuels in their operations. Then, in 2011, a congressional investigation found that in fact between 2005 and 2009, 12 companies had injected 32 million gallons of diesel fuel or fracking fluids containing diesel fuel in wells in 19 states.

The industry groups then shifted their argument, declaring that they could not be in violation of federal regulations in their use of diesel fuels because the EPA had never adequately spelled out exactly what exact kinds of fuels were barred.

Indeed, in a 2011 email to ProPublica, Halliburton, a company listed in the congressional investigation as having used 7.2 million gallons of diesel fuel, said it had not violated any laws “because there are currently no requirements in the federal environmental regulations that require a company to obtain a federal permit prior to undertaking a hydraulic fracturing project using diesel.”

The EPA then acted to make its enforcement authority explicit, and earlier this year finalized more detailed regulations governing the use of diesel fuels in fracking operations.

In February 2014, after the EPA released its rule, Lee Fuller, the vice president of government affairs at the Independent Petroleum Association of America, stated that the rule was “a solution in search of a problem.”

“Based on actual industry practices, diesel fuel use has already been effectively phased out of hydraulic fracturing operations,” Fuller said.

Yet energy companies have continued to produce fracking fluids containing diesel fuels. The Environmental Integrity Project’s report identified 14 well fracturing products—commercially called emulsifiers, dispersants, additives and solvents—sold by Halliburton that contain diesel fuels. Halliburton’s own safety data sheets for these products list diesel as a chemical in these products.

“Halliburton is working with state regulators and customers to be sure all FracFocus reports are accurate,” said Emily Mir, a spokeswoman for the company. Mir would not comment on whether Halliburton informs drillers that purchase its products that they are required to obtain a permit before diesel fuel can be used for fracking.

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Some Fracking Companies Illegally Use Diesel Fuel, In Violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act

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The Red Cross Won’t Say How It Spent Sandy Money

by ChristoLardner Posted on June 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the ProPublica website.

Just how badly does the American Red Cross want to keep secret how it raised and spent over $300 million after Hurricane Sandy?

The charity has hired a fancy law firm to fight a public request we filed with New York state, arguing that information about its Sandy activities is a “trade secret.”

The Red Cross’ “trade secret” argument has persuaded the state to redact some material, though it’s not clear yet how much since the documents haven’t yet been released.

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The Red Cross Won’t Say How It Spent Sandy Money

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Yes, frackers can forcibly drill your land, even if you don’t want them to

by BarbraSingletar Posted on June 13, 2014

don’t frack me, bro

Yes, frackers can forcibly drill your land, even if you don’t want them to

By

13254

Jump in. You have no choice.

Forced pooling isn’t some kind of college pool party that jocks compel nerds to attend, resulting in wacky hijinks. It’s a grim legal tool, dating back nearly a century in some states, that allows drillers to tap the fossil fuels beneath a reluctant landowner’s property — if enough of their neighbors sell their drilling rights. The philosophy of such laws is that subterranean pools of oil and natural gas pay no heed to property lines.

As hydraulic fracturing takes grip across the nation, frackers are taking advantage of state laws that were drafted to allow forced pooling for conventional gas and oil drilling.

Newsweek took a trip to Marcellus Shale country and interviewed Suzanne Matteo and Bob Svetlak, two of the residents who’ve been stymieing drilling plans by refusing to sign agreements that would allow Hilcorp to frack their land in Pulaski Township, Penn., in exchange for per-acre payments and royalties:

[L]ate last August, the company filed an application with the state to drill on a large swath of land that includes property owned by Bob Svetlak, 73, … and now the company was trying to use a 1961 “forced pooling” law to access the natural gas beneath his 14.6 acres without his consent.

Matteo says that when she heard about Hilcorp’s move on Svetlak’s property, she knew hers would be next. She, along with Svetlak and two other property owners, represent 35 holdout acres within the 3,267-acre area that Hilcorp has proposed as a drilling unit. Sure enough, a neighbor who had leased to Hilcorp soon showed Matteo a letter from the company encouraging leaseholders to attend a meeting before the state Environmental Hearing Board to cheer on its forced pooling application (referred to as a Well Spacing Application).

“By integrating the tracts in red, Hilcorp can potentially drill twice as many wells into your unit, allowing Hilcorp to fully develop the minerals beneath your land,” the letter said, adding that without forced pooling, more wells would need to be drilled and less gas would be produced. In short, the letter implied to the leaseholders, unless their holdout neighbors were forcibly pooled, their own future royalties would be in jeopardy.

The letter included a map, with Matteo’s land as well as three other unleased tracts clearly identified in red. …

After seeing the letter sent to her neighbors, Matteo and two other holdout property owners filed a lawsuit against Hilcorp, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the state attorney general, alleging that the forced pooling law is a violation of their constitutional right to private property, as well as a violation of state eminent domain law, which stipulates that any taking of private land must be for a public, not private, purpose. …

Despite the health concerns, some of Matteo’s neighbors are frustrated with her and others for holding up the royalties they will receive once the gas starts flowing. Bruce and Jody Clingan, who own a 200-acre golf course nearby, received a bonus of over $500,000 when they signed with Hilcorp, plus 18 percent royalties on future production. Bruce Clingan told CBS that he couldn’t understand why “1 percent” of landowners in the proposed unit could prevent drilling to which the other “99 percent” have consented.

Which is why Matteo believes her lawsuit is just the beginning. “I know I’m screwed, no matter what,” she says. “There’s going to be wells near me no matter what. There’s a large landowner behind me and across the street that would probably love the money for a well pad. But I know we’re getting used as a precedent. If they get away with this with us, it’s going to happen everywhere.”

Forced pooling laws are currently on the books in 39 states, with different states requiring different thresholds of consent among landholders before drilling can be forced upon all of them. Some lawmakers are trying to rein in such laws, while others are trying to introduce new ones.


Source
Your Lawn Need Fracking?, Newsweek

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Yes, frackers can forcibly drill your land, even if you don’t want them to

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