Tag Archives: regulatory affairs

Even Republicans Admit It: Politics Did Not Drive the IRS Tea Party “Scandal”

by AlvinaiTyler Posted on July 5, 2013

Mother Jones

With each passing week, the Internal Revenue Service’s supposed targeting of tea party groups looks less like a scandal and more like a case of IRS staffers doing their jobs, albeit in an overzealous, at times clumsy and narrow-minded way.

From the New York Times we now learn that IRS employees who vetted applications for tax-exempt status heavily scrutinized a Palestinian rights group, open source software developers, and an organization trying to help musicians make money online. This comes on top of the news, as Mother Jones previously reported, that the agency also singled out for extra vetting groups with “progressive, “occupy,” and “Israel” in their name.

That sound you hear is the last gasp of the tea party targeting “scandal,” which some Republicans have tried mightily to hype into a Watergate-esque controversy. Make no mistake: As the agency subjected tea partiers and other conservative groups to an intense amount of scrutiny, it made those same groups wait for months, if not years, to learn whether they’d earned tax-exempt status. This is a big deal. Waiting around that long crimps the flow of donations that a nonprofit needs to survive. Tea partiers are right to be mad about that. But what the drip-drip of revelations in the IRS mess has shown is that it’s not fair to say just tea partiers were singled out. Other nonprofits, partisan and nonpartisan, left- and right-leaning, politically inclined and not, got a grilling by the IRS, too. They also endured long wait times.

You’ll remember that the Treasury Department inspector general report that first looked at the “targeting” of groups with “tea party” and “patriots” in their name found no evidence of political bias. At the time, Republicans in Congress didn’t buy that. Clearly, they argued, this was the work of anti-conservative IRS staffers, or a meddlesome Obama White House looking to suppress its opponents in a closely fought election year. Then we learned that the manager of the IRS Screening Office in Cincinnati, where most of the alleged targeting took place, identified himself as a “conservative Republican.” Still, Republicans forged onward.

Now, with these latest revelations, even some GOPers are coming around to the reality of what happened. From the Times:

“We haven’t proved political motivation,” said Representative Charles Boustany Jr., a Louisiana Republican who, as the chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight, is leading one inquiry.

Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, said that in retrospect, suggestions that Mr. Obama had orchestrated an IRS attack on his political enemies were unwarranted.

“Presidents have always been very careful about maintaining the appearance of keeping hands off the IRS,” he said. “I don’t have any reason to believe there wasn’t targeting of conservatives, but it might well have been a lot more than that as well.”

So there you have it. Republicans have gone from blaming the Obama administration and IRS staffers for targeting tea partiers to double-negative-laced non-concession concessions like Roy Blunt’s. (That said, Republicans aren’t calling off the hounds quite yet: A spokeswoman for Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), who chairs the House ways and means committee, says committee members will continue to “gather the facts” and “follow them wherever they lead us.”)

Questions remain about the process the IRS uses to vet nonprofit applications, and why it takes so long to respond to some nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status. The way the IRS went about scrutinizing organizations in recent years—with its “be on the lookout,” or BOLO, lists—is troublesome, which is why acting IRS commissioner Danny Werfel recently scrapped the BOLOs and pledged to reform how the IRS does its job. But as for allegations of politically motivated targeting, with all we know right now, that scandal appears to be dead.

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Even Republicans Admit It: Politics Did Not Drive the IRS Tea Party “Scandal”

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Economy Adds 195,000 Jobs, But Experts Say Fed Shouldn’t Curb Stimulus Yet

by Louise6qy Posted on July 5, 2013

Mother Jones

The economy added 195,000 jobs in June, according to jobs numbers released Friday by the Labor Department, and the unemployment rate held at 7.6 percent. The news was better than expected, and continues several months of generally positive employment news. But economists say that the joblessness situation in the country is not nearly sunny enough to justify the Federal Reserve reigning in the stimulus measures it has deployed since the recession, a move the Fed has hinted it may make in the coming months.

Employment growth in June was in line with the average monthly gain in jobs over the past year, and numbers for the past few months have been revised upwards—in April from 149,000 to 199,000, and in May from 175,000 to 195,000. More than 62 percent of the job increases last month were in leisure and hospitality, which picked up 75,000 jobs; retail, which gained 37,000; and temp services, which added 10,000. Low-wage service sector jobs have been a hallmark of this recovery; occupations paying less than $13.83 have accounted for 58 percent of the job gains since 2010. This follows a longer-term pattern of middle-income jobs being hollowed out by low- and high-wage jobs after recessions. Here’s what that has looked like since the 2001 recession, via the National Employment Law Project:

And here’s more grim news in June’s report: The number of people working part-time because their hours had been cut back or were unable to find full-time work increased by 322,000 people to 8.2 million between May and June. Last month, there were 1 million discouraged workers—meaning people not looking for work because they believe there are no jobs available for them. That’s an increase of 206,000 from a year ago. When you include these workers, you get an alternative June unemployment rate (which the Labor Department terms the U6 unemployment rate) of 14.3 percent. That’s a significant uptick from May (13.8 percent), and the highest level since February.

In other bad news, the unemployment rate for adult women edged up to 6.8 percent, and the ongoing sequester accounted for a loss of 7,000 government jobs.

A total of 11.8 million Americans remain unemployed, and the proportion of people in the workforce remains at its lowest level since 1979.

For these reasons, economists are saying this is no time for the Federal Reserve to cut back on stimulus measures. In May, Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke hinted the Fed may begin increasing interest rates from their current near-zero levels, and cut back on its purchasing of tens of billions of dollars per month in government bonds. Dean Baker, director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says that the proportion of people in the workforce should drive the Fed’s stimulus policies, not the unemployment rate. Here’s Baker:

Ironically Bernanke made this exact point about declining employment-to-population ratio (EPOPs) back in January 2004 when he was justifying the Fed’s decision to keep the interest rate at what was then considered an extraordinarily low 1.0 percent. Bernanke noted that the unemployment rate at the time was not terribly high, but pointed to a sharp decline in the EPOP from the pre-recession level. Since it was implausible that so many people had suddenly lost the desire or ability to work, Bernanke argued that the falling EPOP was strong evidence of continuing slack in the labor market.

Apparently Bernanke views the recent fall in the EPOP differently than the drop following the last recession.

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Economy Adds 195,000 Jobs, But Experts Say Fed Shouldn’t Curb Stimulus Yet

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Texas Lawmakers Too Busy Targeting Abortion Providers to Deal With Exploding Fertilizer Plants

by Aale Thomas Posted on July 5, 2013

Mother Jones

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In the two and a half months since an explosion at a West, Texas, fertilizer storage facility left 12 first responders dead and at least 200 people injured, two things have become clear. The disaster could have been avoided if the proper regulations had been in place and enforced—and state and federal agencies don’t appear to be in a hurry to put those regulations in place or enforce them.

Texas, whose lax regulatory climate has come in for scrutiny in the aftermath of the West explosion, went into a special session of its state legislature on Monday to push through an omnibus abortion bill designed to regulate 37 abortion clinics out of existence. But the 2013 session will come to a close without any significant action to impose safeguards on the 74 facilities in the state that contain at least 10,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate.

Lawmakers in Austin have a handy excuse for punting on new fertilizer regulations: That would be intrusive. State Sen. Donna Campbell, the Republican who helped to shut down Democratic Sen. Wendy Davis’ filibuster of the abortion bill on procedural grounds, told the New York Times that lawmakers should be wary of monitoring chemical plants more closely because there’s “a point at which you can overregulate.”

As the investigations into the West blast have shown, though, over-regulation is hardly a risk in Texas. The disaster was notable for just how little regulation there actually was and how little it was enforced. Since the April 17 disaster we’ve learned that:

The Texas Department of State Health Services, which tracks the storage of dangerous chemicals, says it is prohibited from regulating those chemicals and that any regulations must come from local officials. Except…
West is in McLennan County, which, like 70 percent of counties in the state, had been statutorily prohibited from adopting its own fire code until 2010, when it reached a high-enough population threshold. It has not adopted one since.
Texas is one of just four states without statewide standards for fire safety and storage at chemical facilities.
Free from the constraints of fire codes, the West Fertilizer Co. stored ammonium nitrate in wooden boxes and didn’t even have a sprinkler system.
A statewide cap on property taxes means that even if they were allowed to have fire codes, most rural Texas fire departments are unable to afford the equipment needed to fight fires at the chemical facilities that are located disproportionately in rural counties.
The company didn’t notify local planners of the presence of dangerous chemicals on site until 2012—at least six years after federal law would have required them to do so—and the town’s volunteer firefighters were never briefed on how to handle a blaze at the facility. One firefighter tried to look up the information on his smartphone en route to the blaze but gave up.
West Fertilizer Co.’s “worst-case release scenario,” according to documents provided to the Environmental Protection Agency, did not allow for the possibility of fire or explosions.
The site hadn’t been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 1985, when, after finding five “serious violations,” the company was fined $30. (That’s $64.95 in today’s dollars.) The 28-year lag between inspections isn’t so bad, considering OSHA has the manpower to inspect each chemical facility in the US about once every 129 years.
West Fertilizer Co. was insured for just $1 million, the same amount of liability coverage the state requires of bounce house operators. However, this was $1 million more than is required by the state for chemical storage facilities.
The facility was storing an explosive product that doesn’t actually have to be explosive.
It understated the amount of said explosive material it was keeping at the site by 56,000 pounds (or about 50 percent).
The company did not work with the Department of Homeland Security to develop security procedures as required by federal law, nor did DHS ever instruct it to do so. It did provide information on the site’s explosive contents to the Texas Department of Health Services, but that agency did not pass that information along to DHS, nor was it required to.
West Fertilizer Co. had no security guards, alarm system, or perimeter fencing despite the fact that it was a storage facility for the primary ingredient of improvised explosive devices, and had been robbed 11 times (presumably by meth manufacturers) in 12 years.
In that same period, police responded to five different reports of ammonia leaks from the facility.
In the 11 years since the US Chemical Safety Board recommended the EPA regulate ammonium nitrate, the source of the West fire, the agency has made no move to do so. It is not included on the agency’s list of hazardous chemicals, and by extension, it’s not included on Texas’ list either.
The facility was less than 3,000 feet away from two schools and a dense residential area and there are no federal or state laws on the books that would have prevented it from getting closer.

In other words, there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit for Texas lawmakers to tackle to prevent future Wests. And yet, in the wake of the explosion, the state of Texas has taken exactly one concrete step to prevent future disasters from happening: It created a website that allows people to determine if there’s a chemical plant in their neighborhood. That’s information that should certainly be available to the public, but it shouldn’t be confused with a step that’s making those plants safer.

The Texas state fire marshal offered to issue voluntary best-practices recommendations for counties without fire codes, and to inspect chemical facilities—again, voluntarily—if the owners so wished, but the effect of that is hampered by the fact that rural counties, where most chemical facilities are located, are still prohibited under Texas law from enacting fire codes. A bill that would have ended that prohibition, which Gov. Rick Perry declined to throw his support behind, went nowhere this session. It is not being considered at the special session.

Legislators also talked about suggesting that facilities put up some signs to notify people about the presence of potentially hazardous chemicals nearby.

The only public statements on West from the state’s top lawmakers in the last month came when the Federal Emergency Management Agency turned down Texas’ request for $17 million in disaster assistance for the disaster it did nothing to prevent on the grounds that Texas has the money to pay for it. (And it does—Texas’ rainy day fund is set to hit $8 billion by 2015.)

Maybe if pro-choice activists really want to stop Texas from regulating clinics they should just start calling them “fertilizer plants.”

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Texas Lawmakers Too Busy Targeting Abortion Providers to Deal With Exploding Fertilizer Plants

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The Expendables: How the Temps Who Power Corporate Giants Are Getting Crushed

by fji5enf2 Posted on July 1, 2013

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the ProPublica website.

It’s 4:18 a.m. and the strip mall is deserted. But tucked in back, next to a closed-down video store, an employment agency is already filling up. Rosa Ramirez walks in, as she has done nearly every morning for the past six months. She signs in and sits down in one of the 100 or so blue plastic chairs that fill the office. Over the next three hours, dispatchers will bark out the names of who will work today. Rosa waits, wondering if she will make her rent.

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In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.

This is not Mexico. It is not Guatemala or Honduras. This is Chicago, New Jersey, Boston.

The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America’s largest companies 2013 Walmart, Macy’s, Nike, Frito-Lay. They make our frozen pizzas, sort the recycling from our trash, cut our vegetables and clean our imported fish. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers.

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The Expendables: How the Temps Who Power Corporate Giants Are Getting Crushed

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Obama: “We Don’t Have Time for a Meeting of the Flat-Earth Society”

by w0ujpysd Posted on June 25, 2013

Mother Jones

President Obama laid out a detailed plan to address the causes and impacts of climate change in a speech at Georgetown University on Tuesday. “I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing,” he said.

A thread throughout Obama’s plan is the idea that addressing climate change is a “moral obligation” to our children. The two-page outline of the plan sent to reporters Monday evening came with the subhead “Taking Action for Our Kids,” and mentioned “kids” or “future generations” a total of four times. The theme carried throughout his speech on Tuesday. “Your children’s children will have to live with the consequences of our decisions,” he said.

Here are the key components of the plan aimed at reducing US emissions:

Directs the EPA to issue draft emission rules for existing power plants by June 2014, to be finalized by June 2015.
Asks the EPA to “work expeditiously” on finalizing rules for new power plants that the agency issued in March 2012 (though does not appear to include a due date for that).
Pledges that the federal government will draw 20 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2020.
Sets a goal of permitting an additional 10 gigawatts of renewable energy on public lands by 2020.
Sets a goal of putting 100 megawatts of renewable energy on federally subsidized housing by 2020.
Creates a new, $8 billion loan guarantee program for advanced fossil fuel projects at the Department of Energy (think clean coal, etc.).
Directs the EPA and the Department of Transportation to work on fuel economy standard for heavy-duty trucks, buses, and vans for after 2018 (following up on the 2014-18 rules they rolled out in 2011).
Sets a goal of cutting at least 3 billion tons of carbon pollution by 2030 through improvements in energy efficiency standards.
Calls for an end to US funding for fossil fuel energy projects overseas unless they include carbon capture technology.

The rules for existing power plants could be huge news, as old, dirty plants account for 40 percent of all emissions in the United States. But there are scant details on what exactly those rules will entail. The EPA has missed deadlines on emissions, and other important rules have been stuck at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs within the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for months.

While Obama did not explicitly endorse or reject the Keystone XL pipeline, a major issue for climate activists, he did state in the speech that the pipeline should only be approved if it “does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” “The pipeline’s effect on climate will be absolutely critical to determining whether this project will go forward,” he said.

The draft environmental impact analysis the State Department released in March found that it wouldn’t dramatically increase emissions, prompting environmentalists to worry about what that means for the administration’s decision. The EPA, however, has said that State’s evaluation of the greenhouse gas impact of the pipeline isn’t good enough. A senior administration official told reporters on Monday night that the State Department is still awaiting a final environmental analysis. “This proposal is not yet ready for a decision,” the official reiterated.

Environmental groups rushed to respond to the plan, putting out largely complimentary statements. Maggie Fox, CEO of the Climate Reality Project, called it a “muscular plan” in a statement Tuesday morning.

What was perhaps most interesting about Obama’s climate plan is the weight it gave to not only mitigating carbon pollution, but also planning for and adapting to changes that are already underway. The plan notes that superstorms, record heat, asthma rates, and drought are already taking a toll. In 2012 alone, the plan notes, extreme weather caused $110 billion in damages.

“The planet will continue slowly warming for some time,” said Obama. “The seas will continue rising…It’s going to take some time for the climate to stabilize.”

The climate-adaptation portion of the plan does the following:

Directs federal agencies to identify and support “climate resilient investments” and remove policies that increase vulnerabilities.
Establishes a Task Force on Climate Preparedness that includes state, local, and climate leaders, which will help identify ways the federal government can help support localities.
Creates seven Regional Climate Hubs through the Department of Agriculture that will work with farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners as well as universities and other research organizations to support climate resilience.
Launches a National Drought Resilience Partnership that will work across agencies to help address drought-related risks.
Directs federal agencies to update flood-risk standards for all federally funded projects to account for sea level rise and extreme weather.
Sets up a Climate Data Initiative that will be used to share federal climate data. This, the administration says, will allow federal and private partners access to data that can be used create appropriate response plans and tools (like sea-level-rise calculator or mobile apps.).

Obama had tough words for those who would deny that climate change is a problem. “I am willing to work with anybody…to combat this threat on behalf of our kids,” he said. “But I don’t have much patience for anybody who argues the problem is not real. We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat-Earth Society.”

He also chastised Senate Republicans for holding up the nomination of Gina McCarthy to serve as the new EPA administrator, calling on them to confirm her “without any further obstruction or delay.”

The nearly 40-minute speech concluded with yet another appeal for future generations. “We may not live to see the full realization of our actions,” he said. “But we will have the satisfaction of realizing the world we leave for our children will be better off for what we do.”

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Obama: “We Don’t Have Time for a Meeting of the Flat-Earth Society”

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Soros-Backed Super-PAC to New York Pols: Pass Reform or We’re Taking You Down

by Margherit Posted on June 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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The deadline draws closer by the hour. In New York, the band of good-government reformers, labor unions, enviros, community organizers, religious leaders, and more have until Thursday night, when the current legislative session ends, to press state lawmakers to pass legislation combating political corruption and kickstarting a public financing program for statewide elections. Standing in their way: The odd coalition of breakaway Democrats and Republicans who control the state Senate and who are blocking the public financing bill, which passed the state Assembly earlier this year and is backed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Friends of Democracy, the super-PAC run by political operatives Jonathan Soros and David Donnelly, is one of the most aggressive backers of public financing in New York State. Soros, the son of liberal financier and mega-donor George Soros, and Donnelly see New York as the front line in the post-Citizens United battle against big-money politics. In an interview on Tuesday, Donnelly had a cut-and-dry message for the independent Democrats, who broke away from the traditional Democratic caucus to form a new leadership coalition, and the Republican legislators who are denying a vote on public financing: Support reform, or we’ll fight to replace you.

Donnelly says public financing should be a no-brainer for independent Democrats and Republicans given the public support for the issue. According to a recent Siena College poll (PDF), 61 percent of New Yorkers say they support statewide public financing. Indeed, in five Siena polls dating back to August 2012, a majority of New Yorkers backed a public financing program. The way it’s proposed, a statewide public financing program would match each dollar of donations up to $175 with $6 in state money. The goal is to nudge political candidates into courting lots of less-wealthy donors instead of a few very wealthy ones.

“It’s pretty painfully clear that if this leadership structure, the Independent Democratic Conference and Republicans together, doesn’t produce on behalf of the citizens of the state a public financing law that addresses corruption, there needs to be a leadership structure that will do that,” Donnelly says. “That means electing people who will lead the Senate in a way that moves that legislation. It’s not so much of a threat as the reality of what we’re going to have to do.”

Donnelly declined to say which state senators Friends of Democracy would target. (Nor would he say how much Friends of Democracy has spent so far on New York’s public financing fight.) “I’m not about one senator or not about independent Democratic senators Diane Savino or Jeff Klein or any of these other Republican senators,” he says. “I’m agnostic about how we go about doing it. It’s a numbers game; we need to take out those numbers.”

Donnelly says he still holds out hope that the state Senate will pass a public financing bill before heading home for the summer. But if the state Senate fails, Friends of Democracy won’t walk away from the issue. In addition to targeting anti-reform senators, Donnelly explains, the super-PAC will continue pushing for a bill in the legislature, possibly during a special session or when lawmakers return later this year to work on a state budget. “If the senators can do it under the current leadership, great. Do it by Thursday, do it in a special session, during the budget session, great,” he says. “We’re not going away.”

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Soros-Backed Super-PAC to New York Pols: Pass Reform or We’re Taking You Down

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Illinois’ New Fracking Regulations Might Not Be So Tough After All

by czwcqtpj Posted on June 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Monday afternoon Illinois governor Pat Quinn signed what the Associated Press touted as the “nation’s toughest fracking regulations,” creating a framework to manage hydraulic fracturing, in which chemicals are piped into rock at high pressure to release stored-up natural gas. But the new regulatory effort, which sharply divided the state’s environmental community and inspired fervor in the southern counties where drilling is most likely to take place, looks more like a tactical concession than an environmental victory.

The law, which was crafted through six months of stakeholder negotiations between the state, select environmental groups, and representatives from the oil and gas industry, includes stringent rules meant to increase public transparency, more closely monitor environmental impact, and provide avenues for recourse in case something goes wrong. But amid biting criticism from activists and advocacy groups that were excluded from the negotiations, environmental organizations involved in the process have argued that although they believe the law was a necessary foothold in the effort to control what seemed to be an inevitable boom in fracking in Illinois, this is by no means the end of the fight.

“It bothers me that the bill is being presented as a model for other states,” says Ann Alexander, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council who was part of the negotiations. “It represents a floor. Yes it’s strong; no, it’s not adequate.” What new law does provide is a baseline for measuring the actual impact of fracking and a mechanism for pushing back if something does go wrong, explains Jenny Cassel, a lawyer with the Environmental Law & Policy Center, another group that was involved in the negotiations.

Critics have attacked the law as regulatory window dressing. “These rules are arbitrary compromises based on negotiations with industry,” says Dr. Sandra Steingraber, a professor at Ithaca College and a vocal anti-fracking activist who led the charge against the bill. “They guarantee neither public health nor environmental integrity.”

Fracking was already legal in Illinois, although there was no fracking-specific regulation on the books, and industry interest has been growing, creating a sense that fracking was unavoidable. Illinois sits atop the New Albany shale play, an area projected to hold 3.79 trillion cubic feet of shale gas. Drilling leases have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into the coffers of counties and residents by way of fees and leases, and according to an AP investigation of state records, high-volume fracking had already begun. After it became clear the regulatory bill would become law, major drilling operations were started in Wayne County, some four and a half hours south of Chicago.

A full moratorium on fracking failed in the Illinois legislature last year, and representatives from the coalition of environmental groups that negotiated the new law have argued that compromise was better than nothing. But Steingraber believes that the lack of regulation wasn’t a reason to give ground. “The industry was waiting for the rules of the road before it came in,” she says. “This bill is a green light. It’s a starting gun.”

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Illinois’ New Fracking Regulations Might Not Be So Tough After All

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Want to Know How Your Rep. Voted on Wall Street Regs? Check the Campaign Cash.

by Polly Browder Posted on June 17, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last week, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow US banks to get out of new financial regulations by operating through their overseas arms. Financial reformers say this is dangerous because markets are global, and a bad bet made by a US bank operating in another country could easily affect banks in the US and cause the US economy to crash again. Bad for America, but good for banks that want to avoid tough new rules. Perhaps that’s why lawmakers who received more money from banks and the finance industry in recent years were more likely to vote in favor of the bill. House members who supported the bill received more than twice as much in contributions from the financial industry over the past two years as lawmakers who voted against it, according to a new analysis from the MapLight Foundation, an independent research group that tracks campaign finance.

Interest groups supporting the bill, including securities and investment companies, banks, and chambers of commerce, contributed an average of 102 percent more to House members who supported the bill than to those who voted no. Check it out:

Democratic House members who voted yes on the bill received 75 percent more money from from the financial services industry than Democrats who voted no.

In 2011 and 2012, groups that supported this bill gave five times more to House members than groups that opposed the bill did. The gap was even larger for donations to Democrats. Over those two years, House Democrats received less than $250,000 from interests that opposed this measure. During the same time period, groups in favor of allowing the banks to skirt regulation gave Dems 28 times as much—close to $7 million. Here’s what that looks like:

What’s remarkable is that some Democrats held firm. Although the bill passed the House last week by a vote of 301 to 124, most Democrats voted against it, which financial reformers say is a significant turn of events. “A majority of Democrats voted against a pro-Wall Street bill…even though it was co-sponsored by Democrats… that was heavily lobbied by Wall Street and everyone had predicted would win by a landslide,” Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, told Mother Jones after the vote last week. “I’m pretty psyched.”

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Want to Know How Your Rep. Voted on Wall Street Regs? Check the Campaign Cash.

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Is This Conservative Think Tank Astroturfing the EPA To Approve Pebble Mine?

by Guadalupe Scharff Posted on June 17, 2013

Mother Jones

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Are pro-mining forces trying to sway the Environmental Protection Agency on Pebble Mine?

Last month, I reported on the potential environmental threats posed by the massive proposed gold and copper mine in Alaska. The EPA conducted a watershed analysis, released in April, that showed that the mine would endanger rivers and the Bristol Bay, as well as the region’s salmon fishery. The EPA extended the comment period through the end of June, allowing more time for the public to weigh in.

A number of organizations, both pro- and anti-Pebble, had circulated mass mailings asking supporters to comment. You’ve seen the type; they’re form letters that people can sign onto via email. As of Friday, pro-mining groups had generated 118,294 comments from those mass mailings. But 117,401 of those comments—or 99.25 percent—came from a single group called Resourceful Earth. Here’s a sample of one of its letters:

I am writing to voice my strong opposition to the EPA’s draft watershed assessment for the vast Bristol Bay region of Alaska because it sets a dangerous precedent, is wholly unnecessary, and relies on dubious source material from biased anti-mining organizations and scientists that recently admitted to falsifying reports submitted in legal proceedings.

Resourceful Earth is a project of the conservative think-tank Competitive Enterprise Institute. Started in 2011, the project’s mission is to “promote access to natural resources and oppose special interests that abuse the regulatory process to lock up the raw materials of prosperity.” CEI is generally opposed to environmental regulations, and has taken millions of dollars over the years from industry like ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, and groups associated with the Koch brothers. CEI was critical of the EPA the last time the agency used the Clean Water Act to block a permit for a coal mine in West Virginia (which is what activists in Alaska are asking it to do on Pebble).

CEI President Fred Smith also signed onto a letter from conservative groups opposing the assessment of Pebble sent to the EPA on June 4. Other groups signing onto that letter include Americans for Limited Government, Americans for Prosperity, and Americans for Tax Reform.

The Save Bristol Bay coalition—which is working to block Pebble Mine—tallied all the comments from the EPA’s docket. As of Friday, the agency had received 424,492 comments. The vast majority—306,198—were against the mine and in support of the EPA’s evaluation of the risks. Many of those came from major environmental groups as well, including Trout Unlimited, Earthworks, and the Sierra Club.

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Is This Conservative Think Tank Astroturfing the EPA To Approve Pebble Mine?

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House Passes Bill That Could Lead to Another Financial Crash—But Reformers Claim Victory

by Claudette Posted on June 13, 2013

Mother Jones

On Wednesday evening, the House passed a bipartisan bill that would allow US banks to avoid new financial regulations by operating overseas. But financial reformers are seizing on a silver lining: most Democrats voted against the bill—something one financial reformer calls a “miracle”—signaling a tougher-than-expected road ahead for similar efforts to scale back new rules on banks that crashed the economy a few years ago, and making the bill’s passage in the Democratic-controlled Senate less likely.

“In our defeatist, Eeyore sort of way, we won today,” says Bart Naylor, a financial policy advocate at the consumer group Public Citizen.

“I’m pretty psyched about the vote,” says Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, a group of national and state organizations that advocate for Main Street-friendly financial rules. “A majority of Democrats voted against a pro-Wall Street bill… even though it was co-sponsored by Democrats… that was heavily lobbied by Wall Street and everyone had predicted would win by a landslide.”

The bill in question, the clunkily titled Swap Jurisdiction Certainty Act, was introduced earlier this year by Reps. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), Mike Conaway (R-Tex.), John Carney (D-Del.), and David Scott (D-Ga.). It would exempt foreign arms of US banks from the new regulations on derivatives (which are financial products with values derived from from underlying variables, such as crop prices or interest rates) that are required by the Dodd-Frank Act, the big post-crisis Wall Street reform law.

When Garrett introduced the bill, he described it as an effort to stem government overreach, saying, “Our job creators—millions being crushed by overly burdensome Washington rules and regulations—deserve to be on a fair, level playing field with the international community.” But financial reformers say the legislation would just encourage banks to move risky activities to their less regulated overseas subsidiaries. And since the derivatives market is global, if, for example, JPMorgan Chase’s London office made some bad bets, the trading loss would immediately poison JPMorgan’s US-based offices, and the broader US economy could come tumbling down again.

The House financial services committee passed the bill a few weeks ago, with just 11 Democrats and no Republicans on the 61-member committee voting against it. But Wall Street reformers and their allies in Congress, including Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), rallied the troops, and changed some minds. On Wednesday, 122 out of 195 Democrats voted against the bill, while only 2 Republicans voted against. It passed 301 to 124.

This is a “huge comeback for Maxine Waters,” and financial reformers, says Jeff Connaughton, former investment banker, lobbyist, and author of The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins. Past moves to weaken financial regulation have often had strong bipartisan support. But it’s now clear that “there is a large constituency in Congress who want to defend financial reform efforts,” Stanley says. The fact that most of the Democratic caucus was willing to buck Wall Street’s wishes and oppose this bill could help stiffen the spines of regulators, reformers argue. The vote “sends an important message that people are just not going to roll over for Wall Street trying to gut this stuff,” Stanley adds.

Reformers hope that Democratic disapproval of this bill could imperil other attacks on rules governing US banks’ foreign operations. Wall Street is currently lobbying regulators to weaken their rules governing how Dodd-Frank regulations would apply to US banks overseas (yes, the very rules Garrett’s bill would gut); some worry that the financial industry is also trying to roll back regulations on foreign operations through a giant free trade deal now being negotiated; and Europe, too, is calling US regulators’ proposed overseas rules too aggressive.

If US banks overseas are allowed to run wild and unregulated, they will concentrate business in less-regulated foreign markets, Naylor says. That’s bad news: Almost every major financial scandal involving derivatives has involved trades conducted through a foreign entity. Sooner or later, Naylor says, “Either a spreadsheet error or a rogue trader will bring down an investment firm. American taxpayers then face the Hobson’s Choice of… bailing out the bank…or watching the destruction.”

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House Passes Bill That Could Lead to Another Financial Crash—But Reformers Claim Victory

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