Tag Archives: regulatory affairs

GOP Bill To Hogtie Wall Street Watchdog Heads for Vote

by SelenaKil Posted on May 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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A bill designed to tie the hands of a key Wall Street regulator is headed for a vote in the House this week.

The SEC Regulatory Accountability Act, introduced by Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) and co-sponsored by 23 other Republicans, sounds innocuously administrative. The bill would direct the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) “to conduct cost-benefit analyses to ensure that the benefits of any rulemaking outweigh the costs,” according to a statement by the House Financial Services Committee. Plus, says Garrett, the bill is good for jobs, job-creators, and people who want jobs. “The American people are hungry for common sense reform that will help unleash the economy,” he said in a statement. “I regularly hear from constituents, especially job creators, about how Washington red tape needs to be cut.”

But financial reform advocates say the bill could kill tons of new regulations designed to rein in the industry that crashed the economy a few years ago. “Cost-benefit has become a favorite club used by industry to try and kill legislation,” Dennis Kelleher of the financial reform group Better Markets told me earlier this year. The SEC is in the process of finalizing scores of new rules required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, and reformers say Garrett’s bill would force the agency to study the impacts of regulations before they are known, and require analysis that would delay final rules. Not only that, says Kelleher, but the cost-benefit analysis the bill calls for includes only “industry costs,” not potential longer term costs to the broader economy that could result from killing these rules. For example, the SEC would have to consider the cost of to industry of making foreign banks adhere to US regulations, but not the cost to the global economy of allowing those banks to be regulated by potentially weaker foreign rules. (Many federal agencies are required to consider cost-benefit analyses when developing major rules, but the SEC and other independent agencies—those outside federal executive departments that are headed by a Cabinet secretary—are exempt.)

The White House slammed Garrett’s bill when it was approved by the House rules committee Wednesday, arguing that it would keep the SEC from doing its job. “The Administration believes in the value of cost-benefit analysis,” the White House Office of Management and Budget said in a statement. “However, the bill would add onerous procedures that would threaten the implementation of key reforms related to financial stability and investor protection.” Still, the president stopped short of saying he’d veto the bill.

As my colleague Tim Murphy reported Wednesday, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House rules committee, attempted to stymie the deregulatory bill by attaching an amendment that would have required political intelligence operatives to register under the Lobbying Disclosure Act and disclose their clients. It was voted down.

Now the GOP bill is headed to the House floor for a vote by Friday. Kelleher has his fingers crossed that the bill doesn’t make it into law. “Financial reform does not exist to minimize cost on the industry that almost caused a second great depression,” he says.

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GOP Bill To Hogtie Wall Street Watchdog Heads for Vote

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State Department Forces Texas Law Student to Take Down Instructions for 3-D-Printed Guns

by Aaron Dempsey Posted on May 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Defense Distributed, the Texas-based company specializing in 3-D-printed plastic firearms, took down its downloadable files on Thursday at the request of the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Control Compliance. The company posted a blueprint for the first fully-operational printed plastic handgun, “The Liberator,” on Monday at its site, DEFCAD; the file was downloaded more than a 100,000 times in its first three days.

In a letter to the company’s founder, Cody Wilson, the State Department alleged that the Defense Distributed’s file-sharing service violated the terms of the Arms Export Control Act, and demanded that it take down 10 of its files, including the Liberator, within three weeks.

“Our theory’s a good one, but I just didn’t ask them and I didn’t tell them what we were gonna do,” Wilson, a University of Texas law student, told Mother Jones. “So I think it’s gonna end up being alright, but for now they’re asserting information control over the technical data, because the Arms Information Control Act governs not just actual arms, but technical data, pictures, anything related to arms.”

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State Department Forces Texas Law Student to Take Down Instructions for 3-D-Printed Guns

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WATCH: Apple Doesn’t Evade Taxes, It iEvades Them Fiore Cartoon

by Shannon Walters Posted on May 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: Apple Doesn’t Evade Taxes, It iEvades Them Fiore Cartoon

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Republicans Boycott Vote on Obama’s EPA Pick

by p555nf Posted on May 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee boycotted a Thursday morning meeting in which they were supposed to vote on the nomination of Gina McCarthy to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Republicans on the committee complained that she had not yet adequately responded to their questions.

The vote had been scheduled for 9:15 a.m. on Thursday, but none of the committee’s Republican members showed up.

Politico reports on what transpired:

Committee ranking member David Vitter (R-La.) announced the boycott by all eight GOP members around 8:30 a.m., saying they would deny the panel a quorum because McCarthy and the EPA haven’t provided answers to the questions they’d posed.
Democrats have noted that the questions totaled more than 1,000 — what they call a record. Republicans also had five “requests” for EPA on issues such as how the agency handles outside groups’ threats of litigation — though Democrats said the GOP senators were actually asking the agency to offer major concessions in how it conducts public business.

Democrats on the committee were quick to attack Republicans for this “obstruction.” Committee chair Barbara Boxer noted that the vote had already been delayed for three weeks to accommodate the panel’s Republican members.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid railed on the effort to block McCarthy in a statement on Thursday, noting that the GOP has also blocked President Obama’s nominee to head the Department of Labor, Thomas Perez. “This type of blanket, partisan obstruction used to be unheard of,” Reid said. “Now it has become an unacceptable pattern.”

The blockade on McCarthy is even more noteworthy because, as we’ve reported here before, she worked for Mitt Romney back when he was governor of Massachusetts, as well as Connecticut’s Republican former Gov. Jodi Rell.

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Republicans Boycott Vote on Obama’s EPA Pick

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Bills That Would Gut Wall Street Reform Overwhelmingly Pass House Committee

by Andrianayhv Posted on May 8, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, three bills that would gut the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill passed the House Financial Services Committee (HFSC) in decisive fashion, with just six members of the 61-member committee voting against all of them.

The three bills passed over serious objections from the Obama administration. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew wrote a letter to Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), the chairman of the committee, urging “members to oppose these bills and others like them that would weaken the important regulatory changes that Wall Street Reform has made to the derivatives market.” A year ago, former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner made a similar statement against a slate of nearly identical bills.

Financial reform advocates say that the three bills would do serious damage to parts of Dodd-Frank that deal with derivatives, which are financial products with values based on underlying numbers, like crop prices or interest rates.

Only six of the 28 Democrats on the committee voted against all three of the bills—Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the senior Democratic member of the committee; Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.); Mike Capuano (D-Mass.); Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.); Al Green (D-Tex.); and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.). Another six Democrats voted against some of the bills. Sixteen Dems voted in favor of all three bills. Thirty-one of the 33 Republicans on the committee voted for all the bills; Reps. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.) and Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) abstained on two of the bills.

House Financial Services Committee members received some $14.8 million in contributions from the financial services and banking sectors during the last election cycle.

One of the offending bills would allow certain derivatives that are traded within a corporation to be exempt from almost all new Dodd-Frank regulations. The second would expand the types of trading risks that banks can take on. The third would allow big US-based multinational banks to escape US regulations by operating through international subsidiaries. Financial reform advocates say it is way too early to start messing with Wall Street reform, especially since key parts of Dodd-Frank have yet to go into effect.

In an opening statement before the vote, Waters listed a series of financial scandals in the wake of the 2007 crisis that she argues make strong financial regulations imperative. “These scandals include, but aren’t limited to, money laundering to drug cartels, Libor interest rate manipulation, and the case of the ‘London Whale,'” the nick-name for JPMorgan’s massive trading loss last year, she said.

The bills will now head to the House floor for consideration, and have a good chance of being taken up in the Senate.

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Bills That Would Gut Wall Street Reform Overwhelmingly Pass House Committee

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4,693 People in America Died on the Job in 2011

by pawel Posted on May 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Workplaces dangers have been in the news more than usual lately, from the deadly explosion at the West, Texas, fertilizer plant to the garment factory collapse in Bangladesh, where the death toll is now more than 700. In light of the latter, there is the temptation to say that what happened in Texas was an anomaly, and that conditions in US factories are so much better than in the developing world. But not so fast: A new report from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the nation’s largest affiliation of unions, shows that 4,693 people died the job in the US in 2011 (the most recent year for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics has released figures).

According to the “Death on the Job” report, the most dangerous occupations in the US in 2011 were in the agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting sectors; mining and transportation were also near the top of the list. The average fatality rate across all occupations was 3.5 deaths per 100,000 workers.

While the numbers are much lower than they were back in 1970, when 13,800 employees died on the job, the AFL-CIO notes that that fatality rate has not improved since 2008. And another estimated 50,000 workers die each year from work-related diseases like cancers and lung ailments.

Part of the issue, the AFL-CIO concludes, is that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) remains underfunded and understaffed, and that penalties are too low to deter violations:

Because of the underfunding, federal OSHA inspectors can only inspect workplaces once every 131 years on average, and state OSHA inspectors would take 76 years to inspect all workplaces.
OSHA penalties are too low to be taken seriously, let alone provide deterrence. The average penalty is only $2,156 for a serious federal health and safety violation, and only $974 for a state violation. Even in cases involving worker fatalities, the median total penalty was a paltry $5,175 for federal OSHA and $4,200 for the OSHA state plans. By contrast, property damage valued between $300 and $10,000 in the state of Illinois is considered a Class 4 felony and can carry a prison sentence of 1 to 3 years and a fine of up to $25,000.
Criminal penalties under OSHA are also weak. While there were 320 criminal enforcement cases initiated under federal environmental laws and 231 defendants charged in FY 2012, only 84 cases related to worker deaths have been prosecuted since 1970.

Read the full report here. Also be sure to check out the Center for Public Integrity’s reporting on workplace safety in the chemical, steel, and fishing industries.

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4,693 People in America Died on the Job in 2011

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Study: 1 in 5 Youth at Risk for Suicide Have a Gun at Home

by cuppyteen Posted on May 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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A new study by leading pediatricians has found that nearly 20 percent of young people between the ages of 10 and 21 who are considered to be at risk for suicide have guns in their homes. The study is being presented Monday at the annual Pediatric Academic Societies meeting in Washington, following a symposium held Saturday that also addressed youth gun suicides, media violence, and gun violence prevention.

For the study, 524 patients were surveyed using a standard suicide assessment screening: 17 percent of the 151 patients determined to be suicide risks said they lived in a home with guns; 31 percent said they knew how to access the guns, and the same number said they knew how to access ammunition; 15 percent said they could get their hands on both.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide is the third leading cause of death of people between the ages of 10 and 24. Among that age group, guns are the top method of suicide. Research elsewhere suggests that having access to guns increases the likelihood that suicidal people will actually kill themselves.

In 1996, the National Rifle Association successfully lobbied for an amendment to an appropriations bill that gutted the CDC’s gun violence research budget. “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control…may be used to advocate or promote gun control,” the amendment read. Since its passage, the agency has been almost entirely absent from gun research, leaving such studies up to others. This January, President Obama announced plans to direct the CDC to resume studying the causes and prevention of gun violence.

Gun rights advocates and groups like the NRA have continued to argue that gun violence studies are politically motivated, and might build a case for greater gun control. After the Tucson shooting in 2011, for instance, NRA chief lobbyist Chris Cox told the New York Times, “Our concern is not with legitimate medical science. Our concern is they were promoting the idea that gun ownership was a disease that needed to be eradicated.” Some have even argued that Obama’s move to restart the research is illegal.

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Study: 1 in 5 Youth at Risk for Suicide Have a Gun at Home

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After MoJo Story, Treasury Department Clarifies Its Stance on Financial Reform Bills

by london Posted on April 25, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, Mother Jones ran a story on how newly-minted Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is reluctant to take a stand against a series of Wall Street deregulation bills now being considered by the House Financial Services Committee. After the story pubbed, a spokeswoman for Treasury got in touch with Mother Jones to clarify its position.

Last year, Geithner slammed a series of seven bills that would have deregulated Wall Street banks. Those bills never made it to the Senate before the last Congress ended, but a spate of nearly identical bills are being considered again. When asked by Mother Jones whether Lew would echo Geithner’s opposition to them, Lew’s office had no comment, but pointed to recent testimony by another Treasury official warning against messing with the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act, the sweeping 2010 law aimed at preventing another 2008-style financial crisis.

Once the story started making the rounds, a spokeswoman for Lew called Mother Jones. “Of course the Treasury secretary would oppose any effort to weaken Wall Street reform,” she said. She pointed to Lew’s recent comments on Bloomberg television. “The purpose of Dodd-Frank was to make sure the American taxpayer would never again be in the position where they had to step in when banks failed,” he told the news channel. “We are committed to that purpose.”

Lew’s spokeswoman also pointed out that Geithner made his statement condemning the bills last year after several of the them had already moved out of committee, and some had passed the House. “We didn’t send the letter until after committee mark up, not while the bills were still in committee,” she said. “It doesn’t mean it won’t happen.” Reformers complain that silence—or stalling, as it may be—on Lew’s part corresponds with Obama administration’s general reluctance to protect Dodd-Frank from attacks on all sides, whether that be in the courts, or regulatory agencies, or in Congress.

The seven deregulatory bills have been presented as technical fixes to Dodd-Frank, but most of them aren’t. One bill would allow certain derivatives that are traded among a corporation’s various affiliates to be exempt from almost all new Dodd-Frank regulations. Another measure would expand the types of trading risks that banks can take on. A third bill would allow big multinational US banks to escape US regulations by operating through international arms.

Financial reform advocates say it’s way too early to alter Dodd-Frank, because even though it is technically the law of the land, regulatory agencies have yet to finish crafting it into rules that can be enforced. Whatever Lew’s reasons for waiting to denounce lawmakers’ efforts to gut Wall Street reform, reform advocates are hoping he’ll stick to a recent promise his spokeswoman pointed to: “We have to finish implementing Dodd-Frank,” he said on CNBC. “I’m committed to using the authority that I have to drive that process forward.”

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After MoJo Story, Treasury Department Clarifies Its Stance on Financial Reform Bills

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Study: Siri Doesn’t Make Texting While Driving Any Safer

by dig1iti43 Posted on April 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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April is Distracted Driving Awareness Month, a time when safety and transportation experts beg, plead and cajole Americans to put down their phones while driving, lest they become a murderer behind the wheel. It’s a thankless job, as American drivers suffer from some serious delusions about their abilities to pilot a car safely while texting their girlfriends, shopping on eBay, or dialing in to Rush Limbaugh. Despite the fact that a quarter of all motor vehicle crashes today involve cell phone use, Americans still think it’s only other drivers who are the problem. More than 90 percent of drivers think other drivers texting or using cell phones behind the wheel are a threat to their personal safety, yet two in three of them do it anyway, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

Elected officials have been reluctant to address the problem, passing legislation that reinforces drivers’ delusions—like the law here in DC that allows people to drive and talk on the phone so long as they use a hands-free device, even though there’s no evidence that talking on a Bluetooth is any safer than just holding up the old phone. (Spend some time in DC cabs to get a sense of how well this law is working out.)

Phone companies have been trying to come up with technical solutions that might head off further attempts by lawmakers to curb cell phone use while driving. The latest of these has been the suggestion that Siri can help. The idea is that simply talking to your phone to send a text rather than punching in the message would somehow allow people to keep their eyes on the road and drive safely while texting. As it turns out, the notion that an app will save lives is as faulty as the promise that the Bluetooth would.

A new study out from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute this month found that:

Driver response time was terrible regardless of whether the driver was manually texting or using Siri.
Texting drivers of any sort took twice as long to react to roadway hazards than when they were off the phone.
Texting drivers spent a lot of time not looking at the road, regardless of whether they were using a voice-to-text app.
Manual texting was actually quicker than using a voice app, but driving performance was equally bad in both cases.

The new study also found a new form of distracted driving delusions: Drivers felt less safe when they were texting, but they felt safer using a voice app than texting manually, even though their performance on the road was equally dangerous.

Moral of the story: When you get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, just put down the damn phone! And just as a chilling reminder of why this is important, watch this video:

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Study: Siri Doesn’t Make Texting While Driving Any Safer

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Here’s Why the NRA Won and Gabby Giffords and Mike Bloomberg Lost

by gammak Posted on April 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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More MoJo coverage of the Senate’s failed background check bill.


Here’s Why the NRA Won and Gabby Giffords and Mike Bloomberg Lost


“Shame On You!”: Senate Rejects Gun Background Check Compromise


Meet the 45 Senators Who Blocked Background Checks


Why Did These 4 Democrats Vote No on Gun Background Checks?


Have You Seen Mitch McConnell’s Facebook Page?


10 Reasons the Background Check Bill Means Victory for the NRA


Map: Most Americans Support Background Checks for All Gun Buyers

Also read our special report on gun laws and the rise of mass shootings.

On NBC’s Meet the Press last month, National Rifle Association honcho Wayne LaPierre, the face of the American gun lobby, delivered this message to New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg: “He’s going to find out that this is a country of the people, by the people, and for the people, and he can’t spend enough of his $27 billion to try to impose his will on the American public. He can’t buy America.” The day before, Bloomberg had announced that he would spend $12 million of his own money on an ad blitz pressing members of Congress to pass new legislation expanding background checks for gun purchases. LaPierre went on national television to tell the mayor that all those millions wouldn’t make the difference in the fight in Congress over new gun laws.

Guess what? LaPierre was right.

The Manchin-Toomey background check legislation that died in the Senate on Wednesday had everything going for it. Bipartisan sponsorship by two centrist senators. The support of 90 percent of Americans. President Obama’s full-throated backing. The momentum for reform created by tragedy and sympathetic advocates with gripping stories—ex-Rep. Gabby Giffords, the Newtown families. All the pieces were there.

Yet it failed. The bill won a 54-vote majority but fell short of the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to pass new laws, a high hurdle that progressives decry as undemocratic. But the main reason it failed—and this is the key point for gun-control advocates—is because the NRA has unrivaled political power, the kind of influence and muscle that Bloomberg, the Brady Campaign, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Organizing for Action, Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly, and the rest of the gun-control lobby can only dream of.

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Here’s Why the NRA Won and Gabby Giffords and Mike Bloomberg Lost

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