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Obama’s latest green move: Banning drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay

by FinlayYgqh Posted on December 17, 2014

Salmon Chanted Evening

Obama’s latest green move: Banning drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay

By on 17 Dec 2014commentsShare

President Obama took another step today to build up his green legacy, just the latest in a recent string of pro-environment actions. He protected Alaska’s Bristol Bay, a major environmental and economic resource, by withdrawing the waters indefinitely from future oil and gas drilling. The Huffington Post’s Kate Sheppard reports:

Obama said in a video Tuesday that he had issued a memorandum withdrawing the region from all future oil and gas lease sales. The region, he said, “is a beautiful, natural wonder and it’s something that is too precious for us to be putting out to the highest bidder.” The region is the source of 40 percent of the wild-caught fish in the United States, and its fishing industry generates $2 billion each year.

The George W. Bush administration opened 5.6 million acres of the North Aleutian Basin for oil and gas leasing in 2007. In March 2010, Obama withdrew the area from offshore lease sales through 2017. Tuesday’s announcement extends those protections indefinitely.

The White House also noted that the bay is home to one of the world’s largest wild salmon runs, driving $100 million in tourism every year, and to many threatened and endangered species, including beluga and killer whales and the North Pacific right whale.

The move prompted excitement among environmental groups. “The administration’s decision to protect Bristol Bay is a huge win for both Bristol Bay fishermen and the region’s coastal communities,” Margaret Williams, managing director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Arctic program, told The Wall Street Journal.

Even Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R), usually of the “Drill, Baby, Drill” school of thinking, cautiously gave her nod of approval: “Given the lack of interest by industry and the public divide over allowing oil and gas exploration in this area, I am not objecting to this decision at this time,” she said in a statement. “I think we all recognize that these are some of our state’s richest fishing waters.”

The Department of the Interior is expected to announce the offshore areas where it will allow oil and gas drilling early next year.

Meanwhile, a decision on a massive proposed gold and copper mine, which potentially poses a bigger threat to Bristol Bay, is still outstanding. As The Wall Street Journal notes, “Tuesday’s announcement is separate from a forthcoming decision by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regarding the extent to which it intends to allow mining activity at the Pebble Mine site onshore around Bristol Bay.”

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Obama Bars Oil and Gas Development In Alaska’s Bristol Bay

, The Huffington Post.

Obama Blocks Oil and Natural Gas Drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay

, The Wall Street Journal.

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Obama’s latest green move: Banning drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay

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This Little History Lesson Should Terrify Vladimir Putin

by Donekola Posted on December 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Why did the Soviet Union lose control of its satellite states behind the Iron Curtain in 1989? Lots of reasons, but the proximate cause was a disastrous war in Afghanistan; plummeting oil prices; and a resulting economic crisis. Here is Yegor Gaidar:

The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms. As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive.

The Soviet leadership was confronted with a difficult decision on how to adjust….Instead of implementing actual reforms, the Soviet Union started to borrow money from abroad while its international credit rating was still strong. It borrowed heavily from 1985 to 1988, but in 1989 the Soviet economy stalled completely. The money was suddenly gone. The Soviet Union tried to create a consortium of 300 banks to provide a large loan for the Soviet Union in 1989, but was informed that only five of them would participate and, as a result, the loan would be twenty times smaller than needed.

The Soviet Union then received a final warning from the Deutsche Bank and from its international partners that the funds would never come from commercial sources. Instead, if the Soviet Union urgently needed the money, it would have to start negotiations directly with Western governments about so-called politically motivated credits. In 1985 the idea that the Soviet Union would begin bargaining for money in exchange for political concessions would have sounded absolutely preposterous to the Soviet leadership. In 1989 it became a reality, and Gorbachev understood the need for at least $100 billion from the West to prop up the oil-dependent Soviet economy.

….Government-to-government loans were bound to come with a number of rigid conditions. For instance, if the Soviet military crushed Solidarity Party demonstrations in Warsaw, the Soviet Union would not have received the desperately needed $100 billion from the West….The only option left for the Soviet elites was to begin immediate negotiations about the conditions of surrender. Gorbachev did not have to inform President George H. W. Bush at the Malta Summit in 1989 that the threat of force to support the communist regimes in Eastern Europe would not be employed. This was already evident at the time. Six weeks after the talks, no communist regime in Eastern Europe remained.

This sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it? War, sanctions, an oil crash, and finally bankruptcy. And while history may not repeat itself, it sure does rhyme sometimes: 25 years later Vladimir Putin has managed to back himself into a situation surprisingly similar to the one that led to the end of the Soviet Union and the final victory of the West—the very event that’s motivated almost everything he’s done over the past few years. This is either ironic or chilling, depending on your perspective.

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This Little History Lesson Should Terrify Vladimir Putin

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Gouging the Gougeable: Yet Another Triumph of the American Health Care System

by JillianLowin Posted on December 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Len Charlap has had a couple of outpatient echocardiograms recently. Elisabeth Rosenthal tallies up the damage:

The five hospitals within a 15-mile radius of Mr. Charlap’s home here charge an average of about $5,200 for an echocardiogram, according to an analysis of Medicare’s database. The seven teaching hospitals in Boston, affiliated with Harvard, Tufts and Boston University, charge an average of about $1,300 for the same test. There are even wide variations within cities: In Philadelphia, prices range from $700 to $12,000.

….In other countries, regulators set what are deemed fair charges, which include built-in profit. In Belgium, the allowable charge for an echocardiogram is $80, and in Germany, it is $115. In Japan, the price ranges from $50 for an older version to $88 for the newest, Dr. Ikegami said.

Because Mr. Charlap, 76, is on Medicare, which is aggressive in setting rates, he paid only about $80 toward the approximately $500 fee Medicare allows. But many private insurers continue to reimburse generously for echocardiograms billed at thousands of dollars, said Dr. Seth I. Stein, a New York physician who researches data on radiology. Hospitals pursue patients who are uninsured or underinsured for those payments, he added.

This is now such a common story that it’s hard to work up the outrage it deserve. Is this practice corrupt? Merely venal? Or just crazy? I don’t even know anymore. What I do know is that if an outpatient echo costs $80 in Belgium and $500 via Medicare, there’s no conceivable justification for a $5,200 charge. It bears no relationship to the actual cost of the test, and is designed primarily to gouge the occasional uninsured patient who has no choice in the matter along with the (inexplicable) occasional insurance company willing to pony up even for obviously outrageous charges. One of the hospitals that performed an echocardiogram on Charlap didn’t even bother denying that this is what they’re doing:

In a statement, the hospital in Princeton that performed Mr. Charlap’s first, more expensive echocardiogram noted that “the vast majority of customers” paid much less than the listed prices. It added that its pricing reflected the need to offset losses because many programs, including Medicare, reimburse less than the cost of delivering services.

I doubt that Medicare is reimbursing less than the cost of performing an echocardiogram, but you can see what’s going on here. The “vast majority” of patients do indeed pay far less than list price. So why have such a high list price? In order to gouge the tiny minority who are gougeable.

It’s lovely the way American medicine works, isn’t it?

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Gouging the Gougeable: Yet Another Triumph of the American Health Care System

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Quote of the Day: Russian Central Bank Decides It Needs to Destroy the Economy In Order to Save It

by CaseyHSJTjrd Posted on December 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Neil Irwin, commenting on the huge interest rate jump announced by Russia’s central bank in the wee hours of the morning:

It may go without saying, but a 6.5 percentage point emergency interest rate increase announced in the middle of the night is not a sign of strength.

Roger that. Russian central bankers hope that this will be an incentive for people to keep their money in Russia, earning high interest, instead of shipping rubles out of the country at warp speed and squirreling them away in any safe haven that comes to hand. And maybe it will work. Alternatively, as Irwin suggests, it may be viewed as a sign of desperation, causing Russia’s oligarchs to pile on the dilithium crystals and ship out their money even faster. You never know what’s going to work when a currency crisis goes into panic mode.

In any case, even if it works, the price is going to be high. Here in America, we argue about whether the Fed will choke off recovery if it raises interest rates to 2 percent. Russia is now at 17 percent. Even if this puts a halt to currency flight, it’s going to kill their economy. In Russia tonight, there are no good options left.

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Quote of the Day: Russian Central Bank Decides It Needs to Destroy the Economy In Order to Save It

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The Lima Climate Talks Actually Produced Something Important: An Idea

by LyndonQuintanil Posted on December 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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So what should we think about the recently concluded climate talks in Lima? They were, as usual, a dog’s breakfast. Rich countries fought their usual battles with poor ones. The talks nearly foundered completely. Over the weekend the wording of the draft agreement went from “weak to weaker to weakest,” in the words of Sam Smith, chief of climate policy for the environmental group WWF. And in the end, no legally binding limits were set on greenhouse gas emission.

That sounds pretty bad. And yet, something important happened in Lima. As weak as the final language turned out, it does do one thing: it asks every country on the planet to submit a plan to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. It doesn’t mandate what the plans should be. It doesn’t require any independent review of the plans. It doesn’t set out any timetables. But it does require a plan from everyone.

This is something new. It may not be legally binding, but then, no agreement was ever likely to be. For the first time ever, though, Lima enshrines the idea that every country should have a plan to fight climate change. This is similar to Obamacare, which is flawed in dozens of ways but, for the first time in American history, enshrined in law the idea that everyone should have access to affordable health coverage. Once you do that—once you get that kind of public agreement to an idea—you can use it as a building block. Eventually Obamacare will become universal health care. In the same way, Lima may eventually be the building block that produces a universal agreement to fight climate change on a global scale.

This is a fairly rosy view of the Lima agreement, and I don’t want to oversell it. Still, the mere principle that every country on the globe should have a formal plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is important. Once the plans are in place, they become a concrete starting point for climate activists everywhere. And then they go from weakest to weaker to weak to something that’s actually meaningful. Everywhere.

It’s not enough. But it’s something.

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The Lima Climate Talks Actually Produced Something Important: An Idea

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Krugman: “Russia Keeps Looking More Vulnerable to Crisis”

by mAskasieie45gg Posted on December 14, 2014

Mother Jones

Paul Krugman just left a conference in Dubai, and decided to write a bit about oil prices because all the geopolitical stuff he heard was pretty grim. But the oil stuff wasn’t that interesting. His one paragraph about geopolitics is:

My other thought is that Venezuela-with-nukes (Russia) keeps looking more vulnerable to crisis. Long-term interest rates at almost 13 percent, a plunging currency, and a lot of private-sector institutions with large foreign-currency debts. You might imagine that large foreign exchange reserves would allow the government to bail out those in trouble, but the markets evidently don’t think so. This is starting to look very serious.

Yes it is, and the reference to Venezuela-with-nukes is telling. A Russian economic crash could just be a crash. That would be bad for Russia, bad for Europe, and bad for the world. But it would hardly be the first time a midsize economy crashed. It would be bad but manageable.

Except that Russia has Vladimir Putin, Russia has a pretty sizeable and fairly competent military, and Russia has nukes. Putin has spent his entire career building his domestic popularity partly by blaming the West for every setback suffered by the Russian people, and that anti-Western campaign has reached virulent proportions over the past year or two. If the Russian economy does crash, and Putin decides that the best way to ride it out is to demagogue Europe and the West as a way of deflecting popular anger away from his own ruinous policies, it’s hard to say what the consequences would be. When Argentina pursues a game plan like that, you end up with a messy court case and lots of diplomatic grandstanding. When Russia does it, things could go a lot further.

I have precious little sympathy for Putin, whose success—such as it is—is based on a toxic stew of insecurities and quixotic appetites that have expressed themselves in a destructive brand of crude nativism; reactionary bigotry; disdain for the rule of law, both domestic and international; narrow and myopic economic vision; and dependence on an outdated and illiberal oligarchy to retain power. Nonetheless, there are kernels of legitimate grievance buried in many of these impulses, as well as kernels of necessity given both Russia’s culture and the post-Cold War collapse of its economy that has left it perilously dependent on extractive industries.

I don’t know if it’s too late to use the kernels as building blocks to improve, if not actually repair, Western relations with Putin’s Russia. But it’s still worth trying. A Russian crash may or may not come, but it’s hardly out of the realm of possibility. And if it happens, even a modest rapprochement between East and West could help avoid a disastrous outcome.

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Krugman: “Russia Keeps Looking More Vulnerable to Crisis”

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Ted Cruz Shoots Self in Foot, Declares Victory

by Greg3678myvmzjm Posted on December 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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File this under “with friends like this, who needs enemies?”

Republican senators fumed as a strategy developed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) intended to undercut President Obama’s immigration action seemed to backfire, giving Democrats a chance to move a batch of controversial Obama administration appointments.

….Saturday’s session was required after conservative Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) objected to an effort by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) late Friday to adjourn the Senate for the weekend….He and Cruz had sought to force a vote to strip out funding that would be used to implement Obama’s plan to halt deportations for as many as 5 million immigrants.

Without the ability to leave for the weekend, Reid instead began the process of bringing 20 long-stalled nominations to a vote, including Obama’s nominee for surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, who was a target of groups like the powerful National Rifle Assn. over his advocacy for stricter gun laws. Shortly after noon the Senate began the first of what could be 40 procedural votes that could lead to confirming all the nominees by the end of the week.

The Cruz/Lee proposal was entirely symbolic in not just one, but two separate ways:

It was merely a “point of order” to express opposition to funding President Obama’s executive order on immigration. It would have accomplished nothing.
It had little chance of passing anyway.

So now everyone has to spin their wheels on the Senate floor over the weekend instead of seeing their families or watching the Army-Navy game. By itself, that might deserve only the world’s tiniest violin. But as long they’re there and have some extra time, Harry Reid decided to start the process of approving a whole bunch of Obama nominations that otherwise might have dropped off the calendar later in the week as senators began pressing to start the holiday recess. That meant Obama’s nominees would have had to face a Republican Senate in January, but now, thanks to Cruz and Lee, they’ll all be safely in office by then.

I’m sure the NRA is thrilled. Ditto for all the Republicans who were apoplectic over the nomination of Tony Blinken as deputy secretary of state. And megadittoes—with a megadose of irony—for Cruz, Lee, and all their tea party buddies who objected to confirming Sarah Saldaña to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Their objection, of course, was meant as a protest against Obama’s executive order on immigration. Now, thanks to a dumb little stunt that was pathetic even as an empty protest against Obama’s immigration plan, they’re going to lose an actual, substantive protest against an Obama immigration nominee. Nice work, guys.

But I guess it’s a nice big platter of red meat that plays well with the rubes. With Cruz, that’s all that counts.

UPDATE: You gotta love this:

Only the Democrats seemed able to wrest a modicum of enjoyment from the day’s proceedings. Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, said that it was “inconvenient to be here voting around the clock” but that he was “kind of pleased at how it’s working out.” Mr. Cardin said, “We will get these confirmations done, and we may not have gotten them done otherwise.” And as Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican, struggled to explain to a group of reporters just what Mr. Cruz was trying to achieve, Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, loped by and clapped him on the shoulder.

“Let me know if you need backup,” Mr. Booker said with a grin.

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Ted Cruz Shoots Self in Foot, Declares Victory

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Disneyland Is the Latest Victim of Thin-Skinned 1-Percenters

by SamGresswell Posted on December 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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If you don’t live in Southern California—or if you do, but have a life—you might not be aware of Club 33, a “secret” club at Disneyland coveted by the rich and famous as a hideway from the hoi polloi at the park. (And, not coincidentally, the only place at Disneyland that serves alcoholic beverages.) It’s so coveted, in fact, that there’s no waiting list for membership. Years ago, it got so long that Disneyland just closed it.

Today, the LA Times passes along breaking news that has outraged the 1% who are the primary (only?) denizens of the place:

For access to what is billed as “the most exclusive address in all of Disneyland” — Club 33 — many members pay $11,000 a year….The current uproar has to do with how many extra VIP cards are allotted to platinum members.

The cards allow a lucky few to enjoy many of the benefits of a member, including access to Disney parks and dining at the secretive Club 33 restaurant, tucked away in Disneyland’s New Orleans Square….But last week, platinum members received a letter that said in 2015 only the member and a spouse or domestic partner would have Club 33 benefits, while the price for the platinum level would rise to $12,000….A current platinum VIP cardholder was enraged. “It really has just turned to a money game for them.”

OMG! “It really has just turned to a money game for them.” This is mighty rich coming from someone who is almost certainly wealthy as hell and probably considers himself a rock-jawed supporter of laissez-faire capitalism. But if Disneyland raises the price and changes the terms of a product that obviously has far more demand than supply, why, it’s just an example of a bunch of ruthless money-grubbers taking advantage of the downtrodden. How dare they?

Plus he’s dead wrong anyway. First of all, last I looked Disney was a public corporation widely admired in the business world for its money-making prowess. Of course it’s a money game for them. Second, the waiting list for Club 33 is so long that it’s closed. Quite plainly, they could double or triple the price of a platinum card and keep their membership at the same level. In other words, if they really were just ruthless money-grubbers, they could instantly double or triple their revenues for Club 33 with the stroke of a pen. The fact that they haven’t done this clearly suggests some combination of loyalty to longtime members along with an understandable desire to avoid a PR headache.

Anyway, that’s Orange County for you. Home of conservative Republicans who have an abiding faith in the free market when they’re the ones setting the rules, but get in a snit when they themselves end up on the business end of the not-so-invisible hand. You can file this under the shockingly thin skins of the rich when they aren’t treated with the fawning deference they all think is their birthright.

UPDATE: Here’s a note for aficionados of behavioral economics. As near as I can tell, the outrage here is not over the modest 9 percent price increase. It’s over the loss of a perk. This is an example of people responding far more strongly to loss than to gain. And in this case it’s especially irksome because it’s the loss of a perk that allows a member to very publicly show off their status. “Going to Disneyland? Here, why don’t you take one of my VIP cards and eat at Club 33. It’s great.” This is a chance to do a favor for someone and show off your ownership of a normally invisible status symbol that money can’t buy. But now it’s gone.

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Disneyland Is the Latest Victim of Thin-Skinned 1-Percenters

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All About That Wall Street Giveaway That Elizabeth Warren Hates

by LinetteMHY Posted on December 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday evening, lawmakers released the text of the massive spending bill that Congress must approve to avoid a government shutdown. Buried on page 615 of that 1,603-page piece of legislation is a provision entirely unrelated to government funding that a few lawmakers managed to sneak into the bill without any public debate during last-minute negotiations. It’s a Wall Street giveaway—written by Citigroup—that would allow banks to engage in more types of risky trading with taxpayer-backed money. Progressive Democrats and their allies have since launched an all-out campaign to strike the Citi-written provision from the spending bill. Elizabeth Warren railed against the provision on the Senate floor Thursday afternoon, warning, “A vote for this bill is a vote for taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street.” As of Thursday afternoon, it was unclear whether House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) could secure enough votes to pass the spending bill containing this measure and send it to the Senate. (Update: The bill passed the House.)

Here are the problems with the Citigroup-drafted provision, according to Michael Greenberger, a former derivatives regulator at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission who is now a law professor at the University of Maryland.

What is so bad about this provision? If Congress okays this measure, taxpayers could be on the hook in the event of another financial crisis. This provision guts the so-called push-out rule created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act. This rule forbids banks from trading certain derivatives—complicated financial instruments with values derived from underlying variables, such as crop prices or interest rates. Instead, banks would have to shift these high-risk trades into separate nonbank affiliates that aren’t insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and are less likely to receive taxpayer bailouts. If the Citi-written measure becomes law, the largest FDIC-insured banks in the country will be able to make a wider range of these risky trades.

What will happen if there’s another financial crisis? If there’s an economic downturn triggered by derivatives trading gone bad, banks will be able to count on a taxpayer bailout—just like they received in 2008. “It’s very dangerous,” Greenberger says. “If banks lose on this type of trading and that causes a disruption in the markets, the taxpayer will be confronted with whether to let the banks fail or bail them out to the tune of trillions of dollars.”

Could taxpayers be at risk even in boom times? Yep. In 2012, JPMorgan Chase lost $6 billion on a bad trade that has come to be known as the London Whale. “JPMorgan was essentially gambling with FDIC-insured money, secure in the knowledge that major losses would be borne by the public while profits would stay in the bank,” David Dayan wrote in Salon last year. JPMorgan, it turned out, was able to withstand that loss without a bailout, but a lot of other US banks couldn’t, Greenberger explains: “You could have a trade that loses a lot more than $6 billion by a rogue trader, in which case taxpayers have to foot the bill.”

How were lawmakers able to sneak this into the big appropriations bill? It’s common for lawmakers to force bills through Congress by attaching them to larger must-pass legislation. The practice is part of the wheeling and dealing that allows Republicans and Democrats to come to agreement on major legislation. But, Greenberger says, “putting these substantive provisions in appropriations bills is very, very dangerous stuff…If you want a controversial provision in there that you couldn’t get in under regular order, this is the way to do it.” He adds, “Then the president has problems vetoing it because the government will shut down. It’s a bad way to do business.”

If Congress approves this measure, what does it mean for economic populism? “Economic populism is alive and well,” Greenberger maintains. “It’s just that nobody in leadership wants to take advantage of it, whether they’re Republican or Democrat.” Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle worked to push the Citi-written provision into the spending bill.

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All About That Wall Street Giveaway That Elizabeth Warren Hates

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Watch Elizabeth Warren Slam Republicans For Doing Citibank’s Dirty Work

by CyrilLackvyfr Posted on December 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday afternoon, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) took to the Senate floor to rail against a Wall Street giveaway that corporate-friendly lawmakers snuck into the massive spending bill that Congress needs to pass this week in order to avert a government shutdown. The measure—which was written by Citigroup—would allow big banks like Citigroup to engage in a broader range of risky trades with taxpayer-backed money. “A vote for this bill is a vow for taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street,” Warren warned in her speech. Here’s the whole thing.

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Watch Elizabeth Warren Slam Republicans For Doing Citibank’s Dirty Work

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