Later On

Interesting article by Michael C. Dorf, a FindLaw columnist and the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law at Cornell University:

Last week, in Wyeth v. Levine, the U.S. Supreme Court held that approval by the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the warnings on the packaging of the anti-nausea drug Phenergen did not invalidate a Vermont jury verdict. The jury awarded damages to Diana Levine for the loss of her arm, on the ground that the FDA-approved warnings were not adequate.

Wyeth was a legitimately difficult case, in which plausible arguments could be, and were, made for either result. On one hand, as Justice Alito, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia, argued in dissent, the FDA-approved label did in fact contain a bold-faced warning about the very injury that befell Levine: It said that Phenergen is safe when injected into a muscle or a vein, but if it accidentally enters an artery it can cause gangrene. Therefore, allowing tort liability for the drug manufacturer’s failure to warn of the gangrene risk (and the resulting risk of amputation) in more specific terms, does seem to undercut the whole point of FDA approval of warnings.

On the other hand, as the majority opinion authored by Justice Stevens emphasized, federal regulation of drugs and their labels has long been understood to supplement, rather than supplant, state tort suits. The Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act does not contain any language expressly forbidding state tort suits that have the incidental effect of requiring stronger warnings than those approved by the FDA. In fact, in 1976, Congress did add such language expressly "preempting" state tort suits, but only with respect to FDA approval of medical devices. Congress’ omission of any parallel preemption provision for approved drugs and their labels, the majority argued, was telling.

The merits of the Wyeth decision will be hotly debated for some time, and are well-summarized in two preview columns on this site by Anthony Sebok and Benjamin Zipursky (here and here). In this column, I shall call attention to an oddity of the Supreme Court’s preemption jurisprudence that Wyeth underscores: The Justices who tend to be most sympathetic to states’ rights claims when the issue is the scope of congressional power tend also to favor a broad view of federal preemption, even though preemption displaces state law with federal law; conversely, the Justices who take a broad view of congressional power tend to take a narrow view of preemption.

Below, I shall explore the possibility that the Court’s conservatives and liberals alike only pay lip service to considerations of federalism, caring more about ensuring the outcomes that fit their ideological predispositions…

Continue reading.

Interesting story:

The man at the center of a fraud scandal at the Treasury Department has been allowed to quietly quit and retire from his job as a government regulator, despite allegations that he allowed a bank to falsify financial records and amidst outcries from investigators who say the case shows how cozy government regulators have become with the banks and savings and loans they are supposed to be checking on.

Darrel Dochow, the West Coast regional director at the Office of Thrift Supervision who investigators say allowed IndyMac to backdate its deposits to hide its ill health, quit last Friday. Prior to his leaving, Dochow was removed from his position but remained on the government payroll while the Inspector General’s Office investigates the allegations against him.

Treasury Department Inspector General Eric Thorson announced in November his office would probe how Dochow allowed the IndyMac bank to essentially cook its books, making it appear in government filings that the bank had more deposits than it really did. But Thorson’s aides now say IndyMac wasn’t the only institution to get such cozy assistance from the official who should have been the cop on the beat.

Investigators say Dochow, who reportedly earned $230,000 a year, allowed IndyMac to register an $18 million capital injection it received in May in a report describing the bank’s financial condition in the end of March.

"They [IndyMac] were able to maintain their well-capitalized threshold and continue to use broker deposits to make loans," said Marla Freedman, an assistant Inspector General at Treasury. "Basically, while the institution was having financial difficulty, it kept the public from knowing earlier than it otherwise should have or would have."

In at least one instance, investigators say, banking regulators actually approached the bank with the suggestion of falsifying deposit dates to satisfy banking rules even if it disguised the bank’s health to the public.

Continue reading.

John Cole of Balloon Juice has a useful graph in this post:

Click to enlarge. A top marginal tax rate of 75% seems about right to me.

Here’s the introduction and essential links. At that link:

An Overview of Deep Capture

My argument has been widely misreported since I began making it in 2005. Therefore I am stating it here as nine straightforward claims that will be difficult to misunderstand or misconstrue. I have grouped them into those describing the setting, the crime, and the cover-up.

Chapters 1-3: The Setting

Chapter 1 – The Players

Over the last twenty years Wall Street has come to be dominated by a group of players who first pushed the laws to their limits, then openly flouted them until they became blurred beyond the possibility of enforcement.

Chapter 2 – The Journalists Tried to Be Players But Became Pawns

Over the last fifteen years the standards of professional journalism have been eroded by a group of reporters who have tried to appear as players, but have become pawns. A significant fraction of the financial journalists on the hedge fund beat have become shills of a handful of hedge funds.

Chapter 3 – Our Captured Federal Regulator The SEC

The Securities & Exchange Commission, regulator of our nation’s capital markets, has been captured by financial elites to the point that it favors Wall Street over Main Street.

Chapters 4-7: The Crime

Chapter 4 – The Crime: “Naked Short Selling” and Other Insincere IOUs. A crime is routinely occurring in our capital markets. Small loopholes created to provide “fault tolerance” in our nation’s stock settlement system are being exploited by Wall Street brokerages and their hedge fund clients to steal billions of dollars.

Chapter 5 – How Corporate Democracy Became a Hoax. One side effect of this crime is that corporate governance in America has been shattered.

Chapter 6 – Ruined Firms & Looted Pensions Another side effect of this crime is that many companies (often innovative tech and biotech companies) have been damaged or destroyed, while the Americans who invested in them were robbed, generally with no awareness on their part beyond the loss of their savings in the stock market.

Chapter 7 – Unsettled Trades & Systemic Risk. A third side effect of this crime is that it has created in our country’s financial system a crack so deep it could trigger a systemic collapse.

Chapters 8 and 9: The Cover-Up

Chapter 8 – The Deep Capture Campaign. The financial media are incapable of bringing a critical mindset to this issue because of their too-cozy relationship with Wall Street (several financial journalists actually seem to be engaged in blue-smoke-and-mirror attempts to obfuscate issues on behalf of the financial elites who turn up wherever this crime is occurring). As a result, the crack in our financial system appears to be reaching catastrophic proportions.

Chapter 9. Within “social media” (blogs, message boards, and wikis) evidence for the preceding points has been pieced together, but there is a campaign to hijack the social media discourse, organized by the same people who are profiting from the crime.

To many, the preceding will appear a bald and unconvincing tale, too fantastic for even the loopiest Hollywood thriller. When I first began discussing these claims, the New York Post ran a photo-shopped picture of me with a flying saucer coming out of my head. For two years the profession of financial journalism has demonstrated that in its view there are, in fact, two subjects beyond critical examination: Wall Street, and the profession of financial journalism.

In the chapters of Deep Capture that follow I will examine evidence that has emerged over the last two years and the degree to which it confirms or falsifies these claims.

I thank you for the courtesy of your visit and the gift of your attention.

Respectfully,

Patrick M. Byrne, Ph.D.

Read this post for why. It begins:

I’ve been waiting for a good time to bring this story to Daily Kos and, since it’s CNBC day (or week hopefully), I figured now would be a good time.

By now, everyone should have heard about the ongoing war that CNBC is waging against the Obama administration and its plans revamp the economy. From it’s constant anti-Obama propaganda and commentary to its shady PR stunt to manufacture a bogus uprising against Obama’s mortgage plan, CNBC has been working overtime as a propaganda front against the Obama agenda.

And now, Jon Stewart has joined in for some good fun. But you haven’t seen real fun until you’ve immersed yourself into the story of Deep Capture.

This rabbit hole involves the thugs surrounding Jim Cramer and some of the top financial "journalists" from the New York Times, WSJ, Fortune magazine and BusinessWeek, top hedge funds, the Mafia, and the DTCC. It also includes "blackmail, smear campaigns, espionage, fraud, harassment, extortion, bribery, rumor-mongering, sabotage, off-shore money laundering, political cronyism, frivolous lawsuits, witness tampering, biased financial research, false identities, bogus credit ratings, bribery, libelous blogs, bad science, forgery, wiretapping, counterfeiting, collusion, lying, cheating, threats and theft."

And if that wasn’t fun enough, it may be the underlying story of what collapsed the entire, global banking system or at least served as the catalyst for the collapse.

Unfortunately, this story is so rich and multi-dimensional that I cannot possibly hope to do it justice here. So I will primarily focus on the financial media angle and, specifically, Jim Cramer and his thug cronies.

The story begins when a very highly respected journalist and business editor for the Columbia Journalism Review, Mark Mitchell, decides to look into allegations made by the CEO of Overstock.com, that some top hedge fund managers, in cahoots with a circle of financial analyst and reporters, had conspired to make a lot of money by betting short on companies and then systematically destroying those companies by spreading false negative information about them and employing other tactics such as flooding the market with "phantom shares" to drive down a stocks value.

To understand this you have to understand how short selling works. A short seller will borrow stock (say at $10) and then sell it immediately and pocket the money ($10). Then, when the company’s stock value plummets ($1), they buy it at its deflated value and pocket the difference ($9). This is perfectly legal. But there’s another variety that takes place because of a flaw in the system.

This is where a short seller sells stock that they haven’t actually borrowed yet. There are loopholes that allow shorters to do this legally, but those loopholes have allowed the practice to be abused – which is illegal. Therefore, it is quite easy to fraudulently put on the open market shares of stock that do not, nor ever will, exist. These phantom shares do nothing but crash the value of a stock and therefore make legitimate short transactions highly profitable.

This is what Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne had discovered had been done to his company. Naked short selling combined with bogus financial analysis, lies and rumors propagated by CNBC reporters all served to trash his company’s stock. So he decided to fight back. He gave a big conference call presentation to a bunch of corporate CEOs and broke the story. That’s when Mark Mitchell comes in. (For the record, Byrne is a Republican. I don’t much care for him. But this is completely irrelevant to this story.) …

Continue reading. And do be sure to read the complete story of Deep Capture. (You can download it as a PDF.)

This is indeed interesting:

Anyone who doubts that there has been a substantial — and very positive — change in the rules for discussing American policy towards Israel should consider two recent episodes:  (1) the last three New York Times columns by Roger Cohen; and (2) the very strong pushback from a diverse range of sources against the neoconservative lynch mob trying, in typical fashion, to smear and destroy Charles Freeman due to his critical (in all senses of the word) views of American policy towards Israel.  One positive aspect of the wreckage left by the Bush presidency is that many of the most sacred Beltway pieties stand exposed as intolerable failures, prominently including our self-destructively blind enabling of virtually all Israeli actions.

First, the Cohen columns:  Two weeks ago, Cohen — writing from Iran — mocked the war-seeking cartoon caricature of that nation as The New Nazi Germany craving a Second Holocaust.  To do so, Cohen reported on the relatively free and content Iranian Jewish community (25,000 strong).  When that column prompted all sorts of predictable attacks on Cohen from the standard cast of Israel-centric thought enforcers (Jeffrey Goldberg, National Review, right-wing blogs, etc. etc.), Cohen wrote a second column breezily dismissing those smears and then bolstering his arguments further by pointing out that "significant margins of liberty, even democracy, exist" in Iran; that "Iran has not waged an expansionary war in more than two centuries";  and that "hateful, ultranationalist rhetoric is no Iranian preserve" given the ascension of Avigdor Lieberman in Benjamin Netanyahu’s new Israeli government.

Today, Cohen returns with his most audacious column yet.  Noting the trend in Britain and elsewhere to begin treating Hezbollah and Hamas as what they are — namely, "organizations [that are] now entrenched political and social movements without whose involvement regional peace is impossible," rather than pure "Terrorist organizations" that must be shunned — Cohen urges the Obama administration to follow this trend:  the U.S. should "should initiate diplomatic contacts with the political wing of Hezbollah" and even "look carefully at how to reach moderate Hamas elements."  As for the objection that those two groups have used violence in the past, Cohen offers the obvious response, though does so quite eloquently: …

Continue reading. Also note this brief Spencer Ackerman post with a somewhat different view.

Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

When Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaiao parades undocumented immigrants in pink underwear before news cameras, puts them to work on chain gangs and houses them in sweltering “tent cities” behind coils of barbed wire, it’s easy to dismiss him as a rogue public official who’s taken legitimate law enforcement a bit too far.

But Arpaio’s publicity-seeking stunts in Arizona are enabled by a federal policy that deputizes police officers to enforce U.S. immigration laws, with few rules and little supervision to prevent exploitation. Recent reports and testimony reveal that the program, known as 287(g) for the section of the law that created it, and intended to target terrorism and violent crimes, has encouraged officers to arrest and imprison people who look foreign for such minor infractions as driving with a broken tail-light, carrying an open alcoholic beverage container, or fishing without a license.

The result has been such gruesome treatment as forcing a pregnant woman arrested for an alleged traffic violation to endure labor in shackles; deporting a disabled U.S. citizen to Mexico where he was reduced to begging on the streets; and jailing an immigrant who’d called the police to save her sister from domestic violence.

Many more immigrants may have been deported under the program despite being lawful residents or having legitimate claims to remain in the United States. The citizenship of people with birth certificates from midwives in Texas, for example, is now being questioned by federal authorities.

Read the rest of this entry »

Booman Tribune has an excellent post on the OLC situation. It begins:

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has an important job.

By delegation from the Attorney General, the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel provides authoritative legal advice to the President and all the Executive Branch agencies. The Office drafts legal opinions of the Attorney General and also provides its own written opinions and oral advice in response to requests from the Counsel to the President, the various agencies of the Executive Branch, and offices within the Department. Such requests typically deal with legal issues of particular complexity and importance or about which two or more agencies are in disagreement. The Office also is responsible for providing legal advice to the Executive Branch on all constitutional questions and reviewing pending legislation for constitutionality.

All executive orders and proclamations proposed to be issued by the President are reviewed by the Office of Legal Counsel for form and legality, as are various other matters that require the President’s formal approval.

In addition to serving as, in effect, outside counsel for the other agencies of the Executive Branch, the Office of Legal Counsel also functions as general counsel for the Department itself. It reviews all proposed orders of the Attorney General and all regulations requiring the Attorney General’s approval. It also performs a variety of special assignments referred by the Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General.

If you are, say, the Director of Central Intelligence, and you get instructions to implement a policy that you think is illegal or unconstitutional, you can ask the OLC to weigh in on the matter. If they rule that the policy is legal and constitutional, then you and your employees are entitled to rely on that information as a legal defense. The presumption is that the OLC provides a legal shield. Even if a court later determines that the OLC’s legal advice was in error, those that acted with the OLC’s blessing are thought to have been acting in good faith.

This is how the system must work because administrative officials cannot be expected to make complex legal determinations about the separation of powers, wartime powers, etc. To use an extreme example, the OLC could say that it is legal for the president to order the assassination/killing of terrorist suspects in foreign lands using, say, aerial drone technology. People that relied on that legal advice would not later be subject to prosecution for murder, even if the Supreme Court ruled that the president does not have the power to authorize extralegal killings.

That the government is set up this way produces a high standard on the OLC to give sound, moral advice. And that is precisely what the OLC under the Bush administration did not do. The advisability and legality of many of Bush’s more extreme tactics in the ‘War on Terror’ are still controversial, but there is a consensus that a lot of the legal justifications for those tactics drafted by the OLC were of a kind that would get you flunked out of law school.

In essence, the OLC gave legal cover to commit war crimes, and they did it using facially flawed legal analysis. This isn’t supposed to happen. It means that the government officials that relied on that legal analysis to commit war crimes are basically immunized for their acts. The next questions are, what is the proper penalty for giving morally defective and legally incompetent advice, and can anyone be held legally accountable for actions deemed legal by the OLC?

The typical defense for Bush’s OLC lawyers goes like this: …

Continue reading.

Interesting survey of articles on global warming and Peak Oil. It begins:

Will the world end in fire or in ice? That is, are we going to be hit by global warming or are we going to freeze because of lack of fossil fuels? We don’t know yet, but it is starting to appear clear that geology is placing a major constraint on anthropogenic CO2 emissions and, therefore, on global warming. Here, I present a brief summary of some of the recent papers that have appeared on the subject.

Until recently, most simulations of future climate have been run without taking into account "peaking" of the major fossil fuels. Concepts such as "peak oil" are not discussed, and not even mentioned, in the reports of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, with peak oil coming, or already arrived, the subject is starting to appear in scientific journals, blogs, and conferences. In a previous post , I reported about the "Mission Earth" seminar held in Zurich in 2009 where climatologists and depletion experts gathered to exchange views. Here, I present a short review of the status of the field. There is a very small number of papers published in scientific journals on this subject and I think this summary includes them all. I also tried to include a number of less formal studies published on the web or presented at conferences.

Some early papers raised the question of the discrepancy of the standard IPCC scenarios and the peak oil projections. The first one was probably Jean Laherrere with a paper published in 2001. Later on Anders Sivertsson , Kjell Aleklett and Colin Campbell wrote in 2003 in "The New Scientist" a paper titled "Not enough oil for climate change". They criticized the IPCC scenarios for being overoptimistic in terms of oil and gas reserves. These early papers didn’t attempt to calculate the future concentrations of CO2.

Perhaps the earliest attempt to quantify the effects of CO2 on climate while taking depletion into account was the work by Jim Hansen and Pushker Karecha, who produced a paper titled "Implications of "peak oil" for atmospheric CO2 and climate". This study was published in 2008 but became available on line as a working paper in April 2007. Hansen and Karecha start from the premise that the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere should not be allowed to exceed 450 ppm; larger values would lead to disastrous consequences. So, they examine several scenarios that involve policy measures to force the reduction of emissions. They find that, if no such measures are taken, CO2 concentrations might rise to near 600 ppm by the end of the century, mainly as the result of coal combustion which, here, is not assumed to peak as a consequence of depletion. Oil and gas would peak before 2030 and would give only a minor contribution to the total of the emissions.

Shortly after the paper by Hansen and Karecha, David Rutledge published a post on "The Oil Drum" website with the title "The coal question and climate change" (June 2007). Later on, in December 2008, Rutledge also presented his results as an invited talk at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Society. Rutledge set up an approach that would be used again by other authors; that is, he started with an estimate of the available resources, from that he generated a production curve that involves "peaking" and then he calculated CO2 emissions in the atmosphere. Then, by means of the software package named "MAGICC," available from NCAR, Rutledge generates climate scenarios in terms of CO2 concentrations and atmospheric temperatures. The results are that geological constraints on coal production (what he calls "producer limited" profile) would limit CO2 concentrations to about 480 ppm even without policy measures to curb emissions. Under these conditions, temperatures might rise of approximately 1.6 deg. C. Rutledge concludes that "if we wish to reduce the temperature rise, we must bury the CO2 (assuming that it will not leak out for 1,000 years), or establish preserves for fossil fuels that prevent them from being produced." …

Continue reading. 

Interesting:

John C. Yoo is a study in contrasts. He’s a soft-spoken legal scholar viewed by his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley as a model of civility. But he’s also emerged as the public face of Bush-era torture policy, the author of a series of radical legal documents described by Yale Law School’s Jack Balkin as a “theory of presidential dictatorship.”

In law-school classrooms around the country, Yoo’s name is invoked as an example of a lawyer who, stirred by political calculus, acts unethically or at least unwisely. His appearances often draw crowds of angry protestors who shower him with epithets like “war criminal” and tie him personally to the torture and death of prisoners in the war on terror. Now, under advice of counsel, Yoo has stopped booking appearances. There is a distinct chill in the air.

In one of the memoranda the Obama Justice Department released last Monday, Yoo, then deputy assistant in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, argued that President Bush was free to use the U.S. military domestically in counterterrorism operations and needn’t be bothered by the Fourth or First amendments. In an op-ed published last week in the Wall Street Journal, Yoo explained that fears about the Bill of Rights are misplaced—it was all just an exercise in justifying self-defense against a Mumbai-style attack and the references to the First Amendment are gratuitous.

But Yoo offers no clear explanation about the circumstances that led to his writing the memo nor do we know how it was used. The memo could have been written to authorize a sweeping domestic-surveillance operation put in place by military intelligence agencies, which former National Security Agency employees have now explained was actually in place and being tinkered with as Yoo was crafting his memorandum. No doubt Congress will soon give Yoo an opportunity to answer questions about the memo under oath.

One part of John Yoo seems to enjoy the public controversy and approaches debate with zeal, while another part of him must feel at least a bit of anxiety. Just as his successors at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel left behind two memoranda repudiating Yoo’s work in devastating terms—disclosed by the department last week—the Justice Department’s ethics watchdog is now finalizing its own report.

Sources at the department who have examined this report state that it echoes some of the harshest criticisms that have appeared in the academic literature, but the report’s real bombshell, they say, will be its detailed disclosure of Yoo’s dealings with the White House in connection with the preparation of the memos. It is widely suspected that the Yoo memos were requested as after-the-fact legal cover for draconian policies that were already in place (“CYA memos”). If the Justice Department internal probe concludes this is the case, that could have clear consequences for the current debate surrounding the Bush administration’s accountability for torture…

Continue reading.

Good sign, reported in the NY Times:

Calling into question the legitimacy of all the signing statements that former President George W. Bush used to challenge new laws, President Obama on Monday ordered executive officials to consult with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. before relying on any of them to bypass a statute.

But Mr. Obama also signaled that he intends to use signing statements himself if Congress sends him legislation that has provisions he decides are unconstitutional. He pledged to use a modest approach when doing so, but said there was a role for the practice if used appropriately.

“In exercising my responsibility to determine whether a provision of an enrolled bill is unconstitutional, I will act with caution and restraint, based only on interpretations of the Constitution that are well-founded,” Mr. Obama wrote in a memorandum to the heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch. The document was obtained by The New York Times.

Mr. Obama’s directions marked the latest step in his administration’s effort to deal with a series of legal and policy disputes it inherited from the Bush administration. It came the same day that Mr. Obama lifted restrictions Mr. Bush had placed on federal financing for research that uses embryonic stem cells.

Mr. Bush’s use of signing statements — official legal documents issued by a president the day he signs bills into law, instructing executive officials how to implement the statutes — led to fierce controversy.

Mr. Bush frequently used signing statements to declare that provisions in the bills he was signing were unconstitutional constraints on executive power, claiming that the laws did not need to be enforced or obeyed as written. The laws he challenged included a torture ban and requirements that Congress be given detailed reports about how the Justice Department was using the counter-terrorism powers in the USA Patriot Act.

Dating back to the 19th century, presidents have occasionally signed a bill while declaring that one or more provisions were unconstitutional. Presidents began doing so more frequently starting with the Reagan administration.

But Mr. Bush broke all records, using signing statements to challenge about 1,200 bill sections over his eight years in office — about twice the number challenged by all previous presidents combined, according to data compiled by Christopher Kelley, a political science professor at Miami University in Ohio.

Many of Mr. Bush’s challenges were based on an aggressive view of the president’s power, as commander-in-chief, to take actions he believed necessary to protect national security regardless of what Congress said in federal statutes…

Continue reading.

Well, in fact they have no plan to offer, but they do have a goal. Josh Marshall:

I mentioned a few days ago that congressional Republicans were simply not part of the conversation on saving the American economy. The policies they’re pushing don’t even amount to conservative. In most cases they’re pushing stuff that’s just transparently ridiculous. Like a federal spending freeze in the face of massive economic downturn and possible deflationary spiral.

And now Greg Sargent has dug up a quote where a leading Republican admits that this is in fact their strategy. It’s not about coming up with policies to save the country; it’s all about pulling down Nancy Pelosi’s and her caucus’s favorability ratings.

"We will lose on legislation. But we will win the message war every day, and every week, until November 2010," said Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., an outspoken conservative who has participated on the GOP message teams. "Our goal is to bring down approval numbers for [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and for House Democrats. That will take repetition. This is a marathon, not a sprint."

That’s not really surprising. But it’s a bit stunning, though perhaps also refreshing, to see them say it out loud.

From the National Geographic:

One day in 1963, when Jim Boucher was seven, he was out working the trap­line with his grandfather a few miles south of the Fort McKay First Nation reserve on the Athabasca River in northern Alberta. The country there is wet, rolling fen, dotted with lakes, dissected by streams, and draped in a cover of skinny, stunted trees—it’s part of the boreal forest that sweeps right across Canada, covering more than a third of the country. In 1963 that forest was still mostly untouched. The government had not yet built a gravel road into Fort McKay; you got there by boat or in the winter by dogsled. The Chipewyan and Cree Indians there—Boucher is a Chipewyan—were largely cut off from the outside world. For food they hunted moose and bison; they fished the Athabasca for walleye and whitefish; they gathered cranberries and blueberries. For income they trapped beaver and mink. Fort McKay was a small fur trading post. It had no gas, electricity, telephone, or running water. Those didn’t come until the 1970s and 1980s.

In Boucher’s memory, though, the change begins that day in 1963, on the long trail his grandfather used to set his traps, near a place called Mildred Lake. Generations of his ancestors had worked that trapline. "These trails had been here thousands of years," Boucher said one day last summer, sitting in his spacious and tasteful corner office in Fort McKay. His golf putter stood in one corner; Mozart played softly on the stereo. "And that day, all of a sudden, we came upon this clearing. A huge clearing. There had been no notice. In the 1970s they went in and tore down my grandfather’s cabin—with no notice or discussion." That was Boucher’s first encounter with the oil sands industry. It’s an industry that has utterly transformed this part of northeastern Alberta in just the past few years, with astonishing speed. Boucher is surrounded by it now and immersed in it himself.

Where the trapline and the cabin once were, and the forest, there is now a large open-pit mine. Here Syncrude, Canada’s largest oil producer, digs bitumen-laced sand from the ground with electric shovels five stories high, then washes the bitumen off the sand with hot water and sometimes caustic soda. Next to the mine, flames flare from the stacks of an "upgrader," which cracks the tarry bitumen and converts it into Syncrude Sweet Blend, a synthetic crude that travels down a pipeline to refineries in Edmon­ton, Alberta; Ontario, and the United States. Mildred Lake, meanwhile, is now dwarfed by its neighbor, the Mildred Lake Settling Basin, a four-square-mile lake of toxic mine tailings. The sand dike that contains it is by volume one of the largest dams in the world.

Nor is Syncrude alone. Within a 20-mile radius of Boucher’s office are a total of six mines that produce nearly three-quarters of a million barrels of synthetic crude oil a day; and more are in the pipeline. Wherever the bitumen layer lies too deep to be strip-mined, the industry melts it "in situ" with copious amounts of steam, so that it can be pumped to the surface. The industry has spent more than $50 billion on construction during the past decade, including some $20 billion in 2008 alone. Before the collapse in oil prices last fall, it was forecasting another $100 billion over the next few years and a doubling of production by 2015, with most of that oil flowing through new pipelines to the U.S. The economic crisis has put many expansion projects on hold, but it has not diminished the long-term prospects for the oil sands. In mid-November, the International Energy Agency released a report forecasting $120-a-barrel oil in 2030—a price that would more than justify the effort it takes to get oil from oil sands.

Nowhere on Earth is more earth being moved these days than in the Athabasca Valley. To extract each barrel of oil from a surface mine, the industry must first cut down the forest, then remove an average of two tons of peat and dirt that lie above the oil sands layer, then two tons of the sand itself. It must heat several barrels of water to strip the bitumen from the sand and upgrade it, and afterward it discharges contaminated water into tailings ponds like the one near Mildred Lake. They now cover around 50 square miles. Last April some 500 migrating ducks mistook one of those ponds, at a newer Syncrude mine north of Fort McKay, for a hospitable stopover, landed on its oily surface, and died. The incident stirred international attention—Greenpeace broke into the Syncrude facility and hoisted a banner of a skull over the pipe discharging tailings, along with a sign that read "World’s Dirtiest Oil: Stop the Tar Sands."…

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Interesting article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Numerous convicts — including embezzlers, robbers, meth dealers and rapists — sold mortgage loans to unsuspecting homeowners in Washington state in recent years while state lawmakers and members of Congress debated and tabled requirements for licensing and background checks, records show.

Ronald Bernard Cox Sr. was among them. The convicted felon sold mortgages for as many as eight years, freely admitting in an interview that he sold loans even while on work release for felony theft in 2003. The Federal Way man, who says many of his customers were higher-risk, lower-income subprime borrowers, is among a handful of sellers named in an ongoing state investigation of one of the mortgage companies he worked for.

Roswitha Martha McKinney sold mortgages for only two years. But during that time she bilked two mortgage company owners, a co-worker and a close friend out of a total of $78,000 using bogus checks, according to police and court and state records. Although McKinney stole from friends and associates rather than customers, she and other convicted check forgers, as well as identity thieves and extortionists, had ready access to bank statements, accounts and other such information.

Criminals who were barred from the mortgage business in other states continued to sell loans to Washington borrowers. Garrett Sytsma of Kennewick violated numerous licensing rules in Oregon, losing his license there in a 2003 suspension made permanent in 2004, then gave a mortgage broker a bad check for his own home purchase. He pled guilty to a gross misdemeanor in Oregon in 2005.

That crime ultimately led to the loss of Sytsma’s license in Washington state, but only because the Washington Legislature finally agreed to require licensing and background checks for mortgage originators in 2007, although employees of federally chartered banks and consumer lending companies weren’t included.

The Seattle P-I examined the histories of loan sellers, taking advantage of records made available for the first time because of the new requirement…

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Another good discussion, again available as  video or audio stream, downloadable MP3 file, or transcript. In addition, you can download a copy of the article "Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America" (PDF). The transcript of the discussion begins:

AMY GOODMAN: The Obama administration is making a concerted effort to boost confidence in the US economy amidst waves of continued layoff announcements, negative economic data, downward-spiraling markets. On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped below 7,000 for the first time in eleven years. The market has now lost almost a quarter of its value this year and more than half since its high in October 2007.

Speaking to reporters yesterday after meeting with the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, President Obama said he was sure the US economy would rally back.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I’m absolutely confident that credit is going to be flowing again, that businesses are going to start seeing opportunities for investment. They’re going to start hiring again. People are going to be put back to work. What I’m looking at is not the day-to-day gyrations of the stock market, but the long-term ability for the United States and the entire world economy to regain its footing.

AMY GOODMAN: The Obama administration officials appeared before Congress Tuesday seeking to reassure lawmakers about the economy. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, testified before separate House committees that the President’s massive spending bill would benefit working Americans. Meanwhile, Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke testified before the Senate Budget Committee about the potential impacts of stimulus.

While the Obama administration is looking to turn around the economy with its stimulus plan and budget proposal, what about the issue of financial regulation, what some people point to as the fundamental cause of the crisis? A new report points to twelve deregulatory steps that led to the financial meltdown. It also does an analysis of the amount of money Wall Street poured into Washington in campaign contributions and lobbying over the last decade. Their answer? A staggering $5.1 billion over the past decade.

Rob Weissman is the author of the report. It’s called “Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America" (PDF). He is director of Essential Action, editor of the Multinational Monitor, joining us from Washington, D.C.

Good morning, Rob Weissman. Talk about what you think were the steps that brought us here.

ROBERT WEISSMAN: Well, we saw over the last decade and really the last three decades, with both parties in power in Congress and the executive branch, this long series of deregulatory moves. And as you go step-by-step through them, you see that those are the things that really paved the way for the current financial collapse.

Perhaps the signature move was the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had prevented co-ownership of commercial banks and securities firms, investment banks. That was precipitated by and directly authorized the creation of Citigroup, which is now sucking so much public taxpayer money and has really been at the cutting edge of driving the financial crisis we’re now in.

You can go forward another year and see that Congress, with the Clinton administration authorization, prohibited the executive branch agencies from regulating financial derivatives, the instruments that no one can really understand or get a handle on but which have multiplied the problem from the housing crash many-fold over. So we now have $600 trillion in financial derivatives being traded around the world, with no one having a handle on what they are, who owes whom, and all of this requiring us to pour tens of billions of more dollars more every day, it seems, into AIG.

You can step forward and look at the failure to enforce rules against predatory lending, beginning with the Clinton administration, but really accelerating in a really terrifying way with the Bush administration, so that there were about three actions taken by federal regulators in the peak period of predatory lending—three—against some of the commercial lenders and mortgage brokers who were undertaking some of the most abusive predatory lending activities. And on and on it goes.

And there was, of course, over the last three decades a real surge in deregulatory ideology. And perhaps the people who were putting this stuff forward believed in it. But it also makes sense to think that, maybe a little bit, they were influenced by the staggering amounts of money that the financial sector was pouring into Washington, as you said, more than $5 billion in campaign contributions and lobbying money. And, you know, they got a good return on investment, and it was good for them while it lasted. It’s turned out to be quite a disaster for them but, more importantly, for the rest of the country and the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Rob Weissman, I want to keep going through these steps and then talk about the money that Wall Street’s poured into Washington. The SEC’s voluntary regulation regime for investment banks? …

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Surely a single-payer system is the most efficient and economical. Why has Obama tried to keep that option off the table (after saying "all options are on the table")? Is he that beholden to insurance companies? You can find a very good discussion here (video stream, audio stream, MP3 file, or transcript). The transcript begins:

JUAN GONZALEZ: President Barack Obama convened 120 experts to the White House Thursday for a summit on healthcare. Participants included doctors, health insurance companies, lawmakers and patients. Obama vowed to make passing healthcare reform a priority this year.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: In this effort, every voice has to be heard. Every idea must be considered. Every option must be on the table. There should be no sacred cows. Each of us must accept that none of us will get everything that we want and that no proposal for reform will be perfect. If that’s the measure, we will never get anything done. But when it comes to addressing our healthcare challenge, we can no longer let the perfect be the enemy of the essential.

JUAN GONZALEZ: While the President said every idea must be considered, the idea of creating a single-payer national health insurance program has already been rejected. White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs said Thursday, “The President doesn’t believe that’s the best way to achieve the goal of cutting costs and increasing access.”

Initially, no supporters of single payer were invited to the summit. After protests were called, the White House invited Democratic Congressman John Conyers and the president of the Physicians for a National Health Program.

AMY GOODMAN: Single-payer advocates have also been largely silenced in the media. A new study being released today by FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, found the views of advocates of single payer have only been aired five times in the hundreds of major newspaper, broadcasts and cable stories about healthcare reform over the past week. No single-payer advocate has appeared on a major TV broadcast or cable network to talk about the policy during that period.

Well, to talk more about this, we’re joined by Luke Mitchell. He’s senior editor at Harper’s Magazine. His article in the February issue is called “Sick in the Head: Why America Won’t Get the Health-Care System It Needs.”

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Luke.

LUKE MITCHELL: Thank you for having me, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: So, why isn’t single payer being considered? Why has it been rejected out of hand? Why do you think it’s the only answer?

LUKE MITCHELL: Well, it’s amazing how far—how out of hand it’s been rejected. Max Baucus said a couple of months ago that everything is on the table. Max Baucus, the US senator who’s going to have a big hand in coming up with whatever reform we do see this year, said everything is on the table, except single payer. He went out of his way to say that we can’t have single payer.

And I think there are a couple of reasons why they’re so explicitly rejecting it. One of them is that it’s a threat to a great deal of people who are making a lot of money right now, which is to say the insurance companies. A single-payer system would take a lot of money out of the insurance system, the private insurance system. And it’s also something that a lot of people in Washington understand as ideologically threatening, that is to say, they equate a single-payer system with what they call, quote, “socialized medicine,” unquote.

So I think what Obama is trying to do is neutralize that threat and get, as he said, the imperfect rather than nothing. And maybe he’s right. There’s clearly a massive resistance to single payer on the Hill.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And this is especially surprising given the fact, as you say in your article, that as recently as 2003 Obama himself said he favored single-payer health insurance.

LUKE MITCHELL: That’s right. That’s right. When I started my Harper’s article, what I wanted to understand is why this approach to healthcare, single payer, which is used in most of the wealthy Western nations, which is much more efficient, which is much more equitable, which is much more amenable to making people healthy, is so far out of the mainstream in the United States. And I think what I found in the article was that—that it’s purely a mental blockage. That is to say that even if you can make the argument, the practical argument, for it—and we can talk about that in a minute—people still don’t want it.

AMY GOODMAN: But we’re in a different time.

LUKE MITCHELL: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: It has—you know, the politicians have said that it’s not doable before, but now we are facing a mass crisis, mass unemployment, tens of millions of people without insurance. Even those who have it are having trouble. I wanted to go to Obama yesterday speaking about, at this healthcare summit, the costs of healthcare. In a minute, we’ll go to that. But the times have changed. We’re talking about bailing out banks…

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From the Congressional Quarterly:

By lifting former President George W. Bush ’s restrictions on funding embryonic stem cell research, President Obama creates an opportunity for Congress to write new rules assuring expanded government support for the fast-growing field.

Codifying the Obama administration’s position would enable stem cell researchers to tap some of the $10 billion in funding for National Institutes of Health biomedical research contained in the recently enacted economic stimulus package (PL 111-5).

It also would block any of Obama’s successors from overturning his support through similar executive actions.

“Congress is likely to cement this policy so it would take a majority of the House and Senate to overturn it,” said Michael Rugnetta, a bioethics researcher at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank that advised the administration on the issue.

Obama issued an executive order on Monday that overturns a Bush policy restricting federal funding for embryonic stem cell research to the 21 cell lines known to exist on Aug. 9, 2001.

Obama’s action gives NIH 120 days to develop guidelines for expanded research, including rules assuring that donors give informed consent and are not paid to donate eggs or embryos.

It does not address a congressional prohibition on using taxpayer funds to help create human embryos for research purposes or destroy them for their stem cells.

Stem cells are primordial “master cells” derived from days-old embryos that are capable of evolving into many kinds of tissues. Scientists believe they can coax the cells into providing replacement cells and cure a variety of ailments, from juvenile diabetes to Parkinson’s disease and some cancers. But researchers say they were stymied during Bush’s eight years in office, because the funding ban cut off access to newer cell lines with greater potential to develop into cell types.

“Scientists believe these tiny cells may have the potential to help us understand, and possibly cure, some of our most devastating diseases and conditions,” Obama said in prepared remarks. “But that potential will not reveal itself on its own. Medical miracles do not happen simply by accident.”

Abortion foes decry the research because it involved the destruction of an embryo — an act they equate with murder.

One avenue for congressional action would be a version of legislation Bush vetoed in 2007 — and introduced again this yea — that would allow research funding on stem cells from surplus embryos discarded by fertility clinics…

Continue reading. Note that the surplus embryos can be used for research to benefit humanity, or they can be destroyed. If you talk to people opposing stem-cell research, ask them which of the two options they prefer and why.

Interesting finding, and it does continue a trend, but I wonder whether that trend might reverse itself if the depression deepens: hard times can bring people to religion. At any rate, the story in WaPo:

The percentage of Americans who call themselves Christians has dropped dramatically over the past two decades, and those who do are increasingly identifying themselves without traditional denomination labels, according to a major study of U.S. religion being released today.

The survey of more than 54,000 people conducted between February and November of last year showed that the percentage of Americans identifying as Christians has dropped to 76 percent of the population, down from 86 percent in 1990. Those who do call themselves Christian are more frequently describing themselves as "nondenominational" "evangelical" or "born again," according to the American Religious Identification Survey.

The survey is conducted by researchers at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and funded by the Lilly Endowment and the Posen Foundation. Conducted in 1990, 2001 and last year, it is one of the nation’s largest major surveys of religion.

The increase in people labeling themselves in more generic Christian terms corresponds strongly with the decline in people identifying themselves as Protestant, the survey found. People calling themselves mainline Protestants, including Methodists and Lutherans, have dropped to 13 percent of the population, down from 19 percent in 1990. The number of people who describe themselves as generically "Protestant" went from approximately 17 million in 1990 to 5 million.

Meanwhile, the number of people who use nondenominational terms has gone from 194,000 in 1990 to more than 8 million.

"There is now this shift in the non-Catholic population — and maybe among American Christians in general — into a sort of generic, soft evangelicalism," said Mark Silk, who directs Trinity’s Program on Public Values and helped supervise the survey.

The survey substantiated several general trends already identified by sociologists: the slipping importance of denomination in America, the growing number of people who say they have "no" religion and the increase in religious minorities including Muslims, Mormons and such movements as Wicca and paganism.

The only group that grew in every U.S. state since the 2001 survey was people saying they had "no" religion; the survey says this group is now 15 percent of the population. Silk said this group is likely responsible for the shrinking percentage of Christians in the United States.

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I’m getting a very late start today, but so it goes. The very funny movie in the title refers to an ensemble sex comedy, Speaking of Sex, whose cast includes James Spader, Lara Flynn Boyle, Bill Murray, Catherine O’Hara, Melora Waters, and Jay Mohr. Well worth renting, though inappropriate for kids. Adults comfortable with sex will find it hilarious.

The Ogallala boys are back, delivering another fine shave. The Rooney Style 1 Size 1 Super made a really great lather from the shave stick—the Ogallala formulation is good—and then the Hoffritz slant bar smoothed off the stubble. More Ogallala goodness with the aftershave splash, and I’m good to go.