Obama Oil Speculation Task Force Ignores Oil Speculation

By Matt Bewig

 

United States - Despite a growing consensus that speculators are behind recent price increases, the government’s almost year-old oil speculation task force has done little more than talk about the problem. From the beginning of January to the end of February, the average retail price per gallon of gasoline jumped 42 cents from $3.30 to $3.72–a spike of 12.7% in just eight weeks. This year’s pain at the pump is eerily similar to last year’s, when gas prices jumped 77 cents from $3.19 to $3.96 in just eleven weeks between February 21 and May 9–a leap of 24.1%.

 

In response to last year’s problem, in April 2011, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder announced the creation of the Oil and Gas Price Fraud Working Group, which was supposed to root out speculators who buy and sell oil futures based on the predicted price of oil. The trouble is, oil industry experts now estimate that financial speculators account for about 65% of the trading in oil futures contracts, up from 30% historically, leading many to conclude that the reversed ratio explains the high and volatile oil and gasoline prices. One analysis estimated that as much as 30% of the current price can be attributed to speculation. While the task force, which has met only four or five times, has been assisting a Federal Trade Commission investigation into gas prices since June 2011, a key problem is that most price speculation is legal, unless a trader relies on insider information or commits fraud, both of which can be difficult to prove.

 

Nevertheless, the fact that the U.S. today is producing more of its own oil than it has in years, and supply is actually outstripping demand, has many demanding action on gasoline prices. This year, however, the President is emphasizing his proposal to eliminate tax breaks that net the oil companies about $4 billion per year. Given the lack of success of the oil speculation task force, those tax breaks are probably safe for now.

Monsanto Agrees to Pay Victims of Dioxin in West Virginia…But Not Much

By Matt Bewig

 

United States - Giant chemical corporation Monsanto has agreed to a tentative settlement requiring it to pay nearly $100 million to settle claims that its factory in Nitro, West Virginia, contaminated the small town and its residents with the toxic chemical dioxin, a cancer-causing waste byproduct of the manufacture of the herbicide 2,4,5-T.

 

For about 75 years, between 1929 and 2004, the Monsanto plant churned out herbicides, rubber products and other chemicals, although it made 2,4,5-T only from 1949 to 1971. Monsanto sold 2,4,5-T (later found to be contaminated with dioxin) to the Army for use in making Agent Orange, which it sprayed on Vietnamese jungles and farms. The dioxin is estimated to have killed and maimed an estimated 400,000 people and caused 500,000 birth defects in Vietnam, but federal courts dismissed a case brought by Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange.

 

Shortly after the Monsanto plant closed in 2004, a class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of tens of thousands of people who lived, worked and went to school in Nitro after 1949. The suit alleged that Monsanto spread toxic substances, including dioxins, all over the town, exposing residents to dioxin levels 100,000 times higher than acceptable. The lawsuit demands medical monitoring for at least 5,000—and as many as 80,000—current and former Nitro residents. Under the tentative agreement announced on February 24, 2012, Monsanto will pay for a 30-year medical monitoring program with a primary fund of $21 million for testing, and up to $63 million in additional funding, if needed; $9 million to clean the homes of class members of dioxin; and court-approved legal fees incurred during seven years of litigation.

 

Before the agreement is finalized, however, a fairness hearing must be held to give class members a chance to object to its terms. That hearing is scheduled for June 18, when expert testimony must be presented to prove the settlement is appropriate. Already Charleston, West Virginia, lawyer Thomas Urban, who represents some Nitro residents, has filed a motion objecting to the $9 million cap on cleanup costs, (an expert for the residents estimated the cost at between $945 million and $3.8 billion), and also the fact that only 3,000 to 5,000 class members would receive any medical monitoring, when there are potentially 80,000 class members.

 

Despite the seemingly large dollar amount of the settlement, Monsanto, which in 2010 earned a profit of $1.1 billion on revenues of $10.5 billion, announced that the settlement would not affect ongoing earnings per share, but that the one-time expense would reduce previously reported earnings per share by .05 percent.

Keystone Pipeline Lobbyists Were Hillary Clinton Fundraisers

By Matt Bewig

 

United States - Environmental group Friends of the Earth (FOE) last week sued the State Department for access to communications between it and lobbyists promoting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, two of whom were prominent fundraisers for the 2008 presidential campaign of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That project, in which Canadian oil company TransCanada wants to build nearly 2,000 miles of pipeline to carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico, requires a presidential permit from the State Department. FOE originally filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the materials in 2010.

 

Two of the lobbyists named in the FOIA request, Gordon Giffin of McKenna, Long & Aldridge, and James Blanchard of DLA Piper, were fundraising bundlers for Clinton’s presidential bid, and DLA Piper was the largest single corporate source of employee and PAC contributions to her campaign. Both Blanchard and Giffin served as U.S. Ambassador to Canada under President Bill Clinton, Blanchard from 1993-1997 and Giffin from 1997-2001.

 

A third pipeline lobbyist, Paul Elliott, worked on Clinton’s campaign as national deputy director and chief of staff for delegate selection. Although the Obama administration recently rejected the permit, TransCanada is preparing a new permit application, leading Damon Moglen, climate and energy project director at FOE, to explain the continued relevance of the request: “The communications we seek are key to ensuring that the State Department isn’t letting lobbyists’ personal connections to Secretary Clinton or President Obama bias its decision-making."

Obama Fights to Retain Warrantless Wiretapping

By Matt Bewig and David Wallechinsky

 

United States - Despite being propelled to victory by progressive supporters critical of the Bush administration’s record on civil liberties, President Barack Obama has directed the Justice Department to defend many of the policies of George W. Bush, including warrant-less wiretapping. Last week, the Justice Department filed papers asking the Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court ruling that allowed the continuation of an ACLU lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a 2008 law giving the government unprecedented authority to monitor Americans’ international emails and phone calls.

 

That monitoring has its origins in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when, a few years later, President Bush instructed the National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept Americans’ telephone calls without warrants, which were required by the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA, a post-Watergate statute meant to rein in domestic surveillance, created a special court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), to approve or reject requests for domestic surveillance.

 

Between 1978 and 1992, presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush presented 7,030 applications for warrants and the court approved all of them as submitted. During his eight years in office, President Bill Clinton and his Justice Department presented 6,057 warrant applications. The FISC approved 6,055 of them, modified one and rejected one.

 

However, the harmonious relationship between the executive branch and the FISC changed after George W. Bush became president. The court rejected six requests outright and modified 179. It is worth noting that all eleven members of the Bush-era FISC were selected by conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Annoyed by the FISC judges’ refusal to rubber-stamp his policies, Bush bypassed the law and ordered the NSA to secretly conduct illegal wiretapping.

 

When Bush’s secret program was revealed by The New York Times in 2005, the Bush administration first agreed to seek FISC approval, and when that failed, got Congress to permit the previously prohibited warrantless wiretapping by passing the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. President Bush signed the bill into law on July 10, 2008, and the ACLU filed its challenge less than an hour later. The provisions of the act are scheduled to end at the end of 2012.

 

The appeals court ruling, which was issued in March 2011, rejected the Obama administration’s argument that the case should be dismissed because the ACLU’s clients could not prove their communications would be collected under the law, which was true largely because the law creates great secrecy around the wiretaps in the first place–a true “Catch-22.”

Georgia Takes Top Two Spots for Worst Polluting Power Stations

By Matt Bewig

 

Georgia leads the nation for dirty power plants, which are the primary source for greenhouse gases like CO₂, methane and nitrous oxide. To put things into perspective, for cars to produce as much planet-baking CO₂ as U.S. coal-fired power plants do in a year, Americans would have to drive at least twice as much as they currently do.

 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has released an online Greenhouse Gas Database that allows consumers to find out which power plants are polluting the most. The database, which includes the 6,700 power plants and heavy industrial sites responsible for 80 percent of all emissions in the US, shows that Georgia is home to the two worst polluting plants in the country—Scherer coal plant in Juliette and Bowen coal plant in Cartersville. Neighboring Alabama has the third worst offender, the Miller coal plant in Quinton, Alabama, while yet another Southern state, Texas, is the locale of the fourth worst plant, the Martin Lake coal plant in Tatum, Texas.