Republican/Libertarian Senator Rand Paul is Blocking Pipeline Safety Legislation – Republican Sen. Rand Paul is single-handedly blocking legislation that would strengthen safety rules of oil and gas pipelines, despite the fact that the bill has industry support simply because he hates government.
In fact, Sen. Paul’s hatred of government runs so deep that his opposition to the bill didn’t change even after a gasoline rupture shook three counties in his home state, Kentucky.
It was after a deadly gas pipeline explosion in a San Francisco suburb last year, and on the heels of other recent explosions and oil pipeline spills, that Congress and the oil and gas industry agreed an overhaul of federal safety regulations was in order.
The bill Sen. Paul opposes would authorize more federal safety inspectors, and pipeline companies would have to confirm that their records on how much pressure their pipelines can tolerate was accurate. The bill would also allow federal regulators to order that automatic shutoff valves be installed on new pipelines to halt leaks sooner. The provisions would expand pipeline inspections to rural areas and would all be paid for by industry fees.
Ideology may serve Sen. Paul well on the campaign trail, but it is doing zero good for his constituents or the rest of America. So far, all the Tea Party has proven is its ability to obstruct bills that have the rare bipartisan support.
Koch Brothers Getting Richer With Secret Sales to Iran – In May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to win contracts.
“I uncovered the practices within a few days,†Egorova-Farines says. “They were not hidden at all.â€
She immediately notified her supervisors in the U.S. A week later, Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries dispatched an investigative team to look into her findings. By September of that year, the researchers had found evidence of improper payments to secure contracts in six countries dating back to 2002, authorized by the business director of the company’s Koch-Glitsch affiliate in France. “Those activities constitute violations of criminal law,†Koch Industries wrote in a Dec. 8, 2008, letter giving details of its findings. The letter was made public in a civil court ruling in France in September 2010; the document has never before been reported by the media.
Egorova-Farines wasn’t rewarded for bringing the illicit payments to the company’s attention. Her superiors removed her from the inquiry in August 2008 and fired her in June 2009, calling her incompetent, even after Koch’s investigators substantiated her findings.
Internal company documents show that the company made those sales through foreign subsidiaries, thwarting a U.S. trade ban. Koch Industries units have also rigged prices with competitors, lied to regulators and repeatedly run afoul of environmental regulations, resulting in five criminal convictions since 1999 in the U.S. and Canada. From 1999 through 2003, Koch Industries was assessed more than $400 million in fines, penalties and judgments. In December 1999, a civil jury found that Koch Industries had taken oil it didn’t pay for from federal land by mis-measuring the amount of crude it was extracting. Koch paid a $25 million settlement to the U.S.
Phil Dubose, a Koch employee who testified against the company said he and his colleagues were shown by their managers how to steal and cheat — using techniques they called the Koch Method.
Yes, these are the same guys who are funding the Tea Party and trying to dismantle Social Security.
96-Year-Old Woman Denied Voting ID for First Time in Her Life – Dorothy Cooper is 96 years old, and she can only remember one election when she was eligible to vote, but didn’t.
The retired domestic worker was born in a small North Georgia town before women had the right to vote. She began casting ballots in her 20s after moving to Chattanooga for work. She missed voting for John F. Kennedy in 1960 because a move to Nashville prevented her from registering in time.
So when she learned last month at a community meeting that under a new Tennessee state law she would need a photo ID to vote next year, she talked with a volunteer about how to get to a state Driver Service Center to get her free ID. But when she got there Monday with an envelope full of documents, a clerk denied her request.
That morning, Cooper slipped a rent receipt, a copy of her lease, her voter registration card and her birth certificate into a Manila envelope. Typewritten on the birth certificate was her maiden name, Dorothy Alexander.
But since she didn’t have a marriage certificate, the clerk denied Ms. Cooper a free voter ID at the Cherokee Boulevard Driver Service Center.
Republicans May Suppress More Than 5 Million Voters – The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has determined that more than 5 million voters may find it significantly more difficult to vote. As one can read in the executive summary at the website for the report:
These new restrictions fall most heavily on young, minority, and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities. This wave of changes may sharply tilt the political terrain for the 2012 election. Based on the Brennan Center’s analysis of the 19 laws and two executive actions that passed in 14 states, it is clear that:
* These new laws could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012.
* The states that have already cut back on voting rights will provide 171 electoral votes in 2012 – 63 percent of the 270 needed to win the presidency.
* Of the 12 likely battleground states, as assessed by an August Los Angeles Times analysis of Gallup polling, five have already cut back on voting rights (and may pass additional restrictive legislation), and two more are currently considering new restrictions.
State Agency Censored Scientific Study According to Scientist – A long-awaited report on Galveston Bay is being delayed by accusations that Texas’ environmental agency deleted references from a scientific article to climate change, people’s impact on the environment and sea-level rise.
John Anderson, the Maurice Ewing professor of oceanography at Rice University and author of the article, accused the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality of basing its decision to delete certain references on politics rather than science. Anderson wrote to TCEQ Commissioner Buddy Garcia Aug. 30 complaining about the censorship, including as an example the deletion of a section saying the ocean level in Galveston Bay is rising by 3 millimeters a year, compared with the long-term average of 0.5 millimeters.
“The sea level rates presented in this chapter are scientific fact, not speculation,” he wrote to Garcia.
TCEQ also deleted any references to human-caused change in other contexts, including a reference to human activity being responsible for wetlands destruction.
TCEQ spokeswoman Andrea Morrow gave no reason for the deletions in an e-mail response, saying only that the agency disagreed with information in the article.
Republicans in Congress Threaten to Allow Pesticides in Our Waterways – More than 1,000 U.S. waterways are known to be impaired by pesticide pollution — and many more may be polluted. In a nationwide survey, the U.S. Geological Survey found pesticides (or their byproducts) in every stream it sampled.
Pesticides discharged into our waterways can kill or cause severe reproductive and developmental harm and cancer in fish and amphibians. The toxins can also move up the food chain, potentially accumulating in people who eat fish, and can contaminate our drinking-water supplies.
Yet there’s a bill in the Senate right now that would prevent the protection of our waterways under the Clean Water Act from pesticide discharges.
The petrochemical industry and large-scale agribusiness are pushing Congress to undermine the Clean Water Act by exempting pesticide applications from the protections and safeguards of water-quality monitoring and permits. Your U.S. senators need to hear from you now that our waterways must be protected from pesticide discharges.
Please take action to urge your senators to oppose all efforts to prevent the EPA from protecting our waterways from pesticide pollution.
Regards,
Jim
Andy Hailey