by Karl Bode

Speaking at an investor conference in San Francisco this week, Time Warner Cable chief operating officer Landel Hobbs told attendees that the carrier raises broadband prices not because they have to — but because they can. “Consumers like it so much that we have the ability to increase pricing around high-speed data,” noted Hobbs. You might recall Mr. Hobbs from the Time Warner Cable metered billing fiasco, when he tried to convince consumers that they wanted low caps and high per gigabyte overages. Not only did Hobbs think low caps and $2 per GB overages were “only fair,” he tried to argue that they’d “actually encourage more use of broadband overall.” Consumers didn’t agree.

“Consumers like it so much that we have the ability to increase pricing around high-speed data,” -Time Warner Cable COO Landel Hobbs

So what allows Mr. Hobbs to ignore reality, his customers, and raise prices without worrying about consumers running to other carriers or an overall negative consumer brand reputation? Competition, or more accurately, a lack thereof.

Limited competition means Time Warner Cable also hasn’t had to rush toward DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades. Comcast, the nation’s largest carrier, is quickly approaching 90% DOCSIS 3.0 coverage across its larger footprint. Even smaller, less profitable carriers like Suddenlink and Mediacom have been working at a faster pace than Time Warner Cable. According to recent cable industry data, DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades now read 43% of the nation’s 120 million homes served by cable. Time Warner Cable? 2,000 users in select portions of one market.

Verizon FiOS is available in roughly only 10% of Time Warner Cable’s overall markets, and Time Warner Cable doesn’t have to try very hard to lure subscribers that have grown tired of sluggish DSL and high landline prices. Time Warner Cable’s also helped by the fact that Verizon’s all but giving up on rural DSL service, either selling or simply ignoring many of these Time Warner Cable markets. In many instances the companies that are buying them take on so much Verizon debt, they can’t afford to upgrade.

Penetration of AT&T U-Verse is actually higher in Time Warner Cable markets — approaching 20%. But AT&T’s top broadband speeds max out around 24 Mbps at shorter loop lengths, and AT&T’s been struggling to get line-bonded VDSL service working. Both AT&T and Verizon have put their next-gen expansion plans in hibernation mode, so Time Warner Cable has the luxury of time. With expensive last-generation DSL most of their subscribers’ only alternative, they also have the luxury of high prices.

Related:

1. Time Warner Cable Will Increase Caps
2. Time Warner Cable Protests Planned
3. Time Warner Cable Metered Billing Will Return
4. Time Warner Caps Go from Ugly To Invisible
5. What Network Neutrality Is REALLY About
6. Time Warner Cable: Just 2,000 DOCSIS 3.0 Users
7. Our National Broadband Plan Is A Bland, Boring Mess
8. AT&T Complains About Ads Mocking U-Verse Capacity Crunch

AP-GfK Poll: Public wants elusive accord on health

Americans want bipartisan accord on health care, but neither party yields

CHARLES BABINGTON
AP News

Americans and their lawmakers are dramatically out of sync on health care, with large majorities of people looking for bipartisan cooperation that’s nowhere in sight.

A new Associated Press-GfK Poll finds a widespread hunger for improvements to the health care system, which suggests President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies have a political opening to push their plan. Half of all Americans say health care should be changed a lot or “a great deal,” and only 4 percent say it shouldn’t be changed at all.

But they don’t like the way the debate is playing out in Washington, where GOP lawmakers unanimously oppose the Obama-backed legislation and Democrats are struggling to pass it by themselves with narrow House and Senate majorities.

More than four in five Americans say it’s important that any health care plan have support from both parties. And 68 percent say the president and congressional Democrats should keep trying to cut a deal with Republicans rather than pass a bill with no GOP support.

Leaders of both parties in Congress say that’s not how it’s going to work out. After a year of off-and-on negotiations, Republicans adamantly oppose Obama’s plans. The White House and Democratic leaders say it’s now-or-never for a health care overhaul, which would cover an additional 30 million Americans, require almost everyone to buy health insurance and impose new restrictions on insurance companies.

The Democrats’ plan relies on parliamentary rules that bar Senate filibusters. That would enable Senate Democrats to pass a companion health care bill — which House Democrats are demanding — with a simple majority. Democrats control 59 of the Senate’s 100 votes, one shy of the number needed to stop GOP filibusters.

The new poll underscores Obama’s struggles to wrest control of the health care debate from Republicans, who couch his efforts as a government takeover and costly intrusion into private lives.

Many of his allies are baffled, because Americans clearly want change, and some of the individual components of the Democrats’ health care agenda seem popular. Moreover, the public has not embraced the Republicans’ overall approach to legislating, giving lower approval ratings to GOP lawmakers than to Democrats, although both parties fare badly.

In the AP-GfK Poll, 43 percent of those surveyed said Obama and Congress should keep working to pass health care this year, while 41 percent said they should start from scratch. On Capitol Hill, the Republicans favor that new-start approach; Democrats say that’s just a way to stall the effort to death.

Sandy Stemm of Springfield, Ore., would seem the ideal target for Obama’s appeal. She’s a Democrat and former bakery manager who recently lost her job and health insurance.

But Stemm, 47, doesn’t like the idea of congressional Democrats going it alone on health care.

“I think it’s important to come to an agreement,” she said in a telephone interview. “We’re all in this together, whether we’re Democrat or Republican.”

John DeHority, a Democrat from Rochester, N.Y., supports Obama’s effort and thinks Republicans have “made a travesty of the process.” But he suggested the GOP is winning the political battle.

“I think passing the bill in its current form would be political suicide for Democrats,” said DeHority, 56, a researcher in health care imaging. He said he thinks the proposed changes would fail because they would not control costs, and “Democrats will take the fall for that.”

Obama’s own message, sometimes shifting, seems unpersuasive to many.

Over the past year, he has moved his emphasis from the moral implications of improving health care to the cost-cutting possibilities to the impact on the deficit. In a fiery speech near Philadelphia on Monday, he renewed his harsh attacks on insurance companies, which he says are overcharging people and denying coverage to less-desirable clients.

The president heads to St. Louis on Wednesday to press his case for overhaul, even as major businesses launch a multimillion-dollar ad campaign to undercut the legislation.

The result is a message mishmash that leaves many people unsure why they should support Obama’s plans, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an authority on political communications at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg center.

“They didn’t make those mistakes in the campaign,” she said, calling Obama a master at staying on message as a candidate. “Communications scholars are shaking their heads,” she said.

White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said Tuesday that Republicans “have played politics with health reform from the very beginning.” Also, many Americans have been turned off by the political dealmaking that took place in Congress, Pfeiffer said, and “the insurance industry has spent millions demonizing health reform.”

More spending is on the way. Major business groups Tuesday announced a multimillion-dollar ad campaign criticizing Obama’s proposals. Health insurance companies are among those paying for the ads, scheduled to air on cable channels nationally and then in 17 states that are home to moderate Democratic lawmakers.

House Democratic leaders are waiting for final legislative language before launching an all-out push to enact the health care bill that the Senate passed on Christmas Eve. The House’s somewhat different version passed 220-215, with 39 Democrats voting against it.

Presidential adviser David Axelrod told supporters on a conference call Tuesday that “what happens in the next 10 days will be critical.” He asked them to talk to friends and neighbors to boost momentum.

The AP-GfK Poll was conducted March 3-8, by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media. It involved landline and cell phone interviews with 1,002 adults nationwide, and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.

____

Associated Press writers Natasha Metzler, Ann Sanner and Erica Werner, and AP polling director Trevor Tompson and news survey specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.

On the Net:

http://www.ap-gfkpoll.com/

A New York City federal judge who found it unconstitutional that the government tried to cut funding to the activist group ACORN has ordered the government to make it clear the funding isn’t blocked.

Brooklyn Judge Nina Gershon on Wednesday rejected a government request to reconsider last year’s ruling declaring the cutoff of funding unconstitutional. She also ordered the government to notify all federal agencies that provisions passed by Congress to block funding have been declared unconstitutional.

The judge says ACORN was punished by Congress without the enactment of administrative processes to decide if money had been handled inappropriately.

ACORN is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. It’s an advocate for low-income and minority home buyers and residents.

The government says it will review the judge’s ruling.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Wednesday assailed the White House for purportedly wasting a year vying for Republican votes on health care reform, alleging that the protracted debate weakened the bill and damaged the party’s standing among progressives.

“We have wasted month after month negotiating with people who do not support serious reform,” he said at a progressive media summit on Capitol Hill. “It’s been a year now and I think the White House finally got that message.”

President Obama advocated for a bipartisan bill last year and worked extensively to court Republican votes, offering major concessions in the process. But only one Republican – Rep. Joseph Cao (LA) – in Congress wound up voting for it, and even he has since backed out.

But Obama has struck a more aggressive tone in recent weeks, demanding an up-or-down vote on the health care bill and championing the use of reconciliation to amend it. Better late than never, said Sanders, who also claimed Democrats made a strategic blunder by ignoring the single-payer option.

“I think [Sen. Max] Baucus [(D-MT)] made a mistake and would admit it when he said single payer was not on the table,” the senator said.

A self-described Democratic socialist, Sanders is an ardent proponent of a Medicare for all insurance system. He ripped Democrats in his speech for refusing to seriously consider the idea — if even to use it as a bargaining chip for a stronger bill — noting that it has support among millions of progressives.The Vermont senator blamed the White House in part for the Democratic timidity, alleging Obama should have focused on the substance of the bill “from day one,” rather than dwelling on the elusive goal of bipartisanship.

He said the senate has 50 votes to pass strong health care legislation and urged Democrats to move forward aggressively with the proposal, describing it as flawed but nonetheless an important step forward.

By Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld and Joshua Dratel

There are times in life when you don’t want to hear, “Well, this will be a learning experience for us all.” Open-heart surgery. In-flight emergencies. Repairing your Toyota. So what about the most important terrorism trial in United States history? Incredibly, there is a noisy political debate about whether to entrust the still-pending 9/11 trial to a military commissions system that, among its many flaws, is untested, likely unconstitutional, and has yet to demonstrate a single, credible result. Sen. Lindsey Graham now proposes legislation to bar a federal court prosecution of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. That is a profoundly ill-conceived idea.

Whether we are at “war with terror” or at work destroying a ring of criminal terrorists, it makes sense, as a matter of national security, to use the right tool for the right job. Military commissions are not that tool. They are a legal experiment that the Supreme Court has rejected at every turn. Even presiding military Judge Col. Ralph Kohlmann derided the Guantánamo 9/11 proceedings as “a learning experience.”

The commissions are now in their fifth incarnation. Hastily conceived after 9/11, they were repeatedly revised by Presidents Bush and Obama, and by Congress. Under the most recent version (the Military Commissions Act of 2009), the Department of Defense has yet to even devise rules for these proceedings. It remains unclear whether commission defendants could plead guilty to capital charges. In fact, no version of the commissions has ever tried a murder case to verdict, never mind a case approaching the importance and complexity of the 9/11 trial. If insanity is repeating the same act and expecting a different result, the attempt to install another commissions system is a textbook case.

Add to this uncertainty the constitutional cloud lingering over critical legal issues like the use of hearsay and evidence obtained through coercion, the legitimacy of using a war court for offenses that the Department of Justice concedes are not war crimes, and the adequacy of the to-be-determined trial procedures. These issues are unique to the military commissions, and they will provide convicted defendants with multiple grounds for appeals. The resolution of these issues will not be speedy. They will grind their way to the Supreme Court only after years of avoidable litigation.

This latest attempt to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic actually complicates the legal process. It adds a layer of appellate review that does not exist in Article III federal courts or military courts-martial. Before the D.C. Circuit or Supreme Court could entertain an appeal, a third, brand-new appellate court called the Military Commissions Court of Review would have to weigh in. And when the Supreme Court finally hears a challenge to the commissions’ constitutionality, it may well overturn any conviction. If swift and certain justice is important to our national security, then using this Rube Goldberg-style system of criminal justice is ludicrous.

By contrast, federal courts are a constitutionally sound forum for prosecuting terrorists. There would be no threshold question about the court’s legitimacy, no grounds for appeal challenging the fundamentals of the system. And compared to the glacial pace of military commissions, a federal court trial would proceed pursuant to established standards designed to move cases forward in an orderly fashion. Federal courts are not only capable of handling complex terrorism trials, they are better than military commissions at doing it.

According to a new report by the NYU Center on Law and Security, the Department of Justice has successfully prosecuted more than 150 terrorism cases since 9/11, securing an average sentence of 16 years. As Colin Powell explained on “Face the Nation,” the military commissions are a failure by comparison: “In eight years the military commissions have put three people on trial. Two of them served relatively short sentences and are free. One guy is in jail … So the suggestion that somehow a military commission is the way to go isn’t borne out by the history of the military commissions.”

Professed concerns about leaks of classified information are a red herring. The 2009 Military Commissions Act adopted, nearly word for word, the same mechanism for protecting classified material used in federal court. Known as the Classified Information Procedures Act, these laws are time-tested and effective. An oft-cited but misinformed counterexample is that Osama bin Laden first learned that he was wanted by the U.S. from a document produced during a 1995 trial. As Eric Holder testified before Congress, that document was not classified, and prosecutors in that case did not attempt to protect the document from release by using CIPA. The strength and success of CIPA in federal court is precisely why Congress chose to adopt it for the military commissions.

The objection that a civilian trial would give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a soapbox from which to spew his hateful rhetoric is simply false. Federal judges have no patience for courtroom outbursts. Witness the federal trial of Zacharias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker. His outbursts and anti-American insults led the judge to revoke his status as a pro se defendant, effectively silencing him for the duration of his trial. By contrast, the military judge at Guantánamo once invited all five of the 9/11 defendants to give a five-minute tirade before the media and victims’ families just to coax them into the courtroom.

In short, using our federal courts is being tough on terror. There is plenty of risk but no discernible benefit to trying the 9/11 defendants in an untested system. This trial should not be a “learning experience.” Too much is at stake for our national security, our values, and our future.

Lt.Col. Darrel Vandeveld (U.S. Army, Ret.) is a former Guantánamo prosecutor.  Joshua Dratel, a federal criminal defense lawyer in private practice, represented Guantánamo detainee David Hicks and is currently an advisor to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers on the representation of high-value detainees.

EL CAJON, Calif. — A California Highway Patrol officer helped slow a runaway Toyota Prius from 94 mph to a safe stop on Monday after the car’s accelerator became stuck on a San Diego County freeway, the CHP said.

Prius driver James Sikes called 911 about 1:30 p.m. after accelerating to pass another vehicle on Interstate 8 near La Posta and finding that he could not control his car, the CHP said.

“I pushed the gas pedal to pass a car and it did something kind of funny… it jumped and it just stuck there,” the 61-year-old driver said at a news conference. “As it was going, I was trying the brakes…it wasn’t stopping, it wasn’t doing anything and it just kept speeding up,” Sikes said, adding he could smell the brakes burning he was pressing the pedal so hard.

A patrol car pulled alongside the Prius and officers told Sikes over a loudspeaker to push the brake pedal to the floor and apply the emergency brake.

“They also got it going on a steep upgrade,” said Officer Jesse Udovich. “Between those three things, they got it to slow down.”

After the car decelerated to about 50 mph, Sikes turned off the engine and coasted to a halt.

The officer then maneuvered his car in front of the Prius as a precautionary block, Udovich said.

In a statement, Toyota said it has dispatched a field technical specialist to San Diego to investigate the incident.

Toyota has recalled some 8.5 million vehicles worldwide — more than 6 million in the United States — since last fall because of acceleration problems in multiple models and braking issues in the Prius.

Toyota owners have complained of their vehicles speeding out of control despite efforts to slow down, sometimes resulting in deadly crashes. The government has received complaints of 34 deaths linked to sudden acceleration of Toyota vehicles since 2000.

One of the crashes claimed the life of a CHP officer last August.

Off-duty CHP Officer Mark Saylor was killed along with his wife, her brother and the couple’s daughter after their Lexus’ accelerator got stuck in La Mesa.

The Toyota-manufactured loaner vehicle slammed into a sport utility vehicle at about 100 mph, careened off the freeway, hit an embankment, overturned and burst into flames.

WATCH

Visit msnbc.com�for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

WEDNESDAY’S health care rally was one of President Obama’s finest hours. It was so fine it couldn’t be blighted even by his preposterous backdrop, a cohort of white-jacketed medical workers large enough to staff a hospital in one of the daytime soaps that refused to be pre-empted by the White House show.

Obama’s urgent script didn’t need such cheesy theatrics. At last he took ownership of what he called “my proposal,” stating concisely three concrete ways the bill would improve America’s broken health care system. At last he pushed for a majority-rule, up-or-down vote in Congress. At last he conceded that bipartisan agreement between two parties with “honest and substantial differences” on fundamental principles wasn’t happening. At last he mobilized his rhetoric against a villain everyone could hiss — insurance companies. In a brief address, he mentioned these malefactors of great greed 13 times.

There was only one problem. This finest hour arrived hastily and tardily. At 1:45 p.m. Eastern time, who was watching? Of those who did watch or caught up later, how many bought the president’s vow to finish the job “in the next few weeks”? We’ve heard this too many times before. Last May Obama said he would have a bill by late July. In July he said he wanted it “done by the fall.” The White House’s new date for final House action — specified as March 18 by Robert Gibbs, the press secretary — is already in jeopardy.

“They are waiting for us to act,” Obama said on Wednesday of the American people. “They are waiting for us to lead.” Actually, they have given up waiting. Some 80 percent of the country believes that “nothing can be accomplished” in Washington, according to an Ipsos/McClatchy poll conducted a week ago. The percentage is just as high among Democrats, many of whom admire the president but have a sinking sense of disillusionment about his ability to exercise power.

Now that we have finally arrived at the do-or-die moment for Obama’s signature issue, we face the alarming prospect that his presidency could be toast if he doesn’t make good on a year’s worth of false starts. And it won’t even be the opposition’s fault. If too many Democrats in the House defect, health care will be dead. The G.O.P. would be able to argue this fall, not without reason, that the party holding the White House and both houses of Congress cannot govern.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that Obama does eke out his victory. Republicans claim that if he does so by “ramming through” the bill with the Congressional reconciliation process, they will have another winning issue for November. On this, they are wrong. Their problem is not just their own hypocritical record on reconciliation, which they embraced gladly to ram through the budget-busting Bush tax cuts. They’d also have to contend with this country’s congenitally short attention span. Once the health care fight is over and out of sight, it will be out of mind to most Americans. We’ve already forgotten about Afghanistan — until the next bloodbath.

The 2010 election will instead be fought about the economy, as most elections are, especially in a recession whose fallout remains severe. But that battle may be even tougher for this president and his party — and not just because of the unemployment numbers. The leadership shortfall we’ve witnessed during Obama’s yearlong health care march — typified by the missed deadlines, the foggy identification of his priorities, the sometimes abrupt shifts in political tone and strategy — won’t go away once the bill does. This weakness will remain unless and until the president himself corrects it.

Those who are unsympathetic or outright hostile to Obama frame his failures as an attempt to impose “socialism” on a conservative nation. The truth is that the Fox News right would believe this about any Democratic president no matter who he was and what his policies were. Obama, who has expanded the war in Afghanistan and proved reluctant to reverse extra-constitutional Bush-Cheney jurisprudence, is a radical mainly to those who believe a conservative Republican senator like Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas is a closet commie.

The more serious debate about Obama is being conducted by neutral or sympathetic observers. There are many hypotheses. In Newsweek, Jon Meacham has written about an “inspiration gap.” He sees the professorial president as “sometimes seeming to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country.” In The New Yorker, Ken Auletta has raised the perils of Obama’s overexposure in our fractionalized media. (As if to prove the point, the president was scheduled to appear on Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” to celebrate its 1,000th episode this weekend.) In the Beltway, the hottest conversations center on the competence of Obama’s team. Washington Post columnists are now dueling over whether Rahm Emanuel is an underutilized genius whose political savvy the president has foolishly ignored — or a bull in the capital china shop who should be replaced before he brings Obama down.

But the buck stops with the president, not his chief of staff. And if there’s one note that runs through many of the theories as to why Obama has disappointed in Year One, it cuts to the heart of what had been his major strength: his ability to communicate a compelling narrative. In the campaign, that narrative, of change and hope, was powerful — both about his own youth, biography and talent, and about a country that had gone wildly off track during the failed presidency of his predecessor. In governing, Obama has yet to find a theme that is remotely as arresting to the majority of Americans who still like him and are desperate for him to succeed.

The problem is not necessarily that Obama is trying to do too much, but that there is no consistent, clear message to unite all that he is trying to do. He has variously argued that health care reform is a moral imperative to protect the uninsured, a long-term fiscal fix for the American economy and an attempt to curb insurers’ abuses. It may be all of these, but between the multitude of motives and the blurriness (until now) of Obama’s own specific must-have provisions, the bill became a mash-up that baffled or defeated those Americans on his side and was easily caricatured as a big-government catastrophe by his adversaries.

Obama prides himself on not being ideological or partisan — of following, as he put it in his first prime-time presidential press conference, a “pragmatic agenda.” But pragmatism is about process, not principle. Pragmatism is hardly a rallying cry for a nation in this much distress, and it’s not a credible or attainable goal in a Washington as dysfunctional as the one Americans watch in real time on cable. Yes, the Bush administration was incompetent, but we need more than a brilliant mediator, manager or technocrat to move us beyond the wreckage it left behind. To galvanize the nation, Obama needs to articulate a substantive belief system that’s built from his bedrock convictions. His presidency cannot be about the cool equanimity and intellectual command of his management style.

That he hasn’t done so can be attributed to his ingrained distrust of appearing partisan or, worse, a knee-jerk “liberal.” That is admirable in intellectual theory, but without a powerful vision to knit together his vision of America’s future, he comes off as a doctrinaire Democrat anyway. His domestic policies, whether on climate change or health care or regulatory reform, are reduced to items on a standard liberal wish list. If F.D.R. or Reagan could distill, coin and convey a credo “nonideological” enough to serve as an umbrella for all their goals and to attract lasting majority coalitions of disparate American constituencies, so can this gifted president.

He cannot wait much longer. The rise in credit-card rates, as well as the drop in consumer confidence, home sales and bank lending, all foretell more suffering ahead for those who don’t work on Wall Street. But on these issues the president, too timid to confront the financial industry backers of his own campaign (or their tribunes in his own administration) and too fearful of sounding like a vulgar partisan populist, has taken to repeating his health care performance.

And so leadership on financial reform, as with health care, has been delegated to bipartisan Congressional negotiators poised to neuter it. The protracted debate that now seems imminent — over whether a consumer protection agency will be in the Fed or outside it — is again about the arcana of process and bureaucratic machinery, not substance. Since Obama offers no overarching narrative of what financial reform might really mean to Americans in their daily lives, Americans understandably assume the reforms will be too compromised or marginal to alter a system that leaves their incomes stagnant (at best) while bailed-out bankers return to partying like it’s 2007. Even an unimpeachable capitalist titan like Warren Buffett, venting in his annual letter to investors last month, sounds more fired up about unregulated derivatives and more outraged about unpunished finance-industry executives than the president does.

This time Obama doesn’t have a year to arrive at his finest hour. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the clock runs out on Nov. 2.

A coalition of communities in six Midwestern states filed a federal lawsuit Monday seeking to force the manufacturer of a widely-used herbicide to pay for its removal from drinking water.

Atrazine, a weed-killer sprayed primarily on cornfields, can run off into rivers and streams that supply municipal water systems. As the Huffington Post Investigative Fund reported in a  series of  articles last  fall, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency failed to notify the public that atrazine had been found at levels above the federal safety limit in drinking water in at least four states.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois by 16 cities in Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, and Iowa.  The communities allege that Swiss corporation Syngenta AG and its Delaware counterpart Syngenta Crop Protection, Inc. reaped billions of dollars from the sale of atrazine while local taxpayers were left with the financial burden of filtering the chemical from drinking water.

Many water utility managers  told the Investigative Fund that they could not afford the expensive carbon filters that are needed to remove atrazine.

Syngenta spokesman Paul Minehart told the Investigative Fund that the company had not yet received word of a federal action, but said that current levels of atrazine in drinking water are safe.

“What Syngenta can say is that EPA re-registered atrazine in 2006, stating it would cause no harm to the general population,” Minehart said. “In the current economy many organizations, including water systems, are looking for additional sources of revenue.  It is not surprising that some water systems would say they cannot afford additional filtering but, for atrazine, there is no need.”

Atrazine has long been a controversial product. The European Union in 2004 banned its use, saying there was not enough information to prove its safety. The EPA recently  announced that it would be re-evaluating the herbicide’s ability to cause cancer and birth defects, as well as its potential to disrupt the hormone and reproductive systems of humans and amphibians.

Last week, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science  reported that male frogs exposed to levels of atrazine below federal limits could become functional females, with the ability to mate and lay eggs.

Citizens in all sixteen of the cities named in the lawsuit get their drinking water from sources next to or surrounded by agricultural fields where farmers use atrazine. Some of these cities sell their water in bulk to other nearby towns.

According to EPA data from 2008, at least two of the cities — Coulterville, Ill. and Monroeville, Ohio — found atrazine in their river water at levels above 30 parts per billion (ppb). To comply with federal law, the level of atrazine in drinking water must not exceed 3ppb on annual average.

Lawyer Stephen Tillery, who is representing the sixteen cities in this complaint, said that these cities alone have spent upwards of $350 million trying to filter atrazine from their drinking water.

To watch a video of Investigative Fund reporter Danielle Ivory discussing atrazine on the TV program Democracy Now, click  here.

Illinois Class Action Complaint Against Syngenta

]]> Huffington Post Investigative Fund |  Danielle Ivory

A coalition of communities in six Midwestern states filed a federal lawsuit Monday seeking to force the manufacturer of a widely-used herbicide to pay for its removal from drinking water.

Atrazine, a weed-killer sprayed primarily on cornfields, can run off into rivers and streams that supply municipal water systems. As the Huffington Post Investigative Fund reported in a  series of  articles last  fall, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency failed to notify the public that atrazine had been found at levels above the federal safety limit in drinking water in at least four states.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois by 16 cities in Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, and Iowa.  The communities allege that Swiss corporation Syngenta AG and its Delaware counterpart Syngenta Crop Protection, Inc. reaped billions of dollars from the sale of atrazine while local taxpayers were left with the financial burden of filtering the chemical from drinking water.

Many water utility managers  told the Investigative Fund that they could not afford the expensive carbon filters that are needed to remove atrazine.

Syngenta spokesman Paul Minehart told the Investigative Fund that the company had not yet received word of a federal action, but said that current levels of atrazine in drinking water are safe.

“What Syngenta can say is that EPA re-registered atrazine in 2006, stating it would cause no harm to the general population,” Minehart said. “In the current economy many organizations, including water systems, are looking for additional sources of revenue.  It is not surprising that some water systems would say they cannot afford additional filtering but, for atrazine, there is no need.”

Atrazine has long been a controversial product. The European Union in 2004 banned its use, saying there was not enough information to prove its safety. The EPA recently  announced that it would be re-evaluating the herbicide’s ability to cause cancer and birth defects, as well as its potential to disrupt the hormone and reproductive systems of humans and amphibians.

Last week, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science  reported that male frogs exposed to levels of atrazine below federal limits could become functional females, with the ability to mate and lay eggs.

Citizens in all sixteen of the cities named in the lawsuit get their drinking water from sources next to or surrounded by agricultural fields where farmers use atrazine. Some of these cities sell their water in bulk to other nearby towns.

According to EPA data from 2008, at least two of the cities — Coulterville, Ill. and Monroeville, Ohio — found atrazine in their river water at levels above 30 parts per billion (ppb). To comply with federal law, the level of atrazine in drinking water must not exceed 3ppb on annual average.

Lawyer Stephen Tillery, who is representing the sixteen cities in this complaint, said that these cities alone have spent upwards of $350 million trying to filter atrazine from their drinking water.

To watch a video of Investigative Fund reporter Danielle Ivory discussing atrazine on the TV program Democracy Now, click  here.

Illinois Class Action Complaint Against Syngenta

]]> http://freddevan.com/wordpress/2010/03/16-cities-sue-manufacturer-of-atrazine-weed-killer-for-contaminating-drinking-water/feed/ 0 http://freddevan.com/wordpress/2010/03/why-apple-cant-control-its-chinese-factories/ http://freddevan.com/wordpress/2010/03/why-apple-cant-control-its-chinese-factories/#comments Sun, 07 Mar 2010 08:38:28 +0000 admin http://freddevan.com/wordpress/?p=15571 While Apple is to be applauded for auditing its suppliers in an attempt to identify poor working conditions, its suppliers are so powerful that Apple can’t effect real change – and nor can any other tech company.

By Malcolm Moore in Shanghai

Only three companies in the world have the expertise necessary to build Apple products.

Last year, after a 25-year-old Chinese university graduate committed suicide at one of the factories that makes Apple’s iPhone, executives from the Californian company flew in for an urgent review.

Sun Danyong threw himself from the 12th floor window of his apartment block after an iPhone prototype went missing on his watch.

Before he jumped, he sent a message to a friend claiming that security staff at Foxconn, the notoriously secretive Taiwanese company that makes all of Apple’s mobile phones and the upcoming iPad, had beaten him severely.

The allegations deeply shocked Apple’s management, and there were calls for Foxconn to be fired. The Taiwanese firm, which operates a series of mega-factories on the Chinese mainland, has been described as “inhumane and militant” by China Labour Watch, a US-based NGO.

However, at the end of the day, Apple was powerless to change the situation. According to analysts, Foxconn and its two rivals, Quanta and Pegatron, are the only three companies in the world that are capable of quickly mass-manufacturing Apple products of the right quality.

Industry insiders said it is this triumvirate, and not Apple, that really holds the power in the relationship. “In the near term, there is absolutely nothing that Apple can do to shift away from these companies,” said Edward Yen, a technology analyst at UBS.

“Apple’s biggest concern is whether the factories can deliver on time, and get the quality right. There really aren’t that many players who can do that, major players who have the skillset and flexibility,” he added.

Apple’s lack of power over its suppliers came under the spotlight again last week, when the company’s own investigation revealed widespread allegations of abuse among the 102 factories that manufacture its goods.

Apple’s 2010 Supplier Responsibility report listed claims of child labour, excessive working hours, environmental abuses and very low wages at many of its suppliers.

And while Apple deserves credit for transparently auditing its suppliers and publishing the results, it was notable how little the US company could do to resolve the problems. Many issues had worsened in the last year, but Apple only terminated the contract of a single supplier.

“Apple can’t do anything about it, it has nowhere else it can turn to to make its products,” said one expert in sourcing from Chinese factories. “If they try and move business away from Foxconn, Foxconn can simply go out and buy whichever supplier they turn to”.

Although Apple carefully chooses the smaller component companies that make the parts that go into its computers, iPods and iPhones, it is the triumvirate of big suppliers who are in charge of running the system day-by-day. If Apple tried to take its business elsewhere, it would risk losing its entire supply chain.

The three companies are behemoths in their own right, producing goods for a roster of blue-chip brands, including Sony, HP, Dell, Acer and Nokia. Quanta is the world’s largest laptop maker, and manufactures 90pc of Apple’s Macbooks, according to Mr Yen.

Foxconn, meanwhile, makes all of the iPhones and the two companies split the production of Apple’s iMac desktop computers half-and-half. Pegatron makes some of Apple’s iPod models.

All three companies are deeply secretive. Foxconn did not respond to requests for a comment on its relationship with Apple, while Elton Yang, the vice president of Quanta said: “We strictly follow up any core policy stipulated by our customers. Meanwhile we shall not and could not comment on anything regarding our customers.”

Apple, asked about the abuses in its report, said: “Last year Apple proactively audited more than 100 supplier facilities around the world to ensure that they comply with Apple’s strict standards. We have also created extensive training programs to educate workers about their right to a safe and respectful work environment.”

Apple controls its research and development, dreaming up its products in Cupertino, California, and then passing the blueprints to its suppliers.

However, elsewhere in the technology industry, the relationship between big name brands and the triumvirate is changing rapidly. Analysts said Apple’s rivals, HP and Dell, have even less control of their supply chain. “With Dell, HP and Acer, they pretty much say to Quanta and Foxconn: ‘Show us what you’ve got’,” said Mr Yen. It is the suppliers, rather than HP and Dell, who come up with new designs and technology. Both Quanta and Foxconn have heavily invested in making sure they are at the cutting edge.

Quanta, for example, made a $10m (£6.65m) investment last year in Tilera, a chip-maker whose technology may allow users to control their computers by waving their hands in front of their screen. Foxconn has backed Innovation Works, the technology incubation firm started by Kaifu Lee, the former head of Google in China.

Nevertheless, Mr Yen predicted it would take Apple a long time if it wanted to change the practices in the Chinese system. “If they genuinely do not like what is happening, they can build up the capabilities of another supplier, feeding it a few projects here and there. They can’t do it overnight though. It would take a couple of years.”

Related Articles

• Apple’s factories are getting worse not better

• Apple iPad on sale in April

• Apple admits using child labour

• Apple iPad ‘to be released March 26′

• Apple sues HTC

• Tesco’s International Sourcing – the machine behind the machine

Rahm Emanuel, the president’s tough backroom operator, has found himself at the centre of a career-threatening row

Paul Harris in New York
The Observer

Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s outspoken chief of staff, has become embroiled in a public row with his critics amid accusations that he has damaged the standing of the presidency and undermined his boss.

Emanuel has become the subject of an intense war of words between those who blame him for the failings of Obama’s tough first year in office and those who insist that Obama should have listened to him more. If the controversy deepens any further, some feel that he may be forced to resign.

The development has been remarkable for a man in Emanuel’s job, which calls for him to adopt a behind-the-scenes role similar to that of a Mafia boss’s consigliere, whispering advice in the ear of the president and then strong-arming political targets into obeying his master’s will.

But critics say the row shows just how much of a strain Obama’s first year of office has taken on his top White House team after a series of political setbacks, especially over healthcare. Officials in Obama’s administration, who once appeared so united, now seem to be in siege mode and starting to fight among themselves.

“It was inevitable that this would happen on one level. You have a president with an ambitious agenda and they have not been getting as much done as they had hoped,” said John Geer, editor of the Journal of Politics and a political scientist at Vanderbilt University.

The worsening atmosphere could become particularly difficult for Emanuel if November’s mid-term elections turn into a Democratic rout. “Rahm Emanuel is burning the candle at both ends. I would not be surprised if he steps down after the mid-terms,” Geer said.

By the standards of the Obama White House, the fight around Emanuel has been unusually public and appears to have employed many of the dirty tricks of media manipulation. It began when some public figures on the left of the party, including prominent bloggers and members of thinktanks, began to call for his resignation, accusing him of being a closet conservative who had failed to get meaningful healthcare reform and other liberal policy through Congress. One, the influential Jane Hamsher of the blog Firedoglake, even said the Justice Department should investigate him.

That growing chorus appears to have forced Emanuel – or, more likely, his supporters – to launch a counter-attack. A column in the Washington Post by the highly respected sketch-writer Dana Milbank reported that Emanuel had set up his own press outreach operation, separate to that of other top White House aides such as press secretary Robert Gibbs and top adviser Valerie Jarrett. It also stuck the knife into those aides and other senior Obama advisers, blaming them for Obama’s problems.

“Obama’s first year fell apart in large part because he didn’t follow his chief of staff’s advice on crucial matters,” Milbank wrote. The piece concluded bluntly: “Obama needs fewer acolytes and more action. Rahm should stay.”

Other pieces followed in which sources attacked Obama’s top aides and repeated the line that Emanuel was the spurned saviour of the Obama White House, not its downfall. But there was a backlash, too. Anonymous sources reported that Michelle Obama had been furious at the Milbank column. “A knife in Obama’s back?” thundered a headline in the Los Angeles Times.

There was much speculation that the pro-Emanuel pieces had done damage to Obama by undermining his authority in the frank way that they had spelled out that Obama’s first year had been a disappointment. “The defence of Rahm favoured by some Washington Democrats is evidence of everything that is wrong with Washington … no wonder people hate this city,” fumed the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein.

Indeed, the civil war between pro-Rahm and anti-Rahm forces has also dragged in the Post. Not only did Milbank’s column trigger much of the dispute, but soon Post columnists were attacking their newspaper for taking too much of a pro-Rahm line in its news stories.

At the end of last week the Post’s longstanding political columnist, David Broder, used his column to attack Milbank and his fellow reporters. Broder called the pro-Rahm argument a “remarkable fiction” and was withering in his critique of his paper’s reporting. Not surprisingly that, too, gave the story a fresh burst of life.

It was perhaps inevitable that Emanuel would end up being the centre of attention. “He is clearly a very strong chief of staff. He has very strong preferences for what should be happening,” said Geer.

Emanuel’s supporters hail him as a master of the political dark arts who gets things done. He is abrasive and renowned for his foul-mouthed tirades, like a real-life American variation on The Thick of It’s fictional Malcolm Tucker. “Fucknutsville” is apparently his preferred nickname for Washington, and he was recently forced to apologise for referring to liberal activists as “retarded”.

Emanuel is known for his ability to dominate and intimidate politicians and cabinet members. No wonder he has made enemies. But he has also now broken one of the cardinal rules of his job: to control the story, not be the story.

In his film Capitalism: A Love Story, Michael Moore squares off with the free-market system for its role in leveraging the United States’s wealth into the hands of a few.

But in one clip cut from the documentary — which Moore provided exclusively to RAW STORY — he interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, who explains how capitalism is actually contributing to the very downfall of the human race and the “degradation of the planet.”

“All sorts of people who have spent their lives studying climate change, from Bill McKibben on down, have warned us that we don’t have a lot of time left,” Hedges said. “So it’s not just that capitalism has destroyed our economic system and hijacked our political system, but it literally is extinguishing the system that sustains life. If that’s not thwarted soon…then we will begin to see massive dislocations, environmental refugees, further depleting of natural resources. Overpopulation is also an issue. The UN estimates that by 2050 the size of the planet will double.”

The very concept of capitalism, Moore declares in the film, is the problem because it inevitably leads to a system where the richest few control the means of production as well as the levers of power — leading to a “plutonomy,” a term used in a leaked Citigroup memo from 2005, in which the finance juggernaut concluded that the United States is no longer a democracy.

In the interview, Hedges decries America’s turn toward supply-side economics over the last three decades as the cause of stagnating middle class incomes, contrasting it with the increasingly lavish fortunes of the wealthy and the aid they often receive from the government at the expense of working people.

Moore discussed the film as well as his takes on the Oscars and recent political news in an exclusive interview with RAW STORY this week.Capitalism: A Love Story is set to be released on DVD and Blu-ray Monday.

This video is from Capitalism: A Love Story.

Download video via RawReplay.com

David Edwards, Sahil Kapur and Stephen C. Webster contributed to this report.

By Joe Conason

The House Ethics Committee is far from concluding its investigation of Rep. Charles Rangel, despite his resignation from the Ways and Means chairmanship, as the Republicans will no doubt remind everyone repeatedly in the months ahead.

Near the top of the ethics docket, they are sure to mention, are allegations concerning the Harlem congressman’s fundraising for the  Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College of New York, a $30 million project at his alma mater. Rangel has acknowledged using his congressional stationery to solicit funds for the center, a violation of House rules. But he has denied more serious charges — based on an investigative report in the New York Times — that he may have exchanged legislative favors for corporate donations to the center.

When ranting on about Rangel, however, what the Republicans surely won’t mention is that he’s not alone in questionable fundraising for a vanity academic institution that bears his name. Leaders on both sides of Capitol Hill have done likewise for years — notably including the odious Trent Lott — but the most troubling example is none other than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who now holds Lott’s former post. If the term “Senate Ethics Committee” weren’t an oxymoron, he would be enduring an intense investigation, too.

McConnell is a graduate of the University of Louisville, a place of higher learning that he is seeking to transform into a display case for his limitless narcissism (as well as that of his wife, former Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chao). Lots of nice things at the  university are named after him, but above all there is the McConnell Center for Political Leadership, a special program much like the Rangel Center at CCNY. In such places, young and idealistic scholars are introduced to the tradition of public service represented by these great men, etc.

According to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has named both Rangel and McConnell to its annual lists of the “most corrupt” legislators, the list of donors to the McConnell Center was kept hidden by university administrators. When the Louisville Courier-Journal sued to obtain the names of those donors, the Kentucky Supreme Court handed down a curious decision. Future donors to the center would have to be revealed, the court ruled in August 2008, but 62 past donors could remain anonymous.

So the Bunning blockade is over. For days, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky exploited Senate rules to block a one-month extension of unemployment benefits. In the end, he gave in, although not soon enough to prevent an interruption of payments to around 100,000 workers.

But while the blockade is over, its lessons remain. Some of those lessons involve the spectacular dysfunctionality of the Senate. What I want to focus on right now, however, is the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.

Take the question of helping the unemployed in the middle of a deep slump. What Democrats believe is what textbook economics says: that when the economy is deeply depressed, extending unemployment benefits not only helps those in need, it also reduces unemployment. That’s because the economy’s problem right now is lack of sufficient demand, and cash-strapped unemployed workers are likely to spend their benefits. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office says that aid to the unemployed is one of the most effective forms of economic stimulus, as measured by jobs created per dollar of outlay.

But that’s not how Republicans see it. Here’s what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say when defending Mr. Bunning’s position (although not joining his blockade): unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

In Mr. Kyl’s view, then, what we really need to worry about right now — with more than five unemployed workers for every job opening, and long-term unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression — is whether we’re reducing the incentive of the unemployed to find jobs. To me, that’s a bizarre point of view — but then, I don’t live in Mr. Kyl’s universe.

And the difference between the two universes isn’t just intellectual, it’s also moral.

Bill Clinton famously told a suffering constituent, “I feel your pain.” But the thing is, he did and does — while many other politicians clearly don’t. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that the parties feel the pain of different people.

During the debate over unemployment benefits, Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat of Oregon, made a plea for action on behalf of those in need. In response, Mr. Bunning blurted out an expletive. That was undignified — but not that different, in substance, from the position of leading Republicans.

Consider, in particular, the position that Mr. Kyl has taken on a proposed bill that would extend unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for the jobless for the rest of the year. Republicans will block that bill, said Mr. Kyl, unless they get a “path forward fairly soon” on the estate tax.

Now, the House has already passed a bill that, by exempting the assets of couples up to $7 million, would leave 99.75 percent of estates tax-free. But that doesn’t seem to be enough for Mr. Kyl; he’s willing to hold up desperately needed aid to the unemployed on behalf of the remaining 0.25 percent. That’s a very clear statement of priorities.

So, as I said, the parties now live in different universes, both intellectually and morally. We can ask how that happened; there, too, the parties live in different worlds. Republicans would say that it’s because Democrats have moved sharply left: a Republican National Committee fund-raising plan acquired by Politico suggests motivating donors by promising to “save the country from trending toward socialism.” I’d say that it’s because Republicans have moved hard to the right, furiously rejecting ideas they used to support. Indeed, the Obama health care plan strongly resembles past G.O.P. plans. But again, I don’t live in their universe.

More important, however, what are the implications of this total divergence in views?

The answer, of course, is that bipartisanship is now a foolish dream. How can the parties agree on policy when they have utterly different visions of how the economy works, when one party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over affluent victims of the “death tax”?

Which brings us to the central political issue right now: health care reform. If Congress enacts reform in the next few weeks — and the odds are growing that it will — it will do so without any Republican votes. Some people will decry this, insisting that President Obama should have tried harder to gain bipartisan support. But that isn’t going to happen, on health care or anything else, for years to come.

Someday, somehow, we as a nation will once again find ourselves living on the same planet. But for now, we aren’t. And that’s just the way it is.

ABC News found that one of Rep. Bart Stupak’s (D-Mich.) biggest contentions in his fight against health care reform legislation — that federal money will go to “directly subsidize abortions” — is not true in all cases.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has repeatedly asserted that there is “no federally funded abortion” in the bill.

According to ABC’s Jonathan Karl: “Pelosi is right in that the bill makes it clear, there can be no federal money for abortion, except in cases of rape, incest, or to protect the life of the mother.”

Stupak argued that “when you read the legislation, $1 per month for all enrollees must go into a fund for reproductive care which includes abortion coverage.”

Karl’s research of the wording of the bill finds this statement to be false. “That’s actually wrong,” Karl reports. “In fact, you only pay the $1 abortion fee if you choose a plan that covers abortion. To anti-abortion advocates like Stupak, the only acceptable solution is a complete ban on abortion coverage by any insurance policy that accepts any federal money at all.”

Watch the report:

A.I.G., Greece, and Who’s Next?

As Greece has tottered on the brink of fiscal chaos, threatening to drag much of Europe down with it, Wall Street’s role in the fiasco has drawn well-deserved scorn.

First came the news that Greece had entered into derivatives transactions with Goldman Sachs and other banks to hide its public debt. Then came reports that some of those same banks and various hedge funds were using credit default swaps — the type of derivative that kneecapped the American International Group — to bet on the likelihood of a Greek default and using derivatives to wager on a drop in the euro.

European leaders have called for an inquiry into the Greek crisis. Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, has told Congress that the Fed is “looking into” Wall Street’s deals with Greece, and the Justice Department is investigating the euro bets. That is better than turning a blind eye, but it is not nearly enough.

The bigger problem is in America, where markets are supposed to be fair and transparent. These particular — and particularly complicated — instruments are traded privately among banks, their clients and other investors with virtually no regulation or oversight.

The Obama administration and Congress have been talking for a year about fixing the derivatives market. Big banks have been lobbying to block change. And the longer it takes, the weaker the proposed new rules become.

Here are some of the problems that must be fixed:

NO TRANSPARENCY Derivatives are supposed to reduce and spread risk. In a credit default swap, for instance, a bond investor pays a fee to a counterparty, usually a bank, that agrees to pay the investor if the bond defaults. But because the markets in which they trade are largely unregulated, derivatives can too easily become tools for dangerous risk-taking, vast speculation and dodgy accounting.

A big part of the problem is that derivatives are traded as private one-on-one contracts. That means big profits for banks since clients can’t compare offerings. Private markets also lack the rules that prevail in regulated markets — like capital requirements, record keeping and disclosure — that are essential for regulators and investors to monitor and control risk.

That is why it is so essential to move derivative trades onto fully transparent exchanges. The administration originally embraced that idea, with exceptions only for occasional, unique contracts. But when the Treasury proposed legislation in August, it included huge loopholes, and a derivative reform bill that passed the House in December has many of the same problems. (The Senate has yet to introduce a reform bill.)

Both the administration and the House would exclude from exchange trading the estimated $50 trillion market in foreign exchange swaps — similar to the derivatives Greece used to hide its debt. The rationale for the exclusion never has been clearly explained.

The Treasury proposal and House bill also would exclude transactions that occur between big banks and many of their corporate clients from the exchange trading requirement, ostensibly because those deals are only for minimizing business risks, not for speculation or for window-dressing the books. That’s debatable. But even if true, other derivatives users would almost inevitably find ways to exploit such a broad exemption.

What is clear about the exemptions is that they would help to preserve banks’ profits. What is also clear is that they would defeat the goals of reform: to lower risk, increase transparency and foster efficiency.

LIMITED POWER TO STOP ABUSES When the House put out a draft of new rules in October, it sensibly gave regulators the power to ban abusive derivatives — ones that are not necessarily fraudulent, but potentially damaging to the system. Derivatives investors who stand to make huge profits if a company or country defaults, for example, might try to provoke default — a situation that regulators should be able to prevent. In the final House bill, however, the ban was replaced with a requirement that regulators simply report to Congress if they believe abuses are occurring.

NO STATE REGULATION, EITHER Current law also exempts unregulated derivatives from state antigambling laws. That means that states have no power to police their use for excessive speculation. Treasury and House reform proposals have called for maintaining the federal pre-emption of state antigambling laws. Pre-emption could be tolerable if derivatives were traded on fully regulated exchanges. But as long as many derivative products and transactions are exempted from fully regulated exchange trading, pre-emption of state antigambling laws is a license for, well, gambling.

The big banks claim that derivatives are used to hedge risk, not for excessive speculation. The best way to monitor that claim is to execute the transactions on fully regulated exchanges, pass rules and laws to ensure stability, and appoint and empower regulators with independence and good judgment to enforce compliance.

Without effective reform, the derivative-driven financial crisis in the United States that exploded in 2008, and the Greek debt crisis, circa 2010, will be mere way stations on the road to greater calamities.

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) has been making headlines recently by threatening to torpedo health care reform unless the bill excludes coverage for abortion.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow believes that Stupak is just looking for publicity with “this antiabortion stunt” and that “it is not rational to think that the Democratic-led House and the Democratic-led Senate are going to let him use health reform as a way to effectively ban abortion.”

She points out, however, that Stupak’s new notoriety means that he may “end up having to answer for some of the unexplained things that no one cared to have [him] explain before.”

“For example,” Maddow noted on Thursday, “Bart Stupak famously was one of the conservative politicians who lived at C Street — a $1.8 million town house on Capitol Hill that featured in the Mark Sanford sex scandal and the John Ensign sex scandal and the Chip Pickering sex scandal. The house is home to a number of members of Congress. It has been reported to be run by the secretive religious group known as the Family.”

The series of scandals involving the Family and its high-level network of political connections has been growing since last summer, when it was learned that the three conservative lawmakers involved in allegations of infidelity all had ties to the C Street house. The Family has since been linked to a proposed law in Uganda which would mandate the death penalty for cases of “aggravated homosexuality.”

Last month the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington suggested that President Obama and members of Congress avoid the group’s National Prayer Breakfast because it “actually serves as a meeting and recruiting event for the shadowy Fellowship Foundation,” another name for the Family.

Stupak has insisted, “There is no such thing as ‘the Family.’ … I rent a room, that’s really about it. … There is no theocracy that I’m a part of.” He has also declined to comment on author Jeff Sharlet’s claim that he is “very involved” in the religious aspect of the Family and has mentored other members.

“But here’s the rub,” Maddow explained. “Everyone who has been living at C Street, including Bart Stupak, has been getting a sweetheart deal. … These are rooms in this really swanky town house that come with meals, they come with maid service … How much do you think that’s worth on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., just blocks away from the Capitol building? How about $600 a month?”

“You can`t pay that kind of way-below market rent unless you`re being subsidized by someone,” Maddow continued. “That`s an in-kind donation to a member of Congress. That means that for every single month he was living there, and he lived there for years, Bart Stupak was apparently receiving an in-kind, very generous donation of rent. Someone was paying for Bart Stupak to live in this fake church. Who was it?”

Maddow was joined by Ed Brayton, state editor of The Michigan Messenger, who has been following the Stupak story closely. Brayton said that last summer, he asked Jeff Sharlet who Stupak was paying rent to if not the Family. He was told that the “C Street house is actually owned … by the C Street Foundation. … The Family operates to a huge network of loosely affiliated nonprofit organizations….. and according to Jeff, the C Street Foundation is directly affiliated with The Family.”

Last summer, Raw Story reported that according to the Washington Post, the house is owned by an even more shadowy religious group, Youth With a Mission, whose declared objectives include establishing world domination through control of government, education, business, and the media.

Brayton, however, seemed disinclined to go too hard on Stupak. “I don`t think it`s fair to paint him as sort of a religious right ideologue,” he concluded. “That`s not what he is. He`s a fairly moderate guy. But abortion is the one issue that, I think, really gets his dander up and that he feels very strongly about, and he feels like that`s a place where his religious views should be imposed on the rest of the country.”

This video is from MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast March 4, 2010.

Download video via RawReplay.com

SOUTHLAKE, Texas — Toyota has for years blocked access to data stored in devices similar to airline “black boxes” that could explain crashes blamed on sudden unintended acceleration, according to an Associated Press review of lawsuits nationwide and interviews with auto crash experts.

The AP investigation found that Toyota has been inconsistent – and sometimes even contradictory – in revealing exactly what the devices record and don’t record, including critical data about whether the brake or accelerator pedals were depressed at the time of a crash.

By contrast, most other automakers routinely allow much more open access to information from their event data recorders, commonly known as EDRs.

AP also found that Toyota:

_ Has frequently refused to provide key information sought by crash victims and survivors.

_ Uses proprietary software in its EDRs. Until this week, there was only a single laptop in the U.S. containing the software needed to read the data following a crash.

_ In some lawsuits, when pressed to provide recorder information Toyota either settled or provided printouts with the key columns blank.

Toyota’s “black box” information is emerging as a critical legal issue amid the recall of 8 million vehicles by the world’s largest automaker. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said this week that 52 people have died in crashes linked to accelerator problems, triggering an avalanche of lawsuits.

When Toyota was asked by the AP to explain what exactly its recorders do collect, a company statement said Thursday that the devices record data from five seconds before until two seconds after an air bag is deployed in a crash.

The statement said information is captured about vehicle speed, the accelerator’s angle, gear shift position, whether the seat belt was used and the angle of the driver’s seat.There was no initial mention of brakes – a key point in the sudden acceleration problem. When AP went back to Toyota to ask specifically about brake information, Toyota responded that its EDRs do, in fact, record “data on the brake’s position and the antilock brake system.”

But that does not square with information obtained by attorneys in a deadly crash last year in Southlake, Texas, and in a 2004 accident in Indiana that killed an elderly woman.

In the Texas crash, where four people died when their 2008 Avalon ripped through a fence, hit a tree and flipped into an icy pond, an EDR readout obtained by police listed as “off” any information on acceleration or braking.

In the 2004 crash in Evansville, Ind., that killed 77-year-old Juanita Grossman, attorneys for her family say a Toyota technician traveled from the company’s U.S. headquarters in Torrance, Calif., to examine her 2003 Camry.

Before she died, the 5-foot-2, 125-pound woman told relatives she was practically standing with both feet on the brake pedal but could not stop the car from slamming into a building. Records confirm that emergency personnel found Grossman with both feet on the brake pedal.

A Toyota representative told the family’s attorneys there was “no sensor that would have preserved information regarding the accelerator and brake positions at the time of impact,” according to a summary of the case provided by Safety Research & Strategies Inc., a Rehoboth, Mass.-based company that does vehicle safety research for attorneys, engineers, government and others.

One attorney in the Texas case contends in court documents that Toyota may have deliberately stopped allowing its EDRs to collect critical information so the Japanese automaker would not be forced to reveal it in court cases.

“This goes directly to defendants’ notice of the problem and willingness to cover up the problem,” said E. Todd Tracy, who had been suing automakers for 20 years.

Randy Roberts, an attorney for the driver in that case, said he was surprised at how little information the Avalon’s EDR contained.

“When I found out the Toyota black box was so uninformative, I was shocked,” Roberts said.

Toyota refused comment Thursday on Tracy’s allegations because it is an ongoing legal matter, but said the company does share EDR information with government regulators.

“Because the EDR system is an experimental device and is neither intended, nor reliable, for accident reconstruction, Toyota’s policy is to download data only at the direction of law enforcement, NHTSA or a court order,” the Toyota statement said.

Last week, Toyota acknowledged it has only a single laptop available in the U.S. to download its data recorder information because it is still a prototype, despite being in use since 2001 in Toyota vehicles. Three other laptops capable of reading the devices were delivered this week to NHTSA for training on their use, Toyota said, and 150 more will be brought to the U.S. for commercial use by the end of April.

By contrast, acceptance and distribution of data recorder technology by other automakers is commonplace.

General Motors, for example, has licensed the auto parts maker Bosch to produce a device capable of downloading EDR data directly to a laptop computer, either from the scene of an accident or later. The device is available to law enforcement agencies or any other third party, spokesman Alan Adler said.

Spokesmen from Ford and Chrysler said their recorder data is just as accessible. “We put what you would call ‘open systems’ in our vehicles, which are readable by law enforcement or anyone who has a need to read that data,” Chrysler spokesman Mike Palese said.

Nissan also makes its EDR data readily available to third parties using a device called Consult, spokesman Colin Price said. The program allows access to a host of vehicle data, from diagnosing the cause of a check-engine light to downloading EDR data after a crash, he said.

However, Honda does not allow open access to its EDR data. Spokesman Ed Miller said the data is only readable by Honda and is made available only by court order.

In many cases, attorneys and crash experts say EDR data could help explain what happened in the moments before a crash by detailing the positions of the gas and brake pedals as well as the engine’s RPM.

“Had Toyota gotten on the stick and made this stuff available early on, I think they’d be in a better position than they are now,” said W.R. “Rusty” Haight, owner of a San Diego-based collision investigation company.

In congressional hearings on the recalls last week, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Toyota’s EDR data cannot be read by a commercially available tool used readily by other automakers. “Toyota has a proprietary EDR, which is the system that only they can read,” LaHood said.

The AP review of lawsuits around the country found many in which Toyota was accused of refusing to reveal EDR and other data, and not just in sudden acceleration cases.

In Kentucky, to cite one example, a recent lawsuit filed by Dari Martin over a wreck involving a 2007 Prius sought information from Toyota to bolster his claim that the car’s seatbelt was defective. Toyota refused, contending there was no reliable way to validate the EDR data and that an engineer would have to travel from New Jersey or California at a cost of some $5,000 to retrieve it.

“There is simply no justifiable reason for Toyota not to disclose this information,” Martin’s lawyers said in a court filing.

Lawsuits in California and Colorado have accused Toyota of systemically withholding key documents and information in a wide variety of accident cases, but no judge or jury has found against the car company on those allegations.

Some crash experts say Toyota shouldn’t bear too much criticism for failing to capture large amounts or specific kinds of data, because EDR systems were initially built for air bag deployment and not necessarily to reconstruct wrecks. They also vary widely from vehicle model to model, said Haight, the San Diego collision expert.

“That doesn’t mean I’m hiding something or preventing you from getting something,” Haight said. “It simply means that, in the development of a car, other considerations took priority – nothing more.”

_____

Anderson reported from Miami. AP Business Writer Dan Strumpf in New York, AP writer Greg Bluestein in Atlanta and AP Researcher Barbara Sambriski in New York contributed to this report.

Republicans like a politician who stands up for what he believes — even if he believes the Republican Party is populated by a bunch of “knuckle-dragging Neanderthals.”

The candidate leading the Florida GOP primary to determine who will take on Rep. Alan Grayson, the Democrat who represents the Orlando-based district, is none other than Grayson himself, according to a poll paid for by his campaign. Grayson is a freshman congressman who has drawn scorn from the GOP and has quickly built a nationwide following of progressives.

The poll has Grayson leading the 13 Republicans — among Republicans — with 27.8 percent of the vote. The congressman who mocked the GOP health care plan by saying that it amounts to telling people not to get sick and if they do, to die quickly, received more support than all of the Republican candidates combined.

No GOP candidate scored above 3.7 percent; 57.7 percent said they were undecided. Grayson did particularly well with women, undercutting the notion that referring to a Washington lobbyist as a “K Street whore” would turn female voters away. (Grayson later apologized for the word choice.)

The poll was conducted on Feb. 26th. There were 324 respondents, all registered Republicans in Florida’s eighth district. The poll was conducted by Middleton Market Research.

Naturally, the national GOP establishment dismissed the results — “This is the most bogus thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Andy Seré, Regional Press Secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Grayson told HuffPost that some of the support comes from Republicans who appreciate that he speaks his mind, while some is due to his far-superior name recognition. But the poll also found at least one area where Republican voters thought favorably of him.

In 2009, Grayson, who carries a copy of the Constitution with him, passed a resolution calling on schools to teach the document for one week in September each year.

Over half of the Republicans polled said that they were more likely to vote for Grayson because of the resolution. He has distributed tens of thousands of copies of the Constitution throughout the district, including one to each high school senior. This September, he said, he plans to go to high schools and teach the Constitution personally in the district.

Take note:

Rahm Emanuel

David Axelrod

Valerie Jarrett

Robert Gibbs

Bob Shrum

Terry Mcauliffe

DLC

Democratic National Committee

Alan Grayson may well be the cure for the poison of the flawed ideas all these idiots (and others) have polluted the Democratic Party with, for over two decades....fdv

WASHINGTON — A wide range of processed foods – including soups, snack foods, dips and dressings – is being recalled after salmonella was discovered in a flavor-enhancing ingredient.

Food and Drug Administration officials said Thursday that the ingredient, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, is used in thousands of food products, though it was unclear how many of them will be recalled. The FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said no illnesses or deaths have been reported.

The officials said the recall, which dates to products manufactured since Sept. 17, is expected to expand in the coming days and weeks. It only involves hydrolyzed vegetable protein manufactured by Las Vegas-based Basic Food Flavors Inc., which did not return a call for comment Thursday.

The agency said Thursday it collected and analyzed samples at the Las Vegas facility after one of the company’s customers discovered the salmonella, an organism that can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children and others with weakened immune systems. The FDA then confirmed the presence of a strain of salmonella in the company’s processing equipment.

Jeffrey Farrar, associate commissioner for food protection at the FDA, said Thursday that many products that contain the ingredient are not dangerous because the risk of salmonella is eliminated after the food has been cooked. Many of the foods involved in the recall are ready-to-eat items that are not cooked by the consumer.

“At this time we believe the risk to consumers is very low,” Farrar said.

A list of more than 50 recalled foods on the FDA Web site includes several dips manufactured by T. Marzetti, Sweet Maui Onion potato chips manufactured by Tim’s Cascade Snacks, Tortilla Soup mix made by Homemade Gourmet and several prepackaged “Follow Your Heart” tofu meals manufactured by Earth Island.

The FDA said the contamination was discovered by a new tracking system implemented to improve tracing of foodborne illnesses.

___

On the Net:

Foods associated with the HVP recall: http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/HVPCP/