PoliticalAction.com Blog

Anticipation is building, and this month we start an important countdown, first to October 1, 2013, when open enrollment begins, and continuing on to January 1, 2014, the start of new health insurance coverage for millions of Americans. In October, many of you’ll be able to shop for health insurance that meets your needs at the new Marketplace at HealthCare.gov.

This is an historic time for those Americans who never had health insurance, who had to go without insurance after losing a job or becoming sick, or who had been turned down because of a pre-existing condition. Because of these new marketplaces established under the Affordable Care Act, millions of Americans will have new access to affordable health insurance coverage.

Over the last two years we’ve worked closely with states to begin building their health insurance marketplaces, also known as Exchanges, so that families and small-business owners will be able to get accurate information to make apples-to-apples comparisons of private insurance plans and, get financial help to make coverage more affordable if they’re eligible.

That is why we are so excited about launching the newly rebuilt HealthCare.gov website, where you’ll be able to buy insurance from qualified private health plans and check if you are eligible for financial assistance — all in one place, with a single application. Many individuals and families will be eligible for a new kind of tax credit to help lower their premium costs. If your state is running its own Marketplace, HealthCare.gov will make sure you get to the right place.

The Marketplace will offer much more than any health insurance website you’ve used before. Insurers will compete for your business on a level playing field, with no hidden costs or misleading fine print.

It’s not too soon to check out HealthCare.gov for new information about the Marketplace and tips for things you can do now to prepare for enrollment.  And, make sure to sign up for emails or text message updates, so you don’t miss a thing when it’s time to enroll.

There is still work to be done to make sure the insurance market works for families and small businesses. But, for millions of Americans, the time for having the affordable, quality health care coverage, security, and peace of mind they need and deserve is finally within sight.

For many years, the United States government has been in denial about global warming; however, a new study mandated by congress, National Climate Assessment and Development Climate Assessment, highlights the impact of global warming on health, infrastructure, water supply, agriculture and in particular more volatile weather.

1. Global climate is changing now and this change is apparent across a wide range of observations. Much of the climate change of the past 50 years is primarily due to human activities.
2. Global climate is projected to continue to change over this century and beyond. The magnitude of climate change beyond the next few decades depends primarily on the amount of heat-trapping gases emitted globally, and how sensitive the climate is to those emissions.
3. U.S. average temperature has increased by about 1.5°F since record keeping began in 1895; more than 80% of this increase has occurred since 1980. The most recent decade was the nation’s warmest on record. U.S. temperatures are expected to continue to rise. Because human-induced warming is superimposed on a naturally varying climate, the temperature rise has not been, and will not be, smooth across the country or over time.
4. The length of the frost-free season (and the corresponding growing season) has been increasing nationally since the 1980s, with the largest increases occurring in the western U.S., affecting ecosystems and agriculture. Continued lengthening of the growing season across the U.S. is projected.
5. Precipitation averaged over the entire U.S. has increased during the period since 1900, but regionally some areas have had increases greater than the national average, and some areas have had decreases. The largest increases have been in the Midwest, southern Great Plains, and Northeast. Portions of the Southeast, the Southwest, and the Rocky Mountain states have experienced decreases. More winter and spring precipitation is projected for the northern U.S., and less for the Southwest, over this century.
6. Heavy downpours are increasing in most regions of the U.S., especially over the last three to five decades. Largest increases are in the Midwest and Northeast. Further increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events are projected for most U.S. areas.
7. Certain types of extreme weather events have become more frequent and intense, including heat waves, floods, and droughts in some regions. The increased intensity of heat waves has been most prevalent in the western parts of the country, while the intensity of flooding events has been more prevalent over the eastern parts. Droughts in the Southwest and heat waves everywhere are projected to become more intense in the future.
8. There has been an increase in the overall strength of hurricanes and in the number of strong (Category 4 and 5) hurricanes in the North Atlantic since the early 1980s. The intensity of the strongest hurricanes is projected to continue to increase as the oceans continue to warm; ocean cycles will also affect the amount of warming at any given time. With regard to other types of storms that affect the U.S., winter storms have increased slightly in frequency and intensity, and their tracks have shifted northward over the U.S. Other trends in severe storms, including the numbers of hurricanes and the intensity and frequency of tornadoes, hail, and damaging thunderstorm winds are uncertain and are being studied intensively.
9. Global sea level has risen by about 8 inches since reliable record keeping began in 1880. It is projected to rise another 1 to 4 feet by 2100.
10. Rising temperatures are reducing ice volume and extent on land, lakes, and sea. This loss of ice is expected to continue.
11. The oceans are currently absorbing about a quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere annually and are becoming more acidic as a result, leading to concerns about potential impacts on marine ecosystems.

“I could end the deficit in 5 minutes,” he told Becky Quick. “You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.”

“You really don’t have any business by playing Russian roulette to get your way in some other matter,” he said. “We should be more grown up than that.”

“We had debt at 120% of GDP, far higher than this, after World War II, and no one went around threatening we’re going to ruin the credit of the United States or something in order to get a better balance of debt to GDP. We just went about our business, and people did it in a cooperative way.”

“You’re playing with fire when you don’t need to play with fire. We don’t need to tell the rest of the world that anytime people in Congress start throwing a tantrum that we’re not going to pay our bills.”

Fred Krupp President of the Environmental Defense Fund wrote, “Congratulations to President Obama on his re-election to a second term, and to all of those who will be serving in the 113th Congress. We look forward to working with them to solve our country’s most pressing environmental problems, including global climate change. As the President declared last night, ‘we want our children to live in an America … that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.’

Previously, Nat Keohane Vice President of the EDF, stated, “…The magnitude and urgency of the challenge have not diminished. If we needed any reminder of that fact, Hurricane Sandy should have provided it—especially coming on the heels of devastating drought, record-breaking temperatures through the spring and summer, and a record low in the extent of Arctic sea ice.

“…Addressing global warming will be politically challenging—but presidents are not elected to do the easy things, and political realities are not set in stone. The first step to tackling climate change is to start talking about it, not just once in a while but routinely, as a fact of life rather than a special-interest issue.

“The next president must build public understanding of the issue, connecting the dots between our own actions and the extreme weather we are already seeing. He must engage folks from across the political spectrum on the possible solutions. And he must be willing to spend political capital to get something done.”
“Exit polls confirm that for millions of American voters, Hurricane Sandy and climate change were decisive factors in this election. As the historic storm just reminded us, we have no time to waste; we must get serious about climate solutions in order to protect our loved ones and communities from terrible impacts — extreme weather disasters, droughts, heat waves, and other dangerous consequences of global warming. Especially in the wake of Sandy, which demonstrated that doing nothing about climate change is much costlier than taking action, this issue clearly should be a top priority for our leaders in government.”

Reference: Global Warming Has Caused Irreparable Damage

by the New York Times

A Non-Issue in Campaign

During the 2012 presidential campaign, neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney, his Republican challenger, spoke much about climate change, despite the fact that both men agree that the world is warming and that humans are at least partly to blame. None of the moderators of the four general-election debates asked about climate change, nor did any of the candidates broach the topic.

Throughout the campaign, Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney have seemed most intent on trying to outdo each other as lovers of coal, oil and natural gas — the very fuels most responsible for rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Mr. Obama has supported broad climate change legislation, financed extensive clean energy projects and pushed new regulations to reduce global warming emissions from cars and power plants. But neither he nor Mr. Romney has laid out during the campaign a legislative or regulatory program to address the fundamental questions arising from one of the most vexing economic, environmental, political and humanitarian issues to face the planet

As governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Romney considered joining a regional cap-and-trade system, then abandoned it because of uncertainty over costs. He has opposed Mr. Obama’s steps to regulate emissions from power plants and vehicles. He has said he would reverse Mr. Obama’s air quality regulations and would renegotiate the auto efficiency standard of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 that automakers agreed to this year.

ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING

Global warming has become perhaps the most complicated issue facing world leaders. Warnings from the scientific community are becoming louder, as an increasing body of science points to rising dangers from the ongoing buildup of human-related greenhouse gases — produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and forests.

Global emissions of carbon dioxide jumped by the largest amount on record in 2010, upending the notion that the brief decline during the recession might persist through the recovery. Emissions rose 5.9 percent in 2010, according to the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists. The increase solidified a trend of ever-rising emissions that scientists fear will make it difficult, if not impossible, to forestall severe climate change in coming decades.

However, the technological, economic and political issues that have to be resolved before a concerted worldwide effort to reduce emissions can begin have gotten no simpler, particularly in the face of a global economic slowdown.

For almost two decades, the United Nations has sponsored annual global talks, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, an international treaty signed by 194 countries to cooperatively discuss global climate change and its impact. The conferences operate on the principle of consensus, meaning that any of the participating nations can hold up an agreement.

The conflicts and controversies discussed are monotonously familiar: the differing obligations of industrialized and developing nations, the question of who will pay to help poor nations adapt, the urgency of protecting tropical forests and the need to rapidly develop and deploy clean energy technology.

But the meetings have often ended in disillusionment, with incremental political progress but little real impact on the climate. The negotiating process itself has come under fire from some quarters, including the poorest nations who believe their needs are being neglected in the fight among the major economic powers. Criticism has also come from a small but vocal band of climate-change skeptics, many of them members of the United States Congress, who doubt the existence of human influence on the climate and ridicule international efforts to deal with it.

 

SUPREME COURT TO HEAR MAJOR CASE CHALLENGING SARBANES-OXLEY ACCOUNTING BOARD

by Christine Hall

May 18, 2009

Unconstitutional Regulatory Agency Wields Huge Power, Little Accountability

Washington, D.C., May 18, 2009—The Supreme Court today announced it would hear a case brought by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Free Enterprise Fund challenging the constitutionality of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB).

The Appointments Clause of the Constitution requires that “officers of the United States” be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. But the officers serving on the PCAOB, with tremendous power to impose criminal and civil penalties on people and companies accused of violating accounting regulations, were not appointed that way.

“The Founding Fathers wanted powerful government officials to be vetted by the President and the Senate, to help ensure agencies remain accountable to elected officials and ultimately the American people,” said Sam Kazman, CEI General Counsel. “The PCAOB imposes massive regulatory burdens on public companies, under threat of criminal and civil penalties, yet the regulators are completely unaccountable to the people, the President or the Senate.”

“The PCAOB has been very bad for the economy,” said Hans Bader, a CEI attorney. “The biggest beneficiaries of the law have been the big accounting firms that failed to warn the public about Enron and similar scandals, which are charging record fees to help businesses comply with the mountain of red tape created by the PCAOB.”

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 created the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, giving it authority to set accounting standards, impose its own set of taxes, and open investigations of accounting firms big and small. Yet unlike counterparts wielding similar authority, such as the IRS commissioner and Federal Reserve governors, PCAOB members are never vetted by the President or by the Senate, as neither of these bodies have a say in who will be appointed.

The PCAOB’s interpretation of Sarbanes-Oxley’s section 404 has cost public companies more than $35 billion a year, has proved especially burdensome to smaller public companies, and has cost the economy as a whole over a trillion dollars, according to a Brookings-AEI study. Bipartisan critics have observed that the PCAOB standards have burdened firms with minutiae while overlooking many of the practices that led to the subprime shenanigans.

“The decision by the Supreme Court to hear the case is good news for American investors and prospects for economic recovery, since a victory in this case will give the President an added incentive and ability to adopt policies that foster economic growth,” said Bader.

If the President can pick and remove the PCAOB members, as the Appointments Clause requires, he will be on the hook for their policy failures, and thus have an interest in making them develop sound policies that protect investors and don’t stifle economic growth. He won’t be able to blame the red tape on an unaccountable agency whose officials he doesn’t select or control.

Moreover, giving the President that role promotes even-handed application of the law. A bureaucrat is less likely to abuse individual citizens if he knows he is accountable to their elected representative, the president. And he is more likely to stand up to vested interests that have lobbyists on Capitol Hill if he knows the president selected him and will back him up.

CEI is acting as co-counsel in the case, and Michael Carvin of Jones Day is the lead attorney.

Ron Paul: 5/19/09

Could it all be a bad dream, or a nightmare? Is it my imagination, or have we lost our minds? It’s surreal; it’s just not believable. A grand absurdity; a great deception, a delusion of momentous proportions; based on preposterous notions; and on ideas whose time should never have come; simplicity grossly distorted and complicated; insanity passed off as logic; grandiose schemes built on falsehoods with the morality of Ponzi and Madoff; evil described as virtue; ignorance pawned off as wisdom; destruction and impoverishment in the name of humanitarianism; violence, the tool of change; preventive wars used as the road to peace; tolerance delivered by government guns; reactionary views in the guise of progress; an empire replacing the Republic; slavery sold as liberty; excellence and virtue traded for mediocracy; socialism to save capitalism; a government out of control, unrestrained by the Constitution, the rule of law, or morality; bickering over petty politics as we collapse into chaos; the philosophy that destroys us is not even defined.

We have broken from reality–a psychotic Nation. Ignorance with a pretense of knowledge replacing wisdom. Money does not grow on trees, nor does prosperity come from a government printing press or escalating deficits.

We’re now in the midst of unlimited spending of the people’s money, exorbitant taxation, deficits of trillions of dollars–spent on a failed welfare/warfare state; an epidemic of cronyism; unlimited supplies of paper money equated with wealth.

A central bank that deliberately destroys the value of the currency in secrecy, without restraint, without nary a whimper. Yet, cheered on by the pseudo-capitalists of Wall Street, the military industrial complex, and Detroit.

We police our world empire with troops on 700 bases and in 130 countries around the world. A dangerous war now spreads throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. Thousands of innocent people being killed, as we become known as the torturers of the 21st century.

We assume that by keeping the already-known torture pictures from the public’s eye, we will be remembered only as a generous and good people. If our enemies want to attack us only because we are free and rich, proof of torture would be irrelevant.

The sad part of all this is that we have forgotten what made America great, good, and prosperous. We need to quickly refresh our memories and once again reinvigorate our love, understanding, and confidence in liberty. The status quo cannot be maintained, considering the current conditions. Violence and lost liberty will result without some revolutionary thinking.

We must escape from the madness of crowds now gathering. The good news is the reversal is achievable through peaceful and intellectual means and, fortunately, the number of those who care are growing exponentially.

Of course, it could all be a bad dream, a nightmare, and that I’m seriously mistaken, overreacting, and that my worries are unfounded. I hope so. But just in case, we ought to prepare ourselves for revolutionary changes in the not-too-distant future.

111th CONGRESS 

1st SessionTo amend title 31, United States Code, to reform the manner in which the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is audited by the Comptroller General of the United States and the manner in which such audits are reported, and for other purposes.

 

February 26, 2009

Mr. PAUL (for himself, Mr. KAGEN, Mrs. BACHMANN, Mr. BARTLETT, Mr. JONES, Mr. REHBERG, Mr. POSEY, Mr. BROUN of Georgia, Mr. POE of Texas, Mr. BURTON of Indiana, Mr. ABERCROMBIE, and Ms. WOOLSEY) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Financial Services

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To amend title 31, United States Code, to reform the manner in which the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is audited by the Comptroller General of the United States and the manner in which such audits are reported, and for other purposes.

 

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

 

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

 

This Act may be cited as the `Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009′.

 

SEC. 2. AUDIT REFORM AND TRANSPARENCY FOR THE BOARD OF GOVERNORS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM.

 

(a) In General- Subsection (b) of section 714 of title 31, United States Code, is amended by striking all after `shall audit an agency’ and inserting a period.

 

(b) Audit- Section 714 of title 31, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following new subsection:

 

`(e) Audit and Report of the Federal Reserve System-

 

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  `(1) IN GENERAL- The audit of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal reserve banks under subsection (b) shall be completed before the end of 2010.

 

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  `(2) REPORT-

 

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    `(A) REQUIRED- A report on the audit referred to in paragraph (1) shall be submitted by the Comptroller General to the Congress before the end of the 90-day period beginning on the date on which such audit is completed and made available to the Speaker of the House, the majority and minority leaders of the House of Representatives, the majority and minority leaders of the Senate, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the committee and each subcommittee of jurisdiction in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and any other Member of Congress who requests it.

 

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    `(B) CONTENTS- The report under subparagraph (A) shall include a detailed description of the findings and conclusion of the Comptroller General with respect to the audit that is the subject of the report, together with such recommendations for legislative or administrative action as the Comptroller General may determine to be appropriate.’.

A BILL

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

H. R. 1207