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Common Cause’s Nick Surgey reports that ALEC gave a cash award of $1,350 to Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) in 2009 as part of their Thomas Jefferson Freedom Award, according to an investigation of ALEC’s tax filings. This presents a potential breach of ethics because House members are prohibited by law from receiving any cash gift.

While ALEC’s main focus is on pro-corporate state legislation, common cause notes that ALEC’s influence extends far into the realm of the federal government:

Read the full story here.

The Economist’s February 18 edition offers a cover package of five articles on “Over-regulated America” (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Our British friends want you to know there’s a problem here in the States that needs fixing:

A study for the Small Business Administration, a government body, found that regulations in general add $10,585 in costs per employee. It’s a wonder the jobless rate isn’t even higher than it is.

You can almost feel The Economist’s pain: the jobless rate should be a lot higher than it is, if the premise about the costs of regulations is correct. Surely if the regulatory burden were

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actually 12 percent of GDP – that’s what the SBA numbers say, if you draw them out – things would be far worse than they are. Ideologically unable to consider the obvious alternative – that regulations don’t add $10,585 in costs per employee, The Economist, just, well, “wonders” aloud.

Here’s what The Economist would have found if they’d dug just a little bit: Fully 70 percent of the SBA estimate was actually based on a regression analysis using opinion polling data on perceived regulatory climate across countries (in a strange twist, a separate article in the same issue actually questions the study, briefly). Whole reports have been written on why that number is bogus.

Our economy is still recovering from a tremendous collapse largely caused by under-regulation of financial institutions. But in its group of articles, The Economist wants us to think the opposite: “The home of laissez-faire is being suffocated by excessive and badly written regulation.” That premise, in turn, leads the magazine to – you guessed it – a series of warmed-over right-wing policy ideas aimed at gutting regulations. Let’s take a closer look.

Read the full story here.

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Sounds dramatic, but in reality the only things getting “suffocated” here are the facts about regulations. To be fair, this article does recognize (as few tend to do) that both parties in the U.S. are responsible for the growth of regulations — this is important to remember, but this falls short of achieving genuine balance given how consistently this piece goes on to misrepresent the relative weight of costs versus benefits of public oversight.

Take this passage, for example:

“A study for the Small Business Administration, a government body, found that regulations in general add $10,585 in costs per employee. It’s a wonder the jobless rate isn’t even higher than it is.”

Well, The Economist is right about one thing: it is a wonder that the jobless rate isn’t higher today — but that has a lot more to due with the fact that Congress seems physically incapable of passing the fiscal stimulus measures that we know are needed to make a real dent in the unemployment rate, and less to due with regulatory over-reaching.

Read the full story here.

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evacuation has meant more than fleeing one’s home. It has meant the death of livestock, contamination of produce and fish, and the realization that returning home won’t be an option for a very long time.

During the initial hours of the crisis, the Japanese government advised residents within a 12-mile radius of the reactor site to evacuate the area. The U.S. government recommended that U.S. citizens evacuate if they were within 50 miles of the plant.

Remember that: 50 miles. Now try to reconcile that with the fact that U.S. nuclear regulations require emergency planning only within a 10-mile radius. Can’t do it? Exactly.

That’s why today, Public Citizen, along with 37 other organizations, filed a petition with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), calling on it to expand the radius for emergency planning from 10 miles to 25 miles, establish a new 50-mile emergency response zone and take other measures to address the inadequacies in regulations governing emergency planning.

Read the full story here.

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comment letter that basically comes down to one simple thing. We tell the financial regulators: don’t let big banks make taxpayer-backed bets. The rule implements Section 619 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, as proposed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and implemented into law by the consumer and investor champions, Senators Jeff Merkley (OR) and Carl Levin (MI).

Excerpt from our joint letter:

There are significant positive elements in this proposed rule. But it still falls well short of fully implementing the statute. It is clear from both the legislative history and the text of the statute that in passing the Volcker Rule Congress sought fundamental change in the American financial system by restoring basic firewalls between the banking system and the capital markets. In the proposed rule, the regulators have not placed the statutorily required limitations on permitted capital market activities. Instead, they have gone to some effort to preserve business as usual in important areas. This includes practices at the center of the financial crisis, such as dealing in illiquid and customized products for which no market exists and bank participation in securitizations. The metrics-based oversight regime favored by the regulators here, while positive in many respects, simply will not work unless it is accompanied by clear restrictions on the scope of permitted activities.

Read the full letter here.

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We’ve discussed all the reasons the Keystone XL pipeline should be rejected. Among the many: the pipeline is not a job creator, the environmental consequences of the pipeline will be disastrous, and it will do little to bring us closer to energy independence. Adding to this list, the claims of reinvigorating the steel industry seem to be false. Just last week, Representative Mike Doyle challenged TransCanada to certify its claim that 75 percent of the steel would come from North America because he had discovered that 148 miles of the pipeline had already been constructed in India.

Meanwhile, the real job creator is continually ignored. A new report details how investments in clean energy and environmental sustainability resulted in one of the few sectors to report job growth during a time of overall job loss. While the total number of jobs created dropped by one percent in 2007-2008, green jobs grew during that same time period by five percent.

Read the full story here.

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This “innocent spouse” relief is especially important for women: 90 percent of those who request relief from joint liability are women, 65 percent of those who request relief make less than $30,000 a year, and some are survivors of domestic violence.

Section 6015(f) of the Internal Revenue Code provides that equitable relief is available for innocent spouses, but the determination rests on a “facts and circumstances” test.

Read the full story here.

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The Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) says, “Legions of vocational and university students, some as young as 16, are forced to take months-long “internships” in Foxconn’s mainland China factories assembling Apple products,” according to Alternet. One study found in some Foxconn factories, which employ 1.3 million people in China, up to 50 percent of the workforce were students.

SACOM and others report that schools teaching journalism, hotel management and nursing threatened students with failure if they did not take a factory position. The Chinese government-owned Global Times noted that “automotive majors at a vocational school in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan, were also forced to serve as interns for Foxconn before they were given their diplomas.

Apple’s formula for mammoth profits, which topped $13 billion last quarter, depends upon a steady supply of forced laborers who are put through a torturous training to accustom them to the factory working conditions.

Read the full story here.

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That’s up 75 percent from 2010. Additionally, these oil giants have made more than $1 trillion in profits from 2001 through 2011. This exceeds the previous record of $136 billion in profits in 2008.

Read the full story here.

Rules to prevent financial fraud or toxic dumping or faulty medical devices — these don’t destroy the free market. They make the free market work better. — President Obama, State of the Union Address, 1/24/12

Over the past year, discussion over regulations has frequently been distortedly one-sided, as if their only possible effect on the economy and markets is to cause damage. The Obama administration itself has often failed to add balance to this conversation, so it was heartening to see the president lay out a more comprehensive assessment in his State of the Union address.

courtesy Barack Obama via flickr

In the address, President Obama focused most on the financial crisis and regulations. He, appropriately, stated that the roots of the economic collapse and ongoing economic troubles included regulatory inadequacy: “In 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them. Banks had made huge bets and bonuses with other people’s money. Regulators had looked the other way, or didn’t have the authority to stop the bad behavior.”

So the effective implementation of strong financial regulations can not only provide needed protections to individual borrowers and savers, they can also abet financial stability, in all these ways making the free market “work better.”

A fuller version of the President’s claim would also include the following reasons why regulations can help the free market work better and help the economy.

Read the full story here.