ProPublica

Meet OIRA – The Secretive White House Office with Disturbing Regulatory Powers

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Screen Shot 2014-08-05 at 11.42.23 AMBut in practice, OIRA operates largely in secret, exempt from most requests under the Freedom of Information Act. It routinely declines to release the changes it has proposed, the evidence it has relied upon to make them, or the identities and affiliations of White House advisers and other agencies’ staff it has consulted. OIRA doesn’t even disclose the names and credentials of its employees other than its two most senior officials.

In 2013 the Administrative Conference, an independent federal agency that reviews government administrative processes, released a study of OIRA’s effect on the application and interpretation of science the agencies gather and analyze to write rules. In examining a group of air-quality regulations, the study found that most of OIRA’s suggestions involved substantive changes. The report concluded that in some instances, the office has proposed changes to the basic science underlying the rules. These included revising numbers in tables created by the EPA, altering technical discussions and recommending different standards altogether.

– From ProPublica’s extremely important article: Lobbyists Bidding to Block Government Regs Set Sights on Secretive White House Office.

Have you ever heard of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, otherwise known as OIRA? Yeah, neither had I.

As someone who prides himself on being a relatively informed citizen, it is always shocking and disturbing when I learn of a powerful organization operating in the shadows of America’s faux democracy with which I am almost entirely unfamiliar. While I’m sure I’ve read many articles in which OIRA was mentioned, I had never fully understood exactly what it is, and how it is used by lobbyists and large corporate interests to further entrench the established oligarchic power structure. We can thank ProPublica for providing this service.

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Who Are We at War With? Sorry, That’s “Classified”

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You’d think that a nation that has allowed the shredding of the civil liberties enshrined in its founding document might deserve to know who the dastardly enemy is to justify such a dramatic transgression, right? Wrong. Amazingly, Carl Levin (D-Michigan) asked the Pentagon to define who exactly the “Al-Qaeda affiliates” we are at war with are. While Mr. Levin received and answer, guess what he told the public? Yep, you guessed it. It’s classified.

From ProPublica:

In a major national security speech this spring, President Obama said again and again that the U.S. is at war with “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.”

So who exactly are those associated forces? It’s a secret.

At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked the Defense Department to provide him with a current list of Al Qaeda affiliates.

The Pentagon responded – but Levin’s office told ProPublica they aren’t allowed to share it. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Levin, would say only that the department’s “answer included the information requested.”

A Pentagon spokesman told ProPublica that revealing such a list could cause “serious damage to national security.”

There’s that “national security” line again.

“Because elements that might be considered ‘associated forces’ can build credibility by being listed as such by the United States, we have classified the list,” said the spokesman, Lt. Col. Jim Gregory. “We cannot afford to inflate these organizations that rely on violent extremist ideology to strengthen their ranks.”

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Fraud Alert: FDA Allowed Drugs with Fraudulent Testing to Remain on the Market

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Essentially the entire U.S. economy is one gigantic fraud.  No one has honor anymore in this society, it is a totally forgotten and discarded virtue.  The ethos of the land is to take whatever you can however you can.  It doesn’t matter who you hurt or what sorts of immoral acts you need to do to get it.  One of the key dynamics that allows for such blatant theft is that the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect us are in fact gatekeepers from the criminals in their respective industries.  In the financial area, this manifests with the SEC and CFTC revolving door to Wall Street.  In healthcare, it manifests with the FDA.  I’ve highlighted the FDA’s shadiness previously, most notably in my piece:  The FDA is Caught Spying on its Employees and Creating an “Enemies List.”  Now in this latest story, we find how little the FDA concerns itself with public health.  From Pro Publica:

On the morning of May 3, 2010, three agents of the Food and Drug Administration descended upon the Houston office of Cetero Research, a firm that conducted research for drug companies worldwide.

Lead agent Patrick Stone, now retired from the FDA, had visited the Houston lab many times over the previous decade for routine inspections. This time was different. His team was there to investigate a former employee’s allegation that the company had tampered with records and manipulated test data.

When Stone explained the gravity of the inquiry to Chinna Pamidi, the testing facility’s president, the Cetero executive made a brief phone call. Moments later, employees rolled in eight flatbed carts, each double-stacked with file boxes. The documents represented five years of data from some 1,400 drug trials.

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