TRUTHOUT:’Obama Wants to Finish the Job in Libya, and More …’

News in Brief: Obama Wants to Finish the Job in Libya, and More …

Thursday 26 May 2011

by: Mike Ludwig, Truthout

Obama Wants to Finish the Job in Libya

The United States and NATO are preparing for the long haul in Libya, where Western forces have engaged in military operations for two months to help rebels in their fight against Muammar Qaddafi’s Army. President Obama told the British Parliament yesterday that Western forces will not let up in Libya “until tyranny is lifted,” according to the International Business Times. A United Nations resolution on the conflict in Libya allows all member states to take any necessary action to prevent attacks on civilians, suggesting that Western forces could be in Libya until Qaddafi steps down or is killed. This vague timeline has some members of Congress questioning the Obama administration’s plan for Libya, where US forces are playing a supporting role, according to US News and World Report.

Lui Requests to Withdraw Nomination

As right-wing attacks on our basic rights and services are growing louder than ever, it’s essential to keep independent journalism strong. Support Truthout by clicking here.

Berkeley Law Professor Goodwin Lui requested that President Obama withdraw his nomination to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday after Senate Republicans successfully blocked the nomination with a filibuster last week. The filibuster was the first used by Republicans to block a nominee. Republicans have accused Lui of being a left-wing ideologue, but liberal Democrats saw him as one of Obama’s most promising nominees. “Unfortunately, Mitch McConnell and the Senate GOP decided to use Goodwin Liu to make a political point – they smeared the reputation of this respected legal mind while ignoring many of their own vows to never filibuster a judicial nominee,” said Marge Baker of People For the American Way. Democrats failed to overcome the filibuster with a vote of 52 to 43, with only one moderate Republican, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, opposed to ending the debate on the nomination, according to The Washington Post.G-8 Protesters Detained in Paris, Bigger Actions Planned

About 50 protesters in Paris have been detained after staging an action against the G-8 meeting that began in France today, according to the Belfast Telegraph. Larger protests are planned in Paris, but the G-8 meeting, which features leaders from the world’s wealthiest countries, is being held in a remote resort town in northern France. G-8 protests organized by factions of the anti-globalization movement have turned violent in recent years. Last summer at the G-8 in Toronto, police arrested hundreds of peaceful protesters, while rioters smashed windows and burned police cars in the city’s financial and shopping districts.

Jobless Claims Rise, Dashing Hopes for the Job Market

The Labor Department reports that the number of Americans filing unemployment claims rose last week to 424,000 from a revised 414,000 in the prior week, raising doubts about the optimistic predictions for the job market, according to Reuters. Economists had expected unemployment claims to drop to about 400,000.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

WORLD WATER WARRIORS: ‘Canada a major exporter of virtual water, says new Council of Canadians report’

MEDIA RELEASE
For Immediate Release
May 25, 2011

Canada a major exporter of virtual water, says new Council of Canadians report

Ottawa – The Council of Canadians is releasing a new report today called Leaky Exports: A portrait of the virtual water trade in Canada. This report highlights the daily loss of massive amounts of the country’s fresh water used to produce commodities, minerals and energy for export. Virtual, or embedded, water is the sum of water used in the production of a good or service. Virtual water trade refers to the embedded water transferred across borders when these goods and services are internationally traded.

One of several major findings in the report is that Canada is the second net virtual water exporter in the world. Canada’s net annual virtual water exports (exports minus imports) amount to just under 60 Bm3 (billion cubic metres), which is enough to fill the Rogers Centre in Toronto 37,500 times.

“Because Canada has more abundant water supplies than some other countries, successive provincial and federal governments have built their economies on the ‘myth of abundance’ and the assumption that these supplies are unlimited,” says Council of Canadians chairperson Maude Barlow, one of the authors of the report. “Most of our provincial and federal governments depend to this day on exports that may endanger Canada’s fresh water legacy.”

The virtual water trade is now coming under close scrutiny as some impoverished and water-poor countries are depleting their water supplies in order to maintain export markets, while other, more wealthy countries import most of their “water footprint” (the total volume of water needed to produce the goods and services for their citizens) in order to protect their own limited water resources.

“While Canada is often touted as having 20 per cent of the world’s water supplies, in fact it has 6.5 per cent of the world’s renewable water,” cautions Barlow. “Many parts of Canada are facing some form of water crisis and nowhere is our groundwater properly mapped. Yet the practice of allowing almost unlimited access to our rivers, lakes and aquifers for commodity, energy and mineral production and export continues without public debate or oversight.”

Other major findings in the report include:

• The increase in virtual water exports to the U.S. is closely related to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA, due to the post–trade agreements’ increase in water-intensive exports to the U.S. and the integration of key parts of the North American agriculture and energy sectors.
• Agriculture consumes 70 per cent of Canada’s fresh water.

“It is our hope that the findings of this report will spark the debate and research so long overdue in Canada,” adds Barlow.

The report is available here.

-30-

For More Information:

Dylan Penner, Media Officer, Council of Canadians,             613-795-8685      , dpenner@canadians.org, Twitter: @CouncilofCDNs

____________________________

Emma Lui

National Water Campaigner

Council of Canadians

Tel: 613-233-4487 Ext. 234

Fax: 613-233-6776

Email: elui@canadians.org

www.canadians.org/water

CENTRE FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY: In setback for corporate lobbyists, whistleblowers can take tips first to government investigators

Tax haven America

U.S. and its banks called “biggest tax haven” in world

Leasing mistake

Watchdog calls SEC “irresponsible” in leasing new office for $556.8 million

Blow the whistle

Your guide to Dodd-Frank law deadlines, hearing and events for the week of May 23

www.iwatchnews.org/2011/05/25/4731/setback-corporate-lobbyists-whistleblowers-can-take-tips-first-government/page/0/1

Finance : Financial Reform Watch

In setback for corporate lobbyists, whistleblowers can take tips first to government investigators

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro, an independent, was joined by the agency’s two Democratic commissioners in a 3-2 vote finalizing rules to protect and reward whistleblowers, as required by the Dodd-Frank reform law.     Charles Dharapak/The Associated Press

SEC rules offer generous bounties to tipsters

By Michael Hudson

15 hours, 12 minutes ago

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Summary of SEC whistleblower protections

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s new rules for corporate whistleblowers include the following key provisions:

Qualifying for a reward

* Original information about a suspected violation of securities law must be based on the whistleblower’s independent knowledge or independent analysis, not already known to the SEC, and not derived exclusively from public sources.

* The information must lead to the successful enforcement by the SEC of a federal court or administrative action by being “specific, credible and timely” to prompt the agency to open a new investigation, reopen an old one, or open a new line of inquiry in an existing one. If the matter was already under investigation by the SEC, the whistleblower’s information must significantly contribute to the success of the probe.

* The whistleblower must report original information through his or her employer’s internal procedures before or at the same time it is given to the SEC. The whistleblower’s voluntary participation in a corporate internal compliance system is a factor that can increase the amount of an award.

* The SEC must obtain monetary sanctions totaling more than $1 million in the case,

Who is ineligible

* People ineligible for whistleblower awards include those with a pre-existing legal or contractual duty to report their information to the SEC; attorneys who try to use information from clients to make whistleblower claims for themselves; foreign government officials.

* Corporate compliance and audit personnel, and public accountants are usually not eligible for awards. Exceptions include when the whistleblower believes disclosure may prevent substantial injury to the company or investors; the whistleblower believes the company is engaging in conduct that will impede an investigation; or at least 120 days have elapsed since the whistleblower reported the information to his or her supervisor or corporate audit committee, chief legal officer or chief compliance officer.

Anti-retaliation protection

* A whistleblower who gives information to the SEC is protected from employment retaliation if she or he has a reasonable belief that the information relates to a possible securities law violation that has occurred, is ongoing, or is about to occur.

Office of the Whistleblower

* The SEC recently created an Office of the Whistleblower, as required by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, to work with tipsters and help the commission determine awards.

Top securities regulators on Wednesday said financial whistleblowers can bypass internal corporate procedures and report suspected fraud first to government investigators, a setback for big U.S. companies that lobbied hard for the agency to take the opposite approach.

The Securities and Exchange Commission decision was hailed as a “major victory” for whistleblowers and investors by one advocacy group.

The agency’s two Democratic commissioners and Chairman Mary Schapiro, an independent, voted to approve final rules on how the agency will operate the generous whistleblower bounty program created by the last year’s Dodd-Frank corporate reform act. The SEC’s two Republican commissioners voted against the rules.

Under Dodd-Frank, whistleblowers can claim big cash rewards if they provide the SEC with “original information” that leads to financial sanctions totaling $1 million or more. They are eligible to receive between 10 percent and 30 percent of the money collected by the SEC in criminal or civil cases against corporate wrongdoers.

Led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, dozens of big companies such as Google Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. argued that the SEC should require bounty-seeking whistleblowers to report fraud first to their employers, rather than the government.

Schapiro said giving whistleblowers the option of coming directly to the SEC “makes sense . . . because it is the whistleblower who is in the best position to know which route is best to pursue.”

“While the SEC has a history of receiving a high volume of tips and complaints, the quality of the tips we have received has been better since Section 922 [of the Dodd-Frank act] became law. And we expect this trend to continue,” Schapiro said.

Republicans criticize final rules

Republican commissioners Troy Paredes and Kathleen Casey said they believed the rules would harm companies’ effort to police themselves by allowing whistleblowers to bypass their employers’ internal compliance systems.

Casey said the final rules package “favors a pound of cure over an ounce of prevention.” In addition to harming internal compliance efforts, she said, the rules overestimate the SEC’s ability to “triage and manage” the large volume of whistleblower tips that will be encouraged by the “very large checks” that whistleblowers might snag by reporting fraud.

The SEC’s enforcement director, Robert Khuzami, told the commissioners that it didn’t make sense to put in place a rule that would require whistleblowers in some cases to report fraud to the very corporate insiders they suspect are violating the law. Khuzami said letting whistleblowers come first to the SEC will allow the agency to build stronger cases and move quickly to head off problems, “preventing small frauds from growing into even bigger frauds.”

Stephen Kohn, executive director of the National Whistleblowers Center, said “the SEC refused to buckle under tremendous pressure from Wall Street lobbyists” who “worked overtime” in an effort to undermine the protections contained in the Dodd-Frank Act.

The Chamber of Commerce countered that “the SEC has chosen to put trial lawyer profits ahead of effective compliance and corporate governance. This rule will make it harder and slower to detect and stop corporate fraud.”

Schapiro and SEC staff said the final rules differed from the agency’s earlier proposed rules in several respects.

The final version narrows provisions that generally exclude accountants and internal compliance employees from qualifying for whistleblower awards. They may qualify for a bounty, for example, if they believe the company is impeding the investigation, or if at least 120 days have gone by since they reported possible fraud to higher ups.

Another change from the agency’s earlier proposal encourages whistleblowers to work through their employers’ internal compliance systems. While whistleblowers are not required to first report their concerns internally, the new rules provide incentives for them to do so.

For example, in determining the size of a whistleblower’s award, the SEC will consider how much the tipster participated in the company’s in-house compliance process. In addition, whistleblowers who report violations directly to their companies may still qualify for a share of the SEC’s monetary recovery, even if they never go to SEC, under the final rules.

Tougher than Sarbanes-Oxley law

The rulemaking process was an important battleground in the campaign to encourage whistleblowers to report corporate crime.

Almost a decade ago, after the Enron debacle and other multi-billion-dollar corporate scandals, Congress passed what one scholar “the most important whistleblower protection law in the world.” But as  iWatch News  has reported, the whistleblower protections included in 2002’s Sarbanes-Oxley corporate reform act largely failed to protect workers or prevent the corrupt practices that helped cause the financial meltdown of 2008.

The Dodd-Frank Act, passed last year by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama, seeks to improve on previous whistleblower laws and use financial incentives to encourage workers to report fraud.

A Senate Banking Committee report said generous rewards are needed to encourage whistleblowers to come forward, because they “often face the difficult choice between telling the truth and the risk of committing ‘career suicide.’ ” Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican who helped craft the Dodd-Frank whistleblower bounty provision, has  noted that he’s personally known many whistleblowers who were blacklisted by government agencies, hospitals, drug companies and other businesses.

After passage of Dodd-Frank, the SEC took up the task of writing the rule that would implement the law’s provisions.

The proposed rules that the SEC released last November drew criticism from a variety of sources. The proposed rules drew 240 written comments and more than 1,300 form letters.

Business lobbyists complained that the rules would hurt companies’ efforts to police themselves. “Instead of allowing companies to identify and fix problems, we are just creating a lottery,” David Hirschmann, president of the Chamber’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness,  said in November. “This bounty program creates incentive for employees to become amateur sleuths in search of a big payday.”

Whistleblower advocates, meanwhile, complained that the SEC’s proposed rules would spawn red tape and discourage workers from stepping forward with information about fraud.

Grassley wrote earlier this month that he was concerned that the agency

would show too much deference to companies’ own self-investigations.

In proposing preliminary whistleblower rules last year, the SEC noted that in many cases it would simply contact the company, “describe the nature of the allegations, and give the company an opportunity to investigate the matter and report back. . . . This has been the approach of the Enforcement staff in the past, and the Commission expects that it will continue in the future.”

Even if workers aren’t required to report problems first to their employers, Grassley said, this approach would expose whistleblowers and put them at risk without the benefit of a serious SEC investigation. He said “the SEC seems to think the business as usual approach will help it catch criminals and cheats while admitting that they will essentially sell whistleblowers out to the company in question at the first opportunity.”

The need for the SEC to finalize the whistleblower rules has become more urgent. Earlier this month, a federal district court in New York  issued the first decision related to the Dodd-Frank law’s whistleblower mandate.  The judge ruled that a whistleblower usually must first provide information to the SEC to pursue a claim, unless the information falls into four narrow categories. Congress “intended to encourage whistleblowers” to report securities violations to the SEC,” the judge said in the case Patrick Egan v. TradingScreen Inc.

To fund payments to whistleblowers, the SEC already has already  set aside nearly $452 million  from past civil settlements in enforcement cases and invested the money in Treasury bills until it is needed.

__________________________________________________________

Summary of SEC whistleblower protections

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s new rules for corporate whistleblowers include the following key provisions:

Qualifying for a reward

* Original information about a suspected violation of securities law must be based on the whistleblower’s independent knowledge or independent analysis, not already known to the SEC, and not derived exclusively from public sources.

* The information must lead to the successful enforcement by the SEC of a federal court or administrative action by being “specific, credible and timely” to prompt the agency to open a new investigation, reopen an old one, or open a new line of inquiry in an existing one. If the matter was already under investigation by the SEC, the whistleblower’s information must significantly contribute to the success of the probe.

* The whistleblower must report original information through his or her employer’s internal procedures before or at the same time it is given to the SEC. The whistleblower’s voluntary participation in a corporate internal compliance system is a factor that can increase the amount of an award.

* The SEC must obtain monetary sanctions totaling more than $1 million in the case,

Who is ineligible

* People ineligible for whistleblower awards include those with a pre-existing legal or contractual duty to report their information to the SEC; attorneys who try to use information from clients to make whistleblower claims for themselves; foreign government officials.

* Corporate compliance and audit personnel, and public accountants are usually not eligible for awards. Exceptions include when the whistleblower believes disclosure may prevent substantial injury to the company or investors; the whistleblower believes the company is engaging in conduct that will impede an investigation; or at least 120 days have elapsed since the whistleblower reported the information to his or her supervisor or corporate audit committee, chief legal officer or chief compliance officer.

Anti-retaliation protection

* A whistleblower who gives information to the SEC is protected from employment retaliation if she or he has a reasonable belief that the information relates to a possible securities law violation that has occurred, is ongoing, or is about to occur.

Office of the Whistleblower

* The SEC recently created an Office of the Whistleblower, as required by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, to work with tipsters and help the commission determine awards.

URGENT REMINDER! MARCH/RALLY: Budget 2011 United Against Asset Sales/Cuts. SAT. 28 May 12 noon Auckland! DON’T CUT OUR FUTURE!

MARCH/RALLY: Budget 2011

United Against Asset Sales/Cuts.

DON’T CUT OUR FUTURE. 

12 noon, Sat 28th May, QE2 Square, Bottom of Queen St, Opposite Britomart.

please distribute to your email lists,newsletters facebook, twitter, txt and talk to your friends, groups and neighbours.

From Asset sales(electricity and more), food prices to Govt cuts.Student loans and Low wages.Civilised society is under threat.

“When good people lay idle, evil prospers”.

Stand up NZ before it’s to late!

Thanks

Coalition for Social Justice.

(members of community groups, churches, unions et al)

PRESS STATEMENT.

COALITION FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE

ph:09 8366389, 021 2106720,

Meredydd Barrar (spokesperson)

A new group has been formed called the Coalition for Social Justice. Its aim is to organise concerns within local communities around the governments Budget proposals and their implications for ordinary New Zealanders

.

Spokesperson Meredydd Barrar says, “Asset sales  cuts to working for families, Kiwi Saver, student loans and general austerity measures are not working in the interests of the majority of kiwis who are struggling to make ends meet.

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“The Coalition is made up of members of community groups, people from religious organisations and unions. Our aim is to promote social justice.

We are organising a MOBILISATION of ordinary Kiwis on SATURDAY 28TH MAY 12pm QE2 Square, bottom of Queen st, Auckland City (see attachment). Also more action as the election campaign develops.

New Zealanders are angry about GST, milk prices and secret Trade deals, cuts to Early Childhood education and privatisation of electricity…Aswell as PPP’s for shcools and other public services.. l

Meredydd Barrar, spokesperson says, “Enough is enough. Recent government announcements about cuts and a Budget that will certainly condemn the majority of New Zealanders to relative poverty is not acceptable. Children and struggling families as well as students looking to further their higher education will be penalised”.

There is a latent anger in New Zealand at the moment. We aim to translate it into action.

Policies of cut backs and austerity measures will increase the gap between rich and poor which is already the 6th highest in the OECD. We believe this is unacceptable and uncivilised.

New Zealanders deserve better than an economic philosophy that only seems to make bankers, corporates and speculators richer.

Meredydd Barrar

Spokesperson