Trump Admin Finally Authorizes Biden Transition

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzDEtHO_UEc&ab_channel=TheRationalNational

Rule Forces Banks To Boost Fossil Fuel Development

A Trump-appointed regulator is trying to make it impossible for Wall Street to divest from the oil and gas industry.


Christof Rindlisbacher
Nov 24




As climate change intensifies, Wall Street firms are under pressure to stop investing in projects that make the crisis worse. But after Alaska’s Republican congressional delegation complained that banks were pulling back from Arctic oil and gas development, a Trump-appointed financial regulator just announced a new rule designed to force banks to continue financing fossil fuel projects.

The rule follows a separate move by the Trump Labor Department to try to block investors from pulling their money out of oil and gas companies.

The latest rule from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) requires large banks with more than $100 million in assets to adhere to a “nondiscrimination” policy that bars them from attempting to disadvantage clients in specific industries.

In justifying the rule, Acting Comptroller Brian Brooks cited “family planning organizations,” “privately owned correctional facilities,” and “makers of shotguns and hunting rifles” as examples of organizations that would be protected under the new rule. However, the rule appears to be designed to put pressure on five major banks who stopped lending to Arctic energy projects.

In June, Senator Dan Sullivan, Senator Lisa Murkowski, and Representative Don Young wrote to Brooks complaining that those banks had decided not to lend to projects in the 1002 Area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The 1002 Area is the site of renewed controversy as the Trump administration last week moved to auction off land to oil companies looking to drill in the Arctic. The auction is scheduled to take place in January, before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.

In July, Brooks wrote back to the Alaskan congressional delegation, expressing skepticism “of claims that the sector poses a ‘reputational risk’ to the banks that serve it” and promising to look into the matter. Brooks’ OCC then contacted several banks in order to “better understand their decision making.” According to the OCC, the responses indicated that several banks had stopped providing services to parts of the energy industry.

Senate Democrats previously criticized the OCC for taking the fossil fuel industry’s side, warning Brooks and other Trump administration officials to “stop pressuring banks to fund new Arctic drilling projects.”

Nevertheless, Brooks forged ahead and ultimately introduced the new proposed OCC rule. The public comment period for the rule ends in January, giving the OCC a small window of time to potentially implement the rule before Biden’s inauguration.
OneWest Ties

The rule comes days after Trump nominated Brooks to a five year term as the comptroller. His nomination faces several obstacles: The Senate is currently in recess and the nomination comes after the Republican Senate failed to confirm Federal Reserve board member Amy Shelton. Brooks began serving as the comptroller in May after the previous comptroller, Joseph Otting, resigned after proposing new rules that would gut the Community Reinvestment Act, an anti-redlining statute.

Before serving as the comptroller of the OCC, Brooks was the former Chief Legal Officer and Vice Chair of OneWest Bank, a predatory mortgage lender that was described as a foreclosure machine. Other OneWest Bank alumni in the Trump administration include Treasury Secretary Steven Mnunchin and the former Comptroller Otting. After OneWest, Brooks worked at the cryptocurrency startup Coinbase before joining the OCC.

Comptrollers typically serve for five year terms, and the comptroller Obama nominated, Thomas Curry, served during the Trump administration until his term expired in May 2017. However, the law does allow the president to remove the comptroller, should Brooks be confirmed to the position.

As Comptroller, Brooks also created rules that allow payday lenders to charge predatory interest rates, sent a letter to the United States Conference of Mayors asking them to consider the economic consequences of public health lockdown measures, and issued a letter giving banks permission to offer cryptocurrency services.
Larger Fight Over Divestment

The OCC’s new rule comes amidst a larger federal backlash against banks who are reducing their lending to fossil fuel companies.

In June, Trump’s Labor Department issued a rule that would make it more difficult for pension funds to divest themselves of fossil fuel holdings. That Trump rule was requested by fossil fuel interests, which said the divestment movement was depriving oil and gas companies of capital.

In February, Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission refused to expand disclosure requirements for climate related risks. The two-pronged approach — keeping investors in the dark about climate risks and then blocking them from taking climate change into account — could create problems as climate change accelerates.

The OCC’s new rule comes as a welcome boost to an oil and gas industry that has been battered by the pandemic. Oil and gas companies are often poorly capitalized, and have been the largest junk bond borrowers in ten of the past eleven years. The abundance of cheap borrowing led to increased energy production in the U.S., but left companies vulnerable to economic downturns, such as in April when oil prices collapsed. There has been a surge in oil and gas bankruptcies this year.

In an introduction accompanying the rule, the OCC described oil companies as “politically controversial but lawful businesses” and compared them to family planning organizations. The OCC also questioned whether it was appropriate for banks to evaluate climate risk, describing the matter as falling under the purview of Congress and environmental regulators.

“It's remarkable to see a Trump-appointed regulator cite seemingly progressive principles from anti-discrimination laws to the outsized economic power of the largest banks in service of preserving fossil fuel companies' access to the banking system,” said Graham Steele, a former Senate banking committee chief counsel. But Steele also questioned whether the rule would be effective, describing it as having a “dubious legal foundation.”

“Lenders are realizing that a lot of these projects just aren't financially viable, and no amount of government coercion is going to change that,” Steele said.

The afterlife of the #Resistance

With Trump gone, will the counterforce he galvanized melt away or find new purpose?


Anand Giridharadas






What does the #Resistance resist now?

For four forever years, President Trump has given a great many Americans a focus. For their minds, for their news consumption, for their rage. Hate him or hate him, Trump was, if many are to be honest with themselves, purpose-giving. He lent the normally dull onward grinding of democracy, the markups and floor votes and rule changes, a cosmic, thundering sense of meaning.

When he goes, and he will go, there will be deserved relief. But there will also be a void. To live in the Trump era was to be amped up all the time, on high alert, on constant war footing, in fight-or-flight mode, ready to roll. When he leaves the scene, politics will hardly fade away. Nor can we afford for it to. But for many it will go back to being more like homework than an addictive horror movie: something you have to dedicate yourself to because it’s important, as opposed to something from which you cannot pry your eyes away.

Many proud citizens of the #Resistance, after marching and meme-ing and quote-tweeting and door-knocking all these years, are likely to step back from political engagement. After all, these years were exhausting. And with the incoming Biden administration, it is possible to feel that, whatever your differences with the president-elect or his team, overall or on particular policy issues, they are rational, competent actors who dwell in the world of reality and will not attempt to buy Greenland.

This understandable desire to recede from the political play-by-play, and give space and faith to the new administration, has been evident as President-elect Biden has unveiled the first of his nominees. In some quarters, there is jubilation, especially among those for whom the Obama years were the gold standard in politics and who are happy to see elements of the orchestra being reassembled. There have also been valid questions raised about the philosophy and record and entanglements of some nominees. But there is another genre of reaction still, and this is the one that concerns me. It’s the sentiment of not wanting to hear criticism of the incoming administration, not because the critiques aren’t valid, but because nothing is as bad as Trump and everyone is tired and who really cares.

When David Dayen tweeted a story in The American Prospect, which he edits, on Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, Tony Blinken, and his work on behalf of corporate clients while out of government, the editor’s replies exploded with this sentiment of wanting to be left alone by history for a little while. “For God’s sakes, he’s not Mike Pompeo — isn’t that enough??”, wrote Alex Beam. “Dude, we’re still dealing with a president who used the OFFICE to enrich himself. Let’s try to chill for like 5 minutes,” wrote @HakunaMatt_tata. “Somewhere, there’s a barefoot mountaintop shepherd whose only garment is a hair shirt. That’s who MUST be our next Secretary of State,” wrote Daniel Timm. Timm’s bio is commendably simple: “#Resist.”

I get it. Wanting to abandon always-on #resistance and hand the keys to Biden and chill is the political equivalent of coming home after a grueling week at work, slipping on an adult onesie, firing up Netflix, and eating ice cream from the box.


But here’s the deal, as Biden would say: America cannot afford the “resistance” to melt away once Trump finally leaves the scene. Because there is much in American life that continues to demand resisting, including the conditions that made Trump possible. And because Biden will not be a consequential president if he’s coddled by the soft bigotry of deep exhalations.

The gaping inequities in this country still very much demand #resistance. The economic precarity that we have come to accept as normal for tens of millions of people demands #resistance. The lack of robust health insurance for everyone demands #resistance. The oxygen-sucking monopolies of our age demand #resistance.

The predations and overextensions of empire demand #resistance. The conduct of forever wars demands #resistance. Unaccountable drone strikes demand #resistance.

Police violence toward Black people demands #resistance. Weaponized white resentment of changing demographics, and weaponized male resentment of increasing gender equity, demands #resistance.

The behavior of the fossil fuel companies fueling climate change demands #resistance.

The erosion of our democratic institutions demands #resistance. Money in politics demands #resistance. The assault on voting #resistance. The stacking of our courts demands #resistance. A Senate whose antiquated rules mean it can no longer really do the people’s business demands #resistance.

But in the times that loom, these worthy endeavors will lack for the galvanizing and clarifying antagonist that was Trump. To #resist Trump was one thing. To #resist what made him possible requires the resistance of diffuse systems, of blobs, of hyphenated complexes. It is one thing to challenge and protest people who are manifestly cruel and sadistic and indifferent to human life. The armies of the #resistance will now have to train their focus and scrutiny on people who seem decent and humane — but who are, nonetheless, entwined with the broken and corrupting systems that have defined this era, and who need to be pressured and held accountable if they are to change things.

Trump was not a departure from history but the culmination of an age — of greed, of plutocracy, of racism left to metastasize through every institution, of negligence, of democratic decay, of the dubious pretensions of those responsible for our biggest problems to be their solvers. If Trump did us any favor at all, it was in pushing a ridiculous age closer to the cliff edge. It’s time to give it a last shove and start again.

Trump campaign continues legal challenges over election

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEEXLnhndpI&ab_channel=CBCNews%3ATheNational

U.S. CDC says most COVID-19 infections spread by people without symptoms

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KAzIxDPp7o&ab_channel=ArirangNews

Oxford Covid vaccine up to 90% effective, trial results suggest

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd8f6eqDDoE&ab_channel=TheIndependent

Sidney Powell will release "KRAKEN on STEROIDS" after being FIRED from Trump Legal Team

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gz0M5oHSaA&ab_channel=ChristoAivalis