The Earthquake and North Anna

Illustration adapted from Google Maps.  


Author's note: the date stamp reflects when I first posted this piece, it is being  updated as other sources of information become available.

I already knew that nuclear power presented problems with waste disposal and potential terrorism. Now I know about earthquakes.

Some pundits on the right used the quake as an opportunity to take a dig at a vacationing Obama or Paul Krugman, for his alleged statement on quakes being an economic stimulus on a faked google+ page. Some on the the left, such as Media Matters and Washington Monthly  took it as an opportunity to take a dig at the right.

I'm more concerned, though, with what Victor Gilinsky, an NRC commissioner at the time of Three Mile Island told Reuters,

It is important to review the seismic design of the plant in terms of current knowledge... "Instead, the NRC has been relicensing plants without any real safety review - they do not question any of the original licensing conditions, they only check to see whether the plant has a program to deal with old equipment. It's an irresponsible approach.

37.936°N, 77.933°W.  That's Tuesday's 5.8  earthquake epicenter and only  eleven miles as the crow flies,  from Dominion Energy's North Anna nuclear plant in Virginia.

The Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRC) tells us Dominion's reactors lost external power and had to switch to four diesel generators.  According to Bloomberg, the NRC's David McIntyre one of those four diesel generators stopped working after startup.  Chris Gadomski, a nuclear analyst for Bloomberg explained why that's problematic:

If we lose the backup diesel generators at North Anna, you can have a similar situation as Fukushima developing there. Virginia Power should try to restore offsite power as soon as possible.

Just this spring, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had rated North Anna as the seventh most vulnerable plant. in the U.S., based on plant design and probability of earthquakes. Virginia's central seismic zone, where Tuesday's quake occurred, is one of the areas in the state where quakes are more common.

After the  quake, former Department of Energy official Bob Alvarez told the watchdog group POGO, 

The spent fuel pools at North Anna contain 4-5 times more than their original designs intended. As in Japan, all U.S. power nuclear power plant spent fuel pools do not have steel lined, concrete barriers that cover reactor vessels to prevent the escape of radioactivity. They are not required to have back-up generators to keep used fuel rods cool, if offsite power is lost. Even though they contain these very large amount of radioactivity, spent reactor fuel pools in the U.S. are mostly contained in ordinary industrial structures designed to protect them against the elements.

Alvarez's complete blog post is here.  In it he discusses a concern beyond core damage, presented by earthquakes:  what would happen to the water-filled pools used to store spent fuel at most U.S. nuclear plants.

On April 25,Reed Williams (email) at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported 

Tuesday's earthquake apparently shook small protective devices at the North Anna Power Station enough to shut down the plant's two nuclear reactors....Dominion Virginia Power would not say exactly when it expects the reactors — representing nearly 13 percent of the state's electric generating capacity — will start producing power again, but it will likely take days....

Data journalist David Kroodsma (email) put together interactive maps of earthquake risks to U.S. nuclear power plants.  I've asked him for specifics on North Anna after the August 23 quake.  He wrote back that he's on vacation, but I hope to get some answers upon his return to work.

In Blacksburg, Virginia  Tech  evacuated the library because the sixth floor was shaking. On the second floor, where I was sitting,  the floor merely  jiggled, as if the person in the next computer carrel was rocking in his chair. According to the University's Department of Geosciences, a magnitude 5.5 eastern U.S. earthquake usually can be felt as far away as 300 miles and sometimes causes damage as far away as 25 mi.  The Department has a page dedicated to the August 23 quake here.

With dense surface rock and and an origin only 3.7 miles deep, Callan Bentley of Northern Virginia Community College and Alexis Madrigal over at The Atlantic explain why  the Virginia quake spread to 22 states and Washington, D.C.  In Washington, three pinnacles on the National Cathedral crumbled, the Washington Monument cracked  and National Mall monuments closed. NBC's Jim MiklaszewskiI says that he, like many other people in the Pentagon,  thought they'd been hit again, as they had been on 9-11.  In New York City, the police ordered the evacuation of City Hall.

Dominion spokesman Jim Norvelle said the plant was designed to withstand an earthquake of this size. But Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists told Reuters,

It was uncomfortably close to design basis...If Fukushima wasn't a wake-up call, this really needs to be to get the NRC and industry moving to do seismic reviews of all the nuclear power plants in the country.

As recently as August 1, his group had questioned why the NRC wasn't implementing its own task force recommendations on safety:

If the Commissioners delay action on the grounds that they do not yet have enough information about what happened at Fukushima to move forward with the recommendations, then it means the NRC also does not have enough information to move forward with relicensing existing reactors or licensing new reactors. In this case, the NRC should institute a moratorium on such business dealings until enough information about Fukushima is available to move ahead on both safety and business issues

It's not like problems at North Anna are new, As Sue Sturgis at the Institute for Southern Studies Studies pointed out :

The risks of a quake at North Anna were known as far back as 1970. In 1975, then-owner Vepco was fined $60,000 -- the maximum allowed by law -- for building the plant over a known geologic fault, the Washington Post reported at the time. Vepco was convicted of making 12 false statements to the NRC about the fault's existence.

So, despite the assurances from the utility and its supposed regulators, I'll continue to wonder about the wisdom of our nuclear renaissance, especially in the wake of Fukushima.  Despite the campaign by the purveyors of nuclear power and fossil fuels, there are better ways to meet our needs for electricity.

*

More earthquake coverage: 

East Coast earthquake: How does a 5.9 temblor happen in Virginia?: Fault lines in the East are not as apparent or as active as in the West, but certain stresses can lead to a rupture. Tuesday's East Coast Earthquake was the biggest in 100 years.

More MTR Madness

Photo montage from Razing Appalachia, a PBS Independent Lens film from Sasha Waters Freyer . After I published this, The Guardian commissioned me to do a slightly longer version, published on August 19 as "The myth of mountaintop removal mining: The myth of mountaintop removal mining: Big Coal says it's a tough choice: we can have prosperity and jobs or a pristine environment, but not both. That's a Big Lie."  In it I was able to link to some additional sources including: Don Shelby's piece on Xcel's retiring CEO;Todd L Cherry and Jason Shogren's 2002 study on the social cost of coal; the Environmental Law Institute's research on subsidies to the coal industry; and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's evaluation of  viable alternative energy sources.  Thanks to my editor there, Matt Seaton for his valuable help, as well as to my friend from newstrust, Patricia L'Herrou  for her valuable feedback, as well as my other readers there for their reviews.  The site selected this post for recognition in its weekly newsletter as one of two top independent media opinion pieces (the other was Mother Jones on Rick Perry.)

*


Soledad O'Brien's piece on mountaintop removal  is now up online with the troubling title, "Steady job or healthy environment: What would you choose?" 

How about both?  The mono-economy of coal is not exactly a sustainable development plan, despite what the industry would have you believe.  The Appalachian Regional Commission's study noted,

As employment in Central Appalachia’s mining sector has declined over time, with levels of employment in the mining industry being 10 percent in 1960 and declining to only 2 percent in 2000, many counties that were already typically experiencing relatively poor and tenuous economic circumstances in the past have been unable to successfully adapt to changing economic conditions...The counties that have emerged from distress in the region have consistently had fewer jobs in mining and a greater number of jobs in manufacturing when compared to the counties that have remained persistently distressed.

Or as Dr. Michael Hendryx at West Virginia University and Dr.  Melissa M. Ahern of Washington State University have pointed out, "The heaviest coal mining areas of Appalachia had the poorest socioeconomic conditions."

And the health toll is steep, as a number of studies have pointed out. Yesterday,  West Virginia's junior senator Joe Manchin was at a  constituent breakfast in Huntington bashing the EPA.  The Senate now has before it the House plan, the so-called "Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act of 2011," (H.R. 2018), which would restrict U.S. EPA's ability to veto permits issued by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Janet Keating, Exectutive Director of Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition  attended and publicly pointed out to Manchin that he said on the CNN program that there is no clear evidence of health impacts from MTR.  She then handed him copies of the eighteen studies showing or suggesting health impacts, Manchin told Keating that at the time the CNN show was taped, these studies were not available. Huh?  I had copies.  Surely a U.S. Senator and former governor has better access than I?

Maybe the health and economic problems brought on by coal explain why we're not buying the attacks on the EPA:  a  majority of voters in four Appalachian states want their water protected and disapprove of mountaintop mining.  The same day as Manchin was in Huntington, Lake Research Partners and Bellwether Research & Consulting released  the results of a poll  commissioned by Appalachian Mountain Advocates, Earthjustice and the Sierra Club.  Of 1,315 people interviewed  in Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee and Virginia, 

Three-quarters  support fully enforcing—and even increasing protections in—the Clean Water Act to safeguard streams, rivers, and lakes in their states from mountaintop removal coal mining. Fully 76% of voters across these four states support this proposal, including a 62% majority who feel that way strongly. Just 8% of voters oppose it. Support for this proposal is farreaching, encompassing solid majorities of Democrats (86%), independents (76%), Republicans (71%), and Tea Party supporters (67%).

Additionally, 57 percent were opposed to mountaintop mining. Forty-two percent of those said they "strongly oppose" the process.  20 percent of the registered voters polled said they support mountaintop mining and ten percent of those said they "strongly support" it. 

The reaction to the poll from Jason Hayes, the communications director for the American Coal Council?  "They're doing a numbers job. They need to frighten people. They need more membership dollars...It's all very frightening if you don't understand what's going on."

I don't know about dollars, although this seems to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Of course, this is the industry which spends money for fancy websites  to "dispel myths" by telling you that reclamation looks like this:


And speaking of dollars, they appear to be profiting our local politicians, including Mr. Manchin. As Manuel Quinones and Elana Schor pointed out,

"Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is more than just a supporter of his state's influential coal producers -- he's a full-fledged industry insider.

On his financial disclosures for 2009 and 2010, Manchin reported significant earnings from Enersystems Inc., a coal brokerage that he helped run before his political star rose. In the 19 months before winning his Senate seat in a hard-fought special election, Manchin reported operating income of $1,363,916 from Enersystems. His next disclosure showed $417,255 in Enersystems income.

Of course Manchin says his investments are in a blind trust, but do you he doesn't know that what's good for the coal industry is good for Joe Manchin? 

As filmmaker Mari-Lynn Evans has said  the CNN program,

Mountain Top Removal Mining is not an issue of jobs v the environment. It is an issue of corporate profits and corrupt politicians v the health and safety of human beings living under MTR sites in Appalachia. WVU scientists estimate over 11,000 people die in Appalachia each year because of coal. MTR mining provides less than 4000 direct MTR jobs in West Virginia. Does that mean, for every MTR job, we must accept that those jobs will cost each of us the lives of two or three of our friends and loved ones?This is jobs v genocide. If you don't understand that, then you don't understand the story.

Is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg Tone Deaf About Privacy?

5/23/10 Cartoon by Atlanta Journal Constitution's Pulitzer Prize winning Michael Luckovich, used by permission (blog including bio, email)

*

Remember the uproar when Facebook made your list of friends, pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region and networks publicly available to everyone? Now, the social networking behemoth has silently enabled facial recognition software without your permission under the rather benign tag "Suggest photos of me to friends." Even if you choose to disable the option, Facebook still will have the technical ability to connect your name with your image.

Mark Zuckerberg might say his company is just evolving on privacy – witness his comments in this video interview that:

We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

Contrast this with his former claims that privacy is "the vector around which Facebook operates".

Imagine if, in the name this vector, his company had labelled the new feature "facial recognition photo tags" and required users to opt in, rather than disable it after the fact. Methinks Zuckerberg would have had fewer takers.

But already, the deck is stacked against privacy. As media activist Cory Doctorow noted in a TED lecture, Facebook employs 

very powerful game-like mechanisms to reward to disclosure – it embodies BF's Skinner's famous thought experiment, the notion of the Skinner box … lavish[ing] you with attention from the people that you love … in service to a business model that cashes in the precious material of our social lives.

Is this new feature really designed to make the site more useful to users or to boost its commercial value as it nears an initial public stock offering?

As Joan Goodchild, senior editor of CSO (chief security officer) Online, noted to me:

Many privacy advocates feel Facebook needs to do a better job of educating folks about what the new feature is, what it does, and how to opt in or out. Many also feel a user should always be opted out of new features automatically, and should then have to opt in themselves. But it is often the other way around when Facebook rolls out these features.

My concerns go deeper: once data is available to third parties, however temporarily, the cat is out of the bag and beyond retrieval. And it's not just this constant meddling with our settings that's releasing our information – there are also security holes, not to mention scams and release of our data by third-party apps, which the Wall Street Journal found "were sending Facebook ID numbers to at least 25 advertising and data firms, several of which build profiles of internet users by tracking their online activities". More recently, Facebook was adding apps to our profiles that we hadn't requested and which we were unable to permanently disable.

And I'm also concerned about the front doors – also back doors--available for governments, including our own, which has been surveilling such security "risks" as the Quakers and calling Virginia opponents of mountaintop removal "terrorists" (pdf) (while excluding the Ku Klux Klan). There are already huge government-controlled facial databases: your photo on your driver's licence, government-issued identity card, travel visa and passport ends up in a government office. If the government wants to see a photo of your face, it often wouldn't need Facebook to get it. But Facebook's facial recognition feature certainly adds data points and a social graph. As Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer of BT wrote me:

"Right now, Facebook has the largest collection of identified photos outside of governments. I don't think we know what the ramifications of that will be."

All this reminds me of Steven Spielberg's Minority Report: the 2002 film, based on a 1958 short story by Philip K Dick, featured law enforcement preventing "precrimes" and corporations bombarding passersby with holographic advertisements which crawled up the sides of walls, addressing them by name. 

Goodchild recently listed some of the hidden dangers of Facebook. And this is nothing new. As early as 2005 (the year after Facebook's rollout), MIT students were already detailing (pdf) what they saw as Facebook's threats to privacy:

"Users disclose too much, Facebook does not take adequate steps to protect user privacy, and third parties are actively seeking out end-user information using Facebook."

Facial recognition on Facebook arrived with no notice in the US, unless you kept up with the social network's blog last December. The feature came to general light last week, when Facebook extended the feature to other countries and European regulators started investigating.

In the US, Congressman Edward Markey (Democrat, Massachusetts), co-chairman of the bipartisan congressional privacy caucus, has complained:

"Requiring users to disable this feature after they've already been included by Facebook is no substitute for an opt-in process … If this new feature is as useful as Facebook claims, it should be able to stand on its own, without an automatic sign-up that changes users' privacy settings without their permission."

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (Epic), spearheaded a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission on 10 June that Facebook's deployment of facial recognition software rises to the level of "unfair and deceptive trade practices". Joining Epic were the Centre for Digital Democracy, Consumer Watchdog and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, all of which asked (pdf) 

the commission to investigate Facebook, determine the extent of the harm to consumer privacy and safety, require Facebook to cease collection and use of users' biometric data without their affirmative opt-in consent, require Facebook to give users meaningful control over their personal information, establish appropriate security safeguards, limit the disclosure of user information to third parties, and seek appropriate injunctive and compensatory relief.

Facebook provides valuable ways to stay in touch with our friends and families, to network with our colleagues and customers and to coordinate activism. But is hypervisibility really in our best interest, and shouldn't we be the ones making the decisions about what to disclose? Markey submitted legislation in May outlawing the tracking of children online. He might need to add something for adults.

 *

UPDATE:  This piece was originally commissioned by the Guardian and appeared with minor changes as "What Facebook fails to recognise: Facebook has form for being cavalier with users' privacy, but its new facial recognition software has truly dangerous implications."  In response to its publication, FB issued this statement on the FTC complaint: 

We have heard the comments from some regulators about this product feature and we are providing them with additional information which we are confident will satisfy any concerns they will have."

Eisenhower: And They Are Stupid

Poster from Labor is Not A Commodity blog

Many have heard of the quotation of Ike on the military-industrial complex, but my friend Mark Barbour brought my attention via his facebook post to a less known Eisenhower quotation about those who would

abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws

Something to think about as the Governor of Wisconsin would end collective bargaining for public workers and  Democrats in Indiana have refused to contribute to a quorum, to evade a similar law there.

As Snope notes

One favorite tactic in political debate is to put words in the mouth of a respected elder statemen [sic] to make it appear he presciently anticipated some modern issue.

Except, the site continues, the Eisenhower quotation, as used in 2005--when George Bush wanted to privatize Social Security--was not a fabrication and can be found in his 11/8/1954  letter to his brother Ed.  

Here's the whole paragraph from the letter:

Now it is true that I believe this country is following a dangerous trend when it permits too great a degree of centralization of governmental functions. I oppose this--in some instances the fight is a rather desperate one. But to attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything--even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon "moderation" in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas.  Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

Mark noted in quoting Eisenhower  that the splinter group today is the Tea Party.  But, consider that the wealthy backers of the Tea Party, such as the Koch brothers in their opposition to Obama and now their role in Wisconsin,  appear a lot more savvy than Howard Hunt.  They are getting ordinary folks to embrace actions that advance their agenda.


As Ike said, " to attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it."

The Koch brothers, et. al., would have you believe that the "mass of people" no longer think government is responsible for the common good.  And media advances this, quoting folks who say that unions were once necessary, but no longer.

Actually, according to the Gallop Poll reported today in USA Today, 61% of folks oppose laws taking away collective bargaining rights for public employees versus 33% who support them. 

Winnie Fox, ¡Presente!

This photograph is a screen shot of Winnie Fox from my friend Jordan Freeman's film Low Coal @ 46:51. Fox is telling the officer at the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection --aka " Department of Every Polluter"about things "going right down the toilet. The corporations are so corrupt.  They'll do anything to make a dollar." 

Juanita "Winnie" Fox would have been 91 this March.  She died this morning after a fall yesterday, according to Janet Keating of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC), when Fox had served as a Board Member.

Vernon Haltom of Coal River Mountain Watch shares his favorite memory,

I'm thinking of the occupation of [then West Virginia Governor and now U.S. Senator Joe] Manchin's office during Mountain Justice Spring Break 2007. It was Winnie's 87th birthday and we all sang Happy Birthday to her. When the cops dragged her out into the hall and were trying to drag her our of her chair, she said to the cop, "I'm ready to die today. Are you?" A few days later then-state senator Vic Sprouse posted on his blog that he wished the cops had tasered her.

Winnie will always be one of those brilliant examples of someone completely unafraid to call it like it is. She will be sorely missed. What are these raging Grannies in heaven going to do if they get access to the lightning bolts?

 Vivian Stockman of Ohio Valley Environmental Coaltion shared this article which included a photo by Jesse Mwaura (and Viv's camera) showing

 Winnie at the big rally near the fountain at the State Capitol—waving a pink (undergarment) slip that was a signal for then-DEP head Stephanie Timberminer to give herself a pink slip.

an

Fox was one of the arrestees June 23, 2009 at at the Marsh Fork School, protesting that the school  sits just 150 feet from  Massey coal silo, under a 2.8 billion gallon toxic coal sludge impoundment held back by only an earthen dam, which is shaken by blasts from the 1,849 acrea mountaintop removal (MTR) site.  The disaster evacuation plan for the school stated that if  the dam broke, the kids at the Pettus Head Start would have 12 minutes before the sludge is 5.7-feet-deep, 31.5 feet in 20 minutes and 72 feet in 30 minutes--that's an average of 4 feet per minute. (I've read the actual plan, but right now it's not available online.  I've written the site to apprise them.)

Fox was using a fancy walker (the kind with the seat) to get about.  I can still see her, decked out in khaki shorts, sunglasses, and white matching tennis shoes, baseball cap and  t-shirt (the latter bearing a message and adorned w. buttons).  With one hand, Fox  steadied herself on the walker.  The other, she raised high above her head in a fist.  Behind her state police were milling about, and behind them, Massey employees and their wives were decked out in their black gear with orange reflective tape. Things were tense that day.  The miners and supporters were restive--one wife shoved Judy Bonds. Others revved their motorcycles to try and drown own the MTR opponents.  There were snipers on the roof.  We walked from the school to the Massey site.  Fox and others including former WV Congressman and Secretary of State Ken Hechler (four years her senior) refused to move off the premises.  Her friends have told me how proud she was to finally get arrested that day (she had been trying for years at other protests.) Here's Viv's photo of Winnie being released from custody.

Born in the eastern Kentucky coalfields, Fox's roots as a protester go back to 1930, according to Jeff Biggers,

when she insisted on drinking from a segregated water foundation in Huntington, West Virginia, where her family moved when she was a child...Fox has been involved in stopping reckless pollution in the rivers and watersheds for decades, dating back to her earliest movement against Ashland Oil's pulp mill dumping of toxic material in the waterways.

 
You can read some of her friends' comments on my facebook post, which is public. Memories of her life have also been coming into the Friends of Mountains mailing list. Here's what Bill Price of the Sierra Club Environmental Justice Program wrote, reprinted with his permission:

Winnie was a strident activist. She was always looking for the next thing that needed to get done (including risking arrest) and always had a kind word for everyone. Except for Bill Raney of course. One of my favorite pictures of Winnie is of her standing over Raney with this fierce look. He looked like he was afraid of being whipped. And I imagine that fear was justified.

[Raney, for those not familiar with his name is President of the West Virginia Coal Association--this link is to a Bill Moyers episode, The Cost of Coal, which includes Raney.  I have no desire to drive more traffic to Raney's site.  Vivian Stockman is searching the archives for a copy of that photo, too,  and I'll post it if she finds it.]

Winnie's granddaughter,  Melissa Fox, wrote OVEC,

In true Winnie fashion there will be no funeral but instead a party honoring her life. 

Please join us this Saturday, February 19, at Wesvanawha, 825 4th Avenue in Huntington from 7:00pm-8:30pm.   All are welcome.  I know that she had many friends at OVEC and throughout the community so please spread the word and pass this along.

 Her daughter, Jan Fox, sent on a draft of the obituary:

Juanita “Winnie” McClure Fox, 90, died on February 16, 2011 at Saint Mary’s Hospital.  She was preceded in death by Jack Leo Fox, her husband for more than 50 years. She was an outspoken environmentalist and fiercely committed to social justice her entire well-lived life. In 2010, she was presented the West Virginia Environmental Council’s Mother Jones Award.   She was the loving mother of John Fox of Logan, WV, Jim Fox of Huntington, WV, Dr. Julia Fox of Eugene, OR and Dr. Jan I Fox of South Point, OH.   She was the grandmother to Wendy  McQuad of Albany, OH, Jack Fox of Logan, WV,  Jim Fox of Mount Vernon, OH, Dr. Melissa Fox of South Charleston, WV, James Paul Fox of Huntington, WV, Vlad and Che Fox-Cisco of Eugene, OR, Catherine and Bethany Cremeans of Cincinnati, OH.  A celebration of her life will take place on Saturday February 19th, 2011 from 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm at Wasvanawha’s at 825 4th Avenue in Huntington, WV.  In lieu of flowers, donations may be directed to OVEC, PO Box 6753, Huntington West Virginia 25773 or  CRMW,P.O. Box 651,Whitesville, WV 25209

Although, like Fox,  I was there that day at Marsh Fork, I never had the chance to talk with her, unlike her lucky friends, who shared many conversations over the years.  But,  I have had the opportunity to read her words, speaking truth to power:  she often wrote letters to the editor of  the Huntington Herald-Dispatch.   I'll quote from her in an upcoming post, "What Would Winnie Say."  Right now I'm due at Roanoke College, ironically, for a reading and symposium at Roanoke College, "Writing about Grief:."

Frank Mooney, ¡Presente!

 Photograph from"The Plan" at Mountainstopremovalstopshere.org

"They have taken everything away from me and now the final insult is, in what should be my retirement years, area coal companies want to buy our life's work and destroy it and run me and my family out of Twilight along with everyone else that lives here, just to mine the coal." 

--Frankie Mooney 

*

I thought folks who read this blog would want to know that Frank Mooney died yesterday. He had suffered from crushed lung in a mining accident and recently had to withstand coal and blasting dust from three mtr sites near his home. When he had knee replacement surgery, he suffered complications that proved fatal.

 Maria Gunnoe wrote the Friends of Mountains list last night:

I am sorry to say that at 5:30 am this morning Frankie passed away.


He went into the hospital to have knee replacement surgery and a blood clot went into his only good lung causing him to have a massive heart attack. He has been on life support now since the 11th...


We at OVEC are so thankful to Frankie and his family for allowing us the opportunity to purchase their home place to protect it from the impacts of MTR. Frankie has been instrumental in the work that has been going on RT 26.


He will be missed but not forgotten.
His work in Twilight will continue.

The following information is adapted from OVEC's site, www.mtrstopshere.com, where you read about the plans to save his family land and the town of Twilight, WV from obliteration via mountaintop removal (mtr).  It would be great if there were conservation easements and/or further purchase that could get the family the money so there was no need to sell.

Frankie Mooney was a 40-year UMWA member with 22 years of experience in underground coal mines. He lost a brother, an uncle and his Dad to "accidents" in the mines. He was permanently disabled from the impact that mining coal had on his health. He lived in the town of Twilight, WV all of his life, on 9 acres that his family has occupied for generations.

The area coal company offered Mooney $775,000.00 for his land, which included the mineral rights and serves as a buffer between coal company land and the town of Twilight. He knew that this would be a strategic buy, since area coal companies, including Massey Energy, are attempting to depopulate all of Twilight and wipe it out forever, as they did Lindytown. If business continued as usual, Route 26 would be gated off, becoming company land for miles beyond Twilight.

Moonie proposed to sell his land to OVEC, an organization which has the resources to fight back against the coal companies. He was willing to sell for $125,000 less than he was offered by the coal company. In hopes that OVEC would raise the funding to help preserve his family legacy from the permanent destruction of mountaintop removal, the local communities, and the access roads to many area cemeteries, he was willing to live in and fight the conditions that MTR is creating. As OVEC emphasized, "Please understand that Frankie and his family did not have to make this choice."

Update:  When I corresponded with Dianne Bady at OVEC on 1/19/11, she let me know that OVEC has already purchased a portion of the Mooney property and a 900 square foot building.

 He had already bought really nice wood siding for our building, and was planning on working on putting it up as soon as his knee healed from surgery. He was such a good man, such a shame he had to leave us so soon.

Frankie's words and photos will remain up at the site, at his family's request.  She said it was fine for me to pass the site on to others as long as I noted that OVEC is working on updating the site and that a partial purchase has already been made.


She also let me know that I could include the following:

OVEC is interested in purchasing more of the Mooney family property in Twilight, and we'll be looking into conservation easements as well. Our most immediate need is for funding to help us with our program work in Twilight. OVEC will be working with community members to try to prevent Twilight from becoming the next community depopulated by MTR - there are 2 Massey MTR mines and a Patriot coal MTR mine within a couple miles of our property and the town of Twilight. These MTR mines are headed toward Twilight. The small community of Lindytown (a mile up the road from Twilight) has already been depopulated and razed just within the past two years; Twilight is the next community in the path...

Judy Bonds, ¡Presente!

Photograph of Judy Bonds by  Sam Eaton of American Public Radio's Marketplace.

Again it was a note from Vernon Haltom, letting me and others know that Judy Bonds, our beloved warrior against mountaintop removal had succumbed to lung cancer. As I think of Judy, gone now barely a day, in my head, I'm hearing Bernice Johnson Reagon sing, "They are Falling All Around Me"

It is your path I walk
It is your song I sing
It is your load I take on
It is your air I breathe
It’s the record you set that makes me go on
It’s your strength that helps me stand

You’re not really gon’na leave me

I can also hear Judy's voice, denouncing Massey at Marsh Fork, or laughing at the after-party for the premiere of Coal Country at the Blue Grass Kitchen in Charleston, WV. 

Here's Judy in an interview from May 27, 2009 w. Fred Smecker for Toward Freedom:

My father and brother always said, 'Every law ever written about coal mining was written in our blood.' I'll always remember that quote. The industry has abused and oppressed our people for 140 years....most have a relative in the coal industry. This divides the community greatly, like a civil war almost - we get lots of threats and intimidation...it's basically a war zone, there are the threats and intimidation, and then the three million pounds of explosives used to blow up the mountains. If you have an industry that's been running amok for 140 years, you have an outlaw on your hands. They control the schools, the media, the politicians - it's virtually a dictatorship! It's interesting, the miners and other coal-workers who stick up for coal it's like the Stockholm syndrome; it's an abusive relationship. A psychologist would have a field day down here.

*

And, in case you're interested, here are the complete lyrics to Reagon's song from the album B'lieve I'll Run On (Redwood, 1978).  You can listen to a clip on Dr. Reagon's site.

They are falling all around me
They are falling all around me
They are falling all around me
The strongest leaves on my tree

Every paper brings the news that
Every paper brings the news that
Every paper brings the news that
The teachers of my life are moving on

Oh, death comes and rests so heavy
Death comes and rests so heavy
Death comes and rests so heavy
Your face I will never see, never see you anymore

But I’m not really gon’na leave you
I’m not really gon’na leave you
You’re not really gon’na leave me

It is your path I walk
It is your song I sing
It is your load I take on
It is your air I breathe
It’s the record you set that makes me go on
It’s your strength that helps me stand

You’re not really gon’na leave me

(oh…)

I have tried to sing my song right
(I will try to sing my song right)
I have tried to sing my song right
(I will try to sing this song right)
I have tried to sing my song right
Be sure to let me hear from you

Half a loaf: the FCC's Weak Rule on Net Neutrality

Graphic from the Florida non-profit journalism site, Flaglerlive, on its September 12, 2010 post," Net Neutrality: The First Amenment Issue of Our Time."  The following is a draft my next piece commissioned by The Guardian.

*
 

Net neutrality is the First Amendment issue of our time. Today, a blog can load as fast as the Wall Street Journal — and, if the blog is good, it can get more traffic than any media conglomerate.

But if bigger companies can pay for faster, priority Internet access, that blogger no longer has a shot. And these big companies know that when they pay for access, they win. They want preferred treatment on the Internet like the preferred treatment they get in the rest of their lives. --Al Franken on August 19, 2010

I wasn't surprised  December 21 to learn the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had passed its rule governing net neutrality 3-2 along party lines.  The topic's been a source of partisan wrangling for years.  Advocates of net neutrality argue users should control content viewed and applications used--that a level playing field promotes democratic participation and free speech. Broadband providers and telephone companies want freedom to boost profits by deciding which content gets to whom first and fastest. Both sides argue theirs is the course encouraging economic innovation. 

My take: the new rule is another example of the Democrats' "half-a-loaf" thinking and falls short of pledges by President Obama and his administration to protect the Internet against phone and cable gatekeepers. The order's text wasn't available immediately, only FCC news releases and statements by its members--Chair Julius Genachowski, joined by Democrats Mignon Clyburn and Michael Copps, who voted to approve, and Republicans Meredith Attwell Baker and Robert McDowell, who voted nay.  Based on those, the rule

• leaves wireless networks unregulated, anointing Verizon, AT&T, et. al. as gatekeepers to the rapidly expanding world of mobile Internet access;
• fails to explicitly prohibit internet service providers from turning  the "information highway"  into a toll road favoring corporate partners, while  detouring the rest of us onto the cyber-equivalent of a pothole-ridden dirt road; and
  
• continues to ground its rationale in legal arguments rejected by the DC Federal Court of Appeals April 6, by defining the Internet as an information service, rather than reclassifying broadband and wireless as a public utility under the Communications Act.  As an information service, the court allowed broadband provider Comcast to block or slow specific sites and charge video sites like YouTube to deliver their content faster to users.  The suit came after Comcast attracted attention in 2008 for secretly using a program called Sandvine to hamper peer-to-peer file sharing applications.

Republicans hate the measure. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (KY) criticized the FCC for taking "what could be a first step in controlling how Americans use the Internet by establishing federal regulations on its use."  He promised to "push back against new rules and regulations” once Republicans take the majority in the House of Representatives in January.  Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX), the Commerce Committee's ranking member, called the vote an “unprecedented power grab by the [FCC's] unelected members” and promised a resolution condemning the rule. She had offered an amendment to block the agency from using any omnibus budget funds to implement net neutrality. Last September, Republicans already had beaten back House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) net neutrality bill.

Public interest groups also are up in arms.  Free Press calls it a squandered opportunity. Public Knowledge says it falls short.  Media Access project finds it  riddled with loopholes.  Center for Media Justice  criticizes its minimal protections.
 
I expected a weak rule after Genachowski held closed-door meetings with industry lobbyists opposing net neutrality and with the industry's Open Internet Coalition, but locked out public-interest and consumer groups.  And, as Greg Sargeant noted in the Washington Post:
 

The problem is...that Dems...don't think they're capable of winning a protracted political standoff, even on an issue where the public is on their side, once Republicans start going on the attack....As a result, they tend to telegraph weakness at the outset...that they'll essentially give Republicans what they want as long as they can figure out a way to call it a compromise.

According to Bloomberg, AT&T, in its attempts to influence policy, met more frequently with the Commission in recent days than any other provider.  Verizon, on the other hand, wanted  the FCC out of the picture. Industry sources told The Hill that given Congressional gridlock, Verizon's call for  legislation suggests the company might not want any resolution at all.  These approaches seemed borne out when AT&T praised the FCC for ending its "hamstrung [status preventing] needed action on...real problems " while Verizon, called for "statutory underpinnings."

Copps, a strong consumer advocate, issued a statement prior to voting, saying he’d battled  since his 2001 appointment "to make sure the Internet doesn't travel down the same road of special-interest consolidation and gatekeeper control that other media and telecommunications industries—radio, television, film and cable—have traveled."  While not the proposal he would have crafted, the rule “could represent an important milestone…[i]f vigilantly and vigorously implemented by the Commission—and if upheld by the courts.”

Those, Mr. Copps, are pretty big ifs.

Book Review: Mike Hudson: The Monster

Cover from MacMillan Publishers.  Just heard back from Nona Walker, book editor of the Roanoke Times, that this review, with minor changes, is slated to run January 2, 2011.  Since there is usually non permalink for reviews there, I'm posting a copy here with a few links, along with a bit of an introduction.  


November 8, I had the pleasure of listening to Mike Hudson speak at Washington and Lee about the connection between predatory lending, Wall Street and the past two year's economic meltdown.  That's the subject of his new book, THE MONSTER: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America—and Spawned a Global Crisis, which came out in October from Holt/Times Books.

Here's a 2008 interview by Randall Chittum published by Columbia Journalism Review in which Mike talks about the leadup to the mortgage crisis and how the dots were there in the form of individual stories--which never got connected:

Mike currently covers business and finance for the Center for Public Integrity, an investigative journalism non-profit. Before that, he worked as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and wrote for Forbes, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Mother Jones, among others.

I met Mike when he was working for the Roanoke Times covering the low-income beat and graciously sent me a note to say our all-volunteer 8-12 page alternative monthly, the New River Free Press, had scooped his daily on the criminalization of panhandling.

Mike started on the trail of predatory lending long before the current melt-down, after he received a 1992 Alicia Patterson fellowship to research businesses that target low-income Americans, He edited the award-winning book Merchants of Misery:  How Corporate America Profits from Poverty (Common Courage Press, 2002 and appeared in the documentary film Maxed Out:  Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lending (Trueworks, 2006).

*

THE MONSTER: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America--and Spawned a Global Crisis, October 2010, Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, New York, 365 pp.

 This fall's latest banking scandal revealed foreclosure lawyers backdating mortgage documents and faking affidavits to courts in order to evict families and resell their homes. After more than two years of stories on the sub-prime mortgage crisis, readers may have wearied . Was the resulting financial meltdown an unavoidable market accident--as former Federal Reserve Chairman Allen Greenspan called it, a “once-in-a-century credit tsunami?” If so, what's the purpose in studying it?

 In The Monster, Mike Hudson paints the larger picture, connecting the dots all the way back to the 80s, exploring how the “plain vanilla business” of mortgages was corrupted and who is to blame. Rather than a tome on finance, The Monster reads like a true-crime story--perhaps because Hudson's first job out of college was covering the Roanoke Times & World News's police beat. The compelling story he unravels stems from interviews with hundreds of individuals and from thousands of pages of court transcripts. Hudson pieces together a Rube Goldberg world of falsified income, forged signatures, and pressure on families to sign sub-prime loans as quickly as possible.   He shows large investments from Wall Street firms sustained these practices, concentrating on Roland Arnall--who created Ameriquest, one of the first and biggest predatory lending firms--and on the Wall Street firm of Lehman Brothers.

For Hudson, Arnall represents the birth of the sub-prime mortgage industry. An immigrant who originally opened up a savings and loan to bankroll his real-estate projects, Arnall figured out how to make lots of money making high-priced home loans to borrowers in mostly minority neighborhoods. His workers felt his impatience to grow the business. Dennis Rivelli, a former manager, told Hudson, Arnall

never cared how you got the volume and where it came from and what you had to do to get it...He could care less. Just pump it out and move on.

After being pressed by S&L regulators in the early 1990s, Arnall morphed his savings and loan into a lightly-regulated independent mortgage lender, Ameriquest. His company might have been advertising as the ""proud sponsor of the American dream" of home ownership, but it wasn't even generating new mortgages. In 2004, one quarter of 1 percent of Ameriquest loans went for home purchases. 99.75% went for refinancing deals with onerous fees and loan rates which increased the odds of foreclosure.

Take, for instance, the case of Carolyn Pittman, who had borrowed $58,859 in 1993 with her husband to buy a one-story, concrete block house near Jacksonville, Florida. They paid $500 per month on a fixed-rate FHA loan which included home insurance and property taxes.

Even after Charlie died in 1998, Pittman kept up with her house payments. But things were tough for her.... Like many older black women who owned their homes but had modest incomes, Pittman was deluged almost every day, by mail and by phone, with sales pitches offering money to fix up her house or pay off her bills. A few months after her heart attack, a salesman ... caught her on the phone and assured her he could ease her worries. He said Ameriquest would help her out by lowering her interest rate and her monthly payments.

 By the time Pittman had been churned through the mill, her house payment came to $1,069 per month. And Arnall's reaction to such stories, "Stuff happens."

Meanwhile Arnall's minions profited:

For those who gave themselves over to the breakneck pace of life inside Ameriquest, the rewards were dazzling. Twenty-three year old salesmen made $100,000 per year. Twenty-six-year-old branch managers groused $200,000, $200,000, even half a million dollars a year, and boosted their takes higher as they climbed within the companies ranks. Many would become millionaires as they made Roland Arnall a billionaire.

 After one aide left the company his consulting contract from Arnall yielded $35 million dollars.


 Nothing could have happened on this scale, however, without the infusion of huge amounts of capital by Wall Street firms such as Lehman Brothers. Lawrence McDonald, a vice president at Lehman explained that

The executives who ran the company's sprawling mortgage business...had direct access to CEO Dick Fuld and his inner circle ..."Their words were not so much heard as acclaimed...Whatever they needed--extra budget, permission for more risk, permission to invest colossal hunks of the firm's capital in their market--they got."

 Hudson first wrote about predatory lending in “Stealing home” for The Washington Monthly (1992) and “Poverty, Incorporated” for Southern Exposure (1993). What’s remarkable to me is how Hudson has stuck with this story. While other reporters wrote an account here or there before dropping the subject, Hudson pressed on, often as a freelancer, completing “Banking on Misery” for Southern Exposure in 2003 and “Workers Say Lender Ran 'Boiler Rooms' (on Ameriquest with E. Scott Reckard) for the Los Angeles Times in 2005, before writing a series of stories for The Wall Street Journal in 2006-7.

 As the Columbia Journalism Review's Dean Starkman (website) notes in his analysis, "Power Problem",

 Only after the crackup had already begun... [was] Wall Street's role in the subprime again laid bare...It referred...to documents available for years. There is really no excuse...as federal regulation folded like a cheap suitcase, the business press...lost whatever taste it had for head-on investigations of core practices of powerful institutions...it relies on [Wall Street and corporate subculture]...for its stories. Burning a bridge is hard.

Hudson now writes about business and finance for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit journalism organization founded by Charles Lewis (bio) who explained his reason for founding the Center in 1989 (see IRE Journal, Spring 1990, "Mercenary, Not Public, Service."

 America's best and brightest reporters, working for the most respected national news organizations, too often do not investigate the country's most important stories.

Predatory lending's contribution to our current economic upheaval is one such story. Some might argue that the buyers should beware, that corporations and politicians will always be complicit. Such cynics probably see no place for investigative journalism. I'd disagree. Hudson digs deep and provides a compelling, convincing account for those who hope that an informed public can stimulate reform.

Uranium Mining in Virginia draws closer, despite opposition

Cartoon from the November 3, 2007 Roanoke Times by Chris OBrion (email, website, RT archive), used with permission from Mr. OBrion, who cartoons regularly for the paper, in addition to doing artwork for other clients from his home in Richmond, VA.

*

In November 2007, I wrote about Coles Hill in Chatham, Virginia in Pittsylvania County, which has been in Walter Coles's family since 1785. Cole's ancestral home sits on one of the largest uranium deposits in the United States. There is also uranium in Orange County, which raised questions  when a shale company prosed a quarry there.

Rising uranium prices and the resurgence of the nuclear power industry after federal underwriting in the 2005 energy bill,  led Cole , along with friends, family and Canadian investors in Virginia Uranium, Inc. to lobby the Virginia Assembly to study lifting the moratorium on uranium mining in Virginia.

If the politically connected Coles has his way, the uranium that lies there will be mined, to his great profit, despite earlier decisions to abandon such mining, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), due to serious questions raised in the 80s and never answered about

where the uranium would be processed, how the mine waste or “tailings” would be disposed of, what safeguards would be in place to protect the environment and public health, how would the facility be secured from earthquakes and floods.

The mining moved one step closer December 8, when the General Assembly's Virginia Coal and Energy Commission’s Uranium Mining Subcommittee met and  unanimously selected Chmura Economics &Analytics of Richmond from among five other consulting groups that made presentations to prepare a $200,000 socio-economic study commissioned by the state, as required by the Assemby. The company's past experience has been in the study of the economic impact of highway investments and airports.  Phillip Lovelace, a Pittsylvania County farmer opposing proposed uranium mining at Coles Hill, said  that he was disappointed that a public comment period wasn’t on the agenda for the meeting in Richmond on Wednesday.

In addition, the National Academy of Sciences committee will spend three days in Danville as part of its study to assess the potential statewide consequences of uranium mining in Virginia. The panel convenes today to hear from representatives from theSELC and the Dan River Basin Association. Monday night, residents will have their say at a session described as a town hall meeting.The study is "sponsored"  by the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, but the funding comes from Virginia Uranium, Inc., the company which is "bringing the energy benefits of uranium to our nation and the economic benefits of uranium development to Southside Virginia."

[It's] affiliate company, Virginia Uranium Ltd., merged with Santoy Resources Ltd on July 21, 2009. The newly merged company, Virginia Energy Resources Inc., holds 22.2% indirect ownership interest in the Coles Hill project. Virginia Energy Resources is trading on the Toronto Venture Stock Exchange.

December 7, More than 30 people attended a meeting at the Henry County Administration Building that was advertised as “Community Meeting to Stop Cancer Causing Practice in Southside.” The event was co-hosted by the Virginia Sierra Club, Martinsville-Henry County Voters League and Virginia Interfaith Power & Light.

The mining issue is being raised in the special election to fill the Virginia 19th District Senate seat vacated by Robert Hurt's defeat of Tom Perriello to represent the area in the U.S. Congress.

I've had contact with Cale Jaffe, SELC's  the assigned attorney before--he's been involved in fighting coal plants in Virginia--he's based out of Charlottesville.  I'll see if he's available for an interview.

The foreclosure crisis won't go away easily

Photo of Mike Hudson, author of The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America – and Spawned a Global Crisis. This piece was commissioned the Guardian, which published it today as, "Let's not foreclose on financial reform:  The modest Dodd-Frank Act is under threat, yet the foreclosure crisis shows the dire risks of an unfettered mortgage industry."  I've only made minor changes and kept the British spelling.


*

This past week saw much coverage of the 1 December loan disclosures from the Federal Reserve, as required by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  The act--so named because it was sponsored by Representative Barney Frank (Democrat, Massachusetts) and shepherded by Senator Chris Dodd (Democrat, Connecticut)--was signed into law on 21 July by President Obama, as a legislative response to the last two years' economic meltdown engendered by the sub-prime mortgage debacle.

Less reported was the 1 December hearing Dodd held on mortgage servicing – the latest place where fraud has surfaced. Servicers, now regulated under the Dodd-Frank Act, calculate principal and interest, collect payments from the mortgagor, act as an escrow agent and foreclose in the event of default.

This makes servicers pertinent, as the US finds itself in the middle of a  foreclosure crisis that isn't going away. According to an interview with law professor Kurt Eggert, who testified at the hearing, the problem is that:

No one agency has been given the job of regulating servicers, and so any oversight has been piecemeal and haphazard. And the regulators often have been worried more about the soundness of banks than the protection of borrowers.

This has resulted in folks losing their homes, because, consumer advocates say, it's more profitable to foreclose than to make the mortgage adjustments once promised by Obama.

Many initial loans, however, were fraudulent. For instance, just recently, on 3 December, SunTrust's Alexandro Aquinta pled guilty to:

transactions in which straw buyers and unqualified buyers obtained over $4m in … loan proceeds … [from] applications [which] contained materially false, fraudulent and misleading information … regarding applicants' employment, income and assets.

But worse, to my mind, are the falsified documents filed by attorneys in so-called "rocket-docket" courts. The resulting foreclosures severely stress families who lose their homes, as well as neighbours who see their property values decline.

To understand how we got to this state, I interviewed Mike Hudson, one of the first investigative journalists to link predatory lending to the economic meltdown and author of The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America – and Spawned a Global Crisis.

According to Hudson, fraud in the banking and mortgage industries dates back to the 1980s. The sub-prime crisis was long in the making and was facilitated by government through bad policy and lax enforcement. Its origins lay in

[A] philosophy of trusting financial players to police themselves. A lack of cops on the street, as it were, allowed fraud to flourish [with] faked paperwork and other ugly practices [in] the origination of loans – and, now, similarly dicey practices in the foreclosure process.

This lack of regulation was a bipartisan business:

The philosophy started getting traction in the Carter administration, gained even more steam in the Reagan years, continue apace under Clinton and saw its full flowering during the Bush Administration. One influential figure who was there through the Reagan-Bush I-Clinton-Bush II years was Alan Greenspan. Remember he was considered to be 'the maestro', a guy who could see around corners and could guide us to unprecedented prosperity.

The meltdown will continue as long as the bad policy and lax enforcement do. The growing foreclosure crisis is just the latest chapter:

The business model for loan servicers ensures that questionable foreclosures will continue to flood the system. With Republicans' Congressional victories, [Dodd-Frank's] financial reform is in danger. If you think the legislative battle was tough, wait until you see the bareknuckled lobbying and backroom armtwisting that are going to emerge as the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau gets under way.

As far as the Dodd-Frank Act goes, Hudson says that the best hope lies in Elizabeth Warren's push to simplify mortgage paperwork, as a measure that could command bipartisan support. But I have my doubts about whether Warren will succeed.  Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell's continued stated primary goal is to block all of Obama's initiatives to render him a one-term president. There's already efforts afoot to weaken the law. And the  financial industry and banking industries and their water-carriers in Congress opposed Warren's appointment to head Dodd-Frank's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; Obama tapped her only as a special adviser to set up the Bureau. And there are other troubling developments including the Fed's recent move to strip a key protection for homeowners under the guise of reform.

The 1 December hearing was the last Dodd will chair for the Senate committee on banking, housing and urban affairs. He decided not to run for re-election after disclosures about his own sweetheart mortgage deal with the predatory Countrywide. In line for the chairmanship is Tim Johnson (Democrat, South Dakota), who has a record of supporting small predatory loan companies (pay-day lending) and fighting credit card reform. 

Some argue that the financial trauma brought on by sub-prime mortgages was an unavoidable market accident: Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan called it a "once-in-a-century credit tsunami". Some hold that borrowers were to blame – folks took out variable rate mortgages for homes they couldn't afford, betting already-inflated prices would continue to rise, so increasing their equity faster than their ballooning payments.

Others disparage government, either for its lack of regulation or for overselling the dream of home ownership. They argue that the buyers should beware, that corporations and politicians will always be complicit. 

I disagree.  I join Hudson in hoping that an informed public can stimulate reform:

The foreclosure crisis is a serious issue; it's more than a series of paperwork snafus. The powers that be in Washington failed to get the facts and act the first time around – when lenders were engaged in a feeding frenzy of predatory lending. The foreclosure scandal is a second chance for leaders and regulators to prove that they can dig out the truth and take action.