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TransCanada Pipeline Foes See U.S. Bias in E-Mails

October 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Environmental groups said the e-mails were disturbing and evidence of “complicity” between TransCanada, the pipeline company, and American officials tasked with evaluating the pipeline’s environmental impact.

The e-mails, the second batch to be released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the environmental group Friends of the Earth, show a senior State Department official at the United States Embassy in Ottawa procuring invitations to Fourth of July parties for TransCanada officials, sharing information with the company about Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s meetings and cheering on TransCanada in its quest to gain approval of the giant pipeline, which could carry 700,000 barrels a day.

“You see officials who see it as their business not to be an oversight agency but as a facilitator of TransCanada’s plans,” said Damon Moglen, the director of climate and energy project for Friends of the Earth. While the e-mails refer to multiple meetings between TransCanada officials and assistant secretaries of state, he said, such access was denied to environmental groups seeking input. Environmental groups argue that the pipeline, known as the Keystone XL project, would result in unacceptably high emissions and disrupt pristine ecosystems.

Before he was TransCanada’s chief Washington lobbyist, Paul Elliott was a top official in Mrs. Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential campaign.

Many of the new e-mails are between Mr. Elliott and Marja Verloop, the counselor for energy and environment at the United States Embassy in Ottawa. On Sept. 10, 2010, in response to an e-mail from Mr. Elliot announcing that Senator Max Baucus of Montana was supporting the pipeline, Ms. Verloop wrote, “Go Paul!” In an e-mail to David Jacobson, the United States ambassador to Canada, she described TransCanada as “comfortable and on board” with some developments in the review process.

Wendy Nassmacher, a State Department spokeswoman, disputed that the e-mails showed a pro-pipeline bias. “We are committed to a fair, transparent and thorough process,” she said in an e-mail on Sunday. “Throughout the process we have been in communication with industry as well as environmental groups, both in the United States and in Canada.”

She noted that the State Department also conducted hearings in communities along the route of the proposed pipeline last week.

Shawn Howard, a spokesman for TransCanada, said Mr. Elliott lobbied the State Department officials on Keystone XL, as did lobbyists for many environmental groups. “Mr. Elliott was and is simply doing his job — no laws have been broken.” The State Department is tasked with permitting pipelines that cross national borders according to the “national interest,” and is weighing the environmental impact of Keystone XL against the benefit in expanding the fuel supply for the United States. Its third and final environmental impact statement, released in late August, said that the pipeline would have “limited adverse environmental impacts” if operated according to regulations.

The Environmental Protection Agency, which may offer comments on such pipelines but is not empowered to rule on their authorization, had sharply criticized the State Department’s previous environmental assessments as inadequate but has not yet weighed in on the most recent judgment.

While the pipeline would help insure the United States a stable fuel supply from a friendly neighbor, environmental groups oppose it because much of the oil would come from subterranean oil sand, and extracting crude oil from the rock produces heavy emissions and destroys the overlying forests. In addition, the pipeline would go through the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the Midwest’s principal water sources, where a spill could prove disastrous.

Although some of the e-mails released Monday speak to a cozy familiarity between Mr. Elliott and State Department officials, others reveal a sometimes tense and conflicted relationship. Officials in Washington repeatedly rejected and parried requests for meetings with TransCanada executives even while trying to please Canada, a close ally; Keystone XL has the strong support of the Canadian government and would provide a lucrative new outlet for Canadian oil.

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Clinton Urges Asian Nations to Compete Fairly in World Markets

July 25, 2011 by Leave a Comment

HONG KONG — In remarks clearly aimed at Beijing’s leaders without explicitly criticizing China, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called in a speech in Hong Kong on Monday for Asian nations to compete fairly in international markets and to include the United States in regional economic agreements.

Mrs. Clinton urged governments not to draft market-shaping regulations in secret and not to favor state-owned enterprises. She called for strong protections for intellectual property and for government contracts to be open to foreign and domestic companies alike.

“All who benefit from open, free, transparent and fair competition have a vital interest and a responsibility to follow the rules,” she said. “Enough of the world’s commerce takes place with developing nations that leaving them out of the rules-based system would render the system unworkable. And that, ultimately, would impoverish everyone.”

Mrs. Clinton called for regional economic integration to be pursued through groups that include the United States like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, whose annual gathering will be led by President Obama in Hawaii in November.

In economic policy, as on security issues, China has preferred to address issues in Asia either bilaterally or through agreements with small numbers of Asian countries, without the United States. That approach to negotiations has allowed greater influence for China, the region’s largest economy and leading military power.

But the hazard of bilateral trade agreements within Asia is that they may create further layers of bureaucracy, Mrs. Clinton said.

“There is now a danger of creating a hodgepodge of inconsistent and partial bilateral agreements which may lower tariffs but which also create new inefficiencies and dizzying complexities,” Mrs. Clinton said. “A small electronics shop, for example, in the Philippines might import alarm clocks from China under one free trade agreement, calculators from Malaysia under another, and so on — each with its own obscure rules and mountains of paperwork — until it no longer even makes sense to take advantage of the trade agreements at all. Instead, we should aim for true regional integration.”

Mrs. Clinton also made an implicit criticism of China’s two-month embargo last autumn on shipments of rare earth metals to Japan, which extended to a brief halt on shipments to the United States and Europe as well. She warned on Monday that international faith in the fairness of the current global trade system is threatened, “when vital supply chains are blocked.”

Departing briefly from the Asian economy themes of her speech, Mrs. Clinton also offered an assurance that Congress and the Obama administration would find a way to raise the ceiling on the national debt.

“The political wrangling in Washington is intense right now, but these kinds of debates have been a constant in our political life throughout the history of our republic,” she said, later adding that she was “confident that Congress will do the right thing and secure a deal on the deal ceiling, and work with President Obama to take the steps necessary to improve our long-term fiscal outlook.”

Chinese officials have been watching warily the debt debate in the United States. With more than $1 trillion in United States Treasuries, China holds roughly a tenth of the American national debt.

China’s precise holdings are unclear, as monthly data for foreign holdings of Treasuries are highly unreliable because the notes are frequently held in the name of various banks in other countries, while the most recent annual data is from last summer and is not fully comprehensive.

Mrs. Clinton spoke in Hong Kong to a gathering of the local branches of the American Chamber of Commerce and the Asia Society.

The secretary of state praised Hong Kong’s commitment to free markets and light regulation. She conspicuously avoided any mention of the democratic aspirations of Hong Kong residents or their concerns about one of the world’s highest levels of economic inequality, which some local critics have attributed to limited regulation of oligopolies and to real estate deals between large companies and the government.

A march on July 1 by protesters calling for more democracy and more populist economic policies drew 54,000 people according to the final police estimate and 218,000 people according to the organizers.

Mrs. Clinton offered unalloyed praise for Hong Kong’s success, and put it in the context of the system of one country with two economic and legal systems that China and Britain created when Britain returned the territory to Chinese rule in 1997. China has objected strongly over the years to any American advice on how to run the territory, contending that this amounts to foreign interference in China’s domestic affairs.

“Under the ‘one country, two systems’ policy, this remains a city that bridges East and West and looks outward in all directions, a place where ideas become businesses, where companies compete on the merits, and where economic opportunity is palpable and real for millions of people, a place that defines the fierce and productive economic competition of our time,” she said.

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Obama Seeks to Win Back Wall St. Cash

June 13, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The guests were asked for their thoughts on how to speed the economic recovery, then the president opened the floor for over an hour on hot issues like hedge fund regulation and the deficit.

Mr. Obama, who enraged many financial industry executives a year and a half ago by labeling them “fat cats” and criticizing their bonuses, followed up the meeting with phone calls to those who could not attend.

The event, organized by the Democratic National Committee, kicked off an aggressive push by Mr. Obama to win back the allegiance of one of his most vital sources of campaign cash — in part by trying to convince Wall Street that his policies, far from undercutting the investor class, have helped bring banks and financial markets back to health.

Last month, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, traveled to New York for back-to-back meetings with Wall Street donors, ending at the home of Marc Lasry, a prominent hedge fund manager, to court donors close to Mr. Obama’s onetime rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton. And Mr. Obama will return to New York this month to dine with bankers, hedge fund executives and private equity investors at the Upper East Side restaurant Daniel.

“The first goal was to get recognition that the administration has led the economy from an unimaginably difficult place to where we are today,” said Blair W. Effron, an investment banker closely involved in Mr. Obama’s fund-raising efforts. “Now the second goal is to turn that into support.”

The president’s top financial industry supporters say they are confident that the support Mr. Obama needs will ultimately be there, despite the financial industry’s unhappiness over his efforts to tighten regulation of their businesses. But it is clear that those supporters will have to work much harder to win over the financial services industry than they did in 2008, before Wall Street’s bust, the subsequent clashes over policy and the sometimes bitter personal differences that lingered afterward.

Executives at large investment banks, a group that gave generously to Mr. Obama in his last campaign, are remaining on the sidelines for now. Only a small handful of such donors have appeared in Mr. Obama’s joint campaign filings with the Democratic National Committee, though officials there said more would appear in the coming weeks.

Some traditional heavy hitters in Democratic Wall Street fund-raising have stepped out of the game. They include Maureen White and her husband, Steven L. Rattner, a founder of the Quadrangle Group, whose Fifth Avenue living room was a critical conduit between Wall Street and Democratic candidates in the years before Mr. Rattner joined the Obama administration to help restructure the auto industry. The couple did not resume their old role after Mr. Rattner left government, and he was caught up last year in an investigation into kickbacks to New York’s state pension fund.

And even as some criticize the president for listening too closely, they say, to Wall Street on issues like the 2008 bailout and financial regulation, he has suffered some unusually public defections and criticism by some former Wall Street supporters, who view his policies and rhetoric as unfair to their industry. Many are Republicans whose support last time around burnished his image as a post-partisan problem solver.

And as Mr. Obama seeks to rebuild, Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, is using his background as a venture capital executive and his policy proposals to woo financial-industry donors.

Last week, Mr. Romney held three fund-raisers in Greenwich, Conn., and New York, including a reception hosted by Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge fund manager who donated to Mr. Obama in 2008. Mr. Scaramucci said he wanted a president who embodied pragmatism and middle-of-the-road solutions. In 2008, that candidate was Mr. Obama, he said; today, it is Mr. Romney.

“He seemed like he was going to be a transformative candidate,” Mr. Scaramucci said of Mr. Obama in an interview. “I’m really not an ideological guy, and I think the country right now needs more practical, less partisan people.”

To offset those defections, Mr. Obama’s campaign has deployed a corps of loyal Wall Street supporters who have fanned out to defend the president’s record and stoke fatigued donors. They include Robert Wolf, the chief executive of UBS Group Americas; the hedge fund managers Orin S. Kramer and Eric Mindich; and Mark T. Gallogly, a co-founder of Centerbridge Partners.

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