Global planting of biotech crops grew 8 percent last year, to a record high of 395 million total acres, according to the latest report from Clive James at the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA). Despite the many regulatory hurdles that governments around the world have erected to the approval and adoption of biotech crop varieties, when farmers have the opportunity to plant them, they do. Last year, more than 16 and a half million farmers grew biotech crops in 29 different countries.

What’s particularly noteworthy is that, while activists try to portray biotechnology as a rich industrial world tool, the bulk of recent growth in biotech crop adoption has come among relatively resource-poor farmers in less developed and newly industrialized countries. The United States has, since the first biotech crop introductions back in the early 1990s, grown the largest number of acreage planted with biotech varieties. But, while annual acreage increases in countries like the U.S. and Canada is starting to flatten a bit, the most robust growth has come from Brazil, India, and China. LDCs and NICs now grow about half of the world’s total biotech crop acreage. In China alone, roughly 7 million poor farmers grow biotech crops on an average of just one and a quarter acres.

On a related note, in this short video, former Secretary of Agriculture Clayton Yeutter discusses the role that advanced technologies have played in making U.S. agriculture a vibrant and productive contributor to the global economy.

My colleagues David Bier and Ryan Radia contributed to this post.

Per the scenario in a previous post, it’s April 2012. You are a conscientious congressional staffer who still takes seriously the need to be a steward of taxpayers’ money. (Yes, I know for a fact, there are more than a few of these folks around on Capitol Hill.) You are watching closely events surrounding an “omnibus” or “minibus” spending bill deemed even by conservative Republican members as “must-pass” because it funds the military as well as other parts of government.

Suddenly, you hear about an outrageous earmark about to be slipped into the bill that would enrich a Fortune 500 company. You decide to alert a network of fiscal watchdogs you’ve met with over the years to wage an instant campaign against this piece of corporate welfare.

You have all the information in the e-mail and are about to hit “send.” But then you remember something from a briefing you attended a couple days ago. The subject was the STOCK (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge) Act – aimed at stopping “insider trading” by members and employees of Congress – that your boss and nearly every other member of Congress voted into law in February.

At the time, you didn’t think the law would affect you since the only trading you do is indirect, through your mutual funds and pension. You were surprised to learn, however, that you now have a broad “duty of confidentiality” that encompasses not just trading on “material, nonpublic information,” but disclosing information to those who might.

You sit back and think, “It is indeed possible that someone I send this to could buy stock in the company, or could short the company based on the coming outrage.” You stare at the computer screen wondering how virtually no one noticed how this law could have potentially criminalized an act of whistleblowing as abetting “insider trading.”

Such a scenario is almost certain if House and Senate versions of the STOCK Act are not modified before a final bill is sent to President Obama. The House passed the bill yesterday with a 417-2 vote after a similarly overwhelming 96-3 Senate vote last week.  Both bills must go to “conference” to produce a final identical bill to be voted on by both houses, giving members an opportunity for a fix to help make sure that whistleblowing and routine communication with outside groups from being caught in the law’s web.

The legislation gained steam after a series of revelations in conservative author Peter Schweizer’s best-selling book, Throw Them All Out, that pointed out that many members of Congress regularly trade stocks and options, sometimes after receiving sensitive information. A “60 Minutes” report based on some of Schweizer’s findings propelled the issue into the spotlight, with President Obama calling on Congress in the State of the Union to ban “insider trading” among its members and staff.

But lost in the justifiable outrage about politicians’ perks is discussion about how provisions in the bills would actually work. Among the most important things to know about the STOCK Act is that  by specifically applying “material, nonpublic information” rules that govern officers and directors of a corporation to Congress, the  bill would bar in many instances the disclosure of such information as well as trading on it.

The bills specifically impose a “duty of confidentiality” on members of Congress and their staffs. They state that “each Member of Congress or employee of Congress owes a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence [emphasis added] to the Congress, the United States Government, and the citizens of the United States with respect to material, nonpublic information.”

The term “confidence” in the context of securities law does not mean faith in a particular institution — indeed it would be difficult to legislate confidence in Congress or any branch of government — but rather keeping matters in confidence. And under the “duty of confidentiality” imposed with regard to publicly-traded companies, many have been prosecuted for sharing information as well as trading on it.

A so-called “tipper,” wrote attorney Nelson Ebaugh in the Texas Journal of Business Law, “is exposed to insider trading liability for simply communicating material, nonpublic information even if he did not personally use the information to trade in the company’s securities.” Ebaugh added that courts are split on whether a “personal benefit” is even required for guilt.

Ebaugh and other experts have argued that insider trading rules have been applied so broadly to such “tippers” of corporate information that they inhibit disclosure about corporate wrongdoing. If these rules were applied to information about upcoming congressional action, it would have serious, if not more severe, effects in muzzling whistleblowers.

In addition to the e-mail to activists from the beginning of this article, conference calls and off-the-record meetings with ideological activists, such as the famed “Wednesday meeting” created by conservative activist Grover Norquist and similar gatherings organized by liberals, could also be curtailed. In the corporate word, the Securities and Exchange Commission has cracked down on what it calls “selective disclosure” to analysts. As a result, under Regulation Full Disclosure, most public companies put information about conference calls on their web site and/or post the recorded call for all to hear.

Following this precedent, if the STOCK Act is passed, the SEC may require meetings and calls in which Congress members and staffers participate to be open to the public or not occur at all. The result would be less outflow of information from Congress and a less-informed public.

Fortunately, some simple language — a “mens rea” or “guilty mind” requirement — could be added in conference to help ensure the new rules don’t inhibit the free flow of information necessary for accountability in Congress. A clause could be added stating something like:

“Nothing in this subsection shall be construed to impose liability on Members of Congress or employees of Congress for acts of disclosing material, nonpublic information to nonaffiliated third parties, unless the Member of Congress or employee of Congress discloses the information to a nonaffiliated third party:

(A)               As a means for making a private profit;

(B)               With knowledge that the recipient of the information, or persons acting in concert with the recipient of the information, intend to use the information for purposes of making a private profit;”

The First Amendment is also threatened by a measure added to the Senate bill by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) that would require so-called political intelligence (an oxymoron if there ever was one!) firms to register as lobbyists.  But these firms do not lobby for legislation, but merely gather information for investors, businesses, and sometimes, as University of Minnesota law professor Richard Painter points out, non-profits such as churches and unions. The work that they do is not that different from the news gathering of high-priced investment magazines and newsletters for wealthy subscribers, which no one doubts have First Amendment protection.

As Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) said on the Senate floor, “We are ultimately dealing with First Amendment rights here, and ought not to legislate until we are prepared to do so in a reasoned way.” Fortunately, the House bill did not contain Grassley’s amendment, but Grassley and Democrats will fight to reinsert the measure in the conference bill.

The exposes of Schweizer and others raise serious issues about power and privilege that need to be addressed. The STOCK Act contains some sensible measures, such as more rapid and specific disclosure of investment holdings. Unfortunately, the “political intelligence” provision of the Senate bill and the “duty of confidence” in both bills would muzzle the communication necessary for sunlight and reform. For the sake of transparency and accountability, this potential muzzle must be lifted.

In a bill passed last week authorizing the Federal Aviation Administration for another year, the moratorium on regulation of the safety of spaceflight participants, in place since 2004, was extended for another three years, but not as long as proponents in industry had hoped:

Section 827 of the bill (on page 318), tucked away in the “Miscellaneous” section of the bill between sections on air passenger screening privacy and air transportation of lithium batteries, extends the current restriction on safety regulations, but only to October 1, 2015. The joint statement of managers of the conference report provides a few more details, on page 152 of the PDF document: “Nothing in this provision is intended to prohibit the FAA and industry stakeholders from entering into discussions intended to prepare the FAA for its role in appropriately regulating the commercial space flight industry when this provision expires.”

The current moratorium, which was due to expire at the end of this calendar year, was put in place by the 2004 Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act, which prohibited the FAA from regulating passenger safety for a period of eight years (its ability to license launches for the protection of uninvolved third parties was not affected). The idea was that the technology was insufficiently well understood by anyone, including the putative regulators, to put in place regulations that wouldn’t stifle industry development and innovation, given all the different approaches (vertical takeoff and landing, horizontal takeoff and landing, air launch, hybrid rockets, liquid rockets, etc.). The model proposed instead was on the basis of informed consent, in which participants would be given all information available on the design and operations of the vehicle, and make their own assessment of the risk, and whether or not it was worth it.

The problem was that everyone had envisioned more rapid progress, but in the seven years since, not a single commercial passenger flight has occurred, due to development problems with Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipTwo propulsion, and the financial crisis starving some of the other fledgling companies of funds needed for development. Accordingly, the industry had been pushing for Congress to extend the moratorium for another eight years to gather more needed experience to intelligently inform regulations, except this time the clock wouldn’t start when the bill passed, but rather when the first commercial passenger spaceflight occurred, to prevent the problem that arose from the first bill.

Though George Nield, head of the FAA office that regulates spaceflight, had wanted the moratorium to end, John Mica, the chairman of the transportation committee on the House side, was amenable, and the extension was included in the House version for months, but it was not in the Senate version, with reports of opposition by a single Senate staffer, and the bill was held up in conference committee for many weeks resolving other, unrelated issues.

Apparently, there was some danger that it would fall out completely, but House Whip Kevin McCarthy apparently went to bat for the industry (Mojave, California, where several of these companies operate, is in his district). He had written an op-ed a few weeks ago advocating the extension, and last week, in a press release with the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, took credit for getting the partial extension, though apparently it was a compromise.

But at least it buys time for the industry to continue to develop their vehicles without the uncertainty that had been hanging over their heads about new rules next year (XCOR Aerospace expects to start flying its Lynx rocketplane late this year, and Armadillo Aerospace and Scaled Composites expect actual flights into space, though without passengers). And the short extension, if nothing else, buys time to try to get the full eight years with the first-flight trigger, in a new Congress.

It’s not news that regulators in Utah are often uncomfortable allowing residents to make their own decisions about how, when, or if they engage in morally questionable behavior. The Beehive State has a well-known bee in its bonnet when it comes to alcohol, but what many non-Utahans may not know is that it is just as strict, if not more so, when it comes to preventing residents from gambling — even if they are in their own home. As federal lawmakers and many states edge toward legalizing, regulating, and taxing online wagering, some Utah legislators want to clarify the letter of their state law to make it absolutely clear that their residents don’t have a choice: gambling in Utah is illegal, whether it’s at a business, in your home, or on your smart phone.

As Eric Bianchi over at CalvinAyre.com reported last week, Utah state Rep. Stephen Sandstrom introduced legislation (HB 108) that would make it illegal for residents of the state to gambling over the Internet and on handheld devices. This is the second measure meant to address the increasing ease with which Utah residents are skirting the state’s strict gambling laws. Last month, the Utah House passed a bill (HB 40) that eliminated “vague working in the state law” that Internet cafes had reportedly been exploiting to allow online gaming — or as the bill’s sponsor Rep. Don Ipson charmingly put it, made them “havens for criminal activity.”

Utah is only one of two states in the nation that doesn’t have any form of legalized gambling, such as a casino or lottery (Hawaii is the other). But that doesn’t mean that residents aren’t doing plenty of gambling anyway.

Of course, that’s always the problem with prohibition, isn’t it? Bans never actually stop people from engaging in a behavior, it simply makes them a criminal if they do. If Utah’s Internet gambling ban is approved, especially as other states move toward legalizing the activity, Utahans will continue to gambling on and offline. Utah will lose tax revenue to neighboring states and residents will not have the protections of their government if their rights are violated while engaging in online gambling. Apparently, Utah regulators would rather try to protect the purity of the souls of their constituents rather than doing the job they are charged with which is to protect their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In one important way, another section of the IPO already does so in communicating the incredible burdens on companies attempting to go public — burdens that create difficulties even for companies as big as Facebook and almost insurmountable for smaller firms. On page 30 of the S-1 (page 37  if counting the total number of pages), Facebook specifically singles out the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 as “risk factors” that will impose substantial costs to the company and its shareholders and divert resources from the firm’s core mission of innovation.

In bold lettering, Facebook announces, “The requirements of being a public company may strain our resources  and divert management’s attention.” The prospectus goes on to explain:

As a public company, we will be subject to the reporting requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (Exchange Act), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Dodd-Frank Act, … and other applicable securities rules and regulations. Compliance with these rules and regulations will increase our legal and financial compliance costs, make some activities more difficult, time-consuming, or costly, and increase demand on our systems and resources.

Regarding Sarbox, Facebook registers a complaint similar to that of many entrepreneurs, investors, and scholars of the economy about the law’s burden. The filing notes that the company is “in the process of designing, implementing, and testing the internal control over financial reporting required to comply with” Sarbox’s infamous Section 404,”which process is time consuming, costly, and complicated.”

Facebook is far from the only firm — big or small — that has found Sarbox to be “time consuming, costly, and complicated.” According to John Battelle’s book The Search, considered a definitive history of Google, Sarbox was “hell for a company like Google, which made its money literally pennies at a time, from millions upon millions of micro-transactions.”

Battelle reports that Sarbox compliance significantly delayed Google’s 2004 IPO. “According to engineers involved in the work, Google had to significantly restructure its advertising report system from the ground up.”

And if Sarbox makes life difficult for humongous firms such as Facebook and Google, we can only imagine the toll it takes on smaller firm seeking to raise capital by going public. And these are the very firms that could be the next Facebook or Google or start the next retailing wave like Home Depot.

And with specific regard to Home Deport, the firm’s co-founder Bernie Marcus has said many time the company likely never could have gotten off the ground if Sarbox and other of today’s regulations had been in effect. “We could never succeed today,” Marcus bluntly told radio host Hugh Hewitt in June.

In contrast to Facebook and other IPOs this year that launched when the firms already had billion-dollar market valuations, Marcus explained that when Home Depot went public, it was nowhere near a billion-dollar company. In fact, it had just four stores to its name.

IPOs of this size were fairly typical in the pre-Sarbox world. AOL founder Steve Case, a member of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness,  recently noted in a Washington Post op-ed, “Initial public offerings of less than $50 million were 80 percent of IPOs in the 1990s but just 20 percent in the 2000s.”

Another key difference between the pre-and post-Sarbox era, is that when small firms went public, they did so to raise the capital they needed to grow. Today, when companies the size of Facebook, Groupon, and LinkedIn launch IPOs, they do so mainly so their limited number of wealthy investors can realize the value of the growth that has already occurred. As Zuckerberg wrote in his letter in the S-1, the primary purpose of the IPO is to make the stock “worth a lot and make it liquid” for existing investors and employees.

Nothing wrong with that, but because Sarbox and Dodd-Frank prevent smaller firms from having the same access to the public markets, job creation suffers. As Case notes in his op-ed: “90 percent of job creation typically happens after a company goes public — and all too often, the alternative is for a company to be sold. While job growth accelerates after an IPO, it decelerates when a firm merges or is acquired.”

The good news is a package of bills passed the House overwhelmingly – with more than 400 votes and, in some cases, the Obama administration’s endorsement – in November to allow Facebook-like innovations such as “crowdfunding,” in which smaller firms can raise some seed capital free of much of the red tape from Sarbox and Dodd-Frank. The bad news is, as House Speaker John Boehner noted in a statement today, these bills have stalled in Harry Reid’s Senate. It’s time to “friend” solutions that allow small entrepreneurs and investors to take full advantage of the Facebook age.

Trey Kovacs assisted with the post.

Only in Bizarro World can you claim someone is your attorney — and thus shielded by attorney work-product privilege — and then insist in the very next breath that they never represented you. But that is what the Obama administration and Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan are doing. The Obama administration refuses to release its communications with Kagan about health care litigation back when she was the administration’s Solicitor General, on the grounds that they are covered by attorney work-product protection. Yet, contradictorily, it and Kagan insist that she never acted as the administration’s lawyer in the matter, and thus doesn’t need to recuse herself from hearing the constitutional challenges to Obamacare that will be decided by the Supreme Court this year.

Law Professor Ronald Rotunda, the co-author of a leading constitutional law treatise, says that Kagan should have recused herself from hearing the case based on the federal statute, 28 U.S.C. 455(b)(3), that forbids former government attorneys like Kagan from being involved in cases they earlier were consulted on, and the Judicial Conference’s ethical guidance for federal judges. As he notes:

[Commentators have been] calling on Justice Elena Kagan to disqualify herself in the ObamaCare litigation because of her role, as Solicitor General, in preparing its constitutional defense. These calls have intensified with the release of recent emails. Justice Kagan’s supporters respond that she testified in her confirmation hearings that she had nothing to do with ObamaCare

First, her phraseology was much more precise. She said she would only recuse herself from any case in which she “officially formally approved something,” or “served as counsel of record” or “played any substantial role.” But the statute requires disqualification if Kagan, as a federal employee (she was the former Solicitor General) “participated” as an “adviser” on a matter, even if she did not give any formal advice. She also must disqualify herself if her impartiality might reasonably be questioned.

In response to a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request, the Obama Administration has turned over some emails but it refuses to turn over many others because, it says, these emails are “protected by the attorney work product doctrine.” That doctrine, the DOJ affidavit explains, covers discussion by “OSG” (Office of Solicitor General) lawyers about “legal issues, arguments, and strategy concerning anticipated” litigation over ObamaCare. So, the DOJ is simultaneously claiming that it completely walled off Kagan from any discussions involving the constitutional defense of ObamaCare, while admitting that Kagan was participating in emails discussing “legal issues, arguments, and strategy concerning” the anticipated ObamaCare litigation.

In March of 2010, there are a series of emails to or from Kagan; the subject line of all of them is “Health care litigation meeting.” The DOJ refused to disclose these emails because they discuss legal arguments for the “expected [health care] litigation.” If Kagan hermetically sealed herself from discussions on shaping defenses for ObamaCare litigation, why is she repeatedly sending and receiving emails shaping defenses for ObamaCare litigation? The Government refuses to release these emails, on grounds of a litigation privilege, while claiming that it erected such a solid wall around Kagan that she never would send or receive such emails. This wall must have more holes than Swiss cheese. If we can read theses emails, we will learn if the legal theory developed in those meetings is the legal theory that Kagan adopts when she rules on the case.

A week after the president announced her nomination to the Supreme Court, a DOJ press officer emailed the Deputy Solicitor General and asked if Kagan had been involved in the preparations for health care litigation. Notwithstanding these earlier emails, he responded, a minute later: “No she never has been involved in any of it. I’ve run it for the Office, and have never discussed the issues with her one bit.” A few minutes later, he forwarded that email to Kagan.

One would think, if Kagan’s Deputy was correct, that Kagan would simply say, “of course,” or, perhaps nothing. But that is not what happened. Less than two minutes later, Kagan wrote: “This needs to be coordinated. Tracy [the DOJ press officer], you should not say anything about this before talking to me.” What is there to “coordinate”? Why would Kagan suggest that they have to get their stories straight? And why “talk” instead of using emails (which leave a paper trail)?

The Judicial Conference of the United States publishes a Compendium of Selected Opinions, to guide federal judges on ethical issues. One section deals with “prior government employment.” The typical fact scenario is a government employee (often a U.S. Attorney) who becomes a judge. Several pages summarizing prior ethics opinions all say the same thing: if the U.S. Attorney was personally involved in a pending or impending matter, she must disqualify herself, and the parties cannot waive that disqualification; if she was not personally involved, but the impending matter was in her office (under her responsibility), she must disqualify herself, unless the parties waive the disqualification.

At the very least, Kagan must disqualify herself because her office was involved with the prospective ObamaCare litigation. . .

Justice Kagan should also follow Supreme Court precedent on this issue. In Schneiderman v. United States (1943). Justice Jackson refused to participate because the case began in 1939, he became Attorney General in 1940, and thus he “succeeded to official responsibility for it.”

While liberal justices like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg have attracted no criticism, and no calls for their recusal, despite routinely appearing before, and being honored by, liberal groups like the National Women’s Law Center that fervently support the 2010 health care law and depict it as remedying a grave “moral and social wrong” akin to segregation, the more conservative justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have been attacked by liberal journalists for attending a Federalist Society event, even though the Federalist Society took no formal position on Obamacare. The liberal journalists claim that they should not have attended this event because tables at the event were purchased by law firms involved in challenging Obamacare in court. But tables at the event were also purchased by law firms that filed briefs supporting Obamacare in court, meaning that the law firms whose attorneys attended this event were on both sides of the issue; and in any event, the mere purchase of tables at an event by law firms with a point of view about the health care law “did not violate any applicable ethics rules,” and does not require recusal by a justice who attends or speaks at such an event  So it is clear that Justices Scalia and Thomas have no obligation to recuse themselves.

Former Supreme Court clerk Carrie Severino makes the case for Kagan’s recusal at greater length here.  Former Justice Department lawyer Ed Whelan discusses the serious nature of the recusal issue here. Another former Justice Department lawyer gives additional reasons why Kagan may be ethically obligated to recuse herself here.

In a follow-up post,  Severino notes that even if Kagan had not advised on, or been consulted, about legal challenges to Obamacare, she might still be obligated to recuse herself, since “precedent in three federal circuits suggests that Kagan ought to recuse herself merely by virtue of being head of the Solicitor General’s office while her office worked on the case. Under that test, even if she never knew the case was being addressed, she’d still need to recuse as a justice.” This is an additional, alternative reason why Justice Kagan should recuse herself from hearing the Supreme Court cases involving the health care law (such as National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius and Florida v. Department of Health and Human Services).

Putting aside the constitutional issues, Obamacare has also attracted criticism for harming the health care system and reducing employment. The Dean of Harvard Medical School, Jeffrey Flier, argued that Obamacare will harm life-saving medical innovation. The 2010 health care law has also been criticized by the Associated Press and others for breaking a number of campaign promises that the president made in 2008.

Proponents of government collective bargaining view it as a fundamental human right. The shameful actions of SEIU in Michigan, however, undermine this claim.

In 2005, Michigan lawmakers signed off to create the Michigan Quality Community Care Council (MQC3). MQC3 maintains a registry of homecare providers to assist Medicaid recipients looking for a caregiver. In reality, the primary function of MQC3 was to make 45,000 private homecare providers government employees and dues-paying union members.

In 2006, SEIU took advantage of Michigan law deeming homecare providers government employees. To gain exclusive representation SEIU organized a covert union campaign. The stealth-organizing tactic led to 20 percent voter turnout and SEIU won a landslide victory.

Soon thereafter, SEIU obtained a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the state. The events following the CBA expose the dangers of government union political influence and permanence of CBAs.

MQC3, acting as a “dummy” employer for homecare workers, created a mechanism for union dues to be siphoned off Medicaid checks. Not only is it illegal to unionize homecare workers who are private contractors, homecare workers already have employers: their Medicaid beneficiaries. Worse, the scheme wholly rejects the purpose of Medicaid by diverting funds from individuals who cannot afford medical care to Big Labor.

Since 2006, SEIU collected nearly $6 million a year and $28 million total (and counting) in union dues from Medicaid payments to homecare providers. The Mackinac Center broke the news and filed suit to stop the forced unionization and dues payments of homecare workers.

Once Michigan lawmakers became aware of SEIU’s exploitation, they took action to stop it. Gov. Rick Snyder eliminated MQC3 funding in the FY 2012 budget and planned to close the program on September 30, 2011. State Rep. Paul Opsommer (R) introduced H.B. 4003, banning stealth unionization of private contractors and forced union dues payments of homecare workers, which passed House.

Apparently, laws that protect low-income individuals with health problems are unpopular in Michigan. Union-friendly state lawmakers worked behind the scenes to stall H.B. 4003 in the Senate and to maintain union funding from MQC3. Their efforts included State Senator Roger Kahn (R) conducting a meeting with SEIU officials to preserve their forced dues collection. Sen. Kahn’s first notes of the meeting read. “SEIU is concerned re: moving forward w/ funding QC3. Gent. Agreement to find $.”

Sadly, SEIU’s collective bargaining power made their political influence superfluous. The binding powers of CBAs allow SEIU to continue collecting union dues until the contract expires on November 15, 2012.

Mackinac Center Legal Foundation Director Patrick Wright explains the devastating effects of union political influence combined with government collective bargaining power, “The amazing resilience of MQC3 indicates that legislation is going to be required to ultimately end the government employee unions’ practice of diverting money from the state’s most needy citizens to fill their own coffers.”

All attempts to protect those in need and taxpayers (by way of lawsuits, reform, and defunding) from corruption have failed. Big Labor’s ability to convince legislators to set up dummy agencies enabling unions to steal from taxpayers is so strong that repealing government union collective bargaining power is the only way to end all such heinous behavior.

However, one legal maneuver may be left to stop illegal forced-dues payments and to recover taxpayer funds in Michigan. Medicaid receives funding from federal and state governments, opening the door for filing “false claims” charges in both state and federal courts to recover taxpayer funds. False claims are taxpayers’ most powerful tool to recover stolen government funds.

On the federal level, the False Claims Act, 31 U.S.C. §§ 3729-3733, allows taxpayers to recoup losses from any person or entity that “knowingly presents, or causes to be presented, a false or fraudulent claim for payment or approval.”

In Michigan, the Medicaid False Claims Act, Act 72 of 1977, directs the state “to prohibit fraud in the obtaining of benefits or payments in connection with the medical assistance program; to prohibit kickbacks or bribes in connection with the program.” Violations of the Medicaid False Claims Act involve “making a claim or causing a claim to be made under the social welfare act that contains a statement of fact or that fails to reveal a fact, which statement or failure leads the department to believe the represented or suggested state of affair to be other than it actually is.”

The creation of MQC3 was fraudulent, exposed as political payback from e-mails obtained by the Mackinac Center. Additionally, proposals creating MQC3 failed to reveal the fact that union dues would be taken out of Medicaid payments.

Government union collective bargaining power allows Big Labor to steal from the needy and increase the costs of providing public services. Removing collective bargaining power from government unions would diminish their political influence and reduce false claims and fraud.

There has been much waxing in the last few days about how unfair it supposedly is that Mitt Romney was taxed at around 15 percent. And that Warren Buffett supposedly pays a lower tax rate than his beleaguered secretary does.

President Obama correctly pointed out in his State of the Union speech that he passed fewer regulations in his first three years than President Bush. Over at the Daily Caller, Wayne Crews crunched the numbers and found that Bush passed 12,588 regulations to Obama’s 10,810.

That’s an average of 4,196 rules per year for Bush, and 3,603 for Obama — nearly two fewer rules per day. For those who believe that Bush was a free-marketeer, Obama has given us another nail for that myth’s well-sealed coffin.

But that doesn’t mean President Obama is less of a regulator than his predecessor. He has passed fewer rules, but they tend to cost more. Regulations are classified as “significant” if they cost over $100 million per year. There are different technical definitions for “significant,” “economically significant,” and “major.” And the Federal Register gives different counts than NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration.

With those caveats in mind, the Federal Register data have President Bush passing 30 economically significant regulations in his first three years. Obama passed 953.

The difference is more than a factor of 30. Roughly one quarter of one percent of Bush’s rules were economically significant. Almost 9 percent of Obama’s are.

What the president said on Tuesday is technically correct. But, as with almost all political statements, there is more to the story.

Last week, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority announced it was considering scrapping the Silver Line stop at Dulles Airport.

Though the Silver line was designed specifically to provide service to Dulles Airport, MWAA Board Member Bob Brown said it “wouldn’t be much of an additional burden on riders because even if Metro stopped at the airport people would still have to take a hike to the airport terminal” (1,150 feet – more than three football fields).

That’s right, MWAA just admitted that the proposed metro stop at Dulles Airport would be so inconvenient that air travelers aren’t likely to use it. So if the Silver Line is really just a westward extension of commuter rail that might not even stop at Dulles Airport, why is MWAA still involved?

More importantly, why would Virginia (one of only eight states with a AAA bond rating and the only one to have kept it without interruption for the last seventy years) surrender authority over a $6.8 billion infrastructure project to a notoriously secretive and debt-addicted semi-private entity like MWAA?

Virginia turning the reins of a large and complex project over to an opaque agency with a worse credit rating than France might seem completely backwards, but maybe the alternative to MWAA is even worse. One argument in favor of giving MWAA jurisdiction over planning the Silver Line is that it is a less wasteful and incompetent entity than the Kafkaesque Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which will ultimately run it.

WMATA’s shortcomings are well documented: it boasts a credit rating of A1 (the rating Italy just lost, “somewhat more susceptible to the adverse effects of changes in circumstances and economic conditions than obligors in higher-rated categories”), expects an revenue shortfall of $89 million for FY 2012, and can’t even keep the escalators in Metro stations from falling apart and injuring riders (let alone prevent train collisions).

Virginia’s decision to play along with MWAA has led to a great deal of confusion about the Silver Line’s cost and timeline, stemming from planning decisions like the infamous underground Dulles Airport Station (a pet concern of Mame Reiley) and the Project Labor Agreement (PLA) mandate slipped in by Dennis Martire (MWAA Board member and VP at the Laborers International Union of North America).

Before MWAA decided that Dulles Airport might not need a metro stop at all, nine members of its governing board felt that building a “first-class” Dulles station was so essential that it was worth hundreds of millions of dollars in extra costs to site the station underground, 500 feet closer to the terminal. Once Virginia voters found out, an unprecedented coalition of local politicians from both parties threatened to stop the project altogether unless plans for the underground station were scrapped.

Once sufficient political pressure mounted against the PLA mandate, MWAA released a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) that stated “no prime contractor working or seeking to work on Phase 2 shall be required…to become a party to any labor agreement other than the Phase 2 PLA.” Ironically, no one can seem to agree what this MOA means: it states in the same breath that no prime contractor shall be required to sign a Project Labor Agreement but that the Phase 2 PLA is binding.

Both of these major crises point to a central underlying flaw in MWAA’s (and WMATA’s) governance: it is unaccountable. MWAA exists in bureaucratic limbo, a “a public body corporate and politic and independent of all other bodies” (VA Code § 5.1-153), meaning that it is exempt from federal contracting requirements like competitive sourcing and from Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

In response to these concerns, there are two pieces of legislation making the rounds in Richmond, HB 33 (whose many patrons include Barbara Comstock – R, 34th District) and HB 2 / SB 3 (Bob Marshall – R, 13th District / Dick Black – R, 10th District).

Both of these address themselves to clarifying the Project Labor Agreement issue: if PLAs are mandated for Phase 2, Virginia will not fund Phase 2. HB 33 is a strongly worded piece of legislation aimed at ensuring that future joint infrastructure investments with neighboring states will not conflict with Virginia’s Right to Work law.

However, HB 2/SB 3 goes a step further by explicitly requiring MWAA to comply with Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act in order to become eligible for Virginia funds, addressing the underlying flaw in MWAA’s governance that allows this type of controversy to fester.

Biologists like to joke that the platypus is an animal designed by committee, being possessed of features that seem to have no practical necessity like a duck bill, poison claws, electroreception, and egg-laying.

The Silver Line extension of Metro is the platypus of infrastructure projects: a confusing and often contradictory mess of atavistic regulation and bureaucratic overlap that ought to be scrapped and redesigned from the ground up.

It remains to be seen whether the Virginia legislature has the wherewithal to do so.