Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations EPA in the news.

I used paypal years ago, still would be, if they didn't freeze my account for firearms transactions. paypal will absolutely not allow a firearms transaction, their right. They froze a few thousand of my money because I sell firearms and had a transaction. The problem was, the "transaction" I had was not firearms related. The stole my money for months, I quit them.

Interestingly paypal will allow transactions for porn and drug paraphernalia but finds itself a moral compass regarding firearms. I'll never use them again and wish them the worst.

This is why the burden of proof should be on the government agency rather than the landowner. In that way, the agencies would foot the bill for such silliness, and would therefore choose their battles more carefully.

I haven't written (er,typed) a business check in years. I use my local banks on-line bill pay systems. Also use that for personal checking; probably write 4 or 5 checks a year on my personal account.

I use Paypal when I can for online purchases it requires no cash balance and takes payment directly from your designated checking account.

Credit cards are my last option.

I subscribe to Lifelock and have since it first became available.

Please remember guys, no EPA discussion on this thread, only updates and links to WOTUS and clean water act, per ewest.

Sorry, I will delete it.

Sorry RAH, deleted the post.

I'm sorry too, snrub, I know it's an aggravation. But if this is the only way we can keep up with current events regarding this issue, then I'm willing to try and make it work.

Ditto

What's ironic about electronic transactions is they can be slower than in person! Hear me out.

This Sunday I realized I had not counted an outstanding check I paid to a business, because after 4 weeks the business has not deposited the check. It was five pages back in the register and I overlooked it in my latest reconciliation. Problem is my checking account is too low to cover it at this time.

No problem I think. I get the wife to do a mobile deposit for me to cover the check. This was on a Sunday. And of course Monday is a holiday. First problem is for some reason the mobile transfer will only go to my secondary checking. The deposit refuses to go into my regular checking. I get a verification via email it's been deposited in my secondary checking and to go to my account to verify it.

I figure, fine, I'll transfer it to my regular checking as soon as it shows up in my secondary checking. Problem is it's now late Tuesday morning and it's not there.

The bank tells me it won't go into effect until Wednesday because Monday was not a business day. Meanwhile if the check comes through before I can get the money in my regular checking I get slapped with a $35.00 "courtesy fee" to cover the check. I think they should call it a sodomy fee. Actually they won't because I'll raise holy hell.

I could have driven to my bank and made the deposit this morning and I'd be covered. What's the point of a mobile deposit if it's so slow?

"This decision expands an injunction that a North Dakota judge imposed for 13 states, not including Texas or Oklahoma, the day before the rule took effect in August"


Texas Cattle and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Assoc applauds U.S. Court of Appeals decision

Cecil, I use Teachers Credit Union. The mobile/electronic transfers happen within a minute or two of me doing it on-line, no delays at all, even on Sunday.

(I suppose this PayPal discussion might should be moved to another thread...but with that said)

I hear you Tim and I am sympathetic and admire your principles, but PayPaL is just too darn easy for me to conduct business with...and these days more and more corporate entities are being bullied into or are accepting of things I do not agree with but I can not "live off the grid" and avoid them all.

My wife does too but changing banks is real hassle with several accounts and bills paid through them. And the nearest TCU is about 20 miles away. The bank I use (Lake City) is only a couple of minutes away.

Huge Paypal fan myself. So darn convenient.

I've got Paypal, but I think I have to have the money in the account, which mean deposits now and then (3 day wait blah blah). I've also got Venmo which is basically like a debt card.

Sometimes there is just no way to figure a bank's logic. Here is an example, I recently made a deposit of two cashier checks totaling around $7k. My bank puts a 5 day freeze on any amount of a deposit over $5k (even if it is cash) so $2K was held. Now if I would have made out two deposit slips, one for each check, there would have been no 5 day freeze, as each deposit would be under $5k, and the entire $7k would have been available immediately. Does anybody see any logic to this???

I suppose I'm the odd one yet again. I have a credit card which I use as my primary Paypal funding source. I get rewards for using it, and PP doesn't have my bank info. PP will default to a bank account automatically, which I had to have just to register for PP in the first place, but it's no longer an active account and hasn't been for years. I just manually select the credit card option at checkout. Never been an issue.

I believe you can do both (bank account & credit card) on PayPal. I have a Wells Fargo account that is 100% dedicated PayPaL account. All my other banking is done at different banking institutions. So every single transaction at Wells Fargo and that account is a PayPaL transaction..but I also have a credit card (that covers basically all credit card fraud on the card) tied to the PayPal account as a backup. 99% of my PayPaL transactions are purchases. I remember the days on e-Bay of having to mail a check, money order, or give some out of state stranger/non-established business my credit card info. I love PayPal! There are 169 million PayPal users worldwide.

ps: Amazon is another basically 1-2 click easy to use entity with tons of great reviews before you buy.

I have a debit card connected to my PayPal account. BUT, the debit card is not connected to any other bank account that PayPal can see, and the bank has instructions NOT to automatically transfer funds into that account. I electronically transfer funds into it when I want to make a purchase, then complete the transaction using PayPal.

I'm not a fan of PayPal for a number of reasons, but still use them when it's the easiest. PayPal seller fees are 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction, so a small transaction can get expensive percentage wise.

E.P.A. Broke Law With Social Media Push for Water Rule, Auditor Finds

By ERIC LIPTON and MICHAEL D. SHEAR

DEC. 14, 2015

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in “covert propaganda” and violated federal law when it blitzed social media to urge the public to back an Obama administration rule intended to better protect the nation’s streams and surface waters, congressional auditors have concluded.

The ruling by the Government Accountability Office, which opened its investigation after a report on the agency’s practices in The New York Times, drew a bright line for federal agencies experimenting with social media about the perils of going too far to push a cause. Federal laws prohibit agencies from engaging in lobbying and propaganda.

“I can guarantee you that general counsels across the federal government are reading this report,” said Michael Eric Hertz, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York who has written on social media and the government.

An E.P.A. official on Tuesday disputed the finding. “We use social media tools just like all organizations to stay connected and inform people across the country about our activities,” Liz Purchia, an agency spokeswoman, said in a statement. “At no point did the E.P.A. encourage the public to contact Congress or any state legislature.”

But the legal opinion emerged just as Republican leaders moved to block the so-called Waters of the United States clean-water rule through an amendment to the enormous spending bill expected to pass in Congress this week. While the G.A.O.’s findings are unlikely to lead to civil or criminal penalties, they do offer Republicans a cudgel for this week’s showdown.

“G.A.O.’s finding confirms what I have long suspected, that E.P.A. will go to extreme lengths and even violate the law to promote its activist environmental agenda,” Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who is chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and is pressing to block the rule, said in a statement Monday. He decried “E.P.A.’s illegal attempts to manufacture public support for its Waters of the United States rule and sway congressional opinion.”

The E.P.A. rolled out a social media campaign on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and even on more innovative tools such as Thunderclap, to counter opposition to its water rule, which effectively restricts how land near certain surface waters can be used. The agency said the rule would prevent pollution in drinking water sources. Farmers, business groups and Republicans have called the rule a flagrant case of government overreach.

The publicity campaign was part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to counter critics of its policies through social media tools, communicating directly with Americans and bypassing traditional news organizations.

At the White House, top aides to President Obama have formed the Office of Digital Strategy, which promotes his agenda on Twitter, Facebook, Medium and other social sites. Shailagh Murray, a senior adviser to the president, is charged in part with expanding Mr. Obama’s presence in that online world.

Thomas Reynolds, who as E.P.A. communications director directed many of the tactics decried by the G.A.O., recently moved to the White House to push the president’s global warming message with many of the same tools he deployed at his former agency.

White House officials declined to say if they think Mr. Reynolds or other agency officials did anything wrong.

Federal agencies are allowed to promote their own policies, but are not allowed to engage in propaganda, defined as covert activity intended to influence the American public. They also are not allowed to use federal resources to conduct so-called grass-roots lobbying — urging the American public to contact Congress to take a certain kind of action on pending legislation.

As it promoted the Waters of the United States rule, also known as the Clean Water Rule, the E.P.A. violated both of those prohibitions, a 26-page legal opinion signed by Susan A. Poling, the general counsel to the G.A.O., concluded in an investigation requested by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

“E.P.A. appealed to the public to contact Congress in opposition to pending legislation in violation of the grass-roots lobbying prohibition,” the report says.

In a letter to the G.A.O. as the review was underway, Avi S. Garbow, the E.P.A.’s general counsel, said the agency had looked back at its social media campaign and concluded that it had complied with all federal laws, calling it “an appropriately far-reaching effort to educate the American public about an important part of E.P.A.’s mission: protecting clean water.”

The rule in question has been adopted by the agency, but its implementation was suspended nationally in October by a federal appeals court after opponents of the plan challenged it.

The G.A.O. report details two specific violations that took place as the E.P.A. was preparing to issue the final rule. The first involved the Thunderclap campaign in September 2014, in which the E.P.A. used a new type of social media tool to quickly reach out to 1.8 million people to urge them to support the clean-water proposal. Thunderclap, described as an online flash mob, allows large groups of people to share a single message at once.

“Clean water is important to me,” the Thunderclap message said. “I support E.P.A.’s efforts to protect it for my health, my family and my community.”

The effort violated federal law, the G.A.O. said, because as it ricocheted around the Internet, many people who received the message would not have known that it was written by the E.P.A., making it covert propaganda. The E.P.A. disputes this finding, noting that it sent out the original Thunderclap message and was hardly hiding its role.

The agency is also said to have violated the anti-lobbying law when one of its public affairs officers, Travis Loop, wrote a blog post saying he was a surfer and did not “want to get sick from pollution.” That post included a link button to an advocacy group that discussed the danger that polluted water posed to surfers and, at least at one point, also included text that said “Take Action,” telling the public to “tell Congress to stop interfering with your right to clean water.”

Such findings by the G.A.O. are infrequent but not without precedent. During George W. Bush’s administration, the G.A.O. concluded similarly that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services violated the anti-propaganda act in 2004 when it covertly paid for news videos distributed to television stations without disclosing that the government had financed the work. In 2005, the Department of Education was found to have violated the same law when it hired a public relations firm to covertly promote the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

The entire amount spent on the social media campaign in question is likely trivial. But whatever the cost, the G.A.O. asserted that it violated a federal Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from spending money without authorization. Penalties include fines and even possible jail time. But even Republicans on Capitol Hill say it will not be enforced that way.

The G.A.O. has instead instructed the E.P.A. to find out how much money was spent by staff involved in these violations, then write a report to Mr. Obama and Congress acknowledging the violation.

The E.P.A. has not yet decided if it will agree to take such a step, said Ms. Purchia, the E.P.A. spokeswoman.

Source: New York Times

LMAO, admit something, not likely.

" ...I have long suspected, that E.P.A. will go to extreme lengths and even violate the law to promote its activist environmental agenda,” Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma...."

A clear message - power corrupts and absolute power corrupts completely.

And to think so many were worried sick over this.

A lot of worried people out there, but I see for other reasons.