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Watchdog 5/24/12

2012-05-24T09:55:57-04:00

Accountability Rules

A recent political cartoon showed an enormous mountain of cash. Uncle Sam sits on top of the pile digging with a shovel. The caption: "There's got to be a democracy in here somewhere." The word "dollarocracy" comes to mind.

Our political system is for sale—by both parties. Billionaire donors back candidates like race horses. Did you know that almost all the campaign contributions to Super PACS come from about 200 people? Or, that all of the campaign contributions of more than $200 come from just a tiny fraction of 1 percent of the population?

Meanwhile, in Washington there are about 12,000 lobbyists—that's 23 for every member of Congress. This undue influence of money has a corrosive effect on our political system. We all want politicians to work for people, not for their corporate sponsors. We all want fair and clean elections. The Center for Public Integrity seeks to provide much needed transparency and accountability, tracking this onslaught of cash, and shining a light on both the sources of this funding and what the donors are looking for in return.

Until next week,

Bill Buzenberg
Executive Director

Obama, Dems dominate GOP in April fundraising
The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee outraised Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee by a nearly 2-1 margin in April, which counters media reports that indicate the two camps are running even. The Obama campaign raised $25.7 million for the month, more than double Romney's $11.7 million. The president's campaign reported $115 million cash on hand compared with Romney's $9.2 million. The DNC reported raising $14.3 million for the month and had $24.3 million cash on hand compared with the RNC's $11.4 million raised and $34.8 million cash on hand. The combined total for the Democrats was $40.1 million compared with $23.2 million for the Republicans.

Ameritrade founder's Nebraska contribution worries watchdogs
In the aftermath of last week's Republican U.S. Senate primary in Nebraska, campaign finance watchdogs are concerned about the role businessman Joe Ricketts played in helping underdog state Sen. Deb Fischer secure the GOP nomination. Ricketts, the founder of the Omaha-based online brokerage firm TD Ameritrade, was behind a $250,000 last-minute super PAC ad buy designed to boost Fischer's prospects.

Fatal gas explosion goes unpunished by OSHA
Early on the morning of Sept. 3, 2009, Nicholas Adrian Revetta left the Pittsburgh suburb of Pleasant Hills and drove 15 minutes to a job at U.S. Steel's Clairton Plant, a soot-blackened industrial complex on the Monongahela River. He never returned home. It's the first in our new Hard Labor series.

Los Angeles school police citations draw federal scrutiny
A Center analysis of police citations against public school students in Los Angeles is getting federal attention. We found that Los Angeles' school officers issued more than 33,500 tickets to students between 10 and 18 years old over three years. That worked out to about 30 citations a day, every day.

Crossroads GPS ad: 'Basketball'

2012-05-24T09:58:01-04:00

Real estate influence group spends 'mind boggling' amount in California House race

2012-05-24T06:00:01-04:00

It’s challenging enough to knock off an entrenched member of Congress in a primary contest. But California State Sen. Bob Dutton probably didn’t count on the fact that he would also be picking a fight with nearly a million Realtors.

The Rancho Cucamonga Republican is running against Rep. Gary Miller, a 14-year GOP incumbent in the June 5 open primary. The National Association of Realtors political action committee and a super PAC funded by the trade association have spent more than $709,000 on advertising and direct mail supporting Miller.

"The amount of money being funneled into this primary from Washington, D.C., special interests on behalf of Miller is mind boggling,” said Clint Lorimore, Dutton’s campaign manager, in an email.

Actually, the super PAC is based in Chicago, as is the trade association. But the NAR has an office in the capital and plenty of money to spend on Washington politics. The association spent more than $22 million on lobbying last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).

The NAR is also the sole funder of the National Association of Realtors Congressional Fund, a super PAC, which has spent about $313,000 on independent expenditures in the race with the regular PAC making up the balance.

Super PACs, made possible by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case, can spend unlimited amounts to support or oppose the candidate of their choice as long as they do not coordinate their activities with the campaign.

Miller sits on the House Financial Services Committee, which oversees the real estate and insurance industries, and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. He is also the founder of G. Miller Development, a home building and development company.

The NAR’s employees and regulated PAC have contributed $68,019 to Miller over the course of his career, according to CRP. Only the National Association of Homebuilders has given more.

That number may seem small, but contributions to federal candidates from political action committees that support multiple candidates are capped at $5,000 per election.

“It’s fairly clear that they’re [Realtors] going to have a level of access to him that the ordinary American doesn’t have,” said Bill Allison, editorial director at the Sunlight Foundation.

Phone calls and emails requesting comment from Miller’s offices in Washington, D.C., were not returned.

Scott Reiter, the managing director of the Realtor's association’s regular political action committee doesn’t see a problem with the super PAC’s pro-Miller expenditure.

“That’s perfectly legal,” he said. “That’s called democracy.”

Dutton has also received support from a super PAC — Inland Empire Taxpayers for Jobs has spent $50,365 on his behalf on consulting and direct mail. The group’s biggest backer is Prime Healthcare Services Inc. of Ontario, Calif, which contributed $25,000.

It’s not clear why NAR spent money from its regular PAC on ads supporting Miller. Unlike a super PAC, regular PACs can make direct contributions to candidates and are subject to contribution limits.

In the 2010 election, the association’s super PAC spent $1.1 million.

Miller found himself in a tough race following redistricting. Having represented the once solidly Republican 42nd District since 1998, he chose to run in the 31st District this year after the 42nd became significantly more competitive.

The National Association of Realtors Congressional Fund was one of the first super PACs to have accepted contributions solely from a related trade association; during the 2010 election cycle, the National Association of Realtors was one of a handful of nonprofits to be responsible for the entire funding of a super PAC, according to CRP.

This election cycle, the California-based Cooperative of American Physicians has done the same for its super PAC, contributing $2.5 million since the beginning of 2011.

John Dunbar contributed to this story.

After 'Citizens United,' is constitutional amendment needed?

2012-05-23T17:01:30-04:00

Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United ruling in 2010, many Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups have proposed constitutional amendments to overturn the controversial decision — or attempt to curb its impact. But not everyone who disagrees with the decision thinks that’s the right approach to reducing corporate influence in politics.

Opponents of the decision — which held that unlimited expenditures by corporations to independently advocate for or against federal candidates did not pose a threat of corrupting politicians — gathered at a forum Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

There, the case was decried as a “product of judicial activism” by Kent Greenfield, a law professor at Boston College Law School. And Jamie Raskin, a Democratic state senator in Maryland who is also a law professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, said the ruling has helped move the nation toward a government “by, of and for the corporations.”

But while both Greenfield and Raskin railed against the threats they see from the influence of corporate money in elections, the men were in opposite corners about whether a constitutional amendment was the best way to fight it.

Greenfield fervently opposes such proposals — which run the gamut from provisions saying simply that “corporations are not people” to measures asserting that Congress and state legislatures have the right to regulate corporate political spending — while Raskin supports them.

“The problem with most of the amendments out there is that they want to burn down the house to get rid of termites,” Greenfield said. “We don’t have to take corporations and say that none of them ever have any constitutional rights in order to solve the problem.”

Greenfield’s ally on the panel — which was hosted by the nonprofit Alliance for Justice — Mark Schmitt, a senior fellow at the progressive Roosevelt Institute, also opposes the idea of a constitutional amendment.

“It’s sending the message that you can’t do anything about money in politics until you pass this amendment,” Schmitt said.

Raskin disagreed, and defended the constitutional push.

“Let’s rebuild the wall of separation between corporate treasury wealth and American political elections,” said Raskin, who as a lawmaker has supported efforts in Maryland to pass a constitutional amendment and introduced legislation to create public financing.

While he noted that a constitutional amendment is “not a panacea,” Raskin said it presents “an organizing vision” and a “flag in the sand.”

He said activists could look to the suffragette movement as a source of hope.

Advocacy for a constitutional amendment, Raskin argued, helped “catalyze” suffragettes after the 1875 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Minor v. Happersett that said the Constitution did not grant women the right to vote. Over the subsequent decades, the movement achieved many victories for women’s rights, including the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 that finally gave women the right to vote.

“The state doesn’t have to permit its own creature to consume it,” he said, quoting a famous line from former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White.

“Corporations have to be subordinate to the state legislatures,” Raskin continued. “Now under Citizens United, basically, the states have to allow their own creatures to devour them.”

Greenfield, who agreed that corporations wield undue power, remained unconvinced.

“I would prefer organizing to be done around something that, if passed, would be a good thing,” he said.

“Let’s talk about making corporations more internally democratic,” Greenfield continued. “If corporations themselves were more democratic, then the fact that they speak would be less problematic.”

On these points, too, Greenfield met with resistance from Raskin.

While Raskin agreed that internal changes within corporations were a good idea, he contended that increased transparency and involvement among shareholders wasn’t enough.

“We can’t leave it to shareholders to protect the rest of us,” Raskin said.

Public radio, Center report on L.A. school court citations' controversy

2012-05-23T16:44:01-04:00

A father talks about his young son’s arrest at school and subsequent court citation, and Los Angeles’ school police chief responds to a growing controversy in a new report aired by Southern California Public Radio.

The report by KPCC radio was produced in collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity. It features an interactive map showing Los Angeles Unified School District middle schools where court citations were heavily concentrated last year. The map is based on a Center analysis of records recording school police officers’ citations for students to appear in lower-level juvenile court.

Students in lower-income, mostly black and Latino neighborhoods were far more likely to be given tickets for disturbing the peace, arriving late to school or being truant and other infractions. The Center’s companion report contains additional details on the accelerating dispute over student-police interaction at schools, and federal education officials’ decision to scrutinize discipline patterns and police citations in the Los Angeles district.

Federal panel advises against prostate cancer screen for men

2012-05-22T12:29:09-04:00

An influential federal task force has finalized its view that men should avoid a controversial test for prostate cancer that was the subject of a Center for Public Integrity investigation last fall.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force advised men against routine prostate cancer screening using the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test because the test often leads to more harm than good. The group found that, under the best of circumstances, one man of every 1,000 given the test would avoid death as a result, while one in every 3,000 would die prematurely from complications related to prostate cancer treatment. Prostate cancer is common, particularly in older men, and often cancers discovered through screening grow so slowly that they would likely not cause harm.

The task force findings, published Monday online in The Annals of Internal Medicine, follow similar draft guidelines that were issued by the group last fall. The Preventive Services Task Force is a group of 16 primary care providers who review preventive health services and make recommendations — recommendations that are closely watched by the medical profession.

Not everyone agrees with the findings. The American Urological Association issued a statement saying it is “outraged and believes that the Task Force is doing men a great disservice by disparaging what is now the only widely available test for prostate cancer, a potentially devastating disease.”

The current debate surrounds the value of the test, but the cost of the test to government health plans has also been the subject of scrutiny. Last fall, the Center reported that 40 percent of Medicare spending on common cancer screening procedures — including the PSA test — is probably unnecessary. Cancer screening tests are widely overused, the probe found, in part because doctors disregard scientific evidence out of ignorance, fear of malpractice suits, for financial gain or in response to patient demand.

Scandalized DOE loan program has Romney connection

2012-05-22T14:38:53-04:00

The federal energy loan program that has created headaches for President Barack Obama has a Mitt Romney connection.

Cathy Tripodi of FaegreBD Consulting lobbies on behalf of Abound Solar, a company that was awarded a $400 million loan guarantee through the same Department of Energy program that aided Solyndra, the now-bankrupt California company that included an Obama bundler as an investor.

Tripodi is a bundler for Romney. She raised $27,000 for the presumptive Republican nominee in April, according to documents filed by his campaign with the Federal Election Commission Sunday.

After receiving a federal loan guarantee, Solyndra ultimately went bankrupt, sticking taxpayers with a $535 million bill and providing fodder for Republican attacks against the president and his green energy initiatives.

Many pundits and politicos began uttering Abound’s name in the same sentence as Solyndra this spring, after Abound announced plans to lay off 280 workers from a Colorado plant and delay the opening of a factory in Indiana. Earlier this month, the Government Reform Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives brought in Abound’s president to testify.

Abound paid $150,000 to FaegreBD Consulting to lobby Congress and the Department of Energy from November through March, records show.

Tripodi is one of 25 lobbyists who have raised more than $3 million for Romney’s campaign.

Tripodi did not respond to requests for comment, and Steve Abely, Abound Solar’s chief financial officer, said her fundraising activities “have nothing to do with consulting she does for Abound and are therefore none of the company’s business.”

Thanks to ethics rules passed in 2007 in the wake of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, all campaigns must regularly reveal the names of lobbyists who fundraise — or “bundle” — money on their behalf.

Federal law limits how much money individuals can contribute to politicians, but bundlers often gain additional influence by asking their friends, relatives and business associates to write checks, which may be delivered in one “bundle” to a campaign.

Unlike Obama, Romney has not publicly revealed the names of all of his campaign bundlers — disclosures that were made by previous Republican presidential candidates, including George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

In April, Tripodi was joined by two other first-time lobbyist-bundlers: Chris Bravacos, whose sole client so far this year is the prescription drug trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), and Kraft Foods’ Abigail Blunt.

Bravacos raised $30,300 for Romney in April, while Blunt collected $28,700.

Notably, Blunt is the wife of Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who has been one of Romney’s biggest boosters on Capitol Hill. According to Reuters, the senator was hand-picked to recruit other members of Congress to endorse Romney this spring, while Romney was still locked in a primary battle with former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

According to campaign documents Romney’s bundlers will be granted perks such as special access to debates and the Republican National Convention, weekly campaign briefings and attendance at finance team retreats.

Bundlers who raise at least $500,000 achieve the “Stripes” level, and people who raise at least $200,000 are awarded the “Stars” level. The names of all Stars and Stripes-level fundraisers will also be published in a commemorative book.

One of Romney’s lobbyist-bundlers appears to have reached the Stripes level: Patrick J. Durkin, Sr., of banking giant Barclays, who has raised more than $927,000 for Romney, records show.

Meanwhile two of his other lobbyist-bundlers look to have reached the Stars level.

One is Wayne Berman, of Ogilvy Government Relations, who has raised nearly $425,000 for Romney. His clients include PhRMA, drug-maker Pfizer, Chevron, Visa, US Airways and the American Petroleum Institute.

The other is T. Martin Fiorentino, Jr., of the Fiorentino Group, who has lobbied on a variety of transportation, infrastructure, health care, telecommunications and appropriations issues over his career. He has raised more than $325,000 for Romney.

Records further show that Austin Barbour — the nephew of former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who is a lobbyist at the Clearwater Group — is almost to the Stars level, having raised $210,700 for Romney.

Obama, meanwhile, does not accept contributions from registered lobbyists, nor are lobbyists allowed to bundle money on behalf of his campaign.

His campaign has released a list of 532 bundlers who have collectively raised more than $106 million for Obama and his joint fundraising committees.

Crossroads GPS ad: 'Obama's Promise'

2012-05-21T10:17:45-04:00

Pressure to meet inspection goals

2012-05-21T06:00:01-04:00

OPINION: Spinning the Supreme Court's 'Obamacare' decision

2012-05-21T06:00:01-04:00

I learned that Mitt Romney had won the Nebraska Republican presidential primary last week via a “Breaking News” e-mail alert from POLITICO. It wasn’t the news from the Cornhusker state, however, that caught my eye. It was instead the health insurance industry’s decision to spend our premium dollars on an Internet ad — an ad warning of dire consequences if the Supreme Court doesn’t rule the way insurers want on the constitutionality of Obamacare.

The worst-case scenario for insurers is if the high court strikes down the provision of the law requiring us to buy coverage (the so-called individual mandate), but allows the law’s important consumer protections to go forward.

The reason Obamacare is built around the individual mandate is because of the relentless lobbying by insurers, and not just on Capitol Hill. Representatives of the industry made frequent trips to the White House during the debate on reform to twist the arm of President Obama, who had campaigned against the mandate when he was running for president.

The insurance reps were persuasive in arguing that the parts of the bill consumer advocates were demanding wouldn’t work unless an “enforceable personal purchase requirement” (a.k.a., the individual mandate) was also included, along with subsidies from the government to help low-income families pay their premiums. And not incidentally, insurers love the mandate because it forces millions more people to buy health insurance policies. The insurance folks made it clear that without the mandate and subsidies, the industry would spend whatever was necessary to defeat reform. So a deal was cut. The industry promised it would not try to destroy reform if it got the mandate, and it would even go along with some of what consumer advocates wanted.

One of the reasons the White House and Congressional Democrats agreed to the mandate was because they thought, foolishly, that including it in the bill might attract some Republican support. Not only would it ensure a viable private insurance market, it actually was first proposed by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Who would have thought that the mandate would wind up being the most contentious part of the legislation and the basis of the constitutional challenge by Republican politicians that would ultimately reach the Supreme Court?

The health insurance industry, through its two big trade groups—America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association—was quick to file an amicus brief when the high court announced it would take up the issue. They argued in the brief that the consumer protections in the law “are inextricably linked to the law’s personal coverage requirement and have to be severed if the court finds the coverage requirement unconstitutional.”

That was in January. Now that we’re getting close to June, when the court is expected to rule, the industry is rolling out a new phase of its campaign to make sure the consumer protections bite the dust—even, I’m willing to bet, if the justices decide to uphold the entire law.

The industry undoubtedly chose POLITICO for its ad because the news organization is widely followed inside the Beltway. Insurers were sending a message to the justices, reminding them of what they wrote in the amicus brief, and also to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, putting them on notice that should the court strike down only the mandate, insurers will be pulling out all the stops to make sure Congress guts the rest of the law.

“At a minimum,” as AHIP and BCBSA wrote in January, the protections that will have to go are the ones that require insurance firms to sell coverage to anyone who applies for it and that prohibit them from using pre-existing conditions and a person’s medical history to deny coverage or to charge exorbitant rates for it.

To bolster its case, AHIP is now pointing to what it claims were unintended consequences of certain reforms in the state of Washington several years ago.

“In the 1990s,” according to the POLITICO ad, “Washington State tried to implement market reforms without a mandate. By 1999, it was impossible for an individual to buy a health insurance policy in 31 of Washington's 39 counties. Learn more about The Link between the individual mandate and market reforms at http://bit.ly/thelinkahip."

Washington Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler confirmed to me that Washington lawmakers in 1999 rolled back some of the consumer protections that had been enacted six years earlier, but he’s not buying AHIP’s prediction that insurers would flee the marketplace if the Supreme Court declares only the individual mandate unconstitutional.

“I think that would happen only in the absence of other mechanisms and options to help reduce insurers’ risk,” Kreidler said. “For example, creation of an open enrollment period for these plans could minimize the likelihood of people jumping in and out of coverage when they have major procedures planned.

“Also, here’s what could be different from 1993,” he added. “If the individual mandate is thrown out but the Medicaid expansion and subsidies upheld, you’d likely have fewer people hopping in and out of the market because of those safety nets allowing them to get and keep coverage.”

Don’t expect the insurance industry to advertise that, though. They want those consumer protections gone. And they will be spending a lot of money in the months ahead to make us all think those protections are not in our best interests after all—regardless of how the court rules.

OSHA inspector's plea: 'My spirit is broken.'

2012-05-21T06:00:01-04:00

VIDEO: A laborer dies in a gas explosion, safety questions linger

2012-05-21T06:00:01-04:00

On Sept. 3, 2009, contract laborer Nick Revetta was killed in an explosion at U.S. Steel's Clairton Plant near Pittsburgh. Revetta's death and the events that followed reveal the limitations of a federal law meant to protect American workers.

Los Angeles school police citations draw federal scrutiny

2012-05-23T16:44:01-04:00

Alexander Johnson arrived at Barack Obama Global Preparatory Academy to pick up his 12-year-old after school on May 19, 2011. When his son, A.J. didn’t appear, Johnson went inside the Los Angeles middle school. What he found was devastating.

A.J. and a friend had gotten into a physical altercation over a basketball game, and school staff had summoned not parents, but police officers. Neither boy was injured, and the school ended up suspending his son for only one day, Johnson said. But officers wrote up a court citation and decided, on the spot, to also handcuff and arrest A.J. as the alleged aggressor — after what Johnson believes was only a cursory look into what had happened.

Despite Johnson’s pleas for another solution to what the citation said was a “mutual fight,” officers drove A.J. to a station, booked him, fingerprinted him and took a mug shot before releasing him. The family hired a lawyer, and school staff later apologized. But Johnson and his wife still can’t comprehend why school officials got police involved. And while school police say they have a duty to fight crime, the Johnsons can’t help but think that officers arrested their son because of snap judgments about African-American kids in South Central Los Angeles.

“He’s got good grades and he’s never been in trouble,” Johnson said he kept telling police. “Tell it to the judge,” he said police replied.

Broader concerns

What happened to the Johnsons’ son is the type of incident — in Los Angeles and elsewhere — that has the Obama Administration’s Department of Education and a growing number of juvenile-court judges deeply concerned.

In fact, the issue of police citations has been included in a federal review of discipline-reform plans that the Los Angeles Unified School District – under pressure to reduce high rates of suspensions of black students — was required to submit earlier this year to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.

“Generally speaking, in all but the most serious cases we would hope that district officials review a range of options … before referring students to the court system,” the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Russlynn Ali, told the Center for Public Integrity in an interview that touched on both Los Angeles and national trends.

Months ago, the Los Angeles district failed to submit any records of police citations or arrests of students to Ali’s office so they could be included in the office’s most recent mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection. The collection of those 2009-2010 statistics from most U.S. schools was an unprecedented attempt by the Education Department to assess an apparent national upsurge in referrals of students to law enforcement.

Los Angeles’ data and New York City’s, too, were conspicuously missing.

But in April, the Center for Public Integrity and a Los Angeles civil rights group, the Labor-Community Strategy Center, obtained and analyzed a large portion of the L.A. data that Ali’s office had expected to get.

The data — obtained through a public records act request — contained tens of thousands of citations to lower-level juvenile court issued by Los Angeles Unified’s own police force from 2009 through 2011.

The data don’t include arrests, which are recorded separately, or separate citations that officers referred directly to a higher-level delinquency court, where Johnson’s son ended up. The data don’t include tickets written by city police either.

But the citations do likely represent the bulk of police-student interactions, and reveal how pervasive the ticketing of students has become in this large metropolitan district, which is struggling with high dropout rates and budget cuts.

The Center found that Los Angeles’ school officers, part of the largest school police force in the country, issued more than 33,500 tickets to students between 10 and 18 years old over three years. That worked out to about 30 citations a day, every day.

More than 40 percent of these court citations were to kids 14 and younger, mostly for disturbing the peace, followed by daytime curfew violations, including tardiness, and scattered tickets for cigarettes, lighters, marijuana, vandalism or having graffiti “tools,” such as a Sharpie. Black students, about 10 percent of the district’s student body, received 15 to 20 percent of all tickets, depending on the year, and Latino students, 74 percent of enrollment, also received a disproportionate number.

Additional Center analysis also shows that these lower-level court citations were highly concentrated in low-income areas where children of immigrants and African-American families attend school. Last year, there were more than 25 middle schools in such areas where at least 50 citations to lower-level court were given to students, many of them 11 and 12 years old. At least a dozen of those schools showed 70 or more tickets issued to students, who were overwhelmingly black and Latino.

After initial findings from the data were disclosed in media reports in late April, students and parents held protests in early May. The Labor-Community Strategy Center urged that the district cut tickets by 75 percent and adopt a moratorium on citations until more studies were done. District police officials declined to stop ticketing, but have engaged in community discussions about reforms.

Ali said she couldn’t comment directly on “independently gathered” Los Angeles statistics. But, she said, “the data you cite reveal, and the recent Civil Rights Data Collection data show nationally, that students of color are disproportionately disciplined.”

National trends

In March, Ali’s office revealed the results of what it had gleaned from districts nationwide that had complied and submitted their arrest and citation numbers for 2009-2010. The findings were stark: Black students, 18 percent of enrollment, represented 42 percent of school-based referrals to police. Latinos, 24 percent of enrollment, were 37 percent of school-related arrests.

“While the magnitude of the problem is something those of us involved with civil rights enforcement have been keenly aware of, I would not be telling the truth if I did not say that I found the data surprising and disturbing on a personal level,” Ali said.

“Mind you,” she said, “racial disparities revealed by data alone don’t constitute a civil rights violation . . . But at minimum, they should certainly be cause for concern and lead to conversations about why the disparities exist and what can be done to ensure fair learning opportunities for all students.”

Ali’s office has offered aid to help districts comply with another upcoming request that’s part of a new national collection of data. The L.A. district told the Center it was too difficult to compile 2009-2010 data from various city police agencies as well as from school police.

Because of concerns about school police in New York City – some students have sued there over alleged excessive force – that city now requires quarterly reports of how many students have been arrested and cited. The first report in February showed that officers issued an average of six tickets daily to New York City students every day during a 90-day period.

That’s fewer than the 30 daily low-level citations that the Center found were issued on average in Los Angeles. The L.A. district, with about 670,000 students, is the second largest public school district in the United States. New York City’s is the largest, with more than 1 million pupils.

Finding a balance

David Goldberg, an officer of the United Teachers Los Angeles Union, told the Center that teachers, hard hit by California’s budget cuts, are frustrated because so many students come to school today troubled by family problems and “with more needs than ever.” Some teachers feel strongly about getting tough on kids who fight or disrupt teaching, Goldberg said. But, he said, “there is probably a growing number of teachers who feel we need a different strategy, that this (citing of students) is not working.”

Among the middle schools in the district, Gompers Middle School in working-class South Los Angeles topped the list at 145 citations last year.

More than 100 tickets at Gompers were for disturbing the peace by fighting or threatening to fight. Two citations were for using offensive language aimed to provoke an altercation. The school’s student body is one-third black and two-thirds Latino. It is one of Los Angeles’ “turnaround” public schools operated by a nonprofit tasked with improving students’ relatively low rates of proficiency in English and math.

Los Angeles Deputy School Police Chief Tim Anderson told the Center that the district policy is for school police to respond to crimes, not discipline matters.

“We’re not counselors,” he said. “We’re not social workers.”

He said officers decline to get involved if they decide a school problem does not rise to a crime.

Anderson said the department of 340 officers and staff use a “matrix” to decide where to deploy officers. The district minimum for high schools is one officer. But if a high school or middle-school is in an area surrounded by a neighborhood with a high crime rate, Anderson said, more officers are sent to those schools to enhance students’ safety.

This year, for example, more police were sent to Gompers after two 7^th graders pulled out a knife and gun while arguing.

Civil rights groups fear that because of this concern for safety, ironically, black, Latino and low-income students are being subjected to unequal police scrutiny over minor matters and more searches than kids in affluent areas.

Zoe Rawson, an attorney with the Labor-Community Strategy Center, who has defended students in court, said: “We are both policing students of color differently because they live in these areas and rely on the public education system, and we are using the police and the courts as a punitive tactic for school discipline despite evidence that it is ineffective, harmful and wasteful.”

A word from the judges

Prominent Los Angeles juvenile-court judges are also arguing that courts are clogged with students whose futures could be harmed more than helped by summonses. A recent report by the Los Angeles County School Attendance Task Force, which included judicial, police and school representatives, concluded: “Involving youth in the criminal justice system has the detrimental and unintended consequences of reducing their chances of graduating high school.”

The task force report cited an Arizona State University criminologist who found that a first-time court appearance in high school increases a student’s odds of dropping out by at least a factor of three. The impact was greater for a student who was only marginally delinquent.

Some of Los Angeles’ inner-city schools have struggled with dropout rates as high as 50 percent. The citations examined by the Center were concentrated at those schools, as well as at middle schools that feed students into those secondary schools.

In a written response to the Center’s findings in April, the district said: “School-yard fights have been a part of school life for a long time. Many intervention programs are in place but young students do not always follow the program . . . A visit to a juvenile-court referee should help make the student aware that fighting is not tolerated in society.”

Christopher Ortiz, the district’s school operations chief, said in a more recent interview that school administrators are told that that the role of school police is clear: “School police do not do classroom management.” Ortiz said the district is continuing to institute what’s known as “positive behavior support” to deal with fights and disruptive behavior.

The court citations examined by the Center do not identify which resulted from behavior on school grounds or nearby.

Courts in a squeeze

Up to now, most kids in Los Angeles with lower-level citations have been summoned to an “informal” juvenile court. They must appear with a parent during court hours, which means students miss school and the parent misses work. Students can face hundreds of dollars in fines, and if they don’t show up to court – many are afraid to tell parents about a ticket – their infraction has a misdemeanor offense added on.

Michael Nash, the presiding judge of Los Angeles’ juvenile courts, said judges in the region plan to consult with peers in other states — in Atlanta, Ga., for example – who have reduced school-based ticketing for minor offenses with counseling practices.

A looming concern in Los Angeles is the planned closure this summer of all the county’s informal juvenile courts due to budget cuts. Nash and Judge Donna Quigley Groman, who is on the bench in full delinquency court, say the plan is to send students who get tickets to probation officers who will manage, the judges hope, mostly out-of-court diversion programs.

Civil-rights groups, however, fear that many more kids will now end up in delinquency court.

Groman doesn’t want that either. “When I see 11-year-olds in my courtroom it really causes my blood to boil,” she told the Center. “I notice there are a lot more young kids showing up here.”

She described an 11-year-old girl who was in her court this month because school police cited her for battery – a more serious charge than disturbing the peace – after she got into a school fight. There is no research, Groman said, showing that sending 11-year-olds to court and putting them on probation is effective.

“It makes them worse,” she said. Schools, she said, are the best place to handle behavior problems. “There are inner-city schools with kids with problems, and they need our help to deal with them” she said.

Jerod Gunsberg, the Johnson boy’s attorney, said that it took six months to get that 12-year-old’s assault charges dismissed in delinquency court. Gunsberg said a probation officer told him she didn’t understand why A.J.'s case was in that court, but that he wasn’t the first student to be referred from his school. The court put A.J. into an informal diversion program of four sessions of anger-management counseling, asked him to write a book report and urged him to continue to get good grades.

The district said no one at Barack Obama or the district could discuss the case because of confidentiality laws. Statistics show that at least 50 citations for lower-level juvenile court were issued at Barack Obama last year.

The Johnsons pulled A.J. out of Barack Obama for a while, but had to drive him a long distance to a more affluent school in Santa Monica. They noticed there were not a lot of police cars patrolling there. At Barack Obama, when his son got into his first fight, “it all went south when police got involved,” Alexander Johnson said. “They didn’t have anyone to handle discipline, and they told me everything goes straight to police.”

The Johnsons put A.J. back in Barack Obama this year, and the school welcomed him back, his parents said, and assured them that a new staffer had been appointed to handle discipline.

Gunsberg said that, unfortunately, even though charges were dismissed and A.J. was not required to formally admit to any wrongdoing, his mug shot and fingerprints remain on file with police until he can try to have them sealed in five years or when he turns 18.

Center for Public Integrity data editor David Donald contributed to this report.

Interactive: Growing workload

2012-05-21T16:34:59-04:00

The number of inspections by OSHA has risen nearly 16 percent since 2000, while the number of inspectors has increased by only 8 percent

In U.S. Steel town, fatal gas explosion goes unpunished by OSHA

UNITED STATES STEEL CORPORATION — 2012-05-23T12:51:12-04:00

CLAIRTON, Pa. — Early on the morning of Sept. 3, 2009, Nicholas Adrian Revetta left the Pittsburgh suburb of Pleasant Hills and drove 15 minutes to a job at U.S. Steel’s Clairton Plant, a soot-blackened industrial complex on the Monongahela River. He never returned home.

Stocky and stoic, Revetta was working that Thursday as a laborer for a U.S. Steel contractor at the same plant that employed his brother, for the same company that had employed his late father. Shortly before 11:30 a.m., gas leaking from a line in the plant’s Chemicals and Energy Division found an ignition source and exploded, propelling Revetta backward into a steel column and inflicting a fatal blow to his head. Thirty-two years old, he left behind a wife and two young children.

Nick Revetta’s death did not make national headlines. No hearings were held into the accident that killed him. No one was fired or sent to jail.

Revetta was among 4,551 people killed on the job in America in 2009, carnage that eclipsed the total number of U.S. fatalities in the nine-year Iraq war. Combine the victims of traumatic injuries with the estimated 50,000 people who die annually of work-related diseases and it’s as if a fully loaded Boeing 737-700 crashed every day. Yet the typical fine for a worker death is about $7,900.

“These deaths take place behind closed doors,” says Michael Silverstein, recently retired head of Washington State’s workplace safety agency. “They occur one or two at a time, on private property. There’s an invisibility element.”

Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, American workers are entitled to “safe and healthful” conditions. Nick Revetta’s death and the events that followed lay bare the law’s limitations, showing how safety can yield to speed, how even fatal accidents can have few consequences for employers, and how federal investigations can be cut short by what some call a de facto quota system.

In the Revetta case, the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration — OSHA — failed to issue even a minor citation to U.S. Steel, the world’s 12th-largest steelmaker and an economic leviathan in Western Pennsylvania. The company paid no fine, although current and former workers say that U.S. Steel’s contractors — including Revetta’s employer, Power Piping Co. — faced intense pressure to finish their work.

OSHA did look into Revetta’s death, as required by law. Michael Laughlin, a safety inspector from the agency’s Pittsburgh office, spent more than two months on the case, working tirelessly to find the cause of the explosion. Yet emails obtained by the Center for Public Integrity show that Laughlin’s requests for help went unanswered, and he was pulled off the investigation by a supervisor striving to meet inspection goals.

“My problem is at what point do we give up quality for quantity,” Laughlin wrote in an appeal to a higher-ranking OSHA official in Philadelphia in November 2009. “I need some guidance because I'm torn and my spirit is broken because of the need to complete this case to the best of my ability."

The official advised Laughlin to “relax” and use the weekend to “go out and hit some [golf] balls!”

In the end, OSHA penalized only an insulation contractor that had been working in the area of the explosion. The contractor paid $10,763 in fines unrelated to the blast and was not implicated in Revetta’s death.

"The OSHA investigation that was done missed the point," says John Gismondi, a lawyer who represents Nick Revetta's wife, Maureen, in a lawsuit against U.S. Steel. "It wasn't the right type of investigation. They spent all their time on penny-ante stuff. How do you have a situation where all the pipes are owned or maintained by U.S. Steel, you have an explosion, a guy is killed and you have no violation? How is that possible?"

"I'm upset with U.S. Steel," says Maureen Revetta, 34, "but I think I'm angrier with OSHA. They're the government agency that's supposed to keep people safe … It just seemed like they purposely didn't want to fine U.S. Steel."

Ten months after her husband's death, a second explosion rocked the Clairton Plant, sending 17 workers to the hospital. OSHA blamed the accident on a contractor shortcut approved by U.S. Steel, an allegation the company is contesting.

In a written statement to the Center for Public Integrity, OSHA said it conducted a "thorough investigation" of Nick Revetta's death. "It was determined [that] there was insufficient factual evidence that could support the issuance of citations specifically related to the root cause of the incident."

David Michaels, assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health, would not talk about the Revetta case; nor would Robert Szymanski, head of OSHA's Pittsburgh Area Office. Edward Selker, the now-retired OSHA deputy regional administrator who urged inspector Laughlin to go hit golf balls, did not return calls to his home. A U.S. Steel spokeswoman declined to comment. In a court filing, the company denied any negligence in the case.

The silence has shaken Revetta's former co-workers. "It just hasn't gone away," says John Straub, a U.S. Steel employee who has worked in Clairton since 1979. "Nobody has really explained to us exactly what happened. They tell us they don't know what the ignition source was. I was working in that same area a couple of weeks before the explosion. I look back and say, 'That could have been me.' "

‘A ton of heat’

The recession has made American workplaces seem safer than they are. In 2008, the year before Nick Revetta was killed, 5,200 people perished on the job. A decade earlier, the toll exceeded 6,000. The soft economy, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics notes, has led to fewer workers and fewer hours in high-risk industries such as construction. Even so, the latest government tally — 4,690 worker deaths in 2010, up 3 percent from 2009 — is sobering. The U.S. workplace fatality rate remains roughly six times that of the United Kingdom, which has stricter safety rules.

It would take the perpetually short-staffed OSHA 130 years to inspect every workplace in the U.S. Managers and their underlings must strike a balance between meeting “performance goals” set in Washington and conducting comprehensive inspections when deaths occur. A target of 42,250 inspections nationwide was established for fiscal year 2012, up 5.6 percent from the previous year’s goal. The number of federal inspectors, meanwhile, has stayed mostly flat; there were 1,118 in February 2012.

In a statement, OSHA said it “does not set strict inspection quotas. The Agency does, however, set inspection goals — and they are just goals — in order to monitor and manage our activities. We do not believe that these inspection goals preclude the Agency from doing a thorough inspection.”

Others aren’t so sure.

"They called them goals, but you were definitely expected to make your numbers — that was the term of art," says David DiTommaso, a former OSHA area director in Montana. "If you didn't, you had to have a reason and you would be judged on it."

In August 2011, with the federal fiscal year nearing a close, an unidentified safety supervisor in OSHA's Region 3 office, covering Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C., urged inspectors to step up their pace and not get bogged down in the minutiae of complex cases, including those involving deaths and serious injuries.

“As per our calculations this morning, we need an average of 14 inspections opened per week,” wrote the supervisor, whose name was removed from an email obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

The supervisor went on: “Essentially, do what you gotta do to stay gainfully employed. It’s great to be caught up, but we only have a short window to open enough inspections to make all of our goals. I suppose you could say, ‘it’s not my problem’ but I can’t guarantee there wouldn’t be a ton of heat coming down from the RO [regional office] on any office that falls short. We are going to be getting a new RA [regional administrator] soon and being perceived as ‘slackers’ is not a good first impression. I know how difficult all of the accidents/fatalities/sig [significant] cases have been on everyone but that won’t likely be taken into consideration when the clock strikes October” — the beginning of the new fiscal year. One OSHA official referred to the supervisor's email as a "Quota System threat."

Other OSHA emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal the numbers-driven pressures that existed in Pittsburgh after Nick Revetta’s death.

In a message to then-deputy regional administrator Selker two months after the first Clairton explosion, inspector Laughlin acknowledged that "goals must be met" but said the Revetta case was "clearly not done.” His bosses nonetheless directed him to end the investigation. (Laughlin died in January after being struck by a car.)

A chart dated two days after Revetta's death shows that OSHA's Region 3 was easily surpassing its counterparts in the numbers game. With the fiscal year coming to an end, the region was ahead of its goal by 245 inspections. In an email four days later, Selker complimented Szymanski and other managers in Pittsburgh for the "very encouraging and impressive inspection stats … We are very well positioned to make sure all FY2009 inspections are 'cleaned up' and issued by 9/30/2009. This will allow a good quick and clean start to what appears will be a challenging FY2010. We can hit the ground running and get off to a good start in the first quarter instead of playing catch-up. If we can hold our own in the first quarter, it will make the rest of the year much less tense."

Patrick and Maureen

Nick Revetta’s older brother, Patrick, is tall and solidly built, with grey stubble. Forty years old, he lives 11 miles from Clairton but has tried to avoid the place since Nick’s accident. He made an exception one bitterly cold day in January 2011. After pointing out Neil C. Brown Stadium, where he played quarterback for the Clairton High School Bears, he drove past a string of deserted businesses on his way to U.S. Steel’s hulking Clairton Plant on the Monongahela River.

Clairton, a city of 6,800 about 15 miles south of downtown Pittsburgh, has seen better days. In 1980, U.S. Steel employed nearly 5,000 at the Clairton Works, as it was then known, where coal is superheated in ovens and turned into coke, a key ingredient in steel. Though the plant remains a major employer, its staffing has dropped by three-quarters, not counting contract workers. Almost one-quarter of the city’s residents and nearly half of its children live in poverty.

The Revetta brothers and their sister, Kathy, grew up in Clairton the 1970s and ’80s. “This place was booming,” Patrick recalls. Nick was the "spitting image" of his father Adrian, who worked for Power Piping Co., a construction and fabrication contractor. "They walked alike. They were built the same way — like bulls, basically," Patrick says. Adrian got Nick a job at Power Piping; Nick would work there for 11 years.

Nick and Patrick grew exceptionally close after their mother, Patricia, died of cancer in 1991. "He was like a son to me," Patrick says. "He drank his first beer with me at my college. I took him everywhere. I raised him."

Nick met Maureen Mulligan in 1994, when they were 17, and they married nine years later. Their son Nick was born in 2005, their daughter Gianna in 2008. The children’s names were tattooed on their father’s right arm, along with the word Italia, a nod to his heritage.

Thin and well-spoken, Maureen is a special education and speech teacher. She struggles to raise the children without their father. Six-year-old Nick craves male attention. “When [the accident] happened, he was 4 ½,” Maureen says. “I don’t think he knew people died. I said, ‘Daddy got hurt at work and he’s never coming home.’ ”

The Clairton Plant is the largest operation of its kind in the country, with 12 clusters of coke ovens, known as batteries, which produce 4.7 million tons of the carbon-rich fuel annually. At the depth of the recession, in early 2009, coke prices were depressed and activity in Clairton was sluggish. As prices began to rebound that year, “there was a mad rush to get everything up and running again,” Patrick says.

Nick was caught in that rush. Power Piping was brought in to help refurbish gas processing equipment. “You could see it every day,” says Patrick, a U.S. Steel employee whose job at the time was to help control emissions from the coke oven batteries. “There was just too much pressure. They had to have that production, man. Nick, he kept telling me they were shortcutting stuff, putting pressure on them to hurry up and get the job finished. I said, ‘Just watch your ass.’”

OSHA inspector Laughlin's voluminous notes reflect the frenetic work environment experienced by U.S. Steel contractors such as Power Piping. "They were pushing the manpower … U.S. Steel pushing … pushing people," Laughlin wrote while transcribing one worker interview.

The winter before he was killed, Nick logged 60 days straight at the Clairton Plant. “He was very proud of his job, proud of providing for his family,” Maureen says. “He never complained about working.” Subdued among strangers, animated among friends, Nick had few hobbies outside his family time. “I never really worried about his safety,” Maureen says. “Then, one morning about two weeks before he died, he said, ‘I don’t think you know what a dangerous place I work at.’ ”

Around the same time, Patrick recalls, Nick complained that there were gas "leaks all over the place" in a part of the plant's Chemicals and Energy Division known as the No. 2 control room. "I always knew somebody would get killed inside that place," Patrick says, "but I never thought in a million years it would be my baby brother."

Four days before Labor Day 2009, Nick and a co-worker were given a routine assignment. They were to repair concrete pillars supporting the dormant B Cold Box, a pipe-filled structure the size of a storage pod in the No. 2 control room. The box is part of a cryogenic process used to separate “light oil” containing benzene, xylene and toluene from coke oven gas; the chemical byproducts in the oil are then sold.

Nick was standing near the box, getting ready to mix grout, when, at 11:26 a.m., an explosion sent him hurtling backward into a column. He appears to have died instantly. A foreman at the plant later told OSHA inspector Laughlin that it looked like Nick had been buried in a snow drift, the "snow" being piles of white, fluffy insulation blown from the B Cold Box.

At the moment of the blast, Patrick was coming off his shift at the plant’s B Battery, maybe 100 yards away. “I heard a loud arcing noise,” he recalls. “I turned in that direction and saw the flash and heard the explosion.” He called Nick three times on his cell phone but got no answer.

Patrick ran to the lunch trailer and encountered Nick’s boss, who said Nick was unaccounted for. Then he saw his brother being carried out on a stretcher. Patrick’s chest grew tight, his breathing labored. He thought he was having a heart attack and was taken by ambulance to the plant clinic.

Eventually, a U.S. Steel worker who’d found Nick told Patrick his brother was dead. Patrick began cursing everyone within earshot, then went straight to Jefferson Regional Medical Center, where Nick had been taken. He asked to see his brother’s clothing, which was “soaking wet. You could smell the benzene.” He saw no signs of trauma: “There wasn’t a burn mark on him.”

Although an autopsy would establish the cause of death as blunt-force trauma to the head and trunk, Maureen also detected no evidence of serious injury when she saw Nick's body that afternoon. "He looked perfect," she says, "except for a little red line on his nose."

The investigation

Mike Laughlin was dispatched to the Clairton Plant about two and a half hours after the explosion. A heavyset Army veteran with a thick grey mustache, Laughlin had investigated dozens of fatal accidents since joining OSHA in 1990.

Rose Bezy, vice president of United Steelworkers Local 1557, which represents about 1,200 U.S. Steel workers in Clairton, joined Laughlin as he picked his way through the debris around the demolished B Cold Box. "The guy was relentless," Bezy says. "He was all over the place."

U.S. Steel officials followed Laughlin as he worked. “Whenever he would take a picture,” Bezy says, “there would be a U.S. Steel guy with a camera, taking the same picture.” Three well-dressed corporate security officials from Pittsburgh appeared at the plant several hours after the accident, Bezy says, and forbade Clairton managers from sitting in on interviews with lower-level employees, as would customarily occur. “It looked to me like U.S. Steel’s own managers were intimidated,” she says.

Laughlin realized early in the Revetta investigation that he needed help navigating complex federal rules detailing the steps companies must take to prevent catastrophic fires, explosions and chemical releases. He kept pressing Pittsburgh area director Szymanski to pair him with someone who had expertise in this "process safety management" protocol. OSHA has several hundred inspectors nationwide with such specialized training, two in Pittsburgh. These specialists can draw conclusions from mangled pipes and burned-out vessels—clues likely to be missed by generalists like Laughlin.

Laughlin made his initial request for help not quite two weeks after Revetta's death. Former OSHA managers say the request should have been granted. "It doesn't make a whole lot of sense that you have an explosion where one of your [inspectors] is asking for help and you don't give it to him," says Dave May, a former OSHA area director in New Hampshire who oversaw some 100 death investigations. "In a fatality you bend over backwards to get the help."

DiTommaso, the former Montana area director, says, "In a situation like [the Revetta accident], we would have got a team in there. You would call the regional administrator and say, 'Look, I've got this type of case. Can we get some people who have heavy experience in that from somewhere around the country?' You've got to make sure there's not a continuing hazard."

The precise cause of the explosion that killed Nick Revetta remains a mystery. Workers had been grinding and welding on the B Cold Box just prior to the blast, but none of the witnesses interviewed by Laughlin reported smelling gas. "No evacuation alarm ever went off," a foreman told Laughlin, according to the inspector's notes.

Another witness said he’d heard "a large gas escaping sound — definitely a pipe hissing — and [seen] a big ball of fire” near Quad 3, a trailer-sized structure, containing four cryogenic vessels, located close to the disabled B Cold Box. There had been an explosion in Quad 3 in 2005. No one was hurt, and U.S. Steel blamed the event on lightning.

Lawyer Gismondi says U.S. Steel's own investigation, which has not been made public, concluded that “there was a gas leak inside [Quad 3] and oxygen got in.” This suggests that two of the three ingredients required for an explosion — flammable gas and oxygen — were present. All that was needed was an ignition source — something as simple as static electricity. U.S. Steel declined to comment.

Near-misses

John Straub, a senior operating technician with U.S. Steel, was at home the morning Nick Revetta died. He learned about the explosion from his wife, who'd seen a bulletin on TV. "I said, 'I know exactly where it was.'" A casual acquaintance of the Revetta brothers, Straub had worked in the area of the blast and had been troubled by what he described as sloppy "hot work" procedures designed to contain sparks from welding and burning.

The job to which Nick Revetta had been assigned — the rebuilding of the B Cold Box — was, in Straub's view, being done without proper enclosures to segregate potential sources of ignition. It was part of a disturbing trend he'd observed: Precautions that would have been taken five years earlier were deemed too expensive and time-consuming. "In the old days, responsibility for safety was shared by the contractor and U.S. Steel," Straub says. "Now it's just somebody else working. You don't look at [a contract employee] like it's your son or your daughter or your dad working, which you should."

Straub filed a 10-page, handwritten complaint with OSHA's Pittsburgh office in January 2010, alleging that U.S. Steel had violated the process safety management standard. Straub claimed that several "near-misses" in the No. 2 control room before Revetta's death hadn't been investigated. Six months later, OSHA cited U.S. Steel for five "serious" violations related to Straub's complaint and proposed a $32,400 fine. The company settled and paid $19,800.

Not long after Straub filed his complaint, Maureen Revetta learned that OSHA's investigation into her husband's death had been closed, with no citations issued to U.S. Steel. She and Gismondi had two unsatisfying meetings with OSHA officials in the summer of 2010. In the first, "One guy said, 'We don't have enough resources,' " Maureen says. "I wouldn't tell parents that I don't have enough resources to teach their kids. I have to figure it out. That's no excuse." In the second meeting, which included then-deputy regional administrator Selker, Gismondi produced inspector Laughlin's written request for help and asked why it hadn't been honored. "They were flustered," the lawyer says.

In October 2010, Gismondi approached OSHA chief David Michaels at a conference in Pittsburgh and hand-delivered a letter. "Mrs. Revetta and I have strong concerns that the OSHA investigation into this accident was not as thorough and complete as it should have been," it said. A month later, Michaels replied that the process safety investigation sought by Laughlin "would not likely have determined the root or underlying causes of the incident that killed Mr. Revetta" and said that Straub's complaint had resulted in citations that would discourage "unsafe practices at the Clairton Plant."

In her own letter to Michaels, the United Steelworkers’ Bezy observed that it took an expert — Pittsburgh-based OSHA inspector Jan Oleszewski — to document the violations Straub had alleged. Oleszewski or someone like him should have been assigned to the Revetta investigation, Bezy argued.

"I fear that [U.S. Steel] will continue to injure and kill our employees and those who contract to work in our plant,” she wrote. “They seem to be above the law in matters of Health and Safety."

Indeed, one week before Oleszewski cited U.S. Steel for violations stemming from the Straub complaint, the Clairton Plant blew up again. It was July 14, 2010 — not even a year after Nick Revetta was killed.

‘You thought someone was dying’

That morning, Denny Lentz, a steamfitter with Power Piping, was helping a co-worker install a flat piece of steel between flanges on a 30-inch coke oven gas line in the Clairton Plant's B Battery. The "blank" was supposed to block the flow of gas while the men repaired a leaking valve. Something went wrong: Lentz, outfitted in a self-contained breathing apparatus, could hear and feel the gas escaping. "It was blowing the coal dust off the ceiling," he says. "Once you got gas blowing everywhere, it's gonna find a spark."

Lentz says that a gas alarm went off several times, but a U.S. Steel supervisor silenced it each time. "I was thinking, 'I gotta hurry,'" Lentz says. He was rushing to tighten the bolts on the flanges when a wall of flame "came right at me and blew me over." He remembers picking himself up off the ground and hearing screams: "You thought someone was dying." The fire peeled the skin off his hands; his ears and the back of his head were burned as well. Others, including the U.S. Steel supervisor, were burned more severely.

OSHA said the procedure approved by U.S. Steel — allowing coke oven gas to keep flowing through the line rather than shutting it off and purging it with nitrogen — invited disaster. The agency cited the company in January 2011 for 12 alleged violations and proposed a $143,500 fine. One violation was classified as "willful," suggesting OSHA believes the steel maker either disregarded or was "plainly indifferent" to safety rules. U.S. Steel is appealing. Lentz and other workers hurt in the accident are suing the company.

The B Battery conflagration may have been foreshadowed 2 ½ years earlier in River Rouge, Mich. At U.S. Steel’s Great Lakes Works on Jan. 5, 2008, a pipe dislodged by a gas explosion fatally crushed Thomas Pichler Jr., a 27-year-old contract pipefitter. A lawsuit filed by Pichler’s parents alleged that U.S. Steel allowed flammable gas to enter the supposedly inactive pipe; the case was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum in March 2011.

Although Michigan’s workplace safety agency did not cite U.S. Steel, the lawsuit uncovered evidence of company culpability. U.S. Steel allowed coke oven gas to enter a line that was supposed to have been out of service, says Robert Darling, the lawyer for Pichler’s parents. During the litigation, U.S. Steel officials betrayed no knowledge of what caused the explosion.

The breakthrough came when the president of Pichler’s employer testified in a deposition that only U.S. Steel had the key to remove a lock on a valve that kept gas from flowing into the pipe on which Pichler was working. Evidence showed that the lock had been removed prior to the explosion. U.S. Steel did not respond to requests for comment on the Pichler case.

Could a more complete OSHA probe and sanctions in the Revetta case have prevented the second blast in Clairton? Celeste Monforton, a former OSHA analyst who lectures at the George Washington University School of Public Health, says that Revetta's death should have prompted a broader investigation that might have identified other hazards.

"OSHA should have used that as an opportunity to look at the entire operation rather than just limiting its inspection to the area where the fatality occurred," Monforton says. "To me, it's just inexplicable that they didn't do it. People can say all they want about OSHA's lack of resources, but they had the tools to go in."

The OSHA Field Operations Manual gives local managers considerable latitude in death cases to determine the scope of investigation. May, the former New Hampshire area director, says, "If the place is a mess and it's had a fatality, it's not atypical that you jump in and say, 'We need to do the whole place.' "

Burros, crabs…and people

Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, a willful safety violation that causes the death of a worker is a misdemeanor, punishable by no more than six months in prison. Contrast this with the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, which carries a one-year sentence for killing or merely harassing one of the animals on public lands.

OSHA chief Michaels says that statutory changes, enabling OSHA to assess stiffer civil penalties and making it easier to criminally prosecute wrongdoers, are needed.

“There’s no question in my mind that higher penalties would encourage employers to eliminate hazards before workers are hurt,” he says. “I think all of us recognize that fear of prison focuses the mind.”

In 2010, Michaels told a Senate panel about Jeff Davis, a boilermaker at the Motiva Enterprises oil refinery in Delaware whose body “literally dissolved” in sulfuric acid after a storage-tank explosion in 2001. Motiva was fined $175,000 for the accident, which hurt eight others.

“Yet, in the same incident, thousands of dead fish and crabs were discovered, allowing an EPA Clean Water Act violation amounting to $10 million,” Michaels testified. “How can we tell Jeff Davis’ wife Mary, and their five children, that the penalty for killing fish and crabs is many times higher than the penalty for killing their husband and father?”

That same year, Rep. George Miller, then chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, introduced legislation that would have raised limits on OSHA penalties and made it easier to hold corporate officials criminally liable for flagrant violations. Opposition from Republican members of Congress and business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, killed the legislation. “It’s been a constant campaign” to demonize OSHA, says Miller, a California Democrat. “The attack on this type of regulation is across the board. It’s not nuanced.”

Postscript

Patrick Revetta has lost 30 pounds since Nick was killed. “He’s not the same person I’ve known for 10 years,” says his wife, Kathy. “He holds everything in. He sits there in a daze.” Still a U.S. Steel employee, Patrick is out on medical leave for post-traumatic stress disorder.

"I got a lot of bitterness in my heart over this, and I don't think it's ever going to go away," he says. "How is it that somebody gets killed, OSHA finds nothing and they send guys back in and go back to full production? I believe OSHA turned their head to it."

His father, Adrian, died of complications from diabetes 13 months before Nick was killed. Adrian would not have allowed the cause of the 2009 explosion to remain undetermined, Patrick says. "If my dad were still alive, there would have been an answer."

On a Saturday in January last year, he drove a visitor from Clairton to the snow-covered Finleyville Cemetery, where his brother, parents and grandfather are buried, and parked his truck next to the family plots. A small Pittsburgh Penguins flag fluttered next to Nick's headstone; following the hockey team had been one of his passions.

On his way down the hill a few minutes later, Patrick gave his horn two taps. Goodbye, little brother.

Obama, Dems dominate GOP in April fundraising

2012-05-24T09:59:29-04:00

As President Barack Obama attacks Mitt Romney's tenure at a private equity firm, the former Massachusetts governor continues to benefit from six- and seven-figure contributions made by former peers to a super PAC supporting his candidacy.

Restore Our Future reported $4.6 million in contributions for April, including $1 million from John Kleinheinz, a San Antonio, Texas-based hedge fund manager and $250,000 from Stephen Zide, a former colleague of Romney’s at Bain Capital.

The real total, however, appears to be $3.9 million — the super PAC reported a $750,000 refund of a donation from Texas homebuilder Bob Perry. Perry is still the top donor at $4 million. Overall, though, it was a disappointing haul for the group — when factoring the refund, the amount was less than half what it raised the previous month.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee outraised Romney and the Republican National Committee by a nearly 2-1 margin in April, which appears counter to media reports last week that indicated the two camps were running about even.

Last week, the Obama campaign started an advertising blitz attacking Romney’s tenure at Bain, claiming that the company was responsible for buying a steel company, saddling it with debt and then shutting it down, leaving hundreds of employees out of work. Romney says he left Bain two years prior to the closure of the company.

John Kleinheinz is founder of Capital Partners Inc., which manages a fund with nearly $2 billion in assets. Stephen Zide has been a managing director at Bain Capital since 2001 and an employee since 1997, according to the company’s website. He gave the super PAC $250,000 in March of last year bringing his total contribution to Restore Our Future to $500,000.

Other donors tp Restore Our Future from the investment world included billionaire Wilbur Ross Jr. who gave $100,000 and Marc Leder and Rodger Krouse, co-CEOs of Sun Capital Advisors Inc. Ross is chairman and CEO of WLRoss & Co. and is a well-known corporate buyout specialist. Sun Capital is a Florida-based private equity company.

The second-biggest donor to the super PAC was oilman and Romney energy advisor Harold Hamm, chairman and CEO of Continental Resources Inc. of Oklahoma City. Hamm gave $985,000 according to the Federal Election Commission.

Last month, the Center for Public Integrity reported that half of Restore Our Future’s funds have come from the finance industry, with the largest contributions coming from ultra-wealthy hedge fund and private equity managers.

In the overall money race, the Democrats dominated.

The Obama campaign raised $25.7 million for the month, $10 million less than March, but more than double Romney’s $11.7 million. The Obama campaign reported $115 million cash on hand compared with Romney’s $9.2 million.

The Democratic National Committee reported raising $14.3 million for the month and had $24.3 million cash on hand compared with the Republican National Committee’s $11.4 million raised and $34.8 million cash on hand.

The combined total for the Democrats was $40.1 million compared with $23.2 million for the Republicans. Numerous media reports last week, citing unnamed sources, indicated that Romney’s joint fundraising total nearly matched that of the Obama camp. The Republican National Committee's press office did not return calls seeking clarification.

The discrepancy may lie in how the “Romney Victory, Inc.” joint fundraising committee is doing its math. In addition to the campaign and RNC, the joint committee includes four state parties and both Republican House and Senate fundraising arms.

The two other major partisan super PACs had relatively disappointing months. American Crossroads, which supports Republican candidates, raised $1.8 million. Super donor Harold Simmons, billionaire chairman and CEO of Contran Corp., was responsible for $1 million of the total. The group reported reported a hefty $25.5 million in the bank, however.

Priorities USA Inc., which supports Obama, raised $1.6 million with $1 million of the total coming from the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. It was a million dollars less than what the organization raised in March. It reported $4.7 million in the bank.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker grants significant access to companies, donors

Wisconsin,United States — 2012-05-20T01:03:01-04:00

You don’t have to be a campaign donor or corporate executive to get an audience with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. But it doesn’t hurt.

Walker received contributions from employees or political action committees at more than half of the 130-plus companies that appear in his official calendars, according to an analysis by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.

These employees and PACs gave Walker at least $1.5 million since May 2009, just after he declared his candidacy for governor.

“Wisconsin is Open for Business,” the Republican governor proclaimed in a press release on the night he was elected. His calendars from January 2011 through January 2012 bear out this stance, revealing a steady stream of contacts with top company officials.

Walker’s spokesman, Cullen Werwie, said the governor’s calendars reflect his priorities.

“Gov. Walker has been working hard to encourage job creators to expand in Wisconsin,” Werwie said in an email interview. “It should be no surprise that those interested in creating jobs in Wisconsin would meet with the governor.”

Center reporters pored through more than 4,400 calendar entries during this 13-month period to tally Walker’s contacts.

The analysis suggested that big donors got more access. Three-quarters of all PACs that have given Walker at least $20,000 are associated with companies that show up on his calendar. In contrast, about a quarter of the PAC donors that gave under $20,000 are listed.

Companies and their executives appear in Walker’s calendars in jobs announcements, factory tours, check presentations, phone calls and private meetings — sometimes labeled “no media,” as with 3M and Caterpillar Inc.

The list includes many big businesses, such as Harley-Davidson, IBM, Northwestern Mutual, Johnsonville Sausage, Walgreens and Uline. No one company dominated Walker’s time: Leading the list, with four contacts, was Ashley Furniture, based in Arcadia, Wis.

“This governor has long been known as being pro-business, which led to business people giving money to his campaign,” said Joe Heim, a political science professor at UW-La Crosse. “Whether the money was related to the access remains to be seen.”

Heim noted that, according to the Center’s analysis, Walker hasn’t received campaign contributions from two-thirds of executives who spent time in person or on the phone with him.

“You can have access to the governor without contributing, to be blunt,” Heim said.

Mike McCabe, executive director of the nonpartisan watchdog Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, disagreed, noting that just 1 percent of the population contributes to political campaigns. He said Walker’s calendars lend credence to citizens who believe that “politics is just a rich person’s game, and you have to have a lot of money to have a voice.”

McCabe added that direct giving to candidates is only a small part of the cash that major players pump into campaigns, with much of the rest coming from outside special interests.

“I guarantee you that the numbers you describe understate the companies’ involvement,” he said.

Does money equal access?

Former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle was once billed as a participant in a “Meet and Greet” breakfast with the Dairy Business Association “exclusively for DBA members who have contributed to the DBA Conduit or Political Action Committee.”

In Walker’s calendars, the connection between money and access is never so explicit. And they rarely say what’s discussed.

For example, the calendars show Walker visiting roofing distributor ABC Supply Co. Inc. on Jan. 18, 2011, for a meeting of a Rock County economic development group.

Recently released video footage shows Walker at this meeting talking to Diane Hendricks, the company’s executive vice president, about his plan to curtail collective bargaining for public workers, which he described as the beginning of a “divide and conquer” strategy.

Hendricks later became Walker’s largest contributor. She gave Walker contributions at or near the maximum $10,000 limit in each of the last two election cycles, then last month wrote him a $500,000 check, taking advantage of a state law that removes the limit for officials facing recalls. Walker also met with Hendricks twice in April 2011, at least once in her capacity as a board member of WisconsinEye, the calendars show.

Another donor, John Bergstrom, who owns the state’s largest car dealership and has given Walker $4,000 since January 2010, received a call from Walker on Jan. 20, 2011, according to the calendars. It was the day after a state Senate committee introduced a bill at Walker’s request that would exempt a single parcel of land owned by Bergstrom from state wetlands rules. The exemption passed, in advance of a bill that eased restrictions on infilling of all wetlands.

Georgia Duerst-Lahti, a professor of political science at Beloit College who signed the Walker recall petition, said the governor’s meetings with corporations and donors “reflects the Republicans’ pro-business ideology, but also the governor’s astounding fundraising.”

Walker has raised more than $25 million since taking office. “How’s he going to raise that kind of money without courting corporations?” she asked.

Heim cited an example — Walker’s acceptance of a phone call in February 2011 from a blogger posing as billionaire supporter David Koch — to illustrate his belief that while money buys access, it does not always buy influence.

“Walker promised nothing,” Heim said. “It was simply a friendly conversation. I bet if I called, he wouldn’t answer. But access is not necessarily influence.”

Few union contacts

While the calendars documented many corporate encounters, the Center found scant evidence of contacts between Walker and organized labor. On April 21, 2011, Walker met with Terry McGowan and Robb Kahl of Local Operating Engineers 139, a union that endorsed Walker for governor and made $12,000 in PAC contributions to his campaign.

McGowan has since expressed discomfort with Walker’s remarks to Hendricks. The union is not endorsing a candidate in the current recall election.

Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s largest teachers union, confirmed that she spoke briefly with the governor on Feb. 9, 2011, as his calendar reflects. But Bell said the requested follow-up meeting never happened. She accused Walker of being more interested in “putting up a front than trying to work with us in a productive way.”

Spokesman Werwie declined to comment on why Walker has seldom met with union officials. But he did say the governor’s schedule “is set and based on how to best create private sector jobs in Wisconsin, which is why (he) met with private sector union representatives, who have largely been a partner in economic development.”

Walker faces Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett on June 5 in a nationally watched recall election.

This three-part series, The Walker Calendar Files, including an interactive graphic of calendar entries, is available at: wisconsinwatch .org /walkercalendars.

The nonprofit and nonpartisan Center (WisconsinWatch .org ) collaborates with Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio, other news media, MapLight and the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Works created, published, posted or disseminated by the Center do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or its affiliates.

About this story

2012-05-18T16:25:31-04:00

This story was reported by Kate Golden, Bill Lueders and Amy Karon for the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.

Ameritrade founder Ricketts' Nebraska contribution worries watchdogs

TD Ameritrade Holding Corporation — 2012-05-18T15:41:19-04:00

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s Republican U.S. Senate primary in Nebraska, campaign finance watchdogs are concerned about the role businessman Joe Ricketts played in helping underdog state Sen. Deb Fischer secure the GOP nomination.

Ricketts, the founder of the Omaha-based online brokerage firm TD Ameritrade, was behind a $250,000 last-minute super PAC ad buy designed to boost Fischer’s prospects in a three-way race that also featured frontrunner Jon Bruning, the state’s attorney general, and state Treasurer Don Stenberg, the favored candidate of the conservative Club for Growth and tea party-aligned Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.).

Thanks to this spending surge and an eleventh-hour endorsement from former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Fischer garnered more than twice as many votes as Stenberg — and beat Bruning by 5 percentage points. Her upset came after she raised only about one-eighth of Bruning’s $3.6 million haul.

If she prevails in November against Democrat Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska governor and U.S. senator, watchdogs worry Ricketts’ influence would be considerable.

“I don't think there is any doubt Ricketts will get more access to Fischer than regular Nebraskans,” said Adam Smith, communications director at Public Campaign. “This is about electing politicians that will benefit his bottom line and the TD Ameritrade lobbyists will know they have a likely champion if she's elected in November.”

This concern is echoed by Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, which, like Public Campaign, favors campaign finance regulations.

“Washington is responsive to the people who got them in power,” said McGehee. “You know the old saying, ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’? That’s the system we have.”

Ricketts’ super-sized contributions to a political group that ran ads advocating against Bruning and for Fischer are legally allowed in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling. Previously, individuals were limited to giving just $5,000 per year to groups that made “independent expenditures,” the Federal Election Commission’s term for messages that explicitly tell people to vote for or against a candidate.

In addition to being the long-time chairman and CEO of Ameritrade, Ricketts is the patriarch of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs Major League Baseball team, which is currently seeking government assistance to renovate its Wrigley Park stadium. (The team also recently benefited from $99 million from taxpayers in Mesa, Ariz., for a new spring training facility and 15,000-person stadium that will be “the western headquarters for the Chicago Cubs.”)

Nebraska’s primary marked the reemergence of the Ending Spending Action Fund, which had been dormant since the 2010 midterm elections. Ricketts is the sole individual donor to the group, having given more than $1.4 million. The conservative super PAC seeks to eliminate government spending that it deems wasteful and reduce the national debt.

Spokesmen for neither Ricketts nor the Ending Spending Action Fund responded to questions for this story.

Kim Hillyer, a spokeswoman for TD Ameritrade, stressed that Ricketts retired from the company’s board of directors last year and that his political activities were “independent of TD Ameritrade.”

Over the past decade or so, the extremely wealthy Ricketts has become increasingly active in his political giving, and he hopes to see a Republican prevail over President Barack Obama in November.

He made his first five-figure federal-level donation in 2004, when he gave $25,000 to the Republican National Committee — a group that has received more than $100,000 from Ricketts to date.

On Thursday, the New York Times linked Ricketts and the Ending Spending Action Fund to a controversial proposal to attack Obama for ties to Chicago minister Jeremiah Wright, who gained prominence during the 2008 presidential campaign for his charged sermons. (Brian Baker, the president of Ending Spending, has stressed that this proposal hasn’t been adopted and was “only a suggestion for a direction to take.”)

In this year’s presidential contest, Ricketts has taken the “anybody but Obama” mantra to heart. And with his checkbook, he has spread his loyalty.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty was the first GOP presidential candidate to win Ricketts’ financial support. But in December, after Pawlenty had bowed out, Ricketts doled out the legal maximum of $2,500 to all eight of the other major GOP candidates in the field — from frontrunner Mitt Romney, the now-presumptive nominee, to dark horse candidate Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor who has since been become the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee.

Notably, last December, Ricketts also gave $500,000 to the anti-incumbent super PAC known as the Campaign for Primary Accountability.

In all, records show Ricketts has given in excess of $2.4 million to more than five-dozen candidates, parties and political committees since 1999, according to Federal Election Commission records, and his wife has donated nearly $200,000.

These donations have overwhelmingly supported Republicans and conservative groups.

Attorney Stephen Hoersting, who co-founded the anti-regulatory Center for Competitive Politics, says the campaign finance reformers’ fears of Ricketts posing a threat of corruption — or having undue influence on a politician such as Fischer — are overblown.

A lawmaker, once elected, he argues, is “always more beholden to the voters who elected him or her.”

“No access Ricketts may have will be enough to persuade Fischer to get sideways with the voters who elected her,” he added. “Remember, there are super PACs on the other side waiting to scour her voting record, now and into the future.”

Former U.S. nuclear commander startles with proposal to cut weapons arsenal by 80%

United States — 2012-05-18T10:21:38-04:00

The chairman of a House subcommittee that helps shape the nation’s nuclear arsenal, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), has been scathing about the Obama administration’s consideration of new cuts in the arsenal’s size. A shift in U.S. targeting policy, now under White House review, “could border on disarmament and significantly diminish U.S. strength,” Turner complained in March. “Clearly, any further reductions will undermine the deterrent that has kept this country safe.”

Turner’s view has strong currency with Republicans in the House, and among some senior military officers at the Pentagon. But it got some politically interesting pushback this week from a former senior military officer, retired Marine Gen. James E. “Hoss” Cartwright. As head of the U.S. Strategic Command under President George W. Bush from 2004 to 2007, he oversaw the nuclear targeting plan and thousands of warheads atop missiles and inside long-range bombers.

Cartwright, who solidified a reputation for original thinking when he became vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2007 to Aug. 2011, startled his former uniformed colleagues again by urging in a new report that the existing American arsenal of 5000 warheads be cut by 80 percent, in an effort meant to be matched by similar reductions in the Russian arsenal.

Cartwright said the proposed cut would boost the credibility of U.S. nuclear non-proliferation efforts, allow the United States to trim its defense budget, and also bolster its security. “No sensible argument has been put forward for using nuclear weapons to solve any of the major 21st century problems we face,” said the report he signed, which was coordinated by former Minuteman missile officer Bruce Blair’s Global Zero project. The report was also endorsed by Richard Burt, a former arms negotiator under President George H.W. Bush, and by Thomas Pickering, Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations.

The report said that only by drastically cutting the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals – and in particular by eliminating all land-based, nuclear-tipped missiles — could the two countries vanquish long-held dreams or fears of a decapitating strike that would destroy leadership and inhibit a robust response. It added that the weapons should also be taken off a high-alert status, in which they are poised for launch on short notice; the purpose of this step, to be taken in conjunction with the reductions, would be to curtail the risk of an accidental launch that would have catastrophic consequence.

The report noted that due to orbital geometries. land-based missiles could not be used against targets in adversarial countries other than Russia and China without first overflying Russian and Chinese territory. (Even hitting Chinese territory from U.S. missile fields would require sending them over Russia, which Moscow would not regard kindly.)

Nuclear deterrence, the report asserted, “is no longer a cornerstone of the U.S-Russian security relationship” but is instead “driven largely by inertia and vested interests left over from the Cold War.” Cartwright’s argument, in short, was exactly the opposite of the Republican thesis that nuclear arms make the nation safer.

Cartwright’s decision to jump into the nuclear debate will enliven it considerably. The Obama administration, as it prepares for the election, has mostly been quiet about the conclusions of its targeting review. And the officials it has sent to Capitol Hill this spring backed new spending on the modernization of nuclear bombs – albeit not as much as the GOP wants – while saying that no decisions have been made yet on how low the arsenal should go.

The Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, told a Brookings Institution audience in Washington on Wednesday — when asked about the new report — that Cartwright “certainly has credibility.” But Schwartz nonetheless lashed out at his proposal to eliminate the existing force of 450 Minutemen missiles, now under Air Force control.

Schwartz said the plan “is far-fetched and introduces the likelihood of instability in the deterrence equation, which is not healthy.” Adopting an instructional tone, he said: “Here’s the reality: Why do we have a land-based deterrent force? It’s so that an adversary has to strike the homeland.”

Coming from a top U.S. military officer, that claim seems jarring; it makes clear he would be an obstacle to pursuing Cartwright's goals, if he was sticking around. But Schwartz is slated to retire a month before the election.

Cartwright’s report, as if anticipating criticism that a force of just 900 total warheads might leave the United States naked, spells out what it refers to as the “draconian” destruction that nuclear weapons planners could still threaten to wreak:

Russia: Weapons of Mass Destruction (325 warheads including 2-on-1 strikes against every missile silo), leadership command posts (110 warheads), war-supporting industry (136 warheads). Moscow alone would be covered by eighty (80) warheads.

China: WMD (85 warheads including 2-on-1 strikes against every missile silo), leadership command posts (33 warheads), war-supporting industry (136 warheads).

North Korea, Iran, Syria: Each country would be covered by forty (40) warheads.

Cartwright is not the first nuclear force commander to get a close look at the highly classified war plan and wind up as an advocate of much smaller nuclear arsenals. Two other former heads of the Strategic Command – Air Force Gen. George Lee Butler (1992-1994) and Air Force Gen. Eugene Habiger (1996-1998) — also endorsed substantial nuclear cuts.

Their views are not radical: A majority of the public finds merit in keeping nuclear arms and modernizing them, even while it is convinced the current arsenal is too large, according to a national survey conducted in April by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, in collaboration with the nonprofit Stimson Center and the Center for Public Integrity.

The survey, mostly about defense spending, found that a strong majority of those sampled favored a deep cut in the nuclear weapons budget as a way of helping to trim the national deficit.

As this year’s authorizing legislation for the Defense Department moves toward enactment, however, Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee have already embraced Schwartz’s view, not Cartwright’s. In a bit of pre-election bravado, they have been trying with unusual determination to turn their concern that U.S. nuclear arms aren’t getting enough love, and enough money, into federal law.

Acting partly at the instigation of Turner, a former Dayton mayor with a major Air Force base in his district, the committee’s majority has approved provisions that would bar arms reductions without more funding for the nuclear weapons complex; would require thousands of nuclear bombs to be held in reserve; and would bar the withdrawal of U.S. nuclear bombs from Europe without specific congressional approval. They also would force the Energy Department and the Defense Department to spend billions more on facilities meant to modernize and expand the country’s manufacturing capability for nuclear arms.

Defense contractors have been applauding the committee's support. As the Center for Public Integrity wrote in March, individuals working at the four biggest companies in the nuclear weapons launch business — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — and their corporate political action committees have given $1.89 million just to members of the House Armed Services Committee since the start of the Obama administration.

The White House has started to push back against the committee's decisions. In a statement late Tuesday, it said the president strongly objected to many of the provisions and warned that his top advisers will recommend a veto if the final version of the defense bill impinges on his ability to set nuclear policy and “to retire, dismantle, or eliminate non-deployed nuclear weapons.”

But the Republican-controlled House Rules Committee on Wednesday barred debate on many amendments by Democrats meant to challenge these policies, and so the die appears to be cast for a party-line House vote on the defense bill, then a larger struggle that involves first the Senate – over the summer — and eventually both parties and their presidential candidates.

“The nuclear weapons issue has been thought by many to be dead and forgotten, but it is once again a major question in Washington, especially on Capitol Hill, and could very well become a key foreign policy topic during the presidential campaign later this year,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association.

Massachusetts workers killed, injured at facilities touted as 'Model Workplaces'

Massachusetts,United States — 2012-05-18T06:00:01-04:00

As federal regulators review a controversial program exempting government designated “model workplaces” from regular safety checks, newly released U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration records detail significant safety risks, injuries and even deaths at the sites across Massachusetts.

OSHA, the federal overseer of workplace safety, has also allowed some Massachusetts employers to retain their “Voluntary Protection Program” (VPP) status even after serious safety problems have been exposed or workers have been killed, according to more than 1,000 documents obtained by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting under a federal Freedom of Information Act request.

The VPP designation frees employers from regular health and safety inspections, and they are largely left to police themselves, a flaw that has contributed to the death of at least two Massachusetts workers, some critics said.

“If you're a VPP program, that should never happen,” said James Lee, a trustee with the American Postal Workers Union Local 497 and a member of the OSHA investigating team that reviewed a horrific 2006 fatal accident at a U.S. Postal facility in Springfield, Mass.

“This would never have occurred if (OSHA) came in more frequently,” Lee said.

OSHA rarely strips VPP sites of their special status, even after violations are found or fatal tragedies occur, like the death of postal worker Robert J. Scanlon in Springfield and the 2004 death of a 34-year-old mother of three who was accidentally sucked into an adhesive coating machine at a Spencer, Mass., manufacturing firm, the OSHA documents show.

Currently 41 Massachusetts employers participate in the highly touted VPP program, including power, chemical and nuclear plants, military and postal facilities and biotechnology firms. Those worksites given the highest VPP rating are subject to OSHA re-evaluations every three to five years; those with lower ratings every 18 months to 2 years, according to the program guidelines.

GE Transportation Aircraft Engines in Lynn has maintained its VPP status, despite a $14,000 fine last year for failing to assess and document the condition of a covered piping system that exposed workers to explosion hazards, OSHA records show.

Workers at defense contractor Raytheon’s Andover plant, a VPP designee since 2009, were exposed to several electrical hazards that could have led to electrical shocks, burns or even death, OSHA inspectors found last year. The hazards were discovered within a year of Raytheon's disclosure in a 2010 company safety report that its Andover facility was one of three Raytheon plants among the company’s U.S. sites with the highest injury rate.

The release of the heavily redacted OSHA records comes in the wake of two recently announced federal reviews of the program, which started in 1982 to reward employers who “achieved exemplary occupational safety and health,” according to OSHA's program description.

More than 80 workers have died at VPP sites since 2000, according to an investigation published last year by the Washington D.C.-based Center for Public Integrity. Following the report, the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Inspector General announced an upcoming audit of the program. OSHA is also conducting its own “top-to-bottom” internal review.

In addition, the federal Government Accounting Office released a report last month faulting OSHA for failing to give clearer guidance to field inspectors about how safety incentive programs for employers like VPP should operate.

Despite numerous requests, OSHA officials did not respond to written questions or return phone calls seeking interviews with NECIR.

Fines slashed following safety violations, including a fatality

Despite at least six “serious” alleged violations — offenses that OSHA believes could cause death or serious injury — against VPP workplaces in Massachusetts since 2001, OSHA has slashed fines in almost all of those cases, including some by as much as 75 percent. Even after finding these problems, though, the agency either approved the site into the program or renewed its status, records show. The OSHA records provide no details about why the fines were reduced.

Laura Pacquette, a 34-year-old mother of three, had worked at FLEXcon, a plastic film and sheet manufacturer in Spencer, Mass., for nine years when she was accidentally pulled into an adhesive coating machine on Dec. 11, 2004. She died of crushing injuries two days later.

OSHA's investigation of the accident found FLEXcon failed to provide adequate guards on the equipment “to protect the operator and other employees from hazards created by a crushing action." The company later corrected the hazard and was fined $6,300, an amount reduced by OSHA to $5,800 just four months later.

FLEXcon was never dropped from the VPP program. Today, with no recorded OSHA violations since that incident, FLEXcon remains part of VPP, a shining example of what Michael Engel, the company's Chief Operating Officer, said in a press release announcing the firm's 15th year as a VPP participant was “proof of the outstanding dedication and commitment of FLEXcon employees in helping to create and maintain a safe and healthful working environment.”

Three other VPP companies in the Bay State — beverage maker Coca Cola in Northampton, defense contractor Raytheon in Andover and chemical manufacturer Solutia Inc. near Springfield — have each been cited for “serious” violations by OSHA since 2003.

All three were ordered to pay fines ranging from $2,275 to $22,000. OSHA later reduced those fines for Coca Cola and Raytheon, in one case by more than 75 percent. The three companies remain on OSHA's VPP list.

Danger and a death at Massachusetts postal facilities

Robert J. Scanlon was 58 when he was crushed to death on Nov. 8, 2006, after being pinned between a truck and a trailer at the Postal Service's Logistics and Distribution Center in Springfield. The now-closed facility was among the 130 postal sites across the country designated as VPP, the largest group of any employer in the U.S.

But before and after Scanlon’s death, there were concerns about safety at the Springfield worksite. Two months before Scanlon's deadly accident, OSHA cited that postal distribution center for two serious health and safety violations. A postal “clean up team” at that facility lacked adequate protective gear and were not properly trained in the use of a chlorine bleach solution when they were called in to mop up a chemical spill. Some of the employees suffered burns and dermatitis as a result of using inadequate protective gloves, OSHA records show. The postal service was fined $975 for those violations.

Two months after Scanlon's death, OSHA again cited the U.S. Postal Service, this time for failing to follow recognized safety practices in connection with the fatality. A $7,000 fine was also imposed. The fine was $3,786.33 below the $10,786.33 average amount assessed to employers in 2006 for safety violations resulting in death, according to a 2007 study conducted by The Massachusetts AFL-CIO, the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health and the Western Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health.

The study, titled “Dying for Work in Massachusetts: The Loss of Life and Limb in Massachusetts Workplaces,” also found that OSHA was so understaffed and underfunded, it would have taken about 117 years for OSHA inspectors to check each workplace under its jurisdiction in Massachusetts alone.

In the aftermath of Scanlon's death, OSHA found several health and safety violations, many of which likely existed beforehand. Among those violations was shoddy record keeping, inadequate employee training, poor lighting conditions, an improperly working intercom system and inadequate safety equipment, said Lee, the union official. Investigators also found that Scanlon was not using safety gear because the required orange vest and flashlight apparently had not been returned to its proper storage area, Lee said.

Scanlon's family did not return several calls requesting comment.

Lee is not alone in his criticism of the program. Other union representatives said the VPP program allows OSHA to exempt businesses from certain evaluations for up to five years, leaving a regulatory gap that can lead to lax safety.

“When VPP first started, the result was extremely positive,” said Timothy Dwyer, president of the National Postal Mail Handlers Union Local 301, rattling off a list of safety improvements that included the purchase of hydraulic equipment designed to lift heavy pallets or large mail-filled bins, easing the physical strain on mail handlers. Dwyer said the union embraced the VPP concept, convinced that it would bring more safety programs into the workplace.

Then several years ago, union officials had second thoughts. With fewer workplace checks by OSHA required under the VPP program, it started to look like safety was being compromised, they said. Regularly scheduled maintenance was being postponed due to budget cutbacks, worrying union officers concerned about accidents. Without the regular OSHA checks, they wondered if safety was being compromised. Soon, unions at the Springfield VPP facility began talking about getting rid of the elite safety program in favor of more conventional OSHA inspections.

“We thought it was a joke,” David Sarnacki, Local 497's maintenance craft director said of the VPP program. "We felt that after a fatality, why were we still part of this?”

It was the economy, rather than the union, however, that finally ended the Springfield facility's VPP program when budget cuts forced a merger with another postal center about two years ago.

Union officials claim they could see the impact cost-cutting measures were having on safety long before that merger as the postal service began grappling with billions of dollars in losses.

Machinery once quickly repaired was not undergoing regular maintenance while staff cuts along with increased demand for quicker mail processing was keeping malfunctioning machines in operation, Dwyer said.

“It's a matter of ignoring procedures because procedures cost money,” he noted. ”An adherence to safety issues is not a high priority for the Postal Service right now.”

Postal officials dispute that contention, however, saying employee health and safety remains a top priority. They declined further comment.

Yet postal workers said they continue to grapple with unsafe conditions, particularly around electrical issues.

Sally Davidow, spokeswoman for the American Postal Workers Union, said beginning in July 2010, OSHA fined the U.S. Postal service more than $6 million after finding that it willfully violated safety standards by exposing workers to serious and potentially fatal shock hazards and burns at 350 processing and distribution centers nationwide. It remains unclear how many of the 29 processing and distribution centers designated as VPP sites were among those plagued by electrical hazards, Davidow said.

Management and union views on VPP effectiveness

Yet despite those violations, many union and company representatives in Massachusetts said participation in the VPP program has made a safer workplace for everyone, provided that management and employees can work cooperatively with OSHA to solve safety issues.

Cindy Raspiller, director of environmental health and safety for Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems, including Raytheon's Andover facility, called participation in the VPP program “a transforming process” that has not only produced safer work conditions but also helped contribute to cost savings.

“We had a good, solid compliance program to begin with,” she said. ”What VPP did was take us beyond that.”

Yet just two years before entering the VPP program in 2009, Raytheon's Andover plant faced violations labeled “serious” by OSHA.

In February 2007, an employee at Raytheon's Andover facility lost his fingers while servicing a machine. Just four months later in June 2007, another employee at the same plant suffered burns to his face while uncapping a hot radiator on a lawnmower. Then, in 2009 after gaining VPP status, the Andover facility was cited again for exposing employees to electrical hazards.

Despite those violations, the question for some is not whether the VPP program works, but whether there is a commitment to make it work at all.

“You have to have a full commitment by management and labor to achieve safety,” said.

Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition of Occupational Safety and Health. ”Unless you have a strong union health and safety program, you end up with companies who portray themselves as safer than they naturally are or who are unable to identify the full range of health and safety issues.”

The New England Center for Investigative Reporting is a non-profit newsroom based at Boston University. This story was done in collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity and the Investigative News Network.

About this story

2012-05-17T18:19:10-04:00

This story was reported by Beverly Ford from the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. Read more about the New England Center here.

Calif. state senator wants 'roundtable' on school expulsions

Kern County,California,United States — 2012-05-17T17:51:12-04:00

The school expulsion capital of California, Kern County, continues to debate whether changes are needed to reduce the number of students that are removed.

In a May 7 opinion piece in the local Bakersfield Californian newspaper, California State Sen. Michael Rubio called for “an expulsion roundtable” to be held Friday at the Bakersfield City School District offices. Rubio’s piece touches on revelations in a Center for Public Integrity report published last December that included an analysis of California state discipline data for the 2010-2011 school year.

“According to the Center for Public Integrity,” Rubio, who wrote, “most expulsions in Kern County were actually discretionary to school district officials, such as for defiance of authority or using obscenity or vulgarity — not for "zero tolerance" violations, such as bringing a gun to school or selling controlled substances on campus.”

“Students who break a ‘zero tolerance’ rule should never be tolerated, but when relatively small Kern County is expelling more kids than huge Los Angeles County, our expulsion process should be closely examined,” said Rubio, who represents part of Kern. The county is in California’s Central Valley, and is an agricultural and oil-production center.

Rubio noted that minority students are “especially impacted.” As the Center reported in March, newly released federal data showed that black students at one high school in Bakersfield represented 15 percent of all student in 2009-2010, but 25 percent of those suspended and 29 percent of all expulsions. The statistics were collected by the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection from Kern’s schools and later analyzed.

“These alarming expulsion trends can be found at several schools in Kern County,” Rubio said, “so we must address this crisis head-on.”

As part of a solution, Rubio said he has co-authored a state bill that would require schools that suspend more than 25 percent of their student body or more than 25 percent of a specific minority group to enact a strategy to reverse that trend.

At least one teacher fired back at Rubio. David Richmond, a teacher at Arvin High School in Kern County, wrote a response to Rubio that was published by the Bakersfield Californian May 13.

“Although a significant majority of our students are sent to school with an understanding of basic social values, there is a significant minority that comes to school not ready or willing to learn,” Richmond wrote. “I can accept the ‘not ready,’ but I refuse, as a classroom teacher, to accept the ‘not willing.’"

“Public schools were not created to become baby sitters for lazy and indifferent students,” Richmond said. “However, if you look at the data, we spend an inordinate amount of money on 10 percent of the students who also take up significant time in the classroom.”

ALEC anti-union push includes key players from Michigan, Arizona think tanks

Michigan,United States — 2012-05-17T08:47:11-04:00

The American Legislative Exchange Council, which backs free-market legislation in the states, has been controversial in part because its membership includes major corporations as well as state legislators. Largely unnoticed has been the influence wielded by a third group of ALEC members: state-based think tanks. Two of those think tanks took center stage at last weekend’s ALEC Task Force Summit in Charlotte.

The Arizona-based Goldwater Institute and the Michigan-based Mackinac Center between them successfully shepherded five model bills through ALEC’s Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development Task force — all targeting public sector unions.

Goldwater representative Byron Schlomach introduced two bills, one requiring that public employees approve their state employer’s automatic deduction of union dues from paychecks every year. Another would prohibit union officials from taking paid leave from public sector jobs to perform union duties.

Michigan’s Mackinac Center sent labor policy analyst Paul Kersey to introduce three more bills targeting unions. One of those model bills is already Michigan law, requiring public sector unions to make audits of their financial activities public. Another Mackinac proposal would require public sector union members to vote on their union membership every three to five years, and a third would make it easier for public and private employees to decertify their union.

Members of the commerce task force confirmed that the five union bills were approved in Charlotte and will become ALEC model legislation if ALEC’s board of directors does not initiate a formal review of the bills within 30 days. ALEC will then likely encourage its member legislators to introduce the model bills back in their home states. Since its founding in 1973, ALEC has successfully pushed hundreds of state-based laws. According to the ALEC website, legislators introduce nearly 1,000 bills each year that are based on ALEC model legislation, and 20 percent of them become law.

Documents released by the left-leaning group Common Cause ahead of the Charlotte meeting offered an unprecedented look at the ALEC agenda. Amid heightened scrutiny, ALEC restricted press access and shortened the summit to one day. ALEC did not return calls requesting information.

A history of influence

Dozens of state-based think tanks, many of them part of a Heritage Foundation-affiliated umbrella group called the State Policy Network, have long held sway within ALEC.

“A very large proportion of the bills are sponsored by these think tanks,” says Nick Surgey, a legal associate at D.C.-based Common Cause, which claims ALEC is actually a lobbying group, not a charity. “But behind that next layer is another set of unknowns about who is pushing the think tanks’ agenda.”

Some, but not all, of Goldwater and Mackinac’s financial supporters have been revealed. In 2010, the last year for which information is available, the organizations had budgets of approximately $3.5 million each, which have been supported with grants from the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the State Policy Network — groups that also fund ALEC.

Goldwater and Mackinac are both part of the State Policy Network, which is headquartered in Arlington, Va., and boasts 59 member organizations across all fifty states. The network was founded in 1992 “at the urging of Ronald Reagan,” according to its website. The policy group is a sponsor of ALEC events and also made grants to 18 free-market organizations in 2010, including $25,000 to the Mackinac Center. In 2008, it gave $50,000 to Mackinac, and $30,000 to Goldwater.

Together, Goldwater and Mackinac draw money from twelve of the same conservative foundations, according to analysis by Media Matters Action Network.

State laboratories

Before the union bills were approved at ALEC’s conference last weekend, some of them were sponsored in the Arizona and Michigan legislatures by ALEC members.

“Arizona is a petri dish for extreme legislation,” says John Loredo, a former House minority leader there.

The Arizona legislature has one of the largest contingents of ALEC legislators in the country. The last eight Arizona Senate presidents have carried the ALEC membership card, including former Sen. Russell Pearce, who sponsored the state’s SB 1070 on immigration, which later became ALEC model legislation and is currently under review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Phoenix-based Goldwater advocated for a package of bills sponsored by ALEC member Sen. Rick Murphy, R-Glendale, targeting public sector unions in the last legislative session, which ended May 3. The bills included the two introduced by Goldwater at ALEC to prohibit paid union leave and require employees to authorize annually automatic deduction of dues from their paychecks.

None of the bills, though, became law in Arizona. Unions and Goldwater squared off in testimony while the legislature considered the union bills. The think tank’s Nick Dranias said “collective bargaining laws threaten the very foundation of our republic,” in the Senate committee’s hearing on SB 1485, which would have ended bargaining for public employees. The committee agreed, recommending the bill for passage, but it did not come to a vote before the full legislature.

“We believe these bills are just a balancing measure,” said Goldwater President Darcy Olsen. “It doesn’t take away the voice of public employees, it just puts them on a par with the rest of the taxpaying citizens of Arizona.”

A separate bill to restructure hiring and firing practices for public sector workers did become law in May after Gov. Jan Brewer vowed to make it a legislative priority at a Scottsdale ALEC summit in 2011. Sponsored by an ALEC legislator, Rep. Justin Olson, R-Mesa, the law allows state employers to fire public sector employees “at-will,” leaving them no appeals for termination.

Sheri Van Horsen, President of AFSCME Local 3111, said the state’s unions are considering a legal challenge or ballot referendum to overturn the law. Because it exempts public safety unions, Van Horsen argues that it is unconstitutional under the equal protection clause.

Of the three model bills that Mackinac’s Kersey introduced at ALEC, only one has become law in Michigan — a provision requiring every union to post an audit of its financial activity online. The other two bills have not been introduced in the Michigan legislature.

Kersey says his model bill, the “Election Accountability for Municipal Employees Act,” would set up a schedule by which public sector employees vote on unionization every three to five years, and would require a majority of all eligible members — not just voting members — to maintain union representation.

The other bill Kersey introduced as model legislation would alter the requirement that at least 30 percent of workers in a bargaining unit approve a petition to vote on ending union representation. Kersey’s model bill would lower that requirement to 10 percent of a bargaining unit’s members and would apply to public- and private-sector unions.

The Midland-based Mackinac Center has played a central role in pushing the GOP-controlled legislature to outlaw collective bargaining for public unions, supporting Gov. Rick Snyder’s year-old “Emergency Manager” law, which has ended public sector bargaining in several cities where the state has appointed a manager. The emergency manager in Pontiac, Mich., a former Mackinac Center adviser, abrogated city contracts with police and firefighters unions last year.

Mackinac also backed Gov. Snyder’s signing of a law in March to prohibit automatic union dues collection for school employees in the state. Four of Michigan’s public sector unions filed an April lawsuit in federal court to reverse the law, claiming it unfairly singles out school employees’ unions, including the powerful Michigan Education Association. The unions also claim the law is “retribution for political speech.” Gov. Snyder signed the law just days after labor’s announcement of a ballot initiative to enshrine collective bargaining in the state constitution.

Lobbying status

The Mackinac and Goldwater centers have faced challenges from state officials, mirroring liberal groups’ national efforts to hold ALEC accountable for lobbying. Common Cause filed a April 20 whistleblower complaint with the IRS, calling on the free-market group, which files as a 501(c)(3) public charity, to register as a lobbyist and disclose how much it spends advocating legislation.

The state-based think tanks are also under scrutiny for frequent correspondence with legislators and testimony at state capitols, and for drafting model bills like the ones both groups brought to ALEC last weekend.

Arizona’s secretary of state sent Goldwater letters asking the think tank to register last year. “We believe you’re lobbying, you should sign up,” Assistant Secretary of State Jim Drake told The Arizona Republic in January.

“I know people look at us and say this must be coordinated effort,” says Goldwater’s Olsen, “That is not how we operate. We’re not a lobbying organization, we’re not doing guerrilla warfare — we’re a think tank.”

Following the letters from the state, however, Goldwater did register some of its representatives as lobbyists.

Olsen notes that the organization wrote the language for a ballot initiative to outlaw card check and institute secret ballot elections for unions — which passed in 2010. Goldwater’s lawyers have joined Arizona in defending the law against a lawsuit brought by the National Labor Relations Board.

Michigan Democratic Congressman Sander Levin asked the IRS in March to review the Mackinac Center’s advocacy role, and evaluate whether indeed it should retain its tax-exempt, public-charity status — which, under IRS rules, allows only limited lobbying.

Levin referenced a number of e-mails in which Mackinac advisers gave state lawmakers detailed advice on legislation that would cap the state’s health care payments to Michigan public sector employees. The e-mails concluded with a message from Mackinac’s Senior Legislative Analyst Jack McHugh, who wrote to Republican ALEC legislator Tom McMillin that “Our goal is to outlaw government collective bargaining in Michigan.”

IRS officials told Levin’s office they would have a closer look at Mackinac’s tax status. In April, the think tank denied wrongdoing. “We are 100 percent confident that we have complied with all laws pertaining to our 501(c)3 status,” Mackinac’s Michael Jahr told the Lansing-area Daily Press & Argus.

Levin’s letter notes that Mackinac Center answered “no” to the question of whether it had engaged in lobbying on its 2010 filing with the IRS. “I am concerned about the response to this question,” he wrote.

U.S. arms Bahrain, despite human rights concerns

Bahrain — 2012-05-16T14:16:37-04:00

While much of the world’s focus has been on the civil war in Syria, the island kingdom of Bahrain continues to shake with anti-government protests that started in last year’s “Arab Spring.” While it has received less attention, human rights groups have documented ongoing government abuses.

Those concerns were enough to put a halt on a weapons sale from the U.S. to Bahrain last fall, but the Obama administration announced last Friday that it has decided to proceed with the sale, despite the ongoing upheaval and protests from both Congress and human rights groups.

“Bahrain is an important security partner and ally in a region facing enormous challenges,” wrote Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Nuland in an official statement announcing the sales. “Maintaining our and our partners’ ability to respond to these challenges is a critical component of our commitment to Gulf security.”

In a nod to the human rights concerns, the Pentagon said the weapons being sold to Bahrain will not include anything that could be used against protestors. Instead, it would be a package of equipment geared towards protecting the country from external threats, including engines for F-16 planes and harbor security boats.

“Sales of items that are sort of predominantly or typically used by police and other security forces for internal security, things used for crowd control, we’re not moving forward with at this time,” said an unnamed administration official on a conference call last Friday. “That would include things like tear gas, tear gas launchers, stun grenades – those sorts of things.”

In December, the Center for Public Integrity reported on concerns from the Government Accountability Office that equipment such as night vision goggles could be used by security forces to crack down on protests. The report also raised questions about how the State department often fails to investigate past abuses from foreign security forces slated to receive military technology, which can increase “the risk that [U.S.-funded] equipment may ultimately be used by violators of human rights.”

A $53 million sale was initially announced last fall, but was frozen in October while the U.S. waited to see improvements on the human rights situation. The administration has declined to disclose a total list of what materials will be sold to Bahrain, or how much the new package will cost.

Bahrain is a major strategic partner for the U.S. The island nation received $80.4 million in military financing from the U.S. between 2005 and 2010 and is home to a 60-acre U.S. naval base which houses the U.S. Fifth Fleet. The fleet patrols the waters of the Middle East and is responsible for making sure the Strait of Hormuz, which a significant portion of the world’s oil passes through, remains open. The fleet would also be a first line of defense against any aggressive moves from Iran.

The protests have largely been driven by a rift between Bahrain’s Sunni ruling family and its majority Shi’ite population, but have been exacerbated by human rights abuses suffered by protestors at the hands of government forces. In November, an independent panel formed by the Bahrani government issued a report detailing a number of abuses, including commonplace torture in police stations such as electrocution and threats of rape. In response to the report, the government promised to reform its internal security forces — something that has yet to happen, according to experts.

Human Rights Watch released a report in late April documenting ongoing abuses in the island nation. The group acknowledges that changes have been made, like putting cameras throughout police stations to record abuses, but found that the torture has simply moved outside the police station. In one case the group interviewed two teenage boys who were taken to an empty lot and beaten severely.

“The situation has not improved very much,” Joe Stork, Deputy Director for Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division, said in an interview. What improvements have occurred have been mostly cosmetic, “not a basic behavior change,” he says.

Stork believes the Obama administration cares about the human rights issue, but feels that political concerns trumped concerns over abuses. “To be meeting a Bahranian request for certain kinds of arms is a bad move in our view,” he says.

At least two leading Democrats in Congress agree the arms deal is a bad idea. “The U.S. and the Government of Bahrain share strategic interests, but if history has taught us anything, this is a time to demonstrate our unambiguous support for the aspirations of the Bahraini people for greater political freedom,” wrote Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) in a statement released Friday. The author of the so-called Leahy Law, which attempts to prohibit arms sales to foreign security forces facing human rights concerns, added that the deal “sends the wrong message.”

“This is exactly the wrong time to be selling arms to the government of Bahrain,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) added in a separate statement. Last October, Wyden introduced legislation to block arms sales to the country. “Reform is the ultimate goal and we should be using every tool and every bit of leverage we have to achieve that goal. The State department’s decision is essentially giving away the store without the government of Bahrain bringing anything to the table.”

The controversy may continue for some time. Stork says he expects the protests to continue. Protestors “feel betrayed they feel sick and tired of having their demands ignored,” he says. “I don’t see this ending, and I don’t think the government is capable of putting it down.”

Education Department issues guidelines for restraining, isolating disruptive students

2012-05-16T09:23:50-04:00

In response to simmering concerns over reported abuses, the U.S. Department of Education issued multiple guidelines Tuesday for how schools can avoid going overboard in restraining or isolating disruptive students.

“As education leaders, our first responsibility must be to make sure that schools foster learning in a safe environment for all of our children and teachers,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement accompanying the release of “Restraint and Seclusion: Resource Document.”

“I believe this document is an important step toward this goal. I also want to salute leaders in Congress for their vigilance on this issue,” Duncan said.

Duncan said 15 principles described in the document “come down to common sense.” He called on districts and schools to consider incorporating them into written policies that make standards clear to staff and parents.

The department’s guidelines state that restraint or seclusion should never be used as punishment, and should never be used at all unless a child’s behavior poses behavior poses “imminent danger” of serious physical harm to the child or others. The principles also warn that such policies should apply to all students, not just disabled children, and that parents and staff should be informed of policies. In addition, parents should be immediately told when a child has been subject to restraint or seclusion.

Congress has wrestled over whether to adopt national standards for secluding students in rooms alone, or restraining students, which can be defined as staff holding down children or restraining them with straps or other devices.

Although the House of Representatives passed a bill with national standards in 2010, the Senate failed to consider legislation on the floor. A similar 2011 measure went nowhere. Divisions among disabled rights groups and arguments over whether states should be left to set standards led to a stalemate.

At least 13 states do not have standards or regulations, according to detailed charts included in the Department of Education’s document. .

Ordered by Congress to investigate allegations of abuse, the U.S. Government Accountability Office in 2009 found “hundreds of cases of alleged abuse and death related to the use of these methods on school children during the past two decades.”

“Examples of these cases,” the GAO said, “include a 7-year-old purportedly dying after being held face down for hours by school staff, 5-year-olds allegedly being tied to chairs with bungee cords and duct tape by their teacher and suffering broken arms and bloody noses, and a 13-year- old reportedly hanging himself in a seclusion room after prolonged confinement.”

Teachers and staff were often found to be untrained in restraint or seclusion methods, and some who committed abuses continued to be employed in the field of education later, the GAO investigation also found.

After the 2010 stalemate in Congress, a Washington, D.C.-based group called TASH, which promotes equal treatment for the disabled, issued its own roundup of news reports of alleged abuses in a report called “The Cost of Waiting.”

In March of this year, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights released analysis of the first-ever detailed collection of schools’ reports of students being restrained or put into isolated rooms. The data required by the department was included in its 2009-2010 Civil Rights Data Collection.

After analyzing it, the civil rights office found that students with disabilities were only 12 percent of the sample but nearly 70 percent of kids restrained by adults at school. Black students were 21 percent of students identified as disabled under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, but they were 44 percent of disabled students who were restrained.

Data also showed that Hispanic students who were not disabled were subject disproportionately to isolation. While comprising 24 percent of students without disabilities, Hispanics were 42 percent, of those subjected to seclusion.

Wisconsin Gov. Walker’s conservative media appearances pay off as he raises millions from out-of-state donors

Wisconsin,United States — 2012-05-18T16:23:01-04:00

On Nov. 10, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker gave the keynote address at the annual dinner of the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank in Phoenix with ties to the powerful, corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council.

“Tonight, you might say I’m preaching to the choir with a bunch of fellow conservatives,” Walker, the son of a minister, told more than 1,000 supporters that night. “I preach to the choir because I want the choir to sing. So tonight I’m asking you to sing.”

His message: Spread the word “in Arizona and all across America that we can do things better.”

The high-profile event was no anomaly. Two days later, Walker addressed students at a conference at the Reagan Ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif., where he was billed as one of America’s “top conservative leaders.”

Walker’s official calendars from his first 13 months in office chronicle these and scores more hours he spent building credentials with conservatives in Wisconsin and across the nation.

The governor granted more interview time to the national, conservative-leaning Fox News cable channel than any other media outlet — nearly twice as much as to his hometown newspaper, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which had endorsed him in 2010.

Walker’s spokesman, Cullen Werwie, said the governor “has multiple media availabilities every week where he is available to answer questions from any legitimate news organization who chooses to attend, liberal or conservative.”

Last fall and winter, Walker halved his overall work schedule, but his PR time hardly changed even as he raised unprecedented millions in response to a recall campaign. Since taking office in January 2011, he has raised more than $25 million -- more than half from other states.

Prime time for conservative hosts

Fox News isn’t the only conservative-leaning outlet Walker favors. Charlie Sykes, a radio host of Milwaukee’s WTMJ, was scheduled for more interview time with Walker than any other media professional in his first 13 months in office. Sykes donated $500 to Walker’s 2010 campaign, records show.

However, Mike Gousha, a television news anchor of Milwaukee’s WISN whose work long has been respected by conservatives and liberals alike, was scheduled for nearly as much time as was Sykes.

Conservative-leaning Vicki McKenna, a radio host on Madison’s WIBA, accrued the third-most time with Walker.

Overall, five of the seven radio and TV talk show hosts with whom Walker spent the most media time are conservatives. (The seventh, Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, has said her stance “depends on the issue.”)

Sykes and McKenna didn’t respond to emails seeking comment.

Walker’s time with media was tallied using a database the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism created from Walker’s calendars.

Katherine Cramer Walsh, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the Center’s findings matched her own assessment of Walker’s strategy: “To shore up his base, spend time with his supporters, and not necessarily build bridges, compromise or reach out to opponents.”

Although politically charged radio hosts such as Sykes and McKenna are popular, their programs are heard by a relatively small slice of the population, said Michael J. Flaherty, who runs a Madison public relations firm and is a former Capitol reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal.

“Most folks don't listen to these people, but the folks who do tend to be fairly loud voices in their local communities,” Flaherty added. “It may look like the governor is talking only to himself half the time. But he’s reinforcing a message that has been multiplied many, many times by these storytellers.”

Walker faces Democrat Tom Barrett, mayor of Milwaukee, in a nationally watched election on June 5.

Distant with liberal media

During Walker’s first 13 months in office, he appeared at numerous press conferences, scheduled nearly 200 hours with media and granted interviews to at least 115 outlets. But not all media outlets had easy access to the governor.

“Gov. Walker skips interviews, does NYC fundraiser,” read a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel headline in January 2012 after a reporter was denied an interview. Walker was fundraising at the time for his recall election alongside Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, the founder of financial services giant American International Group.

Liberal-leaning media, such as Madison’s The Capital Times newspaper and The Progressive Magazine, attended Walker’s press conferences. But they weren’t scheduled for interviews, his calendars show.

Capital Times Editor Paul Fanlund said in one instance this winter when the governor was scheduling year-end interviews with many news media outlets — a common practice — Walker seemed to single out his paper for rejection. Fanlund said Werwie told a reporter that “he personally didn’t like our editorial about his role in the John Doe investigation and he didn’t think Walker would gain anything by talking with us.”

Werwie responded by email that it was “completely absurd” to cover a single denial and supplied four rejections to a Fox News producer. “I turn down tons of requests for interviews,” Werwie said, adding that the governor has rejected media requests from “across the ideological spectrum.”

Dean Pagani, a former press secretary for Republican Gov. John Rowland of Connecticut who now covers gubernatorial issues at GovernorsJournal.com, said he wasn’t surprised Walker didn’t “waste time” talking to people he’s unlikely to persuade.

“When I was (a press officer), our job was to get as much press as possible, regardless of who was asking the question,” he said. But now, “the press secretaries are much more protective, and they want to know where you’re coming from before they let you talk to their governor.”

Governor on the go

In a single day last November, Walker flew to Wausau for a jobs announcement, hopped to La Crosse to sign two economic bills, gave a radio address and headed to his home near Milwaukee, where he gave a Fox & Friends interview the next morning.

His calendars highlight what political scientists call a key political strategy — a constant public-relations focus in a 24-hour news world.

“Scott Walker is a modern politician,” said Geoffrey Skelley, political analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “He spends a lot of time in transit, doing public relations events, talking to people and trying to promote his agenda.

“As the population gets larger and people feel less connected to government officials, it’s a way to seem like you're still in touch with the people who put you in office,” Skelley said.

Walker spent about 530 hours on PR work. His top priority appeared to be his jobs agenda, at about one-fifth of that time, according to the Center’s analysis. Time spent networking with his base and with other politicians came in second.

During his first year in office, Walker visited at least two-thirds of Wisconsin’s counties and 12 other states, plus Washington, D.C. But he bypassed much of the northern third of Wisconsin.

Spokesman Werwie said, “While some counties are harder than others to visit given his hectic schedule, (Walker) has made it a priority to regularly have events and grant media interviews in all areas of the state.”

Pagani said Walker has leveraged his national attention well. If he wins the recall election, he’ll be a conservative hero. If he loses, he’ll be a martyr who can “travel the country saying, ‘I fought the good fight.’ ”

Explore interactive graphics of the governor’s calendars at www.wisconsinwatch.org/walkercalendars.

Coming Sunday, May 20: Who got access to Walker?

Super PAC cash plays big role in Nebraska Senate race

Nebraska,United States — 2012-05-15T19:10:46-04:00

For the second time in two weeks, super PACs will play a major role in determining the outcome of a U.S. Senate primary contest.

Republican Jon Bruning, Nebraska’s attorney general, was expected to win in a cakewalk for the seat, soon to be vacated by retiring Sen. Ben Nelson, a Democrat. Instead, two underfunded insurgent candidates — Don Stenberg and Deb Fischer — are giving him a run for his money, thanks in large part to a handful of outside groups.

Bruning has the fundraising advantage, having raised more than $3.6 million for his campaign. Stenberg has raised about $750,000, while Fischer has raised less than $440,000 for the race, including $35,000 of her own money.

But heading into today’s primary, conservative outside groups have spent more than $2 million on advertising, according to Federal Election Commission records, with nearly $1 million going toward ads attacking Bruning. The ads appear to have been effective — Bruning’s numbers have slipped, according to recent polls.

“This is an unusual amount of spending for a Nebraska primary,” said Michael Wagner, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “I don’t think the Bruning campaign foresaw this.”

Last week, outside groups led by the conservative Club for Growth spent millions in the GOP U.S. Senate primary election in Indiana, where six-term incumbent Sen. Richard Lugar lost to Richard Mourdock, a tea party favorite.

The Club is again flexing its muscles in Nebraska, where it supports Stenberg. So far, its super PAC, called Club for Growth Action, has reported spending more than $714,000 opposing Bruning, mostly on radio and TV ads.

Only Sen. Jim DeMint’s leadership PAC, known as the Senate Conservatives Fund, has spent more on independent expenditures. DeMint’s group has invested more than $947,000 on messages touting Stenberg.

But while polls show that Bruning’s standing has fallen, Stenberg hasn’t experienced a boon. Instead, Fischer, who was endorsed by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin last week, has seen a last-minute surge.

“The top two contenders spent a lot of time bloodying each other up, leaving the door open to an alternative who wasn’t bloodied up yet,” said Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, chair of the political science department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “The timing of the pro-Fischer spending couldn’t have been better.”

Since Friday, the Ending Spending Action Fund, a conservative super PAC, has spent more than $250,000 on a pair of last-minute ads designed to help Fischer across the finish line.

One ad, entitled, “Him: Anyone but Bruning,” plays ominous music as money rains down behind a picture of Bruning, who is accused of getting rich while in office. The other, entitled, “Her: Rancher, Mother, Leader,” plays more upbeat music and urges viewers to “surprise the world” and vote for Fischer, who is described as “conservative outsider” and “one of us.”

The super PAC — along with its sister nonprofit group, Ending Spending, Inc., which is organized under section 501(c)(4) of the U.S. tax code — advocate for decreasing government spending, balancing the budget and reducing the federal debt.

Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010 and a lower court ruling, super PACs like the Ending Spending Action Fund can accept unlimited contributions and pay for ads that advocate for the election or defeat of federal candidates.

The ads cannot be coordinated with the candidates they support.

The Ending Spending Action Fund has reported raising about $1.2 million through March, when it filed its most recent campaign finance report. At that time, the super PAC had less than $2,000 cash on hand.

Joe Ricketts, the founder of the financial services giant now known as TD Ameritrade, is the super PAC’s sole individual donor. (Ending Spending, Inc., where Ricketts is the chairman and CEO, is the sole organizational contributor and has donated about $21,000 in “legal services.”)

Ricketts — a native of Nebraska who now lives in Little Jackson Hole, Wyo. — could not be reached for comment. But Brian Baker, the president of Ending Spending, confirmed that Ricketts was behind the cash boost that allowed the super PAC to play a role in the Nebraska Senate contest on Fischer’s side.

“We think she will be the strongest general election candidate,” Baker said, adding that Fischer was surging in the polls “well before we decided to place any ads.”

Baker declined to discuss if the Ending Spending Action Fund would continue to invest money in the race if Fischer loses the primary.

The winner is expected to face former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey, the one-time governor of Nebraska, who is expected to be a formidable foe.

Wagner, of the University of Nebraska, predicted that outside groups will continue to be a significant force in the general election, especially in states with competitive U.S. Senate races. Republicans hope to win control of the Senate this November.

“This is the tip of iceberg for what the fall will bring,” Wagner said.

Another $250 million drink for missile defenses

United States — 2012-05-16T10:50:35-04:00

The talk of the defense world is the budget — specifically, how to shrink it and what will be cut, due to Congressional wrangling or the looming “sequestration”. Given the new austerity pressures, it’s noteworthy that a costly program targeted for cancellation by both the administration and the Congress has gotten a new government check for a quarter of a billion dollars — and, if the Pentagon gets its wish, will get another $400 million soon.

But that’s what happened with the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS), a putative replacement for the Patriot missile defense system. It has been plagued with so many cost overruns and delays that DoD and Congress both agreed last year to pull the plug — although conflict remains over the timetable.

The Pentagon decided to keep paying until the program attained a “proof of concept,” a status that falls well short of production and deployment but would in theory allow the U.S. or its foreign partners to restart the project later if they chose. DoD requested a total of $804 million over 2012 and 2013. But Congress disagreed, and agreed to fund only the first year.

Two developments have brought MEADS back into the news. The first was the Pentagon’s contractual payment of another $250 million for the project to finish the first year (hat tip to Tony Capaccio and Roxana Tiron of Bloomberg News for reporting this). In addition, the Pentagon has now asked again for another $400 million to finance the second year of work, setting off renewed objections from lawmakers opposed to pouring more funds into a weapon system unlikely to play a real-life role. The House Armed Services Committee has in fact rejected additional funding for the program, a decision that evoked strong objections from the White House in a statement Tuesday evening.

Pentagon officials have said a key reason for keeping the program going is help project partners Germany and Italy, providing “a meaningful capability” for them and “a possible future option for the U.S.” Since the project began in 1995, the U.S. has contributed 58 percent of the funds, while Germany provided 25 percent and Italy 17 percent. The venture is led by Lockheed Martin, in collaboration with a German firm, LFK-Lenkflugkörpersysteme, and the international MBDA-Systems Inc.

A spokesperson for the Pentagon did not return a request for comment, but Frank Kendall, the acting under secretary for acquisition, defended the costs at a March hearing as “not just a contract” but rather “an agreement with two of our … closest international partners.” The White House statement said cancelling it "would be perceived...as breaking our commitment...and could harm our relationship with our allies on a much broader basis." It also could inhibit the harvesting of technology from the program to use elsewhere, the statement said.

Kendall's argument at the hearing did not hold much water with Senator Mark Begich (D-AK), who acknowledged the importance of good international relations, but asked why “we are paying the tab” for “a system we are not really going to use fully.”

Begich and Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) earlier called for the program to be cancelled before the proof of concept phase has ended. “The Department of Defense has stated that it does not intend to procure MEADS,” the senators wrote in a March letter. “Facing a serious fiscal crisis, we cannot afford to spend a single additional dollar on a weapons system such as MEADS that our warfighters will never use.”

A request for comment from Lockheed, a main MEADS contractor, was not returned. But their homepage contains a number of press releases defending the project, including an editorial from retired Maj. Gen. James Cravens, a former Commandant of the Air Defense Artillery School hired by Lockheed in 2004. He denies a cost overrun and scoffs at the idea that Patriot systems, produced by both Lockheed and rival Raytheon Corporation, are enough to protect troops.

“Today’s threats have outgrown the Patriot missile-defense system — just ask a soldier,” writes Cravens, who says upgrading the Patriot is a bad investment “because of its Cold War architecture and technology limitations.” (There has been speculation that technology developed for the MEADS project could be used to upgrade the Patriot.)

Unlike the Patriot system, widely deployed around the globe by both the U.S. and other countries, MEADS was supposed to be more mobile and be able to target missiles coming from all directions. According to the MEADS contractor website, the new system would cover “eight times” the range of the Patriot missile defense systems, with a focus of targeting low to medium altitude missiles, drones and other airborne vehicles and weapons.

Initially projected to cost $3.4 billion to develop, a 2011 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report put the total cost of procuring the 48 systems at $16.5 billion, almost five times the initial projection. The report said the project was “at risk of not meeting several technical performance measures, including assembly, disassembly, and emplacement times, especially in extreme temperatures.”

The report went on: “Requirements satisfaction, software maturity, and cost growth continue to be concerns” among Pentagon officials. in addition, the vehicles used to move the launchers failed to “meet all NATO road requirements, putting their ability to be deployed in question.” Its problems were not constrained to hardware — “the battle management software is delayed and the multifunction radar still faces hardware challenges,” according to a more recent GAO report.

Critics have also depicted the program, conceived in the wake of the Cold War and the first Gulf War, as unnecessary. Thomas Collina, research director of the Arms Control Association, said a number of short-range missile defense systems are already working, including the Patriot land based systems and SM-3 launchers equipped on sea-faring vessels. “If you’re looking to cut budgets, [MEADS] is an obvious target. ... It’s redundant, over-budget and hasn’t met performance expectations,” Collina said.

New GOP super PAC aimed at attracting youth vote

2012-05-14T16:28:50-04:00

Three Republican groups have formed a super PAC called “Crossroads Generation” and given it $750,000 in seed money in an attempt to attract the youth vote, a population that has traditionally eluded the GOP.

Announced Monday, the group was created by the American Crossroads super PAC, the College Republican National Committee and the Young Republican National Federation. Each of the three groups gave $250,000.

The organization says it wants to bring in young voters disillusioned by high unemployment and the national debt.

“Crossroads Generation aims to give a voice to a generation of Americans who are much worse off than they were four years ago,” said Derek Flowers, formerly of the Republican National Committee, who serves as the group’s executive director.

The Republican Party has not done well lately attracting young voters.

In 2008, young Americans favored Barack Obama by a two-to-one margin. Youth voters tend to favor Democratic presidential candidates over Republican candidates, though the gap was unusually large in 2008. Since 1992, the majority of voters ages 18 to 29 have voted Democrat in presidential elections, according to Surbhi Godsay, a researcher at the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), a research center based at Tufts University.

American Crossroads has raised $28 million for the 2012 election for spending on Republican candidates. The group was created by Republican operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie. Super PACs can raise unlimited funds from wealthy individuals, corporations and labor unions to spend on advertising.

The other two founding groups report a membership of 350,000.

The super PAC debuted a website along with a Facebook page and Twitter handle. Monday, it launched a $50,000 online campaign with ad buys in eight states targeted at young swing voters. It also plans to take advantage of the College Republican group’s presence on 1,800 campuses to promote its message.

Branded, “XG,” the splashy website asks, “Are you part of the Crossroads Generation?” and invites visitors to upload videos, photos and text stories about what it’s like being a young person in today’s economic environment.

As of late Monday, the Federal Election Commission had not posted a record of the group’s registration.

OPINION: Palin's rhetoric torpedoed Medicare savings

2012-05-14T12:37:38-04:00

We’ll be hearing a lot from politicians this summer and fall about the urgency of dealing with Medicare spending, which will begin to rise sharply in the coming years as increasing numbers of the country’s 75 million baby boomers turn 65.

If we’re fortunate, some courageous candidates will call for renewed debate on a provision of the health care reform bill that had once enjoyed bipartisan support. The one that spineless Democrats decided had to be yanked when a certain former vice presidential nominee claimed, falsely, that it would create government-run “death panels.”

Medicare expenditures now total more than half a trillion dollars annually, representing 15 percent of federal spending. The only programs to which the government devotes more dollars are Social Security and national defense, both of which consume 20 percent of yearly federal outlays.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that the average annual growth in Medicare spending will be 5.8 percent between 2012 and 2020. It would have been one percentage point higher than that, according to the CBO, if not for the cost-constraining provisions of the Affordable Care Act, most notably the one that will gradually eliminate the bonuses the government pays private insurers to participate in the Medicare Advantage program.

The Affordable Care Act might have been able to curtail spending further if it hadn’t been for Sarah Palin’s reckless rhetoric. It was Palin who charged that a provision of the law allowing Medicare to pay doctors for having end-of-life discussions with their patients would lead to government-run “death panels.”

That provision was important because, according to the Congressional Research Service, about one-fourth of total Medicare spending is for the last year of life, and a lot of that spending could be avoided if more folks received counseling from their doctors on what they should do to ensure that their wishes are carried out when the grim reaper comes calling.

No one understands this better than Dan Morhaim, an adjunct professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and deputy majority leader of the Maryland House of Delegates. Morhaim, who also has been an emergency room physician and internist, has seen many cases in which people were hooked up to machines in vain attempts to restore their health — so many, in fact, that he wrote a book that should be required reading on Capitol Hill.

After reading Morhaim’s book, “The Better End—Surviving (and Dying) on Your Own Terms in Today’s Modern Medical World,” you’ll want to be sure you have a living will or advance directive in place—for your own good, for your family’s good and for your country’s as well.

Advance directives, which allow you to specify the kind of care you want as you approach the end of life, “offer something rare and important in our modern medical system,” Morhaim wrote. “They provide an opportunity to exert influence.”

And that’s never been more important, Morhaim contends. “As the baby boom generation reaches its senior years, as new lifesaving medical treatments are announced almost weekly and as our health care system confronts a crisis of affordability, the need is urgent for ordinary people to demand participation in end-of-life decisions.”

Another physician lawmaker who once shared Morhaim’s passion on this issue is Rep. Charles Boustany of Louisiana. Boustany, a heart surgeon, was one of three Republicans who cosponsored a bill in 2009 that formed the basis of the provision Palin maligned and mischaracterized.

When other Republicans began adopting Palin’s talking point, Boustany was forced to defend his support of the original bill. He was quoted as saying that he knew of many situations in which a critically ill patient hadn’t made his wishes known, leaving family members with the burden of making end-of-life treatment decisions. “This happens every day, multiple times, in hospitals across the country,” he said. “It’s a very important issue.”

The principal sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., said he was stunned when the controversy erupted. “It’s just beyond bizarre,” he told reporters at the time, noting that his bill had broad bipartisan support before Palin posted the death-panel charge on her Facebook page.

What was a good idea then is a good idea now, but Palin so poisoned the well that not a single Republican, not even Boustany, will go near it, certainly not in an election year. Blumenauer has reintroduced the measure as a stand-alone bill, and it has several cosponsors. But as you might imagine, all of them are Democrats. And because Republicans now control the House, Blumenauer hasn’t even been able to get a hearing on the measure.

There is still some hope that the bill might someday become law. Boustany indicated in a 2009 interview that he and other proponents might be willing to back it again “at some point when the temperature has cooled down.”

Many families—and the Medicare program—will be better off if that moment comes sooner rather than later.

Package from Yemen leads to worker illness, government stonewalling

2012-05-14T06:00:01-04:00

Paz Oquendo, a worker at the U.S. Postal Service’s Orlando sorting facility, smelled the noxious odor first. It was Feb. 4, 2011, and the foul stench was coming from one of the large mailbags hanging near the package-conveyor belts.

She ran over to Jeffrey A. Lill, the 44-year-old shift supervisor who was monitoring the sorting from a platform, and reported the smell.

“I can’t breathe,” Oquendo told Lill.

Lill headed toward the center of the sorting floor — an area workers call “the belly” — to investigate the odor.

Then he smelled it — a strong chemical stench he couldn’t identify. It was coming from a bag wet with a brown viscous substance. Lill looked in the wet sack and saw a broken package with tubes and wires sticking out. He remembers reading the return address with surprise: Yemen. Four months earlier, two bombs from Yemen had been sent through FedEx and UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service had alerted everyone to be on the lookout for packages coming from the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula.

Fearing the package was a hazard, Lill ordered the 40 postal employees out of the belly and immediately opened the large bay doors to ventilate the facility. Lill then moved the bag to a cart and pushed it for nearly half a mile to the hazmat shed.

After the package was out of the building, Lill radioed his manager to notify her of the suspicious spill. She told him the next on-duty supervisor would finish handling the incident.

Lill’s throat burned, and the gas had given him a headache. He called his mother in Rochester, N.Y.

“I want you know what happened at the Post Office,” Janet Vieau, 64, a real estate agent, remembered him telling her. “It might be on the news.”

But the incident never made the news. In fact, USPS did not investigate the suspicious package as a security or health threat and did not report it to the Department of Homeland Security, as is the protocol.

The package, now missing, has created a mystery — and solving that mystery could be the key to saving Lill’s life. In the weeks after his exposure to the package, Lill fell devastatingly and inexplicably ill. He suffers from extreme fatigue, tremors, and liver and neurological problems consistent with toxic exposure. He has become so sick that he cannot work and now must be cared for his by mother in New York. Lill’s doctors say they have no way to treat him without knowing what chemicals were inside the package.

All the while, USPS has refused to investigate, stating through lawyers that the incident never occurred. But the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, in partnership with the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley, uncovered related documents and interviewed two whistleblowers who confirm what happened on Feb. 4, 2011 — proving that USPS has refused to investigate not only the potential cause for the illness of an employee, but also what could have been a chemical weapon in Florida.

“I think they’ve just been protecting themselves,” said George Chuzi, a Washington, D.C., lawyer, who is helping Lill and his family pressure USPS to investigate. “If we’re right, they didn’t do something they were supposed to do.”

* * *

Today, Lill lives with his mother in Rochester, N.Y. In a bedroom painted blue, with lights off and curtains drawn, Lill sleeps up to 16 hours a day in a hospital bed.

“He was so vital, so energetic and so personable,” said Vieau, his mother. “He would play basketball and the drums.”

But now Lill is bedridden. “He can watch a DVD, and that’s about it,” Vieau said.

Within two weeks of the Feb. 4, 2011, incident, Lill came down with flu symptoms. He also had insomnia and was disoriented. “It would go away, but each time it came back, it would come back longer,” Lill said, lying in bed with thick curtains blocking out a sunny afternoon in late March — more than a year after the incident.

By June 2011, Lill’s symptoms intensified. He had lost 25 pounds from his trim frame. His liver and appendix were inflamed. He wound up in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer and esophagus. The next month, Lill sat in the dark in his home in Lady Lake, Fla., unable to get out of his recliner and spend time with the two teenagers under his care: his own 17-year-old son and the son of a friend under his guardianship. Lill is divorced.

In his decade of working for USPS, Lill rarely missed a day on the job. But by August 2011, he began what’s become a permanent medical leave.

The next month, Lill’s gallbladder was removed in an attempt to give him relief from his nausea and stomach pain. Days after the procedure, his symptoms returned. Doctors couldn’t explain why. By the end of September, Lill’s mother realized her son could not take care of himself anymore, and she brought him to New York.

Vieau now works in a home office next to Lill’s bedroom, constantly listening in case he is stricken with tremors. “I’ll hear things shaking,” she said. “I have to comfort him, to hold him.”

Lill’s exposure to the suspicious package is the only answer left to his unexplainable health problems. He’s seen more than two dozen doctors, including toxicologists and neurologists, and none has been able to diagnose his illness.

“Unless we know exactly what Jeff was exposed to, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” said Richard Aguirre, one of Lill’s doctors. “If we knew what the toxin is, we could work back and try to find a cure.”

But to this day, USPS denies that Lill was exposed to a potentially toxic package from Yemen.

In a March 9 letter to Chuzi, USPS lawyer Isabel M. Robison wrote: “A review of Postal Service records and multiple inquiries at both the Area and District levels has confirmed — as we previously indicated — that there was no hazardous spill on February 4, 2011 at the Orlando MP Annex.”

* * *

After her shift at the USPS facility in Orlando on an April evening, Paz Oquendo sat on a couch in a hotel room on International Drive. Next to her was coworker Yolanda Ocasio. At the risk of losing their jobs, Oquendo and Ocasio said USPS is lying and covering up the incident. They were there when Lill removed the noxious package from Yemen.

“I don’t understand why the Post Office won’t admit that it happened and do something to help Jeff,” Oquendo said.

In interviews with FCIR, Oquendo and Ocasio confirmed in detail Lill’s recounting of what occurred in Orlando on Feb. 4, 2011. FCIR also obtained a time-stamped email Lill sent to his supervisor, Cynthia Hickman, reporting the exposure to a potentially toxic substance that day. (Hickman did not respond to requests for comment.)

Why, despite paper records and two whistleblowers’ accounts, USPS refuses to investigate the incident is something of a whodunit. But it’s also a national security concern, demonstrating how USPS may not have investigated a potential terrorist attack in Florida.

In October 2010, four months before Lill came in contact with the package, authorities intercepted two packages from Yemen with bomb materials hidden inside printer ink cartridges. One was discovered in Britain aboard a UPS cargo plane and the other was found in a FedEx warehouse in Dubai. USPS briefly stopped accepting mail from the country. Yemeni police then arrested a suspect in the case, and deliveries from Yemen to the United States resumed.

But USPS being on the front lines of counterterrorism is nothing new. Since the 2001 anthrax attacks — during which anthrax-laced letters were mailed to news media and two U.S. Senators, killing five and infecting 17 others — USPS has been on alert for the next attack.

That’s why U.S. Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle, R-N.Y., wants answers about what happened in Orlando on Feb. 4, 2011. Buerkle, whose district includes Lill’s new residence in Rochester, has pressured USPS to investigate what she views as a credible report of a possible chemical weapon.

“We are not satisfied with the level of responsiveness from the Postal Service,” said Timothy Drumm, Buerkle’s chief of staff. “We want to see if the appropriate steps were taken by the Post Office, to see if the employees are safe. But since they say the incident did not happen, we can’t even get that far.”

USPS officials in Washington, D.C., and Florida declined to comment on Buerkle’s call for an inquiry and on the two whistleblowers who have come forward.

* * *

When Lill is awake and lucid, he expresses frustration that his employer won’t acknowledge the incident that may have made him so ill.

Squeezing his eyes shut, his hand trembling, Lill admitted he didn’t follow protocol for handling a spill. Rushing to protect fellow employees, Lill did not follow USPS rules that required him to put on a protective suit before handling the parcel. Because of that, he said, liquid from the package touched his skin. It was brown, syrupy and difficult to wash off.

“I wanted to make sure they got out because one employee had gotten a headache and I got mine pretty quickly,” Lill said. “If I had followed the rules, I guess we would have had a lot more people exposed to it.”

Lill has good and bad days. During the bad ones, he struggles to distinguish reality from dream. “I’ve heard him speaking Spanish in his room, to nobody,” Vieau said, referring to how her son learned Spanish while working at USPS. “Sometimes he’ll laugh and smile and gesture. But he’s not there.”

Lill’s doctors say his symptoms are consistent with exposure to a neurotoxin. To identify which neurotoxin, Lill needs USPS to acknowledge the incident, determine whether the package is in USPS’s possession or was transferred from the hazmat shed to a third-party contractor’s landfill in Kentucky, and then test its contents.

He’s hopeful that if they can find the package, he could be well again.

“I just want my health to be the way it was,” Lill said.

The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting is a nonprofit news organization supported by foundations and individual contributions. For more information, visit fcir.org.

Interactive: Gov. Walker's calendar

2012-05-14T06:00:01-04:00

VIDEO: What kind of defense budget would the American public make?

2012-05-11T11:11:33-04:00

Steven Kull, director of the Program for Public Consultation; Matthew Leatherman, analyst, Stimson's Budgeting for Foreign Affairs and Defense project; and R. Jeffrey Smith, managing editor for national security, Center for Public Integrity discuss the findings of their defense spending poll on May 10, 2012, at the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C.

About this story:

2012-05-10T16:40:31-04:00

This story was reported by J.J. Barrow and Trevor Aaronson for the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.

Watchdog 5/10/12

2012-05-10T17:32:57-04:00

New International Investigations Website

Crime and corruption don't stop at national borders. That's why the Center launched the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 1997. This unique group is comprised of 160 member journalists in 60 countries who investigate bad actors and trans-global issues across the world.

This week, ICIJ unveiled a new website showcasing its award-winning work. I invite you to take a look. There you'll find the full Looting the Seas investigation on worldwide overfishing; Dangers in the Dust, an expose of the deadly international asbestos trade; and Island of the Widows, an ongoing investigation of a mysterious kidney ailment afflicting farm laborers in Latin America. The site also includes information on a new ICIJ investigation of international tax havens.

With deep reporting cutbacks in media outlets in the U.S., the intrinsic value of the Center and ICIJ's global investigative work grows daily. We dig into the toughest and most important stories other media simply aren't able to cover.

Until next week,

Bill Buzenberg
Executive Director

Public supports cuts in defense budget to address deficits
Three-quarters of Americans support cutting the defense budget as a way to reduce the deficit, according to a new poll sponsored by the Center for Public Integrity, the Stimson Center and the Program for Public Consultation. The conclusion is bipartisan: 80 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of Republican respondents supported the cuts. Respondents were presented the defense budget broken down into nine major areas, presented arguments for and against cutting each area, and asked to change each area up or down as they saw fit. Majorities made cuts in all areas. Overall, spending was cut an average of 18 percent, with Republicans trimming an average of 15 percent and Democrats 22 percent.

Lugar loses to super PACs
Indiana Republican Senator Richard Lugar lost in the Indiana Republican primary on Tuesday to Richard Mourdock, a tea party favorite who enjoyed huge backing from super PACs. According to the most recent campaign finance filings with the Federal Election Commission, outside groups supportive of Mourdock spent about $3 million, $1 million more than Mourdock's own campaign.

ALEC exempted from lobbyist status in three states
It could take several years for the IRS to decide whether the American Legislative Exchange Council is indeed a lobbyist required to register with that label and disclose how much it spends on influencing legislation. But in three states — South Carolina, Indiana and Colorado — it turns out that ALEC has quietly, and by name, been specifically exempted from lobbyist status.

Governor cites Center integrity investigation
Iowa Governor Terry Branstad signed a bill last week creating the Iowa Public Information Board, a nine-member commission that will oversee and enforce the state's open records laws. Branstad noted that the lack of enforcement was highlighted by the State Integrity Investigation and affected Iowa's overall grade. Iowa ranked 7th among the 50 states and earned an overall grade of C+.

About this story

2012-05-15T15:05:08-04:00

This story was reported by Kate Golden and Amy Karon for the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. Check back Wednesday and Sunday for parts two and three of the series.

Public overwhelmingly supports large defense spending cuts

2012-05-16T11:41:37-04:00

While politicians, insiders and experts may be divided over how much the government should spend on the nation’s defense, there’s a surprising consensus among the public about what should be done: They want to cut spending far more deeply than either the Obama administration or the Republicans.

That’s according to the results of an innovative, new, nationwide survey by three nonprofit groups, the Center for Public integrity, the Program for Public Consultation and the Stimson Center. Not only does the public want deep cuts, it wants those cuts to encompass spending in virtually every military domain — air power, sea power, ground forces, nuclear weapons, and missile defenses.

According to the survey, in which respondents were told about the size of the budget as well as shown expert arguments for and against spending cuts, two-thirds of Republicans and nine in 10 Democrats supported making immediate cuts — a position at odds with the leaderships of both political parties.

The average total cut was around $103 billion, a substantial portion of the current $562 billion base defense budget, while the majority supported cutting it at least $83 billion. These amounts both exceed a threatened cut of $55 billion at the end of this year under so-called “sequestration” legislation passed in 2011, which Pentagon officials and lawmakers alike have claimed would be devastating.

“When Americans look at the amount of defense spending compared to spending on other programs, they see defense as the one that should take a substantial hit to reduce the deficit,” said Steven Kull, director of the Program for Public Consultation (PPC), and the lead developer of the survey. “Clearly the polarization that you are seeing on the floor of the Congress is not reflective of the American people.”

A broad disagreement with the Obama administration’s current spending approach — keeping the defense budget mostly level — was shared by 75 percent of men and 78 percent of women, all of whom instead backed immediate cuts. That view was also shared by at least 69 percent of every one of four age groups from 18 to 60 and older, although those aged 29 and below expressed much higher support, at 92 percent.

Disagreement with the Obama administration’s continued spending on the war in Afghanistan was particularly intense, with 85 percent of respondents expressing support for a statement that said in part, “it is time for the Afghan people to manage their own country and for us to bring our troops home.” A majority of respondents backed an immediate cut, on average, of $38 billion in the war’s existing $88 billion budget, or around 43 percent.

Despite the public’s distance from Obama’s defense budget, the survey disclosed an even larger gap between majority views and proposals by House Republicans this week to add $3 billion for an extra naval destroyer, a new submarine, more missile defenses, and some weapons systems the Pentagon has proposed to cancel. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has similarly endorsed a significant rise in defense spending.

When it comes to military forces, respondents on average favored at least a 27 percent cut in spending on nuclear arms — the largest proportional cut of any in the survey. They also supported, on average, a 23 percent cut for ground forces, a 17 percent cut for air power and a 14 percent cut for missile defenses. Modest majorities also said they favored dumping some major individual weapons programs, including the costly F-35 jet fighter, a new long-range strategic bomber, and construction of a new aircraft carrier.

“Surveyed Americans cut to considerably deeper levels than policymakers are willing to support in an election season,” said Matthew Leatherman, an analyst with the Budgeting for Foreign Affairs and Defense Project at the Stimson Center, a nonprofit research and policy analysis organization that helped develop the survey.

While Republicans generally favored smaller cuts, they overwhelmingly agreed with both independents and Democrats that current military budgets are too large. A majority of Republicans diverged only on cutting spending for special forces, missile defenses, and new ground force capabilities.

The survey, which was conducted in April, was designed differently than many polls on defense spending, which have asked respondents only if they support a cut. Its aim was instead to probe public attitudes more comprehensively, and so it supplied respondents with neutral information about how funds are currently being spent while exposing them to carefully-drafted, representative arguments made by advocates in the contemporary debate. The respondents then said what they wished to spend in key areas.

The survey’s methodology and the number of respondents — 665 people randomly selected to represent the national population — render its conclusions statistically reliable to within 5 percent, according to the Program on Public Consultation, which conducted it.

Somewhat surprisingly, all of the pro and con arguments about cutting defense spending attracted majority support, suggesting that respondents found many elements in the positions of each side that they considered reasonable. It also suggests that the survey fairly summarized contrasting viewpoints.

Sixty-one percent agreed, for example, with a statement that the U.S. has special defense responsibilities because it is an exceptional nation, while 72 percent said the country is “playing the role of military policeman too much.” Fifty-four percent agreed that cutting defense spending is problematic because it will cause job losses, while 81 percent — in one of the largest points of consensus — agreed with a statement that the budget had “a lot of waste” and that members of Congress regularly approve unneeded spending just to benefit their own supporters.

The survey suggested, in short, that most people do not see the issue in starkly black or white terms, but instead hold complex views about the appropriate relationship between defense spending and America’s role in the world. “Most Americans are able to hold two competing ideas in their mind and, unlike Congress, thoughtfully recognize the merits of both,” Kull explained. “And then [they] still come to hard and even bold decisions.”

The survey also showed that Americans react differently when given data on the current defense budget in different contexts — providing some insight into how partisans on each side of the debate might tailor their arguments to attract support.

When framed, for example, in the context of military spending by other countries, or the portion of the so-called annual discretionary budget devoted to defense, or the amount of money spent for defense during the Cold War, most respondents said they were surprised by how large the U.S. budget is now. But when compared to the overall size of the U.S. economy, or the size of the other two leviathans in the federal budget — U.S. spending on Medicare or Social Security — most respondents said they were not surprised.

By far the most durable finding — even after hearing strong arguments to the contrary — was that existing spending levels are simply too high. Respondents were asked twice, in highly different ways, to say what they thought the budget should be, and a majority supported roughly the same answer each time: a cut of at least 11 to 13 percent (they cut on average 18 to 22 percent).

In one exercise, a larger group chose to cut the defense budget (62 percent supported this) than to cut non-defense spending (50 percent) or to raise taxes (27 percent). They then chose to cut deeply as a means to address the deficit. In yet another exercise, respondents first read pro and con arguments for the nine major mission areas that now compose almost 90 percent of the budget; then a majority of Republicans and Democrats selected lower levels in eight of the nine areas.

For example, two-thirds of the respondents, including 78 percent of Democrats, 64 percent of Republicans, and 57 percent of independents, cut spending on nuclear arms. Respondents on average also sought to cut ground forces the largest dollar amount. The sole program that attracted average support for more spending was the Pentagon’s effort to develop new capabilities for ground forces, but the suggested increase was slight and mostly embraced by Republicans and independents.

Majorities took these steps even though they expressed slightly higher support, on average, for statements in favor of these programs than critical of them. Most notably, they said they were convinced that air power is important (77 percent), special forces are valuable (79 percent), and missile defense efforts are worth pursuing (74 percent), while giving arguments for the Navy and ground forces less backing (69 percent and 57 percent, respectively).

While most programs got either a trim or a buzz cut in the public salon, several won outright support. A majority opposed cutting the controversial V-22 Osprey, an aircraft that takes off like a helicopter and flies like a plane. Even after being told its cancellation would save $1 billion, a clear majority backed its continued production. And even while most respondents favored killing the new strategic bomber, they solidly backed continuing to use bombers to carry nuclear arms as part of a “triad” of forces, alongside land and sea based missiles.

Whether the weight of public attitudes will be felt in Congress and the White House is unclear. As close students of Washington know, legislative outcomes here are often determined not by average views, but by the passionate convictions of noisy minorities. As a result, it’s worth noting which arguments attracted not just support from solid majorities but high rankings as “very convincing.”

These are summaries of some of those arguments: It is time to let the Afghanis fend for themselves (43 percent called this very convincing). There is a lot of waste in the defense budget (39 percent very convincing). Special forces are useful and effective (36 percent very convincing). We are playing the role of world policeman too much (29 percent very convincing). Missile defenses could help defend us (27 percent very convincing). Air power is critical (26 percent very convincing). Nuclear arms serve little purpose now (26 percent very convincing). Defense spending weakens other parts of the economy (25 percent very convincing).

“Americans’ views as expressed in this survey are a big reason why policymakers — after the election — are likely to tighten the Pentagon’s strategy and cut national defense spending more deeply,” said Leatherman, the Stimson Center analyst.

Public offers mixed support for military healthcare changes

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The military has long prided itself on the medical and other benefits it supplies members, both active duty and retired. They have been a major selling point for the all-volunteer force. But with new budget austerity pressures, the military has been forced to consider cutting these benefits.

The public has mixed feelings on this, according to the results of an innovative, new, nationwide survey developed by three nonprofit groups, including the Program for Public Consultation, the Center for Public Integrity and the Stimson Center.

Military personnel costs have nearly doubled since the start of fiscal year 2001, according to calculations by Lawrence J. Korb, a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress and a former assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan. If the costs are not controlled, Korb says, they will eat away at the military’s budget, forcing vital training and modernization programs to the side.

Dealing with this issue was a challenge for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who opposed expanding TRICARE to National Guard members in 2003 and in 2006 pushed for raised fees similar to what the Obama administration has called for in its latest budget. The problem also haunted Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who said of the problem in 2010 “Everybody knows that we’re being eaten alive by health care.”

Under the Obama administration’s 2013 budget, non-active military employees in TRICARE, the main health system, would see an increase in co-pays for medicines among as well as enrollment fees for special TRICARE programs. The administration believes these extra fees would save $34.5 billion in discretionary funds and $16.5 billion in mandatory funds over the next ten years.

The President’s budget proposal also includes a 1.7 percent increase in military pay, which would kick in for fiscal year 2015; it is meant to offset some of the new fees.

But House Republicans have indicated they intend to do away with the TRICARE fee increase, and the issue is expected to be a point of heavy debate during budget markups. The issue has also been raised on the campaign trail. Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has seized on the TRICARE cuts as a potential political issue. “Right now the president is cutting back on spending. And that's something that has to happen,” Romney said during a March debate. But he's only cutting back in the military. He's going after Tricare. Saying ‘OK, we're going to — we're going to raise the co-pays. We're going to cut the benefits.’ Why is it we go after military families?”

According to the survey, however, increasing the co-pays is supported by a solid majority of the American public — 59 percent. This change, which would not impact active duty military personnel, would save around $3 billion a year. A solid majority of the Republicans surveyed, moreover, expressed strong support for cutting military healthcare expenses and other personnel expenses — expressing a higher preference in many cases for that than cutting other military programs.

But overall, a proposal by the Obama administration to raise the annual premium on the families of military retirees younger than 65 from $520 to $1100 was rejected by those surveyed, 53% to 44%. That plan would save another $3 billion a year. A third proposal, changing the cap on military retirees out-of-pocket costs from $3,000 to $7,500, was also rejected by respondents, 63% to 34%, even though it would save an estimated $11 billion a year.

Health care costs were not the only benefit that survey respondents were asked to consider cutting. Currently, military families receive tax-exempt allowances for housing and food. These allowances are growing at a faster rate than basic military wages. Sixty-one percent of the respondents voted to slow the growth rate of these allowances, which resulted in $6 billion saved a year.

A narrower majority (52 percent) supported changing the pensions of new recruits to save $9 billion a year. Currently, military personnel can retire after 20 years and receive a pension, worth 50 percent of the average of their last three years of salary, for the rest of their lives. The respondents supported changing that pension for new recruits so that it begins only at age 60, and is worth 40 percent of the average of the last five years’ worth of salary.

The respondents also rejected a cap on military pay raises that would have saved $2 billion a year. Overall, respondents to the poll voted for cuts to military benefits of around $18 billion.

Korb, the author for a recent study on military benefits, argues that the Obama budget is not really making cuts to TRICARE, but rather is bringing costs “back into the agreed upon accepted standards.” When co-pays and fees were set in 1996, the government agreed that retirees would pick up 27 percent of the cost, with the government shouldering the rest. But with no fee increases in the ensuing years, the percentage that retirees are paying has dropped to around 10 percent; Obama’s budget proposal would raise it to around 14 percent.

Dive into defense survey documents

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Pour over survey results and analysis from the Stimson Center

How this survey was conducted

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This study was fielded over the internet from April 13th - 19th with 665 American adults selected as a representative sample of the American public. They are part of a nationwide panel of Knowledge Networks, a company started by two Stanford professors.The Program for Public Consultation, affiliated with the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, conducted the survey.

The panelists were recruited through a scientific process of selection using two methods: a random selection of possible US telephone numbers (also called random digit dial sampling, or RDD); and a random selection of residential addresses using the United States Postal Service's Delivery Sequence File (a complete list of all U.S. residential households — including households that have only cell phones, and are often missed in random-digit-dial sampling).

Persons were then invited by telephone or by mail to participate in something called the KnowledgePanel. Those who agree to participate but do not have Internet access were provided a laptop computer and Internet service. A representative sample is then chosen from all the panelists for a specific survey. Once that sample completes a survey the demographic breakdown of the sample is compared to the US census. Any variations from the census are adjusted by weighting.

Conducting surveys with this type of representative sample on line has proven superior to standard telephone surveys, because it is drawn from a pool that is more complete demographically. Also respondents can take as much time as they like to read and respond to questions, thus increasing the thoughtfulness of their answers. This method has increasingly become the preferred method for academic and government-sponsored surveys.

A recent study by the American Association of Public Opinion Research concluded that while 'opt-in' Internet panels have limited reliability for general population studies, probability-based Internet panels produce high quality data. This particular survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.8%.

More technical information is here.

Key defense survey charts

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Graphic visualizations of survey information and results.

Key findings:

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Americans want to cut the defense budget deeply to help deal with the deficit, more than they want to cut other programs or raise taxes.
There is broad consensus on this goal, including large majorities of Republicans, Democrats, young, old, males and females.
Around three-quarters of Americans think spending should be cut for air power, ground forces, and naval forces.
Nuclear arms were given the biggest proportional hit, while ground forces took the biggest dollar hit; special forces had the most support.
More than eighty percent of Americans are convinced “there is a lot of waste in the national defense budget.”

Is defense spending a budget priority for Americans? Stay tuned for survey results

2012-05-09T22:20:33-04:00

How close are congressional lawmakers to pursuing what Americans want in a defense budget? Is the Obama administration closer, or farther away, than Republicans?

Three nonprofit organizations — the Program for Public Consultation (PPC),* the Stimson Center, and the Center for Public Integrity — collaborated on a unique survey meant to answer these questions. The results of this innovative survey are set to be disclosed on Thursday morning, May 10. You can tune in to this website at 10 am EST, when a summary of the results will be posted, as well as the full survey, all the answers, and some graphic depictions of public attitudes. Or you can attend a press conference being held by all three organizations to discuss the results (details below).

As a third option, you can join us for a live Web discussion at 2:00pm EST, where you’ll be able to chat with Steven Kull of the Program for Public Consultation, Matthew Leatherman of the Stimson Center and R. Jeffrey Smith of the the Center for Public Integrity. Just enter your email address in the CoverItLive box on this page to get a reminder before the chat starts. We'll be taking questions live, but if you already have something you'd like us to talk about, feel free to email Cole Goins: cgoins [at] public integrity [dot] org, or leave it in the comments below.

We can’t tell you all the results just yet. But we can say with confidence that what Washington is doing is not what the American people say they want. This may or may not surprise you. But if you come back here tomorrow, you’ll find out what your neighbors, friends, and colleagues — on average — think about national security spending, and you’ll learn precisely all the ways that Washington has gotten off-track in this debate.

See details for the press conference here.

*The Program for Public Consultation is a joint program of the Center for Policy Attitudes and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.

ACCOUNTABILITY: Senators demand answers on behalf of military whistleblowers

2012-05-16T11:41:37-04:00

Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) want more information from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta about an inspector general's report criticizing the Pentagon's treatment of whistleblowers — a report first disclosed by the Center and the Project on Government Oversight.

Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and McCain, the panel's ranking member, made their feelings known Tuesday in a letter to Panetta.

"Last Sunday, the Washington Post reported on an 'internal Pentagon report' finding that the Department of Defense Inspector General unit responsible for protecting military whistleblowers had failed to do its job," wrote the Senators, referring to the Center story that was reprinted in the Post. "According to the article, the May 2011 report found 'persistent sloppiness and a systematic disregard for Pentagon rules meant to protect those who report fraud, abuses, and the waste of taxpayer funds.'

"We understand that this report was initiated and conducted by the Inspector General, and that the Inspector General has made a number of changes in an effort to address the problems identified in the report," the letter concludes. "Nonetheless, the systematic failure of the Department to protect military whistleblowers from reprisal is a matter of grave concern. Accordingly, we ask that you provide us with a copy of the report and advise us of the actions that have been taken and will be taken to address the problems identified in the report - including steps to re-open any reprisal cases that were inadequately investigated or erroneously dismissed."

The Center's report also elicited a response from Lynne M. Halbrooks, the acting inspector general for the Department of Defense. Halbrooks submitted a letter to the editor for Tuesday's Post defending her office, a letter noting that the review was conducted at her request and was conducted by staff from the inspector general's office.

"The increase in hiring of staff in support of military reprisal investigations and the changes to practice subsequently initiated were based on my review of the internal report," Halbroks concludes. "I am committed to continuing on a path to establish a model whistleblower program for the Department of Defense. "