Lawmakers in at least four states are considering a back-door way to dampen corporate political spending: Require shareholders to approve it.

State legislators in Maine, Maryland, New York and New Jersey have introduced bills that demand that a majority of shareholders approve corporate gifts to political committees or candidates.

Maryland’s bill is set to get a hearing from lawmakers this week. And more legislative buzz may be coming: The sponsor of the Maryland bill said he’s heard from about a dozen legislators from different states who are interested in the idea.

Supporters see the bills as a way to limit the influence of the landmark 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which ruled corporations had a right to spend unlimited amounts of money calling for the election or defeat of candidates. The decision affected laws in about half the states. 

Companies with deep pockets are now seen as major players in elections at all levels. Top-spending business and trade groups gave more than $48 million to races for state-level candidates in 2014, and more than $211 million to state-level ballot measure campaigns, according to two recent Center for Public Integrity analyses. 

“The whole thesis of Citizens United is that the companies are just speaking for the shareholders,” said state Sen. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat who is sponsoring the bill in Maryland. “If this is going to be anything more than a cynical fiction, then state legislatures need to act to make it real.”

Raskin’s bill would require corporations to get shareholders’ approval for an annual political budget and a slate of candidates or committees the money would support. It would only apply to businesses incorporated in Maryland.

The Maryland Chamber of Commerce calls the idea impractical.

“The bill creates an unworkable scenario for corporations, to be forced to poll their shareholders when they want to make a decision like this,” said Matthew Palmer, senior vice president of government affairs for the chamber.

Raskin said he believes the idea behind his bill is gaining steam after The Washington Post and The Nation published columns he wrote supporting it, and after Congress failed to pass a constitutional amendment meant to overturn Citizens United last fall. About a dozen legislators in other parts of the U.S. contacted him since the articles were published in October, he said, hoping to draft similar bills.

Maine Rep. Deane Rykerson, a Democrat, is among the imitators. His bill is modeled on Raskin’s. “This is not really a total rejection of Citizens United, but it’s a step on the way, temporarily anyway,” he said.

Rykerson’s bill would go one step further than Maryland’s — it would require corporations to give dissenting shareholders a pro-rated rebate for any political spending they don’t support.

“Shareholders can be subsidizing speech they find abhorrent through their stock ownership,” said Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank that supports campaign finance reform. 

Torres-Spelliscy commended the shareholder approach, pointing to similar laws in the United Kingdom. But she said that if campaign finance activists want widespread change they will eventually need Delaware to pass a shareholder-approval law, as most corporations in the U.S. plant themselves there due to favorable tax laws.

In the past, campaign finance reformers have looked to activist shareholders to demand that corporations disclose political donations. They’ve also made an unsuccessful attempt to get the Securities and Exchange Commission to make companies reveal their political giving.

Many do voluntarily, but it’s not mandatory. Some of the nation’s largest companies voluntarily reported giving about $173 million to politically active nonprofits in roughly a single year, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis last year.

Some states already have disclosure laws for corporate political giving, or require a corporation’s board to approve political contributions before a company can give. But no state has passed a law requiring shareholder approval, according to Torres-Spelliscy.

They may not succeed this year, either. A Hawaii senate committee already tabled a version of the bill introduced there in January. New Jersey’s and New York’s bills each have only one sponsor and have languished in committees since being introduced in recent months.

However, in Maine, Rykerson’s bill enjoys bipartisan support, with eight Democrats, two independents and one Republican lined up behind it.

“I think there’s a chance it will pass, and, if nothing else, it will raise awareness about the issue,” Rykerson said.

In Maryland, Raskin is hopeful, even though two incarnations of similar bills died in committee in prior years. The senator doesn’t consider newly elected Republican Gov. Larry Hogan an impossible obstacle, pointing out that he’s Maryland’s first governor elected after accepting public financing for his campaign, limiting his ability to raise money elsewhere. Raskin also said he met with the governor and discussed the idea.

“I think he has an open mind about campaign finance reform, so we’ll see,” Raskin said.

A spokesman for Hogan said the governor’s office would not comment on pending legislation.

Attorney General Eric Holder said the Justice Department will determine within the next 90 days whether to charge individual Wall Street executives with crimes related to the 2008 financial crisis.

Holder said he’s asked the prosecutors who have been investigating the major banks and their executives to make recommendations whether to bring charges or close the probes.

“I’ve asked the U.S. attorneys … over the next 90 days to look at their cases and to try to develop cases against individuals and to report back in at 90 days with regard to whether or not they think they’re going to be able to successfully bring criminal and or civil cases against those individuals,” Holder said in a speech at the National Press Club Tuesday.

The announcement comes as the attorney general prepares to leave his post after more than six years on the job. President Barack Obama has appointed Loretta Lynch, the U.S. attorney for Brooklyn, to succeed him.

Holder has been criticized for failing to bring any individuals to justice for misdeeds that led to the collapse of the mortgage market and the subsequent financial crisis that resulted in the worst recession since the Great Depression

The Justice Department has brought cases against all of the major Wall Street banks that have resulted in multibillion-dollar settlements against many. JP Morgan Chase & Co. settled its case in 2013 for $13 billion. Its CEO, Jamie Dimon, was rewarded with a 74 percent pay raise that year.

Last year Bank of America agreed to pay $16.65 billion in the largest civil settlement in history with a single entity, while Lynch led the investigation into Citigroup which resulted in a $7 billion settlement in July.

“We have exacted or extracted record penalties from banks who we have found to have engaged in inappropriate practices,” Holder said. “To the extent that individuals have not been prosecuted, people should understand that it is not for lack of trying.”

Holder did not say which executives remain under investigation seven years after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in September 2008 sent the financial system into a tailspin that led Congress to approve a $700 billion bailout of the U.S. banking system.

Many of the leaders of the banking giants that traded in mortgage backed securities at the heart of the crisis lost their jobs. But few have been criminally charged or even had to pay civil penalties. 

The crisis was fueled by a soaring housing market during the early years of the last decade.

Wall Street investors developed an enormous appetite for bonds backed by the mortgages of everyday homeowners. Firms like Lehman would buy up thousands of mortgages, pool them together into a security, and sell the cash flow from the mortgage payments to investors, including pension funds and hedge funds. The bonds were thought to be almost as safe as U.S. Treasuries, but they carried a higher interest rate.

The demand was so great that eventually mortgage lenders loosened their underwriting standards and made loans to people who couldn’t afford them, just to satisfy hungry investors.

When the housing market turned down in 2007 and homeowners began to default on their loans, the whole system began to crumble.

In March 2008, Bear Stearns almost collapsed and was sold. Six months later, Lehman failed, setting off a chain reaction that killed dozens more banks and mortgage lenders. Weeks later, Congress approved the bailout of the financial system and soon nearly every major financial institution was on the dole.

The ensuing recession destroyed as much as $34 trillion in wealth and sent the unemployment rate soaring above 10 percent for the first time in 25 years.

The fallout from the crisis is still being felt across the country, with unemployment still higher than its pre-crisis levels and homeowners continuing to face foreclosure by the thousands.

The executives of many major banks, however, walked away with the millions in salary and bonuses they had earned in the years leading up to the crash.

JPay Inc., the biggest provider of money transfers to prisoners, has stopped charging fees to families sending money orders to inmates in Kansas, after a Center for Public Integrity report on the company’s fee structure.

The change that means inmates’ families can now send money for free in every state but one where the company does business.

The Center for Public Integrity reported last fall that families of hundreds of thousands of inmates were charged high fees to send their incarcerated relatives money for basic needs like winter clothes and doctor visits. JPay, which offers families the ability make deposits into inmates’ accounts online for a fee, also charged for deposits sent by mail in four states housing roughly 110,000 inmates. Mail-in payments were traditionally the only free way for families to send money.

The Center reported in November that JPay had eliminated deposit-by-mail fees in Ohio, Indiana and Oklahoma. Kansas was the lone holdout.

JPay is the biggest of the prison bankers, companies that provide financial services to inmates and their families, often charging high fees and sharing their profits with the agencies that contract with them. JPay handled nearly 7 million transactions in 2013 and expected to transfer more than $1 billion in 2014.

The company’s marketing literature urges families to send money by phone or online. Fees for those services can exceed 45 percent of the deposit amount. Families who didn’t like the system could always choose to mail a money order, JPay CEO Ryan Shapiro said in an interview last summer. He did not know at the time where JPay was charging fees for mail-in deposits.

Shapiro later said that The Center’s questions about money order deposit fees caused him to consider the impact of JPay’s policies on its poorest customers. He said he would seek to convince all states to provide families with a free deposit option.

Kansas Department of Corrections spokesman Jeremy Barclay last week confirmed that the $2 fee has been eliminated. Although the change occurred on Jan. 1, the agency’s website still states that there is a fee to deposit money orders through JPay. The department will update its website with the change “within days,” Barclay said in an email.

JPay did not respond to a request for comment on the elimination of Kansas’ money order fee.

JPay and other prison bankers have become central players in a multi-billion dollar economy that shifts the costs of incarceration onto the families of prison inmates, according to The Center’s earlier reports. Families must send money to help relatives buy basic necessities like toilet paper and boots that are no longer provided by corrections agencies.

JPay handled money transfers and other services for 1.7 million offenders, including nearly 70 percent of the inmates in U.S. prisons, the company said last year. Two states, Missouri and Nevada, stopped accepting money transfers through JPay in the months since The Center first reported on the company.

There remains one state, Kentucky, where JPay is the exclusive provider of money transfers and does not offer a free deposit option. Kentucky does not accept deposits by mail and allows JPay to charge fees for deposits made online, by phone and in person at prisons.

The fees that inmates’ families pay to send money vary from state to state. Electronic transfers using credit or debit cards typically incur steep fees charged by JPay or another vendor. Most states that accept money orders or checks by mail deposits by mail allow vendors to deduct a fee from deposits sent by mail but most offer these money order deposits as a free option.

Before JPay popularized electronic payments to prisons, inmates’ families typically mailed money orders directly to the facility where their relative was locked up. Many found the process faster and more convenient than going through JPay.

JPay grew rapidly in the past 12 years by offering to save states time and money by handling deposits into inmates’ accounts and providing other services, such as high-fee prepaid debit cards issued to inmates when they are released. In exchange, states allow JPay to deduct fees from every electronic transfer.

JPay now processes money orders for free in 14 states. One of them, Florida, charges its own fee for accepting deposits by mail.

Seven states still lack a free way for inmates to receive money: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Utah and Wyoming.

Swiss prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation against HSBC Private Bank, and raided the bank’s Geneva offices for evidence as it probes allegations of “aggravated money-laundering.”

Citing “recent public revelations” about HSBC’s activities in Switzerland, the prosecutor’s office warned that the investigation could extend to individual employees at the bank as it probes whether adequate measures were put in place to prevent criminal activity.

Attorney general Olivier Jornot and first prosecutor Yves Bertossa led the search of HSBC’s Geneva headquarters this morning, along with plain clothes investigators and financial analysts, according to ICIJ’s media partner Le Temps. The bank’s compliance department offices were also searched.

The raid comes amid growing scrutiny of the bank following ICIJ’s Swiss Leaks investigation. Together with more than 140 journalists from more than 50 media outlets, ICIJ analyzed a series of leaked files based on information taken from HSBC’s Swiss branch and handed to French authorities by former bank employee and IT specialist Hervé Falciani.

The Swiss Leaks revealed that the bank played an active role in assisting some clients with tax evasion, and also continued to serve other clients after they had been unfavorably named by the United Nations, in court documents and in the media as connected to arms trafficking, conflict diamonds and bribery.

HSBC conceded to ICIJ and its media partners that standards at the bank’s Swiss branch were “significantly lower” at the time covered by the leaked files (which include account details up to 2007), but said “significant steps” had been taken since then to implement reform and end business with questionable clients. The bank claims to have reduced its client base by almost 70 percent since 2007.

Since the publication of the Swiss Leaks investigation, there has been pressure from inside Switzerland for action against HSBC.

In response to the Swiss prosecutor’s announcement on Wednesday, the bank issued a brief statement reiterating that it would continue to cooperate fully with Swiss authorities.

HSBC currently faces criminal investigations in France, Belgium and Argentina. Regulators and politicians in other countries have also announced pending investigations into either the bank or some of its Swiss clients.

In the United States, a law enforcement official confirmed to the Center for Public Integrity that the Department of Justice's tax division has been investigating HSBC for tax crimes since 2010, using the leaked HSBC files which came to the department via the Internal Revenue Service. However nominee attorney general Loretta Lynch, who faces questions over her 2012 deal with HSBC as part of a federal money-laundering prosecution, did not have access to the leaked files as part of her own investigation into the bank, which was initiated by a separate DOJ division.

The Geneva raid follows the banking giant issuing a formal apology via full-page newspaper ads in the United Kingdom. 

HSBC published a full-page advertisement in several Sunday newspapers containing an apology to the bank’s customers and employees in the form of an open letter signed by chief executive Stuart Gulliver. Gulliver described the Swiss Leaks news coverage as a “painful experience” but said the bank’s Swiss branch had been “completely overhauled” in the years since the data was taken and leaked to authorities.

Following revelations that HSBC’s Swiss branch serviced some clients with criminal backgrounds and aided other clients evading taxes, backlash has been particularly virulent for both the bank and politicians in HSBC’s home country of Britain, where fierce debate has broken out on the floor of parliament, and where two separate investigations have been launched.

Lord Stephen Green, the former HSBC boss who was appointed trade minister by Prime Minister David Cameron in 2011, resigned from his position with influential banking lobby group TheCityUK amid growing political pressure around how much the government knew of his role at the bank at the time of his appointment. 

Then yesterday, former chief political commentator for London's Daily Telegraph Peter Oborne spoke out against the newspaper's lack of coverage of the Swiss Leaks affair, and called for an independent inquiry into the paper's editorial guidelines.

Oborne cited perceived interference from management and owners in editorial coverage as a reason for his resignation, and said the paper's lack of coverage of the Swiss Leaks story was part of pattern concerning critical stories about HSBC, a major advertiser with the Telegraph.

"The Telegraph’s recent coverage of HSBC amounts to a form of fraud on its readers. It has been placing what it perceives to be the interests of a major international bank above its duty to bring the news to Telegraph readers," he wrote in an opinion piece for Open Democracy that has since been widely reported by the British press.

Freda Jones knows how much fast Internet is worth –tens of thousands of dollars.

Jones owns a real estate company in Manchester, Tennessee, a small town nestled against the Appalachian Mountains about an hour south of Nashville. She’s been trying to sell a house there for more than seven months, but it isn’t getting much interest. The reason:  It doesn’t have access to a fiber or cable Internet connection.

“We just reduced it $60,000,” Jones explained last month. “It’s a beautiful property, but it doesn’t work for everyone because of the inaccessibility to broadband.”

AT&T Inc. has refused homeowners’ requests to extend its Internet service to the neighborhood, even though its cables lie less than 100 yards away from some houses, residents there said.

If the house were a few miles down the road in Tullahoma, it would be served by an ultra-fast broadband service run by the city.  And it would be worth tens of thousands of dollars more.

While Jones may have to sell this house without Internet on the cheap, she has hope for future sales. In less than two weeks, the Federal Communications Commission, nation’s top Internet regulator, will vote on whether  to overturn a state law that prevents Tennessee cities that operate their own broadband networks from expanding to other towns.

Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Wilson, N.C. each filed petitions with the FCC challenging their states’ respective laws. There are almost 400 city-operated broadband networks nationwide. But their expansion is limited because 20 states currently restrict the ability of municipalities to offer or expand Internet service.

If the laws are struck down, Jones could look forward to homes and businesses in Manchester hooking into Tullahoma’s network, which is one of the fastest in the world. Tullahoma has been considering doing just that for years, but has been blocked.

Jones has a message for the five FCC commissioners who will vote on pre-empting the state laws.

“I would like for the officials there to actually come to a community such as ours and see what’s happening,” Jones said, tears in her eyes. “It seems like sometimes that we’re almost in a third-world country because we are isolated, we have no voice, … and the [FCC] needs to start getting us all the means we need to get our community to grow.”

The Center for Public Integrity first reported on the requests in July. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler appears amenable to the requests. 

Wheeler has repeatedly said he would pre-empt state laws that ban or place barriers on cities that want to build or expand broadband networks if he were asked to do so.

President Obama weighed in on the issue last month in a speech in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

“If there are state laws in place that prohibit or restrict these community-based broadband efforts,” Obama said, “we should do everything we can to push back against those old laws.”

AT&T declined to comment about service in Manchester or their position on city-owned broadband networks, as did Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable. They have filed numerous comments with the FCC opposing the agency from blocking the state laws.

CenturyLink, which provides Internet service in Tennessee, North Carolina and much of the United States, said their primary concern is for the taxpayers in the cities that want to operate their own networks.

“The issue is how best to deliver broadband,” said Melissa Newman, head of federal regulatory affairs at CenturyLink in Washington.  “We are concerned that taxpayer funded, municipal-type broadband may not be the best use of taxpayer money. … When municipal broadband failures occur, the taxpayer is left on the hook.”

The fight against city-owned Internet networks may just be beginning.

The telecommunications giants including Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner Cable have spent millions of dollars to lobby state legislatures, influence state elections and buy research to try to stop the spread of public Internet services that often offer faster speeds at cheaper rates. AT&T alone spent more than $250,000 on lobbying in Tennessee last year, the Center for Public Integrity reported in August.

In Washington, the money has flowed even more. The top Internet providers and their trade associations spent about $88 million on 568 lobbyists to influence federal lawmakers and regulators, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That was enough to place the group in the top 12 of all lobbyists. That spending goes to lobby on all kinds of telecommunications issues, not just municipal broadband.

The Center’s report illustrated how municipal broadband service, especially in rural communities, can help boost businesses and create jobs. It contrasted the experience of Tullahoma with Fayetteville, North Carolina, which was thwarted from allowing its residents to tap into the city’s gigabit broadband network by state law.

Tullahoma’s job market has thrived, while Fayetteville’s has stagnated in recent years.

And that’s the point, said Jim Baller, the Washington lawyer who represents Chattanooga and Wilson in challenging the state laws.

“You are not going to attract a business to your community if what you’re offering is the kind of low level broadband connectivity that is available widely,” Baller said. “That is not the kind of infrastructure that is going to give your community or our country a competitive advantage.” 

Giant health insurer Humana, Inc. faces new scrutiny from the Justice Department over allegations it has overcharged the government by claiming some elderly patients enrolled in its popular Medicare plans are sicker than they actually are.

The Louisville, Kentucky-based company disclosed the Justice Department’s recent civil “information request” in an annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Feb. 18. The company noted that it is cooperating with authorities.

“We continue to cooperate with and voluntarily respond to the information requests from the Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” Humana wrote.  

The privately run Medicare Advantage plans offer seniors an alternative to standard Medicare, which pays doctors for each service they render. By contrast, under Medicare Advantage, the health plans are paid a set fee monthly for each patient based on a complex formula known as a risk score. Essentially, the government pays higher rates for sicker patients and less for those in good health.

But overcharges related to inflated risk scores, intentional or not, have cost taxpayers billions of dollars in recent years, as the Center for Public Integrity reported in a series published last year.

The Center first disclosed multiple investigations of the Humana Medicare Advantage plan last May based on records filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in a Miami civil suit.

But Humana’s SEC disclosure offers fresh details into the wide scope of the Justice review, indicating it is taking aim at a range of common Medicare Advantage billing practices and fraud controls, as well as Humana’s use of home health assessments of patients in its plans. The industry argues these “house calls” improve the health of elderly patients, but federal officials have been concerned that the primary objective is to raise risk scores and revenues.

Humana said the Justice Department had requested a range of records about “our business and compliance practices related to risk adjustment data generated by our providers and by us, including medical record reviews conducted as part of our data and payment accuracy compliance efforts, the use of health and well-being assessments, and our fraud detection efforts.”

The government probe comes at an inopportune time for the burgeoning Medicare Advantage industry, which is mounting an intense lobbying and advocacy effort to stave off proposed government funding cuts.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is set to release proposed funding levels for 2016 on Friday. More than 16 million seniors have joined these private health plans. Humana has enrolled about 3.2 million people in Medicare Advantage plans.

What will happen to the rates is not yet clear. But the Obama administration’s 2016 budget seeks to cut some $36 billion from Medicare Advantage plans over the next decade related to oversized risk scores.

Allegations that some Medicare Advantage plans manipulate risk scores, a process known in the industry as “upcoding,” have been surfacing over the past year in the federal courts.

The Center for Public Integrity has previously reported on several of these whistleblower lawsuits, including one filed by a Miami doctor against Humana.

In that case, Olivia Graves alleges that a Humana medical center had diagnosed abnormally high numbers of patients with diseases such as diabetes with complications that boosted Medicare payments — diagnoses that “were not supported by medical records.” Graves alleges that Humana knew about the overcharges but took no action to stop them. Humana has denied the allegations.

And in early February, a federal grand jury in West Palm Beach, Fl. indicted Dr. Isaac Kojo Anakwah Thompson on eight counts of health care fraud. He’s accused of cheating Medicare out of about $2.1 million by inflating risk scores of some Humana-enrolled patients. Thompson, 55, is free on a $1 million bond and has declined comment through his lawyer.

The Florida indictment did not accuse Humana of wrongdoing, but company spokesman Tom Noland said that it had repaid the government. He declined to say how much.

New scrutiny of home visits also could prove troublesome for the industry. At least one whistleblower, a former manager at a California firm that does medical home visits, has alleged that the process was abused to inflate risk scores.

Humana has been a major promoter of these home assessments. In an email to the Center today, Noland wrote: “We believe in continuing to do in-home assessments as we see this as an important step in establishing care management plans for our members living with multiple chronic conditions.”

Noland declined to say how many of the home assessments Humana has performed. But the company has previously said that it conducted the assessments for about 531,000 members in the first three months of 2014.

Though house calls have become a ritual for hundreds of thousands of seniors in Medicare Advantage plans, federal officials remain concerned about their costs.

A Center for Public Integrity investigation published last year found that the home health assessment industry has flourished even as federal officials struggled to prevent Medicare Advantage plans from tuning up risk scores and overcharging the government by billions of dollars. By the government’s own estimates, nearly $70 billion in “improper” payments were made to Medicare Advantage plans from 2008 through 2013, mostly overbillings tied to inflated risk scores.

CMS officials have indicated that they might bar use of home visits for assessing a patient’s health and a decision to do so could be announced as early as Friday. In the past, however, CMS has backed down from restricting the visits after protests from Medicare Advantage plans.

The Florida criminal case is expected to provide a rare look inside the complexities of the Medicare Advantage payment system.

According to the grand jury, Humana paid Thompson, who ran medical centers in Delray Beach and Boynton Beach, about 80 percent of the money it received from CMS for treating patients. In exchange, the medical center was responsible for paying for all of the members’ medical care.

Humana uses records coded by its doctors to justify each patient’s risk score. Certain medical conditions deemed expensive to treat raise the score and thus the government payment for that patient. The accuracy of those scores is at the heart of the case against Thompson — and the federal probe.

Thompson allegedly reported “false and fraudulent” diagnoses to Humana, which then passed them on to Medicare for payment. The indictment cites eight patients with three medical conditions, including four people said to have “ankylosing spondylitis,” a disease of the spine that can cause abnormal bone growth.

The indictment states that as a result of the inflated risk scores Medicare made “excessive payments” of at least $2,114,332.33.

Humana spokesman Noland said the company “has reimbursed the government to ensure that both the 20 percent and the 80 percent were paid back in full, thus making the government whole.”

HSBC North America's political action committee stopped donating money to U.S. politicians in the weeks before scandal rocked its worldwide operations, a new financial filing indicates.

The lack of activity immediately preceded revelations this month by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project of the Center for Public Integrity, that HSBC's operation in Switzerland apparently assisted customers in hiding their money from tax authorities, while serving other clients with demonstrated connections to arms trafficking, conflict diamonds and bribery. 

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reporters first informed HSBC about the nature of its investigation in early January.

It's unclear whether the HSBC PAC's lack of activity in early 2015 is related to the ICIJ report, and HSBC representatives declined to comment about the PAC's activity. 

In recent years, several high-profile, corporate PACs — JPMorganChase, BP, Goldman Sachs and News Corp. among them— froze their political giving in the midst of unflattering attention. Each time, the PACs eventually began making political contributions again.

HSBC North America's PAC rarely goes a month without making a political contribution, and it has donated to candidates or other political committees in six of the seven Januarys following a national election — January 2013 being the exception, federal records show.

During 2014 alone, HSBC's PAC spent more than a quarter-million dollars on politics, including nearly $100,000 worth of contributions to state- and federal-level politicians, according to federal records.

Recipients of HSBC North America PAC's generosity last year were the campaigns or PACs of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.; Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y.; Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.; Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan.; Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C.; Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y. and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

HSBC's PAC also contributed $1,000 in September to the re-election campaign of former New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, whom a federal grand jury on Thursday indicted on fraud and extortion charges.

The PAC reported it had more than $776,000 cash on hand at the end of January, according to its filing with the Federal Election Commission.

Beyond campaign contributions, HSBC maintains a strong lobbying presence in Washington, D.C., having spent between $2 million and $4 million each year for the past decade trying to influence lawmakers and government agencies, according to disclosures filed with the U.S. House and U.S. Senate.

During 2014, HSBC employed 11 federally registered lobbyists, including 10 who have previously worked for the federal government in some capacity, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Since the revelations this month of HSBC's activities, government authorities in various countries have takenswift action. 

Swiss prosecutors, for example, opened a criminal investigation against HSBC Private Bank and raided the bank’s Geneva offices seeking evidence of “aggravated money-laundering.”

Some U.S. lawmakers have expressed concern about HSBC's actions, with the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee this week delaying a nomination vote on Loretta Lynch to become U.S. attorney general amid questions about how she handled a money laundering prosecution of HSBC in 2012.

Meanwhile, British political columnist Peter Oborne resigned from the Daily Telegraph after accusing the newspaper of deliberately surpressing stories about HSBC, which had been a major advertiser.

HSBC, for its part, issued a formal apology via full-page newspaper ads in the United Kingdom.

Hamish Boland-Rudder and Gerard Ryle contributed to this report.

Breakups are hard — especially when they mean losing contracts worth tens of millions of dollars a year.

Just ask Edelman.

Despite its status as the world’s largest public relations firm, Edelman and the American Petroleum Institute — the nation’s biggest oil and gas trade association — are about to end their decade-long relationship, according to the Holmes Report.

In January, the Center for Public Integrity reported that the PR giant earned a whopping $327.4 million from 2008-2012 in advertising and public relations contracts with the American Petroleum Institute. Details of the split aren’t yet clear.

But the Holmes Report, a trade journal, reported Thursday that Edelman’s advertising subsidiary — Blue Advertising — will be spinning off as an independent firm and taking along its advertising work for API.

In other words, Edelman is losing API mainly because the firm is losing part of itself.

Neither firm has issued a press release about the changes. Edelman declined to comment, and calls to API and Blue Advertising seeking comment were not immediately returned.

Edelman has not been one of API’s top five contractors for more than a year, according to tax filings. The trade group’s top contracts in 2013 included a $32.8 million advertising deal with Blue Advertising but no contracts with Edelman for public relations.

But API has not necessarily cut back on influencing the public. The oil lobby’s contracts with PR firm Fleishman Hillard grew from $4.8 million in 2011 to $23.9 million in 2013, according to annual tax filings.

This work has included print, TV, radio and digital media aimed at helping the petroleum group to “rebalance the conversation about the technique of hydraulic fracturing,” according to Fleishman Hillard’s website.

It’s unclear yet whether Fleishman Hillard will stand to gain more work with API n this shift.

The firm is certainly no stranger to the energy industry. It has also been hired to promote corporation ConocoPhillips, the Rockies Express Pipeline— a 1,700-mile natural gas pipeline, and the Canadian government development of its oil sands.

Edelman, on the other hand, formally declared it would not accept clients that deny climate change following a botched response to a survey and investigation by Climate Investigations Center and the Guardian about campaigns related to climate change.

The contracts between Edelman and API were by far the most lucrative deals inked between PR firms and trade associations from 2008 through 2012, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s recent investigation.

But Edelman wasn’t the only public relations firm that earned big contracts with politically active business groups seeking to shape policy by influencing the public.

Goddard Gunster, for example, earned millions from the American Beverage Association in campaigns opposing sugary beverage taxes.

America is the home of the brave, they say, but a lot of us brave folks are terrified of the way the British do health care.

We’re even afraid of other Americans who aren’t afraid of it, like Dr. Donald Berwick. President Obama nominated Berwick to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services a few years back, but Senate Republicans were so united in their opposition to Berwick that Obama had to wait until Congress was in recess to appoint him.  Berwick struck fear in the hearts of the senators when a few years earlier he said a few positive things about Britain’s National Health Service.

The truth is that those most frightened by the National Health Service—then and now—are insurance industry executives. My former colleagues have been unceasing in their depiction of the NHS as “socialized medicine.” How could anything in the world possibly be worse than a single-payer system in which insurance companies would be unnecessary?

When I was an industry PR guy, I was part of a never-ending effort to defame the NHS, usually by citing a few anecdotes about Brits who claimed to endure long waits for needed care.   

The industry’s propaganda got little resistance from the media or the American public. Few folks on this side of the Atlantic bothered to ask the Brits why they would put up with such an obviously inferior system and why they weren’t clamoring for American-style health care.

To make amends for the years I worked to mislead folks about the NHS, I’d like to recommend a couple of recent articles about Brits who have received care in both the U.S. and the U.K.

The headline of the January 12 story in The Guardian is about all you need to read, quite frankly. “Too many choices, high costs and bureaucracy: British expats grade American healthcare system ‘a pain in the arse.’ ”

The subhead was even more of an indictment of the way we do things here: “Moving to the U.S. for work has advantages for British citizens. The healthcare system is not one of them. It’s so bad that some expats fly home for treatment.”

The article begins by relating the experience of Scottish-born David Gray, now living in Brooklyn, who was recently given the unfortunate news that his doctor was no longer in his insurance company’s network of providers. He was turned away.

“Gray is far from alone,” the article noted. “The American ‘health insurance’ system comes as a nasty shock to many British expatriates working and living in the United States.”

What also comes as a shock is the fact that “many Americans stay in a job they hate for 20 or 30 years mainly because it provides health insurance for them and their families.

“That strikes Brits as a kind of serfdom in The Land of The Free.”

The article quotes Helen Colquhoun, who moved from the U.K. to Boston 12 years ago, as being baffled “why so many Americans are opposed to the idea of what they call ‘socialized medicine’ and why health insurance has anything to do with employment.”

“Why it is tied to employment is beyond me,” she says. “It is a massive burden on business like another tax.”

The other piece I recommend was written for Business Insider by Jim Edwards, a businessman with dual citizenship.

In the January 29 article, Edwards recounts his experiences getting care in both countries for a recent inner ear problem. He wrote about how long it took him to get an appointment with a doctor in the U.S. and then the long wait to be treated after he arrived at the doctor’s office. “I have read many a back issue of Newsweek in my primary care doctor’s office” he wrote.

In the UK, by contrast, “I showed up at 9 a.m. and was seen instantly.”

“For an American, this was bizarre: My butt barely touched the seat in the waiting room before my name was called. Turns out my doc and her staff are serious about patient scheduling.”

Both The Guardian and Business Insider articles noted how Americans are often buried in paperwork after getting medical care.

“If you ever had any health issue that required more than a simple doctor visit, you will know that it precipitates a seemingly never-ending series of forms, bills and letters,” Edwards wrote. “You will be paying bills months, years, later. And it’s almost impossible to correct a billing error. It’s stressful. I developed an intense hatred for health insurance companies in the U.S. because of this.”

In the NHS, he wrote, “there was close to zero paperwork.”

Neither article paints the NHS as nirvana. But none of the Brits would trade the NHS for American-style health care.

“Americans think they have the best health care in the world,” Edward wrote. “Take it from me, a fellow American: They don’t.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced changes Friday to its often-critiqued five-star rating system for nursing home quality —- changes that are likely to negatively affect the ratings for thousands of facilities.

Among the adjustments: the agency is altering how it calculates the staffing figures that are one component of the all-encompassing quality score on the Nursing Home Compare website. That website is widely used by the pubic in evaluating and comparing 15,000 nursing homes nationwide, and is thus crucial to family decisions about where to place a loved one who needs care.  

Whereas it was previously possible for a facility to receive less than four stars in both the registered nurse and total staffing sub-categories and still earn a four-star ranking for staffing overall, now nursing homes must receive the four-star level mark in at least one of those sub-categories in order to receive the four-star staffing rating, according to Patrick Conway, chief medical officer for CMS, the federal agency responsible for overseeing nursing homes. Conway added that homes also must receive at least three stars in both the registered nurse and total staffing components in order to achieve the overall four-star rating for staffing.

Thomas Hamilton, director of the agency’s survey and certification group, said 13 percent, or about 2,000, of the nation’s nursing homes will lose one or two stars on staffing as a result of these policy changes, and other changes in the data underlying nursing homes’ staffing ratings. He explained that the staffing and other changes are part of the agency’s effort to promote continuous improvement in the industry that he said has occurred since the launch of the five-star rating system in December 2008. Staffing is but one criteria used to determine the broader quality score; among the others are health inspections and the percent of residents who are physically restrained.      

In all, about one in three, or about 5,000 nursing homes, will see their broader quality star rating decrease as a result of the changes, according to Conway.    

“We view these changes as part of our continuing journey of quality improvement for the Nursing Home Compare website,” Conway said.

A Center for Public Integrity investigation published in November found widespread gaps between staffing levels reported by nursing homes and staffing levels calculated through an analysis of the homes’ annual financial documents, called cost reports.

The gaps occurred in both nonprofit and for-profit nursing homes, and for all types of direct care staffing positions, though the gaps were greatest for reported levels of registered nurses.

In 2012 the self-reported staffing levels for registered nurses were higher than the average daily level calculated through cost reports in more than 80 percent of nursing homes, the Center found.  

The Affordable Care Act required that nursing homes transition from the self-reported staffing method to a payroll-based system with audited information by March 2012. Officials have said that a payroll-based system for calculating staffing would be the most accurate of all. Hamilton said $11 million in funding awarded to CMS in October 2014 though the IMPACT Act would allow it to complete the process by the end of 2016.  He acknowledged that the variation in payroll systems in nursing homes across the country makes the task a steep one, but said the agency is committed to accomplishing it.

“We’re working hard to make it a reality,” Hamilton said.

Robyn Grant, director of public policy for the National Consumer Voice, the nation's largest nursing homes advocacy group, applauded the changes announced by CMS, but said they do not go far enough.

“We have seen inflation of scores,” Grant said. “The methodology will help bring it more in line with what staffing may actually be like: however, there’s nothing that’s going to help as much as basing the information on payroll data.”

The accuracy of the Nursing Home Compare website has been the subject of significant controversy. The Center's pieces followed the publication in August of a story by The New York Times that found much of the improvement in nursing home performance came on staffing levels and quality measures, two criteria that relied on self-reported data that were not audited by the federal government.

Advocates also welcomed another change announced by CMS: assessing a nursing home’s use of antipsychotic drugs administered to residents as an additional criteria in for measuring quality.   

Cheryl Phillips, senior vice president of advocacy and public policy at LeadingAge, an organization that represents non-profit nursing homes, said the group supports the staffing and quality measure changes, but expressed concern that the public might not understand the reason why quality ratings for many facilities will suddenly drop.

“If we’re really doing all of this to help consumers, all of a sudden changing a nursing home from a four-star to a two-star, is that really helpful in explaining the quality of the care?” Phillips asked.  

Mark Parkinson, president and CEO of the American Health Care Association, an organization that represents for-profit facilities, concurred with Phillips.  

“We are concerned the public won’t know what to make of these new rankings,” Parkinson said in an email.  

CMS is saying on the Compare website itself said that many nursing homes will see a lower quality measure rating as a result of the changes, even though the underlying data may not have changed in individual cases. As a result, the agency said it is not appropriate to compare a facility’s quality measure rating for February with those in previous months.  

Hamilton said the agency has held open forums for nursing home owners and sent notifications about the changes to all of the states.  

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois)  has been among those arguing that higher levels of registered nurse staffing are critical to residents’ quality of care.  Earlier this month, she reintroduced legislation that would require nursing homes to increase registered nurse levels from 8 to 24 hours per day. 

“The need for at least one RN could not be more urgent,” Schakowsky said in a statement when she introduced the initial bill. “Over the past two decades, the medical intensity and complexity of care for nursing facility residents has increased dramatically.”

Five Democrats, including Rep. Charles Rangel (D-New York) and Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-California), have signed on as co-sponsors for the measure.  

The Center for Public Integrity has appointed two new digital journalists to work on audience development and interactive news applications.

John Ketchum joins the Center today as its new Engagement Editor, charged with making our investigations more reader-focused and with leading our audience development efforts and directing our engagement strategies.

He joins the Center for Public Integrity from NPR where he worked as an assistant producer/editor for Morning Edition. Before that he was at NPR's Marketplace as part of a four person team dedicated to covering the income divide in America. John blogged and ran social media strategy for the team. 

"I am excited to break down complex topics in a way that people can understand in the social space," said John. "I believes that now more than ever, people want to understand the world around them. This means meeting them at the mediums they use." 

When he's not working, John likes to cheer on his favorite team, the Detroit Lions. He tweets at @ketchcast.

News Developer Yue Qiu comes to the Center from ProPublica, where she designed interactive graphics and developed news applications. While at ProPublica, she was a 2014 Google Journalism Fellow and 2014-2015 News Application Fellow.

Yue earned a dual Master's degree in journalism and international relations from Columbia University. Funded by Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Qiu led a project to study post-publication censorship in China.

Before attending Columbia University, she covered China’s financial markets, manufacturing and technology as a reporter.

Yue starts at the Center on March 23; she tweets at @YueQiu_cuj.

An outbreak of infections and deaths apparently linked to poorly cleaned medical scopes at a Los Angeles hospital is bringing renewed attention to the broader problem of dirty surgical instruments — the subject of a major Center investigation.

In recent days, an antibiotic-resistant “superbug” known as CRE killed two people and infected five others at UCLA’s Ronald Reagan Medical Center; an estimated 179 more patients may have been exposed from October to January after undergoing a procedure called an endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography. Authorities suspect the deadly germs were transmitted by inadequately sterilized medical scopes used in the procedure, known as duodenoscopes, which are difficult to clean because of their complex design.

But a 2012 investigation by the Center for Public Integrity revealed that the problem of dirty instruments is national in scope, and defies easy solutions. A companion piece was done by NBC’s TODAY show. The Center series, “Filthy surgical instruments: The hidden threat in America’s operation rooms,” detailed how contaminated medical instruments have been showing up in hospitals and outpatient surgery centers with alarming regularity. In 2009, the Department of Veterans Affairs Affairs admitted that 10,737 veterans in Florida, Tennessee and Georgia were given endoscopies or colonoscopies since 2002 with endoscopes that may have been inadequately cleaned. Investigation of a 2008 hepatitis C outbreak that sickened at least six people in Las Vegas revealed that an outpatient surgery center was improperly cleaning endoscopes and reusing biopsy forceps designed for a single use.

At a little-noticed 2011 Food and Drug Administration workshop on the problem, some critics put the blame on poor or overly-complex design of instruments. Decades ago, medical instruments were almost exclusively made of steel and glass, and many resembled the tools used by butchers or auto mechanics. Cleaning those tools was easy, and sterilization required little more than a heavy shot of steam.

The growth of minimally invasive surgeries in the 1990s, however, brought flexible endoscopes that are passed through tiny incisions to see inside patients. Instruments became smaller, more specialized and complicated, with moving parts, tiny holes and long, narrow, hard-to-clean channels running the length of the implements.

At the FDA workshop, experts pointed to the proliferation of complex instruments, but also cited inadequate testing by manufacturers and the struggle faced by poorly-paid hospital employees who clean and sterilize devices in between procedures, often under pressure from nurses and surgeons who need the devices quickly for the next procedure.

In a letter sent today, a California lawmaker is calling on Congress to investigate what the FDA and device makers are doing to prevent more infections, according to the Los Angeles Times. In his letter, U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that disease outbreaks linked to dirty instruments “have national security ramifications.” Lieu told the Times that a recent FDA safety alert issued in response to the UCLA problems provides no assurances that more outbreaks could be prevented.

“While federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are combating superbugs,” Lieu said, “the current recommended sterilization procedures would continue to result in superbug outbreaks and deaths.”

Not long ago, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney promised his administration would battle online smut by strictly enforcing obscenity laws and compelling businesses to install pornographyfilters on every new computer sold in the United States.

That's what makes it jarring that Romney's all-but-defunct 2012 presidential committee — with an assist from U.S. Sen. Rand Paul — is associating itself with a stealthy front group that decries "government censorship" and is best known for producing a cheeky porno spoof that lambastes Internet regulation.

The motive? Cash.

Romney's committee continues to make money by renting the personal information of supporters to big data companies, which in turn peddle the information to most any special interest willing to pay for it, regardless of its views.

Paul, R-Ky., sent an email on Monday in conjunction with an organization called "Protect Internet Freedom" that contends that "net neutrality" stands opposite freedom. The "net neutrality" debate concerns government rules that prevent Internet service providers from blocking or slowing online content, or prioritizing certain content in exchange for payment. The Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to vote this week on new "net neutrality" regulations, which many major telecom companies and trade groups have aggressively opposed.

Paul is a potential 2016 presidential candidate, and his father, Ron Paul, ran for president against Romney in 2012.

"These attempts to regulate the Internet are a direct attack on the freedom of information and an innovative market," Paul wrote in the email topped with a Protect Internet Freedom logo. "The government needs to stay out of the way ... We have to stop this aggressive, invasive and harmful regulation and we need all the help we can get to do it."

After Paul's signature come the message's disclaimers.

"This email was sent by: Romney for President Inc.," it reads. "This message reflects the opinions and representations of the Protect Internet Freedom, and is not an endorsement by Mitt Romney. You are receiving this email because you signed up as a member of Mitt Romney's online community."

Indeed, Romney's campaign has treated its "community" as a commodity ripe for exploitation: Documents filed with the Federal Election Commission indicate Romney's campaign has been renting its supporters' data since not long after Barack Obama defeated him in November 2012.

During 2014 alone, Romney's committee, which continues a long tradition of high-profile politicos such as Obama and Hillary Clinton renting out their supporters' information, earned nearly $2 million off its supporters' information, FECrecordsindicate.

Data and political consulting companies such as FLS Connect, NewsMax Media and Targeted Victory, the latter co-founded by Romney's former campaign digital director Zac Moffatt, are among the Romney campaign's information brokerage clients.

So is New Hampshire-based Granite Lists LLC, which paid the Romney campaign more than half a million dollars last year.

On its website, Granite Lists prominently advertises Romney supporter data as a "highly-responsive list" that "includes donors who passionately support the Republican principles of limited government, fiscal discipline, and free enterprise."

Money Romney's campaign raised by renting supporter information very well could have helped fuel a third presidential run, had Romney not decided last month to stand down.

Jordan Gehrke, a conservative political operative whose resume includes stints leading a pro-Herman Cain super PAC and advising Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., during his 2014 campaign, is helping lead Protect Internet Freedom.

Gehrke confirmed to the Center for Public Integrity that his group did make a "one-time rental" of the Romney's supporter list, which contains the information of millions of people.

He added more than 800,000 people have already signed an anti-"net neutrality" petition that Protect Internet Freedom is pushing.

Gehrke says his upstart group, which he described as a nonprofit "social welfare" organization, has more than 2,000 donors. He declined to name any of them, saying its "not safe for us to disclose our donors" because he's concerned the Internal Revenue Service will target the organization because of its political views.

This isn't the first time Romney's committee made a buck by renting its supporter data to groups whose views or style may not jibe with the image of the straight-arrow candidate. 

An extreme example came in 2013, when the American Unity Fund, a social welfare nonprofit "dedicated to advancing the cause of freedom for gay and lesbian Americans," successfully rented Romney's supporter list and blasted Romney backers with messages, as RedState.com reported.

Romney has consistently opposed same-sex marriages.

As for "net neutrality," Romney has said he opposes the idea in principle, while also calling for strict governmentcontrols over certain Internet content, namely pornography. Obama supports"net neutrality" policy.

Spokespeople for Romney and Paul could not be reached for comment.

The U.S.’s top Internet overseer today voted to bar Internet providers from charging some companies more than others for faster delivery of movies, music and other web content.

The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 along party lines to treat Internet service providers such as Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable much like traditional phone companies. The classification will allow the FCC to impose so-called open Internet rules, also referred to as net neutrality, which require both cable and wireless Internet providers to treat all web content the same. 

The new rules will prevent the companies that control the delivery of web content to homes and businesses from blocking or slowing online traffic, and charging companies like Netflix to more quickly deliver their online services to customers. Net neutrality supporters said this paid prioritization would lead to a two-tiered Internet and stifle innovation and online startups, which couldn’t afford charges for the faster service.

The historic vote is a huge defeat to the giant telecommunications companies, which are among the most powerful special interests in Washington, D.C., and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying, political giving and influence campaigns over the past several years to fight net neutrality.

“This is, overwhelmingly, the biggest defeat for vested interests I can recall in my 15 years working in this sector,” Harold Feld, a senior vice president at Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group in Washington that supported net neutrality, said in an email. “It is a thing that should not be possible, and which therefore nobody but a handful of us believed could happen.”

Last year, the biggest broadband providers and associations that represent them spent $88 million alone on lobbying Congress and federal agencies on all kinds of issues, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

AT&T and Verizon have said they will sue to overturn the ruling.

The FCC also voted 3-2 along party lines to preempt state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that prevent cities in those states that operate their own broadband networks from expanding their services into neighboring areas. The ruling only affects Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Wilson, North Carolina, the cities that filed petitions asking the commission to preempt the laws. But the ruling makes it easier for other cities in those states, as well as cities in 18 other states that restrict municipal broadband, to ask the FCC to overturn the laws.

The telecom giants have also spent millions and to influence state laws restricting municipal broadband.

The one-two punch delivered by the FCC against the telecommunications industry today is a reversal.

Just a couple of months ago, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler had been working on a lighter regulatory net neutrality proposal that would have allowed companies to pay extra for priority access. But in November, President Barack Obama released a video calling on the independent agency to classify Internet providers as a utility.

Google, Facebook, Netflix and other Internet content providers supported strong net neutrality rules. That, taken with the nearly 4 million comments the FCC received, the majority of which were in support of net neutrality, led Wheeler to choose to reclassify Internet providers as common carriers, like telephone companies, under what is known as Title II of the Communications Act.

In a summary of the net neutrality rules released this month before the commission vote, the FCC underscored that the rules aren’t utility-style regulations. The agency said it wouldn’t regulate Internet prices or levy taxes and fees, which Title II regulation permits. The FCC will not release the complete rules until later this month.

Internet providers have said they will reduce investments to upgrade their networks because the regulations will keep them from generating enough of a return. The U.S. Telecom Association, a trade group that includes on its board executives from AT&T, CenturyLink and Verizon, cited a study that found utility-like regulation by the FCC would cause the telecom industry to cut spending on their networks by as much as a third during the next five years, “a negative impact on the order of tens of billions of dollars,” U.S. Telecom said in a press release.

In his summary of the net neutrality rules, Wheeler argued that wireless providers invested $400 billion in infrastructure during the time they were regulated as Title II common carriers. That proves “modernized Title II regulation can support investment and competition,” the summary noted.

In 2007, the George W. Bush administration reclassified wireless carriers as a Title I service, which has fewer regulations. Opponents argue the industry knew the Bush administration would deregulate the industry and started investing in their networks shortly after Bush was elected, a time period that accounts for most of the $400 billion investment, said Gus Hurwitz, who teaches telecommunications law at the University of Nebraska College of Law.

“In the early 2000s, that’s when the FCC classified cable would be Title I, and that was a strong indicator that the Bush administration would do the same in wireless,” said Hurwitz, who also is a visiting fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “That’s what prompted a lot of the investment.”

Kevin Werbach, who studies Internet and communications policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, said Wall Street hasn’t viewed net neutrality regulations or the expansion of municipal broadband as a threat to telecommunications companies. Since Feb. 4, when Wheeler announced he would propose utility-like Internet regulations, telecommunications stocks have mostly increased, with Time Warner Cable leading all companies with an 8 percent increase as of yesterday. Comcast stock has risen 7 percent, and Verizon has increased 3 percent. AT&T has been unchanged.

“The reclassification itself won’t substantially affect investment levels,” Werbach said. “That’s one reason the industry stocks didn’t plummet when the FCC plan was announced.”

Sprint, the nation’s fourth-largest wireless provider, told the FCC in January that strong net neutrality rules would not stop it from upgrading networks. Verizon said the same thing in December, but then reversed itself a day later.

The telecom industry and its partners will certainly sue the FCC over its two decisions, and the agency expects it. Both sides are confident that they will win in court.

Net neutrality proponents say the FCC followed what the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in January 2014 when it struck down the last net neutrality rules. The judges said the agency had the authority to regulate the Internet, but not if it was classified as something other than a telecommunications service. Now the FCC has reclassified Internet service providers.

“I am not terribly impressed with the case against Title II,” Feld said in an email. “It's a pretty straight up agency deference case.”

Net neutrality supporters also believe they may get a favorable ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, if it makes it that far. In 2005, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a dissenting opinion in a decision that argued it was impossible for an Internet service provider to separate its infrastructure from the services and programming it sent over that network. In essence, Internet service providers were telecommunications service companies, Scalia argued, giving net neutrality supporters the legal argument they needed and the confidence that they could get four more justices to side with Scalia.

Hurwitz isn’t so sure.

“I think they are over confident in that interpretation,” he said. “Scalia is very hawkish of agencies establishing a broad authority, and the FCC is establishing a broad authority.”

“Obamacare is a train wreck, and that’s actually not fair to train wrecks.”

So said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland. It was a line that drew both applause and laughs, as you would expect from a gathering of folks who view the Affordable Care Act as an abomination.

Chances are that Cruz and his CPAC fans are hoping the Supreme Court will do what Congress has so far been unable to do, when the justices rule in a few months on King v. Burwell. That’s the lawsuit to be argued at the high court this week —the one arguing that the subsidies millions of people are getting in 34 states to help cover the cost of their health insurance are illegal. Cruz and others who despise Obamacare are hoping that if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the plaintiffs, what they consider a scourge on the nation will soon be eradicated.

But if there ever was a reason to cite the maxim, “be careful what you wish for,” it’s about this lawsuit. A Supreme Court decision that goes against Obamacare would lead to a train wreck with almost unimaginable consequences. And Republicans likely would get much of the blame.

Anyone who thinks such an outcome would usher in an era of a better functioning health insurance marketplace should read the amicus brief submitted by America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s largest trade group.

AHIP’s brief supports the government, not the plaintiffs. It paints a picture not of a new heaven on earth if the Supreme Court decides against the government, but of a health insurance apocalypse. Not everywhere, though, ironically. The marketplace meltdown would occur only in those 34 states, led primarily by Republican governors, like in Texas, that defaulted to the federal government to operate their health insurance exchanges.

In King vs. Burwell, the plaintiffs argue that the way the Affordable Care Act is worded, the subsidies are lawful only in the states that decided to set up and operate their own exchanges. The sponsors of the legislation insist they never intended the law to be interpreted that way. Nevertheless, opponents insist that the courts should require the government to cut off the subsidies it has been paying to low- and moderate-income individuals and families since the beginning of 2014, in the states with exchanges operated by the feds.

Of course, AHIP is not above fear mongering to get what it wants. But in this case, the consequences undoubtedly would look a lot like what AHIP describes. The organization cites history to demonstrate what the future would look like if the plaintiffs prevail.

Most Americans, including many Republicans, agree that it was not a good idea for insurance companies to be able to deny coverage to anyone just because of a preexisting condition. Or to base policy premiums on an applicant’s gender, age and health. Yet that’s what insurers could do pre-Obamacare. And that’s largely why nearly 50 million Americans were uninsured before the law was passed.

The insurance industry was willing to go along with a requirement that they make their policies available to everyone and that they give up their ability to set prices based on criteria like gender and health status. In exchange, insurers insisted that there be a requirement in the law that everyone be required to buy coverage. 

Without the mandate to buy insurance, young and healthy people would once again opt to go uninsured, leaving the marketplace to sicker and older consumers, AHIP wrote in its brief.

AHIP cited as evidence what had happened in years past when New York and a number of other states tried to force insurance companies to accept all applicants without a mandate to buy coverage. Premiums in every one of the states spiked dramatically, and many insurers left those states’ insurance markets because of the “death spiral” that was beginning to result.

A similar spiral would result if subsidies were taken away from the newly insured in those 34 states, AHIP warned. Because 87 percent of the newly insured have such low incomes they qualified for subsidies, most of them—especially the young and healthy ones—undoubtedly would drop coverage if they had to pay the full premium.

“A sicker pool of consumers results in higher premiums, which causes an additional relatively healthy subset of participants to drop out, which in turn results in a further increase in premiums.” That, in essence, is what the death spiral is all about.

In New York, the individual market shrank from 1.2 million to 31,000 between 1992 and 2010, AHIP noted. “At that point, the only people who participated in the market were those who were very sick and affluent,” AHIP wrote in its brief.

Eliminating the subsidies for the newly insured in 34 states would quickly lead to the collapse of the individual health insurance market place in those states just as it did in New York. 

Talk about a train wreck. That is one that would be truly catastrophic and injure millions. 

Wendell Potter is the author of Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans and Obamacare: What’s in It for Me? What Everyone Needs to Know About the Affordable Care Act.

After the nation’s top Internet regulator moved to allow two cities to offer broadband service to their residents, don’t expect a lot of other cities to follow. Expect lawsuits.

The Federal Communications Commission voted last week to preempt laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that make it all but impossible for municipalities to expand Internet service. Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Wilson, N.C., had asked the FCC to act so that they could extend their networks to nearby towns that wanted it.

About 18 other states have laws that restrict cities from building or expanding government operated local broadband networks. The laws are a result of heavy lobbying and spending over the years by large telecommunications companies such as AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable. The FCC’s favorable ruling may be viewed as opening the door to towns in those states to file similar petitions.

But that’s not likely to happen soon, said city officials overseeing networks and broadband experts. First, cities are waiting for the FCC to release their final ruling, probably later this month, on preempting the Tennessee and North Carolina laws. The details may affect how other towns view their chances of getting a favorable FCC decision.

Second, it is likely the FCC’s ruling will be challenged in court, and cities want to wait for the judges to weigh in before paying lawyers to petition the FCC. Any suit will have a chilling effect on cities.

None of the big five telecoms — Comcast, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, Verizon or CenturyLink — issued a statement about municipal broadband immediately after the vote. Comcast and AT&T didn’t respond to requests for comment. The National Conference of State Legislatures, a group that promotes the interests of states in Congress, threatened last year to sue the FCC when agency Chairman Tom Wheeler signaled the FCC would likely vote to preempt the state broadband laws. NCSL repeated the threat after the vote.

“NCSL takes the pre-emption of states very seriously and will continue to pursue our options to ensure that any action taken by the FCC on municipal broadband networks is overturned by the courts,” according to a statement posted last week on its website.

The National Association of Attorneys General said in an email it had no plans to sue, but Tennessee’s attorney general left the possibility open.

It’s unclear how the law applies to other towns in Tennessee and North Carolina. Before last week’s vote, FCC senior administrators said the agency’s decision to preempt the state laws would apply only to Chattanooga and Wilson. Cities in other states, and even those in Tennessee and North Carolina, would have to petition the agency separately for relief from restrictive laws.

In Tullahoma, Tennessee, about an hour’s drive west from Chattanooga, city officials plan to wait to see if the city needs to file its own petition to expand its super-fast broadband network, which began operating in 2007.

“We will do whatever we can to ensure we have the ability to provide our services to anyone in the area that wants it and will pay for it,” Steve Cope, chairman of the Tullahoma Utility Board, which operates the city’s broadband network, said in an email.

Jim Baller, the attorney who represented Chattanooga and Wilson, said the FCC order does explicitly apply to Chattanooga and Wilson. But he said Chattanooga had asked the FCC to strike four words from the Tennessee law that prevented it from providing broadband service outside of its service area. By doing so, it would allow other Tennessee cities to expand. The same situation would apply for North Carolina cities.

“The FCC surely does not intend to require each such municipal utility to file its own individual petition to get the same ruling from the FCC that Chattanooga got,” Baller wrote in an email. “The same is true of North Carolina municipalities that are similarly-situated to Wilson. After all, the FCC’s intent is to remove barriers to community broadband initiatives, not to create costly, burdensome, and time-consuming new barriers of its own.”

If you're going to lose a U.S. Senate election and find yourself nearly $1 million in debt after the bruising campaign, it helps to be Ed Gillespie.

Some of the nation's top Republicans and corporate political influencers will gather Monday night and unite behind the common goal of helping Gillespie — already an extraordinarily wealthy man — recoup at least some of his lost riches.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sens. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W. Va.; Cory Gardner, R-Colo., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, are scheduled to appear at the "campaign debt retirement reception" at the offices of the lobbying shop BGR Group, according to an invitation obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

Haley Barbour, the former Mississippi governor who leads BGR Group, is hosting the confab along with firm executives Lanny Griffith, Ed Rogers and Bob Wood.

Other "host committee" members include:

• Kirk Blalock, a lobbyist at Fierce Government Relations whose several dozen clients include Apple Inc., JPMorgan Chase and Co. and the oil company BP
• Dirk Van Dongen, president of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors
• Brian McCormack, the Edison Electric Institute's vice president for political and external affairs
• Lobbyist David Hobbs of the Hobbs Group, whose clients include Comcast Corp., Honeywell International and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association

As of Dec. 31, Gillespie's campaign committee, which had less than $20,000 in its coffer, owed its namesake candidate $990,000 — money Gillespie personally loaned the committee, according to disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission.

Gillespie found himself pouring huge amounts of money into his campaign largely because his moneyed friends didn't donate nearly as much to help Gillespie as they could have through free-spending vehicles like super PACs and "social welfare" nonprofits. 

And now, it appears, Gillespie's friends and financiers will only be able to help him reclaim a portion of his cash.

That's because federal law states that after Election Day, a candidate's campaign may not repay loans in excess of $250,000 that the candidate himself or herself made to the campaign. 

The FEC noted as much in a letter to Gillespie's campaign on Feb. 25 and has previouslyissued related debt repayment rulings.

Gillespie's options?

He could challenge the constitutionality of the debt retirement law in federal court. Or, he could just say goodbye to the three-quarters of a million dollars. 

John Selph, Gillespie's campaign treasurer, said he wasn't authorized to speak on behalf of the committee. He referred questions to campaign manager Chris Leavitt, who could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday .

Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman and political consultant who co-founded the conservative super PAC American Crossroads, certainly had money to spare his campaign, which in defeat made a surprisingly strong showing against incumbent Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. 

A mandatory personal financial disclosure Gillespie made with the U.S. Senate in September stated he earned more than $3 million in non-investment income and owned millions of dollars worth of real estate, stocks and other investments.

Carrie Levine contributed to this report

On February 18, the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry group, announced that natural gas production from hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania had broken another record, exceeding 4 trillion cubic feet in 2014. “That number – nearly 1 trillion cubic feet more than 2013 – represents more than a quarter of the nation’s total natural gas production,” the coalition said, adding that more than 243,000 Pennsylvanians were “working across the industry.”

Today, a scientific journal devotes an entire issue to a gloomier topic: the public health impacts of all that fracking. It’s a subject the Center for Public Integrity and InsideClimate News explored in great detail in their joint 2014 project, “Big Oil, Bad Air.” The 20-month investigation, which included a 15-minute online documentary by The Weather Channel, described toxic air emissions, health problems and lax regulation in areas of heavy drilling, notably the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas.

The peer-reviewed Journal of Environmental Science and Health published eight articles in an issue it calls “Facing the Challenges—Research on Shale Gas Extraction.” Among other things, the researchers found that fracking may be polluting Pennsylvania streams with mercury; that dogs – good "health sentinels” for human effects – have gotten sick near drilling sites; and that “extreme exposures” to volatile organic compounds, such as the carcinogen benzene, can be expected during several stages of gas production and processing.

The special issue’s editor, John Stolz, director of the Center for Environmental Research and Education at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, said the papers – outgrowths of a 2013 conference – should trigger additional studies.

Fracking is “not the traditional mom-and-pop drilling” and “could be considered a heavy industrial process,” Stolz said, indicating a need for careful siting of drilling rigs and other polluting facilities near residential areas.

“We’re not against the industry. That’s not the point,” Stolz said. “There are things related to this industry that have to be addressed. Let’s do it soberly and with eyes wide open.”

PHILADELPHIA — State election regulators will soon investigate whether Pennsylvanians for Accountability, a liberal nonprofit that repeatedly criticized former Pennsylvania GOP Gov. Tom Corbett and other conservative politicians, violated political disclosure laws.

Pennsylvania's Department of State will initiate an "inquiry into apparent discrepancies" in the political spending reports filed by Pennsylvanians for Accountability, spokeswoman Adriana Arvizo said in response to questions raised about the group by the Center for Public Integrity.

It’s the latest trouble for the union-backed Pennsylvanians for Accountability, an organization that also failed to file a mandatory federal tax return — exposing it to up to $50,000 in Internal Revenue Service fines, as the Center for Public Integrity reported earlier this year.

At least one Republican state lawmaker is also considering holding a legislative hearing to, in part, probe the group’s actions.

According to recently submitted tax records, Pennsylvanians for Accountability spent more than $1 million during late 2012 and early 2013 on advertisements targeting Corbett, who lost re-election in November, and a handful of state lawmakers.

Pennsylvanians for Accountability characterized nearly $475,000 of this sum as “independent expenditure efforts” that consisted of “direct mail and digital advocacy” in nine state House and state Senate races.

Yet the group reported making only $61,000 worth of independent expenditures in two races to the Pennsylvania Department of State.

Pennsylvania law defines an “independent expenditure” as spending “made for the purpose of influencing an election” not done in “cooperation or consultation” with any candidate.

Notably, the independent expenditure reports that Pennsylvanians for Accountability filed with the Pennsylvania Department of State arrived more than six months late, in May 2013, one day after an article about Pennsylvanians for Accountability was published by Pittsburgh-based investigative reporting group PublicSource.org.

At the time, Adam Bonin, the group’s Philadelphia-based lawyer, wrote that the documents had been filed late “inadvertently.”

As a so-called “social welfare” nonprofit organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the U.S. tax code, Pennsylvanians for Accountability is not required to publicly disclose information about its donors, even when it spends money on politics. Candidates, political action committees and political parties, in contrast, must regularly reveal their donors’ names and other identifying information.

But separate tax records and federal labor filings reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity show that the National Education Association, the Service Employees International Union and Democratic-aligned organizing group America Votes accounted for more than $1.2 million of Pennsylvanians for Accountability’s receipts — nearly all of its income.

This year, Pennsylvanians for Accountability should expect scrutiny from some Keystone State Republicans, who, unlike many of their national GOP counterparts, want politically active nonprofits to disclose more information about their funders.

State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, Republican chairman of the House state government committee, says that his committee may hold a hearing on political “dark money” groups like Pennsylvanians for Accountability, which he called “shady” for trying to “mislead the voters” by not identifying its funders.

“The electorate deserves to have good information and transparency in the election process,” Metcalfe said.

Pennsylvania Republican Anne Chapman*, who was among the legislative candidates targeted by Pennsylvanians for Accountability in 2012, likewise expressed concern about Pennsylvanians for Accountability’s campaign finance reports — and about the lack of information regarding the group at the time of its ad blitz against her.

“It should be very obvious who is funding these things,” said Chapman, who lost her 2012 race by about 15 percentage points.

That sentiment was echoed by state Rep. Rick Saccone, a Republican targeted by Pennsylvanians for Accountability in 2012 who ultimately won by just 112 votes out of the nearly 29,000 votes cast that year.

“If there’s no transparency, then bad things happen,” he said.

While hardly transparent about its finances, Pennsylvanians for Accountability appears to be in the midst of a disappearing act.

After its initial spending spree following its September 2012 creation, Pennsylvanians for Accountability did not raise a dime during its second year of existence, according to a new tax filing Bonin provided last week.

As of August 2014, the document states, the group had about $6,000 in the bank.

*Correction, March 4, 2015, 3:01 p.m.: This story orginally misspelled Anne Chapman's last name.