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9 things to know about George Pataki

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What do Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, Martin Van Buren and George Pataki all have in common? All men are former New York governors. And if Pataki can convince voters that he’s fit for the White House, all will have also served as president of the United States.

Pataki will formally announce his presidential run today. A Republican who served three terms as New York’s top executive, he first won that office by defeating Democratic incumbent Mario Cuomo during the famed “Republican Revolution” of 1994. An ardent supporter of fighting Islamic terrorists abroad, Pataki led New York’s government during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In a crowded GOP presidential field, Pataki also stands out for his environmental stances. In 2005, BusinessWeek praised Pataki for his efforts as governor “to cut gases that cause global warming.”

As president, Pataki says he would reduce the size of government and simplify the tax code. He says he would also institute term limits for Congress and ban former members of Congress from lobbying.

Pataki also considered presidential bids in 2008 and 2012 but didn’t run. Here’s more about the man who hopes that 2016 will finally be his year:

Sources: Center for Public Integrity reporting, as well as the American Friends Service Committee, National Institute on Money in State Politics, PatakiCahillGroup.com, Wall Street Journal and WeThePeopleNotWashington.com.

Image sources: Gage Skidmore/Flickr, Michael Vadon/Flickr, Iowapolitics.comFlickr, Jim Cole/AP

Michael Beckelhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/michael-beckelJared Bennetthttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/jared-bennetthttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/05/28/17396/9-things-know-about-george-pataki

9 things to know about Martin O'Malley

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Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley is set to announce his bid for the presidency on Saturday.

The announcement will make O’Malley the second official challenger facing Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the battle for the party’s presidential nomination.

While in the governor’s mansion from 2007 to 2015, O’Malley also did a two-year stint as chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, a political committee dedicated to electing Democratic chief executives.

O’Malley’s presidential aspirations have been Maryland’s worst-kept secret for several years. He has been an active presence in the national political arena since his election as Baltimore’s mayor in 1999. In 2007, the then-new governor even stood in for Clinton at a rally promoting her first presidential run.

Here are nine things to know about O’Malley’s political and financial history:

Image sources: Wikicommons, Maryland Govpics/Flickr

Sources: Center for Public Integrity reporting, as well as the National Institute on Money in State Politics and Washington Times.

Rachel Bayehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/rachel-bayeJared Bennetthttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/jared-bennetthttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/05/29/17303/9-things-know-about-martin-omalley

McCaskill: Medicare Advantage billing fraud 'must be investigated'

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U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill wants federal officials to step up oversight of privately-run Medicare Advantage health plans treating the elderly, citing allegations by whistleblowers that some health plans are overcharging the government for their services.

It is the second recent call by a U.S. Senator for enhanced scrutiny of billing practices in the popular private health plans, which treat more than 16 million seniors.

Last week, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley asked Attorney General Loretta Lynch to tighten scrutiny of Medicare Advantage health plans suspected of overcharging the government, saying billions of tax dollars are at risk as the senior care program grows.

Both McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, and Grassley, an Iowa Republican, cited concerns over the accuracy of a billing tool called a “risk score,” which is intended to pay Medicare Advantage insurers higher rates for taking sicker people and less for those with few medical needs.

But federal officials have struggled for years to track overspending tied to inflated risk scores that prompt overbilling. A 2009 agency study found that some plans had exaggerated how sick patients were to boost their payments, for instance. CMS also has acknowledged that faulty risk scores remain a costly problem, as the Center for Public Integrity first reported last year.

In a May 26 letter to CMS administrator Andrew Slavitt, McCaskill asked for a briefing on steps the government is taking to combat risk scoring fraud and abuse.

"With fraudulently inflated risk scores potentially costing taxpayers billions of dollars every year and resulting in less money in the Medicare Trust Funds for our seniors, this is an issue that must be investigated further," McCaskill wrote.

'Time and again' 

“Gaming the Medicare Advantage system is a threat to taxpayers, but also to Medicare beneficiaries--and we should be doing everything possible to aggressively pursue anyone engaged in wrongdoing," said McCaskill, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Special Committee on Aging.

McCaskill cited the Center for Public Integrity and NPR reports  that uncovered federal whistleblower lawsuits alleging that some Medicare Advantage plans have taken steps to inflate risk scores to overcharge the government.

“Time and again we've seen whistleblowers allege outright fraud when it comes to risk scores, and to me that's a sign there's simply not enough oversight taking place.”

Medicare Advantage plans have gained popularity as an alternative to the government-run Medicare program in recent years, and the plans now cover about one in three people eligible for Medicare at an annual cost topping $150 billion.

But McCaskill noted that in 2014, the Government Accountability Office reported that more than $12 billion in “improper” payments to Medicare Advantage plans tied to faulty risk scores.

Senate Consumer Protection subcommittee Chair Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., holds up a document at a subcommittee hearing on General Motors in April of 2014.Fred Schultehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/fred-schultehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/05/29/17422/mccaskill-medicare-advantage-billing-fraud-must-be-investigated

Center for Public Integrity appoints Chief Development Officer

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Deborah Dubois has been named Chief Development Officer at the Center for Public Integrity, the global nonprofit investigative journalism organization based in Washington, DC.

Dubois, currently the Deputy Executive Director for Development at Justice at Stake, succeeds Robin Heller, who served in that role for five years, leaving in January 2015 to become the Global Development Officer at Rare.

“Deborah is a consummate professional in development and fundraising,” said CEO Peter Bale. “She has a proven record of achievement in the nonprofit sector. She also has invaluable private sector and international experience which makes her doubly valuable to The Center for Public Integrity and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.”

Dubois joins the Center after two and half years at Justice at Stake (JAS), a nonprofit organization dedicated to keeping America’s courts fair and impartial. After eight years as the Vice President of Development, Marketing & Communications at the National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA), Dubois established the development department at JAS under a $2M, four-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. While at JAS, Dubois grew foundation support, adding several new institutional donors during her tenure. She also launched an individual giving program that saw exponential growth and laid the foundation for long term support for Justice at Stake’s new strategic plan. 

“Joining a distinguished and award-winning organization of investigative journalists is an honor and a privilege. To be at the forefront of news and issues that affect the daily lives of millions around the globe is both humbling and extremely exciting,” said Dubois.

“The enormous respect and admiration gained by the Center over its 25 year-plus history inspires me to add to its already significant global impact.  And, it challenges me to do everything I can to help elevate its importance and the issues on which its works, in the minds of those who care about global truths and justice.”

Prior to JAS and NLADA, Deborah was a consultant with Carter Marketing Group, was the Director of Strategy, Research & Analysis at GW Solutions and at Blackboard.  She is the founder of the bilingual journal, “One Eye Open/Jednim Okem,”a Prague-based literary journal that focuses on women’s issues in post-Communist Europe and is the former Chair of the Board of Directors for the Mautner Project. She holds a Masters in Business Administration from The George Washington University and a Bachelor of Arts in Government from Cornell University. 

Dubois will begin work at the Center in early July. 

Deborah Dubois.William Grayhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/william-grayhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/05/29/17418/center-public-integrity-appoints-chief-development-officer

9 things to know about Lindsey Graham

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A foreign policy hawk and staunch defender of Israel, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., will today declare himself a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

In Congress, Graham has been involved with numerous high-profile legislative battles, including national security issues, immigration reform, energy policy and campaign finance regulation.

Here’s more about the political and financial history of this three-term senator who’d like to become the next president.

 

 

 

Sources: Center for Public Integrity reporting, as well as Bloomberg, Center for Responsive Politics, Federal Election Commission, Kantar Media/CMAG, Mother Jones, National Right to Life Committee and YouTube

Image sources: Jim Cole/AP, defense.gov/Wikicommons, John Orell/ Flickr

Michael Beckelhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/michael-beckelJared Bennetthttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/jared-bennetthttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/01/17197/9-things-know-about-lindsey-graham

Incumbents attract cash in N.J. Assembly races

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All of New Jersey’s 80 Assembly seats are up for election this year, but in Tuesday’s primary only 10 of them are contested.

The primary is just the preamble to the real fight in November. Democrats have controlled the Assembly since 2001, but Republicans hope to pick up nine seats to regain the majority.

Still, with months to go before most of the races heat up, the 170 major-party candidates vying for the spots have raised more than $12 million so far and spent more than $6 million.

Tuesday’s ballot also will have one special primary election for a state senate seat in Camden and Gloucester counties, but Democrat Nilsa Cruz-Perez is running unopposed. Democrats already control New Jersey’s Senate and the state has a GOP governor.

Here are 10 things to know about New Jersey's legislative races:

Sources: New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission reports through May 22, the latest available filings; New Jersey Division of Elections, National Institute on Money in State Politics.

 

 

Rachel Bayehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/rachel-bayehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/01/17379/incumbents-attract-cash-nj-assembly-races

The best health care system in the world? Nonsense!

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Americans spend more per capita on health care than people anywhere else in the world, yet outcomes in every other developed country are better on almost every measure, from infant mortality to life expectancy.

A big reason for that is our collective gullibility. We continue to believe what many politicians tell us, despite evidence to the contrary: that we have the best health care system in the world.

Similarly, we continue to be persuaded by insurance companies that they’re essential to the system and better than any government program could possibly be at controlling health care costs.

And we are still buying the pharmaceutical industry’s argument that if Americans don’t keep paying more for prescriptions than anyone else on the planet, drug companies—which have gargantuan profit margins­­—won’t be able to keep developing the drugs we need.

To understand how foolish we are, let’s consider the war of words that recently erupted between health insurers and drug companies.

First, though, let’s take a look at a new study that compares how much Americans pay for prescription medication compared to what folks in a few other industrialized countries pay.

The study, released last week by the Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Policy, showed that pharmaceutical spending in the U.S. per capita had reached $1,010 in 2012. The next highest spender was Germany at $668 per capita. Australia came in at $558.

Am I the only one who finds it more than a little upsetting that the Germans spend 66 percent of what we spend for drugs and the Aussies spend just 55 percent?

As the Kaiser researchers point out, those countries’ citizens get a much better deal on their meds because their federal governments have policies in place to regulate drug prices.  And those nations are not alone. Every other country in the developed world has instituted some kind of price control mechanism. Except, of course, the United States.

Kaiser’s numbers are consistent with those from a 2013 analysis by the 34-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which showed that Americans spend 40 percent more on drugs than the next highest spender, Canada.

As PBS pointed out last year in a report on drug prices around the world, government agencies in other countries set limits on how much they (and their citizens) will pay drug makers for their various products.

“By contrast,” as PBS further pointed out, “in the U.S., insurers typically accept the price set by the makers for each drug, especially when there is no competition in a therapeutic area, and then cover the cost with high copayments.” (Emphasis mine.)

PBS nailed it. American insurance companies are essentially powerless when it comes to negotiating prices with Big Pharma, just as they are becoming increasingly powerless in controlling the cost of hospital care and physician services. The way insurers continue to make money is not by doing a good job for their customers but by constantly shifting more of the cost of care to those customers.

If we were paying close enough attention to what insurers were saying during the health care reform debate, we would have realized that they are, for all practical purposes, impotent when it comes to holding down costs. All we had to do was read between the lines.

One of the insurers’ consistent talking points was that instead of putting them in the crosshairs, policymakers should instead focus on “the real drivers of health care costs.” Those “real drivers,” according to insurance company executives, are the companies and people who actually provide most of the care we need: hospitals, doctors and pharmaceutical companies.

The industry’s impotence was on display yet again last year when the drugmaker Gilead slapped a $1,000 per-pill price tag on its new hepatitis C medicine.

“Is this ‘whatever you can get away with’ pricing here?” America’s Health Insurance Plans’ then-CEO, Karen Ignagni, asked during a health care conference.

The answer: yes. Drug companies can get away with it because private insurance companies can’t stop them. And, with the exception of the Veteran’s Administration and Medicaid programs, neither can the U.S. government. In fact, the pharmaceutical industry was able to persuade lawmakers to make it illegal for the government to negotiate with drug companies when they enacted the Medicare drug benefit in 2003.

It’s telling that, in response to Ignagni’s rhetorical question, a pharmaceutical industry spokesman said, almost mockingly, that insurers should do more to control health care costs.

As for Big Pharma’s claim that Americans must pay more to keep their R&D departments humming, which we seem to have bought hook, line and sinker, the Kaiser researchers, like many others before them, suggested we’re being duped.

“There is evidence that companies overestimate the amount they actually spend,” they wrote, citing a 2011 analysis that found the median R&D costs for producing a new drug was $43 million, which is just 5 percent of the $802 million figure the industry routinely cites.

Maybe the question we should be asking is, how much longer can we afford to be so gullible?

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.

Wendell Potterhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/wendell-potterhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/01/17426/best-health-care-system-world-nonsense

Likely approval seen for latest cable merger

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Cable company Charter Communications Inc.’s proposed $57 billion buyout of Time Warner Cable Inc. made big news last week. But the deal hasn’t sparked anywhere near the level of concern from public interest advocates that Comcast Corp.’s failed bid to buy Time Warner did.

Despite the size of the deal, it is expected to have a much better chance of making it through the regulatory process than Comcast’s bid. Why?

In a nutshell, regulators were concerned that a combined Comcast-Time Warner Cable would have had much greater control over the broadband market than a Charter deal. If Comcast were successful, it would have laid claim to 57 percent of all Internet connections nationwide compared to 30 percent with a Charter-Time Warner Cable combination.

Regulators feared that Comcast, the nation’s largest cable provider, combined with Time Warner, the second-largest cable provider, would have pushed Internet traffic back to its cable network, thus protecting its lucrative cable customer base.

Because of changing technologies and consumers’ viewing habits, such as paying for online streaming videos and programs delivered over the Internet, broadband has become a more important player in the entertainment business.

In addition, Comcast’s ownership of NBC Universal raised worries that the new cable giant would favor its own programming over other networks. Charter doesn’t own a broadcast company or any programming interests.

Charter’s been busy. The company also wants to buy Bright House Networks LLC for $10 billion. If that deal goes through, a combined Charter-TWC, which would be called New Charter, would have 24 million customers compared to Comcast’s 27 million.

The differences between the two deals have brought muted and measured responses from those who had strongly opposed the Comcast-TWC merger.

“Unlike [the] Comcast [deal], which was awful no matter how you sliced it, we need more detail about this proposed transaction to know whether or not it will serve the public interest,” said Harold Feld of Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group that opposed the Comcast-TWC merger.

Sen. Al Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota, who immediately said he had serious reservations about the Comcast-TWC merger when it was announced, seemed to take a lighter tone in a letter sent to the Federal Communications Commission last week.

“To protect the American people, it is essential that regulators thoroughly examine the proposed deal and, if allowed to proceed, consider the need for strong and enforceable consumer protections to guard against any anti-competitive effects and to promote the public interest,” Franken wrote.

And then there were FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s phone calls this month to Tom Rutledge, chief executive officer at Charter, and Time Warner Cable CEO Rob Marcus, telling them that the FCC’s decision against the Comcast-TWC deal didn’t indicate the agency was necessarily against all mergers. The calls surprised many telecommunications analysts and federal regulators.

But before anyone thinks Charter’s deal is a slam dunk, some analysts point to the same regulatory optimism that met the proposed Comcast-TWC merger when it was first announced in February 2014. At the time, Stifel Nicolaus analysts Christopher King and Josh James said in a note to clients that, while opposition will occur, “we ultimately expect the transaction will be approved."

For sure, some opposition has lined up against the deal.

“Charter will have a tough time making a credible argument that consolidating local monopoly power on a nationwide basis will benefit consumers,” wrote Derek Turner, research director at Free Press, a media advocacy group in Washington. “Indeed, the issue of the cable industry's power to harm online video competition, which is what ultimately sank Comcast’s consolidation plans, are very much at play in this deal.”

Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, now a special advisor with the consumer advocacy group Common Cause, called into question the argument that New Charter’s 30 percent share of the broadband market is small enough to pass scrutiny at the FCC and Justice Department.

"Give me a break!  It's 'only' 30% of the market?” Copps wrote in an email. “Add Comcast and what's left for competition? What's left for consumer benefits?”

A Charter Communications van in St. Louis. Charter Communications proposed a $57 billion of Time Warner Cable in May, 2015.Allan Holmeshttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/allan-holmeshttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/01/17427/likely-approval-seen-latest-cable-merger

Anti-Hillary groups to FEC: Take a hike

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A pair of anti-Hillary Clinton political committees are effectively telling the Federal Election Commission to take a long walk off a tall mountain.

The groups — Dick Morris's Just Say No to Hillary PAC and the Stop Hillary PAC — today in separatemessages told the nation's federal campaign regulator that they won't comply with requests to change their names.

The tell-offs follow recent FEC letters that asked the groups to remove the "Hillary" from their monikers, citing federal law that states “no unauthorized committee shall include the name of any candidate in its name."

Federal law also notes that "an unauthorized political committee may include the name of a candidate in the title of a special project name or other communication if the title clearly and unambiguously shows opposition to the named candidate."

The law does not define what a "special project" or "other communication" exactly is — or isn't.

For Cleta Mitchell, an election lawyer representing Dick Morris' Just Say No to Hillary PAC, the law is clear enough. She argues the PAC "clearly and unambiguously shows opposition to [Clinton] by including in its name, title, communications and special projects the words 'Just Say No,' thereby showing opposition to a 'Hillary' candidacy."

Lawyer Dan Backer, meanwhile, was even more blunt in defending his client, the Stop Hillary PAC.

"This committee would encourage the FEC to vigorously investigate who it is that is so stupid that they would think a political committee named 'Stop Hillary PAC' is in any way an authorized committee of Hillary Clinton," he wrote.

Backer then added: "In anticipation of any further harassment of this Committee by partisan agents of any federal candidate intent on hypocritically gagging the opposition, the Committee preemptively advises that it is unaware of any effort by [famed mountaineer] Sir Edmund Hillary to seek federal office."

Stop Hillary PAC raised nearly $800,000 during 2014 and reported about $26,000 left in its account as of Dec. 31, according to federal disclosures. It has this year sponsored a modest number of advertisements advocating against Clinton, meaning it's raised at least some money during 2015 — it's not required to disclose how much until July.

The Dick Morris' Just Say No to Hillary PAC, meanwhile, hadn't raised or spent a cent through the end of 2014, federal records show.

The PAC is named for Dick Morris, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton whose since turned on the Clinton family and regularly speaks out against them as a columnist and TV commentator.

Backer, curiously, panned Morris' relevancy earlier this year when discussing his anti-Clinton PAC. He joked to Bloomberg's Dave Weigel that Morris best known for his cat food commercials and wondered whether he had died.

In recent months, several political committees either voluntarily complied with federal PAC naming rules or agreed to follow them after prompting by the FEC.

Among them: pro-Clinton hybrid PAC Ready for Hillary PAC — it changed its name in April to Ready PAC when Clinton formally declared her presidential run — and pro-Sen. Elizabeth Warren super PAC Ready for Warren PAC, (now the Ready for Warren Presidential Draft Campaign).

The Stand With Rand PAC, managed by Backer's firm, DB Capitol Strategies, changed its name in April to SWR PAC after long resisting a change. Last year, the U.S. Senate campaign committee of Sen. Rand Paul trademarked the term "Stand with Rand."

But many other PACs have so far ignored the FEC. They include a gaggle of both pro- and anti-Clinton PACs, including Faith Voters for Hillary, Arriba Con Hillary PAC and Women Against Hillary PAC.

The FEC is ontheircases, too. Don't, however, expect it to do much: The agency is mired in ideological gridlock, its six commissioners infrequently reaching consensus on anything more than perfunctory matters.

FEC could not immediately be reached for comment on how it plans to deal with committees that refuse its requests, and Clinton campaign officials didn't immediately return a message seeking comment.

The Stop Hillary PAC, for its part, "is prepared to fight for its constitutionally protected rights as far as necessary," Backer told the Center for Public Integrity.

How far is far?

"We are girding our loins for battle," he added.

 

 

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks at an event hosted by the Center for American Progress and the America Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees during March in Washington, D.C.Dave Levinthalhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/dave-levinthalhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/01/17430/anti-hillary-groups-fec-take-hike

9 things to know about Lincoln Chafee

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Former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee will today announce that he is seeking the 2016 presidential nomination of Democratic Party.

Chafee, a former Republican-turned independent-turned Democrat, is trying to contrast himself with Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the party’s nomination, by stressing his 2002 vote against the war with Iraq, which Clinton supported as a senator.

By running, he’s taking on a political juggernaut with much higher name recognition and fundraising resources.

Chafee himself hails from a prominent New England political family and has shown in the past that he’s not afraid to dip into his own financial reserves on the campaign trail.

Here's more about the political and financial history of this 62-year-old who’s developed a reputation over the years for his contrarian views.

Carrie Levine contributed to this report.

Sources: Center for Public Integrity reporting, as well as the Center for Responsive Politics, Federal Election Commission, Providence Business News, U.S. Senate and Wikipedia

Image sources: Save the Bay/Flickr, Cancilleria Del Ecuador/Flick, Lincoln Chafee/Facebook

Michael Beckelhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/michael-beckelJared Bennetthttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/jared-bennetthttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/03/17172/9-things-know-about-lincoln-chafee

12 things to know about Rick Perry

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Republican Rick Perry was the longest-serving governor in Texas history, which means he knows how to raise money.

That wasn’t enough to rescue his 2012 presidential bid, which fell apart in the wake of verbal stumbles that cast the onetime Air Force pilot as unprepared and unpresidential.

This time, the former governor who decided against running for re-election in 2014, starts as an underdog. His status as the only potential candidate currently under indictment won’t help, though his supporters dismiss the charges against him as purely political. The case stems from Perry’s threats to veto money for a statewide public integrity unit unless the prosecutor leading it stepped down after being arrested for drunk driving.  

Perry is also facing a fight for the Texas contributors who have long lined up to support him. Rivals with their own Texas ties include former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who can draw on the Bush family’s long association with the Lone Star State; Texas Sen. Ted Cruz; and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, whose father, former Rep. Ron Paul, was a member of the Texas congressional delegation.

Here’s more on Perry’s political and financial history: 

Sources: Center for Public Integrity reporting, as well as the Center for Responsive Politics, Dallas Morning News, Federal Election Commission, Houston Chronicle, the National Institute for Money in State Politics, New York Times, Texans for Public Justice, usaeconfreedom.org and Washington Post.

Image sources: Ed Schipul/Flickr; Phelan Edenhack/AP; Mark Humphrey/AP; Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Carrie Levinehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/carrie-levineJared Bennetthttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/jared-bennettKimberley Porteoushttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/kimberley-porteoushttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/04/17440/12-things-know-about-rick-perry

Senator would limit lobbyist money that fueled liberal allies

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Sen. Michael Bennet, former leader of the Democratic Party's Senate campaign arm, is sponsoring a bill that would make his successor's job even harder.

Under Bennet’s leadership, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee accumulated nearly three times as much “bundled” money from lobbyists than its counterpart, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of federal campaign finance filings.

The DSCC reported raising roughly $4.3 million from lobbyist-bundlers during 2013 and 2014, compared to $1.5 million reported by the NRSC.

But Bennet’s bill would severely limit high-octane lobbyists’ ability to "bundle" campaign contributions — the act of raising money from people and delivering it to campaigns in one bundle. It’s a move that could further handicap his party’s effort at next year winning back a Senate majority — and has invited cries of hypocrisy from Republicans.

Matt Connelly, a spokesman for the NRSC, said the legislation shows Bennet “says one thing and has done another on the issue.” Connelly declined to comment on the substance of Bennet’s bill.

Sadie Weiner, the DSCC’s national press secretary, declined to comment on Bennet’s proposal. The office of Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., who now leads the DSCC, did not respond to a question about whether the DSCC will continue to accept unlimited money from lobbyist-bundlers.

Asked whether Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, would personally continue to accept contributions bundled by lobbyists, Bennet spokesman Adam Bozzi said the senator wishes campaign finance rules were different and is fighting for reforms, but “until then he will continue to abide by the rules.”

In an emailed statement, Bennet himself said members of Congress’s attention has for too long “been distorted toward lobbyists and special interests, rather than the people who elected them and they represent … we can take significant steps to returning the power to the American people by preventing members of Congress from chasing down tens of thousands of dollars from lobbyists while they should be doing their jobs.”

Already, lobbyists who raise above a certain threshold must be identified by campaigns on reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. Bundlers who are not lobbyists are not required to be publicly disclosed.

Bennet’s legislation would require lobbyists to count money they raise from other people against their own personal contribution limits, which vary for different kinds of political committees.

For example, a lobbyist could only bundle up to $2,700 for a single federal candidate per election.

Beyond restricting how much money lobbyists may bundle, Bennet’s bill would also prohibit members of Congress and candidates from soliciting contributions from registered lobbyists while Congress is in session. It would furthermore force more people to register as lobbyists by eliminating certain regulatory thresholds.

Bennet, who faces re-election in 2016, introduced similar legislation during the 113th Congress, but it failed to even reach the Senate floor for a vote.

Several groups that promote campaign finance and lobbying reform, including Democracy 21, the Campaign Legal Center and the League of Women Voters, have endorsed the bill.

But the legislation’s prospects are equally dim this time around, Bennet and others acknowledged. A divided Congress has been unable to pass almost any campaign finance or ethics bills of late.

Craig Holman, a lobbyist for Public Citizen, which advocates for campaign finance and lobbying reform, said he expects the 2016 elections to be the “ messiest federal election that we’ve ever seen,” which could spark new calls for reform.

“Hopefully, some action will come of it later,” Holman said. 

At least some lobbyists wouldn’t mind if the bill passed.

“I’m in favor of banning not just lobbyist bundling but lobbyist contributions” said Tony Podesta, the founder of lobbying firm the Podesta Group.

Podesta, a high-profile Democratic donor whose dozens of clients include Google, T-Mobile and Wal-Mart, bundled nearly half a million dollars for the DSCC during the 2014 election cycle. That’s more than any other single lobbyist bundled for the committee.

Asked about the legislation’s odds of passing, Podesta wryly nodded at lawmakers’ historic reluctance to pass legislation limiting their own ability to raise money.

“I would say they are 2,700 to one.”

This story was co-published with TIME

 

 

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., is sponsoring a bill that would limit lobbyists' ability to "bundle" campaign contributions from other people and deliver them to politicians and political committees. Carrie Levinehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/carrie-levineMichael Beckelhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/michael-beckelhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/04/17445/senator-would-limit-lobbyist-money-fueled-liberal-allies

Illinois and integrity: a strange tale and curious mix

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The political epitaph for recently defeated Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn aptly summarizes Illinois’ rich history of corruption.

He may have been ineffective, local wags said, but at least he hasn’t been indicted.

Not yet, anyway.

Executive innocence is not to be taken for granted in Illinois, a state where four of the past nine governors have gone to prison and Secretary of State Paul Powell stashed hundreds of thousands of dollars into a shoe box, briefcases and strongboxes that were discovered after his death in 1970.

And there’s more. Much more. For decades a steady stream of local, state and federal politicians have been tried and convicted in the Land of Lincoln. In fact, from 1976 to 2012, 1,913 public officials ended up behind bars after their trials in Illinois’ Northern District, the federal court for the state’s northern counties, according to an analysis by longtime political observers Dick Simpson and Tom Gradel, authors of Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism and Criminality.

That’s the nation’s third-highest rate in the country after the District of Columbia and Louisiana, the pair found.

So how is it, then, that Illinois fared relatively well in the 2012 State Integrity Investigation, a comprehensive national ranking of state government transparency and accountability published by the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International?

In 2012 Illinois received a seemingly mid-range grade of C, but that was the eleventh highest mark in the country. Louisiana came in fifteenth, with a C- grade. New Jersey, another state with a long corruption history, topped the list with a B+.

The explanation for these grades lies in both action and reaction. In Illinois, the corruption has traditionally stemmed from the intersection of the state’s fabled machine-based political culture, grounded in Chicago, with the sheer volume of governmental units. These circumstances have provided fertile ground for the kind of wacky scandals (just Google Rod Blagojevich) that have garnered national and even international attention. And the scandals, in turn, have prompted some reasonably aggressive and well-intentioned state-level reforms that yielded a comparatively high grade for Illinois’current anti-corruption regime.

“Our conclusion was: To get good integrity laws, you have to have major scandals,” said Bob Reed, director of programming for nonprofit government watchdog Better Government Association (BGA). “It’s a reaction to the scandal de jour.”

Reed explained that the BGA found that Louisiana and Illinois also performed relatively well on an integrity index the organization did in 2013.

“There are elements of closing the barn door after the many horses had gotten away,” he said. “They’re trying to fix the problems of the past.”

But even if some of those problems are addressed, political observers say, a deeper one remains — a challenge not subject to legislative fixes or new disclosure rules. A problem of attitude, ingrained and unchanged. In Illinois, says David Yepsen, director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, the public service ethos is different than in other Midwestern states like Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin.

“You don’t get into it to make money,” Yepsen said of public servants in those other states. “Here it’s just a way of doing business. It’s hard to get a meaningful reform effort going when the system is so rigged in favor of institutions that want to maintain the status quo.

“The result is a government that is the laughingstock of the country,” Yepsen said.

An overly harsh assessment? Perhaps. Reporters in every state are now hard at work on an update of the State Integrity Investigation, due out this fall. It’s too early to know how Illinois will score this time around, but the additional reform initiatives that emerged in this legislative session do not give much cause for optimism. Most of them either have been stuck in committee or were passed by just one of the two chambers.

The machine

In Corrupt Illinois, Simpson and Gradel write about the state’s lengthy history of corruption — a history they trace back to the 1833 elections in Chicago, where more votes were counted than there were voters.

From the beginning, the Windy City was at the center of the state’s political culture. Yepsen said many of the ethnic immigrant arrivals to Chicago from Europe, and in some cases the South, viewed government as a business.

“ ‘I use it for a job, I use it to take care of my family,’ ” he said in describing people’s attitudes. “That’s the way we get things done.”

This culture has contributed to the rise of political machines.

And not just in the big town. Illinois has also seen machines in places like Kankakee, a river city and Republican stronghold, where former Gov. George Ryan rose up through the ranks before being convicted on federal racketeering and fraud charges after his term as governor ended in 2003. There have also been suburban fiefdoms like that of Rita Crundwell, who served for nearly three decades as treasurer of tiny Dixon, the childhood home of the late President Ronald Reagan. Crundwell embezzled more than $53 million in what is believed to be the largest municipal fraud in American history.

Still, those machines paled in comparison to the sophisticated apparatus that developed in Chicago.

Coming to prominence under Democratic Mayor Anton Cermak in the late 1920s and early 1930s, machine politics hit its apex under Richard J. Daley. During his 21 years in office, Daley systematized the dispensing of tens of thousands of patronage jobs and assorted welfare benefits while offering avenues of social mobility to a diverse range of ethnic immigrant groups, according to the online Encyclopedia of Chicago.

The stories of Daley’s consolidation of power through patronage have been vividly chronicled in works ranging from iconic columnist Mike Royko’s bitingly acerbic biography, Boss, to Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor’s more measured, American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley — His Battle for Chicago and the Nation. Although different in tone, the works paint a consistent picture of a firmly entrenched political operation of statewide reach in which personal loyalty, patronage and relationships all trumped public interest.

This system led to experiences like the one former Democratic congressman and federal judge Abner Mikva recounted in a 1999 interview. As he walked home from law school in 1948, Mikva recalled, he told a ward committeeman he wanted to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas.

“This quintessential Chicago ward committeeman took the cigar out of his mouth and glared at me and said, ‘Who sent you?’ I said, ‘Nobody sent me.’ He put the cigar back in his mouth and he said, ‘We don't want nobody that nobody sent.’ ”

While not as powerful as it was under the first Daley, machine politics continues to exert an influence in a number of ways on city, county and state levels, according to Simpson and Gradel.

The influence has roots both in demography — for much of last century Cook County had more than half of the state’s residents — and in the fact that many of the politicians who have come to play a significant role in state-level political activity have come up through the same pay-to-play environment.

The Speaker of the House

Politicians like House Speaker Michael Madigan.

The scion of a political family — his father was a precinct captain in the 13th Ward — Madigan grew up in a system where loyalty was paramount — and absolute. Journalist James Ylisela wrote in 2013 that the elder Daley is one of the two men who have most profoundly shaped the speaker’s worldview, according to people who have known him for decades. In a letter emailed to the Center, Madigan said his father, Daley and former state Rep. Zeke Giorgi of Rockford “convinced me the government should help the needy in our society.”

Daley’s impact on Madigan can be seen in Chicago, where Ylisela wrote that “he oversees an army of loyal foot soldiers nicknamed Madigoons, many of whom also hold patronage jobs in any number of city, county, and state government offices and agencies.”

That impact is also visible in Springfield, where Madigan has served as speaker of the House every term but one since 1983. Madigan’s iron grip on the House embodies the personal-relationship style of politics that fosters corrupt behavior, according to Kent Redfield, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Illinois-Springfield.

“If you cross the speaker, you’re just dead,” he said. “It is a very kind of personal politics.”

The man former Gov. Ryan originally called the “Velvet Hammer” is also a partner at a prominent property tax law firm who has used his office to shape legislation and push state contracts that have sent millions of dollars to clients of the firm, according to a series of stories in the Chicago Tribune.

One Tribune columnist called Madigan a “walking conflict of interest.” A Tribune editorial said that he had weakened bills affecting banks, nursing homes and pharmacies that had hired his firm, but noted there was no “smoking gun” indicating that Madigan had violated any ethics rules. Still, the editorial said, “You don’t need an ethics expert to deduce that something is very wrong in Illinois.

Madigan spokesman Steve Brown told the Center in 2013 that Madigan has not violated any laws, and that he complies with a personal code of conduct that says nothing he does in his public work will benefit him or his firm privately. Madigan wrote in his letter to the Center, “The charge of corrupt behavior generally comes from Republicans who have lost their last election.”

The troubled reign of Rod

Disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who crossed Madigan in a bitter feud that brought legislative activity in the capital to a virtual standstill for much of 2007 and 2008, is another politician whose career trajectory reveals the influence of Chicago in Springfield.

Blagojevich is the son-in-law of longtime alderman Richard Mell, who spoke with unabashed pride in a Chicago Tribune interview shortly before his 2013 retirement about the army of patronage workers he had at his disposal.With Mell’s backing, Blagojevich made his way through the state Legislature and three terms in the U.S. Congress from Chicago’s North Side. In 2002, he was elected governor.

But Mell in 2005 publicly accused Blagojevich of corruption. This happened after Blagojevich shut down a landfill owned by friend of Mell, Frank Schmidt. Blagojevich asserted that Schmidt had accepted construction debris without a permit and accused him of “using his ties to the Blagojevich family to solicit” business for an illegal-dumping operation. Mell said Blagojevich drummed up charges against Schmidt to draw attention away from Blagojevich’s top fundraisers and their pay-to-play practice of soliciting campaign contributions in exchange for political appointments.

In December 2008 then-U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Blagojevich.

“Fitzgerald charged that the Governor and his associates had engaged in a ‘political-corruption crime spree,’ ” David Mendell wrote in The New Yorker. The same day, prosecutors disclosed the now famous recordings of Blagojevich exulting in the windfall that had come to him because, as governor, he was entitled to fill the Senate seat left vacant by Barack Obama’s election to the presidency.

The day after the election Blagojevich told an adviser, “I’ve got this thing and it’s f---ing golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for f---in’ nothing.”

Redfield said these statements and actions were grounded in a Chicago-style code of behavior.

“Blagojevich treated the state of Illinois like a supersized Chicago ward,” he said. “In supersize Chicago, everything has a price; people expect that. You don’t give anything away for nothing, whether it’s a U.S. Senate seat or a plumbing inspection,” Redfield said.

Blagojevich was impeached and removed from office in January 2009 and indicted by a federal grand jury in April 2009.

Mendell wrote that Blagojevich responded by appearing regularly on reality and talk shows like the Late Show with David Letterman, where he claimed that he had done nothing wrong and ripped into federal authorities for persecuting an innocent man.”

In August 2010, he was convicted on one charge of lying to the FBI, but the jury was hung on 23 other counts. Before his retrial, prosecutors dropped three counts, and in June 2011 he was found guilty on 17 of the 20 remaining public corruption charges.

The former governor’s pretrial antics gained the state international notoriety and contributed to the sense among Springfield politicians that strong measures had to be taken to make state politics more transparent and to raise the level of integrity, according to Reed of the Better Government Association.

“You have to ask, Why all of a sudden is there an appetite to make these changes?” Reed said. “There is an embarrassment factor. It went beyond our border and had a detrimental effect on the image and … the standing of the fifth-largest state in the union.”

The costs of corruption

“Something needed to be done,” Reed said, describing lawmakers’ sentiment after Blagojevich’s ouster.

Indeed, actions were taken that contributed to Illinois’surprising score in the State Integrity Investigation. State legislators set new campaign finance limits, overhauled state procurement, created a path to recall a misbehaving governor and changed the state’s budgeting and planning procedures, the State Integrity Investigation found.

Measures increasing oversight and transparency of purchasing decisions sought to revive the public’s shaken confidence and to thwart future pay-to-play schemes. For the first time legislators restricted how much individual candidates, political leaders, political action committees and political parties could receive. Political committees had to report receipts and expenditures quarterly, rather than every six months. And candidates had to tell the State Board of Elections about any contribution of at least $1000 within five days; if the election is less than a month away, then the notification for those larger contributions must occur within two days.

These post-Blagojevich changes helped form the basis of Illinois’ comparatively high overall score for state government measures. But a closer look at some of the project’s individual categories shows substantial differences between the reform laws’ progressive intent and the actual practice of implementation and enforcement.

In a variety of categories making up Illinois’ score — Political Financing, Judicial Accountability and State Civil Service Management among them — the state earned high marks for the laws on the books, but scored far lower on the effectiveness of those same laws.

A particularly illustrative category: Public Access to Information.

Based in large part on the freedom of information overhaul passed in the aftermath of the Blagojevich scandal, Illinois received a perfect 100 for its public access to information, but only a 63 for the effectiveness of that law.

The public access counselor, a position first created by Attorney General Lisa Madigan (Speaker Michael Madigan’s daughter) and enacted as a permanent position as part of the 2010 law, has no authority to penalize public bodies that don’t comply with the Freedom of Information Act, the State Integrity Investigation found.

At a March panel during a freedom of information event, Public Access Counselor Sarah Pratt acknowledged that her office still had requests for review of FOIA requests that stretch all the way back to 2011. Pratt said she could use a 50 percent increase in lawyers for her staff.

Maryam Judar, executive director of nonprofit group the Citizen Advocacy Center, said a series of “blowback” provisions have been passed that dilute the law’s power even further. She cited provisions that allow agencies to take more time to respond to people who file many requests and that give agencies free rein to say that a request is “unduly burdensome.”

Even if the law had not been weakened, the number of journalists covering statehouses across the country,has plunged in the past decade, according to Yepsen of the Simon Institute. A 2009 study by the American Journalism Review found that the number of statehouse reporters had dropped in Illinois from 2003, and a Pew Research Center report showed that the state had one of the lowest ratios of statehouse reporters to residents in the country. This dearth of coverage has emboldened public officials who might otherwise not engage in illegal activity, he said.

Political financing is another troubling issue for reformers. Based in part on post-Blagojevich reforms, the state scored 90 percent on the sub-category of regulations governing the financing of individual political candidates as part of the State Integrity Investigation.

Yet state legislators also responded to the 2010 Citizens United decision by passing a bill in 2012 removing contribution limits that had applied to certain types of political action committees. This has contributed further to what Brian Gladstein, director of programs and strategy for Common Cause Illinois, called “a playground of opportunity” for special interest influence.

Possible corruption cure

The fight for a cleaner Illinois goes on, but no one sees a quick turnaround. Authors Simpson and Gradel, for instance, have delineated an eight-point plan to transform Illinois’ political culture.

Among the initial proposals: greater transparency and accountability, more inspectors general, a widespread program of civic education in schools and greater citizen participation in government and politics.

A proposal to require civics education is among more than a half-dozen accountability and transparency bills that were proposed in the Illinois General Assembly in the just-concluded legislative session. Legislators have since been called back, but mostly to deal with the budget.

Others would have required university police departments to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests, forced local governing bodies to maintain websites with budget and contracting information and authorized the secretary of state to institute an Internet-based system for the filing of statements of economic interests.

In early May Gov. Bruce Rauner signed into law a bill mandating that the Governor’s Office of Boards and Commissions post online meeting notices and agendas at least 48 hours before each meeting. With one exception, the other bills all died somewhere in the legislative process.

Individual bills aside, Simpson and Gradel believe that transforming Illinois’ political culture could take several decades.

The task is complicated by Illinois being the most highly bureaucratized state in the country, according to a BGA analysis. With nearly 7,000 stand-alone units of government, Illinois has by far the largest number in the country, the BGA found.

This degree of bureaucratization provides fertile ground for corruption, inefficiency and ineffectiveness, according to Redfield, the emeritus professor.

The sheer size of government is daunting enough, he says, while the number of governmental units also cultivates in the public a transactional, relationship-based approach toward maneuvering in the system.

“Clearly, the schools and local government is too fragmented,” he said “That makes it difficult for citizens to know who to talk to …. It reinforces the idea that ‘I can’t get engaged with [this], politicians are in for themselves ….’ It reinforces the idea that it’s about connection, who has the inside track.

“Outcomes are dependent on personal relationships rather than value,” he said.

Of course, the State Integrity Investigation dealt only with state government, not local governance. Even in Springfield, though, reformers must also contend with a broader challenge: public cynicism. Many Illinoisans faulted Blagojevich not so much for his illegal activities but for getting caught. Reed of the Better Government Association said such attitudes give law-breaking politicians cover for their wayward behavior.

“Until we turn the corner and say that this is unacceptable, [and] you are shunned, not embraced, this is going to continue,” he said.

But Yepsen of the Paul Simon Institute said he believes the public has tired of the corruption and is ready to push for change.

“The politicians can’t hold this off forever,” he said. “I think over time, stuff will start to change. “I’m hopeful, anyway.”

This story was co-published with the Chicago Sun-Times

A sign for the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.Jeff Kelly Lowensteinhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/jeff-kelly-lowensteinhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/04/17442/illinois-and-integrity-strange-tale-and-curious-mix

FCC says price counts in announcing new broadband plan

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The Federal Communications Commission, concerned about the high cost of broadband, wants to put cell phones that can access the Internet in the hands of America’s poor in hopes of reducing the digital divide.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is proposing to beef up the $1.7 billion Lifeline program, funded by charges on phone bills, and originally created to subsidize the cost of landline phones. The program now reaches 12 million families and has been expanded to limited-use cellphones.

The proposal is far from being a done deal — still to come are comments on what a minimum service package should look like. For example, the amount of data usage and voice minutes to be permitted will need to be determined. Wheeler also asked for comments on how to increase competition among mobile phone providers to reduce prices.

Wheeler hopes to reduce fraud and abuse in the oft-criticized subsidy program, and shrink the digital divide. Whether that can be accomplished through a wireless connection is an open question. The program does nothing about wireline connections, which are faster, more robust and cheaper than wireless phones.

Regardless, a disproportionate number of low-income families do not have Internet connections of any sort, and low-cost wireless access may be their best option. No connection means no easy access to the wealth of online information that most Americans enjoy, such as health research, job openings, education and training, and banking and government services.

Only 48 percent of households earning $25,000 or less have broadband at home compared with 95 percent of households with incomes of $150,000 or more, putting the poor at an even deeper economic disadvantage, according to the FCC. Those percentages haven’t changed much in recent years.

A long-running debate among Washington, D.C., policy analysts has been how to reduce the divide. Some analysts and surveys say households choose not to purchase broadband service because they either don’t have the computer skills to navigate the Internet or they don’t think online content is relevant to their lives.

Other analysts argue that the high price of broadband and a computer is the biggest reason low-income families don’t buy Internet service. It’s all in how you ask the question, as the Center for Public Integrity has reported more than once.

Wheeler, in his proposal to reform the Lifeline program, is coming down on the price side of the argument. And he has data that supports his position.

In an FCC study that tested different subsidies, services and marketing strategies for smartphones — and released just days before Wheeler’s announcement — the agency concluded that price, not digital literacy, was the determinant for previously unconnected users to buy a broadband plan with a subsidized smartphone.

“Patterns within the data indicate that cost to consumers does have an effect on adoption and which plans they choose,” the study’s authors wrote. Requiring wireless carriers “to offer or provide digital literacy training does not appear to be an efficient or effective model for converting non-adopters to adopters.”

John Horrigan, who studied Internet adoption when working on the Obama administration’s 2010 National Broadband Plan, said the FCC’s findings support his research that shows price is the primary obstacle to broadband adoption.

He added in an email, however, that while the FCC found that offering training through carriers was not effective, “offering training through community institutions (neighborhood nonprofits, libraries) is effective and should be part of any overall broadband adoption strategy.”

While the distinction may seem inconsequential, it has big implications on what policy the FCC should follow to reduce the digital divide. The FCC is scheduled to vote on Wheeler’s proposal June 18.

This story was co-published with TIME

Federal Communications Commisison (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler testifying on Capitol Hill in March, 2015.Allan Holmeshttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/allan-holmeshttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/05/17446/fcc-says-price-counts-announcing-new-broadband-plan

Can federal education law be used to curb harsh school discipline?

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Opponents of zero-tolerance school discipline are urging Congress to use education funding to pressure states to reduce suspensions and referrals of students to juvenile-justice systems.

The advocates see an opportunity to advance their concerns because Congress is currently debating reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA. The act was last reauthorized in 2001 under the name No Child Left Behind. That controversial legislation, which expired in 2007, tied funding for qualifying schools to mandatory student testing.  Divided lawmakers haven’t been able to come up with a replacement for the act but congressional leaders say this is now a priority.

On Thursday, a Capitol Hill roundtable featured Democratic lawmakers backing discipline-related measures they hope their colleagues will agree to include in proposals now pending in the Republican-led House and Senate.

The roundtable was sponsored by Dignity in Schools, a national network of parents and civil rights groups concerned with so-called school push out -- when  children are removed from school to punish them for disruptive conduct. The network is waging campaigns in 24 states to urge school districts and states to use counseling, mediation and conflict resolution methods—rather than suspending kids from classrooms or calling police in to deal with relatively minor conflicts.

 “Public school discipline practices are pushing children out of school,” said Janel George, senior education policy counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which co-sponsored the event. “You cannot learn and you cannot achieve if you’re not in a classroom.”

Edilberto Flores, 19, of the Los Angeles Youth Justice Coalition, said he was first suspended from school in fourth grade for carrying a lighter. He said he had a chaotic home life where he was exposed to guns in his house, cocaine dealing and beatings of family members.

 “I was only a little kid,” he said.  At school, he said, “they never asked me why I carried a lighter with me. They never asked me what was going on with me... They didn’t know what was going with me at home.” 

Flores said he was repeatedly suspended and finally expelled from high school. He did time in juvenile detention for assault—where a mentor connected with him and helped him eventually graduate from a different high school after he was released from jail. 

After the roundtable, students, parents and others affiliated with Dignity in Schools visited lawmakers’ offices at the Capitol to lobby them to embrace discipline-related proposals authored by Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., and Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.

At the roundtable Scott said lagging achievement for minority students is directly linked to suspensions, which are disproportionately imposed on students of color.  

“All the bad things start happening when you drop out of school,” Scott said, “and school suspensions are the first step to dropping out.  It’s also a major step in what’s called the school-to-prison pipeline. Once you’re on that trajectory, that’s where you’re headed.”

Scott has been urging schools to embrace discipline reforms for some time now in Virginia.

While school districts practicing harsh discipline are scattered across the country, the Center for Public Integrity recently analyzed national education data and found that Scott’s home state of Virginia led the nation for the rate at which students are referred to law enforcement agencies from schools.  Local police data the Center obtained shows that referrals are mostly for allegations of some sort of disorderly conduct. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe appointed cabinet members in May to come up with ideas for how to stop the flow of students into the criminal-justice system.

Scott, on Capitol Hill, has included specific provisions related to school discipline in a “Democratic substitute” he authored in response to a GOP-supported education reauthorization bill in the House. The GOP-supported House bill is the Student Success Act by Education and Workforce Committee chairman John Kline, R-Minn.  The committee passed the bill in February.

Dignity in Schools and other advocates say the Kline bill lacks incentives to push schools to adopt discipline reforms they argue are successful at keeping kids in school and changing disruptive behavior. They bill, they say, simply allows for funds distributed as large block grants to be used for "school safety" that could include counseling methods.

In a letter to Kline in February, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund urged consideration of Scott’s discipline proposals. “The Scott Amendment would prevent schools that employ overly punitive ‘zero tolerance’ policies from receiving federal dropout prevention grants,” the letter said.

Scott’s amendments would also block some federal funds if schools “have demonstrated racial discipline disparities or overuse exclusionary discipline,” the group said. But the proposals would also allow states to “use data to help develop and target improvements,” including support for teachers and school leaders and “better family engagement programs.”

George of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund said she’s seen signs of bipartisan agreement in the Senate that give her hope that some discipline reforms could make it into legislation.

In February, the Every Child Succeeds Act—a Senate proposal—was passed by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee with bipartisan support. It included an amendment sponsored by Connecticut Democrat Murphy that requires states to develop policies to stop unnecessary seclusion of students and physical restraints to respond to discipline problems. 

The amendment stemmed from the Supportive School Climate Act of 2015, which Murphy co-authored with Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.  The bill includes requirements that schools show how they will develop “positive behavior interventions” for students. It also requires development of codes that acknowledge the negative impact of putting kids in the criminal-justice system and that emphasize attempts to help students learn from mistakes rather than be removed from school.   

Juvenile residents sit at a table in a new career guidance center at the Atlanta Department of Juvenile Justice's Metro Regional Youth Detention Center in August 2014.Susan Ferrisshttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/susan-ferrisshttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/05/17456/can-federal-education-law-be-used-curb-harsh-school-discipline

Nuclear weapons labs hit with sizable fines for new security violations

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The Obama administration levied fines totaling nearly a million dollars this week against two of the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories, mostly for failing to keep track of classified materials and for repeatedly disclosing information related to nuclear weapons design in public presentations stretching over nearly a decade.

In notices published by the Energy Department on June 5, the National Nuclear Security Administration provided only general information about the materials and data that got loose but said the breaches were among the most serious such infractions, and could have an “adverse impact on national security.”

It said a private company that operates Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, would be fined $577,500 for its poor handling of classified nuclear bomb design information.

A second private company that operates Los Alamos National Laboratories, also in New Mexico, faced a fine of $247,500 for failing to secure something that was identified only as classified “matter,” according to one of the notices, as well as a fine of $150,000 for an unrelated employee safety violation.

The notice did not explain what the missing “matter” is, but accused Los Alamos of conducting a poor investigation into what happened to it and of wrongly assuming, for years, that it had been safely destroyed.

The Energy Department said the two violations involving classified materials and data were labelled with its highest level of severity because they “involve the actual or high potential for adverse impact on the national security,” but it did not explain further. Even Los Alamos’s own internal inquiry “concluded that a compromise of classified information cannot be ruled out,” the Energy Department said.

The notices suggest that the laboratories – which endured unusual scrutiny a decade ago over allegations that they had failed to safeguard highly sensitive nuclear weapons information – are still having trouble complying with security regulations.

In January, the Energy Department’s Office of Inspector General asserted that a Los Alamos classification officer had erroneously approved the release of classified information and said the lab had poorly trained its classification employees. In 2004, the laboratory’s director suspended the lab’s operations to fix problems that included the loss of classified computer disks, and in 2006, police responding to a domestic violence call at an employee’s home discovered thumb drives from the lab that contained classified information, along with illicit drugs.

Those events helped provoke the Government Accountability Office to say in a 2008 report that Los Alamos “has experienced a series of high-profile security incidents that have drawn attention to the laboratory's inability to account for and control classified information and maintain a safe work environment.”

This week’s infraction notices add to the laboratories’ growing list of national security embarrassments.

In one, federal investigators specifically said Los Alamos National Security, LLC, the corporate consortium that manages Los Alamos National Laboratory with a base contract of $2.2 billion annually, could not account for an unspecified piece of classified matter. It was last logged in at Los Alamos in 2007, the report said, shortly before it was supposed to be shipped to the Energy Department’s Nevada National Security Site for disposal.

Personnel at the Nevada site did not determine until five years later that the missing material had never been shipped from Los Alamos, according to the notice, which did not explain the lapse. Los Alamos’s internal investigation into the missing material concluded that it was probably destroyed, but turned up no confirming documentation.

An investigation by the Energy Department concluded to the contrary that “the probability of undetected removal cannot be regarded as ‘low,’” according to the notice. Energy Department investigators found the lab’s internal investigation to be riddled with factual errors.

“The fact that [Los Alamos National Security] didn’t realize this material was missing for five years, and the unreliable nature of their review of it when they did learn about it is very disturbing,” Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a nonprofit watchdog organization that tracks nuclear labs in that state, said. “It’s particularly troubling because the investigators’ report says it could have had a high level of damage to national security.”

In a separate probe, Energy Department investigators similarly found a longstanding security breach went undetected for years at Sandia National Laboratories.

Between 2003 and 2011, according to the notice, an unnamed employee of Sandia gave presentations at the lab and in settings open to the public that divulged classified nuclear weapon design information. In some cases, slides from the presentation were handed out on paper to the audiences, or computer disks containing the full presentation were distributed.

A supervisor at the lab discovered the breaches in 2012, kicking off an Energy Department investigation that eventually turned up 47 versions of the employee’s presentation saved on unsecure servers at Sandia National Laboratory. They were stored there as early as 1997 and were accessible for years to foreign citizens, according to the violation notice.

Even after the presentation’s presence on the unsecure network was discovered, Sandia did a sloppy job of purging it from the computer system, according to the notice. The lab searched only for documents with the same title, and overlooked others that lacked that label.

Sandia’s internal review reached the same overall conclusions as the Energy Department, according to the notice. Both concluded that classified information about nuclear weapon design was compromised.

The $577,500 fine was assessed against the Sandia Corp., the lab’s Lockheed-Martin-owned managing contractor. But Coghlan called it “a slap on the wrist” to a contractor that collected more than $26 million in bonuses and fees last year for managing Sandia.

Sandia’s three full-scale nuclear weapon development programs have strained the lab’s capacity to manage classified information, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration.

“Sandia continues to experience a significant number of security incidents, topping out at 190 incidents of security concern in FY2014,” according the administration’s last annual performance evaluation of Sandia. “Failure of the workforce to follow established Corporate Policy relative to classification reviews continues to be a [safety and security] management concern.”

“Sandia has taken this security issue seriously since becoming aware of it in 2012,” Jim Danneskiold, a spokesman for Sandia, said Friday, after the new notices were published. “After discovering and reporting the issue, Sandia analyzed the causes and identified, developed and carried out a series of improvements that will reduce the likelihood of security violations of this kind.”

The Energy Department’s violation notices acknowledged that both labs had made progress correcting the problems that led to the violations. The contractors have until June 26 to contest the fines.

This August 1997, file photo, shows the exterior of the Center for National Security and Arms Control at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M.Patrick Malonehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/patrick-malonehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/05/17462/nuclear-weapons-labs-hit-sizable-fines-new-security-violations

11 things to know about Virginia's legislative primary

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Correction, June 8, 11:53 a.m.: This story has been corrected to update the margin that Democrats need to effectively have a majority in the Virginia Senate. The party currently needs just one seat to win control because the lieutenant governor, now a Democrat, serves as tie breaker under the state constitution. 

Virginia Democrats are hoping to win at least one additional Senate seat in the commonwealth’s legislative elections this year to regain the majority, with Tuesday’s primary setting the stage for the bigger battle ahead.

All 140 seats of the state legislature are on the ballot in November, however only 18 of those seats — 10 in the House and eight in the Senate — face contested primaries on June 9.

The most expensive fight so far this year is a Republican primary in the Richmond area, where House Speaker William Howell, a 14-term incumbent, faces a challenge from his former protégé and tea party darling, Susan Stimpson.  

Here are 11 things to know about the money behind Virginia's legislative races:

Sources: Center for Public Integrity analysis of TV ad data from Kantar Media/CMAG through June 1, Virginia Public Access Project and Virginia campaign finance reports through May 27, Federal Election Commission, The Washington Post, PoliticsPA and the Associated Press.

 

 

Rachel Bayehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/rachel-bayehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/08/17449/11-things-know-about-virginias-legislative-primary

Newt scores loot from GOP

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If you thought Newt Gingrich is raising money for the Republican National Committee purely out of party devotion, think again.

The RNC has reportedpaying Gingrich’s company $90,000 so far this year for “fundraising services,” according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.

The RNC and Gingrich Productions, which describes itself as a “multimedia production company … featuring the work of Newt and Callista Gingrich,” did not respond to questions from the Center for Public Integrity about the specific fundraising services performed by Gingrich Productions.

The RNC, however, has sent out fundraising emails over the signature of the former speaker of the House of Representatives, who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

For instance, on March 26, the RNC blasted out a Gingrich-signed missive announcing that RNC Chairman Reince Priebus had authorized the formation of “a special group of our Party’s top supporters who will provide the resources our Party needs” for the 2016 elections.

“I am honored the Chairman has tasked me to lead and assemble this important team of Republican grassroots leaders from across our great country,” Gingrich wrote.

Readers were invited to “become a member and support RNC Victory 2016” by clicking a link, which led to an RNC donation page.

The RNC has sent out otherfundraisingemails over Gingrich’s signature during the past two years, and it paid Gingrich Productions $9,500 in September 2013 for “media services.”

A Center for Public Integrity analysis of Federal Election Commission data found only two other payments to Gingrich Productions: one from the Citizens United Political Action Victory Fund for $1,401 in 2011 described as “royalties,” and one from Gingrich’s own 2012 presidential campaign for $8,400 for “web development,” also made in 2011.

Gingrich is a senior adviser at law firm Dentons, as well as a CNN political commentator.

His presidential campaign, meanwhile, is still working to pay off $4.65 million owed to dozens of creditors.

It could take awhile. The campaign only reported bringing in $17,000 during the first three months of the year —a lot less than the $90,000 the RNC paid Gingrich’s production company.

Ben Wieder contributed to this article

 

 

Carrie Levinehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/carrie-levinehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/08/17458/newt-scores-loot-gop

Free market ideology doesn't work for health care

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In my column last week I suggested that one of the reasons Americans tolerate paying so much more for health care than citizens of any other country — and getting less to show for it — is our gullibility. We’ve been far too willing to believe the self-serving propaganda we’ve been fed for decades by health insurers and pharmaceutical companies and every other part of the medical-industrial complex, a term New England Journal of Medicine editor Arnold Relman coined 35 years ago to describe the uniquely American health care system.

One of the other reasons we tolerate unreasonably high health care costs is gullibility’s close and symbiotic relative: blind adherence to ideology.  By this I mean the belief that the free market — the invisible hand Adam Smith wrote about more than two centuries ago and that many Americans hold as a nonnegotiable tenet of faith — can work as well in health care as it can in other sectors of the economy.

While the free market is alive and well in the world’s other developed countries, leaders in every one of them, including conservatives, decided years ago that health care is different, that letting the unfettered invisible hand work its magic in health care not only doesn’t create the unintended social benefits Smith wrote about, it all too often creates unintended, seemingly intractable, social problems.

In a commentary for The Catholic Spirit, Jason Adkins, executive director of the Minnesota Catholic Conference, wrote after the 2011 government shutdown in Minnesota that, “The inability (of state lawmakers) to compromise (on the budget)…was not based so much on stubbornness or sheer partisanship as it was on adherence to ideological principle.”

He went on to note that “an almost slavish adherence to ideology in politics can and does inflict harm to the very people public officials claim to serve.”

That certainly has been the case in health care. Adherence to ideology has made it impossible for Democrats and Republicans in Washington to even have a civil conversation about how to expand access to care and reduce costs.

Meanwhile, the price tags for drugs and a stay in an American hospital have become so astonishingly high they can take our breath away.

In his recent book, America’s Bitter Pill, Steven Brill described in almost painful detail his analysis of the hospital bill he received last year soon after surgery to repair an aortic aneurism. The cost of room and board alone at New York-Presbyterian hospital was $63,000. The hospital also charged thousands more for things like “patient education,” which Brill said he doesn’t even recall receiving.

As Brill noted, not only were the charges far higher than they would have been just a few years earlier, his insurance company, UnitedHealthcare — the country’s biggest — was not able to negotiate much of a deal. “UnitedHealthcare’s discount for the total of all of these crazy charges was just 12 percent!” he wrote.  (Emphasis his.)

Why? Because New York-Presbyterian had become so big through mergers and acquisitions that insurance companies could not exclude them from their networks. And the hospital’s massive size meant insurance companies had little leverage to ask for substantial discounts.

Brill has feigned pity for insurers. “Nothing has been done to curb the marketplace of exorbitant bills and exorbitant profiteering on the part of hospitals, medical device makers and obviously the drug companies,” he told NPR. “They're incompetently managed; they're not very nice people when you get them on the phone. But they're sort of stuck in the same ditch we're in, which is being forced — unlike the payers for health care in any other developed country on the planet — being forced to pay uncontrolled, exorbitant prices and high profits that are generated by nonprofit hospitals and by drug companies and medical device makers. In that sense, I kind of feel sorry for them.”

At this point its worth noting that in an attempt to convince us that competition in the insurance industry is robust and proof that the free market is working, America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s biggest trade group, brags that it represents more than 1,300 companies.  The problem is that there are far too many insurers. There are so many that not a single one of them is big enough to reduce hospital charges the way Medicare can.

Matthew Herper, who covers science and medicine for Forbes, explained in an article last week why the free market doesn’t work in the drug industry, either. He used the skyrocketing costs of many cancer drugs to illustrate his point. When the cancer drug Gleevec was launched in 2001, it cost $24,000 a year. Fifteen years later: $90,000. “It happened partly because competition increased and, as new drugs entered the market at higher prices, Novartis raised its price, too,” Herper wrote. “The normal law of supply and demand worked in reverse.”

If it weren’t for our gullibility and our “almost slavish adherence to ideology,” we might be able to make progress on health care costs.

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.

Wendell Potterhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/wendell-potterhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/08/17460/free-market-ideology-doesnt-work-health-care

Food flavor safety system a ‘black box’

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Ingredients created by food companies flavor what Americans eat each day — everything from juice drinks and potato chips to ice cream and canned soups. They give Cheetos their addictive cheesy taste and help distinguish Jolly Ranchers from other fruit-flavored candies.

But the organization responsible for the safety of most “natural” and “artificial” flavors that end up in foods and beverages isn’t part of the U.S. government. Rather, the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association — a secretive food industry trade group that has no in-house employees, no office of its own and a minuscule budget — serves as the de-facto regulator of the nation’s flavor additives.

The trade association, which operates with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s blessing, says that it makes research on the safety of various flavors available for public inspection.

“Oh, garbage,” said Susan Schiffman, an adjunct professor at North Carolina State University who studies sweeteners. “It’s not transparent.”

In late 2012, Schiffman and a colleague from the National Institutes of Health were months away from publishing a paper examining the biological effects of the popular artificial sweetener sucralose.

But first they needed to contact the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association.

The trade group, Schiffman learned, had recently approved the safety of a chemical compound that amplifies sweetness. She says she contacted the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association in December 2012 to learn the chemical’s name and identification number so that she could research its safety.

“They said, ‘We’ll call you back.’ No call back. So I called again. No call back,” Schiffman remembered. “So then I wrote a letter. Nothing happened.”

While her persistent requests went unanswered, Schiffman says she eventually received the information she needed from a flavor expert unaffiliated with the trade association. But Schiffman still had a problem: She couldn’t find safety data on the chemical anywhere.

When a scientist from the trade association finally called her back, Schiffman says she asked him for data supporting the safety of the sweetness-enhancing compound. But she says he refused to give it to her.

“‘There’s something in the food supply, and I can’t find out the toxicity of it?’” Schiffman recalled asking the flavor group scientist who declined her request. “They would not give me the safety data… It was absolutely astounding.”

The Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association disputes Schiffman’s version of events.

John Cox, the trade group’s executive director, wrote in an emailed statement to the Center for Public Integrity that Schiffman requested only information on the safety status of the flavor, which was “promptly provided” to her. But he said she never asked for the data supporting the determination.

“If Dr. Schiffman had requested the safety data,” Cox wrote, “we would have provided it to her.”

Public interest groups, however, share Schiffman’s frustration with the trade association. They, too, report getting stonewalled by the flavor group when requesting information about the industry’s safety determinations.

A ‘black box’

The largely industry-run system for evaluating flavors is “fundamentally problematic because it’s so opaque,” said Erik Olson, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s senior strategic director for health and food. “It’s a black box.”

Yet the system factors into food products found in nearly every consumer’s grocery cart.

In recent years, activist groups and social media campaigns have been demanding that food companies become more accountable to consumers and transparent about what they are adding to their products.

But most Americans know as little about the decidedly low-profile Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association and its safety assessments as they do about the more than 2,700 flavoring chemicals it has declared safe during the past five decades.

Moreover, public interest groups say the FDA’s recent response to a Freedom of Information Act request suggests that even the government may be blind to the science behind many of those flavors.

Much is at stake: The flavor industry’s system of self-policing helps it avoid government oversight, potentially saving companies significant amounts of time and money. In Europe, by contrast, companies must have their flavors and other ingredients reviewed for safety by an independent agency funded by the European Union.

The flavor industry makes its safety evaluations “behind closed doors” and then asks consumers to trust them, said Caroline Cox, research director for the Center for Environmental Health. “We just have enough experience with all kinds of toxic chemicals to know not to want to trust an evaluation if someone says, ‘Trust us, it’s all OK.’”

“There is some real need for reform here,” Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, who serves on a subcommittee that oversees the FDA, said in an emailed statement. “We can do better than just letting the flavor industry decide for themselves which chemicals they can put in food without any oversight.”

Industry officials say flavors used in food sold in the United States are safe, pointing out that they pose very little health risk because they are used in such small doses. But identifying health concerns would seem to be difficult with so little scientific information publicly available behind some of the trade group’s safety decisions.

A Center for Public Integrity review of documents provided by the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association found that four of the group’s most recent safety assessments depended largely on studies that were not published in scientific literature. Public interest groups say that is problematic because it doesn’t allow the scientific community to vouch for the industry’s safety decisions.

The Center for Public Integrity contacted two dozen flavor companies to discuss their ingredients and the process by which they evaluate their safety. Most of them either declined to comment or ignored interview requests.

Two company officials who responded in writing both stressed that flavor companies are very guarded about discussing such information.

“Given the competitive landscape in our industry, many companies, including ours, regard our flavor formulations as valuable proprietary business information,” Donald Wilkes, president and chief executive officer of California-based Blue Pacific Flavors, emailed in response to questions. “We typically do not share this information unless required to do so for legal reasons.”

Nevertheless, the public should be assured food flavor safety standards are high, said Kevin Renskers, president-elect of the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association and vice president for corporate safety and regulatory affairs at Takasago International Corp.

“FEMA operates the premier global program to assure the safety of flavor materials,” he responded in an email.

Lucrative business

The companies that make up the flavor industry — including international manufacturers such as Givaudan, Firmenich and Sensient — are not household names. But they make their money by selling flavors to big food companies such as Kellogg, Kraft and Nestlé.

Last year, Switzerland-based Givaudan reported 4.4 billion Swiss francs (roughly $4.8 billion) in sales of flavor ingredients. The company leads the industry with about 25 percent of the global market share in flavors and fragrances.

“The modern processed food industry could not flourish without the flavor industry,” said Kantha Shelke, a food scientist and spokeswoman for the Institute of Food Technologists, a society of food science professionals.

Today, Shelke said, the flavor industry is “big, it’s complicated and it’s sophisticated” — to the point where companies can create a product that tastes like guacamole without even using avocado as an ingredient. The goal, one industry scientist told CBS’ 60 Minutes in 2011, is to develop addictive flavors that consumers “want to go back for again and again.”

Shelke says flavor companies don’t like to discuss their flavor compounds, partly because they are worried about scaring “chemophobic” consumers who might be frightened by long, unfriendly-sounding chemical names.

Consumers’ growing unease with chemicals in food has recently led companies to remove some controversial ingredients from their products. Fast food chain Subway, for example, announced last year that it was removing azodicarbonamide from its bread after a popular food blogger revealed that the chemical, used as a dough conditioner, was also used in making yoga mats. 

Within the last month, Subway, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut each announced plans to remove artificial colors and flavorings from their products.

By law, flavor ingredients only have to be listed on food labels as “natural” or “artificial” — and rarely do labels volunteer additional information. Natural flavors are derived from plants and animals, while artificial flavors are synthetic chemicals. Both are produced in labs by scientists.

When it comes to questions about safety, flavor companies typically defer to the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association. The group is managed by Verto Solutions — a Washington, D.C., firm that provides scientific consulting, communications and government relations services to the flavor group, as well as other similar trade associations, including the International Association of Color Manufacturers, the International Organization of the Flavor Industry and Pickle Packers International.

While the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association reports no lobbying, it understands Congress’ power to regulate the food industry. The group is hosting its second annual congressional “fly-in” event on June 16-17 to “increase its visibility” and meet with representatives “to ensure that they are aware of the U.S. flavor manufacturing industry and its importance to the economy,” according to its website.

‘The highest standards for transparency’

The Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association’s program for evaluating the safety of flavors has won praise from some corners of government, namely the FDA and the Government Accountability Office.

Its flavor safety program launched in 1960 — two years after Congress passed the first law regulating ingredients added to food.

The law allows food companies to bypass a lengthy government-led safety review if they can establish that their ingredients are “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, for their intended use.

In other words, companies using the so-called GRAS process must demonstrate that there is a consensus among scientific experts that their ingredients are safe.

Companies have the option of involving the FDA in the process, but most ingredient manufacturers choose to make safety determinations without government oversight.

In Europe, the industry doesn’t have the option to police itself.

The European Union requires companies to have their new flavors and other additives reviewed by the European Food Safety Authority, an independent agency funded by the European Union.

The Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association’s member companies — which produce 95 percent of all flavors on the market in the United States — typically forgo FDA review and instead choose to submit their flavors to the trade association for a safety review.

A standing panel of six to eight scientific experts oversees the trade group’s safety program and determines whether ingredients are generally understood to be safe by the scientific community. These experts, who are paid by the trade association, review published and unpublished data before making a conclusion on the safety of an ingredient’s use.

“From Takasago’s perspective, to have GRAS approval by the FEMA Expert Panel provides us with a high level of confidence that our material can be used safely,” said Renskers, the company official and Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association president-elect.

Industry officials stress that flavor ingredients generally pose very little safety risk because they are used in such small amounts in food. The trade group used this argument to support its conclusion that methyl eugenol is safe, despite studies finding that it causes cancer in animals.

The naturally occurring flavor, which the FDA has approved as a food additive, is used in foods including jellies, baked goods and chewing gum. The Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association first determined methyl eugenol to be GRAS in 1965, but the group revisited that decision in 2001 after studies by the National Toxicology Program found “clear evidence of carcinogenic activity” of the substance in male and female rats and mice.

But the trade group still concluded that methyl eugenol “does not pose a significant cancer risk” to humans because it is used in food at such low levels.

After the trade group reconfirmed that it was safe, the International Agency for Research on Cancer found that methyl eugenol is “possibly carcinogenic to humans.”

The Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association notes that many of the flavors it has reviewed over the years have also been evaluated for safety by other scientific bodies, including the European Food Safety Authority.

The Government Accountability Office praised the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association’s program in a 2010 report about the FDA’s limited oversight of food additives, specifically highlighting its procedures to prevent conflicts of interest and its practice of voluntarily informing the FDA about each of its safety determinations.

Scientists who serve on the flavor group’s expert panel are forbidden from having financial ties to companies submitting flavors for review. To that end, panelists’ stipends come from the trade association, rather than from companies directly. Panelists also review the safety of ingredients without knowing which company submitted them.

For these reasons and more, the trade group bills its GRAS program as “fully objective” and “not subject to bias.”

The Government Accountability Office report further applauded the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association for informing the FDA of flavor names, properties and reasons for the expert panel’s conclusion when notifying the agency of new safety determinations.

But if the FDA has such information, it can’t find it, according to the agency’s response to a recent Freedom of Information Act request.

Last October, the Center for Science in the Public Interest requested “all information that the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association (FEMA) has supplied to FDA since 1960 as support for its determinations that flavors it has evaluated are generally recognized as safe, or GRAS.”

The FDA’s May 21 response: “We have searched our files and find no responsive information.”

Laura MacCleery, the attorney for the public interest group who filed the records request, said she was “shocked” that the FDA’s response appears to contradict the flavor trade group’s public statements about sharing information with the FDA.

“We were worried about how we would handle the volume of documents,” MacCleery said. “I guess that’s not a concern.”

In an email, FDA spokeswoman Lauren Sucher said that the trade group “provides information about its GRAS lists to the FDA,” but she did not explain why this information was not produced in response to the public records request.

In addition, she said that a separate organization, the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives, which is affiliated with the World Health Organization, “has evaluated nearly 2,000 FEMA flavoring agents.” Those evaluations are based on information provided to them by the trade group, according to the FDA. Since the mid-1990s, FDA staff has participated in the evaluations conducted by the international organization, Sucher added.

The GAO said that it based its 2010 report on interviews with the trade group and the FDA. Steve Morris, GAO’s director for food safety and agriculture, said in an email that he was not sure why the FDA could not produce the documents requested by the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Overall, the FDA praises the trade group’s safety program.

“In the FDA’s experience,” Sucher wrote in an email, “FEMA makes scientifically rigorous, credible determinations that have stood up to the scrutiny of the scientific community of qualified experts.”

For its part, the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association says it has long provided the FDA “with the basis for [each] FEMA GRAS determination … including all of the safety data.” Providing the Center  for Science in the Public Interest “with all of the information that FEMA has provided to FDA since 1960 would likely fill five hundred boxes,” the trade group’s Cox said in a written response.

The trade association periodically announces its determinations in a food industry trade magazine, but those announcements do not include the data supporting the safety assessments.

However, the trade group, which boasts that its GRAS program “meets the highest standards for transparency,” says it will share safety data with any member of the public for only a copying fee.

Safety process questioned

Schiffman isn’t the only scientist who has recently cried foul on the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association.

Last September, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and other public interest groups argued in a letter to the FDA that the trade group’s flavor safety program “does not comply with FDA policies.”

Their chief complaint: that the flavor trade association bases its safety decisions for new flavor chemicals on unpublished safety data.

To establish ingredients as “generally recognized as safe,” determinations typically rely on published studies to show that qualified scientists generally agree that the ingredients won’t harm consumers. This process allows companies to avoid subjecting their ingredients to an extensive FDA-led safety review.

The consumer groups’ letter points to comments Michael Taylor, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for food, made to The Washington Post last August: “The [GRAS] assessments need to be based on publicly available information where there is agreement among scientists,” the Post quoted Taylor as saying. “It has got to be more than three employees in a room looking at information that is only available to them.”

But the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association, the public interest groups charge, doesn’t always follow such guidance.

In their letter to the FDA, they said they could find “no relevant published safety data” establishing the safety of a handful of flavors declared safe by the trade group last July.

“We asked FEMA for the published data on the four substances and it said there was none,” the letter stated, adding that the trade group offered to make 7,000 pages of unpublished data available for a $1,000 processing fee. “This practice is contrary to FDA guidance … and a common sense definition of general recognition.”

The Center for Public Integrity sent the FDA a detailed list of questions about the trade group’s flavor safety program. The list included inquiries about the advocacy groups’ complaints, the agency’s interpretation of regulations regarding the use of published data and the extent to which the agency reviews each of the trade association’s safety determinations.

After nearly two weeks, FDA spokeswoman Sucher emailed that “there are so many questions that we do not currently have the resources available to provide individual responses.”

Olson, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said FDA officials met with representatives of the public interest groups late last year to discuss their concerns about the trade association’s flavor safety program.

While agency officials listened to their complaints, he said they made no commitment to requiring the trade group to change how it runs its program.

Officials from the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association’s management firm would only answer questions in writing. The expert panelists paid by the trade group to assess the safety of flavors either declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests.

The trade association’s expert panel “reviews all available information relevant to its GRAS assessment to assure the safety of the candidate flavoring substance under its conditions of intended use whether the data are published or unpublished,” Cox wrote in response to questions.

He cited a section of the regulations governing GRAS assessments that notes that they “shall ordinarily” be based upon published studies.

In his response, however, Cox didn’t clearly answer a question about whether the trade group used only unpublished data to conclude that those four approved ingredients were generally recognized as safe. The Center for Public Integrity asked the trade group in an email to clarify how exactly those four safety determinations were made. Two days later, late on a Friday afternoon, two boxes of documents arrived at its newsroom.

Inside: 9,000 pages — 75 pounds — of published and unpublished safety data supporting four of the most recently approved flavors, including what the trade association described as a fruity flavor, a savory flavor and a minty, cooling flavor.

The trade association declined a request to review the documents with reporters.

A ‘daisy chain of inference’

A Center for Public Integrity review of the documents revealed that the four safety determinations were based mostly on unpublished studies, many of which redacted the name of the chemical being studied to comply with the trade group’s conflict of interest procedures.

The published reports used as safety evidence for three of the four chemicals evaluated not the specific chemical at hand, but a component of it or a structurally related substance. After reviewing the documents at the Center for Public Integrity’s request, researchers who have authored several reports on the GRAS system for the Natural Resources Defense Council were skeptical.

“It’s a daisy chain of inference,” Tom Neltner, an attorney and chemical engineer, said as he looked over the documents.

Without published studies assessing the safety of the specific chemical in question, “It’s hard to say it’s ‘generally recognized as safe,’” added Olson.

As he leafed through documents, Olson said that the four flavors in question should have instead been submitted to the FDA for a thorough evaluation.

But the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association contends that it is operating according to government policies. In a written response to questions, Cox pointed out that safety assessments can involve “data on structurally related substances.” 

FDA guidance states that such information can be used to support a safety determination, “depending on the circumstances.”

The FDA, however, did not respond to specific questions asking if the agency agreed that the trade association was following the rules on published data.

“When you have an industry like this making safety decisions, we are dependent on this trade association getting it right in order to protect public health,” Neltner said. “But the system is so opaque.”

Little is known about many of these chemicals outside the trade association, said Maricel Maffini, a scientist who has co-authored several Natural Resources Defense Council reports on food additives.

“You have to basically trust their judgment."

This story was co-published with TIME and Huffington Post

Just some of the products on American grocery shelves which include "natural" and "artificial" flavors.Chris Younghttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngErin Quinnhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/erin-quinnhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/09/17465/food-flavor-safety-system-black-box
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