For the past six months, political TV ads have extolled the virtues of presidential hopefuls, tore down opponents and in one instance, set pastoral scenes to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel. 

So, which strategy worked? One things for sure: Iowans prefer nice over nasty.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights plans to continue its probe Friday into the Obama administration's work on environmental justice, including efforts to enforce civil rights law, the subject of a Center for Public Integrity investigation last year. An all-day hearing in Washington, D.C., will spotlight minority communities near landfills, ponds and pits where coal ash gets dumped, and also is expected to examine the Environmental Protection Agency's record of handling discrimination complaints.

A byproduct of coal-fired electricity, coal ash contains harmful metals such as arsenic, chromium, lead, mercury and many others. One of the nation’s largest industrial waste streams, it has fouled water supplies and endangered public health across the country, spurring the EPA to regulate its disposal for the first time last year. Disadvantaged communities are often located near ash ponds, according to the EPA.

“Too often our nation’s communities of color bear the brunt of toxic substances generated by nearby plants and processes,” the commission’s Martin Castro said in a prepared statement. The bipartisan commission advises the president and Congress on civil-rights issues.    

A Center investigation in August found that the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights has routinely failed to enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial discrimination by those receiving federal financial assistance. The office has dismissed nine out of every 10 community claims alleging environmental discrimination, the Center found, and has never once issued a formal finding of a Title VI violation.

EPA officials say they have begun the work of turning the office around. They have announced plans to do more frequent compliance reviews and publish an annual report to chart the office’s progress. In December, they issued a notice of proposed rulemaking removing certain deadlines, and put out a case manual for investigators examining civil-rights claims.

Esther Calhoun, who lives in Uniontown, Alabama, and whose Title VI complaint over a sprawling landfill that accepts coal ash was detailed by the Center, is scheduled to be among the first panelists at Friday’s hearing. “I’ll go to the commission and hope that [members] hear me because I speak for the people,” she said.

Those living near the Arrowhead Landfill must contend with pungent smells that seem to wash over their neighborhood, and nagging ailments that never seem to fade. Some no longer sit on their porches, grow gardens or let children play in their yards. Almost everyone claims to have suffered ill effects, from headaches to earaches and neuropathy.

“It feels like an endless situation, but we don’t have to live this way,” said Calhoun, who will testify about what she calls a lack of response from local, state and federal officials, including at the EPA.

The agency’s civil-rights office launched an investigation into the Uniontown complaint in 2013 but has yet to make a decision.

Addressing the commission last month, the EPA’s director of civil rights, Velveta Golightly Howell, outlined recent steps her office has taken to improve its Title VI program. “There is still much more work for us to do to create the program that we both want and the public deserves,” she said in prepared remarks.

Asked about the Center’s investigation, Golightly Howell said the office has made “preliminary” findings of Title VI violations before. One case involving pesticide spraying near California schools attended by mostly Latino students was detailed by the Center.

Other panelists at Friday’s hearing are to include community advocates; industry representatives; and experts on civil rights and coal ash.

“The commission is a voice of moral authority for civil rights in this country,” said Marianne Engelman Lado, of the environmental law firm Earthjustice, who is handling the Uniontown complaint.

Also a panelist, Engelman Lado intends to remind the commission about the last time it examined the EPA and Title VI, in 2003. At the time, the agency was embroiled in controversy over policy guidelines, such as its legal standard for determining environmental discrimination.

While the EPA has stepped toward reform recently, she said, “We haven’t seen meaningful change since that 2003 report.”

Last month, the agency’s civil-rights office held five public meetings on a proposed rule meant to improve the way it responds to Title VI complaints. Billed as a “wholesale attempt” to reform the office, the proposal would remove several statutory deadlines that require the agency to decide within 20 days whether to accept a complaint for investigation and allow it another 180 days to complete an inquiry.

Golightly Howell has called the proposed rule a “necessary step,” but critics say the change would actually weaken protections for complainants. The Center found that the office took nearly a year, on average, just to determine whether to accept a complaint.

Five community groups sued the EPA in July, seeking to force the agency to finish investigating civil-rights claims that have been pending for at least a decade — some as far back as 1994.

“The idea that the EPA is seeking more discretion, not less, is very problematic,” said Engelman Lado, who represents the groups in the lawsuit. “EPA is not even using authority it has today.”

The civil-rights commission, for its part, may hold additional briefings as part of its annual enforcement report. One of those briefings may be in Uniontown.

“They need to see what we see here,” Calhoun said. “Maybe they’ll see why we feel like we’re being left out.”

Washington state officials want to find ways to protect consumers from abusive sales and lending practices in the mobile-home industry.

The effort was sparked by a recent investigation by The Seattle Times, BuzzFeed News and the Center for Public Integrity that found that the nation’s leading mobile home company extracts billions from poor customers by using deceptive tactics and charging high interest rates.

Some 450,000 people across Washington state live in mobile homes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

A bill backed by Gov. Jay Inslee and the state Department of Commerce calls for a study of how the industry sells, finances and repossesses the homes. Supporters say state laws that protect conventional homebuyers typically do not safeguard people buying mobile homes.

Commerce director Brian Bonlender said the key difference is that mobile homes are typically financed with personal property loans.

“The consumer protections around those are much less significant,” Bonlender said in an interview. Unlike mobile-home purchasers, buyers of conventional homes in Washington enjoy extended timelines to resolve financing problems and foreclosure mediation, he said.

Inslee said in a statement he wants to “find ways to stop unfair practices that could leave some Washington homeowners out in the cold.”

Nationwide, nearly 18 million people live in mobile homes.

The ongoing investigation of the industry, "The Mobile-Home Trap," has focused on Clayton Homes, a company owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway that dominates mobile-home lending, sales and manufacturing. Clayton builds nearly half the new manufactured homes sold in this country every year, sells them through a network of more than 1,600 dealerships, and finances more than a third of all mobile-home loans, more than any other lender by a factor of seven.

When people fall behind on their loans, Clayton repossesses the homes and resells them.

Bonlender said the study could offer the Legislature some potential solutions when lawmakers return for their long legislative session in 2017.

The bill is sponsored by Rep. Cindy Ryu.

At the federal level, an industry-backed plan to roll back consumer protections has stalled in recent months. Last April, the U.S. House approved a bill that would raise the interest-rate thresholds at which additional consumer protections would take effect. The bill would overwhelmingly help Clayton Homes.

The proposal was also included in a larger U.S. Senate bill last year that was approved in a committee but did not make it to the Senate floor.

After a story in December alleging Clayton systematically targets minority borrowers and charges them higher rates, senior Democratic lawmakers called for a federal investigation of the company.

Evoking the contaminated-water crisis in Flint, Michigan, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights showed concern and compassion Friday for residents of polluted communities who maintain they are victims of environmental racism.

“I see the specter of Flint in the communities that are represented by our panelists,” Patricia Timmons-Goodson, vice chair of the commission, said via teleconference at a hearing that focused on the dumping of coal ash. “In your communities, like Flint, there is knowledge of the dire health consequences of many of these toxic products.” 

Flint’s nearly 100,000 residents have been exposed to elevated levels of lead after water from the Flint River corroded the city’s pipes. Some residents complained about the tainted water for two years before elected officials and regulators were compelled to act.

“Poor communities become saddled with decisions made by policy makers, politicians and others who frequently take the past of least resistance – that’s with the politically  un-empowered, those who have the least access to the justice system and to the ballot box,” Commissioner Michael Yaki said via teleconference.

Residents of Waukegan, Illinois; Uniontown, Alabama; and Florence, South Carolina, told the commission they were worried about leakage from coal ash pits and landfills. Coal ash is a byproduct of coal-fired power generation and contains harmful metals including arsenic, chromium, lead and mercury.

Dulce Ortiz, who lives near a coal-fired power plant in Waukegan, said she feels her concerns are being ignored by state and federal officials.

“How are companies allowed to do this in my community time and time again?” she asked.

A Center for Public Integrity investigation last year examined how the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Civil Rights handles discrimination complaints from communities. The Center found that the office has dismissed nine out of every 10 claims and has never once issued a formal finding of a civil-rights violation.

The commission began investigating the EPA last year and in January held a hearing to receive testimony from a trio of agency officials, including Velveta Golightly-Howell, head of the Office of Civil Rights. On Friday the commission heard testimony on the health effects of coal ash as well as comments from coal industry executives and advocacy groups such as Earthjustice.

Commissioners are mulling a visit to Uniontown and possibly another community to see firsthand what residents have described. The commission is slated to issue a report with its findings and recommendations in September.

Ideally, community members said Friday, they would like to see funds set aside for site cleanups, more facility closures – and to simply have their concerns taken seriously.

“I love Alabama; it’s a nice place to live,” said Uniontown resident Esther Calhoun, who lives near a large landfill that takes coal ash. “But I’m just telling you, the system is broken. Discrimination is still there. And if you’re black, your voice will hardly ever be heard.”

“Ms. Calhoun,” Timmons-Goodson said, “I’ll say your voice is being heard loud and clearly today.”

BELLEVUE, Ohio — At 2:15 in the morning, an insomniac corporate defense lawyer in San Francisco finished crafting a “revolutionary” scientific theory.

Now Evan Nelson of the law firm Tucker Ellis & West needed a scientist willing to publish it in a medical journal. If his theory were given scientific validity, Nelson could use it to win lawsuits.

Nelson defended companies that had exposed people to asbestos, a heat-resistant, fibrous mineral. Asbestos causes several deadly diseases, including mesothelioma, a rare cancer that often drowns the lungs in fluid.

Nelson had expressed frustration with the argument that asbestos is the only known cause of mesothelioma. After scouring the scientific literature and applying his own logic, Nelson came up with a new culprit: tobacco.

Nelson sent a typo-ridden email to Peter Valberg of Cambridge, Massachusetts. A former professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, Valberg was by then a principal at the environmental consulting firm Gradient Corporation, with offices in Harvard Square.

“We can collaborate to publish several key, revolutionary articles that you will see unfold as I present this stuff to you,” the lawyer wrote in the 2008 email.

Citing a few scientific articles, Nelson drew a hypothetical link between the fact that cigarette smoke contains radioactive particles and limited evidence that people exposed to radiation had higher rates of mesothelioma.

“It is amazing that no one has pout [sic] this together before me, but I am confident that you will agree it is solid science that proves tobacco smoke causes mesothelioma — you just have to look at the tissue [sic] through the proper lense [sic].”

There was an obvious problem with Nelson’s “science.” Researchers for decades have exhaustively analyzed data on the health of hundreds of thousands of smokers. Since 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General has summarized the findings of study after study, none of which shows evidence that tobacco causes mesothelioma.

Valberg wrote back within hours, calling Nelson’s scientific theory “very intriguing.” He was game to try to disseminate it in peer-reviewed journals. He later sent Nelson a contract agreeing to write the first of three articles and even offered him a 10-percent discount. In the meantime, Valberg would adopt Nelson’s theory as an expert witness in lawsuits, using it against mesothelioma victims such as Pam Collins of Bellevue, Ohio.

The emails offer a rare glimpse into a world where corporate interests can dictate their own science and scientists for hire willingly oblige. It’s a phenomenon that’s grown in recent decades as government-funded science dwindles. Its effects are felt not only in courtrooms but also in regulatory agencies that issue rules to try to prevent disease.

The National Institutes of Health’s budget for research grants has fallen 14 percent since its peak in 2004, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. With scarce resources, there’s little money for academics to study chemicals that most already deem to be toxic. Yet regulatory officials and attorneys say companies have a strong financial interest in continuing to publish research favorable to industry.

Gradient belongs to a breed of scientific consulting firms that defends the products of its corporate clients beyond credulity, even exhaustively studied substances whose dangers are not in doubt, such as asbestos, lead and arsenic.

Gradient’s scientists rarely acknowledge that a chemical poses a serious public health risk. The Center for Public Integrity analyzed 149 scientific articles and letters published by the firm’s most prolific principal scientists. Ninety-eight percent of the time, they found that the substance in question was harmless at levels to which people are typically exposed.

“They truly are the epitome of rented white coats,” said Bruce Lanphear, a Simon Fraser University professor whose own research showing that even tiny amounts of lead could harm children has been called into question by Gradient scientists. A panel of experts convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded in 2012 that there is no reliable evidence for a safe level of lead.

Valberg and other scientists at Gradient declined to be interviewed for this story, as did the firm’s president, Teresa Bowers. On its website, Gradient says it “has applied sound science and rigorous data analysis to help our clients resolve challenging environmental problems.”

Nelson, now 51, lost his job in 2013 after his new law firm learned of the Valberg emails. Three years later, he is still unemployed and living with his in-laws.

“I get that trying to say that radiation from tobacco smoke causes mesothelioma, that’s on the fringe,” he said in a recent interview. “In all my conversations with Gradient, I was always very clear that I wanted them to look at the science and I didn’t want them to do anything that the science didn’t support.”

The techniques of consulting firms like Gradient evoke the tobacco industry’s strategy of creating doubt about science. Gradient doesn’t do its own animal or human studies. Often, it criticizes the work of others.

Douglas Dockery, chairman of the environmental health department at the Harvard School of Public Health whose work on air pollution is a frequent target of Gradient scientists, described their critiques as “lame.”

“For the academic, there’s no value in going back and trying to refute these low-quality or poor-quality studies,” he said. “You want to make real advances.”

He noted that Gradient sometimes attacks others’ work through letters to journals, which don’t go through peer review but have the air of authority. Thirty of the 149 publications the Center analyzed were letters.

Stalling regulations

Nearly half of Gradient’s articles that are peer-reviewed are published in two journals with strong ties to industry, Critical Reviews in Toxicology and Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, the Center’s analysis found.

These articles are often aimed directly at regulators. The Department of Health and Human Services’ National Toxicology Program, for example, listed styrene, used to make foam cups, as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.” Scientists at Gradient responded with an article paid for by the styrene industry saying the government finding was wrong.

Besides publishing articles, Gradient also routinely submits comments and attends hearings when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is reviewing a chemical to determine its toxicity. The firm is one of several that the chemical industry relies on to stall regulations.

Those efforts have been enormously successful, especially during the Obama administration. While there are more than 80,000 chemicals available for commercial use, the EPA over the past 30 years has assessed the health risks of only 570. These scientific assessments are necessary before any new regulation can be enacted. So the EPA’s chemical research office has become a bottleneck that the chemical industry has targeted.

Industry and Congress pounced on criticisms of the EPA’s chemical assessment process from the National Academy of Sciences, prompting the agency to start dozens of reviews of toxic chemicals all over again. Many, like its reviews of formaldehyde, arsenic and hexavalent chromium, had been in the works for years.

During the Bush administration, the EPA said it needed to assess at least 50 chemicals a year to keep pace. But in the past five years, the agency’s Integrated Risk Information System has completed only six reviews — an all-time low. Last year, it failed to complete a single one.

The reviews rely heavily on published literature. The industry has argued that its research tends to be dismissed, putting pressure on the EPA to explain how much weight it gives each article. The EPA also has responded to criticisms that its chemical reviews have been cloaked in secrecy by holding more public meetings, which are dominated by industry scientists.

Gradient scientists have played an active role in trying to prevent tighter regulations.

In 2010, they helped delay for years the EPA’s review of arsenic, a substance most Americans regularly consume in water, rice, fruit juices and other foods. Agency scientists were about to report that arsenic posed a much greater health risk than previously thought, even at the amount the EPA currently allows in drinking water. They determined that for every 10,000 women exposed daily to the highest amounts of arsenic allowed by law, 73 eventually would get lung or bladder cancer.

Gradient scientists argued that the EPA left out the most recent research on arsenic and should redo the analysis. The omission was due mostly to delays by the Bush administration’s Office of Management and Budget, which had to approve all EPA scientific reviews. Some members of Congress latched on to Gradient’s argument to accuse the EPA of cherry-picking data. They twisted the agency’s arm to start the analysis over again.

The EPA was going to ban most uses of pesticides containing arsenic at the end of 2013. But without a scientific review, it had to postpone the ban indefinitely.

Gradient also helped persuade the Food and Drug Administration to declare another ubiquitous chemical, bisphenol A, harmless. That controversial decision was made in 2008. Nearly all Americans are routinely exposed to BPA in canned food, plastic bottles and cash-register receipts.

Hundreds of articles by academic scientists have linked BPA to health problems in humans, including infertility, diabetes, cancer and heart disease. In 2006, Gradient scientists published an article attacking dozens of academic studies that had reported reproductive problems in rats and mice fed BPA. The FDA cited Gradient’s article and a few industry studies in its decision.

Gradient maintained that humans are exposed to far less BPA than the animals in those studies. Frederick vom Saal, a University of Missouri professor who has investigated BPA for more than two decades, called that argument “complete nonsense.”

“You create a false statement of fact, and then you discount a whole literature,” vom Saal said.

A group of academic researchers were so outraged by an article on BPA written by Gradient’s Julie Goodman and Lorenz Rhomberg that they wrote a lengthy response with a table listing all the “false statements” in it.

“In this article, there is nothing that is true,” vom Saal said. “It’s ridiculous. And that’s how they operate.”

Rhomberg, who once worked at the EPA, now sits on a panel that reviews all of the agency’s toxic chemical assessments before they become final.

Adam Finkel, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a former official at the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, was close friends with Rhomberg for many years. He says he’s perplexed by how his friend seems to have changed since he joined Gradient.

“In 1997, Dr. Rhomberg submitted brilliant comments to our OSHA regulation on [the solvent] methylene chloride, in which he skewered a half-baked industry theory that the cancers it caused in animals were irrelevant to humans,” Finkel said. “Nowadays, I see him routinely cheerleading for some of the same sorts of unconvincing arguments designed to make substances seem less risky."

Asked to respond, Rhomberg said, “Open discussion about the evidence and how it is to be appropriately interpreted is essential to the scientific process, and any claims that paint as illegitimate the making of critical comments is destructive of the scientific process.”

Finkel is especially upset with arguments Gradient made in trying to prevent the EPA from listing a little-known chemical called n-propyl bromide as a hazardous air pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Gradient’s Goodman wrote a lengthy public comment in 2014 paid for by a maker of n-propyl bromide. In it, Goodman argued that a government study showing high rates of cancer among rats exposed to the chemical had no relevance for humans.

Finkel said Goodman offered no proof to support this but was “just making stuff up.” He said he found the document offensive because hundreds of workers are exposed to the chemical and some have suffered serious disabilities. In 2013, The New York Times told the stories of furniture workers in North Carolina who found it difficult to walk after being exposed to n-propyl bromide for only a few weeks.

Defending such a product, Finkel said, “is not your finest hour when you’re talking about something we know is killing people.”

Harvard ties

Gradient was founded in 1985, about the same time as two of its biggest competitors: Environ and ChemRisk. When the company was bought in 1996 by The IT Group, a hazardous-waste-disposal company, it was reporting annual revenues of $5 million. But Gradient was sold back to its founders in 1999 and no longer reveals its finances.

The company often touts its ties to Harvard. Several of its scientists used to be on faculty at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Some continue to teach there as adjunct faculty.

Gradient’s clients include two of the most powerful lobby groups in Washington, the American Petroleum Institute and the American Chemistry Council. Other frequent clients include Navistar, a diesel truck manufacturer, and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, a regulatory agency that has a history of aligning with industry.

Gradient has become a leading scientific voice in trying to prevent further regulation of air pollution. That puts its scientists at odds with former colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health, such as Dockery.

Dockery was among a team of scientists at Harvard who after the Arab oil embargo in 1973 set out to evaluate the health effects of burning domestic coal instead of foreign oil to generate power. With funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Harvard scientists recruited more than 8,000 volunteers in six cities living near coal-burning power plants. Monitors were used in each city to measure soot and smog.

After collecting data for 15 years, the researchers themselves couldn’t believe what they were finding. People who lived in communities with the dirtiest air died on average two years younger than those who breathed cleaner air. That meant that eliminating air pollution could increase life expectancy in some cities to the same degree as if scientists had found a cure for cancer.

The results of the Six Cities Study were so dramatic that researchers decided they couldn’t publish them without corroboration, Dockery said. The Harvard scientists were able to convince the American Cancer Society to share data on the health of 1.2 million volunteers tracked since 1982. The researchers matched it to EPA data on soot and came up with similar results.

For a while, the studies attracted little attention. But that changed in 1997 when the EPA — under pressure from courts to enforce the Clean Air Act — used the studies as the basis for new air-pollution rules.

According to the EPA, none of its regulations saves as many lives as the Clean Air Act. The agency estimates that in 2010, rules on soot and smog kept 164,000 Americans from dying prematurely, mostly from heart attacks. By 2020, it expects the number of lives saved annually to rise to 237,000.

But the regulations are expensive. The EPA estimates that industry will have spent a total of $65 billion on pollution controls by 2020.

Facing intense criticism from industry, the Harvard researchers agreed to have a third party reanalyze the data. It was given to the Health Effects Institute, a respected scientific firm funded by both the automotive industry and the EPA.

The three-year wait for the institute’s results was nerve-wracking, Dockery said. But the reanalysis ultimately confirmed the findings of the Harvard researchers.

“After that was released we thought the issue was settled,” Dockery said.

Since then, however, Gradient scientists have taken a leading role in trying to cast doubt on the studies’ findings. Gradient has published 37 articles on different aspects of air pollution, funded by the American Petroleum Institute, Navistar and the International Carbon Black Association, whose members are subject to clean-air regulations.

In congressional testimony in 2012, Goodman accused the EPA of being biased by giving too much weight to the Harvard and American Cancer Society studies while ignoring “dozens of other epidemiology studies,” including many that found no health problems caused by current levels of air pollution.

In her testimony, Goodman cited only six studies that she said show no harmful effects from soot. But two of those studies were funded by industry. And authors of the other four say their findings supports those of the Six Cities Study.

“It would be wrong for her to say that we didn’t find an effect,” said Dr. Bill McDonnell, a former EPA scientist whose work was cited by Goodman. “We did find a relationship. It just seems like you can just make up your own facts now.”

“Mrs. Goodman and the company she works for have a reputation of misrepresenting the science consistently,” said Bert Brunekreef, director of the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences at Universiteit Utrecht in the Netherlands and co-author of two of the articles.

A team of European researchers led by Brunekreef combined the results of more than 20 studies done in the United States, Europe and Asia and found that as people are exposed to more fine-particle soot, they are more likely to die prematurely, especially from heart disease. In Dockery’s mind, the question of whether soot is linked to early deaths is beyond dispute.

“One of the disappointments about Gradient is they tend to go over these same arguments that have been thoughtfully discussed previously,” Dockery said. “It doesn’t advance the science very much.”

Since 2013, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, a regulatory agency, has paid Gradient $1.65 million to challenge the EPA’s scientific analysis of the benefits of reducing ground-level ozone, also called smog. Gradient already had been doing similar work for the American Petroleum Institute.

Goodman has criticized a U.S.-government-funded study led by a group of public-health scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. The study explored whether smog was linked to deaths.

Michael Jerrett, the lead author of the ozone study, explained that researchers analyzed health records of 448,850 people in the American Cancer Society database for a period of 18 years. The volunteers lived in 96 cities.

The researchers found that, just as with soot, people in the smoggiest cities die prematurely.

It remains the only study to find “a long-term effect on mortality from ozone,” Jerrett said.

In a 2011 letter published in Environmental Health Perspectives, Goodman described the work as “an uncorroborated study that likely misinterpreted the findings regarding ozone effects.” Jerrett was not given the opportunity to respond.

“I felt that that letter was not following the normal conventions that we would use for scientific debate in the literature,” he said.

The ozone study was published in 2009 in the venerable New England Journal of Medicine. Jerrett said it went through two rounds of peer review with more than 50 pages of questions and another 40 pages of responses.

“I don’t think we’ve misinterpreted the findings at all,” he said.

Gradient in the courts

Gradient doesn’t just take on high-profile targets like Harvard researchers. It also helps companies defend themselves against ordinary people like Pam Collins, a high-school graduate from Bellevue, Ohio.

In 1965, at age 21, Collins landed a good-paying job at the General Electric light-bulb plant in Bellevue.

“She was a hard worker. Didn’t take any shortcuts,” recalled Gail Veith, who worked alongside Pam Collins.

For 14 years, Collins’ job was to stamp the GE monogram on the tops of quartz light bulbs used in projectors. Every 15 minutes, she would tug on a pair of gray, fuzzy gloves and push trays of the bulbs into an industrial-grade oven so the ink would dry.

The gloves were dusty. “When we would throw them off, over on the table, you could see little stuff coming off of them,” she said years later.

A recession in the early 1980s hit factories in Ohio especially hard. By 1985, GE had shut down the light-bulb plant.

Years later Collins suffered from fluid buildup in her lungs, one of which collapsed. On October 1, 2007, Collins’s doctor told her she had mesothelioma; her right lung was removed not long afterward at the Cleveland Clinic.

Collins was miserable at that point, said her brother, Tom Smith. She couldn’t catch her breath. She was always tired.

“I don’t think she ever recovered from that surgery,” recalled her youngest son, Jason. “She just whittled away.”

Jason had his mother move in with him for a while. She weighed only 98 pounds and needed help just to stand in the shower. Eventually, Jason felt he had no choice but to put her in a nursing home. He teared up talking about it.

As it turns out, the dusty gloves Collins had used at the GE plant were made of asbestos. She knew that at the time but trusted the company not to expose her to anything that could make her sick. Her son says she would get emotional thinking about how she was betrayed. She sought out a law firm in Cleveland for help with the bills. One of the lawyers on the case was Shawn Acton, who had been trying mesothelioma cases for years.

Collins’ lawsuit started out routinely. But it quickly became like no other case Acton had tried. He remembers reading a report from a scientist hired by the law firm defending the manufacturer of the gloves. The report, written by Valberg, said:

First, to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty, Ms. Pamela Collins' described use of asbestos gloves most likely did not cause or contribute to her developing pleural mesothelioma.

Second, to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty, Ms. Collins' carcinogen and radiation dose from her exposure to tobacco smoke most likely did increase her risk for developing pleural mesothelioma.

“I almost fell out of my chair,” Acton said in a recent interview. “I’ve cross-examined some of the best defense experts in the country. And I’ve never heard even the most hardcore advocate for the defense ever claim that smoking causes mesothelioma. Nobody has ever gone that far before Peter Valberg.”

Acton did a little research and discovered that Valberg had just co-authored an article in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity saying that cigarette smoke emits radiation. And he noticed that the article was funded by the law firm representing the maker of the gloves.

Acton had no idea that months earlier a lawyer at the firm, Evan Nelson, had concocted the scientific theory that Valberg was using against Collins. Or that Valberg and colleague Goodman had emailed drafts of the article in advance to the lawyer, as their contract required.

Acton flew to Boston in April 2009 and deposed Valberg under oath, asking why he had written the article and why the defense firm had paid for it.

Valberg: So because I’m interested in the risk factors of radioactivity, and Julie Goodman is a molecular biologist … we both felt this was a useful piece of work to put out there and see what the rest of the scientific community might say about it. …

Generally, these articles require more time than we actually bill to a company. So Gradient contributes to these as an encouragement for people to do professional development. …

Acton: Who asked Tucker Ellis & West to contribute, as you put it, to the funding of this article?

Valberg: We said, ’This is work we can do.’ So we asked them to contribute. …

Acton: Did you discuss aspects of the article with anyone at Tucker Ellis & West before it was published?

Valberg: No. I mean, they knew we were working on it. They didn't have drafts. They didn't make comments, scientific comments, and so forth.

Q. So you never sent a document to Tucker Ellis & West in draft form before that article identified as Plaintiff's Exhibit 24 was published?

A. Not to my knowledge, no.

Acton would not learn until years later that what Valberg said was not true.

Damning emails

A few days after that testimony, David Durham, a 67-year-old retired electrician in Louisville, Kentucky, would be diagnosed with mesothelioma. Durham had been exposed to asbestos through work he did at some of Louisville’s biggest factories, his lawyers alleged in a lawsuit.

But a physician testifying on behalf the companies blamed Durham’s mesothelioma in part on radiation treatments he received for cancer in 1967. The doctor relied on a few articles recently published in scientific journals, including one in Cancer Causes and Control. The authors of that review included Goodman and Valberg.

When Durham’s lawyers, Hans Poppe and Joseph Satterley, realized that this article was funded by Tucker Ellis & West, one of the law firms for the defense, they decided to subpoena all records the firm had about that article.

They were stunned when they started reading the 498 pages of emails between Nelson, Valberg and Goodman.

“This is not the way real science works. It doesn’t start with a lawyer coming up with a theory,” Poppe said.

Nelson told the Center that his former law firm should not have released the emails because they were confidential under attorney-client privilege. He is suing Tucker Ellis & West for damages. He said the firm didn’t release other emails showing he didn’t want Gradient to publish anything unsupported by science.

Nelson acknowledges that the science used in asbestos lawsuits can be twisted.

“In one way I’m glad that I’m out of asbestos litigation because I think there’s a lot of corruption in it,” including on the part of lawyers working for mesothelioma victims, he said. “I’ve heard other attorneys telling experts ‘This is the opinion I’d want you to have.’ ”

Nelson said he never did such a thing, and doesn’t think Gradient did anything improper in the Collins case. Still, he said, no law firm wants to hire him because opposing counsel could always say, “Look what Nelson did over here, and he’s trying to do the same thing here.”

The emails revealed that Valberg and Goodman had trouble getting the three Nelson-commissioned articles published in journals. Two of the three eventually were accepted. But the article linking cigarette smoking to mesothelioma never made it into print.

The first sentence of that article said, “Cigarette smoking may increase mesothelioma risk in individuals not exposed to asbestos.”

In a deposition, Goodman tried to distance herself from the notion that she simply agreed to publish Nelson’s scientific theory. A lawyer for a mesothelioma victim asked Goodman if the source of the funding had had any influence on the article.

Goodman: No, and that should be obvious by the fact that our opinions are different than those of Evan Nelson in many cases.

Poppe: In what way?

Goodman: Well, for example, he believed that the epidemiology evidence showed an association between smoking and mesothelioma, and we did not conclude that.

The manuscript Goodman and Valberg wrote concluded there was data suggesting that cigarette smoking causes mesothelioma, in keeping with Nelson’s theory. Goodman and Valberg conceded that no study of smokers had ever shown the link, but said such studies were statistically weak because they didn’t include enough smokers.

One of the scientists asked to review the manuscript for the journal Human and Ecological Risk Assessment didn’t buy this explanation. “NOT TRUE,” the reviewer wrote in all caps.

As a standard practice, peer-reviewed journals send manuscripts to other scientists, who comment anonymously and recommend for or against publication. In this case, all three reviewers gave the article a thumbs-down.

Another reviewer said, “The logic in this paper is very fuzzy.”

And the final reviewer said, “This paper presents what I consider a highly biased review of the evidence that tobacco exposure is associated with an increased risk of mesothelioma. I strongly suspect the authors must work with someone with a strong financial interest in this subject. … The evidence that tobacco smoke is associated with mesothelioma is if anything extremely weak, and hardly convincing.”

Even Nelson questioned Goodman’s commitment to getting the paper published. “I don’t know how hard she tried,” he said.

Goodman continues to testify in mesothelioma lawsuits and write articles exonerating asbestos. Citing other industry-funded research, she wrote in 2013 that the most common form of asbestos — chrysotile — wasn’t responsible for higher rates of mesothelioma and lung cancer in electricians.

This has become a standard defense in asbestos cases. The position is rejected, however, by most of the scientific community. In 2012, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, concluded that all forms of asbestos cause mesothelioma. That same year, a coalition of nine epidemiological organizations issued a joint statement calling for a worldwide ban of asbestos.

“Numerous well-respected international and national scientific organisations, through an impartial and rigorous process of deliberation and evaluation, have concluded that all forms of asbestos are capable of inducing mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis and other diseases,” the statement said.

At the time, Goodman served on the board of directors of one of the organizations, the American College of Epidemiology, which endorsed the statement. Behind the scenes, she tried to prevent it from being issued. After reviewing a draft, Goodman wrote:

“I do not think this document accurately reflects the science. Before I go on, I would like to mention that I am involved in asbestos litigation. While I understand that some may perceive my position as biased, I feel that it puts me in the position of being quite familiar with the most up-to-date science.”

Goodman went on to argue that there is a “safe dose” of asbestos.

She was outvoted by her colleagues on the board. The statement wound up being endorsed by 227 public-health organizations and experts.

The following year, citing other industry studies, Goodman again asserted in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology that there is a safe dose of chrysotile asbestos. In the same article, she contradicted the work she did for Evan Nelson, writing that “smoking has not been associated with mesothelioma.”

Pam Collins’s lawyer said efforts by industry consultants to absolve asbestos of blame show they will say almost anything.

“Why are some of these companies putting so much money into research to be published in scientific and medical journals years and sometimes decades after they stop making the product?” Acton asked rhetorically. “Is its purpose for the advancement of medicine? Is its purpose to address a public health concern? Its purpose is for litigation. It’s science for sale.”

Virginia legislators are debating bills this week that would limit the role of school cops and prohibit charging K-12 students with “disorderly conduct” — a reaction to Center stories on unusually aggressive school policing there.

Among the reform proposals:  a measure that would release school administrators from state code requirements that they report a range of incidents to police, including potential misdemeanors.  Another bill under debate would strengthen the rights of students with disabilities if they’re charged with disorderly behavior and face prosecution in court.

Last April, the Center for Public Integrity published an investigation identifying Virginia as having the top rate of public school  referrals of students to law enforcement agencies.  Based on an analysis of 2011-2012 data collected by the U.S. Department of Education, Virginia’s rate of referring students to cops or courts was about three times the national rate of six referrals for every 1,000 students. Black students and those with disabilities were referred at even higher rates.  

Criminal charges against Virginia students arrested at schools often fell heavily on middle-school kids and black students, the Center also found after examining local arrest records in some jurisdictions.

Among these students was Kayleb Moon-Robinson, an autistic sixth-grade student who was charged in the fall of 2014 with disorderly conduct for kicking a trash can after he became upset at his school in Lynchburg. The 11-year-old was also handcuffed, arrested and charged with felony assault on a police officer when he tried to break free from an officer’s grasp.

Kayleb’s story and other examples of the criminalization of young students were also featured in a report the Center produced in collaboration with Reveal, an investigative public radio program.

The Center investigation helped “generate a lot of talk—and now action,” said Jason Landberg, education attorney for the JustChildren Program of the Legal Aid Justice Center in Virginia.

JustChildren’s attorneys represent special-needs students in disputes over appropriate educational services at their schools. The lawyers have grown increasingly concerned that students are getting arrested and prosecuted for behavior at school that’s not uncommon for children their age, or conduct that stems from a disability. A number of conservative organizations in Virginia have also urged reforms to school policing, including doing away with disorderly conduct charges against students.

On Monday, three bills backed by JustChildren were referred to the full House Education Committee from the House Elementary and Secondary Subcommittee.  The measures are scheduled to be heard in the full committee later this week.

One proposal, HB1061, sponsored by Henrico County Democrat Lamont Bagby, would require schools to consider “feasible alternatives” before referring students to law enforcement or expelling them. The proposed requirement would not apply to students accused of having firearms or certain other kinds of weapons at school.

Two other bills that also moved forward,   HB 1132 and HB 1134, are sponsored by Republican Dave LaRock from Loudoun County.   

LaRock’s HB 1132 would strike language from state code that some administrators interpret as a  mandate that they report any possible misdemeanor to law enforcement.  The other LaRock bill, HB 1134, would eliminate the option to charge elementary and secondary students with committing disorderly conduct at school or school events.

Another House bill that would also scale back the role of school police has already passed out of the House of Delegates with overwhelming bipartisan support.  HB 487, which was approved on a 95-to-2 votes in the House, is sponsored by Jennifer McClellan, a Richmond Democrat.

McClellan’s bill amends language in state legislation that authorizes state grants to pay for school resource officers; the legislation currently requires such grant-funded officers—who are a minority of the state’s school cops—to enforce “school board rules and codes of school conduct.”

Striking this language, McClellan said, will provide more discretion to school administrators and officers so they don’t have to feel compelled to involve police in relatively minor violations of school rules. 

“That’s not really the officers’ job,” McClellan said.

McClellan said she thinks another bill she is co-sponsoring—LaRock’s proposal to end disorderly conduct charges against students—could likely face amendments if it is to move on.

Legislators, she said, have discussed the idea of applying a prohibition on disorderly conduct charges to younger students only, or limiting the prohibition to cover only students enrolled at schools where an incident takes place. That way, she said, school officials could have some flexibility to react to a disruption created by minors who aren’t enrolled at a school but cause a disruption.  

McClellan is co-sponsoring another bill related to school policing —HB 1213—along with David Albo, a Republican delegate from Fairfax Station.

Focused on special-needs students,  that measure would require that students charged with “willfully disrupting” school be afforded the opportunity to submit special educational plans or behavior assessments as part of their defense in court. The minor, at least 10 days before trial, would have to inform prosecutors of the intent to use the documents as evidence and provide prosecutors with copies.

McClellan acknowledged that a number of her colleagues in Virginia legislature support a hard “law-and-order” line and are reluctant to embrace some of the proposals. “But this is an area I know has bipartisan support,” she said, referring to calls to reform school-policing policies. 

After the Center report was published and aired last April, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, appointed a cabinet-level task force to come up with ideas for how to reform school policing. Last October, members of the task force said they were launching a “Classrooms, not Courtrooms” initiative to retrain all school police in the state and help schools embrace the use of alternative discipline methods.

Update, Feb. 9, 2016, 2:20 p.m.: This article has been updated to note that Republican presidential candidate John Kasich has also been targeted by negative mailers from America Needs Leadership.

As New Hampshirites prepare to vote in their state’s Republican presidential primary, allies of Chris Christie have launched an 11th-hour, “dark money” attack on Marco Rubio.

Mailers sent to New Hampshire residents have criticized Rubio, a U.S. senator from Florida, for not being tough enough on illegal immigration and for utilizing a subsidy under the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

As first reported by The Resurgent and Mother Jones, these mailings were paid for by an upstart group called America Needs Leadership.

Christie, New Jersey’s governor, desperately needs to beat Rubio in New Hampshire to energize his sputtering campaign. Rubio has enjoyed rising poll numbers after his strong third-place finish last week in Iowa, where Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump narrowly edged him out.

According to the Columbus Dispatch, America Needs Leadership has also targeted another Christie rival with negative mailers, Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

The ad’s sponsor

America Needs Leadership is not organized as a super PAC that must disclosure its donors. Rather, it’s a nonprofit group under sec. 501(c)(4) of the U.S. tax code, which means the group is generally allowed to keep the names of its donors secret.

That designation also means that, by law, the group’s primary purpose must be “to promote social welfare,” not to engage in electoral politics — although it may advocate for or against candidates to a limited degree.

What exactly is the group’s mission? According to its all-but-empty Facebook page, America Needs Leadership wants “a new generation of leaders to step up to move our country forward with strength and resolve.”

Records with the Internal Revenue Service show that America Needs Leadership was awarded tax-exempt status as a “social welfare” nonprofit in December 2015.

Who’s behind it?

America Needs Leadership’s bare-bones website was registered in October 2015 by Kurt Luidhardt, an Indiana-based political consultant at The Prosper Group, a digital agency he co-founded in 2006. Campaigns & Elections magazine has described Luidhardt as “one of the GOP’s top thinkers in online campaigning.”

According to his official biography, Luidhardt has worked with Republican politicians including Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, former Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts — and Christie.

Campaign finance filings show two groups connected to Christie paid Luidhardt’s The Prosper Group nearly $300,000 last year.

One is America Leads, a super PAC backing Christie’s presidential bid, which paid The Prosper Group about $255,000 last year. Press reports describe Luidhardt as leading the super PAC’s digital efforts.

The other is Leadership Matters for America, a federal political action committee Christie launched last year ahead of his official presidential campaign, paid the firm about $41,000 in 2015.

Meanwhile, IRS records list Virginia-based political consultant Timothy Koch of the firm Koch & Hoos as a contact for America Needs Leadership, the sponsor of the anti-Rubio mailers. According to The Resurgent, the address of Koch’s firm was listed as the return address on the recent mailings to New Hampshire voters.

Koch also serves as the treasurer of the pro-Christie super PAC America Leads, which paid Koch & Hoos about $32,000 last year for accounting and compliance services. The now-defunct presidential campaign of Republican Rick Santorum was also among Koch & Hoos’ clients, according to federal campaign finance records.

Neither Luidhardt nor Koch responded to requests for comment from the Center for Public Integrity.

Money in

It’s unclear who’s is funding America Needs Leadership. The mailers sent to New Hampshire voters note that contributions from foreign nationals and government contractors are prohibited. But they also highlight the fact that the group may accept "unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations and other U.S. organizations” and note that America Needs Leadership "does not make contributions to, or coordinate its spending with, any candidates or political parties."

Money out

It’s also unclear how much America Needs Leadership is spending. The group’s first official tax return—which would provide insights into how much money America Needs Leadership raised and spent during its first year of existence — will not be required to be filed with the IRS until after the November 2016 general election.

Why to watch this group

With the emergence of America Needs Leadership as an anonymous attack dog, Christie has become the latest GOP presidential candidate to benefit from “dark money” in the 2016 election.

But he’s not the first.

Secretive groups that don’t disclose their donors are playing a larger role in 2016 than any presidential primary before.

For example, a group supporting Rubio called the Conservative Solutions Project spent more than $8.5 million on TV ads last year. And fellow GOP White House contenders Jeb Bush and Bobby Jindal also saw allies utilize “social welfare” nonprofits in attempts to boost their respective campaigns.

Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, “social welfare” nonprofit groups like America Needs Leadership may spend a portion of their funds directly calling for the election or defeat of federal candidates. That means America Needs Leadership may take on a more direct advocacy role before the 2016 presidential primary is over.

This story was co-published with Al Jazeera America and TIME.

For the second time, the Obama administration has proposed to put a stake through the heart of a huge nuclear nonproliferation project in South Carolina that Congress just won’t let die, despite billions of dollars in cost overruns and a long-term price tag that officials say is wildly unaffordable.

The Department of Energy proposed in its 2017 budget request, released Tuesday Feb. 9, to terminate funding to the Mixed Oxide fuel plant at the Savannah River Site. The project, known as MOX, was viewed as a path to dispose of 34 metric tons of plutonium from the nation’s Cold War nuclear weapons program, under a deal reached decades ago with Russia.

MOX is meant to convert the nuclear weapons explosive into fuel for domestic power plants. But management failures, detailed in a four-part 2014 series of articles by CPI, have undermined that goal, and nuclear power plants have shown little interest in using MOX fuel.

Several DOE reports have officially endorsed the predominant solution urged by independent scientists: diluting the plutonium and burying it at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a subterranean nuclear waste dump in New Mexico known as WIPP. The president’s proposed budget recommends this path.

But a series of accidents two years ago stopped waste shipments to WIPP, and they still haven’t resumed. The Energy Department recently announced it expects some shipments to resume by the end of the year. Already, $4.5 billion has been spent on the unfinished MOX plant, and some estimates place its ultimate price at about $30 billion. Dilution and disposal at WIPP is estimated to cost about $17 billion.

Burial is “the least bad way,” according to Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group. The cost and environmental uncertainty of the MOX conversion process are both too high, he said.

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, in a letter to Obama dated Nov. 20, 2015, expressed a clear preference for diluting and disposing of the plutonium at WIPP. He called it one of several “high-priority ‘hot potato'’” issues. The letter was posted on the website of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group, on Feb. 9.

But the Obama administration still faces staunch opposition from South Carolina’s congressional delegation, which has fought to keep the MOX project alive, even in the face of delays and rising costs. Three years ago, the South Carolina delegation led the way when Congress blocked the Obama administration’s recommendation to shelve MOX.

“I don’t think there’s any question that they’re just trying to salvage a jobs program at this point,” Lyman said.

In a written statement, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, called the Obama administration’s proposal to cease funding MOX “reckless.” He expressed pessimism about renegotiating the terms of plutonium disposition with Russia during such a chilly phase in its relationship with the United States.

"Now is not the time to change course and have the Obama administration try to renegotiate anything with the Russians,” Graham said. “It will not end well for U.S. interests. One can only imagine what the Russians will ask for in return.”

In the letter to Obama, Moniz said that Russian nuclear officials "are amenable to discussion" but that the Russian foreign ministry had not expressed its views as yet.

President Barack Obama wants the Federal Election Commission to get a modest budget boost.

The White House's fiscal year 2017 budget proposal calls for the FEC, an agency that's recently suffered from anemic funding, staffing cuts and internal discord, to receive about $80.5 million — more than ever before.

The funding would allow the FEC to employ the equivalent of 365 full-time staffers, according to the proposal released today by the White House's Office of Management and Budget. That represents 34 more staffers than the agency employed just two years ago — about a 10 percent workforce increase.

An FEC budget allocation at the level the White House is proposing "would provide the commission with adequate funds to fulfill its mission of protecting the integrity of the federal campaign finance system," said agency Chairman Matthew Petersen, a Republican.

The FEC's budget figure does come with one key caveat: $8 million of its proposed $80.5 million is reserved for expenses associated with the agency's likely move from its current headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C., to another, yet-to-be-selected building.

When funds for moving and leasing expenses are excluded, the FEC is slated to receive $72.5 million in fiscal year 2017 — about $1.4 million more than it got in fiscal year 2016.

The proposed increase also continues to reverse a trend from earlier this decade, when the FEC's annual budget stalled out near $66 million in 2010, 2011 and 2012 after 16 straight years of funding growth.

The agency then experienced a budget cut in 2013, the same year Chinese hackers infiltrated its computer and network systems. The hack prompted the agency to invest in cybersecurity improvements, and Congress approved small budget increases in subsequent years.

Congress created the FEC more than 40 years ago to enforce and regulate the nation's election laws.

But the agency, which among its commissioners features three Democratic appointees and three Republican appointees, often deadlocks along ideological lines on high-profile cases.

Petersen acknowledged in December upon assuming the chairmanship that the FEC would at best hit "singles" during 2016.

In other words, don't expect the agency to agree on prescriptions for the thornier issues of this election cycle, such as how to regulate "dark money" or write new rules governing how super PACs may coordinate efforts with the political candidates they support.

As it's done for several years, the White House's latest FEC budget proposal predicts a $430,000 savings from U.S. Senate candidates filing their campaign finance reports electronically, instead of on paper.

Obama's thinking, however, may be little more than wishful: the Senate last year again refused to shed its decidedly 20th century ways and adopt the same campaign disclosure procedures used by presidential and U.S. House candidates.

Money can’t buy happiness, and in New Hampshire, it might not buy enough votes for some struggling presidential candidates, either.

Chief among them: former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

For months, Bush and his supportive super PAC, Right to Rise USA, have saturated Granite State airwaves — sponsoring roughly one third of all TV ads in the Republican race.

In the past week alone, the Bush campaign-super PAC duo aired more than 1,400 TV ads in New Hampshire, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of broadcast and national cable data from media tracking firm Kantar Media/CMAG.

That’s more than any other Republican candidate’s operation.

But Bush, who’s very future as a presidential candidate may hinge on his New Hampshire performance, has barely seen his pre-primary poll numbers crack double digits.

Showing a tinge of regret over outsourcing his messaging to a super PAC, Bush said on Monday that he would “eliminate” the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, which allowed super PACs to proliferate in the first place.

“This is a ridiculous system we have now where you have campaigns that struggle to raise money directly, and they can't be held accountable for the spending of the super PAC that's their affiliate,” Bush told CNN on Monday. Bush added that campaigns should be permitted to accept unlimited political contributions.

Right to Rise USA, which as a super PAC can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, has indeed been Bush’s main TV ad messenger, airing more than seven in 10 of all pro-Bush ads in New Hampshire.

“If your message isn’t resonating and your candidate isn’t a strong one, no amount of ads will take them over the finish line,” said Erika Fowler Franklin, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project.

Cutting through the noise

That’s not to say advertising does not hold some significance so far in election cycle.

In a crowded race with so many voices, it’s not always so simple to be heard.

“When you have that much advertising and that much noise in a small state, it’s hard to know what even gets through,” said Scott Spradling, president of New Hampshire-based political consulting firm Spradling Group and former anchor and political director for WMUR-TV. “Except for the TV stations … there are diminishing returns when you have so many candidates doing that much advertising.”

Democratic candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have nevertheless pressed forward with an ad blitz: Each have aired more ads in New Hampshire than any Republican presidential ad sponsor.

Head-to-head, Clinton has aired slightly more ads in New Hampshire than Sanders, although Sanders appears poised to defeat her by a significant margin.

For Sanders, it may have been more about the quality of his ads than their quantity.

Research firm Ace Metrix is measuring every political ad for effectiveness by surveying 500 people demographically aligned with the U.S. Census.

“[Sanders’s ads] are not policy specific, and they are hard to argue with,” said Mark Bryant, vice president of Ace Metrix Politics. Sanders’ most successful ads center on topics such as social security, health care and affordable public education.

Unlike Republican presidential candidates, Sanders and Clinton have kept their advertising positive for the time being — in contrast with their recent debates with one another.

TV ads sponsored by Sanders and Clinton typically tout their own platforms, personal histories and campaign promises.

Clinton’s supportive super PACs also have yet to target Sanders, despite pro-Clinton Priorities USA Action raising $25.3 million during the second half of 2016, with $6 million coming from billionaire George Soros.

The role of going negative

A crowded Republican field has led to more attack ads as candidates struggle to remain viable.

In New Hampshire last week, about two in five TV ads sponsored by a Republican candidate or supportive super PAC attacked an opponent, either in part or full, the Center for Public Integrity’s analysis of Kantar Media/CMAG data indicates.

Bush’s campaign and Right to Rise USA super PAC engaged in heavy negative advertising last week, as did a super PAC, Conservative Solutions PAC, supporting Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. (Rubio’s own campaign aired more than 700 ads with a decidedly positive tone.)

Then there’s Donald Trump, who didn’t air a single TV ad in New Hampshire until 2016.

But when Trump finally did, his opponents and affiliated outside groups immediately pounced with nasty, anti-Trump ads of their own.

So Trump struck back, inundating the first-in-the-nation primary state with more than 3,500 ads between January and February, Kantar Media/CMAG data indicates. More than a third of Trump’s ads aired during the past week, many promoting the billionaire businessman, but others lampooning Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who edged him out last week in Iowa’s caucus.

Trump still remains a frequent target in ads sponsored by super PACs — most prominently, by the pro-Bush Right to Rise USA.

He wasn’t only targeted by candidate-specific groups: one super PAC — for now — is entirely dedicated to discrediting Trump.

Formed by Katie Packer, the former deputy director of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run, Our Principles PAC spent about $2.5 million in a last-ditch effort to knock Trump down in Iowa and New Hampshire polls.

“With voting almost here, Donald Trump has a secret,” says a narrator in one Our Principles PAC ad, which casts Trump as a liberal. “Trump doesn't want you to know he supports a pathway to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants.”

Trump wasn’t the only candidate on the receiving end of attacks.

In an attack ad flurry, pro-Rubio Conservative Solutions PAC targeted Bush, Right to Rise USA jumped on Rubio for relentlessly repeating talking points at Saturday’s Republican debate and America Leads — aligned with Gov. Chris Christie— criticized Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich’s banking history.

Though viewers may bemoan negative ads, they are predisposed to pay attention to negativity, said Fowler at the Wesleyan Media Project.

“This translates to benefit democracy,” Fowler said. “Negativity helps to inform and engage.”

While spending more on ads may not earn presidential hopefuls a golden ticket to the White House, TV ads still play a role — and aren’t likely to disappear anytime soon.

“TV ads are more likely to move the needle overall while digital ads can reach a niche audience,” Fowler said. “The campaign toolbox is just becoming more diverse."

What’s next

Republican candidates are already laying groundwork in South Carolina, airing ads and reserving TV spots ahead of the Feb. 20 GOP primary.

In January and February, candidates and affiliated outside groups aired about 14,500 ads. Rubio — with the help of his super PAC — is running the most ads, and pro-Rubio Conservative Solutions PAC reported on Tuesday spending just over $1 million in ads there, according to FEC filings.

But the field has been slow to peer beyond South Carolina and Nevada’s late February caucus to March 1 — Super Tuesday — when a dozen presidential nominating contests will be waged.

Of them, Texas is the biggest prize: On the Republican side, 155 delegates are up for grabs in this state where the winner does not take all. (Delegates there are awarded on a proportional basis.)

Bush is so far the only candidate in Texas — Republican or Democrat — with a notable television advertising presence.

From today through Feb. 29, his Right to Rise USA super PAC has already booked more than $2.2 million worth of TV ads on major network affiliate stations in Texas’ top three markets: Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of Federal Communications Commission records.

The super PAC has also booked airtime in Texas’ state capital, Austin, where Cruz — among Bush’s presidential campaign foils — built his political acumen as Texas’ solicitor general.

Michael Beckel contributed to this report.

“Science is the father of knowledge,” Hippocrates famously wrote, “but opinion breeds ignorance.”

Nearly 2 ½ millennia after the father of Western medicine offered that insight, science and opinion have become increasingly conflated, in large part because of corporate influence. As we explain in “Science for Sale,” an investigative series launched today by the Center for Public Integrity and co-published with Vice.com, industry-backed research has exploded “as government-funded science dwindles. Its effects are felt not only in courtrooms but also in regulatory agencies that issue rules to try to prevent disease.”

Substances like asbestos and arsenic, whose poisonous properties seem incontrovertible, have become subjects of ceaseless debate. With the aim of obscuring the truth, corporations are steering millions of dollars to scientific consulting firms. Some of these consultants, for example, maintain there are “safe” levels of asbestos despite statements to the contrary from the World Health Organization and many other august bodies. Air pollution, the hired guns say, really isn’t the killer the Environmental Protection Agency makes it out to be.

Tainted science affects us all. It is used to fend off, or lessen the sting of, lawsuits filed on behalf of sick people. It freezes the regulatory process, forcing the EPA to redo chemical reviews underlying rules designed to protect public health. It has swayed the Food and Drug Administration and made it harder for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to protect workers.

It creates doubt where little or none existed.

Stay with us over the next two weeks as we show you, among other examples, a defense lawyer who “suggested” an outlandish scientific theory to paid researchers all too eager to bite, and an entire industry that slanted a nationwide study to get the results it wanted. As a former EPA scientist told us, “It just seems like you can just make up your own facts now.”

— Jim Morris, managing editor for environment and labor

TEXAS CITY, Texas — It began with a headache; then came shaking of the hands. Leuvell Malone’s wife noticed unusual behavior. He struggled to button his shirt straight and crashed the car into the hot-water heater in the garage. Finally, a seizure landed the 55-year-old chemical worker in the hospital.

His doctor at first thought Malone might have suffered a stroke. But it turned out to be worse than that. The father of four had a rare and deadly brain tumor.

During his 32 years of greasing machines at the sprawling Union Carbide plant south of Houston, Malone feared the chemicals he breathed might one day make him sick, his sons recall. So he reported his illness to the local office of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

That was in November 1978. Just a few days later, Bobby Hinson, one of Malone’s co-workers, died of the same rare tumor, known as glioblastoma. He was 49 years old. OSHA inspectors went to the plant to find out how many other workers there had died of brain cancer.

To their surprise, the plant’s medical director already had compiled a list of 10 names. “To walk in the front door without tracing through the population and come up with 10 brain cancers is just startling,” an OSHA investigator, Dr. Victor Alexander, told a local reporter. Malone would die just three months after he was diagnosed.

More than 7,500 men had worked at the plant since it opened in 1941. Tracking those who had died was a daunting task. It took three years, but scientists at OSHA and their brethren at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, would discover 23 brain-tumor deaths there — double the normal rate. It was the largest cluster of work-related brain tumors ever reported, and it became national news, catching the attention of The Washington Post, The New York Times and even Walter Cronkite.

The leading suspect was vinyl chloride, a chemical used to make polyvinyl chloride plastic. PVC is found in an endless array of products from plastic wrap to vinyl siding to children’s toys. Industry studies already had found higher-than-expected rates of brain cancer at vinyl chloride plants, and in 1979, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC, part of the World Health Organization, took the unequivocal position that vinyl chloride caused brain tumors.

Yet today, a generation later, the scientific literature largely exonerates vinyl chloride. A 2000 industry review of brain cancer deaths at vinyl chloride plants found that the chemical’s link to brain cancer “remains unclear.” Citing that study and others, IARC in 2008 reversed itself.

However, a Center for Public Integrity review of thousands of once-confidential documents shows that the industry study cited by IARC was flawed, if not rigged. Although that study was supposed to tally all brain cancer deaths of workers exposed to vinyl chloride, Union Carbide didn’t include Malone’s death. In fact, the company counted only one of the 23 brain-tumor deaths in Texas City.

The Center’s investigation found that because of the way industry officials designed the study, it left out workers known to have been exposed to vinyl chloride, including some who had died of brain tumors. Excluding even a few deaths caused by a rare disease can dramatically change the results of a study.

Asked hypothetically what it would mean if deaths were left out, James J. Collins, the former director of epidemiology at Dow Chemical, which merged with Union Carbide in 2001, said, “That wouldn’t make very good science.”

Richard Lemen, a former U.S. assistant surgeon general and NIOSH deputy director, put it more bluntly: “I think that borders on criminal.”

The vinyl chloride episode shows what can happen when scientific research is left to companies with a huge stake in its outcome. After launching a flurry of vinyl chloride studies in the late 1970s, OSHA and NIOSH abruptly stopped under the anti-regulatory climate instilled by the Reagan administration. The chemical industry, meanwhile, continued to update its studies and use them to defend against lawsuits by people blaming their brain cancers on vinyl chloride. The result was biased research that changed the scientific consensus. The final update of the largest vinyl chloride study is expected to be published this year.

The dominance of industry-funded research for specific chemicals has become more common as funding for biological research from the National Institutes of Health has become scarcer — declining 23 percent, adjusted for inflation, since 2003, according to the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. In contrast, industry has shown a willingness to spend lavishly on research used in litigation.

The means regulators and courts sometimes must rely on scientific research paid for by companies with a huge financial stake in its outcome.

In a brief statement to the Center, the American Chemistry Council, the trade and lobby group that paid for the industry study, noted that the IARC determination that there is no association between vinyl chloride and brain cancer “was based on inconsistent findings among the available studies, lack of an exposure-response relationship, and small numbers of reported cases in most of the studies.”

Otto Wong, the now-retired author of one of the study updates, expressed concern after hearing the Center’s findings. If industry officials knew in advance that they were excluding the deaths of workers who may have been exposed, they should have designed the study differently, Wong said.

Ongoing environmental hazard

Despite stricter regulations on vinyl chloride in the workplace since 1975, the question of its health effects remains relevant. PVC plants in places such as Calvert City, Kentucky, and Plaquemine, Louisiana, still emit vinyl chloride into the air. In 2014, companies reported releasing more than 500,000 pounds of it, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA is expected to decide this year whether to set stricter emission limits for vinyl chloride and other chemicals discharged by PVC plants.

There have also been notable cases of vinyl chloride contamination. In 2012, a train derailment in Paulsboro, New Jersey, released heavy concentrations of the chemical into Mantua Creek, sending 250 people to the emergency room and stoking fears of long-term health effects. “I’m going to be worried for the rest of my life,” said Alice Breeman, a mother of three who was caught in the release and sued Conrail, CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern Railway. CSX and Norfolk Southern have since been dismissed as defendants.

In 2014, residents of McCullom Lake, Illinois, settled an eight-year-old lawsuit in which they claimed exposure to vinyl chloride that bled into groundwater from a nearby chemical plant, now owned by Dow, had caused a cluster of 33 brain tumors. The village has just over 1,000 residents. Dow admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement, whose terms are confidential.

Today, all legal disputes and regulatory actions on vinyl chloride must rely heavily on industry studies given the dearth of independent research. An industry-sponsored update in 2000 — the largest and most-cited vinyl chloride study — reported 36 brain cancer deaths at 37 vinyl chloride plants among workers employed from 1942 to 1972. Despite the small number of cancers, that rate was 42 percent higher than what would have been expected in the general population.

By the slimmest of margins, however, the number of deaths failed to meet a standard known as statistical significance – at least a 95-percent certainty that the high rate of brain cancer was not simply a fluke. Even one more death could have altered that conclusion.

The Center was able to scrutinize how that study was designed and conducted after obtaining nearly 200,000 internal industry documents from lawyer William Baggett Jr. He spent nine years on a lawsuit filed by Elaine Ross, whose husband, Dan, worked at a vinyl-chloride plant in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and died from brain cancer in 1990 at the age of 46. The case was settled 15 years ago for several million dollars, Baggett said, adding that the exact terms were confidential.

Vinyl chloride first gained notoriety in 1974, when it was revealed that four workers at a B.F. Goodrich plant in Louisville had died of angiosarcoma of the liver, a cancer so rare that typically no more than 25 cases per year are reported in the United States. The most recent tally of liver angiosarcomas among people exposed to vinyl chloride is 197 worldwide, including 50 in the U.S.

The evidence of carcinogenicity in the Louisville case was so overwhelming that the plastics industry couldn’t deny it. Still, the industry pushed back against new regulations, saying they could cost the nation up to 2.2 million jobs and cripple the plastics industry.

OSHA nonetheless went ahead in 1974 with a workplace limit for vinyl chloride that was 500 times stricter than the one in place when the Louisville cluster became public knowledge. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned the chemical from use in cosmetics and hair spray. Industry predictions of severe losses never came true. The regulations were met.

Built-in weaknesses

The vinyl chloride studies most often cited today — including a major study soon to be published — in fact are updates of a study first done in 1974. After companies learned of workers suffering from angiosarcoma, they quietly decided to find out what other cancers vinyl chloride might be causing.

The industry study was flawed from the start. The weaknesses built in to it only became worse as decisions were made on how to update it.

In June 1973, the industry’s trade group, then known as the Manufacturing Chemists’ Association, hired the consulting firm Tabershaw-Cooper Associates to tabulate cancers at vinyl-chloride plants. The first challenge was to compile a list of workers exposed. Rather than let scientists at Tabershaw-Cooper ultimately decide which workers should be put on the list, the chemical companies assigned the task to their own plant managers. At Union Carbide, managers decided to include only people working directly with vinyl chloride, based on some written records but also on supervisors’ distant memories.

Until the mid-1970s, exposure data was crude to non-existent. The managers reasoned that workers’ recollections of the potency of odors — categorized as high, medium or low — would be one way to estimate exposures. Jim Tarr, who worked as an air pollution regulator in Texas at the time, said such a method “doesn’t even reach the level of being junk science.”

Tarr, now an environmental consultant in Southern California, said it’s ridiculous to expect anyone to remember distinct odors years after the fact. In fact, vinyl chloride can be smelled only at levels far higher than even the old regulations allowed.

Tabershaw-Cooper’s final report — without revealing the methods used — said that measuring exposures at the plants “proved generally to be impossible.” It acknowledged that managers’ techniques for determining levels of exposure were “subjective” and had “questionable validity.”

Even with this problematic data, Tabershaw-Cooper reported in 1974 that there were more brain tumors than expected at vinyl chloride plants. A follow-up completed in 1978 reported that brain cancers at vinyl-chloride plants were occurring at twice the normal rate.

There was evidence from the start that Union Carbide workers in Texas City who died of brain cancer had been exposed to vinyl chloride. When news of the first 10 brain cancers at the plant broke in 1979, Union Carbide’s Gulf Coast medical director, Dr. David Glenn, acknowledged as much while also trying to deflect blame from the chemical.

"Although the press has strongly indicated that vinyl chloride may have been the culprit, only about one-half of our [brain cancer] cases had any known exposure to this chemical,” he said in a statement.

Yet none of those workers was included in the study updates that have formed the bedrock of today’s scientific consensus. The only brain cancer death from Texas City included in these updates was that of Luther Ott, a 57-year-old production worker who wasn’t even diagnosed until a month after the medical director’s statement. Ott died in February 1980.

Chemical industry officials knew before they hired Otto Wong to do an update that none of the 10 brain cancer deaths in Texas City had been included in previous studies, even though Glenn said half of the workers had been exposed to vinyl chloride.

One week after Glenn’s statement, Union Carbide’s corporate medical director, Dr. Mike Utidjian, told an industry task force that none of the 10 Texas City victims had a “clear cut” exposure. Nor were any included in previous studies.

Wong said it would have made more sense to start the study over rather than update a flawed one.

“From the scientific point of view, a better approach would be to do a new study,” he said.

That would entail reanalyzing which workers were exposed and which weren’t.

In fact, by March 1981, scientists at Union Carbide had determined that at least four of the workers who died of brain cancer had been exposed to vinyl chloride. The biostatistician who wrote that memo, Rob Schnatter, declined to comment for this story.

Schnatter did not keep the four dead  workers a secret. He and another Union Carbide scientist acknowledged them in an article published in 1983.

Schnatter wanted to amend which workers were in the industry study. In 1982 he sent a memo to his colleagues at Union Carbide, one of whom wrote a handwritten response : “No, we are not adding people to the cohort.”

This reflected a critical decision that all but guaranteed the study’s outcome. According to the protocol, workers included in the original study could be dropped from updates if new information showed they hadn’t been exposed to vinyl chloride. But the reverse wasn’t true. Workers not initially included in the study couldn’t be added even if it turned out that they had been exposed, according to a Union Carbide memo.

In 1974, Tabershaw-Cooper was given a list of 431 exposed workers from Texas City. But when the study was updated a decade later, the number of exposed workers had dropped to 289 names.

Susan Austin, a Union Carbide epidemiologist at the time, complained in an internal memo that the odd rules for reclassifying whether workers were exposed “could lead to substantial bias.”

Collins, the former Dow epidemiologist, said it should been nearly impossible to cheat on this type of study. When scientists are deciding which workers were exposed to a chemical, they usually don’t know which ones have died. Therefore, they can’t skew the outcome by excluding dead workers.

“There’s no way to fudge the data,” Collins said.

But in this situation, Union Carbide did know which workers had died. It also knew it was excluding workers who had been exposed to vinyl chloride. The Center found no evidence that Union Carbide removed workers with brain cancer who had been in the original 1974 study. But the documents show that when the study was updated, at least three brain-cancer victims Union Carbide knew had been exposed were not included.

“It looks like they did leave them out by their own admission,” said former NIOSH official Lemen, who at one time served as a consultant for lawyer Baggett.

Kenneth Mundt, the lead author of the most recent update of the vinyl chloride study and a principal at the consulting firm Ramboll Environ, at first promised to answer questions from the Center. But weeks later, Mundt said that the study’s sponsor, the American Chemistry Council, wouldn’t allow him to talk because of pending litigation.

A Dow spokesperson said, “If Texas City workers met the eligibility criteria … then they would have been included in the industry-wide study, regardless of the cause of death …. Not all Texas City workers had opportunity for exposure to vinyl chloride.”

‘Unusual’ decisions

Documents show that more than three exposed workers might have been excluded from the updates. That’s because of a decision made in the early 1970s not to include people who were not stationed full-time in departments having direct contact with vinyl chloride. OSHA and NIOSH scientists noted that many of the brain cancer victims held jobs that would have brought them in contact with chemicals throughout the plant. They listed seven in maintenance, two in shipping and three in construction.

Leuvell Malone Sr. worked in maintenance. His son, Leuvell Malone Jr., said he had no idea Union Carbide claimed his father hadn’t been exposed to vinyl chloride.

“He was all over the plant. He did all of the oiling for all of the machinery,” Malone said. “He had to be exposed.”

The government study seems to back up Malone’s claim. NIOSH reported in its study that “maintenance men moved throughout the plant and were exposed to many different agents in an irregular manner.” 

Richard Waxweiler, a former NIOSH epidemiologist involved in the investigation of the Texas City cancer cluster, said in a recent interview that he didn’t know Union Carbide had excluded so many brain-tumor deaths from the industry study. He called it “unusual” that maintenance workers like Malone were left out.

Internal Union Carbide documents show that the company didn’t dismiss the possibility that 10 other workers who died of brain cancer also may have been exposed to vinyl chloride.

In fact, exposures may have been far more widespread. In the plant’s own report to the Texas Air Control Board, which regulated air emissions at the time, Union Carbide said it released 940 tons of vinyl chloride into the air in 1975. That was after the company had implemented new pollution-control measures.

The Air Control Board calculated that in 1974, the Texas City plant released 3,000 tons of vinyl chloride — 12 times the emissions from all U.S. plants combined in 2014.

Collins said the emissions data don’t prove that everyone at the plant was exposed to vinyl chloride. But Tarr, who calculated the numbers at the time for the state of Texas, disagrees.

“There’s no question whatsoever that everyone who worked in that plant was exposed to vinyl chloride,” he said. “It was only a question of, what was the amount of that exposure and what was the duration of that exposure?”

Union Carbide strategized for nearly two years on how to limit the threat from government studies of the Texas City cancer cluster. One Union Carbide lawyer advised internally that the more brain cancer deaths there were, the easier it would be for widows like Leuvell Malone’s wife, Ada, to win lawsuits.

The company decided to do its own analysis simultaneously, reasoning that “Independent investigations of the same set of data frequently yield differing results.”

The company also decided to hold a press conference to announce its results first, telling NIOSH just two days in advance. The story was front-page news.

"Our exhaustive studies neither indicate that any deaths due to brain cancer have been caused by occupational exposure, nor do they suggest any changes to our existing employee health programs or production procedures,” plant manager Damon Engle said in a press release.

Union Carbide said only 12 employees had died of malignant brain tumors. Although earlier press reports had been higher, medical specialists at the company were quoted as saying that nine of the brain cancers “were winnowed out of the final statistical findings.”

NIOSH was blindsided by Union Carbide’s tactics. When the agency released its own findings two weeks later, media attention already had waned. NIOSH had counted 23 brain-tumor deaths, a rate that was double the national average. And it blamed the deaths on chemicals at the plant.

‘It still hurts’

The chemical industry has used its most recent studies in lawsuits to argue that vinyl chloride doesn’t cause brain tumors.

Frank and Joanne Branham grew up in the small village of McCullom Lake, Illinois, about 60 miles northwest of Chicago, and loved it there. When they got married, they built a home right on the lake. But there was one problem: the odor from a nearby chemical plant.

“There were times when we couldn’t have our windows open in the summer,” Joanne recalls. “The smell was so bad that it would hurt your eyes.”

In 1998, they moved to Arizona. Six years later, Franklin Branham started having seizures. Finally, his doctor diagnosed glioblastoma, the same rare brain cancer that had killed Leuvell Malone. Branham had only three months to live.

Joanne still breaks down talking about the day Franklin died. “It’s been 11 years, but it still hurts,” she said.

Not long after her husband’s death, Joanne visited McCullom Lake and talked to her former next-door neighbor, Bryan Freund. She discovered that Freund had the same type of cancer. Freund’s next-door neighbor, Kurt Weisenberger, had it, too.

Joanne said it was obvious to all of them that the cause was environmental.

“It doesn’t take a scientist,” she said. “That just doesn’t happen.”

They hired an attorney and filed a lawsuit claiming that a nearby plant had dumped toxic chemicals into a lagoon. They alleged that they were poisoned by vinyl chloride and other volatile chemicals.

Eventually, 33 people around McCullom Lake developed brain tumors.

Freund, one of only two brain cancer survivors from the town, has been dealing with his illness for more than a decade and said he is constantly exhausted. One year ago, he had surgery “to remove a whole bunch of my brain. They’ve taken out so much I cannot believe it,” he said.

He’s now back on chemotherapy.

The current owner of the plant, Dow Chemical, denies that people in the community were exposed to vinyl chloride, though it settled the case with the brain cancer victims about a year ago. During the litigation, the company hired expert witnesses who cited the Mundt study to prove that the brain tumors couldn’t have been caused by vinyl chloride.

One such expert, Peter Valberg of Gradient Corp., wrote that the families in McCullom Lake were citing early studies linking vinyl chloride to brain cancer but failed to cite more recent reviews.

“These in-depth summaries and updates of worker cohorts do not support a causal link between VC exposure and brain cancer,” Valberg wrote.

Aaron Freiwald, the lawyer for the McCullom Lake families, said the scientific consensus today doesn’t account for the fact that workers were excluded from industry brain cancer studies.

“We established that even one accounted-for brain cancer would completely shift the data,” Freiwald said. “If there are at least three additional cases, it seems pretty clear that the literature on vinyl chloride and brain cancer as it is has to be rewritten.”

Former race-car driver Scott Tucker was arrested by federal agents today on racketeering charges related to his online payday lending operations that court documents say generated more than $2 billion.

In an indictment unsealed today, a New York grand jury charges Tucker with bilking 4.5 million customers through illegal payday loans starting in 1997. In 2003, to elude state regulators, the indictment alleges, Tucker entered into “sham business relationships” with three Indian tribes to shield the operation with tribal sovereign immunity.

The Center for Public Integrity and CBS News exposed Tucker’s relationship to the payday lending business in a series of 2011 articles. At the time, Tucker was best known as a late-blooming and successful driver in the American Le Mans Series.

“Scott Tucker and Timothy Muir targeted and exploited millions of struggling, everyday people by charging illegally high interest rates – as much as 700 percent,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.

Bharara said agents of the FBI and Internal Revenue Service exposed Tucker’s relationship with Indian tribes as “a criminal scheme.”

The Center’s investigation revealed that Tucker’s deals with three tribes, the Miami and Modoc of Oklahoma, and the Santee Sioux of Nebraska, gave them only 1 percent of the revenues.

The indictment alleges that Tucker spent more than $100 million of the income on personal items, including luxury homes, automobiles, a private jet and expenses for his racing team, Level 5 Motorsports.

To create the illusion that the tribes owned the company, AMG Services, Tucker prepared false documents submitted to state courts, the indictment says. It also says he gave his workers in Overland Park, Kansas, daily weather reports to make customers on the phone believe the business was located on tribal lands in Oklahoma and Nebraska.

In 2012, the Federal Trade Commission sued Tucker and the tribes for violating federal lending laws. The tribes settled the case a year ago for $22 million. The FTC is currently seeking $1.3 billion from Tucker.

The indictment also charges Tucker’s lawyer and brother-in-law, Timothy Muir, with racketeering.

Debbie Mann can barely afford the drug that banishes the stabbing pain rheumatoid arthritis causes in her joints. Although Medicare helps cut the $40,000-per-year list price for prescription Enbrel, she said she still paid more than $3,800 last year.  

She thought about going off of it but doesn’t want to return to what she was like before — sleeping most of the day.

“You just want to sit in a chair and not be part of life,” said the 56-year-old retired nurse from Goshen, Indiana.

Mann would love a cheaper alternative, but Enbrel, made by Amgen Inc., is a biologic medicine, among the most expensive and difficult type to make because they are derived from sources such as live cells rather than chemicals in a lab. Less costly drugs that function in much the same way — called “biosimilars” — are expected to hit American markets in the next few years.

Yet if an Enbrel biosimilar becomes available in the U.S., as it already is in Europe, Mann will face more hurdles to obtain it in Indiana. That's thanks to the quick work done by the pharmaceutical companies that swooped in to lobby the legislature there. Drug lobbyists have helped push through bills limiting pharmacists’ ability to dole out biosimilars in more than a third of the states since 2013.

The biosimilar campaign is just one example of the wide-reaching power of state-level lobbying — a power that’s grown as Congress stalemates and federal lobbying declines.

More companies and interest groups are pushing their agendas in the states, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of five years of lobbyist registrations from all 50 states gathered by the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Since 2010, the number of entities with either in-house lobbyists or part-time hired guns working in the states has grown more than 10 percent. 

That means, on average, every state lawmaker was outnumbered by six companies, trade associations, unions or other groups angling for their attention from 2010 to 2014.

And more special interests are finding it worthwhile to scatter lobbyists in dozens of states — or even all 50 — to make sure increasingly important state legislatures don’t leave them out of the picture.

Lobbying, protected by the constitutional right to petition the government, takes different forms and follows different rules in each state. By wining and dining legislators, pressing flesh and citing talking points, dishing out campaign contributions and gifts, lobbyists wrangle lawmakers for details large and small that serve their employers’ interests:

• AT&T Inc. lobbies against laws that require the company to provide land lines so it can cut infrastructure costs and expand its voice-over-Internet business.
• Apple Inc. pitches its computer technology as the gateway to classrooms full of A+ students.
• Tobacco companies back efforts to outlaw e-cigarettes for kids in exchange for regulators not treating the new smoking tools like normal tobacco products that face taxes and advertising limits.
• On-demand car booking service Uber Technologies Inc. jumped from no lobbying in the states in 2010 to having foot soldiers in 35 states by 2014. Its goal: avoid rules designed for the traditional taxi industry.

“Not a lot is happening in Washington,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow and lobbying expert at New America, a Washington-based think tank, and author of The Business of America is Lobbying. “If you’re stymied at the federal level, you start looking to the states.”

State-by-state lobbying on controversial issues may also be less visible than similar efforts in Washington, especially in light of widespread staff cuts among reporters covering statehouse news.

Drugmakers and the power of 50

Across America, lobbyists for drugmakers — including Enbrel’s maker Amgen — have worked at a feverish pace to push state laws that make it harder for pharmacists to substitute cheaper biosimilars for brand-name biologic drugs, as is commonly done with regular generic drugs.

The laws in many cases require the pharmacist to take extra steps before dispensing the cheaper drugs, including notifying the doctor, retaining extra records or, in some cases, getting patient consent.

Opponents say these laws make it less likely a pharmacist will substitute a biosimilar and more likely to instill doubt in patients about the alternate drugs. That could mean fewer patients get access to cheaper versions of specialty drugs that treat a range of diseases, including cancer, hepatitis C and Crohn’s.

“It’s going to cost some patients more money. It's certainly going to cost the health care system more money,” said Diana Zuckerman, president of the nonprofit National Center for Health Research, a nonpartisan think tank that vets new medical treatments. “And it’s certainly going to benefit the brand-name companies. That’s the whole point.”

Pharmaceutical lobbyists say biosimilars are tricky to make and could be risky for patients, therefore pharmacists should take extra care when giving them out (though federal regulators are currently developing a system for confirming biosimilars as “interchangeable” with the original medicines). And lobbyists press state lawmakers to pass laws quickly, arguing pharmacists could not substitute the drugs at all without explicit authority.

So far 30 states have considered bills on biosimilars, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Laws have passed in at least 18 states and Puerto Rico since 2013.

Though pharmaceuticals in the U.S. are primarily regulated by the federal Food and Drug Administration, states find plenty of places to jump in — as do lobbyists.

Drug companies ask state lawmakers to make sure Medicaid or other health plans cover their products. They ask for drugs to be distributed widely, such as Mylan Inc. asking states to allow schools to stow EpiPens for any child who has a severe allergic reaction — even without a prescription. Painkiller makers such as Purdue Pharma LP resist efforts to restrict prescriptions, as the opioid epidemic claims lives.

With broad reach in multiple states, the pharmaceutical and health products industry dominates the lobbying landscape, making up 21 of the Center for Public Integrity’s top 101 lobbying entities.  

Big names Pfizer Inc., Bayer AG, AstraZeneca PLC and at least 18 other drug companies and their trade associations have each lobbied in 34 or more states since 2010.

Mylan, for example, jumped from having registered lobbyists in nine states in 2010 to 45 states by 2014 as its push for EpiPens took off.

Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the drugmakers’ main trade association, declined to comment for this article. It has said its members are committed to helping ensure “broad patient access to safe and effective medicines through a free market.”

In general, drugmakers favor laws that allow them to sell drugs widely at the price they set, often asking lawmakers to force insurers or government to pick up the tab.

“It is a rare day when we actually win a debate against pharma,” said Leigh Purvis, a health researcher for AARP, which sells insurance and lobbies about drug prices. “They are extremely well funded and extremely effective.”

The drug companies are part of a broader trend — more companies or interest groups are finding it necessary to spread out to all 50 states or close to it.

“These presumably are companies that to some extent are doing business in all 50 states and believe that state policies are increasingly going to be important to their bottom line,” said Thomas Holyoke, a professor of political science at Fresno State University who studies interest groups. “They tend to want more uniformity across the states because it’s a lower compliance burden for them.”

Back in 1997, according to research by a team of political scientists at the University of Iowa, not a single entity had lobbyists registered in all 50 states.

However, in 2013, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s analysis, at least nine companies and interest groups lobbied in every state: AARP, the American Heart Association, AstraZeneca, AT&T, Express Scripts Holding Co., the National Federation of Independent Business, the National Rifle Association of America, Pfizer and PhRMA.

Differing registration rules in the states mean that direct comparisons among them are difficult. Lobbying registrations also likely represent a minimum threshold for the lobbying taking place nationwide.

While some states even require government employees to register if they lend expertise to lawmakers or push for a bill, in other states the rules are looser. New York requires that lobbyists register only if they earn or spend at least $5,000 a year. In Texas, part-time lobbyists aren’t always required to register and report their activity. Lobbying in Nevada is only reported when the legislature, which ordinarily meets every other year, is in session.

Federal decline

Even federal lobbyists are getting in on the state action. Nearly all of the top 20 lobbying firms in the National Law Journal’s 2015 ranking indicated that they are active at the state and local level.

McGuireWoods, a top 20 firm headquartered steps from the Virginia Capitol in Richmond, has said state and local lobbying is its biggest moneymaker. In recent years, D.C.-based firms such as Cornerstone Government Affairs and Summit Strategies bolstered their rosters of state-focused influencers.

It’s all happening at a time when federal lobbying is on the decline. From 2010 through 2014, the number of companies and organizations with registered federal lobbyists declined by 25 percent, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics.

To be sure, federal lobbying rules have changed over time, including a 2007 federal law signed by President George W. Bush that tightened rules on lobbying, so more entities are using other tools to influence government outside of formal registered lobbying. Yet in that same five-year period, the number of entities sending lobbyists to state capitals increased 10 percent.

States, meanwhile, are pushing out many more new laws than Congress. Federal lawmakers passed 352 bills and resolutions in 2013 and 2014, according to CQ Roll Call. States passed more than 45,000 bills in that same time period.

Large insurers such as Aetna have long been major players in state lobbying, because insurance is largely regulated at the state level. So is alcohol. As a result, Anheuser-Busch InBev SA has had a steady presence in state capitols, with lobbyists in 49 states in both 1997 and 2013.

But some interest groups are pivoting to the states rather than focusing on Washington, where partisan differences seem to have slowed policymaking. The Consumer Healthcare Products Association, which went from lobbyists in 24 states in 2010 to 34 states in 2013, started pushing for state laws blocking sales of certain cough syrups to minors while it waits for a national ban to prevent teens from abusing the medicine, which can induce hallucinations. They’ve been successful in nine states so far, a spokesman said.

Experts say states also are picking up even more regulatory responsibility as more states expand Medicaid, for example, or are asked to decide specific rules for how to administer certain federal programs, such as welfare.

“If I’m either in favor or against more spending on welfare, I’m now going to spend more time targeting the states rather than just Washington.” said Adam Newmark, a political science professor at Appalachian State University.

Companies that have something to sell to states, such as Xerox Corp. with its speed camera and electronic tolling programs, also spread out to many statehouses. And others play defense against lawmakers seeking new revenue sources: Tobacco company Altria Group Inc. regularly fends off cigarette tax hikes.

In Idaho, Dennis Lake, a Republican state representative at the time, introduced a bill in 2011 that called for increasing the state’s cigarette tax. But he couldn’t get it past the committee he chaired.

He blames heavy lobbying by tobacco companies. Altria had five lobbyists roaming the statehouse halls that year and spent more than $165,000 on lobbying, according to a review by Idaho Falls’ Post Register.

Indeed, one of Altria’s in-house lobbyists, Amanda Klump, spent $2,500 to host two members of Lake’s committee and the speaker of the House at a gubernatorial inauguration party in January that year, according to state records and the Post Register.

“They were everybody’s friend,” Lake said. “Idaho is an anti-tax state, so whenever you try to do something with any of the sin taxes, they come out in force and say, ‘Oh this is a tax increase.’ ”

Altria spokesman David Sutton said the company lobbies on tobacco taxes because they affect its business. "We get engaged when we need to,” he said.

State dominance

About every two weeks last summer, former Navajo National Councilman Daniel Tso took his white Nissan truck on a tour of oil wells and fracking sites in northwest New Mexico. What he saw there concerned him. Oil was spilled onto the ground, he said, and former fracking sites were not filled in with soil and replanted as promised.

Tso worried about damage to the lands his people hold dear, damage alarmingly near Chaco Culture National Historical Park and its sandstone ruins of the ancient Pueblo peoples.

“We’re tied to the land,” he said. “There’s nothing like walking the land and touching the earth.”

Tso doesn’t trust state agents to regulate the oil and gas drillers. First, Tso pointed out, there aren’t enough inspectors — only 14 to oversee 60,000 active wells in the state, according to a report by Inside Energy, a journalism initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

And even if it had enough inspectors, the state has little authority to enforce its own regulations. The penalties for spills and other violations haven’t been updated since the 1930s, thanks in part to the influence of the powerful oil and gas industry.  

In 2013, lawmakers and environmentalists tried to update the state’s rules to increase penalties for spills and other infractions from $1,000 per day to $10,000 per day.  

Oil and gas lobbyists swarmed the statehouse during hearings and votes on the bill.

“I’ve never seen so many suits in my life,” said Viki Harrison, director of Common Cause New Mexico, which lobbies for tighter ethics rules. “People were just lined up outside. They couldn’t even fit in the committee room.”

Thirty-six oil and gas lobbyists representing 23 companies and five trade associations worked to sway lawmakers to nix the bill, her organization later reported.

Among them was Kent Cravens, who started a job as the lead lobbyist for the New Mexico Oil & Gas Association one day after resigning from the state Senate.  He did not return requests for comment.

State records show his boss at the oil association, president Steve Henke, picked up the $17,638 tab after lawmakers dined at The Bull Ring, an upscale steakhouse an 11-minute walk from the State Capitol in Santa Fe, 10 days after the bill was introduced. The association declined to comment.

The bill failed in the New Mexico House by a vote of 32-36. Since then, state regulators have made no formal attempts to seek penalties on oil companies in New Mexico.

It’s one example of the formidable power industries that band together can wield in particular regions or statehouses. While some industries, like pharmaceuticals and telecommunications, seek influence in all 50 states at times, others, such as energy in the West or agriculture in the Great Plains, dominate one particular part of the country. And through their lobbyists, they fight to ensure tax and regulation schemes benefit them as much as possible.

“Right now I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that the oil and gas industry in New Mexico is essentially self-regulating,” said Eric Jantz, an attorney with the New Mexico Environmental Law Center who worked on the failed bill. “Oil and gas brings out its lobbyists and gets people from the oil patch to come and testify and spreads money around.”

The energy industry wields incredible influence in states whose coffers are filled with oil tax money, such as North Dakota.

“There’s almost no deception. It’s almost completely transparent,” said Democratic Rep. Ben Hanson, who represents the city of West Fargo in the state Assembly. “They want you to pass these laws because it will make it easier for their companies to operate.”

The North Dakota Petroleum Council, which represents 575 oil and gas companies in the state, did not return calls for comment.

Individual organizations can wield incredible power in particular states as well. An average of 29 lobbyists per year roamed Montgomery on behalf of the Alabama Education Association teachers union from 2010 to 2014, according to state records.

Fidelity Investments averaged 18 lobbyists in the Massachusetts Statehouse, less than a mile from its global headquarters.

The Walt Disney Co. relied on an average of 30 registered lobbyists each year to represent it and its subsidiaries in Florida.

Overwhelmed with influence

As more lobbying interests haunt state capitols, the temptation grows for lawmakers to rely on lobbyists’ expertise. Many legislators make laws for only part of the year and have minimal staff to help them.

That’s what happened when drug companies asked North Dakota legislators in 2015 to require insurance companies to cover costlier chemotherapy pills at the same rate they covered the intravenous version of the cancer-killing treatment.

“When pharma comes in with an oral chemotherapy bill that no one understands at the beginning of session, it’s going to get passed,” said Hanson, the North Dakota state lawmaker.

And it’s what happened when the maker of Debbie Mann’s drug, Amgen, and other biologic drug makers teamed up in Indiana.

In 2013, as legislators considered a bill limiting pharmacists’ ability to prescribe biosimilars, Amgen sent two lobbyists to the state, the first time it had a lobbying presence there in at least seven years. After that bill failed, the drugmakers tried again the next year, working to better explain biologic medicines to legislators.

“We had to educate and educate,” said Michael Leppert, a lobbyist who represented the trade association now called the Biotechnology Innovation Organization that pushed for the legislation. “It was very, very new.”

Amgen boosted its presence to five lobbyists working in the Hoosier State in 2014. State records show they teamed up with 23 more from biotech interests, including cancer-drug-maker Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss company Roche Holding AG. That’s more than double what those companies had in the state in 2010.

“Amgen operates in a highly regulated industry,” said Amgen spokeswoman Kelley Davenport in an email. “Our lobbying efforts and expenditures reflect Amgen's continued advocacy efforts to provide patient access to and advance the coverage of existing and future products.”

None of the other companies responded to requests for comment.

Republican Rep. Ed Clere, who sponsored the bills in the Indiana House, told The New York Times that Genentech brought him the legislation. Strikingly similar bills were introduced in other states.

After the bill passed, Clere and Sen. Brandt Hershman, the bill’s Senate sponsor and also a Republican, received “Legislator of the Year” awards from the state’s biotechnology trade association. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Debbie Mann, who pays attention to rheumatology news, didn’t know the bill on biosimilars was working its way through her state legislature in 2014. And since the legislation received little media coverage at the time, it’s likely Mann’s fellow patients don’t know obtaining cheaper drug options will require navigating more state mandates in the future.

In the meantime, Mann said she pays more for Enbrel each year and worries what would happen if her husband fell ill, knowing she would no longer be able to afford the medicine that keeps her going.

“All it takes is something major to happen in our finances, and that’s going to be the first thing to go,” she said. “That’s a lot of money.”

Reporters Ashley Balcerzak and Michael J. Mishak contributed.

Half a century ago, journalist Joe McGinniss authored The Selling of the President, a brilliant exposé about the unabashed marketing of successful 1968 presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon. The image on the book jacket perhaps said it all: the candidate’s smiling face emblazoned on a pack of cigarettes.

The extent of the shameless packaging of a national politician, indeed, a former vice president running for the White House, was a revelation to most Americans. It reflected a much darker view of the American presidential election process than had been portrayed in Theodore H. White’s iconic series of books, The Making of the President.

How quaint that innocence lost appears today. U.S. presidential elections have become garish media spectacles. It is a bazaar of candidates, consultants, pundits, and assorted hucksters that lasts a full two years—half the length of an elected president’s term in office. Every four years, the American people endure by far the longest and most expensive election of any nation in the world—until the next one. The 2016 race for the White House is the wildest, most expensive money and media circus ever.

The next president, aided by thousands of paid and unpaid staffers, consultants, volunteers, and incessant expensive advertisements, will have raised and spent an unprecedented sum in the neighborhood of $1 billion. Most of that money comes from the very wealthiest Americans, a tiny percentage of the overall population. In January 2015, the conservative Republican billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries and their political allies announced their intention to spend an astonishing $889 million in the 2016 presidential and congressional elections. That is more than twice what the Koch network spent in 2012; it is about equal to the election spending of the Republican and Democratic parties combined.

According to the New York Times, in the first months of the 2016 presidential campaign cycle, 158 families and companies they own or control contributed $176 million to candidates in both major parties. “Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign,” the Times reported. Most of this money was delivered through channels that are now legal thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in 2010 that enables unlimited spending in support of campaigns and other political causes by corporations and nonprofits alike.

The $176 million represented nearly half of all of the “early money” raised in the 2016 presidential election campaign. These donors, the Times noted, “are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters. Across a sprawling country, they reside in an archipelago of wealth, exclusive neighborhoods dotting a handful of cities and towns.”

The so-called “wealth primary” has become a critical factor in the outcome of presidential elections. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, in every election since the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974 and the election reform laws that followed, the major party White House candidate who raised the most money the year before any primary or caucus votes had been cast, and been eligible for federal matching funds, became his party’s nominee for the general election. But the post-Watergate reforms about money in politics began to unravel in 2000, when Republican George W. Bush declined to participate in the presidential campaign matching-funds system and his $100,000-and-up donors also began to blatantly number their campaign checks, so that they and their industry would receive “credit” after the election for the campaign cash contributed. The Democratic Party presidential nominees (in 2004 Senator John Kerry and Barack Obama in 2008) soon thereafter also opted out of the reform system, and the financial floodgates have been wide open ever since.

The bottom line is that the candidate raising the most financial contributions in the year before the actual voting won the nomination of his party every time. The candidate with the most and largest contributions not coincidentally also usually generates the most media advertising, the most corresponding news media coverage “buzz” and public perceptions about the candidate’s “momentum,” and eventually the most votes.

By the end of 2015, the top fundraisers in the 2016 White House race were Democrat Hillary Clinton with $94 million and Republican Jeb Bush with $133 million. Clinton, the First Lady during former President Bill Clinton’s two terms in office, a U.S. senator from New York between 2001 and 2009, and secretary of state in the first Barack Obama administration, correspondingly led her next closest primary opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, by sixteen percentage points in opinion surveys. However, the declining fortunes of Jeb Bush, the son of the forty-first president and brother of the forty-third president, reflected the exception that proves the rule; although the early frontrunner in mid-2015, as of January 2016 he was polling sixth in a race crowded with more than a dozen Republican hopefuls.

The commanding ten- to twenty-point lead taken by Republican candidate Donald Trump through most of the second half of 2015 indicates that, whether won through paid organizing and advertising or generated free of charge, media buzz is an essential factor determining the prospects of politicians seeking the American presidency. The pugnacious billionaire businessman and television personality eschewed traditional fundraising and spent relatively little of his own money, around $6 million, by the end of 2015. At that point, he had hardly paid for any political advertising. Yet his outspoken and often provocative public statements—calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, proposing a ban on Muslims entering the United States, claiming that thousands of New Jersey Muslims cheered the September 11 attacks, debunking the prisoner-of-war heroism of Republican Senator John McCain—enabled Trump to dominate front pages, news broadcasts, and social media feeds for months. The result was massive public attention and a corresponding lead in opinion surveys.

Subverted by Greed

American politics is now a game for the very rich. Candidates seek to buy their ways into office, with campaign donations from wealthy individuals, corporations, and interest groups, or, as in the case of Trump, with personal fortunes and the public platforms such fortunes afford. The relatively picturesque days of “just plain folks” like Abraham Lincoln and Harry S. Truman running for office, winning, and going to Washington are pretty much over. There won’t likely ever be a sequel to Frank Capra’s 1939 movie classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; politics today is more like a Stephen King horror film. Wealthy and powerful interests have hijacked democracy in the United States, in the view of most Americans, according to several recent polls.

According to a New York Times survey, 84 percent of Americans think “money has too much influence” in American politics and that “most of the time,” winning candidates specifically help their campaign donors once in office. Many people believe that the increasing cynicism about politics has led to voter disenchantment and disengagement. For example, voter turnout in the 2014 congressional and state elections was the lowest since World War II, just 36.4 percent.

Politics and campaigns have become vastly more expensive. Fewer and fewer folks of modest middle-class means can afford to take a year or two off from their daily lives and mount a robust, well-funded campaign for political office. Eight of the last ten U.S. presidents were millionaires before they were elected, and roughly half of the 535 members of Congress today are millionaires—an irony, given that only about 5 percent of their constituents can claim such wealth.

Who is making by far the most money from this exclusive game? Major media corporations, that’s who. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Professor Robert W. McChesney wrote a seminal book in 1999 describing this phenomenon, aptly entitled: Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times. A few years later, in 2003, I had the chance to discuss the problem with former President Jimmy Carter. “I think now the entire election process, including the nomination of candidates, is predicated to a major degree on how much money they can raise,” he told me. “And that involves, in most cases, going to special interest groups who hope they can get a favor after the election is over. … We’ve not made any progress on the extremely distorting effect of high finance being requisite for any successful candidate. If you look at the list of candidates now that are prominently mentioned for president, almost all of them who have any chance at all are millionaires or multimillionaires. And this is not an accident. An average person like I was, just a peanut farmer back in 1976, you know, we won with practically no money because we campaigned all over the country and built up a grassroots organization. … I think nowadays that would be absolutely impossible, which means that there’s a criterion for success in American politics now—the Democratic or Republican Party—and that is extreme wealth or access to major wealth. And we are the only democratic nation in the world, in the Western world, within which that blight or cancer is affecting our system.”

How and why did politics become so ridiculously expensive and exclusive? Carter pointed a finger at the media corporations. “Our political system has been subverted in a very damaging way by the greed, primarily of the news media, television stations, who demand in this country, almost uniquely among great democracies, that candidates have to pay for their presentation of their own campaign platforms and promises through extremely expensive news media. And this is a basic fallacy of our system now,” Carter said.

One of the main reasons that presidential campaigns are so expensive is the high cost of television advertising that competing candidates purchase to promote themselves to wide viewerships. Presidents, congressmen, and the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) have been afraid, unable, or unwilling to require the powerful broadcasting and cable television companies to provide free airtime to political candidates as is the case in most other major democracies—which would lower the cost of campaigns, help to reduce the outsized influence of wealthy donors, and provide a more even-handed platform across the spectrum of candidates.

Bill Clinton momentarily tried to buck the media industry. In his January 1998 State of the Union Address, Clinton, citing the escalating campaign fundraising “arms race” in America, proposed a major new policy initiative to decrease the exorbitant and rising costs of campaign advertisements. “I will formally request that the Federal Communications Commission act to provide free or reduced-cost television time for candidates,” the president said. “The airwaves are a public trust, and broadcasters also have to help us in this effort to strengthen our democracy.” Within twenty-four hours, FCC Chairman William Kennard disclosed that the FCC would develop new rules governing political advertisements. Within days, the multibillion-dollar broadcast corporations and their various sponsored congressional leaders in both political parties shut down this historic proposal; the White House quickly realized that if it did not step back, Congress might penalize the FCC for this perceived impudence and cut its annual budget.

The reform idea has made no progress in all the years since. And little wonder. Between 1996 and late 2000, according to the Center for Public Integrity, the fifty largest media companies (deriving half or more of their revenues from broadcasting, cable operations, publishing, online media, and their content providers) and four of their trade associations spent $111.3 million to lobby Congress and the executive branch of the government; by 1999 the number of registered, media-related lobbyists had ballooned up to 284 people. And between 1997 and 2000, media corporations took 118 members of Congress and their senior staff on 315 all-expense-paid trips to meet with lobbyists and CEOs to discuss specific legislation and policies favored by their industry.

Reed Hundt, who was the FCC chairman from 1993 to 1997, once told me that he was fascinated by the unique political power that only the media corporations can wield. “The media industry does not mobilize great numbers of voters and it actually is not comprised of America’s largest, economically most important companies,” he said. According to Hundt, the media’s significant clout comes “from its near-ubiquitous, pervasive power to completely alter the beliefs of every American.” Members of Congress and presidential candidates, he said, are afraid to take on the news media directly for fear that they will “disappear” from the TV or radio airwaves and print news columns.

Years later, two campaign finance reformers, Senators John McCain and Russell Feingold, a Republican and a Democrat, respectively, separately told me that media corporations represent the most powerful special interest in Washington. Why? Because, they noted, the broadcast industry and individual stations and network news organizations decide which politicians will be on the air. For three successive sessions of Congress, they could not get their campaign finance legislation passed with that “free airtime” provision because the broadcasters blocked it by enlisting members of Congress who were presumably also worried about being on the air. The McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation only passed and became law in the United States after they grudgingly removed this proposed broadcast “free airtime for candidates” regulation.

There was a valiant nonprofit advocacy group, the Alliance for Better Campaigns, founded in 1998 and run by a former Washington Post reporter, Paul Taylor; the group’s honorary co-chairmen were former U.S. presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter and former CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite. Despite the respected people involved, the organization shut down after a few impressive years—the multibillion dollar television broadcast industry and their Congressional leadership allies were simply too powerful to overcome. But according to one of its last, most compelling reports, Gouging Democracy, “Local television stations across the country systematically gouged candidates in the closing months of the 2000 campaign, jacking up the prices of their ads … despite a 30-year-old federal law designed to protect candidates from such demand-driven price spikes.” And between 1980 and 2000 alone, “political advertisers spent five times more on broadcast television ads, even after adjusting for inflation. The candidates made these payments to an industry that has been granted free and exclusive use of tens of billions of dollars worth of publicly owned spectrum space in return for a pledge to serve the public interest.”

Broadcasters are making more revenue than ever on political advertising. Meanwhile, local TV stations—where most Americans get their news—devote only a tiny percentage of their main programming to politics, including interviews with officials and candidates at election time. Stations have a financial disincentive to “give away” airtime when they can make millions by selling it. The average news program sound bite has gone from forty-four seconds more than forty years ago to less than ten seconds today.

Deepening Disillusionment

Beyond the broadcasters’ substantial power and largely unregulated greed, so many other developments have diminished Americans’ perceptions of politicians, public relations, advertising, and the news media. Trust in the U.S. government is at near-record lows, following decades of scandals from lies about the Vietnam War, the Watergate cover-up, the Monica Lewinsky affair, and deception justifying the invasion of Iraq. Congress has the highest disapproval rating recorded in forty-one years of public opinion tracking by the Gallup polling organization—86 percent. Trust in the news media is not faring much better; only four in ten Americans have “a great deal” or “a fair amount of trust and confidence” in the media to report the news “fully, accurately, and fairly.” If Americans fully understood the extent to which U.S. media companies directly profit from the political process, the level of trust would probably be even lower.

A half-century after the The Selling of the President, America now has more than four times more public relations specialists than professional journalists; in 1960 the ratio of journalists to flacks was one to one. According to the Columbia Journalism Review and researchers at Cardiff University and the University of Technology in Sydney, 50 percent of news content in some American, British, and Australian news outlets was directly derived from press releases. Over the same period, annual spending on advertising in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television in the U.S. has skyrocketed from $12 billion to more than $150 billion, twice the rate of inflation. While as late as the early 1990s only about 2 percent of total TV advertising revenues was from political commercials, today political advertising accounts for more than 20 percent.

In his successful 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon raised $25.4 million, and spent $6.3 million of it on television advertising; forty years later, freshman Illinois U.S. Senator Barack Obama’s 2008 successful presidential campaign raised $750 million, nearly five times that amount (adjusted for inflation), and $280 million of it was spent on TV advertising. Disillusionment with the money and media circus seems likely to deepen. In the 2016 election cycle, spending on political television advertising is projected to reach at least $4.4 billion for federal races alone, up from $3.8 billion in 2012. But, have no doubt, it will be the broadcasters’ best year ever.

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2016 edition of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs.

In 2001, toxicologist Dennis Paustenbach got a phone call from a lawyer for Ford Motor Company.

The lawyer, Darrell Grams, explained that Ford had been losing lawsuits filed by former auto mechanics alleging asbestos in brakes had given them mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer virtually always tied to asbestos exposure. Grams asked Paustenbach, then a vice president with the consulting firm Exponent, if he had any interest in studying the disease’s possible association with brake work. A meeting cemented the deal.

Paustenbach, a prolific author of scientific papers who’d worked with Grams on Dow Corning’s defense against silicone breast-implant illness claims, had barely looked at asbestos to that point. “I really started to get serious about studying asbestos after I met Mr. Grams, that’s for sure,” Paustenbach testified in a sworn deposition in June 2015. Before that, he said, the topic “wasn’t that interesting to me.”

Thus began a relationship that, according to recent depositions, has enriched Exponent by $18.2 million and brought another $21 million to Cardno ChemRisk, a similar firm Paustenbach founded in 1985, left and restarted in 2003. All told, testimony shows, Ford has spent nearly $40 million funding journal articles and expert testimony concluding there is no evidence brake mechanics are at increased risk of developing mesothelioma. This finding, repeated countless times in courtrooms and law offices over the past 15 years, is an attempt at scientific misdirection aimed at extricating Ford from lawsuits, critics say.

“They’ve published a lot, but they’ve really produced no new science,” said John Dement, a professor in Duke University’s Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and an asbestos researcher for more than four decades. “Fifteen years ago, I thought the issue of asbestos risk assessment was pretty much defined. All they’ve accomplished is to try to generate doubt where, really, little doubt existed.”

The glut of corporate-financed science has yielded mixed results. Exponent had a role in jury trials won by Ford in St. Louis and Pittsburgh last year, for example, and in a trial Ford lost in Tennessee. Judges have noted the infusion of controversy into a subject that for many years was not controversial in the least. A veteran asbestos judge in Wayne County, Michigan, wrote in an opinion that he’d never encountered the argument that “the science was not there” on mesothelioma and brakes until he heard a case involving an Exponent witness.

The discord over brakes bankrolled by Ford “has, in certain cases, tipped the scales for the defendants with juries,” said plaintiffs’ lawyer Jon Ruckdeschel. “More frequently, it has been used by industry lawyers to increase the costs and burdens on the courts and sick mechanics by creating a tidal wave of pre-trial litigation regarding the ‘science.’ ”

A troubling history

Over the past decade 109 physicians, scientists and academics from 17 countries have signed legal briefs affirming that asbestos in brakes can cause mesothelioma. The World Health Organization and other research and regulatory bodies maintain that there is no safe exposure level for asbestos and that all forms of the mineral — including the most common one, chrysotile, found in brakes — can produce mesothelioma.

Worries about brakes as a source of disease go back decades. A 1971 Ford memo shows that while the company didn’t believe brake dust unleashed by mechanics contained significant amounts of asbestos, it already was exploring alternatives to asbestos brake linings. One of them, made of metal and carbon, performed well, the memo says, “but the cost penalty is severe ($1.25/car just for front-end brakes).”

A Ford spokeswoman declined to comment for this article. In its 2014 annual report, the company said, “Most of the asbestos litigation we face involves individuals who claim to have worked on the brakes of our vehicles over the years. We are prepared to defend these cases, and believe that the scientific evidence confirms our long-standing position that there is no increased risk of asbestos-related disease as a result of exposure to the type of asbestos formerly used in the brakes on our vehicles.” Ford announced recently that it earned a record pretax profit of $10.5 billion in 2015.

A written statement to the Center for Public Integrity delivered on behalf of Paustenbach by a public-relations firm says, “Dennis was viewed as one of the leading risk assessment experts in the country, and was contacted by Ford because of his experience and expertise in this field. … As Dennis and others learned more about brake dust, it was clear that while there was considerable data on the subject, the scientific information had never been synthesized and analyzed.”

His conclusion after reviewing the scientific literature, according to the statement: “There is no credible study that has shown an increased risk of disease in auto mechanics.”

An Exponent vice president declined to comment. On its website, the 49-year-old firm, originally known as Failure Analysis Associates, says, “We evaluate complex human health and environmental issues to find cost-effective solutions. … By introducing a new way of thinking about an existing situation, we assist clients to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles.”

A Center review of abstracts on the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed website turned up 10 articles on asbestos brakes co-authored by scientists affiliated with Exponent or Cardno ChemRisk since 2003. (The latter was known simply as ChemRisk until it was acquired by Brisbane, Australia-based Cardno in 2012). None of the articles reported an elevated risk of mesothelioma among vehicle mechanics.

Many physicians and scientists say, however, that these papers muddy the waters by drawing overly broad conclusions from earlier studies of workers who might have had no contact with asbestos brakes. “In the asbestos area the whole literature has been so warped by publications just supporting litigation,” said Dement, of Duke. “It has a real negative impact on pushing the science forward.” Dement said he has, on rare occasions, consulted for plaintiffs in the past 10 or 15 years, earmarking nearly all fees for the university.

In a 2007 article, two researchers at George Washington University — one of whom, David Michaels, now heads the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration — reported finding six “litigation-generated” papers   on asbestos and auto mechanics published from 1997 through 2001. In the ensuing five years, 20 such papers were published. All told, 18 of the 26 papers published from 1997 through 2006 were “written by experts primarily associated with defendants, while eight were written by experts who work primarily for plaintiffs ... Sponsorship by parties involved in litigation leads to an imbalance in the literature … whoever is willing to fund more studies will have more studies published.”

Craig Biegel, a retired corporate defense lawyer in Oregon who represented plaintiffs later in his career, did an update of the Michaels paper as part of his doctoral dissertation. Biegel searched the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed website using the words “asbestos” and “brake.” He found 27 articles written from 1998 to 2015 by experts known to work for industry; all, he said, showed either no elevated risk of mesothelioma among mechanics or minimal asbestos exposures.

He found 10 articles written by plaintiffs’ experts; all showed an association between the disease and brake work. And he found 11 articles written by foreign scientists, who, as far as he knew, were not involved in litigation. All but one showed an association or documented high asbestos exposures.

“As far as I’m concerned, both sides in a lawsuit do the same thing: They both fund research to obtain evidence for trial, not to advance science,” said Biegel, who once defended asbestos property-damage claims for a Fortune 500 company he declined to identify. “The only difference is that defense counsel have almost unlimited industry money and plaintiffs’ counsel do not want to spend their own money.”

Ford’s knowledge of asbestos

There are several ways microscopic asbestos fibers can be sent airborne and enter the human body during brake work. Over time, friction wears down brake linings and pads — many of which contained asbestos prior to the mid-1990s and some of which still do — and they need to be replaced. A mechanic who opened a brake drum would find it filled with fine dust from the decayed lining. The easiest and most common way to clean it out was to use compressed air, a technique that generates grayish, fiber-bearing clouds that can trigger disease years later if the worker is not properly protected. Many weren’t.

Other opportunities for exposure: filing, grinding or sanding brakes, or cleaning up work areas.

Ford wasn’t the only U.S. automaker to use asbestos brakes. General Motors and Chrysler did as well and found themselves in court as a result. Of the so-called Big Three, however, only Ford continues to get hit with mesothelioma lawsuits; GM and Chrysler are immune by virtue of their 2009 bankruptcies. “The extent of our financial exposure to asbestos litigation remains very difficult to estimate,” Ford said in its 2014 annual report. “Annual payout and defense costs may become significant in the future.”

Documents show Ford was mindful of concerns about asbestos brakes by the late 1960s. An unpublished report by an industrial hygienist with Ford of Britain in 1968 said that while brake linings at the time contained between 40 and 60 percent asbestos, field tests indicated dust that collected in brake drums had a low asbestos content because much of the material decomposed after repeated braking. Consequently, he wrote, there was no evidence that blowing out the drums presented a “significant hazard to health.”

The hygienist added, “It would be helpful, however, for clinical examinations to be made of some repair mechanics with long experience of brake cleaning to confirm this view. It would also be desirable to include in Service manuals a general instruction that inhalation of dust during brake cleaning should be minimised.”

A 1970 Ford memo titled “Asbestos Emissions from Brake Lining Wear” included a bibliography of 40 articles on the cancer-causing effects of asbestos, dating to 1954. And the same 1971 memo bemoaning the $1.25 cost of asbestos-free brakes noted that the state of Illinois was considering banning the use of asbestos in brake linings, beginning with the 1975 model year.

In 1973, Ford began telling its own employees to use “an industrial type vacuum cleaner” to remove dust from brake drums. “Under no circumstances shall compressed air blowoff be used to clean brakes and brake drums,” the company said. It first told its dealers about what it called “a potential health hazard” in 1975.

In a court filing, Ford said it began putting “caution” labels on packages of asbestos-containing brakes and clutches in 1980; many mesothelioma victims who have sued the company say they never saw such labels. In the same document Ford said it began a “complete phase-out of asbestos-containing brake products” in the 1983 model year, starting with its Ranger pickup truck. A decade later, only Ford Mustangs and certain limousines were equipped with asbestos brakes; some asbestos-containing parts for older model-year vehicles were available until 2001through dealerships and authorized distributors.

That was the year lawyer Grams reached out to toxicologist Paustenbach to gauge his interest in studying mesothelioma in ex-mechanics. “I contacted Dr. Paustenbach because he is one of the leading professional experts in the world,” Grams, who no longer represents Ford, said in a brief phone interview. Grams said he had read none of the recent deposition testimony about the relationship between Ford and its two brake consultants, Cardno ChemRisk and Exponent.

In his curriculum vitae, Paustenbach, president of Cardno ChemRisk, says he is “a board-certified toxicologist and industrial hygienist with nearly 30 years of experience in risk assessment, environmental engineering, ecotoxicology and occupational health.” The 181-page CV shows he has worked on topics ranging from arsenic in wine to heavy metals in hip implants; authored or co-authored 271 peer-reviewed articles; and given 440 presentations at conferences. He is regularly retained as a defense expert in asbestos litigation and other toxic-tort cases.

Paustenbach offered a window into his thinking in a 2009 article written by a University of Virginia business professor.

“Without a doubt, a large percentage of environmental and occupational claims are simply bogus, intended only to extract money from those who society believes can afford to ‘share the wealth,’” Paustenbach told his interviewer. He said, “The vast majority of cases that I’ve seen were fraudulent with respect to the scientific merit and billions upon billions of dollars are redistributed annually inappropriately — at least from a scientific standpoint.

“… Nonetheless,” Paustenbach said, “I am a firm believer in the wisdom of juries and support giving generous awards to those that have been truly harmed by bad corporate behavior.”

In a 2010 letter to Dolores Nuñez Studier, a lawyer in the Ford general counsel’s office, Paustenbach claimed his firm’s papers had “changed the scientific playing field in the courtroom. You know this better than anyone as you have seen the number of plaintiff verdicts [in asbestos cases] decrease and the cost of settlement go down over time.”

In the letter, which surfaced in the discovery phase of a lawsuit, Paustenbach complained that the fee structure in place between Ford and Chemrisk was “out of date” and too low.

“Dolores, currently, you are among our largest clients,” he wrote. “And, Ford has certainly been a loyal supporter. The Big 3 [automakers] were the foundation of the firm during our formative years, and for this reason, I have tried to go the extra mile to satisfy your needs.”

Asked to explain the letter during a 2014 deposition, Paustenbach said he was merely emphasizing to Studier that “we invested in scientific research to answer questions that remained unanswered in the courtroom for many, many years …. And I was pretty proud of that.” He said he didn’t feel it was fair for his firm to lose money “when, in fact, I was so committed to getting the science straight.”

Creating doubt

The World Health Organization estimates that 107,000 people die each year from asbestos-related diseases. “Exposure to asbestos, including chrysotile, causes cancer of the lung, larynx and ovaries, and also mesothelioma (a cancer of the pleural and peritoneal linings) [and] asbestosis (fibrosis of the lungs),” the WHO says. “No threshold has been identified for the carcinogenic risk of asbestos, including chrysotile.”

OSHA says, “There is no ‘safe’ level of asbestos exposure for any type of asbestos fiber. Asbestos exposures as short in duration as a few days have caused mesothelioma in humans.”

Taking the WHO and OSHA statements at face value, the case against asbestos would seem to be closed: Even someone with very low exposure to the mineral should worry.

In papers published over the past 15 years, however, scientists with Exponent, Cardno ChemRisk and other consulting firms have questioned whether brake mechanics truly are at heightened risk of developing mesothelioma, the disease that has fueled litigation against Ford and others.

A 2004 Exponent paper funded by Ford, GM and Chrysler, for example, concluded that “employment as a motor vehicle mechanic does not increase the risk of developing mesothelioma.” An update of that paper in 2015 found the same result. Each paper was a meta-analysis — an agglomeration of the results of multiple studies that, taken individually, may be too weak to indicate an effect.

In a deposition last October, Exponent’s Mary Jane Teta, a co-author of both meta-analyses, defended her firm’s findings. “I disagree when they say there is no safe level [of asbestos],” she testified. “I know the level of chrysotile … experienced by vehicle mechanics is safe.”

In his statement to the Center, Paustenbach wrote, “It is implausible that nearly 20 epidemiology studies” –  on which he bases his legal opinions – “would conclude that there is no increased risk of mesothelioma for the time period during which brakes contained chrysotile asbestos if that were not the appropriate conclusion.”

The studies Paustenbach cites, however, are fraught with limitations, such as small sample sizes, vague job classifications and lack of exposure data. And not all of them found, as he put it, “no increased risk of mesothelioma” among mechanics. In a 1989 paper, for example, a Danish researcher who studied causes of death among auto mechanics reported finding a single case of mesothelioma among her subjects, where none would have been expected in the general population. As with other cancers, she wrote, this number was "too small to state or rule out a potentially increased risk."

A co-author of another paper, Kay Teschke of the University of British Columbia, testified in a 2012 deposition that her research was being mischaracterized.

“Vehicle mechanics do many different things in their day; some might work on engines, some might only work on wheel alignment,” Teschke testified. “And when you dilute the [asbestos] exposure in that way, you can’t find the relationship with the job … It doesn’t mean that people in that job are somehow immune to the effects of the exposure … "

Christian Hartley, a lawyer in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, who has represented about 100 mesothelioma victims in brake cases, said the papers used in the defense of such lawsuits “push all this data together that’s totally incomparable. That’s what gets reported in the literature and is used to persuade judges and some experts. It’s very misleading to think we have any kind of real handle on what a typical mechanic has for exposure.”

Dr. David Egilman, a clinical professor of family medicine at Brown University and editor of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, argues that the papers are deceptive by design. Many reanalyze previously published studies of workers described as mechanics who may have had no contact with asbestos brakes, he said. The effect, Egilman said, is to dilute the cancer data so the overall risk appears low.

Egilman, who consults for asbestos plaintiffs, spends much of his time rebutting Paustenbach and other industry-funded researchers. “They can throw a lot of things at the wall and hope something sticks with the jury,” he said. “It forces people like me or other scientists to try to clean up each thing that was thrown at the wall, one at a time. And by the end of the day, that could be confusing to a jury or judge.”

Egilman said the body of work underwritten by Ford and other asbestos defendants is being used to try to deprive sick workers, or their families, of compensation. “Some courts have adopted it as a standard,” he said.

More broadly, the industry-funded papers can confuse the public – and even government experts.

In 2009, the National Cancer Institute published a fact sheet on its website stating there was no evidence brake work was associated with an increased risk of mesothelioma or lung cancer. The 2004 meta-analysis funded by the automakers was cited as a reference.

Dr. Arthur Frank, chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at Drexel University, was incredulous.

“What is truly ironic about such a statement is that it is incontrovertible that asbestos, including chrysotile, the type of asbestos found in brakes, does, in fact, cause lung cancer and mesothelioma,” Frank wrote in a letter to the institute’s director obtained by the Center for Public Integrity through a Freedom of Information Act request. “Since we have not banned asbestos in this country, those who might read this statement could well think asbestos brakes are safe, putting at risk both professional and ‘shade tree’ mechanics, and their family members.”

Frank said the meta-analysis cited by the institute was “unreliable and should not serve as the basis for any statement by the NCI.”

Then-NCI Director Dr. John Neiderhuber replied that he had discussed Frank’s critique with an in-house expert who agreed that the language on the website should be amended. The new statement, posted less than two weeks after Frank sent his letter, read that while studies of cancer risks among auto mechanics were limited, “the overall evidence suggests that there is no safe level for asbestos exposure.” The citation of the 2004 paper was deleted.

The brake studies have had global reach. The “chrysotile-is-safe” argument has been used to stave off asbestos bans and preserve markets in developing nations such as India and China, where building materials and other products containing asbestos are widely used.

“The real nefarious part of this research … is that a lot of people who live in those countries are continuing to be exposed under uncontrolled conditions to asbestos,” Egilman said. “That’s the real horror story here.”

A Ford loss in Tennessee

While the brake papers and the experts who write them have contributed to defense verdicts in mesothelioma cases, things occasionally go the other way.

Ronnie Stockton operated an auto repair shop 100 feet from his home in Jackson, Tennessee, for 30 years and specialized in brake jobs, often on Ford vehicles. He’d attended training classes in which instructors recommended that paper masks be worn around brake dust but never heard a “full description of what asbestos did,” he said in a recent interview. “We wasn’t warned it could kill you when you swept it up and didn’t wear the mask.”

As it turned out, Stockton’s wife, Joyce, was the one who got sick. She used to help her husband sweep out the shop. She kept the books and washed Ronnie’s dusty clothes. One night in December 2010 she lay down in bed and felt her chest tighten. “I thought I was having a heart attack,” she said. A biopsy confirmed that she had mesothelioma, to that point merely a strange word she’d heard in lawyers’ TV commercials. “I would sit in front of the television trying to learn how to pronounce it, not ever knowing I had the disease,” she said.

The Stocktons sued Ford and went to trial in August. Two Exponent scientists were among the defense experts.

In his closing argument after nearly two weeks of testimony, Ruckdeschel, the Stocktons’ lawyer, said Ford’s experts had “spun the literature” on asbestos. “They’re not taking what the studies say; they’re putting a spin on it.”

If independent research had shown no connection between brake work and mesothelioma, Ruckdeschel said, “they wouldn’t have had to go and pay Exponent to write all the papers to say, ‘Well, we’ve reanalyzed the data, and there really isn’t any evidence.’ ”

Defense lawyer Samuel Tarry urged jurors not to be swayed by the millions of dollars Ford had invested in the papers. It “shouldn’t come as any surprise that over time it costs a lot of money to defend these cases and to publish research where it can be critiqued and criticized and start discussions,” he said. Tarry recounted the testimony of Exponent’s Mark Roberts, who “told you that the majority of mesotheliomas in women are unrelated to asbestos. … He explained that all of us have a background risk, not just for mesothelioma but for any type of cancer …. They can happen naturally. They can happen with an environmental insult.”

After deliberating about two days, the jury returned a $4.65 million verdict in the Stocktons’ favor. It assigned 71 percent of the liability to Ford and 29 percent to brake manufacturer Honeywell, which had been brought into the case on Ford’s motion. Ford has asked for a new trial.

Latisha Strickland was the jury foreman. She’d wanted to assign 100 percent of the blame to Ford but agreed to the 71-29 split to avoid a hung jury.

“I felt ashamed — I had compromised what I thought it should be,” Strickland, a home-school teacher, said in a telephone interview. “You couldn’t give me the Powerball lottery to go through the amount of surgeries this woman [Joyce Stockton] has gone through.”

Strickland said she was especially put off by the 1971 memo showing Ford decided not to spend $1.25 per vehicle to replace front-end asbestos brakes.

“It proved Ford knew,” she said.

Jie Jenny Zou contributed to this story

This story was reported by Sarah Barr for the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange.

RICHMOND, Virginia — On a Tuesday afternoon in December, Richard Walker stood on the corner outside the city’s social services building and hollered.

“Hey! I’m helping people who’ve got a felony conviction like me get their rights back. You know anybody like that?”

Walker, 57, called out to office workers in suits, the women in line for cheap cell phones and the young man pushing a baby stroller down East Marshall Street.

He jogged alongside people hurrying toward a line of purple city buses who wanted to know more but risked missing their ride if they paused. He pressed fliers into the hands of people who said their cousin, son or friend could use some help.

Every few minutes he brought someone back to a card table where he patiently explained the forms they would need to fill out to have their right to vote restored after a felony conviction. He showed them the form for nonviolent offenses and the one for more serious crimes.

Walker soothed their worries: It’s OK if you have outstanding fines, it’s OK if it was a long time ago, it’s all OK.

For three hours, he moved nonstop. Then he tallied up the forms he had stuffed into a manila envelope and walked them across the street to the government office where they would be processed.

Twenty-five people more were on the way to regaining their right to vote, a tiny share of the hundreds of thousands in Virginia who cannot vote because they have been convicted of a felony. But it’s a start, says Walker, who had his own rights restored in 2012 after a conviction for cocaine possession.

Across the country, an estimated 5.85 million U.S. citizens cannot vote because they have a felony conviction on their record, according to The Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy organization. Most of those affected are out of prison and on probation, parole or have completed their sentence. The number includes some people who lost that right because of crimes they committed before turning 18.

Reformers say the concept — known as felony voter disenfranchisement — runs counter to basic ideas about democracy and leaves entire communities without a voice in close elections.

And, in an era when presidential contests have been decided by thin margins — a few hundred votes in Florida in 2000; fewer than 120,000 in Ohio in 2004 — the votes of former felons could help make a difference for candidates.

Those reformers want to make it easier for people to get their rights back after a conviction. But others say the bar to re-entry should remain high to ensure people with felony convictions have turned over a new leaf.

A cluster of recent state activity around felony voter rights, mostly on the side of easing the process, and a longer-term trend toward making it easier for those with records to vote has some reformers optimistic. Maryland lawmakers voted last week to allow former felons to vote once they are out of prison, rather than waiting to complete probation or parole. And in Kentucky and Iowa, where some face a lifelong ban on voting, changes also are possible, whether through legislative or judicial action.

“The long-term prospects around the country are to move away from these lifetime bans and allowing more and more people to vote,” said Tomas Lopez, counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s democracy program, which tracks and supports efforts to roll back felon voter disenfranchisement. 

As important as changing laws are, it’s also critical to make sure those with felony records who can vote know they are able to do so, supporters say.

“The biggest obstacle in most states is that people just do not know that they ever could get their rights restored,” said Edward A. Hailes Jr., managing director and general counsel at the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization.

Who gets to vote

A patchwork of state laws and policies controls who has the right to vote after a felony conviction.

People convicted of felonies in Maine and Vermont never lose their right to vote. They can even cast absentee ballots while serving prison time. But in other states like Florida, Kentucky and Iowa, people with felony records cannot vote again unless they successfully petition the governor, a process that can take years and end in a denial.

Most states fall somewhere between, allowing people with felonies to vote after their sentence, or once they’ve completed parole or probation. In some cases, the process is automatic; in others, it requires an individual to apply to the state, especially in the case of serious or violent crimes.

People under 18 can be affected by felony disenfranchisement either because they live in a state that treats some minors as adults in the criminal justice system, like New York or North Carolina, or because they are charged as adults.

Precise numbers about the juveniles affected by felony disenfranchisement are hard to come by, because not every state tracks how many minors end up in the adult system. In 2010, about 137,000 16- or 17-year-olds likely faced criminal prosecution because their state set the boundary for being treated as an adult at younger than 18 years old, according to a federal analysis released by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. However, there’s no way to know if those teenagers faced felony or misdemeanor charges, or were convicted.

In addition, several thousand more young offenders are transferred from the juvenile system into the adult system each year, where they could face felony charges that would bar them from voting if convicted.

Advocates and opponents

Supporters of changing the laws say that voting is a building block that can help people lead full, successful lives once they leave prison.

“You have to get people engaged in the community. This is the most fundamental way you can do that,” said Lopez.

For young people in particular, losing their right to vote as an adolescent could mean they’ll never pick it up because they’re not civically engaged at a young age, he said.

But rights restoration should not be too easy, said Roger Clegg, president and general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative think tank that studies race and ethnicity.

“If you’re not willing to follow the law, then you can’t claim that you have the right to make the law for anyone else,” he said.

People with felony records should have to demonstrate they have changed before they are allowed to vote again — and that process shouldn’t start until they’ve served their entire term, including parole or probation, Clegg said.

While there are many groups working to loosen felony voter restrictions, there are no prominent organizations strictly opposed to any changes for every felon.

Instead, when the issue does reach lawmakers, the debate typically isn’t whether to ever permit someone with a felony record to vote, but when and how to allow it.

Last year, when the Maryland General Assembly initially approved legislation easing the rights restoration process, Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, vetoed the bill, saying those on probation or parole were still serving their debt to society.

“The current law achieves the proper balance between the repayment of obligations to society for a felony conviction and the restoration of the various restricted rights,” he said. The Maryland Senate voted to override the veto earlier this month, after the Maryland House of Delegates did so in January.

Clegg said he thinks that the organizations motivated to make voting easier for former felons are motivated by a sense of fairness, as well as a desire for more Democratic voters. The theory goes that the racial minority voters who make up a disproportionately large share of the disenfranchised are likely to vote for Democrats.

Lopez said it does not make sense to look at the issue as one likely to benefit only Democrats or Republicans. Each voter is an individual and should be treated as such, he said.

“I think there are some people who may view this through a partisan lens but I don’t think that’s the right way to look at this,” he said.

Bridging the gap

In Virginia, an estimated 400,000 people cannot vote because of their criminal history.

Virginia long has had one of the more stringent rights restoration policies in the country, but a series of executive actions by Govs. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, and Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, have made the process easier by simplifying forms, shortening waiting periods and lifting other barriers, such as a requirement that all court fees be paid before restoration.

Walker is trying to make the most of the changes. He’s already helped several thousand people fill out forms for rights restoration — which includes the right to vote, serve on a jury or as a notary public and run for public office — and wants to reach 100,000 through his nonprofit, Bridging the Gap. He runs the organization, with small donations and money from his own pocket, on top of his day job as a mental health counselor.

Walker said his first vote after having his rights restored, for President Obama in the 2012 election, was the most important he’s cast post-conviction. For all his adult life, Walker had been a regular voter, and he felt something precious had been taken from him when he lost his civil rights. When he could vote again, he felt complete.

“That made a big difference to me to be able to go back and have a voice,” he said.

But not enough people know they have the option to get their rights restored, Walker said.

In Virginia, the process for those with nonviolent offenses has been streamlined so that there is no waiting period for rights restoration after the end of supervision. Unlike some states though, an applicant does need to submit a paper form or go online to request restoration.

Those with records of more serious offenses must wait three years after the end of supervision and submit an application that includes a letter from their probation or parole supervisor. The Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth conducts a criminal background check, and the application is then approved or denied by the governor.

Walker said he’s pleased with the changes that have been made so far in Virginia. He wants the state to go even further, putting in place automatic restoration or eliminating the loss of voting rights entirely.

In Virginia, extending automatic rights restoration will require an amendment to the state Constitution, a push advocates say they won’t take on until 2017.

An effort to amend the constitution likely will encounter more opposition than the governors’ changes.

For example, Virginia Del. Mark L. Cole, a Republican who chairs the Privileges and Elections Committee, said in an email he supports rights restoration and has helped guide several constituents through the process. He thinks Virginia's system works as is.

"I believe the current process, which requires a review is probably the best approach," he wrote. "I do not support an automatic restoration with no review."

Bridging the Gap also helps people navigate jobs, housing and health care when they re-enter the community after prison. Walker knows that for many people leaving the criminal justice system voting does not rank high — if at all — on their list of priorities, especially those who never voted before. He hopes he can help make civic responsibility an important part of their lives.

Clarence Woodson Bey, 64, who left prison in 2000 (he wouldn’t say what his offense was ), was denied his bid for rights restoration twice before Bridging the Gap helped him navigate the process several years ago. When he finally received the paperwork restoring his rights, it was a moment that “lit him up like a Christmas tree.”

“I feel like I have learned and I wanted to have that opportunity to vote before I leave this Earth,” he said.

He’s since gone to the polls twice, with Walker by his side to help navigate the process. More than the candidates he voted for, or the issues that most engaged him, Bey remembers most clearly how excited he was to feel wholly a citizen, an emotion he intends to recapture with every election.

“My voice counts, that’s for sure,” he said.

Walker and other reformers want people who are returning from prison to see how policy affects their lives. It’s one thing to hope a legislator pushes a policy that helps with re-entry. It’s another to decide who that legislator will be.

People may think first of the ability to cast a ballot in a presidential election, but local and state politics matter, too, said Hailes of the Advancement Project.

“People with felony convictions want what other people want — to vote,” he said. “They want to stand up and vote for better streets and trash pick-up, and the president of the school board.”

Having a say

Reformers say prohibitions on voting because of a felony conviction run counter to American ideals of equality.

“Even if only one person was affected by this policy, it raises fundamental questions by what we mean by democracy,” said Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project.

Supporters of ending felony voter disenfranchisement add that the policy can have real and troubling effects on elections — on how politicians approach entire communities and likely even who is elected in some cases.

The numbers of people who lose their right to vote because of a felony conviction is high enough that academics have studied whether the policies can tip elections.

In one oft-cited 2002 study, sociologists looked at voting patterns in Florida during the 2000 election and concluded that Al Gore would have carried the state, and the Electoral College, over George W. Bush had voting rights been extended to people with felony records. The same study looked at 400 Senate elections from 1978 and 2000 and found that seven may have been reversed in favor of Democrats if not for felony disenfranchisement.

In swing states like Virginia, where elections can be won by tiny margins, those findings suggest felony disenfranchisement matters both philosophically and practically. And the policies affect some communities in disproportionate ways.

Of the citizens affected by felony disenfranchisement, about 2.2 million are black, according to the Sentencing Project. It’s a finding that means about 1 in 13 black adults cannot vote, the group says.

Lewis Webb, a program coordinator at the American Friends Service Committee who works on prisoner re-entry issues, said the issue of felony disenfranchisement isn’t sufficiently recognized for the way it diminishes the gains of the civil rights movement.

“It’s really for me the ultimate slap in the face to those who struggled so hard to get the Voting Rights Act passed,” he said.

The costs are both legal and social, said Webb, who also is a facilitator with Campaign to End the New Jim Crow, a group based in New York that wants to end mass incarceration and the collateral consequences that accompany prison sentences.

“If your dad didn’t vote, you don’t vote. Not because you can’t but because it’s not something you talked about,” he said.

State reforms

Lopez of the Brennan Center said states’ interest in loosening the rules could partly be an outgrowth of the growing consensus that says criminal justice reform is necessary. Allowing people to participate in their communities may help discourage recidivism, making it a smart-on-crime policy that appeals to policymakers across the political spectrum.

Between 1996 and 2008, 28 states passed laws on felon voting rights. Many of them lifted restrictions, including seven that repealed lifetime disenfranchisement for some people with felony records, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Some states have moved in the other direction though, such as a 2011 executive order by Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad that rolled back a policy that allowed people with felonies to vote after completing their full sentence. In the order, Branstad said it was important for offenders to be evaluated individually for rights restoration.

The Supreme Court of Iowa said in early February that it would consider a challenge to the state’s ban on voting for convicted felons.

In 2015, three states considered major reforms, including Maryland. And, Wyoming passed a bill that would allow more ex-felons to vote. By early February of this year, 46 bills had been introduced in 16 states that deal with felony voter rights, nearly all of which eased the process for offenders or offered support to navigate the rights restoration process.

This year, reformers will be watching particularly closely to see if Kentucky lawmakers will push the legislature to consider simplifying the rights restoration process.

Last fall, outgoing Gov. Kentucky Steve Beshear, a Democrat, issued an executive order that would have made rights restoration easier for many people, but incoming Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, rolled it back because he said the issue was a legislative matter.

Webb said state reforms alone will not be enough though. Better education about who can vote and grassroots action to get people to the voting booth also are needed.

“I do believe for this to have any real traction, it’s going to have to return to the street,” he said.

The federal appellate judges mentioned as possible replacements for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia have generally kept financially conservative profiles, according to a Center for Public Integrity database, but several made hefty salaries at prominent law firms before joining the bench.

As speculation rages about who President Obama might nominate to replace Scalia, the names of federal appellate judges Merrick Garland, Jane Kelly, Patricia Millett, Jacqueline Nguyen, Srikanth Srinivasan and Paul Watford keep popping up.

For the disclosures required of federal judges, five of the six reported relatively modest and uncomplicated financial holdings for 2012 — the most recent year readily available — compared with many of their colleagues sitting on appellate courts, the nation’s second highest level of courts.

All but one of the possible nominees, Garland, steered clear of investments in corporate stock ownership, which have been called a “mousetrap” for judges due to the potential for conflicts of interest with their caseloads. In a broader 2014 investigation, the Center for Public Integrity found 24 examples in which other federal appellate judges owned stock in companies with a case before them, a violation of federal law.

On the Supreme Court, where many cases are decided by a 5-4 split, such stock ownership can have an especially profound impact. Justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts and Stephen Breyer have had to recuse themselves from cases when their ownership overlapped with matters before the high court.

To be sure, the possible nominees’ finances could have changed since those 2012 reports. Their next disclosures, covering 2015, are due in mid-April.

But the 2012 financial disclosures do shed light on the heady salaries some received at top tier law firms — and the relative financial sacrifice that these lawyers took to become federal appellate judges who will earn $215,400 in 2016 instead of close to $1 million in private practice. All but Kelly have flitted between private firms and public service in their careers.

Five of the six have only recently joined the bench as Obama appointees, and have not had as much time to accrue one of the biggest perks of being a federal judge, free global travel for speaking engagements and teaching.

Still, two of the judges in the elite group would already fit in nicely with the current Supreme Court judges in one unusual way: two of them were landlords, just like five of the current members of the high court. See who below:

Merrick Garland, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
Garland, the sole appointee of the group not chosen by Obama, reported the most complicated financial portfolio of this group. In addition to other investments, the Clinton appointee is the only one to report owning stock in 2012, with holdings in big name companies such as Pfizer Inc., General Electric Co. and Citigroup Inc. He also was a landlord, earning as much as $100,000 in 2012 for a property in New York City.

Jane Kelly, 8th Circuit U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
The Obama nominee reported one of the simplest sets of investments among this group: only three investment accounts and no direct stock holdings in 2012. The former federal public defender is the only one of the group who has not been employed by private law firms in her professional career. Another detail that sets her apart: she reported partial ownership of a family farm.

Patricia Millett, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit 
Millett, an Obama appointee, reported earning sizable salaries of about $1 million annually as a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in the two years before becoming a judge in 2013. The international firm, based in Washington, D.C., is one of the largest in the country and is known for its lobbying. Millett reported no direct stock holdings in 2012, choosing instead a portfolio of mutual funds, U.S. Treasury bonds and other vehicles. She was the only one of the judges on the possible short-list to report a spouse’s salary: her husband works as the office manager of the Florida Sugar Cane League, a trade association representing sugar companies.

Jacqueline Nguyen, 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
Nguyen, another Obama appointee, is also a landlord who reported collecting rent from one California property. She reported no direct stock holdings but did list almost two dozen other investments, including college savings accounts. After stints in private practice and in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Central District of California, she joined the judiciary in 2002, initially as a California Superior Court judge.

Srikanth Srinivasan, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit 
Another lawyer who recently joined the judiciary, Srinivasan reported earning $1.3 million for a single year as a partner at the O’Melveny & Myers law firm in 2011, one of the biggest firms in the world. He also served on and off in the Justice Department’s Office of the Solicitor General. The Obama appointee reported no individual stock ownership in 2012 but did have well-diversified investments in dozens of mutual funds. He also appeared to be saving for future college bills for his teenaged twins using 529 accounts, tax-free education savings plans.

Paul Watford, 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
Watford appears to have the fewest assets of the bunch, based on his disclosure covering 2012. He reported no individual stock holdings and just three accounts: one with a credit union, one a retirement account and the third with his former law firm, the latter two accounts closed that year. The Obama appointee did report earning $328,000 from his former law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, a Los Angeles-based litigation powerhouse, in what was apparently his salary for just the first five months of 2012 before he resigned to take a seat on the Ninth Circuit.  He now earns less than that in a whole year as a judge based out of Pasadena, Calif.

Read the 2012 reports:

Hardbound volumes of Critical Reviews in Toxicology and Regulatory Toxicology and  Pharmacology spanning decades are shelved at the National Library of Medicine’s subterranean archives — the world’s largest medical collection — in Bethesda, Maryland.

The peer-reviewed journals are among a select group of medical titles indexed by the National Institutes of Health, and they belong to international associations whose members pledge to uphold ethical and scientific standards. The titles come at a price: an issue of Critical Reviews retails for $372, while an annual subscription to Regulatory Toxicology costs $275.

Yet critics also claim the journals are purveyors of “junk science” — misleading, industry-backed articles that threaten public health by playing down the dangers of well-known toxic substances such as lead and asbestos. The articles often are used to stall regulatory efforts and defend court cases.

An analysis by the Center for Public Integrity found that half of all review articles written by top scientists at the consulting firm Gradient since 1992 were published either in Critical Reviews or Regulatory Toxicology. No other journal came close.

“You’d have to be delusional to not recognize that the issues they’re dealing [with] and policies they’re setting won’t affect the profits of very powerful sources,” said Canadian anti-asbestos activist Kathleen Ruff, who called both journals “egregious examples” of a deeper problem of industry influence.  “Creating doubt is an endless activity and, in the meantime, people die unnecessarily.”

Editorial boards at both journals are laden with scientists and lawyers employed by industry, making them easy targets for public-health advocates. Current board members include private consultants who have also received compensation as expert witnesses in court.   

“The harm is that it actually muddies the independent scientific literature,” said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “They’re stacking their weight on their side of the scale.”

Those behind the journals deny that industry relationships compromise scientific independence.

“There is this prevailing issue, which is really unfortunate, that anything supported by industry is tainted,” said David Warheit, a Critical Reviews board member and scientist at Chemours, which manufactures titanium dioxide, an ingredient in sunscreen. “Perceptions pervade everything.”

Warheit said each submission to the journal is evaluated by four or five peer reviewers as opposed to the typical two or three. “I have reviewed some awful papers for [Critical Reviews in Toxicology], and they didn’t get published.”

New Mexico veterinarian and Critical Reviews editor Roger McClellan declined an interview request from the Center, writing in an email that he was proud of the journal’s 45-year history. “My scientific record speaks for itself,” he added, providing copies of his 64-page résumé and biography.

Gio Gori, editor of Regulatory Toxicology, also declined to comment and referred all questions to the publisher, Elsevier. A spokesperson cited a 2003 editorial by Gori, which referenced the journal’s objectivity and “more than 600 international scientists who generously assist in the journal’s peer-review process.”

Chaos and turmoil

EpidemiologistPhilippe Grandjean was one of 42 scientists who signed a letter in late 2002 criticizing Regulatory Toxicology’s frequent failure to disclose conflicts of interest and deep industry ties, starting with Gori.

A former director of the National Cancer Institute, Gori made millions as a tobacco consultant questioning the dangers of secondhand smoke in scientific journals as well as The Washington Post.

“Gori is the kind of guy who would write especially obnoxious editorials where he would castigate honest scientists as being out of their minds,” said Grandjean, a Danish epidemiologist. “It was so blatantly biased towards industry and against open and transparent science.”

Elsevier stood by the journal but implemented a disclosure policy in 2003.

A decade later, Grandjean found himself drafting another letter — this time airing his concerns about Critical Reviews, where he  served as a board member.

An adjunct professor at Harvard School of Public Health and a pioneering mercury researcher, Grandjean said he joined the Critical Reviews board more than 30 years ago despite its reputation for being cozy with industry because he believes in collaboration and felt he could have a say in the journal’s content.

That changed in 2012 when the journal published two articles rebutting research from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health linking lung cancer to diesel fumes. Grandjean said the publication “wasn’t science for science’s sake,” but a way to cast doubt on NIOSH’s findings.

His complaints got no traction with editor McClellan or then-publisher Informa Health, which Grandjean said reneged on promises to conduct an independent review. Taylor & Francis, the current publisher, declined to comment. In 2012, McClellan defended the journal’s disclosure policies and said that Grandjean’s complaint had been shared with other members of the editorial board, “none of [whom] shared the views expressed by Dr. Grandjean.”

Grandjean resigned in 2012, ending a positive relationship that began under founding editor Leon Golberg. “I thought if [McClellan] invited me, he thought my advice would be useful, but apparently this changed to a situation where it was useful to have my name on the masthead to justify this was a balanced journal.”

Like the journal he founded, Golberg’s career aligned closely with industry. A native of Cyprus who held academic positions in South Africa and Britain and spent the end of his career at Duke University, Golberg oversaw Critical Reviews from its inaugural issue in September 1971, published by The Chemical Rubber Co.

The journal was introduced as “the voice of reason” in an era of “chaos and turmoil.”

“Never before have so many regulatory actions been taken or proposed — some too late, others prematurely — that have bewildered the consumer and had a crushing impact on industry,” Golberg wrote.

That same year, a public health crisis unraveled when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning against diethylstilbestrol (DES) — a synthetic hormone used for decades by pregnant women to combat morning sickness and prevent miscarriages or premature deliveries — which Golberg had co-created in 1938. As many as 10 million people were exposed to DES before it was linked to a rare vaginal cancer and other fertility problems, spawning myriad lawsuits.

Golberg’s role in the DES debacle is less well known than his later achievements. They include founding the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology (CIIT), now the Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences, a research group “founded and funded by the chemical industry,” according to the Research Triangle Regional Partnership. He also jump-started the British Industrial Biological Research Association, a consulting firm whose clients include ExxonMobil and Procter & Gamble.

In the 1970s, Golberg consulted for a now-discredited campaign for “safer” cigarettes by R.J. Reynolds, which still funds fellowships in his honor at Wake Forest and Duke. He died in 1987 from mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer linked to asbestos exposure.

McClellan succeeded Golberg as both Critical Reviews editor and CIIT leader, working with trade groups like the American Chemistry Council. Critical Reviews has since become one of the most-cited toxicology journals, at the same time drawing a spate of criticism.

Ruff, the anti-asbestos advocate, chastised Critical Reviews in May for what she alleged to be improper disclosure in a 2013 asbestos article. Testimony in a court case stated that an industry group paid the authors nearly $180,000 in writing fees, which were erroneously described as “grants.”  She cited the incident as a reason for stricter disclosure reporting and enforcement.

As Critical Reviews editor, McClellan has been outspoken against regulation. By his own count, he has testified before Congress 20 times. In 2011, he argued against a proposal by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to curb ground-level ozone, or smog, as too expensive, calling for lawmakers to recognize that “a healthy economy with people employed is the cornerstone of a healthy population.”

Industry ties

Since its 1981 debut, Regulatory Toxicology has billed itself as a credible and objective source for a broad audience. Its co-editors promised to focus on science instead of politics and “mythology.”

“Safety is relative, not absolute,” AIDS researcher Frederick Coulston and FDA scientist Dr. Albert Kolbye Jr. wrote in the inaugural issue. “Safety is a moving target.”

The journal has been sympathetic to industry from the start. In its first issue, an associate editor lamented: “There has always been a sense of competition between government and industry, but always a high degree of mutual respect. In the seventies that spirit changed from competition to an adversary posture and from respect to distrust.”

Regulatory Toxicology is the official publication of the International Society of Regulatory Toxicology & Pharmacology, an association whose leaders include a Coca Cola executive, corporate consultants and lawyers.

In an email to the Center, President Sue Ferenc denied that the society plays any editorial role at the journal. Outside of the society, Ferenc heads the Council of Producers & Distributors of Agrotechnology, a pesticide group with its own political action committee.

But significant overlap at both the society and the journal has existed for years.

Gary Yingling, a former FDA attorney who now represents industry clients, has been an editorial board member of Regulatory Toxicology since 1981 while also serving as the society’s general counsel. Fellow board member Terry Quill is an industry lawyer and former society president, who led the society’s push against labeling chloroform as carcinogenic. The EPA has since classified chloroform, a byproduct of chlorinating water, as a probable human carcinogen.

Recipients of the society’s achievement award include well-known journal figures like McClellan, the Critical Reviews editor who also sits on Regulatory Toxicology’s board. The society credited the journal’s growing popularity as the “major” source of its success and “esteem.”

Responding to questions about industry’s financial support of the society, then-president Christopher Borgert wrote in a 2008 newsletter, “Science has an objective means of evaluating information, but it has nothing to do with who got the money and why . . . The process of science removes the scientist, with his numerous biases and conflicts of interest, as far as humanely [sic] possible from the process of data generation and interpretation.”

Regulatory Toxicology’s editors have also made headlines. Chain-smoking through an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 1997, Coulston claimed nicotine wasn’t addictive and smoking didn’t cause cancer. In 2001, his New Mexico chimpanzee lab was stripped of federal funding amid animal abuse claims.

Gori became editor of Regulatory Toxicology following Coulston’s 2003 death and has also served as society president. In 2013, he and 17 other toxicology journal editors penned an editorial criticizing the European Union’s plans to regulate chemicals known as endocrine disruptors. Of the 18 editors, only one did not have industry ties.

‘All that noise’

“If a call comes in and the number is withheld, you might become suspicious and ignore the call,” Grandjean wrote in 2012. “Scientific authorship should be just as simple so that we can concentrate our attention on the sources we trust.”

But representatives of the EPA, the FDA and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration said their agencies treat science equally, regardless of the funding source. Disclosure is encouraged by all three agencies but isn’t mandatory.

Speakers at FDA proceedings are asked to disclose relevant financial relationships but the agency doesn’t bar those who don’t comply from participating.

Science at the EPA and OSHA is evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Study authors are asked to disclose “funding sources and other pertinent interests” at the EPA, while OSHA asks those who comment on proposed rules to provide disclosures with their submissions.

What should or shouldn’t be disclosed is a matter of debate. “There is no agreement on what a conflict of interest is,” said Arthur Caplan, founding director of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. “The disclosures currently say, ‘I’m going to disclose industry funding because that is a potential source of bias. You, reader, have to decide for yourself whether it is or it isn’t. Good luck to you.’ ” Current sentiment “demonizes the industry side,” Caplan added, while ignoring potential biases created by private foundations or government money.

Disclosure policies don’t exist to eliminate bias, said Sheldon Krimsky, a professor at Tufts University who studies science and public policy, but to allow the public to assess potential conflicts that can undermine findings. “Science is not a matter of this fact and that fact; there’s all sorts of nuance in science,” he said. “You can draw conclusions in science beyond what your data tells you.”

Krimsky’s own research has found that industry-backed studies typically yield findings that bolster a company’s bottom line. “Companies want you to produce a specific result,” he said. “They won’t publish it if you don’t.”

Even with proper disclosure, assessing a study’s credibility takes time, said the NRDC’s Sass. “In the end we still have to go through it on its merits; so do the EPA, and [other] federal bodies,” she said. “That leaves us with the task of addressing the substantive flaws each time, article by article.”

In the federal regulatory process, this can mean additional public hearings and meetings where activists go head-to-head with, and are often outnumbered by, industry representatives.

“The system can’t manage all that noise,” Caplan said. “The science tends to get lost and the politics wins or the economics wins. When there’s that much noise going on, other factors start to resolve the dispute and they’re not factual.”