When you’ve faced down mafia dons, fought with energy companies, and led investigations into nuclear weapons, it can be hard to find a new challenge. But if he was looking for one, John F. Sopko seems to have found it.

This week, the Obama administration announced that the veteran investigator is their pick for the vacant position of Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a key watchdog role as the U.S. draws down its forces in the country after over a decade of conflict.

Sopko’s selection fills just one of the government's ten vacant inspector general jobs, according to the non-profit watchdog Project on Government Oversight (POGO), which supports his pick. The Department of State has gone almost 1,600 days without leadership, the most of any department. The Obama administration’s slow pace in filling the jobs has been the source of contentious hearings by the Republican controlled House.

When Sopko starts work — unlike most IG positions, SIGAR does not need Senate confirmation — he will have his hands full. Waste, fraud and corruption in U.S. operations in Afghanistan have been persistent challenges. In 2011 a government watchdog estimated that one-sixth of the nearly $100 billion spent by Washington in Afghanistan since 2002 was wasted.

Last month, in SIGAR’s quarterly report to Congress, the office highlighted the continuing threat posed by corruption and questioned whether Afghan forces can provide enough security for ongoing U.S. funded construction. “Afghan reconstruction has reached a critical turning point,” acting IG Steven J. Trent wrote in the report. “The shift in strategy, decline in funding, and persistent violence and corruption underscore the need for aggressive oversight.”

Trent has been the acting IG since September of 2011, meaning that the job has been empty for 475 days.

Sopko has investigated crime and corruption for years, on and off the Hill. He started his career as a prosecutor in Ohio, where his most high-profile case involved being lead prosecutor against the Licavoli mob organization. He spent most of the 80’s and 90’s as deputy chief counsel at the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, an entity with standing subpoena authority that gives it great power. While there he led a number of investigations, including a look at waste and abuse at the DC-area Blue Cross-Blue Shield. He helped disclose that executives burned through cash on luxurious travel while driving the company into a financial hole. The committee also monitored the proliferation of nuclear weapons and investigated alleged abuses by labor unions.

In 1997 he moved to the Department of Commerce, where he conducted other investigations. Then in 2004 Sopko became the Democrat’s General Counsel and Chief Oversight Counsel for the House Select Committee on Homeland Security. He subsequently became head of the Homeland Security Studies & Analysis Institute, an independent organization federally chartered to study and improve operations at DHS.

When the Democrats took over the House, Sopko was invited by Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) to come back to the Hill, this time as chief counsel for oversight and investigations for the House Energy and Commerce committee — one of the chief watchdogs for the energy industry and government agencies as varied as the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Commerce. In 2009 he left to join lobbying firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Field, where he has been ever since. (A search of lobbying disclosure records turned up nothing under Sopko’s name.)

The importance of good IG’s was something acknowledged by Sopko in a 2009 editorial. The previous IG for SIGAR, Arnold Fields, resigned in early 2011 under bipartisan pressure over his job performance.

“This vacancy was among the most important positions to fill, and they have found an excellent person for the job,” Danielle Brian, POGO’s Executive Director, said in a statement. “We look forward to seeing serious oversight of the tens of billions of dollars being spent on Afghanistan reconstruction” in coming years.

Through a White House spokesman, Sopko decline to comment for this article.

A whistleblower who was fired by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration after complaining publicly about the poor quality of injury and illness data kept by employers has won a major court victory.

Robert Whitmore, a supervisory economist with OSHA’s Office of Statistical Analysis, lost his job in 2009, ostensibly for insubordination. On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that Whitmore was fired in retaliation for telling journalists and Congress about OSHA’s failure to crack down on companies submitting suspect data. OSHA is supposed to use the data to identify potentially unsafe workplaces; accuracy, therefore, is crucial.

The Merit Systems Protection Board upheld Whitmore’s firing, finding that he had acted in a threatening manner toward a supervisor. The appeals court, however, found that OSHA failed to provide “clear and convincing” evidence that Whitmore’s whistleblowing had no bearing on his dismissal. The case will go back to the board for rehearing.

The court found that Whitmore’s airing of concerns about employer recordkeeping, beginning in 2005, led to “increasingly strained relationships with OSHA officials” and “paralleled his increasingly poor performance reviews and adverse personnel actions after decades of exceptional service.”

The court went on: “Despite Robert Whitmore’s highly unprofessional and intimidating conduct, which may well ultimately justify some adverse personnel action, he is nevertheless a bona fide whistleblower.”

Whitmore would like to have his job back, his lawyer, Paula Dinerstein, told the Center for Public Integrity on Thursday. He went public with his concerns because “OSHA for a long time had not been enforcing [recordkeeping] requirements,” said Dinerstein, senior counsel with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which advocates for federal whistleblowers. “In certain industries, [injury and illness] rates were so low that nobody could possibly believe them. OSHA was accepting really low numbers and was actually bragging about them, saying, ‘Look how much progress we’ve made.’”

An OSHA spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raskin disagreed, and defended the constitutional push.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accountability Rules

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

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

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

Until next week,

Bill Buzenberg
Executive Director
 

New International Investigations Website

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

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

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

Until next week,

Bill Buzenberg
Executive Director

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fines slashed following safety violations, including a fatality

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danger and a death at Massachusetts postal facilities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Management and union views on VPP effectiveness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ads cannot be coordinated with the candidates they support.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A ton of heat’

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

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

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

Others aren’t so sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrick and Maureen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The investigation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Near-misses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You thought someone was dying’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burros, crabs…and people

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postscript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Broader concerns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

National trends

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding a balance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A word from the judges

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courts in a squeeze

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outside groups have spent more than $6.4 million in the Texas GOP primary for the seat of retiring U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, more than any other House or Senate race thus far in the primary season, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

The race pits establishment favorite David Dewhurst, a wealthy self-financing candidate, against the tea party-backed Ted Cruz.

Cruz himself has raised $6.4 million — a fraction of the $21.6 million raised by Dewhurst. Dewhurst’s sum, though, includes more than $15 million that he has contributed or loaned to his own campaign. (Cruz has given his campaign $470,000, according to FEC filings.)

Delayed since March due to redistricting issues, the Texas Republican primary is a chance for the tea party to build on its momentum after its candidate, Richard Mourdock, defeated long-time Sen. Richard Lugar in Indiana’s hotly contested Republican primary in early May.

Anti-tax super PAC Club for Growth Action has spent $2.5 million on ads, mostly opposing Dewhurst, the lieutenant governor of Texas. A pro-Dewhurst super PAC, Texas Conservatives Fund, fought back with $2.3 million in ads against Cruz, Texas’s former solicitor general.

“Moderate, tax-raising David Dewhurst,” is how one Club for Growth Action attack ad described him. This and other ads focused on his support of a state income tax and other “moderate” positions he has taken.

Club for Growth’s single biggest donor, Virginia James, is New Jersey-based investor who has been recognized for her contributions to right-wing organizations, many of which have ties to tea party funders Charles and David Koch.

Another major Club for Growth Action donor is the campaign committee of tea party heavyweight Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), which has given the group $700,000.

DeMint’s leadership PAC, the Senate Conservatives Fund, itself spent nearly $600,000 on ads supporting Cruz. The leadership PAC has received contributions from the political action committees Koch Industries, AT&T and other major corporations.

Club for Growth's traditional PAC spent more than $41,500.

The pro-Dewhurst Texas Conservatives Fund received a $100,000 contribution from super donor Bob Perry of Texas-based Perry Homes and $100,000 from James Pitcock, Jr., of Williams Brothers Construction, the largest highway construction company in Texas. The super PAC is run by Rob Johnson, former campaign manager for Gov. Rick Perry’s failed GOP presidential bid.

Another pro-Dewhurst super PAC, Conservative Renewal, also received a $100,000 infusion from Pitcock and $500,000 from Texas super donor Harold Simmons.

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey’s super PAC, FreedomWorks for America, also threw more than $100,000 into the race to support Cruz.

While Dewhurst leads in the polls, they also show he may not carry a full 50 percent, the threshold needed to avoid a runoff in July. If the race goes to a runoff, whoever wins then is expected to take the Senate seat in the general election. A Democratic candidate has not yet been chosen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the overall money race, the Democrats dominated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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