Taxpayers across the country are subsidizing the manufacturers of assault rifles used in multiple mass killings, including the massacre of 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. last month.

‘Disturbing’

Maine senator: no red flag

Massachusetts’ $6m deal

New York: public good?

Kentucky: 100 new jobs

The Department of Homeland Security has announced new rules designed to make it easier for thousands of U.S. citizens to legalize undocumented spouses without risking years of separation first. 

The rules—published in the Federal Register Thursday—spell out a policy first announced by President Obama a year ago, in January 2012; the policy is designed to help families avoid the hardship of long separation. However, representatives of those families say thousands of others won’t benefit, and will still face certain exile under a series of little-known but mandatory punishments Congress created in 1996.

Those penalties and their effects on families were the subject of a recent report by the Center for Public Integrity. Thousands of U.S. citizens, many with children, have attempted to legalize spouses only to see them ordered out of the United States for a decade  or more,  as mandated by a 1996 immigration law. As a result, countless couples have chosen not to come forward and attempt to legalize the foreign spouse.

Here is how the current system works, and how the new rule – which takes effect March 4— alters the green-card application process:

Under current law, U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents can sponsor spouses or certain other relatives for a green card, which is a legal permanent residency visa. People who entered the United States unlawfully cannot complete the process for obtaining a green card without returning to home countries first for screening at U.S. consulate.  Once these people leave the United States, however, they trigger what are called mandatory “bars” to returning to the United States.

The bars – penalties Congress created — vary from three to 10 to 20 years, or even life, as the report by the Center and KQED public radio made clear.  

People whose only infraction was to illegally enter the country once and stay for more than a year can later apply for hardship waivers—waivers commonly granted only for extraordinary hardship, beyond the pain of separation from a spouse.  But they can only apply for waivers once they are barred, and living outside the United States.

Couples that have applied for waivers complain that months, even years, have gone by before they have been either granted or rejected, causing families severe financial drain and emotional hardship.

Thousands of couples have not been eligible for waivers at all. This group is large: it includes anyone who has been deported, or admits they crossed the border more than once, or anyone whom immigration officials suspect might have lied or used a fake document to gain entry.  

The new Homeland Security rule won’t change any of these terms for eligibility or rejection.

However, the new procedure will allow U.S. citizens’ undocumented spouses – if their only offense is unlawful presence— to apply for hardship waivers before, not after, they leave the United States for their required green-card interview back in home countries.

Under the new rules, by the time they go to their final interview, these immigrants will know if they’ve been granted waivers.  Separation of couples is likely to be cut to a matter of months, and families will have more information with which to make plans, U.S. officials say.   

The new procedure “facilitates the legal immigration process and reduces the amount of time that U.S. citizens are separated from their immediate relatives who are in the process of obtaining an immigrant visa,” Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said Wednesday.

Randall Emery, president of American Families United, called the new procedure “a step in the right direction,” but said “we expect only 5 percent of our members to benefit.”

American Families United is a loose network of U.S. citizens who’ve been separated from foreign spouses, or forced to move abroad to remain with them. Members also include many citizens who are too afraid to try to legalize a spouse because they fear lengthy bars will be imposed.

Emery’s group has about 100 active members at the moment, he said, and 4,000 supporters through a Facebook connection. Many families are reluctant to join a support group, or go public at all about their predicament.

American Families United, Emery said, will beef up lobbying in an effort to influence immigration reform proposals and address the continuing problems of its members —problems that were detailed by the Center’s investigation.

Read the original story.  

Controversial lenders that claim to be owned by Indian tribes and offer payday loans over the Internet have agreed to stop practices that federal authorities say deceive borrowers and violate federal laws.

The agreement, filed in federal court, could save borrowers hundreds of dollars on each payday loan.

The Federal Trade Commission last year sued an Overland Park, Kan., company, AMG Services, to recover millions of dollars in revenues, alleging that borrowers were illegally deceived. The business was founded and is still managed by Scott Tucker, best known as an endurance race-car driver who recently won the Baltimore Grand Prix.

The Center for Public Integrity first exposed Tucker’s business practices in an investigation done with CBS News.

The case awaits trial. But the FTC argued that AMG Services was continuing to mislead thousands of new borrowers. Tucker and the representatives from the Indian tribes last month agreed to change the practices that the FTC said were illegal.

Borrowers previously had to give the lenders direct access to their bank accounts and have payments automatically withdraw from their checking account. But instead of a single payoff, the lenders would withdraw interest-only payments for months.

By drawing out the loan payments out, a $300 loan could end up costing the borrower nearly $1,000. The FTC said this was not properly disclosed under the Truth-in-Lending Act.

With the agreement filed in a federal court in Nevada, the lenders will no longer require access to a borrower’s bank account and the loans will be paid off in one payment. The lenders also agreed not to tell borrowers that they could go to jail or be sued if they didn’t pay the loan back.

Authorities in several states had pursued AMG Services, accusing the company of violating state payday lending laws. Seventeen states restrict or forbid payday loans.

Nearly all states require payday lenders to register. But AMG Services said it was owned by Indian tribes and therefore had tribal sovereign immunity. Those tribes are the Miami and Modoc of Oklahoma and the Santee Sioux of Nebraska.

The attorney general of Colorado spent years battling the tribes in court, showing that they receive only 1 percent of the revenue from the business. Bank records show that much the rest of the money is used to bankroll Tucker’s personal expenses, including millions spent each year on his racing team, Level 5 Motorsports.

The tribes argue that the FTC cannot sue them either, an issue that will be decided in federal court. Other issues yet to be decided are whether the lenders are violating federal law and if so, how much money they would have to pay back.

The lenders use a variety of brand names, including UnitedCashLoans, US FastCash, 500Fastcash, OneClickCash and Ameriloan.

The Fiesta Bowl game and its many related events have become a football extravaganza that kicks off the new year for the Phoenix area with national publicity and a hefty  economic boost.

But over the past three years, the Fiesta Bowl has also become the source of continuous embarrassment in the Valley of the Sun, for bowl officials, civic boosters and state legislators, as well. And it isn’t over.

The parade of bad news began in December 2009, when the Arizona Republicexposed the Fiesta Bowl’s scheme of urging employees to make campaign contributions and then illegally reimbursing them. In March 2011, a special investigative committee revealed that the bowl had showered elected officials, mostly legislators, with lavish gifts.

That May, the Fiesta Bowl was fined $1 million by the organization that runs the biggest bowls, and put on one-year probation by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Fiesta Bowl CEO John Junker, who was fired, and five other bowl employees have pleaded guilty to involvement in the illegal reimbursements. A lobbyist pleaded guilty to disclosure violations over a trip by legislators.

Now, as the 2013 state legislative session approaches, many Arizonans believe the Legislature has not one Fiesta Bowl scandal, but two.

The first is the tale of freebies: tickets to high-profile football games and bowl-paid jaunts around the country that dozens of legislators took from at least 2003 to 2010, often with family members in tow. The second is whether lawmakers intend to do anything about the behavior that was uncovered, or just carry on as if nothing ever happened.

Rules, loopholes and history

At first glance, Arizona would seem to have one of the nation’s strictest gift laws: a $10 annual limit on gifts to public officials from lobbyists or any entity that employs lobbyists.

But critics say you could drive a Fiesta Bowl float through the exemptions. In nearly every case, the tickets, flights, luxury hotel rooms and pricey meals that were part of the Fiesta Bowl scandal were all perfectly legal because of quirks in the law.

What tripped up many legislators was failing to meet state reporting requirements —requirements that critics say themselves are inadequate. When the goodies came to light, legislators scrambled to amend their financial filings and reimburse questionable expenses.

Lawmakers maintained that they weren’t swayed by gifts like a 2008 trip to see a football game in Boston, which included a contingent from the Fiesta Bowl and cost more than $65,000.

Fiesta Bowl officials described the trips, which usually included an hour-long presentation on bowl-related topics, as educational. But former bowl CEO Junker admitted to investigators that the gifts were meant to curry favor. The Legislature has handled at least nine pieces of legislation related to the Fiesta Bowl since 2002, including a bill that threatened construction of the football stadium that the bowl ultimately came to share with the Arizona Cardinals. The measure was killed in committee.

Lawmakers can argue that they support the Fiesta Bowl on its own merits, but “whatever they think of themselves, the perception of the public is that there’s something going on that shouldn’t go on,” said David Berman, senior research fellow at the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University. “It isn’t healthy.”

Waiting for action

Indeed, many Arizonans are puzzled by the Legislature’s failure to do any sort of ethical house cleaning. Last session, more than a half-dozen reforms were proposed to restrict gifts and strengthen reporting requirements. None passed.

“I was stunned that in the wake of the Fiesta Bowl there wasn’t some sort of comprehensive gift-ban reform,” said Deb Gullett, a lobbyist with Gallagher & Kennedy and a GOP legislator from 2001 to 2005.

Lawmakers and observers cite several reasons why nothing happened: an election year, potential embarrassment for the one-in-three legislators who had taken Fiesta Bowl-funded trips and the lack of any strong push from outside public-interest groups, which were caught up in other issues. Some legislators argued for better training, not legislation.

And there was reluctance to give up perks, according to Phoenix Democratic Sen. Steve Gallardo, whose reform proposals were shot down.

“You have legislators who look forward to the fancy dinners, they look forward to the little freebies,” said Gallardo, who had been on Fiesta Bowl trips.

Whatever the reason, the lack of action left Arizonans fuming.

 “By doing nothing,” said The Arizona Republic, “legislative leaders virtually have ensured a return engagement of the Fiesta Bowl game-ticket scandal. And they clearly are fine with that.”

In fact, more than a third of lawmakers accepted the Arizona Diamondbacks’ offer of free tickets to opening day on April 6.

“It is preposterous,” said Diane E. Brown, executive director of the nonprofit Arizona Public Interest Research Group, “that while legislators are striking out on necessary gift ban reform, they are scoring on tickets to a high-profile baseball game.”

Between the tickets and a meal at Coach & Willie’s sports bar and grill, the Diamondbacks shelled out $4,908 to host state officials. Who attended? State reporting law doesn’t require that detail.

Or a lot of other details, either. The comprehensive State Integrity Investigation, released in March, gave Arizona an F in lobbying disclosure and a D-plus in legislative accountability. The state ranked 30^th overall, with a grade of D-plus, in the 50-state assessment, a joint project of the Center for Public Integrity, Public Radio International and Global Integrity.

Window dressing?

What now? Many reform advocates aren’t optimistic, but the door may not be closed. At least one Republican lawmaker is taking up the issue, and the minority Democrats have included gift reform on their list of legislative initiatives for 2013.

Their big emphasis this time around is on disclosure. And that could hook up with broader legislation to increase transparency in campaign finance, a hot-button issue for some legislative leaders. If the Legislature fails to act, there are rumblings of a citizens’ ballot initiative.

There’s potentially plenty to fix. Under current Arizona law, that $10 gift limit doesn’t cover food, beverages, travel or lodging. There’s a Draconian-sounding ban on entertainment, including sports tickets. It doesn’t apply, though, if the freebie is offered to all members of a legislative committee or house — regardless of how many attend.

The disclosure requirements for gifts, meanwhile, are short on detail, with different rules for lobbyists and legislators.

Lobbyists, who file quarterly, must list the names and amounts spent on meals and other permissible gifts for individual lawmakers (there’s a $20 threshold). But they don’t have to disclose who attended “special event” functions, which can include everything from dinners to ball games.

Legislators have to list gifts worth more than $500 to themselves and immediate family, with some personal exceptions, as part of their annual financial disclosure reports. But all they have to put is the name of the donor. No date, purpose or actual amount.

The regulations are just “a lot of window dressing,” said Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery. He blames vague laws for hamstringing his investigation of 28 legislators and three other public officials who had gone on Fiesta Bowl-funded trips. Montgomery wrapped up the probe in December 2011 without filing any charges. Instead, he recommended a list of reforms to state gift and disclosure laws.

Drawing the line

Going forward, the issue boils down to two basic questions: Where should Arizona draw the line on gifts? And what kind of disclosure should be required?

Tim Hogan, executive director of the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest, is categorical: No gifts. “This should be a black and white rule,” he said, “and I guarantee that life as we know it will not end.”

Florida adopted that approach in 2005 — the notable exception is flowers on the Legislature’s opening day — and got top marks in the State Integrity Investigation in the sub-category of regulating gifts and hospitality to lawmakers. But legislators have found a way around the restrictions through political committees that are allowed to accept unlimited money.

In Arizona, the debate remains vigorous on where to set the boundaries on entertainment, meals and travel.

Rep. Gallardo is calling for a “straight-up ban” on entertainment. “We get quite a few invitations,” he said. “You’d be amazed. A lot of these are events that the general public would have trouble getting tickets to.” They include the Waste Management Phoenix Open golf tournament, NASCAR events at Phoenix International Raceway and season tickets to university football games.

Sen. Michele Reagan, a Scottsdale Republican who took trips, has a new philosophy in the wake of the Fiesta Bowl: “If the public has to pay for it, we should have to pay for it, as well.”

John MacDonald knows the gift issue up close and personal. A former Fiesta Bowl lobbyist, he entered into an agreement in September to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of failing to report expenditures.

“As a lobbyist, I will tell you, lobbyists have far too much influence at the state capital,” said MacDonald, now a partner in Policy AZ.

He takes aim, in particular, at the expensive meals that some lobbyists lavish on legislators.

Steakhouses, such as Durant’s and the Capitol Grill, and the private University Club in Phoenix are favorite destinations.

“It’s just human nature for somebody to be indebted to you when you give them something,” MacDonald said. “The lobbyists who use the wining and dining, they know that full well. For the majority of lobbyists who are down there doing the grunt work every day, it is annoying to watch people take shortcuts.”

MacDonald notes, however, that it works both ways. “I have literally seen legislators hang around the Capitol at the end of the day,” he said, “and look for a lobbyist to take them out to drinks and dinner.”

Senate Majority Leader John McComish contends that the issue isn’t the meals, but the disclosure. “Much business in this country is conducted over lunch,” the Ahwatukee Republican, who took Fiesta Bowl trips, said via email. “I view lunch with a lobbyist as an efficient use of time rather than some type of gift or treat; and would have no problem reporting that on a monthly or even weekly basis.”

Scores of groups, from nonprofits to trade organizations, invite lawmakers for meals.  The Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry gives legislators a free seat at eight to 12 major events a year, many of them educational, such as the annual legislative forecast lunch.

Legislators make $24,000 a year for a regular session that runs four to six months, with the possibility of special sessions and committee meetings in the off season. On that salary, “it would be fairly challenging to go to all of these different events,” said Chamber president and CEO Glenn Hamer, “and I think you want public officials out there and among the public.”

The Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, a nonprofit with 20 member tribes, holds an annual lunch and breakfast for legislators and wants to catch incoming freshmen with a lunch during their orientation.

“They’re so bombarded with issues, it’s hard to get their time unless you feed them,” said the group’s lobbyist, Norris Nordvold.

That’s just the point to John Loredo, a partner in Southwest Policy Advisors consulting firm and a Democratic legislator from 1997 to 2005. He would forbid all meals outright. If you want to see lawmakers, do it the official way: “There’s a reason why taxpayers pay for them to have an office and a secretary to schedule meetings.”

Is this trip necessary?

While free travel was a focal point of the Fiesta Bowl debacle, there’s little pressure to shut off all funding for legislators to attend conferences. Instead, there are calls to weed out the junkets and examine the funding sources.

Sam Wercinski, executive director of the Arizona Advocacy Network, a public-interest group focused on transparency, uses his own experience as a yardstick. He’s received funding for Washington, D.C., forums on issues like voter protection and judicial independence, valuable sessions that were beyond his group’s budget.

“We don’t want to impact the ability of these underpaid lawmakers to seize the opportunity to be educated on issues,” he said.

Arizona lawmakers seized a lot of opportunities in 2011. They went to gatherings sponsored by at least 50 groups, from the American Federation for Children to Young Elected Officials. The trips crossed the political spectrum, from GOPAC (a new generation of Republican leaders) to NewDEAL Leaders (pro-growth progressives).

The destinations and costs, however, are mostly mysteries — legislators aren’t required to report that information, and the form has nowhere to put it.

The disclosure statements indicate twenty-eight legislators received scholarships in 2011 to attend conferences of the American Legislative Exchange Council, which advocates limited government, free markets and federalism. ALEC held a major meeting in the Phoenix area that year, as well as sessions in New Orleans; Santa Barbara, Calif.; Cincinnati; and Washington, D.C.

In October, Common Cause released a report criticizing ALEC’s use of corporate funding for scholarships and calling on states to bar them. “We’re not saying that legislators can’t go to ALEC conferences,” said Nick Surgey, staff counsel of Common Cause. “We’re saying that the use of corporate money in this way is inappropriate.”

Reagan, the Scottsdale senator, argues against singling out ALEC. Ultimately, she said, the public needs to help decide what’s appropriate and not.

Some maintain that the public should play a more active role — paying the bills if a conference is valuable enough for legislators to attend. “To maintain public confidence, it’s worth it,” said Bart Turner, head of the Clean Elections Institute, a now-dormant good government group.

The push for full disclosure

A year ago, Maricopa County Attorney Montgomery took a hard line on gifts in proposing changes following his investigation. He’s changed his mind. “I’ve since come to the conclusion that an outright gift ban doesn’t make sense,” he said. “It’s going to be a never-ending game to reclassify, redefine, recharacterize something” to create a loophole.

Now he argues for full, fast online disclosure of anything worth more than a minimal amount, say $25 or $50.

House Minority Leader Chad Campbell, another Fiesta Bowl trip recipient, agrees. “You’re never going to take the money out of politics…” said the Phoenix Democrat. “But what you’ve got to do is to give people the ability to know where the money’s coming from and connect the dots.”

California, which ranked fourth in the State Integrity Investigation, tries to does just that. Lobbyists and lawmakers must make detailed reports on gifts and trips, which are filed on websites. But making the connections is hard, because it’s not an electronic system that can be used to sort, analyze and cross-reference.

In October, Arizona Sen. Jerry Lewis proposed using technology to dramatically increase transparency in gift reporting. The centerpiece of his plan was an interactive online database to replace the state’s current “antiquated” system.

The Mesa Republican intended to lay the groundwork for legislation in 2013. But he lost his seat in November’s election and won’t be back to push it when the new session starts in January.

Sen. Reagan is interested in picking it up. “This will probably be a very bipartisan bill,” she said. “This doesn’t split down party lines.”

The idea could get lift from Democrats, who are expected to have more leverage in the GOP-dominated Legislature, since Republicans no longer have a two-thirds supermajority in both Houses.

Gov. Jan Brewer is leaving the ball in the Legislature’s court. But she’s “always interested in accountability and transparency,” her spokesman Matthew Benson said in an email.

The Arizona Chamber of Commerce is also open to greater transparency and more real-time reporting, as long as the rules are clear, fair and easy to comply with.

Even if nothing passes next session, the game isn’t over, Chamber CEO Hamer said: “When it comes to any kind of reform, it’s not unusual for things to take a few years to get through.”

But legislators should beware of going overboard in the reporting requirements, said Martin Shultz, senior policy director for Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. If lawmakers have lunch with a lobbyist, will they have to pore over the bill and figure out who ate what?

“My view is that this is petty, petty, petty,” said Shultz, a Capitol veteran who worked previously for the electric utility Arizona Public Service. “It assumes, from cynics, that somehow a registered lobbyist can buy the vote of a lawmaker through a meal.”

Legislators have pushed transparency in other areas, particularly government spending. Now there’s a move from some Republicans to require more financial disclosure from independent expenditure committees. Gift reform could piggyback on that issue.

Lobbyist MacDonald is skeptical. Legislators, he said, “simply are too self-interested to enact anything that would be meaningful in terms of lobbying reform or gift ban.”

In his view, change will have to come from the outside, through a ballot initiative.

The Arizona Advocacy Network is starting to gear up. The group is working on a broad anti-corruption bill that would cover gifts, conflicts of interest and the Clean Elections public finance system.

If the Legislature fails to act on it, said executive director Wercinski, “there’s already discussions with national and state partners about doing a citizens’ initiative about this around 2014.”

Notre Dame’s high-profile re-emergence among college football’s elite has focused new attention on the university’s long-standing claims that it does things “the right way” — that football players are treated like anyone else on campus, with no special favors.

The boasts of lofty moral standards have long struck other schools’ fans as a bit sanctimonious. But they are getting fresh scrutiny now, in part because the bright lights of college football’s biggest stage have brought renewed attention to a two-year-old case involving a Notre Dame player and chilling allegations of sexual assault.

In August 2010, 19-year-old freshman Lizzy Seeberg accused the athlete of sexually assaulting her in his dorm. She filed a report with campus police, which sat on it for two weeks before even interviewing him. By then, Seeberg had committed suicide. Administrators would later convene a closed-door campus disciplinary hearing—three months after Seeberg’s death became national news—in which the player was found “not responsible.” In the university's only direct comment on the case, Notre Dame's president, the Rev. John I. Jenkins, told the South Bend Tribune in December 2010 that university police had conducted a "thorough and judicious investigation that followed the facts..." He acknowledged, however, that the inquiry could have been conducted "more quickly, perhaps." The player, who has not been publicly identified, reportedly has never missed a game, nor presumably will he miss tonight’s national championship contest with Alabama’s Crimson Tide. Meanwhile, a small but vocal number of critics are asking pointed questions about how this case was handled, and wondering aloud whether Notre Dame’s righteous rhetoric is really a fiction.

As tragic as the details of the Seeberg case are, they are actually far from unusual. The struggles that colleges have faced in addressing campus sexual assault were the subject of an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity beginning in 2009. Published in a six-part series, “Sexual Assault on Campus: A Frustrating Search for Justice,” the investigation showed that campus judicial proceedings were often confusing, shrouded in secrecy and marked by lengthy delays, leaving alleged victims feeling like they were victimized a second time. Those who reported sexual assault encountered a litany of institutional barriers that often led to dropped complaints. Even students found “responsible” for alleged sexual assaults often faced little punishment, while their victims’ lives frequently turned upside down. Many times, victims dropped out of school — or worse — while their alleged attackers graduated.

The Center series — done in collaboration with National Public Radio — shed light on what Education Department officials have since called “an epidemic of sexual violence” on campuses. According to a report funded by the Justice Department, roughly one in five women who attend college will become the victim of a rape or an attempted rape by the time she graduates. Much of the problem is up to the institutions to address, because prosecutors face imposing obstacles in filing criminal charges; allegations come down to he-said-she said accounts that may be colored by alcohol, while physical evidence and eyewitness testimony are often lacking.

In April 2011, the Education Department’s civil rights office unveiled its most thorough guidance on how schools must respond to student complaints of campus rape. The 19-page “dear colleague letter,” combined with a unique enforcement strategy, has spurred change at dozens of schools nationwide, including Notre Dame. There’s also proposed federal legislation aimed at combating campus sexual violence.

The guidance hasn’t pleased everyone, and the legislation is, for the moment, stalled. Sadly, cases like Seeberg’s continue to make headlines. The latest comes from elite Amherst College, where a former student has documented allegations of her school’s callous treatment following an alleged rape by a classmate. Highly emotional, colored by broader cultural stereotypes, these cases remain among the thorniest for colleges and universities. Even so, lawyer Brett Sokolow, who advises college administrators, says he believes they have improved their handling of what he calls “the garden variety cases” — those without ties to money or influence.

But “the old rules still apply if [the alleged assailant is] a star athlete or a student president…Corruption still exists in those cases,” he says, while adding he’s not familiar with the details of the Seeburg case. 

Changes

That new federal guidance, announced with fanfare by Vice President Joe Biden, says schools have an obligation, under the federal law known as Title IX, to investigate student complaints, and to take prompt and effective action to end harm.

The guidance has drawn fierce pushback, much of it focused on a policy the civil rights office was already enforcing: that schools should rely on the more lenient evidence standard in these cases — “preponderance of evidence” rather than the higher “clear and convincing” or even “beyond a reasonable doubt” evidence standards. Groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which advocates for free speech and due process, have penned multiple letters arguing that such a “weak” principle undermines, in its words, “the reliability, integrity and basic fairness of the disciplinary process.”

“We see the burden of proof on many campuses being the only protection an accused student has,” says FIRE’s Joe Cohn, whose last letter, in May 2012, included 19 professors, lawyers and other individuals as co-signers.

Taking a cue from the department, many colleges and universities were using the preponderance standard when the guidelines came out. Others have followed suit. Some 40 schools at last count have also adopted what administrators describe as “the easy things” — policy reforms and procedural fixes like hiring a Title IX coordinator and offering appeal rights to both the accused and accusing students. Some administrators are even clamoring for more guidance to clear up lingering “confusion” about what Title IX requires.

By all accounts, the civil rights office has become far more aggressive since December 2010, when it announced its first in a series of “model” settlements with schools regarding policies on campus sexual assault. These settlements have emerged from “compliance reviews” that were pushed by the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Russlynn Ali, who stepped down in early December. Unlike formal complaints, which students must file before the office can act, these compliance reviews have allowed the department to act proactively in response to allegations of campus sexual violence.

To date, there have been 11 such reviews — and the first one was at Notre Dame. Prompted by the Seeberg case, the civil rights office launched a seven-month investigation into how the school handles all sexual assault complaints. That ended in June 2011 with a “voluntary resolution agreement,” in which Notre Dame agreed to speed up investigations, adopt the “preponderance” standard, and issue no-contact orders for alleged assailants and their alleged victims, among other things. Seth Galanter, the civil rights office’s acting director, declined to discuss the Notre Dame resolution, citing its “open” status. The office is currently monitoring the school to ensure its compliance.

Many of the reviews are ongoing, but the office has hammered out similar settlement agreements with such schools as Eastern Michigan and Yale. Last spring, it took the rare step of joining the Justice Department in examining how the University of Montana, as well as local law enforcement, handle campus rape allegations — after several prominent cases there, some involving football players. The civil rights office has even seen the number of formal complaints from students filed against schools soar to more than 120 in the past four years— a rise of more than 41 percent.

“One of our goals,” Galanter says, “is to make sure the April 2011 ‘dear colleague’ letter isn’t just a piece of paper.”

A multi-front struggle

Over on Capitol Hill, victim advocates have pressed for passage of the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act. Filed in the fall of 2010, the federal legislation was meant to codify the Title IX guidance, creating minimum, national standards for colleges and universities. Two years later, after lobbying by FIRE and others brought about changes in the bill, some supporters now actually oppose it. The most notable change: the bill would no longer require schools to use the “preponderance” standard.

“Now we have this monstrous bill all wrapped up in nice sounding language,” says lawyer Wendy Murphy, a prominent victim advocate. She believes the bill, stripped of that mandate, would give institutions leeway to use a higher burden, thus in her view undermining the guidance.

Bill supporters counter that the SaVE Act would still require that institutions expand programs to offer prevention awareness and bystander intervention education, meant to stop sexual assaults from occurring. And the legislation would improve victim protection, they say, by guaranteeing counseling, legal assistance, and medical care on campus, as well as other accommodations.

“We didn’t get everything we wanted,” agrees Daniel Carter, a long-time victim advocate now with the VTV Family Outreach Foundation, who helped draft the original bill. But “no one was willing to sacrifice [the whole measure]” he explains, to preserve a few of its mandates.

Administrators and advocates alike expect the legislation to pass — eventually. It had been incorporated, as Section 304, into the Senate’s re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, but not the House’s. Advocates were pinning their hopes on the bill making it in the final version of VAWA until the House let it expire at the end of the congressional session on January 3. Now, it will have to be re-introduced, as will the stand-alone version of the bill. Its sponsor, Senator Robert Casey Jr., a Democrat from Pennsylvania, will keep working to ensure final passage of the Campus SaVE Act in the 113^th Congress, his office says.

For all the attention on campus sexual assault, it remains an intractable and complex problem. The cultural climate surrounding these cases is tense— especially those involving athletes. They are, after all, popular public figures who may be pivotal to the reputation and success of a school’s highest-profile programs.

It all feels painfully familiar to Laura Dunn, whose case was featured in the Center series; in 2005, she reported her allegations of rape by a crew member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He denied the allegations. It took the university nine months to contemplate, and then reject, filing disciplinary charges against him. 

“It’s almost like you’re attacking something bigger than the individuals who assaulted you,” Dunn says. When she thinks about how much progress colleges have made in combating campus sexual assault, her thoughts turn to Lizzy Seeberg and that Notre Dame football player.

“Until college athletes are handled differently,” Dunn says, “nothing has changed.”

You probably missed it because of the media’s focus on the fiscal cliff, but a provision of ObamaCare took effect on January 1 that can help you avoid making costly mistakes when you sign up for health insurance. At the very least you’ll be able to understand what you’re actually signing up for.

From now on, health insurers will have to provide us with information in plain English, and in no more than four pages, about what their policies cover and how much we’ll have to pay out of our own pockets when we get sick. And they’ll have to provide it in a standard format that will enable us to make apples-to-apples comparisons among health plans. Click here to see an example of what the plan descriptions must now look like.  

As you can imagine, insurers fought hard to kill that part of the law. That’s because they’ve profited for years by using legalese and gobbledygook in describing their policies, and also by purposely withholding information we really need to make informed coverage decisions. 

Now, at long last, thanks to ObamaCare, you can say goodbye and good riddance to “explanations” like this one:

“Benefits are payable for Covered Medical Expenses (see ``Definitions'') less any Deductible incurred by or for a Covered Person for loss due to Injury or Sickness subject to: (a) the Maximum Benefit for all services; (b) the maximum amount for specific services; both as set forth in the Schedule of Benefits; and (c) any coinsurance amount set forth in the Schedule of Benefits or any endorsement hereto. The total payable for all Covered Medical Expenses shall never exceed the Maximum Benefit stated in the Schedule of Benefits. Read the ``Definitions'' section and the ``Exclusions and Limitations'' section carefully.”

Yes, that’s from an actual policy the folks at Consumers Union found during research they did a few years ago into the consequences to patients of indecipherable policy descriptions.

One of the reasons I decided to go public as a critic of the industry I used to work for  was my disdain for how insurance firms padded their bottom lines through obfuscations like that paragraph above.  I described to members of Congress in 2009 how they “confuse their customers and dump the sick—all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.”  

Sharing the witness table with me during my first Senate testimony  were Nancy Metcalf, senior editor at Consumer Reports, and Karen Pollitz, then research professor at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute.  Metcalf pointed out in a policy brief she provided the senators that the average American adult reads at an 8^th grade level, yet the typical health plan document is written at a first-year college reading level.  She also noted that because of the lack of standardization, terms like “deductible” and even “hospitalization” varied from plan to plan.  An article she wrote for Consumer Reports described a health insurance policy that essentially hid in dense fine print the fact that hospital coverage excluded the first day of hospitalization—“usually the most expensive day when lab and surgical suite costs are incurred.” That meant, of course, that the patient would have to pay the full amount of that first day in the hospital, typically several thousand dollars.

Pollitz, now a senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation, spent more than a decade trying to get legislation enacted to help consumers make sense of health insurance. She and consumer advocates in California who had been studying the issue began citing the now-common “Nutrition Facts” label as an example of what was needed.

It was so needed, she told Congress, that even studies conducted by the insurance industry showed that the majority of people asked said that they would prefer to work on their income taxes than try to read their insurance policy.

In addition to the standard format and plain English that must now be used, insurers must also provide an estimate of how much a given policy will pay for “having a baby (normal delivery)” and “managing type 2 diabetes” and also how much the policyholder will have to pay. In years to come, additional examples will have to provided, such as for a heart attack or breast cancer.

Pollitz cautions, however, that the cost information in the examples this year is not necessarily as reliable as it could and should be. With little fanfare, the government told insurers last summer they could use a simple formula during 2013 to estimate policyholders’ out-of-pocket expenses. Next year, however, they’ll have to start using their actual claim experience in the examples.

It’s not perfect by a long shot, but it’s a great start and a lot more than we’ve ever had before.

A leading Republican in the Texas legislature, who says she’s outraged by allegations that corporate dental chains put profits ahead of patients, has introduced a bill that would allow the state to regulate chains and forbid them from forcing dentists to meet revenue quotas.

A joint investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and PBS Frontline last summer found that two of the largest dental chains owned by private-equity firms, Aspen Dental Management and Kool Smiles, put pressure on its dentists to meet production goals, prompting complaints of overbilling and unnecessary treatments.

Both companies deny this. And a coalition of dental chains in Texas contends that their dentists have total control over patient care. But the chief sponsor of the bill remains skeptical.

“Several reports, including the Frontline program, have uncovered outrageous activities involving the illegal enticement of patients, especially among our Medicaid providers and often involving dental service organizations,” said Republican Sen. Jane Nelson, who chairs the Senate’s Health & Human Services committee.

Nelson did not name a specific chain. Aspen Dental does not accept Medicaid and has no offices in Texas. But Kool Smiles has clinics throughout Texas, and public records show that the state Attorney General has been investigating Kool Smiles for Medicaid fraud.

Texas has been embroiled in a Medicaid fraud scandal for the past couple of years. The initial focus was on overbilling Medicaid for unnecessary braces on children. But the scandal has since widened. State authorities said last October that beyond braces, they’ve identified 89 dental providers they suspect of overbilling Medicaid by $154 million.

The state hasn’t identified those providers, but a spokeswoman for the state Health and Human Services Commission said that because chains bill Medicaid the most, they were more likely to be scrutinized.

Most states outlaw anyone but a dentist from owning a dental clinic. Corporate dental chains are often owned by private-equity firms, but they contend that dentists own the actual practice. The chains say they merely provide those owner dentists services under contract.

But in many cases, the chains open the clinics, own the equipment, hire the dentists, employ the staff, and control the business strategy, which might include specializing in dentures or Medicaid patients. And our investigation found that Aspen Dental and Kool Smiles set revenue targets for each clinic.

The push to boost corporate profits has led to allegations that dentists are pressured to bill more than they might otherwise. Regulators in Georgia, Connecticut and Massachusetts concluded that dentists at Kool Smiles were routinely doing unnecessary procedures, including using  more expensive stainless steel crowns on cavities when a simple filling would do.

The executive director of the Texas dental board, Glenn Parker, wrote legislators last October that he had no power to monitor chains to assure that dentists were free to treat patients as they saw fit.

“The dental board and staff are aware of the many media stories concerning the allegations of Medicaid fraud and patient abuse,” Parker wrote. “We are appalled by stories indicating that some dentists have over-treated young patients by placing unnecessary crowns, fillings or braces on those children.”

Nelson’s bill would require dental chains to register with the Texas State Board of Dental Examiners and forbid them from influencing treatments or setting quotas for a particular dental procedure.

The Texas Coalition of Dental Support Organizations, recently formed by a group of dental chains, opposes new regulation, saying laws on the books are already adequate.

“It is a felony to practice dentistry without a license, including by influencing, controlling or interfering with a dentist’s professional judgment,” the group says on its Web site. “The Attorney General is specifically empowered to prosecute violators of the Texas dental statutes and bring the full force of law down on anyone who would endanger patient safety by attempting to interfere with dentists’ clinical judgment or by practicing dentistry without a license.”

But without some way to track dental chain’s behavior, the Attorney General has no way of knowing whether they may be interfering in patient care, said Dr. Richard Black, an El Paso orthodontist who handles legislative matters for the Texas Dental Association. The state dental association supports the bill.

“There’s nothing sinister about this. We’re not interested in punishing anybody,” he said. “If they feel that they are doing everything exactly right then I don’t think they should feel at all put out by registering and being part of our state system.”

A new report by KPCC Southern California Public Radio focuses on continuing debate in Los Angeles over when it’s appropriate for school police to get involved in ticketing or arresting students.

In collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity, KPCC reported Monday that nearly half of all tickets issued in the mostly-minority Los Angeles Unified School District are still being given to students 14 or younger. The most common charge is disturbing the peace. That’s roughly the same proportion that previous Center and public radio reports found when analyzing older data. Administrators pledged reforms after those earlier stories.  

As the KPCC and Center joint report says, the L.A. district is continuing to institute “positive behavior support” methods in every school as way to both limit student suspensions and moderate law-enforcement involvement in discipline matters. The district’s “strategic plan” for 2012-2015 declares a commitment to “a non-punitive enforcement model that supports strategic problem-solving models rather than citation and arrest-driven enforcement.”

However, not all schools have adopted the new models. And the district hasn’t sufficiently clarified standards for ticketing, a Los Angeles student-parent group, the Community Rights Campaign, said in a Jan. 2 letter it sent to Superintendent John Deasy.

The group noted that, according to recent data, school police in Los Angeles are still giving out more tickets than police in New York City’s district, which is larger.

Black students, who make up about 10 percent of the L.A. district’s students, comprised 20 percent of all students ticketed in recent months, the Community Rights Campaign said. And, as the Center pointed out, students as young as six and seven have been cited, the group said.

“We remain firm that the district needs to implement specific guidelines preventing the use of citations, arrests and other formal law enforcement interventions for school discipline,” the group’s letter says.

Los Angeles Unified has the nation’s largest school police force.

Juvenile court judges in Los Angeles, probation officers, school police and administrators are currently discussing how to set specific standards for police intervention in schools.

Over time, judges and civil rights attorneys in Los Angeles have become concerned that school-police tickets – more than 1,000 in September and October -- are disproportionately given out in low-income schools whose students are mostly Latino and black.

Middle schools with high citation rates feed into high schools with high dropout rates. Judges said that in recent years, they began to feel that too many students accused of schoolyard fights in middle school and other minor infractions were being inappropriately ticketed in certain schools.

The release of citations data over the last year has confirmed these concerns, judges say.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is monitoring Los Angeles Unified’s agreement with the department to change academic and discipline practices. Citations are among the trends the department said it would monitor.

In its Jan. 2 letter, the Community Rights Campaign also expressed concern about the district’s recent decision to initiate daily patrols by Los Angeles city police officers inside elementary schools. The decision to organize city police checks at schools followed the massacre of 20 school children by a man who shot his way into a school in Newtown, Conn., last month.

While the need “to act” is understandable, the group said, its members are concerned that there have not been public discussions about this decision, nor clear “parameters” set for the role of officers.

The Community Rights Campaign is part of the Labor-Community Strategy Center, which successfully organized students last year to stop early-morning police sweeps around Los Angeles’ inner-city schools, where students were being ticketed even if only minutes late.  Some students were handcuffed and searched.

The Center for Public Integrity’s ground-breaking series, Cracking the Codes, has been named first-place winner of the 2012 Philip Meyer Journalism Award sponsored by Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE.) The series documented how thousands of medical professionals have steadily billed Medicare for more complex and costly health care over the past decade – adding $11 billion or more to their fees – despite little evidence elderly patients required more treatment. The series also uncovered a broad range of costly billing errors and abuses that have plagued Medicare for years – from confusion over how to pick proper payment codes to apparent overcharges in medical offices and hospital emergency rooms. The findings strongly suggest these problems, known as “upcoding,” are worsening amid lax federal oversight and the government-sponsored switch from paper to electronic medical records.

This project represents a classic mix of the Center’s ability to marry traditional shoe-leather reporting with rigorous data analysis. Reporters Fred Schulte and Joe Eaton, working with project editor Gordon Witkin and database editor David Donald, analyzed 133 million Medicare records over 20 months to demonstrate how upcoding of diagnoses and procedures was steadily increasing Medicare payouts over the years.

Less than a week after the final installment of Cracking the Codes was published, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Attorney General Eric Holder issued a letter sternly warning five hospital and medical groups of their intent to ramp up investigative oversight, including possible criminal prosecutions, of doctors and hospitals that use electronic health records to improperly bill for more complex and costly services than they actually deliver. Following the publication of our stories, the Obama administration’s top health information technology official launched an internal review to determine if electronic health records are prompting some doctors and hospitals to overbill Medicare.

The Meyer Award honors Philip Meyer, professor emeritus and former Knight Chair of journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Meyer is the author of “Precision Journalism”,‖ the seminal 1973 book that encouraged journalists to incorporate social science methods in the pursuit of better journalism. 

With her resignation this week, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis leaves behind a department advocates say has adopted a renewed focus on enforcing worker safety laws but been unable to push through a number of long-sought regulations.

The first Hispanic woman to hold the top post at a Cabinet-level agency, Solis said in a letter to department employees that she planned to return to California, where she grew up.

Labor advocates credit her with restoring the department’s commitment to protecting workers, particularly vulnerable populations, and bringing stronger enforcement of worker safety laws. During her tenure, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Mine Safety and Health Administration expanded initiatives to crack down on repeat violators of safety and health laws – sometimes drawing the ire of the business community.

Yet the department hasn’t finalized a host of rules to protect workers that many in the labor community view as long overdue.

As the Center for Public Integrity has reported, a surprising resurgence of black lung disease has affected coal miners in Appalachia. For more than 15 years, experts and the government’s own scientists have pushed to lower the standard for exposure to the dust that causes black lung. In 2010, MSHA proposed a rule that would lower the limit, among other things, but it remains unfinished.

Similarly, OSHA announced in 2009 that it was starting the process of issuing a rule to address combustible dust – a hazard that, as the Center has reported, has killed or injured hundreds of workers during the past two decades. Yet rule development remains in the early stages.

OSHA has also been unable to finish rules to protect workers from harmful substances they breathe. Standards to lower exposures to beryllium and silica, both contaminants that can cause severe lung disease, have been in the works for years but remain incomplete.

“Where the administration has been a real disappointment has been in the regulatory department,” said Peg Seminario, director of safety and health for the AFL-CIO. This inability to finalize new rules, she said, is not the fault of Solis, but of a White House reluctant to issue new regulations.

Rep. George Miller, a California Democrat who has long been an outspoken worker advocate, issued a statement praising Solis as “a tireless advocate for all hardworking Americans.” President Obama cited her work in helping working families recover from the financial crisis.

A federal judge ruled Thursday that Walmart can be added to a lawsuit alleging widespread wage theft at a Southern California warehouse.

Lawyers for contract workers at the Schneider Logistics warehouse in Mira Loma, Calif. – whose sole customer is Walmart – had moved to add the retailer to the case in November.

Monday’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder will force Walmart to defend itself against allegations that Schneider, at Walmart’s behest, cheated as many as 1,800 low-wage workers out of millions of dollars.

Walmart fought becoming a late addition to the case, but Snyder wrote that the plaintiffs had a “good faith explanation that they did not seek to name Walmart as a defendant until this stage of the litigation because they only recently uncovered evidence in discovery that justifies a lawsuit against Walmart.”

The lawsuit, filed in October 2011, claims that Schneider and two staffing agencies, Premier Warehousing Ventures LLC and Impact Logistics Inc., failed to keep proper payroll records, falsified time sheets and misled workers about the amount of money they had earned.

All three companies have denied the allegations. The staffing agencies, however, agreed to pay a collective $450,000 in fines and back wages to settle citations issued by California labor officials after a warehouse raid last year. Schneider was not cited by the state.

Walmart spokesman Dan Fogleman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. Last November, he said: “While we have a set of quality standards that must be met, the third party service providers we utilize are responsible for running their day-to-day business. They manage their people completely independent of us.”

When Pennsylvanians agreed to a massive increase in natural gas drilling in the state, they were told that the economic benefit would outweigh any potential risk to the environment.

The drilling employs a controversial technology known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that backers say will help the nation become energy independent and provide jobs and lower heating costs for Pennsylvanians.

But with gas prices collapsing thanks to an unforeseen glut, energy companies are pushing for permission to export the commodity to countries such as Japan and South Korea. Exports will lead to more drilling, more damage to roads and the environment, and higher, rather than lower, gas prices, say critics.

Pennsylvanians are “surprised, stunned, angry and upset” about the export push, said Delaware Riverkeeper Maya van Rossum. “And that’s whether or not they’re supportive of fracking.”

Some history

Fracking involves injecting millions of gallons of water, sand and toxic chemicals into holes drilled into underground shale deposits.

The technology, which became popular in Pennsylvania around 2008, enabled drilling companies to access enormous, previously unreachable supplies of natural gas — and brought hope to a state long-mired in a recession.

Despite its economic potential, fracking has a dubious environmental record. Exempt from the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Air Act, it has been blamed for contaminating residential wells and sparking explosions.

Drilling rigs don’t make great neighbors, either. The fracking process — which requires trucking in billions of gallons of water — is unsightly and tough on roads.  But those concerns took a backseat to drilling in Pennsylvania, where a pro-fracking governor, Republican Tom Corbett, was elected in 2010.

Natural gas production in the U.S. has been so prolific that the price of gas has fallen to approximately $2.50 per million British thermal units from a previous high of about $15.

Low prices were great for consumers, who were able to heat their homes at record-low cost, but not so great for natural gas producers, whose profits and stock prices spiraled downward.

Shares of Chesapeake Energy, for example, the No. 1 producer in Pennsylvania and No. 2 nationwide, reached nearly $70 in 2008 but are now trading around $17.

New markets, more profits

Gas companies are now seeking authorization from the Department of Energy to export the gas overseas, where demand is higher.

They already have permission to export the gas to the nation’s free trade partners, which are not major potential customers. Many are obtaining permits to build the massive facilities that convert the gas to liquid by chilling it to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit, which allows it to be shipped overseas.

To realize big profits, they need permission to export to non-free trade agreement countries such as South Korea, India, China and Japan, where the price of natural gas has reached more than $18 per million British thermal units.

Requests from 16 gas producers to export to such countries are currently in limbo. Approval may hinge on the conclusions published last month in an Energy Department report on exports. The status of the permits will remain undecided until the closing of a public comment period and additional department analysis.

If the agency approves the permits, natural gas companies would be allowed to export upward of 21 billion cubic feet of liquefied natural gas (LNG) per day — more than one-quarter of current U.S. consumption.

The report claims that although such large-scale exports would cause a slow rise in domestic prices, they would benefit the nation’s economy overall by improving the balance of trade, encouraging foreign investment in the U.S. and creating more income for natural gas producers.

But the macroeconomic benefits of exports don’t mean much to those who have to deal with gas rigs, potholed roads and contaminated water supplies.

“If you think, ‘That’s where we are today and the markets couldn’t be more deflated,’ what happens if the markets open up and the industry is allowed to go hog wild?” asked David Masur, executive director of the Pennsylvania-based environmental advocacy group PennEnvironment.

Masur estimates that approximately 6,000 wells have been drilled in Pennsylvania so far, and said that as many as 50,000 wells could be drilled as the industry grows.

“I think we will continue to see many of the effects we’re seeing now, many-fold over,” he said.

One town’s story

In the beginning, fracking brought a much-needed economic boost to Dimock, Pa.

“There were preachers in church saying this was God’s work, this is a gift from heaven,” said Victoria Switzer, a retired teacher who lives in Dimock.

But the town’s water became so contaminated with methane gas that a private well exploded. Water taps became potential flamethrowers. Fifteen families in the town filed a lawsuit against Cabot Oil & Gas, alleging the company’s drilling practices had contaminated their water supply.

Cabot was barred from drilling in the Dimock area, fined $120,000 and ordered to deliver water to the residents. That hasn’t stopped other drillers.

Switzer, who was one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said the sky is lit up at night by natural gas flares. Roaring natural gas compressors make sleeping difficult. And these problems continue for days, sometimes weeks, on end, she continued.

“Let’s just plunder and glut the market. How is that going to benefit us?” Switzer asked. “I can’t even heat my home with natural gas.”

Dimock may be a major source of natural gas, but there’s no pipeline to Switzer’s house.

Van Rossum said the drillers’ promise that fracking would be good for Pennsylvania was simply “messaging.”

“It’s not truth,” she said. “It’s not reality.”

For its part, the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an energy industry trade association focused on Pennsylvania, said in a statement that it supports “common-sense natural gas export policies” that “could be a major economic boost for our nation.”

As environmental groups push to regulate fracking and manufacturers seek to keep natural gas prices low in America, producers are primarily concerned with getting back in the black.

More than $170 million has been spent so far lobbying on a variety of liquefied natural gas issues, including transportation and facility siting. At least $6.5 million of that sum was spent specifically to support or oppose LNG exports. The actual figure is probably much higher because of vague lobbying disclosure laws.

From shortage to glut

In the early 2000s, the U.S. was on track to become an importer of natural gas as resources ran low.

Energy companies built multibillion-dollar LNG import facilities up and down the country’s coastlines. But the advent of widespread fracking by companies such as Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Chesapeake Energy made the facilities unnecessary.

The industry invested “tons of money in building these re-gasification terminals, and in less than five years, they’re barely operating,” said Bill Cooper, president of the Center for Liquefied Natural Gas.

Exporting, however, would not only solve the price problem, it would mean the idle import facilities might become useful if energy companies converted them to export terminals.

But the energy companies’ gain could come at a loss for consumers.

A study that the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration published in January 2012 concluded that domestic natural gas prices would rise dramatically if the U.S. began exporting.

Other LNG export studies, from the Brookings Institution and the Baker Institute Center for Energy Studies at Rice University, also concluded that prices would rise but that increases would be moderate and manageable.

“We do have an astronomical amount of natural gas and the demand predictions in the future will not cause that to go away, even if we do export,” Cooper said.

Dow objects

In addition to consumers, some petrochemical, manufacturing and utility companies have expressed reservations about large-scale exports because of their potential impact on domestic natural gas prices.

Petrochemical companies such as Dow Chemical are among the largest consumers of natural gas in the country, and they use it both as a primary material for products and as a fuel.

Dow CEO Andrew Liveris blasted the Energy Department’s recent pro-export report, saying it “offers the baffling conclusion that the U.S. would be better off using its domestic natural gas advantage to fuel growth and jobs in other regions [of the world] versus strengthening the U.S. economy through manufacturing and benefiting consumers with lower energy costs.”

Scott Morrison, government affairs manager for the American Public Gas Association, says his organization opposes exporting LNG, because doing so will make natural gas less affordable for the consumers and manufacturers served by APGA’s members. APGA represents local, publicly owned gas utility companies.

Exporting LNG will also negatively affect the affordability of natural gas vehicles and run counter to the goal of U.S. energy independence, Morrison said.

But most trade associations and companies have been loath to speak out, either because their members don’t take a uniform view or for fear of appearing anti-free market.

The National Association of Manufacturers, for instance, wouldn’t say whether it supported or opposed natural gas exports, only that it supports “free trade and open markets” and believes “policies that accommodate growth in domestic natural gas production” are important.

Legislative issue

The release of the most recent Energy Department report sparked a response from Capitol Hill.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the incoming chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has called for the Energy Department to develop a national energy strategy and to further clarify its criteria for approving pending permits.

In response to the report, Wyden said in a statement that he will continue working to make sure that “unfettered natural gas exports don't harm U.S. consumers and manufacturers.”

Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, has been one of the most vocal opponents of jumping into large-scale LNG exports and says that more careful study and debate on the economic and environmental effects of the practice are needed.

Markey introduced two bills, the North America Natural Gas Security and Consumer Protection Act and the Keep American Natural Gas Here Act, that are likely to be reintroduced in the new Congress, said Eben Burnham-Snyder, a committee spokesman.

Markey also blasted the study.

In a letter to Energy Department Secretary Steven Chu, he wrote that the study contains “fundamental flaws” that cause it to “severely underestimate the negative impacts of large-scale natural gas exporting,”

In addition, there are long-standing concerns that LNG facilities would become terrorist targets. A fire resulting from an LNG spill could severely burn people up to 1 1/4 miles away, according to a Government Accountability Office report.

Sens. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, both support exports.

Louisiana is home to Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass facility, the first newly proposed LNG export terminal the Energy Department has approved. Alaska is home to a 40-year-old facility that is the only currently operating LNG export terminal in the U.S.

Lengthy debate expected

The Energy Department’s new report is just one factor in deciding the future of the natural gas exports.

Gaining permission to export natural gas isn’t easy.

First, a potential exporter needs permission to export to free-trade agreement countries. Next, the company needs to get permission from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to build a facility. FERC in turn works closely with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Coast Guard, the Department of Transportation and the states.

If the applicant is given the green light to build a terminal, it can go back to the Energy Department and request permission to export to non-free trade countries, such as Japan, South Korea and India.

Even if their requests are approved, they will have to spend $6 billion to $10 billion on each new or converted facility, and construction is likely to take several years.

Once the facilities are up and running, Pennsylvania and other gas-producing states can expect to see a big increase in drilling, a prospect that has left some in the state fearful that its history of natural resource exploitation will repeat itself.

“Pennsylvania has been the dumping ground for so long,” Switzer said. “I taught history, and people don’t learn from history.”

The state of Rhode Island will broaden access to government information through a new online portal under an initiative announced Thursday by Gov. Lincoln Chafee. Chafee said many documents will be available immediately and that the state will continue to add audits, contracts and other financial documents to the website over the next 18 months.

“The people of Rhode Island deserve more and better information about the operation and management of their government,” said Chafee in a statement. “I believe that greater openness and transparency will ultimately strengthen our citizens’ faith in their government, bolster our national reputation, and increase our economic competitiveness.”

The new “Transparency Portal” provides easy access to government financial data and documents. Users can search for contracts by bid number or vendor, sort through government expenditures or file a public records request, all on one site.

Chafee, an Independent, has promised in the past to improve transparency. In June, he signed a bill that broadened the state’s public records laws.

Some documents published on the new site had been accessible elsewhere, while others, such as contracts, had to be requested through open records laws.

“It seems to be as much about accessibility as it is about transparency,” said John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island.

Christine Hunsinger, a spokeswoman for the governor, said his administration would like journalists and the public to try out the site and report back on what type of additional information they’d like to see included. “It’s an ongoing, iterative process,” she said.

Rhode Island earned a B- for its access to public information from the State Integrity Investigation, a 50-state ranking of transparency and corruption risk released in March. The project is a collaboration between Global Integrity, Public Radio International and the Center for Public Integrity. Global Integrity has been working with Chafee’s office to help bolster the state’s open government practices. Rhode Island received an overall grade of C from the State Integrity Investigation, which ranked it ninth among the states. 

Workplace safety and health regulators should conduct an enforcement blitz and amend policies to give greater protection to the growing number of vulnerable temporary, or “contingent,” workers, a new report recommends.

The report from the Center for Progressive Reform, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, echoes many of the findings of a December Center for Public Integrity story detailing the increasing use of contingent workers to perform some of the most hazardous, undesirable jobs.

The number of contingent workers has more than doubled during the past two decades, with the current total estimated at more than 2.5 million, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Recent studies have indicated that contingent workers suffer injuries at higher rates than other employees.

Use of such workers is particularly popular in industries such as farming, construction, warehousing and hotel services, the group’s report says. Unable to outsource these jobs, companies have turned to contingent workers to reduce labor costs, the report says. By using contingent workers, the employer can avoid paying for workers’ health insurance and workers’ compensation costs, eliminating incentives to provide safe workplaces, the CPR researchers say.

Steven Berchem, the chief operating officer of the American Staffing Association, said in a statement, "We have not had an opportunity to review the report, but worker safety is paramount to our members and the American Staffing Association is actively engaged in continual efforts to ensure safe working conditions for temporary and contract employees."

Yet these workers are often assigned to dangerous work and not given the proper training or safety equipment, the new report says.

The Center’s recent story highlighted the case of Carlos Centeno, who worked for a temporary staffing agency and was assigned to the Raani Corp. plant near Chicago. The chemical tank he was cleaning doused him with a 185-degree mixture of water and citric acid, inflicting burns over 80 percent of his body. The company failed to call 911, according to a federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration report obtained by the Center, and more than 98 minutes passed between the time of the accident and Centeno’s arrival at a hospital. He died three weeks later.

Friday’s report urges reforms. OSHA should target companies likely to use contingent workers and conduct “enforcement ‘sweeps,’ ” it said, and the agency should issue rules to ensure temporary laborers receive the proper training and protective equipment.

The report also recommends OSHA revise the criteria for inclusion in its Voluntary Protection Programs, an initiative designed to recognize “model workplaces” and exempt them from regular inspections. Yet a Center series revealed that preventable deaths continue at the so-called VPP sites, with few consequences for employers. Friday’s report suggests OSHA ensure participants don’t use large numbers of contingent workers to perform the most dangerous work.

OSHA did not respond to requests for comment on the recommendations.

As Ronald Reagan once famously said, “There you go again.”

The culprits in this case are health insurance companies that want to change ObamaCare so they can keep selling highly profitable junk insurance to young people and keep charging older folks so much in premiums they have little money left over for anything else.

What’s happening now is a repeat of the tactics insurers employed during the final weeks of the health care reform debate. Back then, they papered Washington with a flawed “study” warning that premiums would soar if lawmakers ignored their recommendations. And now insurers are once again disseminating a new study with similar predictions. This time they’re trying to convince us that coverage for all young adults will become unaffordable next year if Congress doesn’t gut an important consumer protection in the reform law.

In 2009, shortly before the Senate voted on reform, America’s Health Insurance Plans —the main industry trade group —hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to estimate how much premiums would increase under the law. The study was quickly discredited, however, when it became clear that the accounting firm had ignored sections of the legislation that would keep coverage more affordable.

The current study, by the actuarial firm Oliver Wyman, also suffers from sins of omission —which raises concerns that this new effort may also have been influenced by the insurance industry. (Oliver Wyman has not responded to my request for comment.)

Even if it didn’t finance the study, which was published last week in the trade publication Contingencies, AHIP is using it as part of its campaign to persuade Congress to delay or repeal a provision of the reform law. That provision, which takes effect Jan. 1, 2014,  will prohibit insurers from charging older people more than three times as much as younger people.

“NEW STUDY FINDS AGE RATING RESTRICTIONS WILL INCREASE PREMIUMS FOR YOUNGER INDIVIDUALS,” reads the headline of a story on AHIP’s website.

Oliver Wyman maintains that “because of changes required by the ACA…premiums for younger, healthier individuals could increase by more than 40 percent.” The problem is that the firm doesn’t tell us enough about how it arrived at that conclusion for us to trust the math. It says the “rating factors” it used in its calculations are proprietary.

And then there are the omissions. Nowhere to be found in the Contingencies article is mention of the fact that for most young adults, the Affordable Care Act will enable them to obtain affordable, decent coverage for the first time. They’ll do that either by staying on their parents’ policies until age 26 if they can’t find a job that offers coverage, or through the expansion of the Medicaid program or the availability of premium subsidies for low-income individuals and families.

While it is true that some young adults who are currently insured will pay more, the important word here is “some.” The majority will not.

Here’s what you need to know that isn’t included in any of the industry’s talking points:

Young adults comprise the largest segment of the uninsured. That’s primarily because they either don’t have jobs that offer coverage or they don’t make enough money to pay the premiums insurance companies charge.

Because so many of them have low (or no) incomes, an estimated eight million of the currently uninsured 18 to 34-year-olds will qualify for Medicaid if all states expand eligibility to include people earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL).

Another 9 million will qualify for subsidies on the new state exchanges, where options will be better than what the current market offers because junk insurance with ridiculously limited benefits and high deductibles will be outlawed. According to the Young Invincibles, a nonprofit advocacy group, of the 11.2 million uninsured young people between 21 and 29, almost 90 percent will be eligible for subsidies. So most young folks will be able to get decent coverage for less than what they can find today.

And if they have better-than-average jobs and make too much to qualify for subsidized coverage (subsidies will be available for individuals earning up to 400 percent of the FPL) the ACA gives people under 30 the option of buying cheaper “catastrophic” policies.

As the Young Invincibles pointed out in a recent letter to the federal government, of the 6.2 million uninsured between 21 to 25, approximately 5 million earn below 300 percent of the federal poverty level. And of those in that age range who currently have private coverage and earn more than that, only 2.5 percent will be adversely affected by the age rating changes.

While it’s regrettable that even 2.5 percent of people in that age group will likely have to pay more, it’s not a good enough reason to delay or repeal an important provision of the law that will make coverage more affordable for many more Americans. Don’t let the insurance industry and its allies convince you otherwise with studies that don’t tell the whole story.

As the White House considers proposals to allocate federal money for armed guards in schools, prominent school-discipline reform groups have issued a report denouncing the idea as a misguided reaction to the Newtown school shooting.

“Placing more police in schools has significant and harmful unintended consequences for young people that must be considered before agreeing to any proposal that would increase the presence of law enforcement in schools,”says an issue brief released Friday by the Advancement Project, Dignity in Schools and other organizations.

The Advancement Project, founded in 1999, has offices in Washington D.C. and California, and has worked with school districts and states to adopt alternatives to school suspensions and expulsions. Dignity in Schools is also devoted to working with school districts, advocating fewer school suspensions and less involvement of law enforcement in school discipline.   

The groups called on the White House and Congress, before they act, to consider how the school-discipline climate changed after more police were introduced to schools in response to the Columbine school shootings nearly 15 years ago in Colorado.

“We have seen what happens when [schools] ramp up police presence and other security measures in response to a shooting or other violent act. In Colorado, it resulted in more students getting arrested for minor misbehaviors, more students being pushed out of school, and a declining sense of safety in schools,” the brief says.

“These unintended consequences,” the report continues, “are persistent and pervasive – despite efforts by parents, students, and the school district, the high arrest rates and racial disparities that resulted from increased police presence and zero tolerance policies still exist.”

Vice President Joe Biden, who is leading a new White House effort on gun control and school safety, is reportedly interested in the idea of allocating federal money to schools that wish to have armed guard protection, according to a recent report by the Washington Post.

The idea is being championed by one of Congress’ most ardent liberals, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who told the Post that Biden is “very, very interested” in a plan she presented to finance the deployment of police officers at schools. 

“I don’t see why anyone should object to it, left or right,” Boxer told the Post. “It’s an area where I think I can find common ground with my colleagues on all sides.”

Biden has met with a number of different groups this week in his role as leader of the post-Newtown effort —among them the National Rifle Association.

The NRA, under scrutiny for its intense efforts to preserve gun-ownership liberties, has suggested that schools consider training and arming teachers or other appointed staff inside schools. The NRA has offered to pay for and provide training.

"If we truly cherish our kids more than our money or our celebrities, we must give them the greatest level of protection possible and the security that is only available with a properly trained — armed — good guy," NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre said at a press conference explaining the group’s recommendations.

LaPierre also urged Congress to appropriate “whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school.”

But in its Friday brief, the Advancement Project, whose ideas have gained traction recently in Washington, reacted with dismay to both the NRA and Boxer’s recommendations.

Following the Newtown killings, Boxer also proposed placing National Guard in schools.

“We object to using the limited resources of the federal government to expand the presence of police in schools,” the Advancement Project brief says. “More specifically, we oppose the legislation offered late last Congress by Senator Barbara Boxer to facilitate the installation of National Guard troops in U.S. schools. We cannot support any such actions that have not been shown to make schools safer and instead can lead to terrifying, fatal mistakes.”

The Advancement Project report cites specific examples of students ticketed or arrested for minor infractions in various cities with a beefed-up school police presence, including Denver, Colo., New York City and Los Angeles, as reported by the Center for Public Integrity in a series of recent stories recently.

In Denver, where parent-led reforms are now aiming to reverse harsh discipline practices, schools saw a 71 percent jump in referrals of students to police or courts between 2000 and 2004. Most referrals, the brief notes, were for minor infractions such as using obscenities, disruptive appearance and destruction of non-school property. 

“Serious conduct, like carrying a dangerous weapon to school, accounted for only 7% of the referrals,” the report says.

The Obama Administration has noticed these patterns, the report also says, and has taken action to encourage or require schools to adopt alternatives to suspensions and involvement of law enforcement in discipline matters.

On Dec. 12, Advancement Project co-director Judith Browne Dianis testified at the first congressional hearing on the so-called school-to-prison pipeline. That’s a term coined by groups arguing that the involvement of police in what should be school disciplinary matters is putting some students, especially  low-income minorities, on a path to more serious trouble.

Proposed legislation to regulate online purchases of ammunition and high-capacity magazines is bringing new attention to a growing cyberspace ammo market that has operated with little government oversight.

Under federal law, firearms dealers must obtain a federal license and keep records of their transactions, but there’s virtually no federal regulation of ammunition suppliers or sales —though there was prior to 1986. Adults who currently want to stockpile large amounts of ammo—say 1,000 rounds of rifle fire or more— can buy it from dozens of web sites that specialize in bulk sales, often at low prices. Some sites also hawk magazines that fire up to 100 rounds without reloading, which critics argue have repeatedly been tied to deadly mass shootings and should be outlawed.

Some of the online sellers list no names of their owners, give only a post office box as their address and ship merchandise to customers using overnight couriers. Buyers can access a special search engine to compare inventory and prices at more than 30 dealers.

Nima Samadi, who follows the $3 billion- a-year small arms industry for the market research firm IBISWorld, said online ammo sales have been gaining in popularity “due to convenience and lower prices consumers can get by buying in bulk online.”

Legislative efforts

But some gun control advocates in Congress hope public outrage over the recent Newtown, Conn., massacre, in which 20 elementary school children and six school employees were killed, will prompt a closer look at these businesses and the firepower they can unleash.

Earlier this month, U.S. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., re-filed a bill from last summer that would put an end to online and mail-order sales by requiring that ammo transactions take place “face to face.”

The bill also would license ammo dealers and require them to report purchases of 1,000 rounds or more, which McCarthy has said would bring ammunition sales “out of the shadows and into the light, where criminals can’t hide and responsible dealers can act as a line of defense against the planning and stockpiling of a potential mass killer.”

In a separate action, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. on Jan. 8 said he would push for instant background checks to prevent ammo from being sold to felons, the mentally ill and others prohibited from buying firearms. Blumenthal, in a prepared statement, called ammo sales “the black hole in gun violence prevention.”

Also this month, McCarthy re-filed a bill—first introduced last summer in the wake of the Aurora, Colo., movie theater shootings—that would ban the manufacture and sale of magazines carrying more than 10 rounds. These magazines have been used in 15 mass shootings since 2000, according to the Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group in Washington.

 “These devices are used to kill as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time possible and we owe it to innocent Americans everywhere to keep them out of the hands of dangerous people,” McCarthy said in a statement.

In addition, a White House panel on gun violence led by Vice-President Biden is considering a range of proposals, including universal background checks for gun buyers and tougher penalties for carrying firearms near schools. Biden is expected to present recommendations this week. President Obama has already called for new laws to ban the sale of assault weapons and large-size magazines. An assault weapon ban in effect from 1994 to 2004 also banned new high-capacity magazines. 

Attempts to ban or restrict ammo sales could prove to be among the most contentious measures under review, with nobody fully confident they can predict the outcome.

Tighter regulation “is certainly a possibility,” said Samadi, the arms industry analyst. But he noted that public opinion is fickle and said “it’s hard to accurately predict what will happen.”

The online sale of ammo “is a somewhat new and developing industry and there isn’t too much information out there,” he added.

Fervent opposition 

The National Rifle Association strongly opposes ammunition regulation. The NRA argues that banning online ammo sales “would turn back the clock to the days when ammunition was only available in person at licensed stores, driving up prices and making less popular cartridges nearly unobtainable for millions of lawful gun owners.”

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the industry trade group, would not comment. In the past, however, the group has said regulations “would not affect criminals or their ability to obtain ammunition.”

Retail interstate shipments of ammunition were made legal by the 1986 Firearm Owners’ Protection Act. The law allowed ammunition to be shipped to individuals through the mail and eliminated existing record-keeping requirements. 

The NRA notes that officials of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had concluded by the 1980s that licensing ammo dealers for nearly two decades provided “no substantial law enforcement value” in keeping bullets out of the wrong hands. Officials supported loosening regulation at that time. ATF spokesman Mike Campbell said in an interview that the agency no longer comments on pending legislation.

Marc Gallagher, a co-owner of ammoseek.com, the search engine that helps buyers find the best prices, agrees. He said it “appears that the lawmakers proposing such laws are merely attempting to capitalize on horrible tragedies to further their agenda and disdain for the Second Amendment.”

Such legislation “would do nothing to prevent criminals and crazy people from doing horrible things with guns,” Gallagher wrote in an email. “It would only prevent honest and law-abiding citizens from being able to freely purchase ammunition online,”

Gun control forces have thus far made limited political headway against that argument—and concerns that an online ban would infringe on private business. A 2009 California law that required all handgun ammo sales to be face-to-face was struck down by the courts, though supporters of the law are trying to reinstate it this year. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo also said this month that he  favors a ban on online ammo shipments. While a few other states and some localities have restricted shipments of ammo or large-capacity magazines to residents, efforts at federal regulation have stalled.

That was the case last July when U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) and McCarthy introduced S. 3458 and H.R. 6241, called the “Stop Online Ammunition Sales Act” on the heels of the Aurora movie theater shootings in which 12 people died and dozens more were wounded. Police found an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle magazine capable of firing 100 rounds at the scene. Authorities said at the time that the shooter, James Holmes, 24, bought four guns at local gun stores and more than 6,000 rounds of ammo online. One of the firms authorities tied to these sales is bulkammo.com , according to media reports.

The company’s lawyer, Oliver Adams, of Knoxville, Tenn., did not respond to requests for comment from the Center for Public Integrity. In the past, he has said that the company was “actively assisting in the investigation.”

The firm maintains a St. Louis post office box and takes orders by phone or email 24 hours a day, with a promise to ship merchandise promptly. Federally licensed firearms dealers must have a “premises address,” where transactions take place and inventories and records can be inspected by federal agents.

Bulkammo.com says on its website that it was set up to provide “serious shooters and training professionals with a reliable, economically priced source for bulk ammunition.”

The website doesn’t name the proprietors, except to say an employee named “Steven,” a former Marine, is a member of a staff that is “experienced and well-prepared to become your private armorer.” The firm passes muster on Angie’s List and has many favorable comments from satisfied customers on gun enthusiast websites and blogs.

“We shoot a lot of rounds (just like you) and we understand the frustrations and inconveniences of finding good suppliers who consistently have what is needed at good prices,” according to the website.

The company requires buyers to certify, among other things, that they are at least 21 years old, have never been convicted of a misdemeanor domestic violence charge or other crime and have “not been adjudicated as a mental defective” or “committed to any mental institution.” (Under federal law, people over 18 years of age can purchase rifle ammunition, 21 years old for handgun ammo .)

Other firms list a wide range of ammo for sale, though several say they are having a tough time filling rising demand, presumably from customers concerned that Congress might impose new restrictions in light of the Newtown slayings. Calls and emails to several of the online dealers were not returned.

The price for .223 bullets, the size fired by the semiautomatic rifle used in the Newtown shootings, can be bought for as little as $400 for 1,000-rounds. High-capacity magazines start at about $28, though they can cost much more depending on the manufacturer and the number of rounds they hold. Some sellers throw in free shipping and offer other discounts and promotions.

Although the online dealers don’t appear to have their own lobbying organization in Washington, some have been contributing to an NRA fund called the National Endowment for the Protection of the Second Amendment .

MidwayUSA, a Missouri company, began a program in 1992 that asks customers to “round up” the total of each order to the nearest dollar or higher. Other dealers signed on and together have funneled some $9.5 million to the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, a lobbying arm, according to the company’s website. MidwayUSA did not respond to requests for comment.

In December, MidwayUSA announced that contributions topped $1 million for 2012, the most since the round-up program started. That drew a note of thanks from NRA official Chris Cox, according to the company’s website. 

“With the reelection of President Obama, America can bank on more attempts to diminish our freedom and constant legal challenges to the Second Amendment,” said Cox. “This significant support is coming at a time of great need.”

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision unleashed nearly $1 billion in new political spending in the 2012 election, with media outlets and a small number of political consulting firms raking in the bulk of the proceeds.

Spending records released by the Federal Election Commission show that throughout the 2012 election, corporations, unions and individuals that could take advantage of the high court’s ruling were responsible for about $933 million of the estimated $6 billion spent during the contest.

Nearly two-thirds of the new money — about $611 million — went to 10 political consulting firms, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis. All but one of the top 10 recipients bought advertising in various media markets on behalf of super PACs and nonprofits. Eighty-nine percent of the expenditures made to the top 10 went to spots attacking candidates, the data show.

“For some in the industry, it has been a definite boon,” said Dale Emmons, president of the American Association of Political Consultants. “This election appears to have set a new benchmark on the amount of money that could be spent, because there were no limits on what could be spent.”

The 2010 Citizens United decision and a lower-court ruling allowed unlimited donations to super PACs and nonprofits, independent groups that used the funds primarily to fund ad campaigns.

Media buyers keep only a fraction of the total spending — usually 15 percent, according to Federal Communications Commission records, with the rest going to media outlets.

The winners

The top recipient of independent spending among media buyers was Mentzer Media Services, the Towson, Md.-based media placement firm run by longtime GOP consultant Bruce Mentzer.

Mentzer attracted nearly $204 million from conservative super PACs and other outside groups. In a tough year for Republicans, only 26 percent of the candidates who were supposed to benefit from the ads won their races, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis.

The firm was the preferred vendor for the pro-Mitt Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, which paid Mentzer nearly $132 million to purchase air time in presidential battleground states.

A Mentzer employee who answered the phone declined to comment on the firm’s involvement in the 2012 election.

Second was Crossroads Media, which was paid about $163 million to buy media time for conservative super PACs and nonprofits in 2012. The firm is run by Michael Dubke, the former president of Americans for Job Security — a pro-Republican nonprofit and one of Crossroads’ top clients.

Waterfront Strategies, which worked for Democratic groups, ranked third, at $81 million.

Democratic-aligned Mundy Katowitz Media, fourth on the list, was the preferred vendor for the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action, placing more than $57 million in television ads for the group.

American Media & Advocacy Group, a favorite of conservative groups, ranked No. 5 at $27 million.

Target Enterprises — a Los Angeles-based media buyer for conservative super PACs — was paid $17 million, ranking it No. 6. The firm had a dismal success rate, coming in dead last among firms catering to super PACs and nonprofits. Seven percent of its preferred candidates won on Nov. 6.

A woman who answered the phone at Target Enterprises Tuesday said both principals of the company were “mid-flight” and unavailable for comment.

The Center analyzed FEC data compiled by the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics. The $933 million in spending came from super PACs, nonprofits, and to a lesser extent, “527” organizations that were the favorite independent spending vehicle in past elections.

FEC coordination law a ‘joke’

The Citizens United decision opened a huge new potential market for consultants, but there was a catch. Consultants who work for candidates — but also work for “independent” groups that support those same candidates — have to be careful.

The high court’s decision did not affect the ban on donations to candidates from corporations and unions, nor did it affect contribution limits from individuals. Instead, it focused on spending by independent groups, unaffiliated with candidates.

As long as super PACs act independently of the candidate, there is no danger of corruption, the high court reasoned.

But sometimes the separation between the campaign and the like-minded super PAC or nonprofit can be hard to discern.

Waterfront Strategies, for example, in its FEC filings lists the same address as GMMB — a well-known Democratic media consulting firm and the preferred vendor for President Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns.

Waterfront was the beneficiary of $81 million paid by some of the biggest Democratic outside spending groups — including Majority PAC, a super PAC backing Democrats running for Senate, and the League of Conservation Voters.

The Huffington Post reported that Waterfront is an internal branch of GMMB. It was incorporated in Delaware, and its president is listed as Raelynn Olson, GMMB's managing partner.

Both Waterfront and its parent company, GMMB, worked to elect Democrat Richard Carmona in his unsuccessful bid for Arizona’s open U.S. Senate seat. Majority PAC hired Waterfront to purchase airtime for ads supporting Carmona and attacking his Republican opponent, then-Rep. and now Sen. Jeff Flake. Carmona’s campaign hired GMMB for its ad buys in the same race.

One Majority PAC ad used the same childhood photo of Carmona that was featured in an official Carmona campaign ad.

GMMB did not reply to requests for comment.

Setting up spinoffs is more about “optics” than skirting coordination rules, said Paul S. Ryan, senior counsel for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.

Under current law, as long as a firm assigns each client separate consultants — and those two don’t coordinate their activities — that constitutes a satisfactory firewall, according to Ryan.

“That’s a pretty ridiculous and modest constraint on campaign coordination,” Ryan said.

Texas two-step

American Media & Advocacy, which also has no website, received nearly $27 million to buy media for super PACs and other outside groups.

The organization worked for the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC that paid for ads attacking Pete Gallego, a Democrat who defeated Republican Francisco Canseco in the race for  U.S. House of Representatives in Texas’ 23rd District. The firm also worked for Canseco’s campaign.

Records show that at least one of American Media’s buyers purchased media in the San Antonio market for both the Congressional Leadership Fund and the Canseco campaign.

Records show that American Media shares an Alexandria address with the high-profile, bipartisan consulting group Purple Strategies. Purple Strategies failed to respond to the Center’s repeated inquiries about any affiliation that it might have with American Media & Advocacy Group.

American Media and Advocacy is “well aware of the FEC coordination rules, including the common vendor rules,” said Jim Kahl, the group’s attorney, “and they have procedures in place to comply with them.”

In Ohio, American Media & Advocacy Group was paid by the Congressional Leadership Fund to purchase ads slamming Democrat Betty Sutton in the House race for District 16. American Media was also working for Sutton’s Republican opponent, Rep. Jim Renacci.

The same person was listed in records as buying media in the Cleveland market — at the same TV station in at least one case — for both the Renacci campaign and the Congressional Leadership Fund.

Candidates and super PACs can avoid charges of coordination altogether by sending up smoke signals in cyberspace.

For example, one of Target’s top clients was Freedom PAC, a super PAC that paid the firm nearly $3.4 million for ad buys supporting Rep. Connie Mack, the unsuccessful Republican candidate in the Florida Senate race.

Freedom PAC released an ad containing some of the same footage that was on the Mack campaign’s YouTube channel.

Under FEC coordination rules, campaign committees and the outside groups that boost their candidates may share material as long as it is publicly available.

“It’s a pretty big joke that anyone would really believe that these groups are truly independent from the candidates,” Ryan said. “They’re not.”

On October 26, 2011, the Illinois legislature passed a bill that authorized construction of a multi-billion-dollar smart grid and reshaped how utility companies seek approval for raising electricity rates. Consumer groups opposed the measure, saying it was a handout to utilities.

But the final blow for opponents came three months later when former state Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who had pushed the bill through the legislature only to resign after winning its passage, registered his own lobbying firm and signed his first clients. Prominent among them: Commonwealth Edison, one of the state’s largest utilities.

“It’s hard to believe that there wasn’t a quid pro quo for this,” said Scott Musser, an Illinois lobbyist for AARP, which opposed the bill.

McCarthy declined to comment. And despite the potential conflict of interest, his move seems to have been in full compliance with state ethics laws. In Illinois and 14 other states, there aren’t any laws preventing legislators from resigning one day and registering as lobbyists the next, according to data compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Most other states impose “cooling off” periods of one or two years during which legislators or government officials are restricted from lobbying or taking certain private-sector jobs. But a review by the State Integrity Investigation found that in several of those states, including Florida, Indiana and Utah, to name a few, the rules are riddled with loopholes, narrowly written or loosely enforced.

And so in many states, it is simply common practice for lawmakers and other officials to cash in on their expertise and connections by lobbying or consulting for the private sector immediately after leaving office. Ethics experts say this “revolving door” erodes public trust in government and corrupts policy-making.

In the most egregious cases, legislators or regulators have written laws or set policy that helps a business or industry with whom they have been negotiating for a job once they leave office. Some states do not ban this practice.

“It smells bad, I guess is about the nicest way I can say it,” said Peggy Kerns, director of the Center for Ethics in Government at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Need for balance

Even advocates of stricter revolving-door laws caution that a balance must be struck. A complete ban on post-employment lobbying or overly restrictive laws preventing other private-sector work could discourage qualified people from serving in public office and unfairly penalize them for their work. The issue can be particularly complicated at the state level, where many legislatures meet for just a few months a year and pay lawmakers modest salaries. Those calling for stronger laws generally support one- or two-year cooling off periods.

But in the absence of such temporary bans, ethics experts say the revolving door between government and the private sector helps elevate the interests of wealthy private clients above those of the public.

“Legislators build up relationships with one another,” said Jason Kander, Missouri’s new secretary of state, who pushed unsuccessfully for ethics reforms as a state legislator. “It’s one thing when that working relationship is beneficial to your constituents — that’s how the process is supposed to work. But when that relationship becomes beneficial to paid interests, that’s when you cross the ethical line.”

From legislator to lobbyist

In 2003, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed an ethics reform bill that placed limits on post-government employment for certain public officials. The law prevents officials from taking a job if they oversaw a contract with their potential employer while in government. The reform came after the administrator of the Illinois Gaming Board started working for Harrah’s casino immediately after resigning from office in 2003. But the law does not prevent a legislator from sponsoring a bill that benefits a company and then resigning in order to work for the firm.

McCarthy’s case was perhaps the most dramatic example of this, but he is not alone. Over the past year, several other lawmakers have stepped down to begin lobbying careers. In a March editorial, the Chicago Tribune wrote that  legislators should “be embarrassed” by the common practice.

The Senate sponsor of the electrical utility bill, Mike Jacobs, is the son of a former legislator who now lobbies for ComEd, the utility, among other clients. ComEd also hired Rep. Marlow Colvin, who had actually proposed another piece of legislation that the utility opposed, after he resigned in March. Colvin told an Illinois newspaper he had been talking with ComEd about the position for months before his retirement. Another representative stepped down in November and will head the Illinois Petroleum Council, an industry lobbying group.

“It’s akin to insider trading,” said David Morrison, deputy director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, a good-government group. Morrison said companies that can afford to hire former legislators as lobbyists gain an advantage when promoting their interests in the capital.

The other states without laws restricting legislators’ post-government employment are Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming. Some states have different rules for members of the legislative and executive branches. Missouri, for example, does impose restrictions on executive officials. Lawmakers in Michigan are prohibited from lobbying immediately if they resign before the end of a session, but are free to lobby once a new session begins.

Resigning early

As Illinois shows, some outgoing legislators resign early rather than serve their full terms. The move usually has little effect on governance as long as the session has ended (most legislatures meet for only part of the year). But in North Carolina, the timing can help circumnavigate the state’s six-month cooling off period.

Harold Brubaker, a Republican who had been speaker of the House when the party controlled the legislature in the 1990s, ended his long legislative career by resigning last July after the session ended. “You know when it’s time to go,” he said in a statement at the time. But the statement also mentioned that he planned to begin lobbying. By stepping down in July, Brubaker will be eligible to lobby his former colleagues as soon as the next legislative session begins, later this month. 

Brubaker did not respond to requests for comment.

In September, a local Republican group held an event to honor Brubaker and several legislators attended, including Speaker Thom Tillis, who presented him with an award. A local paper reported that Brubaker’s acceptance speech included one request for his former colleagues. “Just remember one thing,” Brubaker said, “When I come visit you in the future, just say ‘Yes.’”

The move shows that North Carolina’s six-month cooling off period, which advocates won only after a hard battle in 2005, is “badly in need of change,” said Jane Pinsky, who heads the North Carolina Coalition for Lobbying and Government Reform. State Sen. Richard Stevens stepped down in September and announced he would join a Raleigh law firm, though he said he wasn’t sure whether he would lobby the legislature. Such moves “undermine confidence in state government,” Pinsky said.

As for Brubaker, by resigning early he was also able to straddle the line with his campaign funds. Lobbyists are barred from making campaign contributions in North Carolina, but there’s nothing saying a future lobbyist can’t. Brubaker still had about $37,000 left in his campaign account when he announced his intentions, according to campaign finance records, and about six weeks later he sent $6,800 to three former colleagues.

Narrow rules

Most states do have laws limiting what type of private work public officials can immediately turn to after leaving office, even beyond restrictions on lobbying. But in some states the laws are so narrow or are interpreted so loosely that good-government groups say they fail to prevent many conflicts of interest.

In Indiana, for example, a post-employment rule prohibits officials in the executive branch from taking certain jobs within a year of leaving office and bans for life work on matters they “substantially participated” in while in office. In a 2010 report, TheIndianapolis Business Journal examined 27 cases since 2006 and found that the state Ethics Commission enforced the one-year cooling off period in only three of those cases. The commission allowed all the rest to begin their next job immediately, though it did limit the officials from working on certain contracts in 12 cases. Two budget directors, for example, were allowed to work for companies even though they voted on the issuance of bonds involving those companies while in office.

The Journal report was spurred by a revolving-door scandal that led to fines, resignations and even an indictment that is still not settled. In September 2010, Scott Storms left his job as a lawyer and administrative law judge for the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission to work for Duke Energy, which had been negotiating with the commission over the construction of a cutting-edge coal-powered plant and the deployment of a smart-grid system.

A consumer group raised alarm over the move, and it soon emerged that Storms had conducted hearings involving Duke in the days after the company had offered him a job, in July of 2010. Duke put Storms on leave and Gov. Mitch Daniels fired David Lott Hardy, Storms’s boss at the utility commission, after it became clear that Hardy had known of the Duke dealings. After a complaint was brought, the same Ethics Commission that had allowed Storms to go to Duke ended up fining him $12,000 and barring him from future state employment, ruling that Storms had violated conflict of interest rules by working on matters involving Duke while negotiating with the company for a job. Storms denied wrongdoing. Hardy is now awaiting trial on charges of misconduct over the case.

However, the Ethics Commission did not find Storms to have violated the post-employment rule. While he did oversee issues involving Duke, Storms did not directly regulate the company or issue contracts.

“I’m not going to say the words ‘there’s nothing wrong with it,’” said David Thomas, the state’s inspector general, who investigates ethics issues in the executive branch. But, he added, “The post-employment rule wasn’t violated.”

TheIndianapolis Star said in an August 2011 editorial that the scandal revealed a “pervasive pattern of intimacy between regulatory officers” and Duke, adding that the arrangements were, “unjustifiable by any measure of common sense.”

IG Thomas says his office has effectively enforced the law, pointing to 47 cases in which his office, which staffs the Ethics Commission, has issued 117 restrictions since the revolving-door law was enacted in 2005. He said that accusations that his office is too lenient indicate a misunderstanding of the law, which he says imposes a one-year waiting period only if an employee was directly regulating a company or involved in issuing contracts. In a report to the state legislature last year, Thomas recommended against making the revolving-door law more restrictive, pointing to a 2010 federal court ruling that struck down Ohio’s cooling off period as too broad.

Julia Vaughn, policy director for Common Cause Indiana, disagrees. She said the attitude that led to the Storms scandal has continued throughout the Daniels administration. “This does go all the way to the top,” she said. “It reveals a conspiracy to just get around these laws, that they were considered an inconvenience and that they stood in the way of people who wanted to use their public influence for private gain.”

Last summer, Purdue University’s board of trustees, most of whom Daniels had appointed, named him the next university president. The inspector general’s office said the move would not violate ethics laws. But Vaughn and others have said the case presents clear conflicts of interest and shows the weakness of the state’s laws and the Ethics Commission.

“It’s been a rubber stamp agency for a long time,” Vaughn said. “The law’s only as good as the enforcement of it.”

The Daniels administration declined to comment for this story, referring questions to the inspector general. But after a Democratic lawmaker filed an ethics complaint in response to Daniels’ appointment as Purdue president, a spokeswoman for the governor called it “partisan nonsense.” 

Loopholes abound

Even where laws on post-government lobbying exist and are enforced, outgoing public officials have found ways to comply while violating the spirit, government watchdog groups argue. In many cases, lawmakers are prevented from registering as lobbyists for a certain time frame but not from working in an office full of lobbyists and advising them.

“I think that’s a slippery area that needs to be closed,” said Kerns, of the Center for Ethics in Government. “I don’t think any public official should have any kind of a job from a lobbying firm.”

Florida has a two-year cooling off period during which ex-legislators cannot lobby their former colleagues. But this hasn’t stopped them from working for lobbying firms or from lobbying the executive branch. According to the Orlando Sentinel, at least eight former speakers of the Florida House went on to lobby after leaving the legislature. One of them, John Thrasher, pulled in $1.6 million as a lobbyist in 2008, according to the Sentinel, compared to a state lawmaker’s salary of just under $30,000 a year (Thrasher subsequently returned to government as a state senator).

The most recent example is Dean Cannon, who formed his own firm even before leaving office in November, though the firm is not yet registered to lobby. In order to comply with state law, Cannon has said he will focus on lobbying the executive branch and working as a consultant to local governments on political and legislative strategies. His colleague and predecessor as speaker, Larry Cretul, will handle the firm’s legislative lobbying.

The arrangement has led some to question the law’s effectiveness. Cannon was a strong ally of the Orlando-Orange County Expressway Authority, for example, as it fought last session against a proposal that would have consolidated the agency with several others. Before he left office, the authority invited Cannon to a November meeting to help the agency prepare for the next legislative session. A spokeswoman for the agency told the Sentinel that her company invited Cannon as the outgoing speaker, but by the time the meeting occurred he had already announced he would soon be lobbying. He has also acknowledged he is seeking a lobbying contract with the authority.

The episode prompted the Sentinel to question Florida’s revolving-door law, and its enforcement, in a November editorial. “Floridians can’t be blamed,” the paper wrote, “for wondering if senators and representatives are making decisions to serve the public interest or to please potential employers.”

On Tuesday, the Senate Ethics Committee began work on a sweeping ethics reform bill that could prevent similar moves in the future, either by expanding the cooling off period to include executive branch lobbying or by preventing lawmakers from accepting any work for a firm that lobbies the legislature. 

The loophole that allows legislators to work for lobbying firms even applies while they are still in office. One of the side effects of having a part-time legislature, as Florida and nearly all states do, is that many lawmakers often have more lucrative work on the side. According to a report published in July by Integrity Florida, a nonprofit that pushes for ethics reform, 11 lawmakers in the state reported earning money from firms engaged in lobbying in the 2012 session.

Utah’s law, passed in 2009, contains perhaps the biggest loophole. While it bans lawmakers from lobbying for one year after leaving office, it exempts anyone lobbying for themselves or for a business they are associated with, as long as lobbying is not the business’ primary activity. In 2009, a governor’s commission recommended closing the loophole, but a 2010 effort to do just that failed to pass the state House.

Term limits

Some academics and watchdog groups argue that term limits, which several states have enacted over the past two decades, effectively force more legislators into lobbying jobs. Voters in Michigan approved term limits in 1992, restricting members of the state House to three two-year terms and senators and statewide officials to two four-year terms.

In October, the Detroit Free Press tracked the careers of 291 officials elected from 1992-2004 and found that 71 of them, or nearly one-quarter, ended up either registering as lobbyists or working as consultants or paid advocates. Two former chairs of a House energy committee went to work for utility companies. In the 2009-2010 session, Rep. Kathy Angerer sponsored a bill that would have imposed a two-year cooling off period. The bill failed, however, and Angerer joined AT&T as a lobbyist after the session ended.

Florida’s Dean Cannon was limited by term limits, and some proponents of stronger revolving-door laws blame term limits for worsening the revolving door  in Missouri and Nebraska as well.

Reforms

Legislators are often reluctant to limit their own options for earning a living. Rep. Jennifer Weiss, a North Carolina Democrat who did not run for re-election in 2012, learned this firsthand when she was part of a group that helped pass the state’s revolving-door law.

“I had wanted a year all along,” Weiss said, but the group met with too much resistance from legislators on both sides of the aisle, she added, and had to settle for a six-month cooling off period. “People wanted to be able to leave the legislature and lobby, to be blunt.”

Similar efforts have failed over the past few years in Idaho, Michigan, Missouri and Illinois, to name a few. Morrison of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform said his group compromised by pushing for a six-month cooling off period rather than a year, but the initiative has made no progress.

Morrison said Illinois’ laws are effective at slowing the revolving door for executive branch officials. And Weiss stressed that a six-month period is better than nothing. While most states do impose some limits, ethics experts say that laws should not completely restrict lawmakers or other officials from moving to the private sector.

“They need something else to do,” said George Connor, a professor of political science at Missouri State University.

Still, Connor said, loose laws in Missouri allow a pervasive revolving-door culture. The state’s outgoing speaker of the House, Steven Tilley, resigned last summer and immediately began a new career in political consulting and lobbying, a step that Connor said has a corrosive effect on governance. “These kinds of relationships cause people to lose sight of the public interest,” he said.

One of Tilley’s last moves as speaker was to appoint a “blue-ribbon” committee tasked with generating ideas for updating the state’s highway system. Tilley, who did not respond to requests for comment, appointed Rod Jetton, a former speaker and now marketing director of a Missouri engineering firm, as co-chair. Also named to the committee was Thomas Dunne, the outgoing chairman and CEO of Fred Weber, Inc., a highway construction company and also one of the first clients that Tilley signed after leaving office.

“It’s the smell test,” Connor said. “That smells bad.”

The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges is voicing concern over the push to put armed police or guards into American schools following the Newtown school massacre of 20 first-graders and six staff last December.

On Tuesday, the Reno, Nev.-based group posted an excerpt of a letter sent to Vice President Biden, who has been leading a month-long effort to gather ideas for more effective gun restrictions and improved school safety. The White House is reportedly poised to reveal some recommendations Wednesday at a midday press conference.

In its letter to Biden, the NCJFCJ expressed strong misgivings about the prospect of communities putting armed guards in schools – which could become even more likely if federal dollars are offered to help schools make that choice.

Published reports indicated Biden’s task force was considering such a plan, which has also been pushed by Sen. Barbara Boxer, a liberal Democrat from California. In addition, the National Rifle Association has been vocal in its backing of armed security in the nation’s schools.   

Echoing concerns by civil-rights and juvenile-justice advocates, the NCJFCJ warns in its letter than an expansive police presence in schools can lead to unintended and negative consequences. The judges’ group argues that the posting of police officers to ensure safety has in the past led to misguided crackdowns on kids.

The letter notes that many counties across the country saw an upsurge in arrests of minors for modest indiscretions after districts began deploying police on campuses during the 1990s. The increased police presence on campuses has not improved school safety, the judges’ organization argues, while asserting that graduation rates in some of these schools have fallen. Some students’ futures have been jeopardized, the judges say, by early introduction into the criminal-justice system.   

“The influx of police in schools has been one of the main contributors to the growing number of children funneled into this pipeline,” the letter to Biden says. “Research shows that aggressive security measures produce alienation and mistrust among students which, in turn, can disrupt the learning environment. Such restrictive environments may actually lead to violence, thus jeopardizing, instead of promoting, school safety.”

The NCJFCJ’s letter was signed by its president, Judge Michael Nash, who is the Los Angeles County Juvenile Court’s presiding judge.

The letter refers to the 75-year-old NCJFCJ as one is a nation’s oldest and largest judicial membership organizations. Members study and recommend methods for improving juvenile-justice practices and advise more than 30,000 juvenile-justice professionals.

Nash, along with other juvenile court judges, has been an enthusiastic participant in a push  to reform school-discipline practices in Los Angeles and elsewhere, in part by reducing the use of police officers at schools. 

He was interviewed by the Center for Public Integrity for a recent series of stories about the deployment of school police in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the area’s largest. Officers in the California district, data analysis showed, were ticketing thousands of mostly low-income Latino and black students annually for alleged conduct ranging from tardiness to school-yard fights.

In March, the NCJFCJ took an official position that discipline practices had grown too harsh in a some regions across the country, resulting in too much police involvement and too many students sent to court for relatively minor misbehavior.   

In July, the NCJFCJ began a national project to reduce school expulsions and promote new ways to keep students engaged in school.

“Any proposal to place more armed personnel in school,” the letter says, “would be counterproductive to the success of this project.”

In conclusion, Nash’s letter invites Biden to contact the group. The judges, the letter says, are “committed to remain involved in ongoing conversations to craft solutions to enhance student safety while promoting student school involvement and success.”

Last Friday, the Washington, D.C.-based Advancement Project and several other organizations involved in school-discipline reform released a report also expressing concerns about putting police in schools in response to the Newtown shootings. The Advancement Project has also begun a petition drive to oppose financing armed guards in schools.

After a number of its representatives met with aides to Biden and President Obama, the National Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Coalition also issued a series of recommendations for a “comprehensive” approach aimed at keeping children safe from gun violence.  

“Across the country, people are searching for answers,” the Washington, D.C.-based coalition says in its recommendations. “The NJJDPC views this as a critical moment to invest more broadly in the true safety of proven strategies, not in the false sense of security of arming teachers or increasing police presence in every school. It is our view that true safety will not result from having more guns in schools or other places where youth congregate.”

The coalition includes the Campaign for Youth Justice, the National Juvenile Defender Center and the Center for Children’s Law and Policy.

The Newtown children and teachers and other staff were gunned down by a disturbed local man who shot his way into the school with semi-automatic weapons belonging to his mother.

The National Rifle Association, in response to the shooting, has offered to train staff at schools in communities that decide to arm teachers or other employees who are designated to protect students in the event of an attack.

In the meantime, some communities are already taking action unilaterally. 

The small Montpelier school district in rural northeast Ohio, for example, has decided to pay for training four employees – who are not teachers -- who have agreed to carry their own guns inside the district’s one building. About 1,000 students are enrolled in kindergarten through high school. Legislators in various states, including South Carolina and Oklahoma, are considering legislation to allow teachers or other staff to have guns inside schools.

And in Arizona, the Associated Press reported, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio – who has been investigated for allegedly violating the civil rights of Hispanics – plans to post armed volunteers on the perimeters of schools.