If you’re curious about what I used to do as a PR guy for the health insurance industry, how I often took facts and figures and twisted them to advance a specific political or financial agenda, take a look at the behavior of some members of Congress last week.

Like I used to do, they took numbers in a report from a government agency — in this case the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office — and twisted their meaning to suggest something never intended by the report’s authors. Like I used to do, they misled the public with statistics to advance their team’s ultimate agenda, which, of course, is to win votes in November. And if getting people to vote against their own best interests means making comments that not only are dishonest but also contradict what they’ve said previously, so be it.

I have to wonder if, also like my former me, they have trouble sleeping at night.

At issue is a section of the CBO’s 10-year budget and economic outlook, which was released last Tuesday. The agency’s economists updated their previous estimates that 800,000 fewer Americans might be working in 2017 because of the Affordable Care Act than would have been the case if Congress had not passed the law. The economists now believe that the number might actually be closer to 2 million and maybe 2.5 million by 2024.

The CBO never suggested that those jobs would be “lost” or that hundreds of thousands or millions of people would be laid off because of Obamacare. Rather, the law is expected to reduce the labor participation rate, meaning that many people will choose of their own free will not to stay in jobs because they need the health insurance.

Over the years, both Democrats and Republicans have pledged to support efforts to eliminate what has come to be known as “job lock,” a phenomenon unique to the U.S. employer-based health insurance system. What “job lock” means is that people stay in jobs they often hate, usually at big corporations, out of fear that they might not be able to find affordable coverage if they quit, even to take a job at a smaller company.

For decades, big employers that provide health coverage in this country have had an advantage over smaller employers that can’t afford to offer subsidized benefits. They’ve been able to attract workers who might prefer to work for a small business — or start a business of their own — but decide against it solely because of health insurance.

And in a system like ours in which millions of people every year lose their health insurance when they get laid off, big employers to a large extent have been the ultimate deciders when it comes to who will be able to keep their health insurance and who will lose it.

As a consequence, most of us with employer-based coverage have always been just one layoff away from joining the ranks of the uninsured. Millions of us join those ranks every year because our employers decide our services are no longer needed.

As Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the 2012 GOP vice-presidential nominee, said during the Congressional debate on health care reform in 2009, “the key question that ought to be addressed in any health care reform legislation, is are we going to continue job lock, or are we going to allow individuals more choice and portability to fit the 21st century workforce?”

The Affordable Care Act, by changing the health insurance marketplace to make it more consumer-friendly and a little less insurance company-friendly, essentially does exactly what Ryan said should be health reform’s most important goal: it ends job lock.

But last week, after the CBO report was released, Ryan — surprise! — changed his tune. He suggested that Obamacare was encouraging people "not to get on the ladder of life, to begin working, getting the dignity of work, getting more opportunities, rising the income, joining the middle class."

Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina tweeted: “Obamacare will cost our nation about 2.5 million jobs and increase the deficit by $1 trillion.”

The next day, CBO director Doug Elmendorf said in testimony before the House Budget Committee, which Ryan chairs, that Obamacare critics were misrepresenting the data.

“The reason we don’t use the term ‘lost jobs’ is there is a critical difference between people who like to work and can’t find a job — or have a job that’s lost for reasons beyond their control — and people who choose not to work,” he said.

Despite Elmendorf’s clarification, and the Obama administration’s efforts to set the record straight, we can expect the spin to continue. Don’t be surprised to see campaign ads later this year saying that Obamacare will cost 2.5 million jobs, with the CBO cited as the source.

And you can expect millions of Americans to be influenced by the intentional misrepresentation of facts and figures during the next election. But don’t expect those politicians purposely twisting the record to lose any sleep over it.

American Crossroads, the conservative super PAC behemoth that slumbered through 2013, is awakening.

In recent days, the group has spent more than $187,000 on negative advertisements targeting Democrats, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of filings with the Federal Election Commission.

Of that sum, about $137,000 went toward television ads critical of John Walsh, the Montana Democrat who will be sworn into office Tuesday to replace Max Baucus, the veteran legislator who the Senate last week confirmed as the next U.S. ambassador to China.

Another $50,000 funded mailings opposing Alex Sink, the Democrat running in the March 11 special election in Florida’s 13th Congressional District. Politicohas reported that TV ads are also in the works. The seat has been vacant since the death in October of Republican Rep. Bill Young.

American Crossroads, co-founded in 2010 by GOP strategists Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, has vowed to help the GOP wrest control of the U.S. Senate away from Democrats in November and expand the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

To gain a Senate majority this fall, Republicans need to pick up six new seats, and the contest in Montana could be one of the determining races.

Ahead of the 2010 and 2012 elections, American Crossroads used its vast financial resources to boost its favored candidates and attack Democrats.

It was the top-spending super PAC during the 2010 midterm elections, at roughly $22 million. And during the 2012 election cycle, it spent about $105 million — more than every other super PAC, with the exception of pro-Mitt Romney group Restore Our Future.

Crossroads GPS — a controversial nonprofit group affiliated with American Crossroads — has also been a major attack dog against Democrats.

In 2013, American Crossroads did not directly fund any political advertisements, although it did transfer $53,000 to another super PAC that backed Republican Gabriel Gomez during a special U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts.

Heading into 2014, American Crossroads reported about $2.7 million in the bank. Its largest donor last year included Contran Corp., the company of Texas billionaire Harold Simmons who died in December, which gave $1 million. Coal industry executive Joe Craft gave $500,000 through a trust.

John Walsh, the Montana Democrat who was sworn in as a U.S. senator today, is following in predecessor Max Baucus' footsteps by embracing legislation designed to make campaign funding more transparent.

Like Baucus before him, Walsh plans to co-sponsor the Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, the Center for Public Integrity has learned. The bill requires senators and Senate candidates to electronically file their campaign finance disclosures with the Federal Election Commission. Its main sponsor is fellow Montanan Jon Tester, who is also a Democrat.

"Montanans expect and deserve transparency, accountability and responsibility from those who represent them in Congress," Walsh said in a statement.

Baucus was recently tapped by President Barack Obama to be the next U.S. ambassador to China.

Electronic filing of campaign finance documents is already mandatory for House members, House candidates, presidential candidates and political action committees.

But senators are exempt: They still file their reports on paper with the office of the Secretary of the State, which, in turn, sends the materials to the FEC, which hires a contractor to key in the data.

E-filing would save taxpayers about $500,000 a year, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.

Walsh has already shown a propensity to voluntarily e-file his reports with the FEC, submitting his fourth-quarter campaign finance documents with the agency last week. And he plans to continue to do so, said Lauren Smith, his spokeswoman.

In doing so, Walsh will be joining a growing number of incumbent senators who have adopted the practice of voluntarily e-filing the reports.

Walsh has been the favorite of national Democrats to fill the opening created when Baucus announced his intention to retire, rather than seek re-election, last April.

Walsh, the state's lieutenant governor and former adjutant general of the Montana National Guard, kicked off a Senate bid in October. He was running for the spot against several Democratic primary candidates, including former Lt. Gov. John Bohlinger, who has said he will probably end his campaign now that Walsh has been appointed to office.

Freshman Rep. Steve Daines is expected to be the GOP contender in what could be one of the most competitive U.S. Senate races this year.

Walsh raised $583,000 during the fourth-quarter of 2013 and ended the year with about $436,000 in the bank, according to his most recent campaign finance filing. For his part, Daines ended the year with about $1.9 million in his campaign war chest.

When the Texas Juvenile Justice Department released a report in June 2013 recommending the closure of the Corsicana Residential Treatment Facility, the authors presented an arresting image. The campus in Corsicana, Texas, they wrote, “continues to pose a risk to the vulnerable youth population it serves as hazardous debris and glass are continually unearthed after rain or strong winds.” The roughly 90 youths at the facility, most of whom had been diagnosed with severe mental illnesses and who had committed crimes, were using the glass and debris to "harm themselves." Many of the buildings, the authors noted, "warrant complete replacement."

When Corsicana was finally emptied by the Texas Legislature in December 2013, many in the world of juvenile justice reform already viewed the facility as dangerous and unsalvageable. A federal Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that in 2008, 23 percent of Corsicana inmates reported having had sexual relations with staff. Violence was up as well; in 2012, the facility was responsible for 32 percent of all violent incidents in the juvenile justice agency, despite housing only 10 percent of the agency’s youths.

A pristine set of buildings

It hadn't always been this way. The “hazardous debris and glass” had once belonged to a pristine set of buildings in this county seat 55 miles south if Dallas, where for decades the state’s orphans had received a free education and learned vocational skills while churning butter, eating pork chops and rotating various household chores.

Over the last 124 years, ever since it was founded by an 1887 bill in the Texas Legislature as the Texas Orphan Asylum, this facility’s particular history has followed broader trends in juvenile issues. As the nation turned to incarceration, the facility grew, only to shrink as the country turned back to community programs. The abuses found at Corsicana could be found in many other places across the United States. But so could the positive stories, as agencies clambered to respond to federal scrutiny. As the country changed, and its approach to juvenile justice changed, so did Corsicana, mirroring the country's treatment of its youngest and most vulnerable population.

When the facility opened in 1889, it housed 54 orphans and dependent children on a 200-acre campus of tree lined walkways and grand brick buildings. The numbers grew quickly: 400 by the turn of the century, 890 as the Great Depression began in 1932.

“People couldn’t take care of their children and they’d just leave them,” explained Dr. Tommy Stringer, a local historian and an administrator at Navarro College. “Sometimes they’d come back and sometimes they didn’t.”

The numbers dropped again in the 1940s, but according to records studied by historians James Markham and William T. Field, in 1948 the facility had “twenty-one brick structures and a number of small frame cottages, barns, and outbuildings on 417 acres.” The home operated as its own independent school district, and taught youths vocational skills ranging from cosmetology to mechanics to printing to agriculture. The youths helped operate a broom factory, sorghum mill, farm, dairy, laundry, cannery, store, power plant, bakery, kitchen and hospital.

Robert Calvert, who later became the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, lived at Corsicana after his father died and his mother, who couldn’t care for him, dropped him off one day. Calvert was 7 years old. In a 1972 oral history interview with Baylor University, he remembered that kids taken to the home spent a couple of weeks in quarantine. Once out, they were put in a chore rotation. Calvert chopped wood for the kitchen’s wood-burning stove. He churned butter. And for more than a year he tended to the hogs, on one occasion delivering a sow’s babies. “I’m probably one of the few people in the world that was ever midwife to a sow,” he said with a laugh.

Agnes Johns, who was dropped off by her parents in 1942 and graduated from the facility’s high school in 1951, remembers sweeping the floors, and polishing them by having one girl stand on a wool blanket while another dragged her along. “The facility just made a lot of memories,” she says. Sixty years later, Johns still remembers the pork chops: “The best pork chops I ever had in my life.”

Separate systems 

In those days, most of the youths housed at Corsicana were from nearby counties, and the facility was not a part of the Texas juvenile justice system. That system was centered in Gatesville, about 100 miles away, where in the late 1880s the Texas Legislature oversaw the construction of a “House of Correction” for juvenile male offenders, who were seen for the first time as needing an institution separate from the ones housing adults 

While Corsicana’s kids — all of them white—  were farming and taking classes, juvenile lockups were expanding, largely along racial lines. In Texas and nationally, “white reformers did not include black children in the emerging idea of modern childhood,” explains Dr. William Bush in his 2010 book, “Who Gets a Childhood: Race and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth Century Texas.” 

He writes: “Juvenile courts and institutions discriminated against African Americans by allocating fewer resources for their treatment, which had the effect of narrowing the range of options to punitive ones such as incarceration.” Like their adult counterparts, juvenile offenders received little in the way of education programs and worked brutal farm jobs. 

The parallel tracks of state care for youth converged in 1957, when a reorganization brought orphanages and juvenile facilities under same agency, the Texas Youth Council. The merger signaled a turn toward community-based treatment plans for juvenile offenders, as well as the increased use of foster care for state dependents. Students at the orphanage were transferred to the Corsicana Independent School District and the facility became known as the Corsicana State Home.

Nationally, juvenile courts were soon forced by the U.S. Supreme Court — in Kent v. U.S. and In Re Gault — to recognize due process rights not unlike those of adults, including notification of charges, protection against self-incrimination, the right to counsel and the right to confront witnesses. The largest reforms in Texas came with the 1971 case Morales v. Turman, in which Judge William Wayne Justice oversaw massive changes in the treatment of juvenile offenders. There would be no more corporal punishment or extended isolation. All juvenile facilities would be run with a common set of standards. Responding to the case, the Texas Legislature considered shifting toward community programs and other alternatives to confinement.

Changing missions

Although Corsicana still housed non-delinquent, state-dependent children throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the broader trend toward community-based treatment brought on by these changes was mirrored in increased usage of foster care for state-dependent children who would have once filled Corsicana. Texas was following national trends, and with this shift, the facility needed a new mission, a new population on which to focus its resources.

In 1983, the facility became a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed youth, or what one internal report referred to as “‘hard to place’ adolescents.” That year the Texas Youth Council became the Texas Youth Commission (TYC), and though the facility had a new mission, it did not yet have enough youth to actually fulfill its design. 

It didn’t take long. With the erosion of social welfare programs under President Ronald Reagan, the country, and Texas, saw a massive spike in violent youth crime. According to an official TYC history, “the Texas rate for homicides by juveniles was almost twice the national rate … and there was a 285 percent increase in youth committed to TYC for violent offenses.” Texas authorities enacted “blended sentencing,” allowing a juvenile offender to enter adult facilities once they turned 18.

Reflecting the boom in incarceration brought on by the national War on Drugs and criminologist John DiIulio’s popular conception of the juvenile “super-predator,” the country at large and Texas in particular were demanding that violent youths be locked up in the interest of public safety. Critics, according to Bush, the historian, “decried” the term “for fanning the flames of an already extant panic that had caused many state legislatures to pass tougher juvenile sentencing laws.”

By the late 1990s, the numbers resulting from this swing toward fear were simply unmanageable, and Corsicana, equipped to hold roughly 100 youths, overflowed. Large numbers of youths throughout the bulging juvenile justice system were diagnosed with mental illnesses, and most of them were in facilities not explicitly designed or equipped to handle them. TYC had trouble finding and keeping trained staff to look after the statewide locked up juvenile population, which by 2001 had reached more than 5,000. Something would have to give.  

Troubling tales

In 2007, reporter Nate Blakeslee published a landmark article in The Texas Observer outlining sexual misconduct by administrators at the West Texas State School, near Odessa, and the cover-up by Texas Youth Commission authorities. Further investigations by the Texas Rangers, the FBI and other media found that sexual and violent conduct had been condoned to a shocking degree throughout the system, including some 2,000 allegations of staff-on-youth violence between 2003 and 2006 and 60 instances of “suspicious broken bones.” Further investigations found that Corsicana had played a major role in the scandal. In 2008, according to U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 23 percent of Corsicana inmates said they’d had sexual relations with staff.

In another Texas Observer report, by journalist Laura Burke, TYC administrators countered that numerous inmates would make false allegations in order to speak to a psychologist about other issues, or so they could go get a sexual assault exam and “eat hamburgers and cookies.” Corsicana Superintendent Laura Braly also explained that since so many of the Corsicana inmates had mental illnesses and had been sexually victimized since early ages, they were more likely to “interpret everything as being sexual.”

Even still, the agency enacted reforms. In 2010, TYC executive director Cherie Townsend testified to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Review Panel on Prison Rape that Corsicana was trying to improve safety and had “strengthened treatment,” “increased professional development,” “implemented ‘Seeking Safety’ curriculum” and “sealed bathroom doors that are not in use.” TYC facilities were outfitted with more than 10,000 cameras.

“If I'm watching video footage and I see a staff member maybe touch a kid on the arm too much, proximity is maybe too close,” Braly told the panel at a hearing. “That's a red flag for me, and that's something we're going to watch.” Braly instituted town hall meetings among the staff and more intensive screenings for incoming youths.

Those reforms had uneven success. According to data obtained from the Texas Department of Juvenile Justice by The Texas Tribune, Corsicana’s rate of staff-on-youth violence dropped just as “confirmed physical assaults among youths” steadily grew from 17 assaults per 100 youth in 2007 to 54 in 2011. “The Corsicana Residential Treatment Center for youth with serious mental illness has, by far, the highest levels of violent and disruptive behavior in [the Texas Juvenile Justice Department],” wrote Dr. Michele Deitch, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas LBJ School for Public Affairs, in a May 2013 report called “Understanding and Addressing Youth Violence in the Texas Juvenile Justice Department.” “This calls into question not only the safety of youth in the facility but also the effectiveness of the programming taking place there and the appropriateness of this setting for a treatment purpose.”

Although journalists were not allowed to interview inmates and staff, Brandi Grissom spoke with the mother of one Corsicana inmate who had been stabbed twice during his three and a half years there. Other youths stole his food, and the staff did not intervene.

“Corsicana was stymied from the start,” Deitch explains. “There were so many factors” that made the Corsicana facility “not very effective,” including the fact that it was far from an urban center, where more mental health specialists could be called upon, and the fact that “it was an old, rundown place.”

In the wake of the agency-wide scandals, legislators, urged by activists and think tanks, oversaw a shift from large juvenile lockups to the increased use of community-based treatment and rehabilitation programs. These programs focus on keeping juvenile offenders closer to their home communities and in smaller groups. The Corsicana facility had once housed 200 youths, but by 2013 had fewer than 70, and this reflected a statewide decline from nearly 5,000 youths in state-run lockups to roughly 1,200, according to statistics published by the Austin American-Statesman.

As the Legislature increasingly listened to reformers and looked to put more troubled youths in small, community-based programs, it decided that the state could no longer afford to keep open all of its juvenile facilities. Corsicana, with its aging buildings and high rates of violence, was at the top of the list. Local state Rep. Byron Cook argued vehemently to keep the campus open, in part because of the jobs it provided.

In that sense, Corsicana was no different than hundreds of other prisons in rural areas around the country that provide employment for the local population. Those jobs can be hard to replace in such small communities. But in Corsicana, according to Dr. Stringer, the nature of working with mentally ill youths meant that those employed at the institution were particularly committed to their work. “They’d given a lot to that facility,” he said.

At the end of 2013, the youths formerly housed there were transferred to other facilities. It’s being kept open with a skeleton staff, and closure, to many, seems imminent. Deitch and other juvenile justice advocates worry about what will happen to the youths who once populated it. “The real problem is that they don't know what to do with this population,” she says, “and they didn't solve the problem by closing this facility.”

“These kids need to be handled not out in the free world, but in a very different environment than in a correctional setting, a setting more like a hospital than a juvenile prison,” she added.

When the possibility of closure was announced, adults who had once lived at the facility as state-dependent children, and who still hold yearly reunions at the facility’s grounds, objected. They reminded lawmakers that the facility had historical relevance, transcending contemporary policy concerns. “To us it’s hallowed ground,” said Johns, the alumnus. “If they wait a few years, we’ll all be gone and they can do whatever they want.” 

Launching its deepest review yet into a mysterious kidney disease striking Central America, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is organizing three studies exploring the causes of an ailment afflicting thousands of sugarcane workers.

The research will be funded by $1.7 million in contributions from the Central American sugar industry — a setup raising concerns with some about how fully the studies will address the industry’s role in the outbreak. The CDC said it has protocols in place to prevent undue influence.

For more than two years, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has examined how a rare type of chronic kidney disease, CKD, is afflicting agricultural workers along Central America’s Pacific Coast, as well as in Sri Lanka and India. A recent study estimated that the ailment has killed more than 20,000 people in Central America alone.

Most scientists suspect the disease is caused by a combination of factors including chronic dehydration from hard labor in tropical heat and exposure to toxins such as pesticides. Still, experts have yet to fully uncover the origins of a malady that has devastated agricultural communities across Central America.

One village of sugarcane workers near Chichigalpa, Nicaragua, called La Isla, or “The Island,” has lost so many men to the disease it is now known as the “Island of the Widows.”

Ailing Nicaraguan sugarcane workers have staged angry protests, demanding compensation and medical care from sugar companies. Last month, Juan de Dios Cortez, a 48-year-old cane worker, was gunned down by police who forcibly broke up a protest of sick former workers blocking the entrance to a sugar mill in Chichigalpa. Three police officers who fired on the demonstrators were subsequently discharged following an internal investigation by the Nicaraguan National Police.

The bitter dispute over the role of work practices in CKD has fueled growing tensions among the scientists.

Some feel more proof is warranted before conclusions are drawn; others say clear evidence already shows that dehydration experienced on the job is a basic cause of the disease, creating a moral obligation to act.

The question of whether the disease is linked to occupational hazards carries high stakes. That designation could mean improved medical benefits and possible compensation for workers, and the risk of major liability for the industry.

The industry maintains it is not at fault, and said it is open to the review.

“We are fully convinced that there is no direct relationship between CKD and the activities conducted in the sugarcane industry,” said Mario Amador, general manager of Nicaragua’s National Committee of Sugar Producers, one of the groups funding the CDC studies. “A sign of our good faith and our conviction about this is the support we give to scientific studies.”

The team conducting the CDC and industry-backed study will be led by Boston University epidemiologist Daniel Brooks. He previously conducted a study of CKD in Chichigalpa that was organized by the World Bank and funded by the sugar industry as part of a mediation process triggered by a community complaint.

Brooks’ research pointed toward dehydration as a likely culprit, but he has been cautious in describing his results. “The Boston University team believes that the CKD epidemic is caused by a combination of factors,” Brooks said in an email. “Results to date suggest that one or more of these causes are occupational, and more research is needed to identify the specific factors.”

The CDC said in a statement that “we don’t know” if labor practices are to blame.

Brooks and his team will conduct three new studies in partnership with the CDC. One will examine the role of occupational factors in the disease, a second the possibility of a genetic component, and a third the process of early-onset kidney damage among adolescents in the affected areas.

The conflict of interest question

Funding for the studies will be routed through the CDC Foundation, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the CDC that raises outside funding to support research.

The occupational study will be backed by $1.05 million from the Sugar Producers of the Central American Isthmus, and the genetics and adolescent studies will be funded by $675,000 from the National Committee of Sugar Producers of Nicaragua.

Amid the larger scientific debate over the causes of CKD, some have raised concerns about the industry’s financial support for the CDC’s research.

Catharina Wesseling, an epidemiologist who chairs the scientific group Consortium for the Epidemic of Nephropathy in Central America and Mexico (CENCAM), expressed concern that the grants were not awarded through an open bidding process. Instead, according to the CDC Foundation, Boston University approached the CDC with a proposal, and funding was then obtained from the sugar industry.

“It’s not the correct way to do it for me,” Wesseling said. “There’s still an indirect link.”

The CDC Foundation and Boston University said Brooks and the CDC would control all aspects of the study’s design and execution, that findings would be published regardless of outcome, and that the study team would create a publicly available website with updates on the status of the research. Industry personnel will have no role in the study team.

“CDC is committed to helping to find the etiology of the illness,” said Dr. Reina Turcios-Ruiz, an epidemiologist with the CDC. “We are actively working to guard scientific integrity of what we find.”

Medical ethics experts consulted by ICIJ said that while the arrangement did pose the risk of conflict of interest, public-private partnerships were important tools for supporting vital research that might not obtain funding otherwise.

“The real question is how we can best manage conflict to ensure objective science,” said Dr. Cary Gross, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine and its Program for Biomedical Ethics.

The “occupational illness” divide

And the larger question remains: What has triggered the outbreak?

Some researchers in the region say evidence for the dehydration hypothesis is overwhelming and argue that, even if other factors are involved, its role is clear enough to demand immediate workplace interventions. “The best evidence now, and it is very, very strong evidence, is dehydration,” said Wesseling. “That is evidently an occupational disease.”

Recent studies by scientists in CENCAM identified a biological mechanism in which dehydration produced CKD in lab rats, through the activity of an enzyme in the kidney. A previous study by Brooks showed that sugarcane workers in strenuous jobs such as cutting cane suffered significantly more kidney damage over the course of a single harvest season than other workers.

Last week, the nonprofit organizations Solidaridad and La Isla Foundation, which supported the CENCAM research, received a multimillion-dollar grant from the Dutch National Postcode Lottery to fund a new series of studies.

The research will focus on dehydration interventions such as more water, rest and shade for workers, said Jason Glaser, the director of La Isla Foundation. The studies will also explore how dehydration may interact with environmental toxins to sicken workers. “If you want to save lives, you need to focus on occupation and you need to get real,” said Glaser, who has been an outspoken critic of the sugar industry.

The evidence for dehydration may be growing, but scientific debate still churns. Government-backed studies in El Salvador and Sri Lanka have found pesticides and fertilizers to be the primary causes of the ailment, and officials in those countries are seeking to ban leading brands of agrochemicals from affected areas.

While the theories are not incompatible — dehydration and toxic exposure could be working together — the mysterious ailment has become a political Rorschach test.

The left-leaning El Salvadoran government, backed by Cuban doctors, blames pesticides imported by Western multinationals. The scientists and NGOs involved in groups such as CENCAM, many of them from Europe and United States, focus on brutal working conditions in the sugar industry.

For its part, the industry emphasizes the uncertainties in the science, and has long attributed the disease to alcohol abuse and poor health habits among its workers.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect how the Solidaridad/La Isla Foundation studies will explore environmental toxins as well as dehydration as a potential cause for CKD.

Republican megadonor Harold Simmons last year declared President Barack Obama the "most dangerous American alive."

And ahead of the 2012 election, the Texas billionaire who died in December had gained notoriety for personally bankrolling Democrat-bashing super PACs such as American Crossroads and pro-Mitt Romney Restore Our Future with tens of millions of dollars.

At the same time, however, Simmons was quietly contributing chunks of his massive fortune to decidedly liberal political forces, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of new filings with the Internal Revenue Service by Simmons' private charitable foundation.

Among the beneficiaries was Planned Parenthood, which relentlessly advocates for Democrats — particularlyObama— through its political arms.

In 2012, the Harold Simmons Foundation — which was headed by Simmons and funded by his wealth, but controlled by two of his daughters — gave Planned Parenthood Federation of America $200,000 and Planned Parenthood of North Texas $101,750, IRSfilings show.

The foundation also approved $800,000 in future grants to Planned Parenthood Federation of America and $300,000 to Planned Parenthood of North Texas, records indicate.

Furthermore, Public Campaign, a nonpartisan outfit "dedicated to sweeping campaign reform that aims to dramatically reduce the role of big special interest money in American politics," received $350,000 from the Harold Simmons Foundation for a "campaign finance reform project." It's due another $250,000 in future cash, records show.

Simmons' donation dissonance springs from tumultuousrelationships with his children and continues a long-standing pattern.

By Simmons' design, his politically liberal daughter, Lisa Simmons, runs the Harold Simmons Foundation's operations and serves as its president. Another daughter, Serena Simmons Connelly, serves as the foundation's executive vice president. She is personally a big-dollar donor to Democratic causes.

The Harold Simmons Foundation is, however, decidedly fueled by father: its more than $18.2 million in non-investment income during 2012 came from one source — Contran Corp., Simmons' private holding company, of which he served as board chairman until his death last year. He also controlled the vast majority of Contran's shares.

Amber Neal, the Harold Simmons Foundation's grants administrator, declined to comment.

Neal said she forwarded the Center for Public Integrity's questions to an "appropriate person" at the foundation, although no one from the foundation has since replied or been reachable for comment.

Several other politically engaged organizations that received financial support from the Harold Simmons Foundation in 2012 hardly resemble the patently conservative causes Simmons himself favored. Among them:

• The Texas Tribune, an Austin, Texas-based nonprofit news organization that's routinelyreported on Simmons' politicalinfluenceefforts, business affairs and campaign financedust-ups. Donation: $20,000.
   
• The Tides Foundation, for "health and water sanitation program for women in Peru." The Tides Foundation supports various left-of-center causes, including campaigns to abolish the death penalty and increase the minimum wage. Donation: $20,000.
   
• The League of Women Voters of Texas Education Fund, which in part aims to "make complex and controversial issues accessible to the non-expert citizen in a balanced manner." Donation: $10,000.

In all, the Harold Simmons Foundation spread $18.5 million among more than 200 nonprofit organizations during 2012, IRS filings indicate.

Many of the foundation's beneficiaries are traditional charities not known for overt politicking — hospitals, museums, community groups, arts and cultural outfits, religious organizations, food banks, educational institutions and the like.

Seven-figure recipients in 2012 include $5 million to the Parkland Foundation of Dallas for construction of a "new women and infants' specialty health hospital," and $2 million to Presbyterian Communities and Services of Irving, Texas, for a new hospice and palliative care center.

The Crystal Charity Ball of Dallas, which benefits various charities, and the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Society, each also received $1 million.

The beleaguered Federal Election Commission is hiring up in hopes of fixing glaring computer and paperwork problems.

A "senior application developer" — who could earn up to $116,901 annually — tops the wish list for the agency that operates information technology systems that Republican and Democratic commissioners alike agree is obsolete and, in October, was successfully attacked by Chinese hackers.

The FEC is likewise hiring four staffers to help dispatch a massive backlog of disclosure reports that analysts review for errors, anomalies and completeness. It has also recently posted an opening for a computer specialist to "manage and troubleshoot" its IT systems.

The agency's backlog swelled to 2.2 million pages in November, and FEC staffers have made little progress since, as 2.1 million pages remain unchecked, FEC Chairman Lee Goodman told the Center for Public Intergity. That's roughly 21 weeks worth of work, as analysts typically process about 100,000 pages per week.

In all, the FEC's Reports Analysis Division, which is tasked with processing campaign finance reports, is down 10 staffers.

Such a status quo won't fly, Goodman said.

"Regulated political committees rely upon prompt review of their reports to catch mistakes before they ripple through several reporting periods, and the public deserves accurate financial information on the reports required by the commission," he said in an email.

Goodman added he's "confident" the FEC will hire four new analysts by March. They could make up to $55,421 annually. It's unclear whether the FEC will post additional report analysis openings later this year.

The FEC's hiring spree follows an investigative report by the Center for Public Integrity that detailed how the agency's funding and staffing levels have eroded for several years.

Two congressional committees in January began investigating the FEC's computer and resource problems.

A confidential study by the Energy Department has concluded that completing a controversial nuclear fuel factory in South Carolina may cost billions of dollars more than the department has previously promised, according to government officials and industry sources briefed on its results.

The study, conducted for Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, also found that finishing and then operating the factory to help get rid of Cold War-era plutonium as part of a nonproliferation arrangement with Russia would likely cost a total of $25 billion to $30 billion on top of the $4 billion spent on its construction so far, the sources said.

That amount is so high, the officials said, that the Obama administration is leaning towards embracing what one described as “some other option” for dealing with the 34 tons of weapons plutonium that the so-called Mixed Oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel plant at Savannah River was supposed to help eliminate.

Many officials now agree that “it’s time for a shifting of gears,” said the administration official, who requested that he not be named because he was not authorized to speak about the report. He added that accommodating such an expensive project within federal budgets that will be constrained for years to come is not considered feasible.

But no clear alternative to the fuel factory has been chosen, much less announced. As a result, officials said, the administration will likely propose to keep funding the plant’s construction in fiscal 2015, albeit at a level below the roughly $343 million appropriated in 2014. The plant’s builders have sought $600 million to $700 million a year to keep construction on schedule.

This decision in turn means that in its forthcoming new budget proposal, the department will advocate spending hundreds of millions of dollars to continue work on a factory unlikely to fulfill its initial goal — on top of the billions it has already spent.

Asked about the report, a spokesman for the contractor building the plant referred questions about it to the Energy Department. Keri Fulton, a spokeswoman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, the arm of the department responsible for the MOX project, said the agency would not comment.

Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Poneman declined to comment on the projected costs Friday. But he told the Center for Public Integrity at a nuclear weapons conference in Arlington that “we are taking very, very seriously obviously the MOX program. We’ve had a hard look at it. We’re going to continue to examine what all of our options are.”

Kevin L. Bishop, a spokesman for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — the principal champion of keeping the MOX project alive, said his office did not have a copy of the report and offered no comment.

Graham, who sits on both the Armed Services Committee and the Appropriations subcommittee on energy and water development, held up Moniz’s confirmation last year while demanding a new pledge from the White House that the plant, which employs 2,100 workers in his state, would be finished. His spokesman said any notion that he accepts the need to embrace an alternative would be “incorrect.”

But senior administration officials have said they would support the completion and operation of the MOX plant only if its construction costs could be substantially reduced. Without new savings, a government official and an industry official said the new report suggests, construction costs alone could reach $10 billion, or nearly ten times the initial estimate and more than $2 billion higher than the department’s most recent public tally.

As a result, the department has engaged in protracted, private negotiations with Shaw Areva MOX Services, the French- and Dutch-owned consortium responsible for building and running the plant, to revise the contract in a way that would limit the company’s profits and boost its responsibility for cost overruns.

“Areva should know that if it makes mistakes, it should suffer the consequences,” one government critic of the program said, noting past construction problems that have boosted the project’s costs. But the negotiations have so far stalemated, with the company refusing to accept DOE’s demands, government and industry sources said. That’s why the administration is now moving to embrace other solutions in the coming year, they said.

Initially, U.S. officials anticipated that Russia — which committed years ago to a similar program to convert its plutonium into reactor fuel — would object to any American decision to abandon the project. But one government official said that in private diplomatic discussions, the Russians had indicated they might support a U.S. decision instead to transform the plutonium metal into a less explosive powder — partly through oxidization — and then bury it deep underground in concrete containers. Among the alternatives that have been studied by the department over the past year, this idea was the cheapest, several sources said. One said it would cost only $6 billion and take only five years.

The speed with which that U.S. effort could be completed was attractive to the Russians, the official said.

The department’s study was conducted by John MacWilliams, a Harvard-trained lawyer and partner at a Boston-area private investment fund. He also has been studying other multi-billion dollar department programs plagued by cost overruns. MacWilliams did not respond to email and phone requests for an interview.

Moniz, who has spent most of his career as a professor of physics at MIT, helped broker the agreement with the Russians that called for joint efforts to dispose of 34 tons each of plutonium, one of two principal fuels used to power nuclear arms. The plutonium came from tens of thousands of warheads dismantled at the end of the Cold War.

The MOX plant was designed to crush the plutonium cores or “pits” of those warheads, bake the powder, and oxidize it — but then do even more: It was to mix it with oxidized uranium to make a so-called “mixed oxide” fuel that would be burned in commercial reactors.

So far, no commercial reactor operators have pledged they would burn the fuel, however. And one reason the plant’s lifetime operating costs were estimated in the department’s report to be so high — a total of up to $34 billion — is that the Energy Department would have to pay the operators a fee to use the MOX fuel, officials said.

Due to cost overruns and funding shortages, the White House last spring slowed construction work on the fuel facility, which is about two-thirds finished, and submitted a budget that would have eliminated construction funding starting later this year. Just over $4 billion has already been spent on the facility, according to the department’s latest public estimate.

Matthew Bunn, now at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, was a White House official during the Clinton administration, when he helped develop the plutonium disposal program, and has followed it closely ever since. Bunn hasn’t seen the latest Energy agency report, but said that the cost of the Savannah River MOX plant has spun out of control.

 “The things we’re trying to accomplish aren’t worth that amount of money,” he said Thursday. “To me, in an environment of extreme budget constraints and sequesters, there has got to be a better way.”

One of the other alternatives MacWilliams studied was disposing the plutonium in three-mile deep “bore holes” drilled deep into the bedrock. A second option, officials said, was mixing the plutonium with high-level radioactive waste and storing it in a future long-term storage facility.

If oxidized plutonium is to be buried, the most likely site is the department's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., a network of salt-lined caves deep underground. Doing so might require the site's expansion, several sources said, which in turn would require gaining local permission to do so. That creates some uncertainty about the political viability of that option, several sources said.

This article was co-published with Foreign Policy.

To discourage folks from signing up for coverage on the Obamacare exchanges, Republican lawmakers in several states have pushed through bills making it difficult for people to get free help from specially trained “navigators” authorized by the Affordable Care Act.

At the top of the list of special interest groups supporting such legislation: groups  representing insurance agents and brokers, who, of course, charge for their services. They view the navigators as a threat to their income.

Nowhere have the agents and brokers found more friends than in the Missouri legislature, which last summer passed a bill making it unlawful for anyone other than a licensed agent or broker to give advice to any state resident about choosing a health plan.

As I wrote last June, Missouri lawmakers passed the bill even though it was in apparent violation of federal law, which states that individuals and organizations that complete a certain level of training can serve as navigators to help people choose plans that are best suited for them. Lobbyists for agents and brokers weren’t happy that the federal law doesn’t require navigators to be state-licensed, and they really weren’t happy with the part requiring that navigators’ services be free to consumers and small businesses. While navigators cannot actually sign someone up for coverage as agents and brokers can do, they can help folks complete eligibility and enrollment forms, and provide unbiased information about available options.

In a big win for consumers in Missouri and elsewhere, a federal court in Kansas City late last month blocked the GOP-sponsored law, ruling that it was indeed a violation of federal law.

“The Court is of the view that any attempt by Missouri to regulate the conduct of those working on behalf of the (federally operated health insurance exchange) is preempted,” wrote U.S. District Judge Ortie Smith.

Ironically, had state GOP lawmakers allowed Missouri to set up and run its own exchange, their anti-navigator law might have passed the court’s muster.

“The ACA provides states an opportunity to create exchanges,” Judge Smith wrote. “It also provides an avenue for states and HHS (the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) to jointly operate an exchange. Missouri has opted not to be in the health insurance exchange business. Having made the choice to leave the operation of the exchange to the federal government, Missouri cannot choose to impose additional requirements or limitations on the exchange.”

While the ruling was specific to Missouri, it is expected to have ramifications in states that passed similar laws. And don’t expect Missouri to challenge Judge Smith: both Missouri Governor Jay Nixon and Attorney General Chris Koster are Democrats. The only comment Missouri Insurance Commissioner John M. Huff , a Nixon appointee, has made is that his department is reviewing the ruling.

The state’s agents and brokers, however, are not ready to throw in the towel. Clearly anticipating that Nixon and Koster would not appeal Smith’s ruling, the Missouri Association of Independent Agents a few days ago filed a “motion to intervene” in the case. This means that MAIA wants the court to recognize it as a party in the case  so that it will have legal standing to challenge the ruling.

If you read deep into MAIA’s filing, you will find all the evidence you need of what this is really about: money. On page 10 of the group’s 13-page motion is this: “The interests of MAIA and its members are of a different quality than those of the Defendant (the state of Missouri), involving potential direct economic harm and the ability of MAIA members to serve insurance consumers.”

MAIA and its allies are not putting all their eggs in the judicial basket, though. They’re once again trying to protect the economic interests of agents and brokers in the Republican-controlled Missouri legislature. And once again they’re making some headway.

Last week two new bills that would benefit agents and brokers advanced in the state senate. One would require navigators to take a state-approved exam and undergo a background check. The other would allow people to sue navigators for up to $50,000 for unlawfully disclosing personal information about them. The Republican sponsors of the bills said they wanted to protect Missourians from fraud. Democrats responded that the bills were just new attempts to erect barriers for people trying to buy health care on the exchange.

Undoubtedly one of the reasons GOP lawmakers are interested in protecting the agents and brokers from any “economic harm” is their willingness to open their checkbooks for Republican candidates during campaign season. According to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, 75% of the contributions MAIA made through its political action committee went to Republicans in 2012, with 85% of its contributions going to incumbents the group wanted to see reelected.  Pretty good evidence of how things really work in the “Show_Me” state.

The Center for Public Integrity has won a prestigious George Polk award for its “After the Meltdown” series, which revealed that many of the major players responsible for the 2008 financial crisis have faced few consequences for their actions.

The award, announced Sunday evening, is the second for the Center, which was similarly honored in 2003. The Polk awards, given by Long Island University, are considered among journalism’s most prestigious; they recognize journalism that “places a premium on investigative and enterprise work that is original, requires digging and resourcefulness, and brings results.” The Center’s citation is for business reporting.

It goes specifically to managing editor for finance and “After the Meltdown” project manager John Dunbar; team leader and senior reporter Alison Fitzgerald; reporter Dan Wagner; and former Center intern Lauran Kyger.  A total of 30 recipients from 15 news organizations were recognized in 13 separate categories.

“I’m delighted that the Polk judges recognize the extraordinary investigative work of the Center," said Executive Director Bill Buzenberg. "The ‘After the Meltdown’ series was a six-month investigation that built on our 2008 report on the subprime 25 — ‘Who’s Behind the Financial Meltdown?’ This project was a true team effort, and reflects the Center’s commitment to deep reporting."

The four stories in the “After the Meltdown” series were published five years after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. went bankrupt. The Center’s key findings revealed that:

• The mortgage executives at Bear Stearns Cos. Inc., who led that firm down a path to its own destruction, are now doing similar work for Bear’s former competitors.
• The chief executive officers of five of the major Wall Street banks that got into the most financial trouble in 2008 are all living in luxury, none of them having faced any criminal or even civil liability for their mismanagement.
• The top executives — many of them founders — of every one of the 25 largest subprime lenders from the boom years 2005 through 2007 are back in the mortgage lending business.
• The majority of the regulators tasked with preventing or cleaning up the meltdown are back in the private sector, earning big fees from writing books and lecturing about their experience.

To report these stories and gather the rich details they featured, Center reporters combed through court records, SEC filings, real estate records in several states, mortgage term sheets, the National Mortgage Licensing System and many other documents. Reporters also tracked down the principals in each story, and interviewed friends, former colleagues, business associates, bridge partners and golf caddies to gain more insight and detail into the stories’ many subjects.

The series made it clear that the nation’s regulators and prosecutors failed to hold those most responsible for the financial crisis accountable for damage to the economy, including the steepest recession since the Great Depression, the loss of millions of jobs and trillions in wealth.

Following this series and other stories that highlighted the government’s lack of action against major banks and executives tied to the crisis, the U.S. Justice Department and SEC became more aggressive in their pursuit of sanctions against corporate wrongdoing. JPMorgan Chase for example, entered into multibillion dollar settlements with the government and for the first time acknowledged wrongdoing.

The George Polk Awards were established in 1949 to honor a CBS correspondent killed while covering the civil war in Greece. Past honorees include Walter Cronkite, Carl Bernstein, Christiane Amanpour and Gay Talese.

The awards will be presented at an April 11 luncheon in New York.

Other winners of this year’s Polk awards include The Guardian and The Washington Post for their reporting on the U.S. government’s collection of phone and Internet communication based on documents obtained by National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden. The Post was honored with a second Polk for a six-part series on the U.S. food stamp program and The New York Times was awarded two Polk Awards, for reporting on the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh and for a five part series called “Invisible Child” about a homeless girl in New York City.

“In the tradition of George Polk, many of the journalists we have recognized did more than report news,” said John Darnton, curator of the awards. “They heightened public awareness with perceptive detection and dogged pursuit of stories that otherwise would not have seen the light of day. Repercussions of the NSA stories in particular will be with us for years to come.”

Click through to experience the full version of this story.

The Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas is the site of one of the biggest energy booms in America, with oil and gas wells sprouting at an unprecedented rate. But local residents fear for their health - not from the water, but from the air they breathe.

Our eight-month investigation reveals the dangers that come with releasing a toxic soup of chemicals into the air and just how little the government of Texas knows - or wants to know - about it.

Continue reading Big Oil, Bad Air: Fracking the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas.

KARNES CITY, Texas — In January 2011, with air quality worsening in Texas’ booming oil and gas fields and the federal government beginning to take notice, state environmental regulators adopted rules to reduce harmful emissions.

The industry rebelled. So did the state legislature.

A few months later, the legislature overwhelmingly approved SB1134, a bill that effectively prevented the new regulations from being applied in the Eagle Ford Shale region of South Texas, the fastest-growing oil shale play in the nation and maybe the world. Since then, more than 2,400 air emissions permits have been issued in the Eagle Ford without additional safeguards that would have reduced the amounts of benzene, hydrogen sulfide, formaldehyde and other toxic chemicals that drift into the air breathed by 1.1 million people.

The Texas legislature’s rush to protect the oil and gas industry reflects a culture in which politics and business are almost inseparable.

State Rep. Tom Craddick, who championed the House version of SB1134, owns stock in nine oil companies, five of which are active in the Eagle Ford. At the end of 2013, the stock was worth as much as $1.5 million. That year Craddick, and the partnerships and corporations he controls, received royalties of as much as $885,000 for mineral rights. For decades he had a lucrative partnership with Mustang Mud, an oilfield supply company.

Corporations, along with unions, are banned from giving directly to state candidates in Texas, but since 2000, industry employees and related political action committees have contributed more than $800,000 to Craddick’s campaigns, according to an analysis of data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

The industry has also invested more than $600,000 to help Craddick’s daughter, Christi, win a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission in 2012. The Railroad Commission, which issues drilling permits, has been criticized for years for allowing its three commissioners to accept campaign contributions from the industry they regulate. But with support from the House Energy Resources Committee, of which Tom Craddick is a member, it has beaten back attempts at reform.

Other members of the Texas legislature also benefit from the oil and gas industry’s largesse.

Forty-two of the body’s 181 members or their spouses own stock or receive royalties from companies active in the Eagle Ford, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of thousands of pages of financial disclosure records. Their holdings are worth as much as $9.6 million, according to a conservative estimate based on the 2012 data.

Gov. Rick Perry, who signed SB1134 soon after it landed on his desk, has collected more than $11.5 million in campaign contributions from those in the industry since the 2000 election cycle. Attorney General Greg Abbott, the favorite to win the Republican nomination for governor, has raked in more than $4 million. Since he has been in office, Abbott has sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 18 times for interfering in Texas affairs.

Supporters say the oil and gas industry has been good to Texas, and they are right. The industry employed 315,000 people and paid $8.5 billion in taxes in 2010. It has been particularly important to counties in the Eagle Ford. The tax base in Karnes County, at the epicenter of the drilling, exploded from $489 million in 2008 to $6.6 billion last year, a 1,200 percent increase.

The downside of this surge in prosperity is the introduction of industrial-type air pollution to a rural area where people of limited means rarely share in the bounty and have little defense against an industry as iconic in Texas as longhorn steers.

Rep. Tim Kleinschmidt, a Republican who represents Karnes County in the state legislature, is no stranger to that industry. He has leased some of his own land to oil companies in the past, and the law firm where he practices specializes in negotiating oil and gas agreements. While his focus is now on commercial real estate, his first work for the firm was on those leases.

“I’ve practiced in an oil field my whole life,” he said.

He acknowledges that the boom had created environmental and infrastructure challenges. On tours of the region he hears complaints about both. But he says he hears just as often about fortunes made overnight by residents who’ve leased their land.

Kleinschmidt said the industry is proactively addressing people’s concerns.

“I can’t say too much in support of our oil and gas industry in Texas,” he said. “Our oil and gas industry is very environmentally concerned.”

That’s not how Sister Elizabeth Riebschlaeger sees it.

The 77-year-old nun-turned-activist speeds through the Eagle Ford in her white Honda Civic, intent on exposing the ills she believes have been forced on residents by the oil and gas industry.

“They do not like to complain,” she said. “They don’t want to make trouble. They don’t know they’re being taken advantage of.”

Most of the Eagle Ford’s residents live in small towns or on farms and have scant influence on lawmakers. About 23 percent have incomes below the federal poverty line,  compared to 17 percent statewide and 15 percent nationally.

“Let’s be blunt. That is not really a body of voters that the power structure in Austin [the state capital] has any real concern about,” said Larry Soward, a former member of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Soward is now president of the board of Air Alliance Houston, an organization dedicated to reducing air pollution.

While the situation in Texas may be extreme, it’s not unusual for politicians to be seduced by the industry, said Michael Nelson, a professor of environmental ethics and philosophy at Oregon State University.

“What’s going on is the masking of a moral decision in a utilitarian kind of debate that puts more weight on what can be seen, in this case the financial benefit, [than on] what can’t be as readily measured: the risks,” Nelson said. “Those risks to health and environment aren’t as perceptible as the financial benefit, so the cost benefit equation is tipped out of balance.”

Business comes first

People who suffer the effects of oil and gas emissions have few places to turn for help other than to the politicians and regulatory agencies that are often cheerleaders for, and financially beholden to, the industry.

“It doesn’t matter what the people say. It … does … not … matter,” said Sharon Wilson, a leader in the Texas office of the environmental group Earthworks. An Earthworks study last year concluded “by failing to deter reckless operator behavior, [Texas] regulators practically condone it, thereby increasing health risks for residents living near oil and gas development.”

Rep. Lon Burnam, a Fort Worth Democrat who has served 16 years in the Texas House, is the most outspoken of a handful of legislators trying to curb the oil companies’ influence. He describes the legislature as “a wholly owned subsidiary of the oil and gas industry.”

In the last legislative session, Burnam introduced 12 bills that would have regulated or taxed the industry in some way. Most died in the House Energy Resources Committee, where six of the 11 members, including Craddick, own stock or receive royalties from the industry, according to their personal financial disclosures.

Sometimes it seems that everyone in Texas is connected in some way to the oil business, including even Burnam. According to his disclosure forms, his wife inherited mineral rights from her parents worth as much as $10,000.

The Energy Resources Committee is led by Republican Rep. Jim Keffer, whose investment portfolio includes stock in Plains All American Pipeline, Anadarko Petroleum and Chevron worth as much as $1.2 million at the end of 2012.

The committee’s vice-chair, Myra Crownover, is part owner of Robinson Drilling, a family-run West Texas company with 14 rigs that can drill more than two miles deep, according to its website. Crownover says on her website that she was named the Texas oil and gas industry’s “Legislative Champion” last year.

Over the years, Robinson Drilling has been penalized by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration for numerous safety violations. Four Robinson Drilling workers have died since 2004, according to OSHA records. One worker has been paralyzed.

Crownover said in a statement that she is not involved in the day-to-day operations of Robinson Drilling, but knows the company “is fully committed to maintaining a safe working environment for its employees.”

“Incidents are down dramatically,” she said, “and Robinson Drilling has passed recent OSHA inspections without citations.”

Although Crownover benefits personally from the industry, she said she listens to diverse opinions when considering legislation before the committee. “Landowners, mineral owners, environmental groups, and the industry all have important and sometimes competing points of view,” she said in an emailed response to questions. “It is our job to sort it all out to ensure our environment is protected and all Texans benefit from the production of oil and gas.”

Soward, the former TCEQ commissioner who left in 2009, doesn’t see it that way.

“The interests of the people … are irrelevant to the extent that they differ from the interest of the industry,” he said. “If someone has a problem with air quality or the roads being torn up or the land being ruined, they are not going to be listened to. They will not be heard because that is going against the interest of business.”

The TCEQ, like the state legislature, is intertwined with the industry.

The agency’s three commissioners are appointed by the governor and are paid $150,000 a year.

Three of the last four commissioners later registered as lobbyists, and collectively have taken in  between $160,000 and $420,000 since 2010. Jeffrey Saitas, the TCEQ’s executive director from 1998 to 2002, also lobbies for oil and gas companies, among other clients.

In 2013 alone, Saitas banked between $635,000 and $1.3 million in fees, much of it from energy companies like Valero, Marathon Oil and DCP Midstream. That puts his total earnings as a lobbyist between $6 million and $12.3 million, according to financial disclosure records filed with the Texas Ethics Commission.

Saitas declined to comment for this article.

Modest rules ignite uproar

Despite the industry’s deep political ties, the TCEQ tightened its emissions standards in 2011.

Complaints from people in North Texas, where a gas-drilling boom had begun in the Barnett Shale in 2002, were drawing unwanted attention from the EPA. And a TCEQ study had found underestimated or previously undetected emissions at oil and gas sites.

“These are not isolated instances but have occurred statewide and indicate a pattern,” Richard A. Hyde, then deputy director of TECQ’s Office of Permitting and Registration, wrote in a Jan. 7, 2011, interoffice memo obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, InsideClimate News  and The Weather Channel.

Soward, the former TCEQ commissioner, said the rules were a modest attempt to placate people in Dallas-Fort Worth and head off EPA intervention.

“The state didn’t want the federal government stepping in,” Soward said. “I think TCEQ felt this was one thing they could do to have minimal impact on the industry but appear to strengthen regulatory action … I think they were looking for a way out, not for a way to make things better.”

The regulations required operators to install leak-detection systems and emission-control devices on equipment where none had been required before, and to reduce emissions when starting, shutting down and maintaining their wells. Operators of new wells would have to sample their releases and make the results available to state regulators. They would also be required to coat their storage tanks with reflective paint to reduce heat-generated emissions.

The rules were unexceptional when compared with regulations being considered in Colorado, also a major drilling state. But for the pro-industry Texas legislature, they went too far.

State Sen. Glenn Hegar, a Republican, led the opposition in the Senate while Craddick led the fight in the House. SB1134 prohibited the TCEQ from extending the new rules outside the Barnett Shale unless the agency first performed a time-consuming and costly analysis for each well application, proving that the benefit of improved air quality justified the additional cost to the operator.

Hegar, who is now running for state comptroller, prepared talking points to show where the TCEQ had erred. The second most generous donor to Hegar’s campaign so far is Charles Scianna, president of Sim-Tex, a pipe manufacturer that services the oil and gas industry.

Instead of taking air samples in places where facilities were exceeding their state-approved emissions levels, samples should be taken in areas where facilities were in compliance, according to the undated talking points Hegar used to explain his objections to the rules.

“It would not be appropriate for TCEQ to use air quality monitoring data that has been, or will be, collected in areas where there are oil and gas facilities that are known to be operating out of compliance,” the document said, because “TCEQ [should] address the non-compliant emissions from such facilities … through enforcement against those facilities, rather than by including more stringent requirements in the new or amended permit.”

A few months later, Hegar further handcuffed the TCEQ by placing a rider on the state budget bill. It prohibited the agency from using tax dollars to perform the cost-benefit analyses.

TCEQ spokeswoman Andrea Morrow said in a written statement that the legislation did not “significantly affect TCEQ’s ability to implement new regulations.” She did not elaborate or respond to further questions.

Soon after the legislation became law, the TCEQ voluntarily narrowed the focus of its rules. Today the tighter standards apply in only 15 of the Barnett Shale’s 24 counties.

While the legislature was slamming the door on the TCEQ’s attempt to enforce new statewide emissions rules, it was also slashing the agency’s budget.

Legislative appropriations for the TCEQ dropped 39 percent — from $555 million in 2008 to $341 million in 2013 — even as the Eagle Ford was experiencing unprecedented growth in drilling. During that same period, the legislature cut the entire Texas budget just 8 percent.

The TCEQ budget rose slightly in 2014, to $372 million. But only $3 million was allocated for regional air monitoring and just $579,000 for air monitoring equipment. The legislature set aside a “maximum” of $200,000 to study the health effects of emissions.

Reforms fail again and again

As the legislature was limiting the new air pollution rules, it was also snuffing out an attempt to reform the Texas Railroad Commission, which has long been criticized for bowing to powerful interests. Like the legislature and the TCEQ, the Railroad Commission is powered by oil and gas industry money. Since 2010 the three current commissioners have accepted nearly $2.3 million from the industry in campaign contributions.

The Sunset Advisory Commission, a legislative body charged with reviewing the efficiency of Texas agencies, urged legislators to dramatically reform the Railroad Commission. Among other things, it recommended that the Railroad Commission have one elected commissioner instead of three and that key decisions be made not by the commissioner but by independent administrative judges.

“Critics would argue that elected Commissioners pose a conflict for the agency’s regulatory role, as the costs of a statewide campaign often rely on campaign contributions from the regulated industry,” the Sunset Commission’s 2011 report said.

Hegar, the state senator who with Craddick’s support had drawn up legislation to weaken the TCEQ emissions rules, chaired the Sunset Commission. He also introduced legislation to force the changes.

The reforms were necessary, he said in a statement at the time, to “meet the very tall test of balancing the protection of Texans and our environment while at the same time ensuring that the oil and gas industry remains vibrant in Texas.”

Hegar declined to discuss his support for Railroad Commission reforms or his pushback on the TCEQ rules. Legislative observers said Hegar’s pro-business bent likely motivated him to oppose tightening the emissions regulations and that growing public discontent with the Railroad Commission prompted him to support the commission reforms.

With Hegar’s support, the Senate voted 29 to 2 to approve the restructuring of the Railroad Commission. But the core reforms died in the House Energy Resources Committee, where Keffer, the nine-term Republican with hefty energy investments, presided over their demise. The committee, and then the full House, voted to keep three elected commissioners, but the House and Senate could agree only to defer the issue for two years.

Last year the Sunset Commission again hammered away at the Railroad Commission’s deficiencies. It recommended that commissioners be barred from taking campaign contributions from the industry they regulate — and that they be required to resign if they run for another office.

Again the reforms died in Keffer’s committee.

Tom Craddick, who sits on the committee, had a personal stake in the outcome of this fight.

Had the legislation been approved, his daughter, Christi, the railroad commissioner, would no longer be able to accept donations from the industry, whose contributions to her 2012 campaign accounted for 25 percent of her war chest.

“When rules intended to bring fairness and accountability to our public agencies are discounted the message is clear: the industry is setting the agenda,” said Tom Smith, director of the Texas chapter of Public Citizen, a nonprofit public-interest advocacy organization.

The legislature later approved a bill that barred railroad commissioners from running for another office without first resigning from the commission, but Gov. Perry vetoed that bill. Its provisions would have applied to Chairman Barry Smitherman, who is currently running for Texas attorney general. According to campaign information filed on Jan. 15, he has raised more than $2 million for his campaign, with energy company employees among his top donors. That included $3,500 from employees of Range Resources, which controls more than one million acres of land in Texas and Pennsylvania.

Range Resources employees also donated more than $5,000 to Smitherman's 2012 campaign for his commission seat, including a contribution from Jeffrey L. Ventura, the company’s CEO. 

Industry boosters

The Railroad Commission defended Range Resources in a 2010 fight with the EPA.

Two families in a community just west of Fort Worth had complained that dangerous amounts of methane and benzene were poisoning their water wells. When the commission didn’t act on the complaints, the EPA began investigating. It blamed the contamination on gas wells operated by Range Resources, and ordered the company to take a number of actions to solve the problem.

In 2010 the Railroad Commission, led at the time by Elizabeth Ames Jones, disputed the EPA’s findings and conducted its own tests. It concluded that the methane and benzene were naturally occurring and voted 3-0 to absolve Range of the EPA’s allegations.

“We'll see which is the real protection agency, and I’d say it's the Railroad Commission of Texas,” Jones told The Texas Tribune after the vote.

Commissioner Michael Williams praised Range for standing up to the EPA.

“We owe an enormous thank you to Range Resources, because, quite frankly, they put up a diligent and aggressive defense of their operations,” Williams said.

Both Williams and Jones received more than $1 million in campaign contributions from the industry during their tenures. Jones resigned from the commission in 2012 to run unsuccessfully for the state senate. She is now a policy advisor at Patton Boggs, a Washington D.C.-based law and lobbying firm that advises U.S. and international clients on oil and gas projects.

Williams left the commission in 2011 to campaign for a U.S. Senate seat. He soon switched gears to run for an open U.S. House seat instead, but lost in the Republican primary. In 2012, Gov. Perry made Williams commissioner of the Texas Education Agency, the state’s top education post.

The EPA eventually withdrew its order against Range Resources, saying it wanted to avoid an expensive legal battle.

Money fuels influence

Burnam, the Fort Worth Democrat who has tried for years to rein in the industry, has grown accustomed to such defeats. “It’s a political environment that is not conducive to regulating in the interest of public health,” he said.

Last year Burnam introduced legislation that included many of the environmental safeguards Colorado has adopted to police the drilling method known as hydraulic fracturing. Had the bill passed, companies would have been required to notify local officials before drilling within 1,000 feet of nursing homes, schools, hospitals and other occupied buildings. Companies also would have had to provide safety and health information to nearby residents through a public outreach program.

But opposition materialized quickly. The Texas Oil and Gas Association, Marathon, ConocoPhillips, Shell Oil, Chevron and other industry giants lined up to tell Texas legislators to kill the bill.

Bill Stevens, with the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, told the House Energy Resources Committee that the requirements in Burnam’s bill were too tough.

“You are establishing a baseline that is stricter and a higher standard than some people have or want in their communities,” Stevens told Burnam in a cordial exchange captured by a video camera.

“That is definitely the purpose of this legislation,” Burnam said. “I want to establish a baseline … for the health, safety and welfare of the people.”

After a short discussion of some of the bill’s provisions, Stevens ended his testimony by saying: “If that is the baseline you are trying to establish for cities across the state, then that is something we oppose.”

Burnam’s bill died in committee.

Lisa Song, Zahra Hirji, Sabrina Shankman and Marcus Stern contributed to this report.

How does one of America’s biggest oil and gas booms go mostly unrecognized in the national media? Hard to say, but it has. A subject of solid local coverage, the Eagle Ford Shale play in South Texas has yet to become part of the national conversation on hydraulic fracturing – fracking – in contrast to, say, Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale or North Dakota’s Bakken.

This oddity, along with the sheer size of the play – 26 counties, 20,000 square miles – attracted us to the story. We focused on the air-quality impacts of drilling and related activities  because chemical-laden air may prove to be an even bigger public health consequence than tainted water, which has been widely reported.

The partnership that produced "Big Oil, Bad Air: Fracking the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas" was formed in the spring of 2013. Two nonprofit news organizations, the Center for Public Integrity and InsideClimate News, teamed up with The Weather Channel to explore the issue of air emissions and the consequences for the people of the Eagle Ford.

What We Did to Get the Story

• Took eight trips to the Eagle Ford to interview sources, talk with people in their homes and take videos and photos.
• Filed 24 Texas Public Information Act requests with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). Using the state disclosure law, we sought records that would help us understand how the agency regulates the oil and gas industry’s emissions and how it does or doesn’t respond to residents’ complaints.
• Interviewed more than a dozen engineers and industry experts and studied government and industry publications so we could create an infographic, glossary and primer to explain how pollutants are released during oil and gas extraction. A few asked not to be identified because they didn’t want to be part of what they considered a controversial project.
• Interviewed more than 20 scientists about the health impacts of chemicals emitted during gas and oil development. Few have studied the health effects in the Eagle Ford, so we reached out to scientists knowledgeable about shale plays in other regions, as well as general experts in air monitoring, petroleum engineering, public health and toxicology. Due to the controversial nature of the topic, some scientists—including tenured professors—declined to be interviewed.
• Read 284 complaints filed with the TCEQ by Eagle Ford residents who said they had been affected by oil and gas drilling. We then tracked the agency's follow-up to these complaints.
• Reviewed hundreds of financial and campaign contribution disclosure documents on file  with the Texas Ethics Commission to determine whether legislators’ personal finances were linked to the industry.

How People Tried to Thwart Us

• The agency responsible for regulating air emissions – the TCEQ – refused to make any of its commissioners, officials or investigators available for interviews. Instead, we had to submit questions via emails that were routed through agency spokespeople. It's unclear if the spokespeople passed our questions along to the agency’s experts. We received answers to most of our emails, often in some detail. But some of our questions were ignored or answered with talking points on general topics. The TCEQ employees who dealt with our public records requests were helpful and responsive, however. They discussed the filing process over the phone and answered questions about our requests.
• When a reporter called TCEQ field inspectors at their homes — a commonly used reporting technique — TCEQ spokeswoman Andrea Morrow left the reporter a message saying, “Under no circumstances are you to call our people and harass them at home.” Morrow also blocked the reporter from approaching the agency’s chairman, Bryan Shaw, at a public meeting in Austin.
• The agency's public records pricing system was puzzling. We were charged as little as 20 cents for one document but were asked for more than $10,000 to provide a batch of documents that had been given to another news agency years ago. We withdrew our request.
• The Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates drilling and all other aspects of the industry, made Commissioner David Porter available for a 10-minute phone interview. The Weather Channel later scheduled an on-camera interview with Porter, but when the producers arrived at the appointed time, they were told Porter was sick and would not be available for the next month. Like the TCEQ, the Railroad Commission spokespeople refused to discuss anything on the phone, including even technical questions about the mapping data we purchased from the agency. Nor would they make Porter or other top officials available for final, pre-publication phone interviews.
• Industry officials in Texas were as reluctant as regulators to meet face-to-face or go on camera. Most insisted that all queries be submitted in writing. No tours of Eagle Ford operations were allowed, despite several requests. No on-the-ground discussions of air pollution were facilitated. Hunt Oil was the exception. When we asked about a problem at one of its processing plants, the company set up a phone interview with an executive who answered our questions.
• Steve Everley, a spokesman for Washington D.C.-based Energy in Depth, which is affiliated with the Independent Petroleum Association of America, was the only industry representative who agreed to appear on camera. Omar Garcia, who heads the San Antonio-based communications arm of the 11 biggest Eagle Ford operators, answered questions over the phone and by email.

As our reporting deepened, even some Eagle Ford residents grew skittish. Mike and Myra Cerny, who live near Karnes City and are surrounded by oil and gas facilities, spoke at length with a reporter in June. But several months later they retired from public view and declined requests for photographs or an on-camera interview.

To be sure, Netflix doesn't have ruthless Frank Underwood advocating for its corporate interests.

But the "House of Cards" distributor is nonetheless building itself into a political force in Washington, D.C., where just about every denizen seemed to binge-watch the show's second season this weekend.

The video streaming and movie rental company invested $1.2 million in federal lobbying efforts during 2013 — more than twice its 2012 spending and nearly 10 times its 2010 spending, according to disclosures filed with the U.S. Senate and U.S. House. 

Much of Netflix's recentlobbyingactivity is focused on its support for "net neutrality," the notion that Internet service providers can't penalize certain content providers, such as those that use huge chunks of bandwidth, with slower connection speeds or extra fees.

The White House and Congress have both been targets of Netflix's governmental influence efforts.

"We're not politically driven. We're driven by a few core issues. We're there sticking up for what we believe is in the best interests of our customers," Netflix spokesman Jonathan Friedland told the Center for Public Integrity. "I would not look at our activity as a rocket ship as much as building a base ... we didn't even have a presence a few years ago."

In all, 17 lobbyists represented Netflix's interests to the federal government during 2013, 13 of whom have previous experience working for the government, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks lobbying matters.

Among Netflix's lobbyists are Christopher Libertelli, a former senior adviser at the Federal Communications Commission; Lisa Kountoupes, former assistant director of the Office of Management and Budget; Shawn Whitman, former chief of staff to Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo.; and Ed Barron, a former deputy chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Comparatively, well-known tech or entertainment companies such as Apple ($3.37 million) and eBay ($2.24 million) spent more than Netflix on federal lobbying in 2013, while others such as Live Nation Entertainment ($220,000) and SiriusXM Radio ($200,000) spent less.

Beyond lobbying, Netflix also recently created a political action committee, FLIXPAC, that donates money to politicians and political committees.

Recipients include the campaign and leadership PAC of Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va.; the leadership PAC of Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt.; and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Federal Election Commission records show.

At the end of 2013, FLIXPAC reported having $6,918 to its name — a modest amount relative to many corporate PACs. Friedland says he's not sure whether the PAC intends to increase its fundraising and expenditures as the 2014 election cycle hits stride.

Several top Netflix employees also regularly contribute directly to political committees. Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings, who heavily favors Democrats, has spread tens of thousands of dollars among politicos including President Barack Obama; Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.; Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.; and former Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.

Hastings also contributed tens of thousands of dollars more to the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, according to federal campaign filings.

And it's not just Netflix showing financial interest in Congress. A handful of congressmen are also sweet on Netflix — when it comes to their investment portfolios.

Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., for one, owned at least $16,002, and as much as $65,000, worth of Netflix stock, according to his most recent personal assets disclosure. Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Ill., owned up to $15,000.

Booker, meanwhile, owned at least $15,001, and as much as $50,000, in Netflix stock, a Center for Responsive Politics tally shows. He's also mentionedthecompanymorethan afew times on his Twitter account— it boasts 1.45 million followers — and has tweeted his support for net neutrality.

Elected officials generally disclose the values of their assets in broad ranges.

An online campaign waged by a mysterious new nonprofit group claims that an Obama administration effort to curb lending abuses will take away people’s guns, close down charities and destroy the free market. To drive the point home, the group portrays President Barack Obama as a marauding Godzilla.

The attack’s sponsors are at this point anonymous.

At issue is a government initiative to sue banks that debit people’s bank accounts illegally on behalf of companies in fraud-prone industries. A major target is online payday lenders that charge steep fees for short term loans and can trap consumers in a cycle of debt. The Justice Department says some banks ignore obvious signs of fraud by these merchants because the banks can collect large fees for the service.

The government effort — called “Operation Choke Point” — could turn industries deemed risky into financial pariahs, choking off their access to the financial system.  It has drawn strong objections from industry groups, a formal inquiry by one Republican lawmaker and letters of reassurance from the Justice Department to trade groups and lawmakers.

The group behind the new online campaign, called “Stop the Choke,” takes a less public approach. Its website, Facebook and Twitter accounts accuse the government of threatening a vast range of Web-based companies that the government sees as potential fraud risks, including online lenders and porn sites; ammunition and firearms dealers; and Ponzi schemes and “pyramid type sales.”

Puppies, kittens and the elderly are deployed in shareable Facebook art to illustrate the kinds of unassailable American icons that allegedly could suffer from aggressive regulation of so-called home-based charities, a loosely regulated category of nonprofits that regulators say present heightened fraud risks.

Such anonymous, online political attacks have become common in the Internet age, but rarely are they so careful to cloak the identities of their sponsors.

“It’s disingenuous and it’s intended to be deceptive,” says Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which advocates for transparency as a means of political accountability.  “You can only assume that industries that make a lot of money preying on consumers are behind it.”

The purpose of the Web campaign is to simulate ersatz public outrage in hopes that a real outcry will bubble up, Sloan says. She says they want people “to jump on a preexisting bandwagon in hopes that there’ll be a real one.”.

There are few clues as to the backers’ identity.

There is no “about” section on the website. The site, Twitter account and Facebook page include no names, addresses or phone numbers. The Web address was registered anonymously on Dec. 16, about three months after the name “Operation Choke Point” first appeared publicly in a presentation by a Justice Department lawyer.

The Facebook page says the group is a nonprofit. It features the sort of anti-regulatory rhetoric often employed by nonprofits financed by right-wing and Tea Party groups.

The page features dozens of photos and references to Tea Party favorite U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. A Cruz spokesman said the Facebook page “is not affiliated with the senator, and we don’t know who set it up.”

A public request for comment on Twitter this month did not receive a response.

Numerous trade groups representing industries affected by Operation Choke Point and contacted by the Center said they knew nothing about the campaign.

So-called “front groups” are sometimes used by businesses that take positions that they do not want to be associated with, according to Sloan. This allows the campaign to avoid association with unpopular industries and “say things that are much more outrageous than the businesses are willing to say on their own,” she says.

The Justice Department has subpoenaed dozens of banks that work with industries it wants a closer handle on, alleging that the banks ignore red flags like high rates of payment disputes by dissatisfied consumers. The Center was among the first to report on the strategy in August.

Banks do business with these industries through outside companies called third-party payment processors. Banks are required by law to understand their customers’ businesses, even when the relationships are indirect. They can be held liable for clients’ fraudulent transactions.

Bank regulators repeatedly have warned banks about the risk of working with third-party payment processors, whose clients generally are too small or risky to establish their own banking relationships. Guidance by regulators carries a lot of weight with banks because the government can restrict their activities and eventually put them out of business if they fail to comply. That’s one reason banks are easier targets than web-based companies that can disappear and regroup overnight

One expert on industries’ efforts to influence official Washington said the campaign is unlikely to sway policy. Daniel Hill, president of Ervin Hill Strategy, said its unknown authors are “preaching to the choir director."

"There’s not enough meat to persuade anyone who doesn’t already feel the same way; in my opinion, the funders are wasting their money," Hill said in an email.

The Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, California Rep. Darrell Issa, last month demanded more information on the issue from the Justice Department because of concerns that the true goal is "to eliminate legal financial services to which the Department objects."

The Justice Department assured lawmakers and trade groups that that the probe will not harm banks whose customers follow the law.

"We want to protect the public from mass-market consumer fraud by holding accountable those banks and payment processors that violate federal law by facilitating fraudulent transactions,” Justice Department lawyer Peter Kadzik wrote in a letter to the American Bankers Association and Electronic Transfer Association.

When the Affordable Care Act required that “large employers” offer health care coverage to workers, businesses reliant on part-time, temporary and seasonal workers in the staffing, construction, retail and service industries sought a way to loosen those obligations.

Enter the “Employers for Flexibility in Health Care Coalition,” a working group with a name that suggests it brings solutions to the complicated health care law. E-Flex, as it is often called, says on its web page that it is “working to help ensure that employer-sponsored coverage — the backbone of the U.S. health care system — remains a competitive and affordable option for employers and for employees.”

E-Flex’s name regularly appears in testimony and letters to Congress and in comments filed with federal regulators. But the coalition has no office space or business registration in Washington, D.C.

So who or what is E-Flex? It is two dozen trade groups and corporations that came together in an effort to convince the government to reduce employers’ health insurance obligations and narrow workers’ eligibility for employer-sponsored health coverage.

E-Flex dramatically increased spending on lobbying last year, to $460,000, compared with $300,000 in 2012, a 53 percent jump. The increase in activity is no doubt tied to the continuing debate over employer-mandated coverage. Last week, President Barack Obama announced he would delay the coverage mandate for medium-sized employers until 2016.

Coalitions like E-Flex don’t usually publicize how much members pay or how they operate. But a Center for Public Integrity review of voluntary corporate disclosures, lobbying records and interviews with coalition members and experts in the industry sheds new light on these vaguely named, largely unknown, yet highly influential organizations.

For its part, E-Flex is led by the Retail Industry Leaders Association.

Christine Pollack, the vice president of government affairs at the retail group and chair of E-Flex said the coalition was created by an executive committee of trade associations and a health insurance giant to “coalesce on a common thread” of problems presented by inconsistent workforce hours.

Founding members had bumped into one another for years on Capitol Hill, said Edward Lenz, an attorney for the American Staffing Association, and in some cases, maintained relationships with the same lobbying firm — the D.C. arm of Ernst & Young.

All members, including UPS, 7-Eleven and the National Association of Home Builders, make financial contributions to E-Flex, but the exact amounts are hard to come by. One member, the retail clothing outlet Gap, voluntarily disclosed that it gave the coalition at least $1,000 in 2012, according to a document released by the company. But most companies haven’t embraced such additional transparency practices.

Lobbying reports filed with Congress provide a bit more information on the group’s finances. Members that contribute $5,000 or more in a quarter and “actively participate in the planning, supervision or control of the lobbying activities” are required to be disclosed, though the exact amounts of their contributions need not be reported.

The Retail Industry Leaders Association and the American Staffing Association are among those named in E-Flex’s reports to Congress, as are health insurer Aetna, the Food Marketing Institute and the National Restaurant Association.

“Some probably chip in a quarter million” while others give closer to $5,000, said Craig Holman of Public Citizen, a public interest group.

Before Congress passed reforms in 2007 in the wake of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, these informal lobbying groups, formerly known as “stealth coalitions,” had no obligation to disclose contributors.

Earlier this month, the E-Flex coalition told the House Ways and Means Committee that the current health care law’s requirements for employers are “fundamentally unworkable.”

The group asked that the definition of full-time employment be raised from 30 hours per week, arguing that this would “maintain flexible work options,” allow employees to work more hours in order to take home more pay and let employers offer “more generous” health coverage to full-time workers.

David Rehr, a former lobbyist who is now an adjunct professor at George Washington University’s graduate school of political management, says forming coalitions is “an important advocacy tool.”

The most effective coalitions have a variety of members that attract attention and “breaks the norm” on Capitol Hill, he said.

One obvious reason to join a coalition is that there’s “strength in numbers,” added Emily Holubowich, senior vice president at lobbying firm Cavarocchi Ruscio Dennis Associates.

Uniting various groups on a common issue can show “diversity of support” and facilitate easier “access to congressional offices,” Holubowich continued.

With all of its members, the E-Flex coalition can claim to represent dozens of employers and millions of jobs over a wide range of industries.

But that’s not all that’s at stake when forming a lobbying coalition.

“Coalitions add a great deal of credibility to each of the members, especially in a case like this,” where there’s an “immediate and singular legislative issue,” Holman said.

He added that smaller businesses can use coalitions to amplify their lobbying power, and members can pool their funds.

One active member of E-Flex that attends weekly meetings is the American Staffing Association, a group that calls itself “the poster child for that sort of intermittent, short-term work” represented in the coalition, according to Lenz, the association’s legal counsel.

Forming a coalition makes sense “if the interests are sufficiently similar,” Lenz said, adding that the association was “unquestionably” more successful lobbying through the coalition than if they’d gone it alone.

Moreover, with the midterm election season approaching, members might look to the deep-pocketed businesses and trade associations among them who can “spend very heavily in the next election,” Holman said, meaning congressional support or opposition to E-Flex could have potential campaign ramifications.

Some ad hoc groups are entirely run out of lobby shops.

The Coalition for 21st Century Patent Reform and the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service both list lobbyists on the “Contact Us” pages of their websites.

A steering committee of major corporations including 3M, Caterpillar, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly and Proctor & Gamble leads the Coalition for 21st Century Patent Reform, a group formed in 2005 with nearly 50 current members.

Since 2007, the coalition has spent just shy of $8 million on lobbying, with a top priority being the implementation of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, which went into effect last year. 3M voluntarily disclosed a $70,000 contribution to the coalition in 2012, which was used for lobbying.

The Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service, which calls itself the “collective voice of the mailing community,” has spent $655,000 in its five years of lobbying.

Its more than three dozen members include businesses and associations who rely on, represent or supply the mailing industry, such as American Express, Bank of America, Conde Nast, the Envelope Manufacturers Association, FedEx, the National Retail Federation, the Newspaper Association of America and Verizon.

The only coalition member known to self-report financial contributions to the group is eBay, which voluntarily revealed a $5,000 payment for membership dues in 2012.

Last year, the coalition, which says it represents a $1.3 trillion industry with 7.8 million private-sector workers, lobbied Congress and the U.S. Postal Service. It has endorsed the Postal Reform Act of 2013, which would address financial constraints for the postal service and modify mail delivery schedules and rates.

Another informal lobbying group is the Coalition for a Domestic Insurance Industry, a business set up in Wilmington, Del., in 2007. It represents 13 U.S.-based insurance firms, half of which are Fortune 500 companies. They include American Financial Group, Berkshire Hathaway, Chubb, Hartford Financial Services Group, Liberty Mutual Group, W. R. Berkley and the Travelers Companies.

The coalition primarily lobbies for corporate members before Congress on tax issues regarding a “loophole” that exists for foreign-based insurers, and it spent $2.5 million during the past seven years doing so.

In 2012, when the coalition spent a total of $190,000 on lobbying efforts, Chubb disclosed a contribution of $140,000, all of which was used for lobbying.

A phone call from the Center for Public Integrity to the point of contact on the coalition’s website was immediately referred to the group’s lobbyist at Capitol Tax Partners, who only spoke with the Center off-the-record.

When Comcast Corp., a Washington lobbying powerhouse, fires up a campaign to convince lawmakers and regulators to support its $45 billion purchase of Time Warner Cable Inc., don’t expect much opposition from the companies' biggest rivals.

Instead of fighting the deal — which would create a cable TV and broadband Internet provider with 30 million customers and a television network — rivals like Cablevision Systems Corp. and Cox Communications Inc. will likely try to use the merger of the No. 1 and No. 2 cable companies to extract their own concessions from the government, including seeking permission for their own mergers and lighter regulation.

If that happens, the Federal Communications Commission, which approves such deals, may trade off having a smaller number of cable television and Internet service providers for agreements that the remaining companies won’t block or slow Internet traffic for their personal gain. That’s the guarantee of a free and open Internet that President Obama has pursued since being first elected in 2008.

Charter Communications Inc., which was close to buying Time Warner Cable before Comcast undercut it with last week's deal, would be viewed as a sore loser if it chose to oppose the merger. The company is already looking around at other cable companies to buy, including Cox, according to a Bloomberg report.

Rather than fighting, the companies are likely to say, “’We need scale to compete with Comcast,’” so approve our deals, said Harold Feld, a senior vice president at Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group in Washington.

AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., the biggest wireless companies, are likely to lie low for the same reason. 

“AT&T and Verizon typically have had a gentlemen’s agreement that, ‘We don’t comment on your merger and you won’t comment on our merger,’” Feld said.

Verizon spokesman Ed McFadden appeared to confirm that when asked about the deal. “This just changes the name of the competitor in some of our markets,” he said in an email. AT&T did not respond to a request for comment.

The big phone carriers also may devise a different, more subtle, approach to the Comcast purchase.

AT&T and Verizon may use the deal to push the Federal Communications Commission to give the more leeway as they tries to shift from providing Americans traditional wired-phone service to service based on the Internet and wireless frequencies, predicts Jeff Silva, senior policy director for telecommunications at Medley Global Advisors in Washington, D.C.

The FCC voted last month to proceed with pilot tests of the so-called IP-transition, which would send phone calls over wireless networks using the Internet. (IP stands for Internet protocol.) Traditional phone companies have sought permission to switch to IP-based networks because they are cheaper to maintain than the old copper-wire phone networks.

How phone companies may be regulated under an IP-based system is unclear, but it raises the possibility of rolling back rules.

“I can see AT&T and Verizon saying, ‘Look how big Comcast and all these cable companies are getting with all these consolidations, and we do the same thing as they do, but we are regulated differently. That’s not fair,’” Silva said. “So, they may use this as leverage to push for a more aggressive IP-transition policy at the FCC.”

That leaves it to satellite TV providers, smaller cable companies and consumer groups to fight the Comcast purchase – a lopsided battle if there ever was one.

Comcast spent the eighth-largest amount on lobbying in Washington in 2013, doling out $18.8 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Comcast also upped its campaign contributions, with its political action committee raising $2.1 million in 2013, an increase from 2009 and 2011, the first years of the 2010 and 2012 election cycles.

Time Warner Cable spent much less on lobbying in 2013 -- $8.3 million – but it still dwarfed DirecTV’s $2.5 million and Dish Network’s $1.5 million of lobbying spending in the same year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Public interest groups that oppose the merger because it will reduce competition also have far less money than the corporations.

“The public interest community is definitely outgunned in terms of resources,” said Olivia Wein, a staff attorney in the Washington office of the National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group that focuses on low-income and elderly consumers.

“David and Goliath is an image that comes to mind.”

What may be the biggest hurdle is the FCC itself. The agency, which will have to rule whether the purchase is in the public interest, may approve the merger if it can convince Comcast to agree to follow the FCC’s Open Internet rules, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned last month.

The so-called net neutrality rules barred broadband providers from blocking or slowing Internet traffic so that they could favor their own content over competitors’, or could charge for faster delivery, which would give an advantage to content providers with deep pockets over smaller, startup Internet companies.

“Instead of appealing the D.C. Circuit ruling to the Supreme Court, now all of a sudden you’ve got this deal to work with,” Silva said. “So the FCC may be looking at this as an opportunity to convince a huge broadband company and service provider to follow its net neutrality rules that they wouldn’t have been able to do previously.”

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler announced Wednesday that the commission will propose new net-neutrality rules. 

Comcast agreed to follow the FCC’s net neutrality rules through 2018 when the agency approved its purchase of NBC Universal in January 2011. A similar deal and even an extension of the rules may be part of an approval of buying Time Warner Cable. And if the FCC can secure that agreement, Internet companies that need an open Internet such as Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. may back off from any opposition.

“I’m thinking [FCC policymakers] are thinking real hard about what their strategy might be in this,” Silva said. “And if they can get some concessions on net neutrality, they may not oppose this.”
 

The Federal Election Commission wrote Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., to ask why it hasn't yet received a paper copy of her campaign finance report for final three months of 2013.

And it's no love letter.

"It is important that you file this report immediately," Deborah Chacona, the assistant staff director in the FEC's Reports Analysis Division, told McCaskill's campaign committee on Wednesday. "The failure to timely file a complete report may result in civil money penalties, an audit or legal enforcement action."

McCaskill's response? Blame the U.S. Postal Service.

"The McCaskill campaign did in fact mail in (and voluntarily electronically file) its year-end FEC report on time, but the USPS inadvertently failed to deliver it, even though it had been mailed to the correct PO Box," McCaskill spokesman John LaBombard explained to Center for Public Integrity in an email. "The campaign immediately contacted the FEC to alert them to the USPS’s error, and has re-mailed the hard copy of the report."

The filing snafu highlights the Senate's arcane campaign finance disclosure rules.

Indeed, McCaskill is among a small group of senators who voluntarily submit their campaign reports electronically.

This digital version of her report — currently available for anyone to review on the FEC's website — shows McCaskill raised about $87,000 during the final quarter of 2013, primarily from a variety of individuals and political action committees, and by renting out her supporter lists. Her campaign ended the year with $148,707 cash on hand and $35,000 in debt — money the campaign owes to McCaskill personally.

But Senate campaign finance reports submitted electronically are not considered official documents by either the Senate or government regulators. Only paper copies will do. Senators, therefore, must continue sending hard copy documents to the FEC to comply with federal law.

When the FEC receives the hard copies, it will then — at taxpayer expense— convert the paper filings into electronic form.

McCaskill is also one among 35 senators sponsoring legislation aimed at requiring themselves and fellow senators to file official campaign finance reports digitally. Most sponsors are Democrats or independents, although several Republicans, including Sens. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Johnny Isakson of Georgia, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, have also signed on.

Members of the U.S. House have been e-filing campaign finance reports for years.

The six-member FEC in December formally recommended to Congress that it change federal law to require senators to e-file their campaign finance reports — and ditch mailed-in paper documents.

As Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Cable Inc. roll out a massive lobbying effort to win regulatory approval for the merger of the nation’s two largest cable companies, one key step for the companies will be garnering the support of prominent civil rights and minority groups.

Comcast has already shown it can pull support from key minority groups — dozens sent letters of support to the Federal Communications Commission, which must approve the buyout, while it was considering Comcast’s last mega-deal — its 2011 purchase of NBC/Universal.

As tax data analyzed as part of a collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity and theNew York Times show, 55 such groups both accepted funds from Comcast’s corporate foundation between 2004 and 2012 and sent letters to the FCC supporting the Comcast-NBCU deal.

Those include large and well-established organizations such as the National Urban League, which received $835,000 from Comcast’s foundation during the period, as well as local groups such as the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, which received $42,300 in grants from Comcast since 2009.

The data also show an emphasis by Comcast in building links to the Hispanic community. Of the $8.6 million given to groups that offered support in the NBC deal, nearly 60 percent went to Hispanic groups. The recipients included the National Council of La Raza ($2.2 million), the Hispanic Federation ($345,000) and the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce ($320,000).

Indeed, the USHCC hailed the Comcast-Time Warner Cable announcement on the same day the deal was announced for “forging an innovative world-class technology company, with increased capacity to deliver ground-breaking products.”

Support for the Time Warner Cable deal from the National Council of La Raza, the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights group, would likely be even more helpful to Comcast.

In 2010, while the FCC was scrutinizing Comcast’s NBC purchase, La Raza was one of six Hispanic groups to send a letter to the FCC’s chairman highlighting an agreement they had struck with Comcast and NBC in advance of the merger.

As part of that deal, Comcast and NBC made a number of concessions, including the creation of new Spanish programming, increased funding for Hispanic scholarships, greater minority hiring and the addition of a Hispanic to Comcast’s board of directors.

The agreement with the merging companies would “promote the goals of expanding economic opportunity for Hispanic families and preserving and enhancing programming for Hispanic audiences,” Janet Marguia, La Raza’s president, and five other Hispanic leaders wrote to the FCC.

That agreement, and similar deals with other minority groups that have received Comcast funds, has drawn criticism from those who say the civil rights groups are selling short the interests of their constituents.

“Comcast has very big relationships with a lot of Hispanic politicians and nonprofit groups and I hope they are more challenging of this deal,” says Joe Torres, a spokesman for Free Press, a group that often opposes Comcast. “This is a massive merger and I’m hoping there will be a lot more skepticism.”

Others are less forgiving.

“They got nothing, all they did was make sure the Hispanic audience would be targeted more effectively through the Comcast-NBC machine,” says Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a group that opposes media consolidation. “You have an overall problem of civil rights groups and others being on bended knee in front of corporations for their donations.”

David Cohen, Comcast's government affairs chief, rejects any such criticism.

“People would like to take this 20-plus-year-old incredible commitment to communities and these organizations and would like to make it a bad thing — that we are buying off support for the transaction,” Cohen said in an interview with the Times, referring to the Comcast Foundation’s $140 million in grants since its inception and more than $3.2 billion since 2001 when all kinds of corporate support (cash and in-kind support like free public service announcements) are included. “That is simply not true. And I believe it is offensive to the organizations we support.”

Lisa Navarete, a spokeswoman for La Raza, says the 2010 deal with Comcast and NBC didn’t constitute a formal endorsement of the merger. More than three years after the agreement, she says the group is generally satisfied with Comcast’s outreach to Hispanics, though she says the group is concerned about the near-absence of Hispanic anchors on MSNBC or Hispanic actors on NBC staples such as “Saturday Night Live.” Still, she praises Comcast’s moves to add a Hispanic to its board, establish a minority advisory council and launch El Rey, an English-language channel targeting Hispanics.

The $2.2 million La Raza has received from Comcast will not affect the group’s planned negotiations with the company about the proposed Time Warner merger, nor did Comcast donations influence the group’s stance toward the NBC deal, Navarete says.

“The implication of those types of thoughts is minority organizations aren’t smart or sophisticated enough to be able to take money and still make a decision based on the merits,” she says.  “I think its offensive to say we take positions based on who we get money from.”

To be sure, not all Hispanic groups have supported Comcast’s acquisitions. In 2010, the Latino Business Chamber of Los Angeles wrote to the FCC to oppose Comcast’s acquisition of NBC/Universal, citing negative stereotyping of Latinos in the companies’ programming and a dearth of Hispanic executives.

The Latino Chamber’s chief executive, Theresa Martinez, says the group will likely oppose the Time Warner deal as well, citing the effect of higher cable and Internet prices on the poor — particularly in light of the creation of a new Time Warner cable channel for the Los Angeles Dodgers that could increase cable rates $5 per month. As for Hispanic groups that have lined up with Comcast in the past, she terms their motives “political.”

“I say it’s political because sometimes money talks,” she says. “You can be bought out for things like that and you don’t look at the big picture.”

The Energy Department has repeatedly and substantially underestimated the costs of building a South Carolina plant meant to turn surplus plutonium from nuclear weapons into fuel for power plants, federal auditors declared in a new report on Feb. 20.

The Government Accountability Office said the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration moreover has never completed “root cause analyses” of why the cost of the two construction projects at the heart of the effort have ballooned over the past decade.  

Providing a new window on what it depicted as the agency’s continuing mismanagement of the program, the GAO said that without such analyses, those in charge can’t correct existing problems, weigh any alternatives and learn from past mistakes.

The department failed to take a deep dive into the numbers, the report said, even when NNSA officials decided last April to slow construction of the Mixed Oxide or MOX fuel plant, which is located at DOE’s Savannah River Site, pending a review of alternatives for disposing of the plutonium.

NNSA officials have repeatedly promised to reform construction management of the overall project, which includes not only the fuel plant — which combines plutonium and uranium oxides to make reactor fuel — but a separate building where nuclear wastes are solidified to get them ready for burial.

The MOX plant is now expected to cost billions more than first estimated, due to what the GAO last year called the Energy agency’s “record of inadequate management and oversight.”

The GAO report found that the Energy department’s April 2013 draft estimate of the total cost of the plutonium weapons-to-fuel program — $24.2 billion — was “not reliable” because it ignored key steps in calculating the figure.  

A recently-completed Energy Department study of the plutonium plant and alternatives, not yet released, pegs the overall cost of the project at up to $35 billion, the Center for Public Integrity has reported.  

Auditors said in Thursday’s report that the NNSA’s April figure was based on a review marred by the lack of any written plan, as well as a failure to document the sources of its data or submit its estimates to management for approval.

NNSA officials told the GAO, the report said, that they regarded its $24.2 billion figure as “predecisional” because the whole program was under review at the time and they thus had no need to get management to sign off on it. NNSA also did not obtain an independent estimate for the overall program costs, the report said, nor did it seek similar estimates for the fuel plant and waste solidification building.

In 2002, the Energy agency estimated the MOX plutonium fuel plant alone would cost about $1 billion. By 2012 it said it would cost $7.7 billion. Now the Energy agency expects the price to rise to up to $10 billion, according to a government official who has studied the project.

In a Jan. 24 response to the GAO, NNSA’s Associate Administrator for Management and Budget Cynthia Lersten concurred with most of the findings, and wrote that “root cause analyses” for cost increases at the MOX plant and Waste Solidification Building are expected to be completed by Sept. 30.

She also wrote that the agency wouldn’t formally update its MOX project cost estimates until after the Obama administration decides whether to proceed with it or select an alternative pathway to rendering the plutonium in nuclear weapons unusable.

But GAO’s report said that DOE never mentioned that it was conducting a root cause analysis during its review of the program, which began in November 2012 and ended in January.

Under a 2000 treaty, both the United States and Russia have pledged to dispose of 34 tons each of their plutonium from dismantled warheads. At Russia’s insistence, the United States agreed to do so by turning it into reactor fuel.

The NNSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.