Concerned the chemical may be linked to a kidney disease killing agricultural workers, Sri Lanka this week ordered a ban on glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s top-selling herbicide Roundup.

The move comes weeks after publication of a new study in Sri Lanka suggesting glyphosate as the leading culprit for the illness. The paper did not provide new scientific evidence, but laid out a detailed theory that the use of glyphosate in areas with heavy metals in the drinking water is causing the chronic kidney disease. Roundup is the top selling herbicide in the world, and Monsanto said the newest study is built upon untested theory rather than hard data.

“Glyphosate acts as a carrier or a vector of these heavy metals to the kidney,” said Dr. Channa Jayasumana, the study’s principal author.

For more than two years, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has examined a mysterious form of kidney disease that has killed tens of thousands of agricultural workers in Central America, Sri Lanka and India. The malady is suspected by scientists to be caused by a combination of factors including chronic dehydration from hard labor in tropical heat and exposure to toxins such as pesticides, but its origins have yet to be fully uncovered.

Wednesday’s announcement by Sri Lanka was the most dramatic measure taken to date to combat the illness. The legislature in El Salvador approved a ban on dozens of agrochemicals including glyphosate last September, but the proposal has so far not been signed into law.

“An investigation carried out by medical specialists and scientists has revealed that kidney disease was mainly caused by glyphosate,” Special Projects Minister S.M Chandrasena told reporters in Sri Lanka. “President Mahinda Rajapaksa has ordered the immediate removal of glyphosate from the local market soon after he was told of the contents of the report.”

Roundup is used all over the world, including in countless areas that do not suffer from this distinct form of kidney disease.

“There are no epidemiologic studies suggesting that exposures to glyphosate-based products are associated with renal disorders either in Sri Lanka or elsewhere,” said Monsanto spokesman Thomas Helscher. “The paper presents a theory, the theory has not been tested, and there are a significant number of publications supported by data that make the Jayasumana hypothesis quite unlikely to be correct.”

Sri Lanka’s ban represents a triumph for Jayasumana, a researcher who has long insisted that pesticides and the heavy metals arsenic and cadmium are responsible for the disease.

While he has transformed in Sri Lanka from a resented outsider – a government official once denounced his theories as “arsenic terrorism” – to a respected voice in official policy, some scientists question the evidence behind the pesticide theories, considering them plausible but largely unproven.

Jayasumana’s study does not include laboratory or field tests, and appeared in a little-known “open access” journal in which publishing fees are paid by the authors.

"Banning of pesticides is to be supported under the precautionary principle, since they may be potentially related to CKD," said Dr. Catharina Wesseling of the Program on Work, Environment and Health in Central America (SALTRA). "However, although beneficial for worker's health, we should not expect that this will solve the epidemic in Central America."

Jayasumana’s article contends that glyphosate, which forms powerful chemical bonds with heavy metals, enters into compounds that persist in drinking water until they break down in people’s kidneys. It is the combination of heavy water and Roundup or other glyphosate products, he argued, that places the population at risk.

“I think we can explain the geographical distribution as well as the time problem with our hypothesis,” Jayasumana said, in reference to the epidemic’s unusual geography and its surge in all of the affected regions during the 1990s.

Jayasumana contends Monsanto failed in its obligations to warn the public of the health risks posed by glyphosate when used in areas with heavy water. Glyphosate was originally patented as a chelating agent – a substance useful for its ability to form strong chemical bonds with metals – so Monsanto was aware of these properties, Jayasumana said.

“I don’t see any warnings on the bottle or on the label,” he said. “I feel it’s a fault by Monsanto.”

Official studies in Sri Lanka have found heavy metals and pesticides including glyphosate in the environment of affected areas and in urine samples of kidney patients. One study published last August by Sri Lankan health officials in partnership with the World Health Organization found that urine samples of sick patients had elevated levels of cadmium, and that 65% of patients’ urine samples also had traces of glyphosate.

El Salvador has also identified traces of heavy metals in a small number of affected communities, and glyphosate is used widely in the country. Dr. Carlos Orantes, the director of El Salvador’s national research program into the epidemic, said his team is working on developing a map of areas with hard water within El Salvador’s borders.

“Our primary principal is to protect human lives,” said Orantes, a proponent of banning pesticides including glyphosate in El Salvador.

Editor's note: The story has been updated to include a more current comment from Dr. Catharina Wesseling.

Education experts on Thursday unveiled a trove of research suggesting that schools should stop doling out harsh discipline that pushes kids away from school often for minor infractions. 

The new research — the product of years of work — follows the unveiling earlier this year of two Obama administration initiatives that also address concerns about zero-tolerance school punishment and the future of young black and Latino males, in particular.

Removing millions of kids from school on suspension leaves them further behind academically, warn researchers. They recommend that educators consider alternative intervention ideas that schools around the country have embraced with success.

“We are never going to close the (ethnic) achievement gap until we close this discipline gap,” said Dan Losen, one of the researchers, who is based at the University of California at Los Angeles. He spoke at a Congressional briefing Thursday sponsored by the Black Caucus Education and Labor Task Force.

Losen is the director of UCLA’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies and part of a 26-person research team and advocacy team called the Discipline Disparities Research Collaborative.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., spoke at the briefing to show support for the team’s reform effort.

“I came to this issue through a story,” he said.

Murphy said his wife, who practices public-interest law, told him about an 8-year-old boy with a long history of neglect and problems. He was expelled from his school because he took one of his few possessions, a Pokemon thumb tack, to school, Murphy said, and ended up poking another student with it. The boy was ultimately returned to school with lawyers’ help.

The research team is especially concerned about disproportionate rates of suspensions of black, Latino and disabled students. Research is also starting to show evidence that gay students, too, are affected by suspensions at relatively high rates.

In January, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education unveiled their own joint effort to promote alternative discipline ideas to schools to cut suspensions. And in February, Obama announced a privately-funded initiative, My Brother’s Keeper, whose aim is to support community-based programs that have shown success at keeping black and Latino boys engaged in education and out of the criminal-justice system.

Most suspensions are for small infractions, such as chewing gum, wearing a uniform incorrectly or showing disrepect, according to the researchers. Children often miss days of school when suspended.

Data have also shown that black kids — and Latino kids once they’re in middle and high school — are removed from school at higher rates than white classmates, researchers said, even when students come from similar economic backgrounds.

The Center for Public Integrity reported last year on mostly Latino and black students expelled from regular schools and told to enroll in alternative schools that are so far away the children either were forced to do home study or drop out. In Los Angeles, until recent reforms changed practices, schools were calling police at times to repond to discipline matters. Black and Latino kids in middle schools were getting citations for disorderly conduct by the hundreds, as the Center also reported.

According to one paper unveiled Thursday, there is no evidence that “students of color” engage in disruptive behavior “sufficiently different from others" to justify higher rates of punishment. Survey data from 8th and 10th grade black, white, and Hispanic students indicate that black males reported similar or lower use of drugs, alcohol, and weapons at school compared to other students, yet they also reported receiving more suspensions than any other group.”

Nationally, one of the group’s research papers says, 25 percent of black students with disabilities were suspended from school at least once in the 2009 school year. That’s a higher rate than for any other ethnic group — and 16 percentage points higher than white students with a disability.

During a press briefing Thursday, Ramiro Rubalcaba, the principal of Azusa High School in southern California, described how he struggled with doubts about alternative discipline methods when he worked in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“I was one of those skeptics,” he said.

He was assistant principal at Garfield High School, in a high-poverty area with a tough reputation, and he was suspending 600 students a year. Then the district began training in alternative ideas, he said, “and I had an ‘aha’ moment.”  During the 2011-2012 school year, he said, Garfield suspended a single student once.

Azusa High, he said, is down to three suspensions this year compared to 70 last year.

He said there are a variety of tested alternative approaches to booting out kids, and if school leaders decide on one particular type they should give it go without deviating.

“It can work,” he said, “If it’s implemented with fidelity.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi last Thursday rejected the notion that Democrat Alex Sink’s narrow loss to Republican David Jolly in last week’s special election in Florida — in a congressional district that Republicans have held for half a century — was a referendum on Obamacare.

“I’m very proud of our House Democrats, not only how they’ve embraced the Affordable Care Act … but how proud they are of it,” Pelosi said. “I think the Republicans are wasting their time using that as their election issue and they will find that out.”

Pelosi went on to say, however, that, “there are some things (about the law) that need to be fixed.”

She didn’t suggest what those things are, but I’m betting at the very least she wishes she and others who helped write the law had made it simpler for people to get the insurance protection they need.

The reform law made many of the insurance industry’s most despised practices illegal, like refusing to offer coverage to applicants with pre-existing conditions and canceling people’s policies when they get sick.

And the ACA now requires insurers to provide information about their policies in understandable language and in a format that enables people to compare one plan with another. It also established federal and state health insurance “exchanges” to make shopping for coverage more convenient and less stressful.

But despite those and other important benefits of the law, trying to figure out which health plan among many is best for you is anything but a walk in the park.

With only two weeks left before the March 31 deadline to enroll in a plan for 2014, I talked to Rachel DeGolia — one of the specially trained ACA navigators who is helping folks in Cleveland, Ohio, figure out how to move out of the ranks of the uninsured — to find out how she would fix the law if she had the power to do so.

I also consulted the 114-page “Navigator Resource Guide” developed by the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University Health Policy Institute to help navigators like DeGolia deal with all the questions they get every day from folks.

Although DeGolia still believes a single-payer system would be better than the multi-payer system the ACA is built upon, she nevertheless considers the law “a huge step in the right direction.”

But, she says, lawmakers need to figure out how to make coverage more affordable and to reduce the complexity that has defined the health insurance industry for decades.

“Coverage is not as affordable as many people need it to be yet,” she says.

In the 25 states that have expanded their Medicaid programs to include residents with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, the people at the lower end of the income spectrum are in many cases better served by the law than middle income individuals and families.

“If you make $30,000 and can find an affordable premium but still have a $5,000 deductible, that’s not a great deal if you get sick,” she said.

“It doesn’t make sense to me why we have to have these high deductibles,” she added. “Maybe they exist because people need to have ‘skin in the game,’ but I haven’t met people who overuse services. That’s not the norm. I’m afraid the deductibles will be so high for some people that it will deter them from getting the care they need, even if they are insured.”

And because plans with the highest deductibles have the lowest premiums, she says she worries that people will “settle” for a plan that provides less comprehensive coverage than then they really need.

Another problem with the health plans being offered on the exchanges is that many of them have “narrow” provider networks, meaning that a person’s doctor might not be included.

“It’s a challenge is to help people who have never had insurance to explain it to them,” said DeGolia. “You can easily spend two hours with them. It’s a big learning curve.”

DeGolia also wishes the ACA didn’t limit enrollment to just a few months a year — which brings me to that Georgetown Navigator Resource Guide. Here’s Question 37 (of 270):

“Why can’t I buy a plan when I need it? Why do I have to wait for the open enrollment period?

Answer: If everyone were allowed to wait until they were sick to buy coverage, premiums would be very expensive … Health insurers need a mix of healthy and sick people to make premiums fair for everyone.”

(Of course, if everyone were covered and automatically enrolled in a single-payer system as in other countries, there wouldn’t be a need for open enrollment. Our health care system is complex in large part because we have so many payers.)

Click here to find the answers to the other 269 questions in the resource guide. And for more information about how the reform law affects you, check out my eBook: “Obamacare: What’s in It for Me? What Everyone Needs to Know about the Affordable Care Act.”

Two investigative projects produced by the Center for Public Integrity, including one by its International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), were honored for journalistic excellence Monday by the Scripps Howard Foundation.

The ICIJ won the William Brewster Styles Award for Business/Economics Reporting for Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze. That first place honor, carrying a $10,000 prize, recognized a succession of reports built upon more than 2.5 million leaked files.

In one of the largest collaborations in journalism, the massive ICIJ project took 18 months to complete, and resulted in more than 50 stories involving 112 journalists in 58 nations. Those reports revealed more than 120,000 names and companies in a hidden parallel economy of offshore tax havens, prompting multiple international tax investigations.

The other Center investigation honored was Toxic Clout, a year-long series of stories exploring conflicts in the world of chemical science. The project, written by David Heath, Ronnie Greene, Jim Morris and Chris Hamby, was a finalist for the Edward J. Meeman Award for Environmental Reporting.

The top environmental reporting prize went to The Seattle Times.

Other winners of the Scripps Howard Awards announced Monday included The Guardian US for Public Service Reporting for “The NSA Files.”

“The Center for Public Integrity is truly honored to have two of its major investigative projects honored by the Scripps Howard Foundation,” said William Buzenberg, the Center’s executive director.

“This important work on the growing use of global tax havens, and the lack of regulation of dangerous toxic chemicals in our environment, are representative of the depth and excellence in our most compelling work.”

Established in 1953, the Scripps Howard Foundation’s awards recognize outstanding print, broadcast and online journalism in 15 categories. The winners will be honored at a May 22 dinner in Cincinnati. 

See the full list of Scripps Howard Awards winners, and congratulations to all winners and finalists.

"Super PAC" is officially legit.

Making good on a promise, language authority Merriam-Webster recently published an entry for "super PAC" in its online unabridged dictionary — a subscription-only product. Inclusion of "super PAC" in its free online dictionary is forthcoming, Associate Editor Kory Stamper told the Center for Public Integrity.

The Merriam-Webster entry reads:

Super PAC, noun: a type of political action committee that is legally permitted to raise and spend larger amounts of money than the amounts allowed for a conventional PAC; specifically: an independent PAC that can accept unlimited contributions from individuals and organizations (such as corporations and labor unions) and spend unlimited amounts in support of a candidate but that cannot directly contribute money to or work directly in concert with the candidate it is supporting

The entry also includes quotations from campaign finance reform advocate Fred Wertheimer and New York Times reporter Nicholas Confessore to illustrate the use of "super PAC" in speech and writing.

Oxford Dictionaries and Associated Press Stylebook have previously inked "super PAC" entries in their respective publications.

Such a lexicographic development is, perhaps, no surprise: Super PACs have become electoral politics' white-hot stars since the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in 2010 helped facilitate their creation later that year.

Together, super PACs raised more than $828 million and spent $609 million during the 2012 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. These groups already have spent tens of millions of dollars more during the 2014 midterm election cycle, Federal Election Commission records indicate.

Super PACs have permeated popular culture, too, as key plot points in television serials from Netflix's "House of Cards" to ABC's "Castle."

No single show, however, boosted public awareness of super PACs quite like Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report."

In the name of satire, comedian Stephen Colbert created his own super PAC, using it as a vehicle to incessantlypokefun at the nation's campaign finance system.

But credit Roll Call reporter Eliza Newlin Carney, then writing for National Journal, for coining the term "super PAC" as we know it. She did so as shorthand for the painfully clunky term "independent expenditure-only political committee," a.k.a., IEOPC — the formal name for a super PAC, so far as the federal government is concerned.

Carney's creation sure stuck: News tracking service LexisNexis, for example, cites more than 2,500 instances of publications writing "super PAC" since the beginning of 2014.

Incumbent Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., easily fended off a primary challenge from David Hale, a tea party activist whose platform included a novel proposal to add more transparency to politicians’ campaign funding.

Had Hale been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, he planned to introduce legislation that would have required members of Congress to clearly display on their websites the corporate logos of the political action committees that helped bankroll their campaigns — like NASCAR drivers display sponsor logos on their cars.

“If Congress truly wants to be transparent, they will readily pass such an act and put their PAC money where their website is,” Hale wrote on his blog in January. "It's only fair that we the people know who is donating to our congressional representatives in the House and Senate."

During the campaign, Hale was dramatically out-raised by Kinzinger, who collected more than $1 million. More than half of this sum came from PACs, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The PACs of Home Depot, General Mills and the American Society of Anesthesiologists all contributed to Kinzinger’s campaign during the final stretch of the GOP primary, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of federal filings.

For his part, Hale raised less than $10,000, none of which came from PACs — groups that frequently favor incumbents with their political giving.

In the closing days of the race, Kinzinger was also trumpeted in radio ads by an operation called Main Street Advocacy, a “social welfare” nonprofit headed by former Rep. Steve LaTourette, R-Ohio, that wants Republicans to prioritize “pragmatism instead of social dogma.”

Main Street Advocacy — which is not legally required to publicly disclose its donors — spent $20,000 on the pro-Kinzinger ads, Federal Election Commission records show.

Kinzinger will now face Democratic challenger Randall Olsen in November.

Federal officials are taking aim at more than a dozen state laws that reined in the activities of so-called “navigators” — advocates who are helping consumers negotiate the complexities of Obamacare. Specifically, the Department of Health and Human Services is proposing to clarify exactly what states can and can’t do in their attempts to regulate this little-known but critical aspect of federal health reform.

As the Center reported in August, 17 states have passed laws that impose additional regulations on the navigators— typically members of social service organizations and advocacy groups who are funded through the Affordable Care Act to help people sign up for insurance (Louisiana passed a law after publication).

Some state officials have said the navigator laws, which generally create additional state training and licensing requirements, were necessary to protect consumers. Many of the state bills were pushed by insurance agents and brokers, who saw navigators as potentially infringing on their traditional role in the insurance marketplace. But consumer groups argued that some aspects of the state laws were unnecessary and would inhibit navigators from helping people enroll in coverage through the new online federal health marketplaces, known as exchanges.

The federal law says states may establish their own regulations so long as they don’t prevent navigators from carrying out their duties. But until now, federal officials had declined to clarify what would meet that criterion.

Last week, the health and human services department effectively agreed with some of the consumer groups’ arguments, releasing a proposed rule that singles out a handful of provisions included in the state laws that the department, “considers to conflict with or prevent the application” of the federal law. While the rule is not yet final, it may lead to yet another round of legal battles between states and the federal government over the health care law. HHS is currently collecting public comments on the proposal, and will do so until mid- April. It’s not clear when a final rule might emerge.

The proposed rule says that states may impose their own oversight of navigators, such as requiring fingerprinting or background checks. But it lists several provisions that state laws may not include, such as requiring navigators to refer people to agents or brokers, preventing navigators from helping people who already have insurance that they bought through an agent or broker, or prohibiting navigators from discussing the details or benefits of particular plans.

Most of the state laws contain at least one of these provisions, and it’s unclear what will happen if HHS adopts the rule as final. The rule itself would not immediately invalidate a state law, said Richard Olague, a department spokesman, but would instead provide guidance for states and others on the department’s position. It could also become fuel for lawsuits.

“I think you can expect to see a lot of litigation,” said Wes Bissett, senior counsel for government affairs for the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America. “Just because HHS were to promulgate a rule that says certain state laws are preempted doesn’t make it so.”

Bissett said his organization supports some aspects of the proposed rule — it would also allow the department to fine navigators and would prohibit them from going door-to-door, for example — but that other provisions may simply tie the hands of state regulators. He pointed to the clause that prevents states from requiring that navigators refer people to agents or brokers.

“If you have a working relationship with an agent, there may be a benefit to talking to that person before talking to a navigator that doesn’t have that experience,” he said. Bissett said his organization plans to submit comments on the proposed rule.

After they were passed last year, the state navigator laws led to at least two lawsuits, brought by unions and community health groups in Missouri and Tennessee who said the laws were overly restrictive. In January, a federal judge enjoined Missouri’s law, saying the state could not choose to regulate navigators if it elected not to run a health care exchange. The federal health law says that navigators are to be regulated by the health exchange of the given state, but 34 states opted not to run their exchanges, and the federal government has run the marketplaces in those states instead, taking oversight duties of navigators as well.

Last summer, navigators were drawn into the larger political battle over the health care law, with a batch of mostly Republican state and federal public officials directing scrutiny at groups that had applied for federal navigator funds.

A report released in January by the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services also seemed to indicate that the navigator laws, at least in part, were having an effect on outreach for the law. The report found that community health centers located in the nine states that had both adopted navigator laws and also declined Medicaid expansion, another provision of the health care law, had fewer resources compared to similar groups in other states.

Bisset said he has seen little evidence that the navigator laws have hindered application of the reforms, and that they have helped protect consumers with additional oversight.

Just last week, the Kansas state Senate and Arizona House passed their own navigator bills, and similar legislation is pending in Oklahoma. Each would appear to be set up for a collision course with the federal rule if they are passed by the full legislatures.

A federal judge has ruled that payday lenders must obey consumer-protection laws even if they are affiliated with Indian tribes.

The March 7 ruling by U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro of Nevada was a huge blow to a payday lending business run by Scott Tucker, who has used his earnings to finance a professional race-car team.

The Center for Public Integrity, in collaboration with CBS News, exposed Tucker’s involvement in a business called AMG Services in a series of stories in 2011.

The Federal Trade Commission is suing Tucker, alleging that he was making loans over the Internet using illegal and deceptive claims. Regulators in several states pursued Tucker for years but he was able to elude them after selling his business to the Miami and Modoc tribes of Oklahoma and the Santee Sioux tribe of Nebraska. Tucker continued to manage the business and kept at least 98 percent of the income, court documents show.

Several state courts ruled that they have no jurisdiction over tribal entities because they are sovereign nations. The FTC is claiming that AMG Services violated federal laws that apply to tribes. Last year, U.S. Magistrate Cam Ferenbach concluded that tribal entities are not exempt from federal consumer laws. In her ruling, Navarro accepted that decision.

"It's a strong signal to deceptive payday lenders that their days of hiding behind a tribal affiliation are over," Jessica Rich, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a press release.

In January, Ferenbach concluded that AMG Services violated federal laws by using deceptive practices. In the coming months, Navarro will consider whether to accept Ferenbach’s decision again.

The FTC is seeking to have the payday lending business, Tucker and other defendants return all the money they made using allegedly deceptive means. FTC attorney Nikhil Singhvi said the amount will “easily be in the millions of dollars.”

Two days after Navarro issued her ruling, Tucker’s brother Blaine was found dead in the parking lot of a shopping center in Leawood, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City. Police say he committed suicide but provided no other details. Blaine Tucker was a defendant in the FTC lawsuit.

A lawyer for Tucker did not respond to an email seeking comment Wednesday.

Colorado’s tough, new air pollution rules for the oil and gas industry were approved only a month ago but already are making an impact in Texas, where lawmakers and energy companies have long resisted tightening air standards.

Several companies have approached the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund and expressed interest in discussing whether Colorado’s rules make sense for Texas, according to Jim Marston, a vice president at EDF. Marston didn’t name the companies.

“The companies are often ahead of the Texas state government,” said Marston, who works in the group’s Austin office. “If some important industry leaders like the idea, it might move state government.” EDF played a leading role among the environmental organizations that helped craft the Colorado rules.

Many energy companies participated in Colorado's rule-making process, but only four of them — Anadarko Petroleum Corp., DCP Midstream, Encana Corp. and Noble Energy, Inc. — fully support the new regulations.

Anadarko and DCP Midstream also operate in Texas.

The Colorado Oil & Gas Association, a trade group, had strong objections to some of the rules. For example, the association argued against requiring regular leak inspections at small storage tanks.

Marston said the individual companies' support was crucial for the rules' approval — and would be necessary in Texas, too. "We don't pretend we could have done it ourselves," he said.

Luke Metzger, director of Environment Texas, a citizen advocacy group, also found hope in Colorado’s actions. “Frequently, legislators in this state ask for other models to look to, and Colorado, being a big oil and gas state, is somewhere Texas officials will take seriously," he said.

Neither Metzger nor Marston expects much action in Texas during this election year, when key positions, including governor and energy regulators, are being contested.

In Colorado, Gov. John Hickenlooper’s office and the state’s Department of Public Health and Environment led the process. “I’d love to think we could have the support of the governor in Texas,” Marston said, “but that’s probably a lot less likely than in Colorado.”

A recent eight-month investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, InsideClimate News and The Weather Channel revealed that nearly one in four of Texas’ current legislators or their spouses own stock or receive royalties from companies operating in the Eagle Ford Shale, one of the nation’s most active drilling regions. The report also found that Texas does little to monitor or limit the industry’s air pollution. The number of drilling permits issued in the Eagle Ford increased 168-fold in six years — from 26 in 2008 to 4,416 in 2013 — while the budget of the state’s environmental regulatory agency was slashed 39 percent. During that period residents filed hundreds of complaints about oil and gas drilling activities.

Colorado’s rules require oil and gas companies to regularly monitor and repair unintentional, or “fugitive,” leaks of gases that have adverse climate effects, like methane, a potent greenhouse gas. They also rein in gases that can cause health problems, including volatile organic compounds (VOCs) like benzene, a known carcinogen.

The rules exceed regulations issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2012, which won't fully be implemented until 2015. The EPA rules don't directly address methane and some of the most important apply only to gas wells.

A recent study commissioned by EDF and conducted by the consulting firm ICF International found that if the U.S. oil and gas industry adopted many of the same technologies that Colorado now requires, the industry’s methane emissions could be cut 40 percent and could save the U.S. economy more than $100 million a year.

John Christiansen, a spokesman for Anadarko, said the Colorado rules offer  "a very common-sense approach to constructively addressing something that is very important to the people of Colorado." He hopes they will help "build public trust as we move forward with our operations there."

Last year, four Colorado communities banned hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, an extraction technique used on oil and gas wells. People who live near drilling sites in other states have also voiced concern about the industry’s air pollution, the risk of groundwater contamination and the surge of earthquakes linked to underground disposal of fracking wastewater.

Christiansen said the Colorado rules also make financial sense for the industry. Instead of releasing some of the gases into the air, companies can collect and sell them.

When asked whether Anadarko would voluntarily adopt the Colorado standards at its Texas operations, Christiansen said the company would have to gauge their effectiveness in Colorado before "[we] determine whether or not it applies to other areas." DCP Midstream, which also operates in Texas, did not respond to requests for comment.

The impacts of Colorado’s standards, which will be rolled out between this spring and May 1, 2016, are expected to be dramatic. State regulators predict they will eliminate at least 92,000 tons of VOCs annually — more than all the VOCs that Colorado’s cars emit each year.

Colorado vs. Texas

The more than 20 pages of rules passed by Colorado’s Air Quality Control Commission are groundbreaking because of the scope of gases they target, their rigorous monitoring guidelines and their inclusion of the industry’s smallest emitters. Here’s a rundown of five significant changes:

• Colorado’s rules will be applied statewide, rather than being adjusted for geology or population, as they are in many states. Texas, for instance, has stronger protections in 15 counties in the densely populated Barnett Shale near Dallas-Fort Worth. Other regions of the state, including the booming Eagle Ford Shale, have much weaker regulations.
• The rules directly address methane, a greenhouse gas that is 20 to 100 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Texas has no methane-specific standards, but like all other states, it enforces EPA regulations that indirectly limit methane.
• The rules recognize that small fugitive emissions can have a major cumulative impact on air quality. Both Colorado and Texas have rules that target these leaks during facility maintenance, startups and shutdowns. But fugitive emissions also occur at other times, and Colorado’s rules better address them. For example, Colorado companies will have to inspect their largest-emitting facilities monthly and their smallest ones once a year using advanced technology. In Texas, quarterly inspections are required only for a limited number of facilities in the 15 Barnett counties.
• Colorado gives operators five working days to fix fugitive leaks unless they can prove more time is needed. The EPA rules, which only affect facilities built or modified after Aug. 23, 2011, require repairs within 5 to 15 days. In Texas, operators in the 15 Barnett counties have 30 to 60 days to repair leaks. (A few Texas counties that don't meet federal air quality standards must make the repairs within 15 days.) Thousands of facilities in other Texas counties have no deadlines for repairs. In fact, regulators don't even know that many of them exist, because operators are allowed to audit their own emissions.
• Colorado requires all storage tanks that release more than six tons of VOCs a year to use technology that reduces emissions by at least 95 percent. The EPA has a similar requirement, but it applies only to tanks built or modified after Aug. 23, 2011. In Texas, most tanks can emit up to 25 tons of VOCs per year. In order to meet that limit, the majority of tanks use control devices that reduce VOCs by up to 98 or 100 percent, said spokesman Terry Clawson of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Change in Texas 'at least thinkable now'

Bruce Baizel, energy program director at the environmental group Earthworks, expects other states to follow Colorado's lead on air quality regulations.

Methane control and leak detection and repair “are the next wave of issues for oil and gas,” Baizel said. Lawmakers in California and Pennsylvania are already considering adopting similar methane rules, he said, and in Texas the possibility “is at least thinkable now. Two years ago I would not have said this, but partly because of this effort, the earthquake issue, the groundwater issue, the situation has changed.”

Some environmentalists, including Sandra Steingraber, an environmental health scientist from New York who founded the nonprofit New Yorkers Against Fracking, believe no amount of regulation can effectively mitigate the health problems associated with natural gas drilling. "What we need is no fracking," she said.

But Louis Allstadt, a former executive vice president at Mobil who is now an outspoken fracking opponent in New York, said it can't hurt to tighten regulations as long as fracking continues.

“It’s unrealistic to expect existing wells to be shut down…until the production falls off,” Allstadt said. In the meantime, “it is critical that they be required to do the best job possible at containing” emissions.

This report is part of a joint project by the Center for Public Integrity, InsideClimate News and The Weather Channel. Zahra Hirji and Lisa Song are with InsideClimate News and Jim Morris is with the Center for Public Integrity.

A policy brief released Thursday urges California school districts to reject beefing up campus police forces and security when they start receiving substantial funding aimed at improving education for needy kids.

“The New ‘Separate and Unequal,’ " brief was prepared by two community groups in Los Angeles and Oakland whose members are concerned that too much police involvement at some schools is negatively affecting primarily Latino and black students.

The new education money was raised by a tax increase California voters approved in November 2012. Proposition 30, as the measure was dubbed, is already credited with stabilizing an education system — once nationally admired — that’s been damaged over the years by cuts in funding. Now the state is enacting what’s called the “Local Control Funding Formula,” which will steer extra money to districts with high concentrations of low-income kids, English language learners and foster children.

School boards can design their own spending plans for those funds. The new brief calls this infusion of money a “rare opportunity” to invest in academic and support services and remove barriers to black and Latino kids’ success. But it also argues that “over-policing of their schools is undeniably one of [those barriers.]”

One of the groups, the Los Angeles-based Labor-Community Strategy Center, has been instrumental in persuading the L.A. Unified School District to roll back ticketing of students by campus police that was sending thousands of middle-school kids into courts every year for minor infractions.

The brief reports that the Los Angeles Unified School District’s budget for this year calls for spending more than $91 million on policing and security, including nearly $50 million for campus police officers and more than $32 million for civilian campus aides hired to patrol halls.

The report, which includes footnotes to L.A. Unified’s budget, also notes that the district budgeted more in unrestricted funds for security than for after-school programs. The security expenditure, the report also says, is more than the expenditures for counselors, "and far more than double what it budgeted for health services and teacher assistants.”

The other organization that produced the brief is the Black Organizing Project in Oakland, a parents group concerned that poor police relations with black youth are harming children’s future. New data shows that black youth are arrested and then not charged in that city in vastly disproportionate numbers, as the Center has reported.

The brief notes that during the last academic year, California schools, statewide, had one counselor for every 808 students, one of the worst such ratios in the country.

Monica Carazo, a spokeswoman for L.A. Unified, said the district couldn't comment on the brief because officials were still reviewing it.

As the Los Angeles Timeshas reported, parents’ groups are mobilizing to demand that 80 percent of a $1 billion infusion that could be headed to L.A. Unified be spent directly at schools with needy kids, and not on the district’s bureaucracy.  School board member Monica Garcia, who has supported limiting police involvement in routine discipline, released a statement recently that said the district “must be transparent and accountable for support to low-income, English learners and foster care children.”

As 2008 began, the future looked brilliant for green energy giant Suntech Power and its high-rising founder, Shi Zhengrong.

Suntech was one of the world’s largest makers of solar panels, the first non-state-owned Chinese company traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Shi, born to a farm family so poor it had to put him up for adoption, was a self-made billionaire hailed as one of Time magazine’s “Heroes of the Environment.”

Then Italy changed everything.

By 2012, Suntech’s push to dominate southern Italy’s solar industry landed it in the middle of a sprawling fraud scandal. Lawsuits and bankruptcy filings followed, the New York Stock Exchange kicked the company off its Big Board, and Shi stepped down as chief executive of the empire he’d built from nothing.

The story of Suntech’s fall links China to Italy, Germany, London and Wall Street, passing through some of the world’s leading tax havens and ending up — Dolce Vita fashion — in some of the most luxurious spots in Rome.

It’s a tale about the nexus of offshore financial secrecy and Italy’s onshore culture of corruption, featuring a cast of characters that includes figures linked to a businessman who has served, authorities allege, as a front for Mafia clans. 

Read the rest from Investigative Reporting Project Italy and ICIJ on ICIJ.org.

The setting was ornate, the subject esoteric, but the implications huge.

The crowd that filed last month into the wood-paneled room 226 in the Dirksen Senate Office Building included lawmakers, lobbyists, company executives, and a few mystery guests — a roster that reflected the enormity of the issue at hand: nothing less than control of the growing wireless market and the hundreds of billions of dollars that go with it.

Verizon Communications Inc. and T-Mobile USA Inc. were out in force, as were some of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington, D.C.  Along with those household names was the little-known but  quietly influential Jonathan Spalter.

The chairman of Mobile Future, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group, sat at the witness table along with the big wireless carriers and well-known consumer advocates to tell senators how the government should auction valuable airwaves that the telecommunications companies say they need to keep up with the exploding use of smartphones and tablet computers.

Spalter told the senators that the best way to ensure a successful auction — one that would best serve customers and promote innovative technologies — is to allow all wireless companies to bid without restrictions on as many frequencies as they want.

What Spalter didn’t reveal is that Mobile Future, which describes itself as “a coalition of cutting-edge technology and communications companies and a diverse group of non-profit organizations,” is funded in part by wireless giants AT&T Inc. and Verizon, which are also advocating for an auction free of limits. The group also didn’t detail that relationship when it submitted three research papers to the Federal Communications Commission arguing against restricting how much spectrum a company can obtain in an auction.

And it didn’t disclose the fact that data from a research paper it used to create a graphic arguing against limits was commissioned by AT&T and filed with the FCC, which is writing rules for the auction.  Mobile Future does list AT&T and Verizon as among its 82 members on its website.

Sally Aman, principal of Aman & Associates, the public relations firm hired by Mobile Future, said the committee “is and was fully aware of Mobile Future's membership.”

But the relationship wasn’t clear to almost anyone watching the proceedings.

Orchestration of influence

Mobile Future is just one thread in the massive influence web being deployed by AT&T and Verizon as they fight proposals advocated by their smaller competitors and the Justice Department to limit how much of the new wireless frequencies they’ll be allowed to bid on at the auction that’s scheduled for next year.

The spectrum that’s up for sale is highly coveted because it allows transmissions to travel long distances and penetrate buildings. Good spectrum is crucial for wireless companies to attract customers by delivering an ever-increasing amount of information to smartphones and computer tablets.

The competition for control of the airwaves has set off an intense lobbying fight that rivals some of the largest battles over telecommunications policies of the past. The four biggest carriers together spent $37.3 million in 2013 trying to influence lawmakers and the FCC on a host of policy issues ranging from taxes to cyber security as well as spectrum — and the auction is still more than a year away.

But the carriers led by AT&T and Verizon likely have spent at least twice as much more on behind-the-scenes influence campaigns — hiring Ivy-league academics, giving cash to think tanks, associations and universities, and employing public relations firms — all part of a synchronized effort to sway the FCC to establish rules that favor them, said James Thurber, a professor at American University who has been studying lobbying for 30 years.

“This includes all the advertising, white papers, surveys, grass-roots and top-roots activities going on,” Thurber said.  “Lobbying isn’t just what the federal registered lobbyists do. It’s an orchestration of a variety of techniques and influence.”

Battling AT&T and Verizon are Sprint Corp. and T-Mobile, the third- and fourth-largest carriers whose networks and customer bases are dwarfed by their larger rivals. The two have put together their own influence campaigns, hiring teams of paid academics and building connections with consumer groups and associations. But Sprint and T-Mobile are at a disadvantage against the deeper pockets and vast network of political ties of AT&T and Verizon, according to those who track Washington lobbying efforts.

At stake is no less than who may ultimately control the public’s wireless access to the Internet, on which all kinds of data — from medical records and bank transactions to Amazon purchases and movie downloads — travel from providers to smartphones and tablets.

The sale of the newly available airwaves also will determine if the wireless market becomes one ruled by two companies or if a recent burst of competition initiated by T-Mobile will continue, said Harold Feld, a senior vice president at Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group in Washington that wants to limit how much spectrum each carrier can purchase in the upcoming auction.

“For wireless carriers, the stakes are enormously high,” Feld said. If the smaller companies are shut out of the auction, “it’s hard to imagine they can overcome that and compete with AT&T and Verizon over time.”

‘Stupid, arrogant, broken’

Three years ago the Justice Department blocked AT&T from buying T-Mobile, arguing“consumers across the country, including those in rural areas and those with lower incomes, benefit from competition among the nation’s wireless carriers.”

The government was soon proven right.

John Legere (pronounced Ledger), the trash-talking chief executive officer who took over T-Mobile in September 2012, has cut prices, eliminated two-year contracts and roaming charges, and offered to pay early termination fees for customers who switch to T-Mobile.

Wearing his iconic hot-pink T-Mobile T-shirt and black leather jacket, the maverick CEO declared his industry “stupid, arrogant, broken” in a Jan. 9 interview with Yahoo Tech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and said he doesn’t much care how his competitors respond to his changes.

“I don’t give a s---,” Legere said, the expletive bleeped by Yahoo. “Ultimately, I’m deploying a set of capabilities or a way that the marketplace should behave on behalf of consumers.”

But respond they have.  All three of his larger rivals — Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint — have cut prices, offered rebates and instituted less restrictive plans.

“I don’t think the people at the Department of Justice are at all surprised at the new competitive options that have emerged in the marketplace,” said Gene Kimmelman, who worked in the anti-trust division when it blocked AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile and is now president of Public Knowledge. “This is what they hoped would occur and had strong reasons to believe could occur.”

The economic benefits to consumers may be short lived, however. To remain competitive, smaller wireless carriers such as T-Mobile will need to win a significant chunk of the newly available spectrum, or they may never be able to compete with AT&T and Verizon, which as of August 2012 controlled a combined 74 percent of the prime spectrum according to statistics released by the FCC. If left unfettered, the two giants are in a position to buy much of what’s left.

“Depending on the outcomes of the spectrum auctions, it could get a whole lot worse in terms of a handful of companies being able to tilt the field in their favor,” said Matthew Hindman, a professor at George Washington University, who researches Internet politics.

Overcrowded airwaves

Spectrum is the life blood for wireless carriers as Americans ditch their desktop computers for mobile devices.

The share of people in the United States who own a smartphone — a mobile computer that can both make calls and access the Internet — increased from 35 percent in May 2011 to 58 percent in January, according to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The percentage of adults 18 years old and older who own a tablet computer jumped from 8 percent to 42 percent during the same period, Pew reported.

Wireless gadgets are quickly becoming the devices Americans use to run their everyday lives, from making purchases, managing finances, working, studying, listening to music or watching movies. The amount of data downloaded from the Internet using a wireless device will, for the first time, surpass the amount of online information flowing through wired connections in 2016, according to an annual report issued by Cisco Corp.

By 2017, residents in North America will download and send 2.1 petabytes of data a month, equivalent to 468,000 DVDs, according to Cisco. And wearable computers and sensors that can track and store information about an individual’s health, monitor a building’s security, measure pollutants, track a car’s performance, regulate a home’s energy consumption or perform a multitude of as-yet-unimagined tasks are expected to increase into the billions of connections by 2018, Cisco reported.

All that data will ride on radio frequencies. The growth has caused the airwaves to become overcrowded, slowing data transmissions.

“It is unlikely that wireless carriers will be able to accommodate this surging demand without additional spectrum,” the White House Council of Economic Advisers reported in 2012. “Other approaches to expanding the capacity of wireless networks … will likely be insufficient to allow capacity to keep up with demand. In short, the projected growth in data traffic can be achieved only by making more spectrum available for wireless use.”

The airwaves to be auctioned next year are some of the most valuable that will ever, in the foreseeable future, be available to wireless providers.  Most of the spectrum targeted for sale is in the 600 megahertz band of frequencies — what wireless carriers call “beachfront property.”

The frequencies are currently occupied by television broadcasters. The FCC will ask them to give up their airwaves voluntarily and if they don’t, some may be moved to another part of the spectrum. The FCC plans to share the proceeds of the auction with those television stations that choose to sell their licenses.

The 600 megahertz band is the kind of airwaves that wireless companies want and need. It travels farther than frequencies above 1,000 megahertz, can penetrate buildings, navigate hilly terrain and more easily go through vegetation, all of which makes it less likely to lose a connection compared with those traveling on higher bands. It’s also cheaper to operate because it requires fewer towers.

As of August 2012, Verizon and AT&T together owned 74 percent of the low-band airwaves, according to calculations using the FCC’s most recent annual report on the competitiveness of the mobile wireless market. Sprint controlled 12 percent, and T-Mobile owned just 0.2 percent.

Most of T-Mobile’s and Sprint’s frequencies are in the higher bands. AT&T and Verizon argue that the high-band spectrum is equally good because it can carry more data, a characteristic that is desirable in urban areas where demand for wireless data is greatest.

Corporate accountants, however, put a higher value on the lower frequencies. Verizon says in its company filings that its frequencies are worth $75.7 billion, second only to the combined value of all of its plants, properties and equipment.

AT&T reports its licenses are worth $56.4 billion. Sprint owns more spectrum than any carrier but it is almost all above 1,000 megahertz. The company priced its spectrum at $41.8 billion. T-Mobile, which has about half the spectrum Verizon has, reported its wireless licenses are worth $18.1 billion.

Verizon and AT&T have used their low-band spectrum to build networks that cover much of the United States, allowing them to attract more customers. Verizon has about 119 million subscriptions, or about 35 percent of all U.S. wireless subscribers, and AT&T has 32 percent, according to the latest report by Strategy Analytics, a technology consulting firm.

Sprint and T-Mobile, whose networks are spotty by comparison, trail a distant third and fourth with 16 percent and 13 percent of the market, respectively, according to the report.

Competition or revenue?

When Congress ordered the FCC in 2012 to hold the spectrum auction, the goals were to increase the frequencies available to wireless carriers, raise money to build a nationwide emergency radio network and pay down the national debt.

The agency now is writing the auction rules to balance the need to raise money with the desire to maintain competition.

Verizon and AT&T argue that capping what they can buy will lower the price paid for the spectrum, cutting the revenue to the government, or worse, cause the auction to fail altogether.

Sprint and T-Mobile argue caps will allow them and other carriers to obtain low-band frequencies needed to compete against their two bigger rivals. The competition will lower prices and encourage the carriers to develop advanced technologies to decrease costs and improve services.

They also argue limits will encourage more bidders, because companies will believe they have a chance of submitting winning bids if AT&T and Verizon cannot bid in every market. More bidders, they argue, means more revenue for the government.

The Justice Department agrees with Sprint and T-Mobile.

In a filing with the FCC in April that drew sharp criticism from supporters of an open auction, the department’s antitrust division argued “rules that ensure the smaller nationwide networks, which currently lack substantial low-frequency spectrum, have an opportunity to acquire such spectrum could improve the competitive dynamic among nationwide carriers and benefit consumers.”

Lobbying war

Those opposing arguments are at the center of the lobbying war.

AT&T and Verizon operate some of the most powerful influence operations in Washington.

Last year AT&T doled out $15.9 million for lobbying on a range of issues, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks lobbying spending. AT&T spent the 11th largest amount of all companies that year, while Verizon ranked 18th.

T-Mobile has increased its lobbying 74 percent in the past three years since its purchase by AT&T was blocked, but at $5.2 million it remains far behind AT&T and Verizon. Sprint spent even less, $2.8 million in 2013.

The spending pays for lobbyists to visit members of Congress, or to urge them to call or write the agency. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who sits on the Judiciary Committee, sent a letter Nov. 20 to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to urge Wheeler not to institute spectrum limits.

Schumer wrote that the caps “would simply … reduce the amount of spectrum offered for auction as well as the revenue that would be generated in return” as broadcasters would choose not to put up their frequencies for sale for fear that they wouldn’t be able to get the high price that the big carriers could offer — an argument found in FCC filings submitted by AT&T, Verizon and their hired economists.

AT&T’s and Verizon’s political action committees gave Schumer a combined $18,000 between 2009 and 2013, compared with $10,000 from Sprint and T-Mobile PACs during the same period, according to CRP.

Six Republican House lawmakers — including Fred Upton, R-Mich., chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees the FCC, and Greg Walden, R-Ore., chairman of the committee’s communications and technology subcommittee — wrote FCC commissioners in April in response to the Justice Department’s filing, arguing that spectrum caps “will reduce the potential revenues from the auction and possibly cause the auction to fail.”

The six authors, who also included committee members Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee, Ed Whitfield from Kentucky, Billy Long from Missouri, and Robert Latta from Ohio, received among the largest campaign contributions in Congress from AT&T’s and Verizon’s PACs for the 2012 elections — a total of $107,000 from both carriers, according to CRP.

T-Mobile’s and Sprint’s PACs gave the group as a whole about half that much, a total of $42,000, according to the center.

Spokesman for Latta and Whitfield said AT&T’s and Verizon’s campaign donations didn’t influence the representatives’ positions on spectrum limits. The other members didn’t reply to requests for comment.

“AT&T and Verizon have put on a full-scale lobbying campaign and they’re spreading money all over town and writing op-eds,” said Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Project at the New America Foundation, which supports limits. “Each side is trying to pressure the FCC, sometimes with public letters, and sometimes with research, and equally often it’s with private phone calls.”

The spending also pays for lobbyists to visit the FCC, where they meet with the staff writing the auction rules and with commissioners who will ultimately vote on them.

Between October 2012, when the FCC issued its notice to develop rules for the incentive auctions, and Jan. 30, when the FCC held a public meeting to discuss its progress, the agency received more than 400 filings that include comments, papers, presentations and information about visits, Gary Epstein, head of the commission task force writing the auction rules, said at the Jan. 30 meeting.

The outpouring ranks the incentive auction among the most active issues at the FCC in years, said a senior FCC administrator. “It’s a lot,” the administrator said. “A whole lot.”

T-Mobile, which views the auction as a make-or-break event for the company, has been a fixture at the agency. 

From October 2012 through March 13, lobbyists and executives for the company visited the FCC 36 times, and submitted 20 comments, presentations, letters and research papers for a total of 56 filings, the most of any organization or company, according to data compiled by the Center for Public Integrity.

One of the biggest complaints T-Mobile gets from customers is the inability to get access deep inside buildings, which can be alleviated with low-band spectrum, said Tim O’Regan, a spokesman for T-Mobile. “Lack of low-band spectrum is the biggest challenge T-Mobile faces,” he said. “It’s critical to the future of our network and critical for the future of the company.”

AT&T and Verizon visited the FCC 15 times each during the same period, according to the Center’s analysis, ranking the carriers as the fifth most active. Sprint met with commissioners and agency staff 11 times during the same period, which ranked it tied at 11th.

It’s not the number of FCC filings “that matters most, but rather the quality and depth of a stakeholder’s conversation and advocacy with FCC staff,” said John Taylor, a Sprint spokesman.

The Expanding Opportunities for Broadcasters Coalition, a group of more than 70 television stations that support the auction, had the second most meetings with the FCC, and the National Association of Broadcasters, which may lose members if stations choose to sell their frequencies, was the third-most active group. Other organizations that have frequented the FCC’s offices in southwest D.C. the most have been the Competitive Carriers Association, a group that includes as members Sprint and T-Mobile and supports spectrum limits, and Dish Network Corp., which is considering launching its own nationwide wireless network.

Buying academic research

But tracking traditional lobbying doesn’t tell half the story of the spectrum influence game.

Wireless carriers have hired economists from some of the most prestigious universities to conduct research to support specific positions and attend FCC meetings where they can explain arcane auction theories and rebut other economists’ papers filed by their rivals.

“With this [spectrum auction], the number of factors that go into what is right and wrong is very complicated and subject to debate,” Public Knowledge’s Feld said, “so this has been an extraordinary boon to academic economists. If you do spectrum auction research, you are making a lot of money now.”

AT&T has assembled the largest team of consultants and economists, most from top universities including Yale, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania.

One of the key studies the company has cited during its meetings with the FCC, according to the center’s research, was conducted by Philip Haile, an economics professor at Yale University, with co-authors Maya Meidan, an economist at the consulting firm Compass Lexecon LLC, and Jonathan Orszag, also at Compass Lexecon, a former member of President Bill Clinton’s National Economic Council.

The authors conclude the government would lose up to $13.4 billion if the FCC institutes the mildest limitations and twice that if tougher restrictions are followed. In a footnote on the front page of the study, the authors disclose that the study “was supported by funding from AT&T.”

T-Mobile has the second-largest team, with Greg Rosston, deputy director of Stanford University’s Institute for Economic Policy Research and a former deputy chief economist at the FCC, figuring prominently. Rosston and another Stanford economist proposed a bidding process in which spectrum limits are sequentially eased if not enough revenue is raised under the caps. T-Mobile also paid Jonathan Baker, an economist at American University, who argued spectrum limits can increase auction revenue.

“We have retained a number of experts … to help us respond and provide expert guidance on complex issues,” said T-Mobile’s O’Regan. He declined to disclose how much T-Mobile paid the economists, saying the compensation was “consistent with what gets charged in the market and the field” for such research.

Enjoying financial support

Verizon also has paid a former FCC economist on its team, Leslie Marx, who researches auction theory at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Marx concluded in her research submitted to the FCC that an auction with no limits increases revenue and the amount of spectrum applied for mobile use.

AT&T and Verizon didn’t reply to repeated requests to comment on its spending on spectrum lobbying and support of research and associations.

Sometimes relationships are less obvious. Economists at Georgetown University’s Center for Business and Public Policy Research — including a former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, Congress’ economic research arm — published a study in April 2013 that found spectrum limits would result in “a less robust and competitive auction and reduce auction revenues by as much as 40 percent” and slow the transition to faster networks, all arguments that are similar to AT&T’s and Verizon’s.

The center states on its website that it “has enjoyed the financial support” of AT&T and the Verizon Foundation and more than a dozen other organizations. John Mayo, an economics professor and executive director of the center, said the financial support didn’t lead to the study or influence its conclusions. He declined to say how much AT&T and Verizon gave to the center.

Spectrum caps “is an important topic that the Center’s experts in telecommunications policy proposed would be ripe for research, ultimately leading to our study,” Mayo said in an email. “The research methods, analysis, and findings in all Center studies are designed and determined solely by the authors and are released subject to internal quality review with no external input.”

The authors state on the front page of the study that their research “is not dependent upon any of the policy positions of current, previous or prospective Center supporters.”

“You can have a peer-reviewed journal article with good data by distinguished scholars that comes to a conclusion that goes to a corporate point of view, and that’s fine,” American University’s Thurber said. “But we should clearly know that it does [support a corporate view], and then we can make a judgment about whether there is a conflict of interest.”

Sprint has been much less active. The company filed a study by two European economists who found “restrictions on the amount of sub-1 GHz spectrum operators can acquire at auction have not resulted in any reduction in auction revenue in the myriad European nations that have adopted them.”

Sprint and T-Mobile also have funded groups supporting spectrum limits. The two carriers and Dish each gave between $10,000 and $24,999 in 2013 to the New America Foundation, which has met with the FCC to argue for caps on frequencies, according to the New America Foundation website.

“As always we are aligned with the other consumer groups and we are all in a coalition with the smaller carriers,” the foundations’ Calabrese wrote in an email. The financial support from T-Mobile, Sprint and Dish, however, was “not for any research papers or anything in particular.”

Free Press, a consumer advocacy and journalism organization in Washington that supports restricting spectrum purchases and has testified before Congress, doesn’t accept money from corporations and has funded no independent research, according to the group’s website. Public Knowledge has received donations from all four carriers for an awards program, and Sprint gave money to the group to analyze FCC spectrum data to develop Public Knowledge’s position on limits, according to Feld.

But consumer groups are outgunned by AT&T and Verizon. With their big spending on traditional lobbying and funding of associations, think tanks and universities, the corporations play the influence game better than anyone else, said Kevin Werbach, who studies Internet and communications policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

“This is their core competency, and they have been playing this game for a long time,” Werbach said.  “These are companies that support foundations and other groups that do a lot of good work, but in the end are strategically designed to advance [AT&T’s and Verizon’s] interests.”

Two sides of Wheeler

FCC commissioners are scheduled to vote on proposed auction rules, including whether it will include limits, at its May 15 meeting. That could open another round of public comments, and at that point the lobbying “will hit its peak,” said an executive at one of the wireless carriers.

Two of the Democrats on the commission, Jessica Rosenworcel and Mignon Clyburn are likely to support limits. The two Republicans, Ajit Pai and Michael O’Rielly, are less likely to.

That leaves the affable FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, who President Barack Obama appointed last year, to decide. Wheeler knows a lot of about lobbying, having headed up the National Cable Television Association, one of the biggest lobbying spenders in Washington, and the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association.

Wheeler, who wields a lot of power as chairman, hasn’t indicated how he would vote. At a speech at his alma mater, Ohio State University, he described himself both as “a rabid believer in the marketplace” and as “an unabashed supporter of competition.”

“A key goal of our spectrum allocation efforts is ensuring that multiple carriers have access to airwaves needed to operate their networks,” he then said.

It remains to be seen which Wheeler will show up to vote — the former lobbyist who fought federal regulations and whom AT&T lobbyist called “an inspired pick to lead the FCC” or the Obama appointee who believes that the wireless market needs more, not less, competition.

A  proposal in a draft communique for the Nuclear Security Summit beginning on Monday to constrain holdings of a key nuclear explosive is concise and modest. But its uncertain fate symbolizes the uphill battle Washington faces in moving the biennial summits beyond what critics depict as stopgap measures, small ambitions, and vague promises to tighten security for the world’s stockpile of nuclear explosives.

A January draft of the communique to be released at the March 24-25 summit in the Netherlands — convened at President Obama’s initiative — for the first time includes a suggestion that nations try to limit their stocks of plutonium, the type of fuel in the bomb that devastated Nagasaki in August 1945.

“We encourage states to minimize their stocks of HEU [highly-enriched uranium] and to keep their stockpile of separated plutonium to the minimum level, consistent with national requirements,” the draft states, according to a copy of the document obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

But that promise — cautious and hedged as it is — had not yet been accepted by the summit participants, according to markings on the draft and interviews with sources familiar with the preparations.

Both India and Russia have resisted limits on plutonium production in the past, said Miles Pomper, an expert with the Monterey Institute for International Studies who is already in The Hague to prepare for the meeting. He said it is an “open question,” based on his own conversations with diplomats, whether they will approve the language in the final communique.

The two previous summits have in contrast focused on securing and eliminating civilian stocks of highly-enriched uranium, the other main nuclear explosive material.

The call to minimize plutonium stocks, which applies to both military and civilian programs, is a departure and obviously nettlesome to some countries.

Japan, India and Russia, for example, plan to build new energy systems based on advanced plutonium-burning reactors. France and Great Britain have produced plutonium under contract for other countries. Separately, India, Pakistan and Israel produce plutonium for weapons, according to a 2013 report by the International Panel on Fissile Materials.

As a result, while the global stocks of weapons uranium have been shrinking after the Cold War, the stocks of plutonium have been growing. They are now estimated at 490 metric tons — enough in theory to fuel tens of thousands of weapons.

Jonathan Wolfsthal, a former Department of Energy official and as a special advisor to Vice President Joe Biden for nuclear security, said that the United States has been trying for years to persuade countries with large stocks to agree to limit or reduce the amount of plutonium they hold in storage.

But Wolfsthal said countries with civilian nuclear programs “have been reluctant to link the issue of nuclear terrorism to their stockpiles of commercial plutonium,” for fear of stigmatizing those programs.

The communiques from the two previous nuclear summits in Washington in 2010 and Seoul in 2012 mentioned plutonium only once, calling on all countries to promote measures to secure, account for and consolidate stocks — not restrict or minimize them.

The Netherlands, which is hosting the summit, has been the driving force behind the effort to include the language in the summit communique, according to a source who has followed the negotiations closely.

Ward Bezemer, a spokesman for the Netherlands Foreign Ministry and head of press communications for the Nuclear Security Summit, declined to comment.

The language on plutonium also represents longstanding U.S. policy. At a speech in Seoul during the 2012 nuclear security summit, President Obama summarized U.S. concerns about plutonium stockpiles. “We simply can’t go on accumulating huge amounts of the very material, like separated plutonium, that we’re trying to keep away from terrorists,” he said.

Jonathan Lalley, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said the White House had no comment on “documents that purport to be deliberative drafts of the summit communique.” The authenticity of the January draft was confirmed by an individual who has seen several such drafts.

The 2010 and 2012 summits have brought new attention to the threat of nuclear terror and encouraged states to reduce, protect or consolidate their stocks of weapons-grade uranium.

Since President Obama took office in 2009, the number of countries with at least one kilogram of nuclear explosive material has fallen from 38 to 25, a reduction of about one third, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based nonprofit group that promotes tighter security measures for fissile materials.

In 2012, for example, then-President Viktor of Ukraine promised to return 234 kilograms (515 pounds) of weapons-grade uranium from a reactor in eastern Ukraine to Russia. That’s roughly the equivalent of 14 bombs.

The last of the transfers took place about a year ago, before protests this year led Yanukovich to flee and to Russia’s moves toward annexing Crimea.

But nearly 1,390 metric tons of highly-enriched uranium and 490 metric tons of plutonium are still located at hundreds of military and civilian sites in 25 countries. The majority of this total is in the United States and Russia, but large stocks also exist in the United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan, China and Japan.

A five-pound bag of flour filled with bomb-grade uranium and a grapefruit-sized bit of plutonium is enough to build a nuclear bomb. So altogether, the stockpiles could be used in theory to build 20,000 uranium bombs and nearly 80,000 plutonium weapons.

At the summit next week, several additional countries are expected to announce the elimination or transfer of weapons materials, White House officials said, without providing details.

Sources say one of them is Japan, which will announce its intention to return to the United States 330 kilograms (730 pounds) of U.S.- and United Kingdom-origin high-quality plutonium, the kind favored by weapons designers, from a research reactor at Tokai, on its Pacific coastline.

But that amount represents just 3.5 percent of the plutonium Japan has in its own warehouses, and less than one percent of its total holdings (some is stored outside the country). Moreover, it is 4 percent of what the country can produce in one year at a new factory scheduled for completion in October.

According to a March 14 Swedish Radiation Safety Authority document posted online , that country is separately willing to transfer ownership of 834 kilograms [1,835 pounds] of plutonium to the United Kingdom, where it was originally produced from Swedish spent fuel.

The summits have also encouraged many countries, nonproliferation experts say, to strengthen their rules and procedures for securing nuclear weapons, materials and the facilities that produce and store them.

“We have truly made the world a safer place,” said Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, White House coordinator for countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations on March 17.

Three particularly vulnerable sites in non-weapons states with enough weapons uranium for the kind of simple bomb terrorists might make have put significant security upgrades in place, said Matthew Bunn, a former White House official now teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The sites are in Sosny, Belarus; Pelindaba, South Africa and Tokai, Japan.

But some nonproliferation experts have expressed frustration that Washington has secured only vague security commitments from some countries.

Administration officials say in their defense that many countries remain jealous of their sovereignty, suspicious of foreign scrutiny, and wary of the expense of increased regulation. As a result, the world’s defensive armor against nuclear terror still has many gaps.

“Today, we do not have an effective global security system, based on common international standards, to protect dangerous nuclear materials,” former Sen. Sam Nunn, the head of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, told a conference in Washington last week.

Bunn said he agrees that the existing “patchwork of existing nuclear security agreements and initiatives is weak and urgently needs to be strengthened with new standards and new measures.”

Nunn and other public figures have called for a new agreement authorizing the International Atomic Energy Agency or some other body to set and enforce tough international rules for securing nuclear explosive stockpiles.

But there is no consensus on the issue, with some experts saying that member states would never give the agency sufficient money and power to act effectively as the world’s nuclear security watchdog.

A Harvard study released this month recommends as a stopgap measure that the IAEA gradually raise the profile of its nuclear security programs, until participation and compliance are viewed as the norm. It could, for example, change the name of its nuclear security “guidelines” to “standards,” implying “more of a baseline that states should at minimum meet.”

The January draft of the summit’s communiqué refers to the IAEA’s “essential responsibility” and “central role” in nuclear security, but does not give the agency a new regulatory mandate. Instead, it emphasizes the IAEA’s advisory capacity. Signatories are being asked only to encourage adherence to the IAEA’s security guidance, while providing greater political, technical and financial support.

Nunn and others have also called on summit participants to focus on securing the 85 percent of the nuclear explosives in the hands of the nine countries with nuclear arsenals, something that they have so far failed to do.

“The real working focus of the summits has been on civil materials, with the assumption, fair or not, that weapons materials will be more secure because they’re military,” said Pomper.

But Laura Holgate, who has overseen the summit’s preparation as senior director of weapons of mass destruction terrorism in the National Security Council, said in an interview with CPI that the United States “makes no assumptions” about the relative security of military stores. Both must get better protection, she said.

But Holgate said that governments are still trying to work out how they can protect military weapons materials without compromising what they see as vital national security secrets.

The White House’s Sherwood-Randall on Monday said that it was difficult “to persuade countries to talk in a public format with others and with international organizations present about their military materials.” But she said the United States has tried to encourage other weapons states to follow the U.S. example and discuss their arsenals more openly.

While the communique requires consensus, some of the countries attending the summit have promised what the administration likes to call “gift baskets,” or joint agreements to take action or highlight achievements.

Holgate said that in one gift basket, the United States, South Korea and the Netherlands will pledge to insure that their domestic nuclear security practices conform to IAEA standards, in hopes other states would do so as well.

The U.S. will also join another statement calling for improved maritime security, including support for the installation and operation of radiological detectors in major ports, Holgate said. Some U.S. critics, such as Thomas Cochran of the Natural Resources Defense Council, depict this effort as a window-dressing unlikely to catch a terrorist’s smuggled explosive.

Further progress will not come easily, experts say.

Two non-weapons nations, Belarus and South Africa, are still holding onto large stocks of weapons uranium. Japan has 44 tons of plutonium, the fifth largest stockpile in the world, set aside for its commercial nuclear power program. Rokkasho, a new plutonium plant capable of producing an additional eight tons a year, is scheduled for completion in October.

Both the Kremlin and the White House over the past several days have been careful to say that President Vladimir Putin’s decision not to attend the Nuclear Security Summit was not a result of the recent tensions.
 
Former President Dmitry Medvedev, now prime minister, attended in 2010 and 2012. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is expected to represent Russia this time.

“We do expect the Russians to continue the important work that we do with them in this context, unabated,” Sherwood-Randall said Monday.

But Harvard’s Bunn said the absence of top Russian leaders at the event will be noticed, if only because Russia and the United States together control the bulk of the world’s nuclear explosive materials.

“The low hanging fruit is generally gone, both in terms of the kinds of reactors you can convert to low enriched uranium and the countries that still hold it,” said Pomper.

Bunn, an expert on physical security, said that the summits have focused too much on short-term fixes rather than on building more robust systems to prevent nuclear terror. In a report, Bunn and his colleagues call for the establishment of a database of nuclear terror-related incidents to demonstrate that the threat is urgent.

Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan expressed shock at data released Thursday showing that thousands of preschool kids were suspended nationwide during the 2011-2012 school year. The suspensions fell heavily on black children, who represented 18 percent of preschool enrollment yet 48 percent of all suspensions.

“I was stunned—I was stunned—that we were suspending and expelling four-year-olds,” Duncan said at a Washington D.C. elementary school, where he and Holder discussed findings of the latest Civil Rights Data Collection by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.  The survey showed that nearly 5,000 preschool students were suspended in the 2011-12 academic year.

“This preschool suspension issue is mind-boggling,” Duncan said. “And we need to as a nation find a way to remedy that tomorrow.”

Duncan said training is needed at schools that suspend large numbers of kids at all grade levels to demonstrate a “better way” of handling problem behavior. “We know there is a correlation between out-of-school suspensions and ultimately locking people up,” Duncan said. “And folks don’t like it when we talk about it. But for far too many children and communities the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ is real.”

Holder said the findings of the data collection are “unacceptable. And it’s important to bear in mind…that these are not abstract statistics,” but rather hard data collected from schools.  

The racial disparities in preschool suspensions, Holder added, “reflect where we are as a society.”

“There are certain preconceptions that people have about kids of color,” he said. Kids can engage in “the kinds of things that kids normally do,” he said, and behavior can sometimes be “misconstrued if you deal with a child with a preconceived notion about that child.”

“We have to break through that. It means we have to train our teachers in ways that are sensitive to cultural differences,” Holder said. “There are a whole variety of ways (to respond to children) that we have so we don’t misunderstand behaviors.”

The collection of national data—accessible to the public online—came from every public elementary, middle and high school in the nation during the 2011-2012 school year; the scope of the data requested from schools was unprecedented. The database includes a trove of detailed information about access to college prep courses, access to counselors, classroom size, teacher pay and other subjects. The data is broken down, school by school, and by demographic groups.

The collection also drills down on a variety of school discipline practices—including the use of restraints—and reports the numbers of students who were referred to police officers.

Nationally, minority kids of all ages were subjected to suspensions and expulsions at a rate three times higher than their white peers. Black students, 16 percent of overall enrollment, were more than a quarter of students referred to law enforcement from schools that year and 31 percent of those arrested. Students with disabilities represented a quarter of kids arrested and referred to law enforcement although they were only 13 percent of the nation’s student population.

Young children enter school “from various types of backgrounds,” Holder said.

“But at the end of the day,” he said. “They’re four-year-olds. They’re  five-year-olds. They’re six-year-olds. And when you see these disparate numbers…you have to wonder: What is it that we are doing? Why are we seeing these numbers?  It’s not because these kids are fundamentally different. I think that’s the kind of things we have to understand. We are getting disparate treatment here.”

“That’s a painful thing for this nation to accept,” Holder said. “But unless we deal with these hard truths we are not going to ultimately come up with the kind of country we want to have.”

Holder is involved in Obama Administration initiatives announced this year to reform school discipline, as the Center for Public Integrity reported in January. Studies have linked out-of-school suspensions with increasing risks that students will drop out and get into trouble with law enforcement.

“Every data point (in the civil rights collection) represents a life impacted,” Holder said, “a future potentially diverted or derailed, and a young man or woman who was placed at increased likelihood of becoming involved in the criminal justice system.”

Across the country, districts with high rates of out-of-school  punishment have seen a large number of  kids being forced to drop out—as the Center reported on farmworker kids in California—or forced into dubious at-home learning plans, as the Center also reported from California.

The Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Catherine LLamon, said Thursday that the database collection has proved useful to detect districts where black children have been left out of college courses—because a principal didn’t think they were prepared to take such classes—and where children have been subjected to high levels of unaddressed sexual harassment.  The collection is the “fullest, richest, most comprehensive” in history, Llamon said.   

“This data was meant for you and me,”   LLamon added, urging the public to use it to scrutinize individual schools and districts and detect inequities that deserve to be addressed.

Yesterday marked the fourth anniversary of Obamacare, but it marked the seventh anniversary of opposition to the concept underlying health care reform.

At least two years before the first words of legislation were written, and three years before the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, the entrenched health care interests were hard at work creating their strategies to ensure as much as possible that whatever passed would not have an adverse effect on profits.

The overall plan included a broad range of initiatives to plant fear, uncertainty and doubt about reform ideas in the minds of elected officials and ordinary Americans. For instance, the special interests collaborated under the auspices of organizations like the Healthcare Leadership Council, a coalition that encompasses executives from insurance companies, drug and medical device makers, biotech firms and hospitals. I know because I participated in many meetings of the HLC during my years as an insurance industry executive.

The campaign of fear, uncertainty and doubt — or FUD, to use its acronym — continues to this day against the law, and it will be waged in coming months by cynical politicians who believe it will be the surest way to win votes in November. I’m already seeing the outlines of the latest iteration of the campaign taking shape.

But let’s first go back to the spring of 2007. Both health insurance premiums and the number of uninsured Americans were continuing to skyrocket. Polls were showing that voters were fed up with our money-driven health care system, and that was emboldening the Democratic presidential candidates to include reform proposals in their policy platforms.

At an industry briefing I attended in May of 2007, Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, which has been conducting opinion and message research for health insurers since the early 1990s, made crystal clear the point that Americans were losing confidence in the private health insurance market.

As I described in my book, Deadly Spin, McInturff’s first slide showed that there had been a significant recent shift in opinion and that a majority of people were now telling his pollsters that the government should do more to solve the many problems plaguing America’s health care system.

Those of us in the room who were members of the industry’s Strategic Communications Committee could see we had our work cut out for us. We knew we would have to scare people away from the notion that more government involvement would be beneficial.  

Also at that meeting were representatives of the industry’s big trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, and one of its PR firms, APCO Worldwide. The AHIP and APCO staffers briefed us on the tactics they were recommending, which included using a front group, initially funded by the pharmaceutical industry and called Health Care America, to begin the scare campaign. Such a campaign wouldn’t be effective if the public knew that drug makers and insurance companies were actually conducting it, so steps would need to be taken to make the media and public believe that Health Care America was really a grassroots organization.

One of the first targets of Health Care America was Michael Moore, whose movie SiCKO was about to have its U.S. premier. The objective of Health Care America’s attacks on Moore and SiCKO was to frighten people into believing that quality of care would suffer if we allowed the government to “take over” the health system.  

Immediately after the first American screening of SiCKO in Sacramento, many reporters got this in their inbox:

“Health Care America, a non-partisan, non-profit health care advocacy organization, released the following statement in response to a California rally held by Michael Moore and a variety of advocates in support of a government takeover of our health care system: The reality is that government-run health systems around the world are failing patients — forcing them to forgo treatments or seek out-of-pocket care in other countries.”

Fast forward to the spring of 2009. Before Democratic congressional leaders had written any reform legislation, political consultant Frank Luntz suggested in a memo to Republican leaders that they should characterize anything the Democrats proposed as a “government takeover.”

“Nothing else turns people against the government takeover of healthcare more than the realistic expectation that it will result in delayed and potentially even denied treatment, procedures and/or medications,” Luntz wrote.

The industry’s years-long FUD campaign clearly has scared millions of Americans into believing — erroneously — that Obamacare represents a government takeover.

This past week, we got a glimpse into how the insurance industry and its political allies will give the “government takeover” campaign a new spin: Obamacare will cause insurance premiums to double in 2015.

Citing “one senior insurance executive who requested anonymity,” The Hill, an inside-the-Beltway publication, predicted last week that “Obamacare-related premiums will double in some parts of the country.”

There is absolutely no reason to believe this will happen — and good reasons why it won’t, which I’ll explain next week — but facts have little place in most political campaigns. Rest assured, the specter of skyrocketing premiums will be part of a carefully crafted and executed campaign designed to create fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of voters next November. Some things never change.

The Japanese government confirmed Monday it will ship hundreds of pounds of nuclear explosive materials back to the United States, after using it for decades to conduct research on nuclear reactor fuels.

Japan’s expected, public pledge came in a joint statement with Washington that was timed to coincide with the first day of a U.S.-led, international Nuclear Security Summit on March 24-25 in the Netherlands.

The plutonium and enriched uranium to be returned are stored at Japan’s Tokai nuclear research complex on the Pacific coast about 65 miles from Tokyo, a facility that U.S. officials long complained was poorly protected from thefts or terrorist assaults.

 The materials — consisting of pocket-sized wafers of metallic plutonium and uranium — could in theory be used to build an arsenal of 68 bombs equal in power to the weapon that destroyed much of Nagasaki in 1945.

But Japan will still have plenty of such materials in its holdings once the repatriation is completed. The plutonium alone is 3.5 percent of what Japan has in its own warehouses, and less than one percent of the country’s total holdings (some of it is stored outside the country). It also represents just 4 percent of what the country can produce in a year at its new plutonium factory, now scheduled for completion in October in the village of Rokkasho.

The deal comes amid heightened U.S. pressure on Japan to reduce or limit the size of its plutonium stockpile, mostly to reduce the risk of its theft by terrorists, and a global drive by Washington to convince other nations to do the same.

As part of its effort to prevent any thefts of other dangerous radioactive materials, such as medical isotopes, that aren’t explosives but could be used to sicken or kill, the United States also pledged with 22 other nations attending the summit to try to secure all radiological substances within their borders by 2016.

Update, March 25 at 11:22am: The final 2014 Nuclear Security Summit communique also included language that, for the first time, urged states to keep stockpiles of plutonium to a “minimum level.” While the statement was hedged — saying that stocks of the nuclear explosive should be minimized “consistent with national requirements” — it nevertheless marked a milestone in the biennial summit process, which began in 2010. Previous summits focused on reducing stockpiles of the other main nuclear explosive, highly-enriched uranium, and did not call for limits on plutonium stockpiles, due to opposition from countries like Russia and India that are seeking to develop commercial plutonium nuclear programs.

The joint U.S.-Japanese statement, released by President Obama and Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, said: “This effort involves the elimination of hundreds of kilograms of nuclear material, furthering our mutual goal of minimizing stocks of HEU [highly-enriched uranium] and separated plutonium worldwide, which will help prevent unauthorized actors, criminals or terrorists from acquiring such materials."

The main elements of the deal were reported on March 11 by the Center for Public Integrity, in a series of articles detailing recent friction between the two countries about Japan’s plutonium programs.

Monday’s joint statement didn’t provide any figures, but according to a decade-old U.S. government report, the Fast Critical Assembly research facility at Tokai has about 730 pounds of separated plutonium. It also has about 1,210 pounds of enriched uranium, capable of use in weapons.

The statement gave no timetable for the transfer of the materials, and did not mention the total size of Japan’s stockpiles or refer to growing tensions between the two countries over Japan’s plan to operate the Rokkasho factory under what U.S. officials consider to be inadequate security.

The square-mile facility, located on a stretch of Pacific 1,000 miles north of Tokyo, is capable of producing 8 tons of plutonium each year. But its workers have not been subjected to background checks, most of its guards are not armed, and its security forces do not routinely engage in realistic training exercises, according to U.S. officials.

While Japan has said it plans to use the newly-made plutonium as commercial reactor fuel, no reactors capable of burning it are now in operation, due to the March 2011 Fukushima disaster.

Officials in Abe’s government have privately told American experts they want to reopen a half dozen or so idled reactors by the end of this year, and more in the coming years.

Nobuyasu Abe, a former U.N. undersecretary general for disarmament who was recently named to the nation’s Atomic Energy Commission, said March 15 at a Brookings Institution symposium about Rokkasho that once the plant is finished, Japan will probably operate it at “partial capacity.”

“That is necessary in order to keep the plutonium balance at least equal, not increasing,” he said — referring to the government’s evident desire to consume the plutonium-based fuel as it is being created.

Kenneth Luongo, a former Department of Energy policy advisor and current president of the Partnership for Global Security, called Monday’s announcement of the return of the weapons materials from Japan “a positive step forward,” especially in East Asia, where Japan is just one of a number of countries trying to decide the shape of their nuclear programs.

“But Rokkasho is going to be a gigantic plutonium factor, so that is a major concern,” Luongo said.

The Fast Critical Assembly, which has operated since the 1967, was damaged by the same March 2011 earthquake that hit Fukushima and is currently undergoing repairs.

During a visit to the research reactor in November, the Center for Public Integrity found aging infrastructure — including unpainted walls and old equipment — as well as relatively light security, given the weapons materials used there.

According to the White House, once the Tokai uranium arrives in the United States, it will be diluted or “down-blended” into low-enriched uranium for use in commercial reactors or other civilian purposes.

The plutonium meanwhile will be stored pending a United States decision on how to get rid of its excess plutonium.

The statement also said the United States has agreed to help Japan “design new enhancements” to the research facility at Tokai, including converting the test reactor there to use non-explosive fuel.

The summit’s agreement regarding radiological materials, including isotopes used for medical purposes, is meant to keep these materials from being used to make a dirty bomb — a conventional explosive device salted with highly radioactive material that, while it can’t produce a nuclear blast, can produce a cloud of dangerously radioactive debris.

The 23 countries — out of 53 attending the summit in The Hague — that signed the pledge include Algeria, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, as well as a number of Western industrialized nations. Conspicuous by their absence from the list are the nuclear powers France, China and Russia.

The signers of the deal also pledged to follow the International Atomic Energy Agency’s guidelines for security for radiological materials.

A March 2014 report by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies found that last year alone, there were 153 cases where authorities in 30 countries lost control of some of their radiological and nuclear materials.

The vast majority of these cases, a total of 141, involved materials that are dangerously radioactive but not usable in nuclear weapons. In about half of cases, the report blamed the loss of the materials on “negligence” by the people handling them. In about a third of the cases, the materials were lost or stolen during transit.

In one high-profile incident, thieves stole a truck outside Mexico City in early December that was hauling cobalt-60 from a hospital to a radioactive waste storage center, according to news accounts. The truck and its contents were recovered not far from where it was taken three days later, but only after the thieves were exposed to dangerous radiation.

The United States may find it hard to meet the new pledge. Last year, the Energy Department acknowledged that 1,500 U.S. hospitals use radiological sources that could be turned into dirty bombs, and warned that it could take until 2025 to improve security for all those sources, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Montana judges must now disclose details about their personal financial ties, a response to a Center for Public Integrity investigation that gave the state a failing grade for its lack of transparency.

The Montana Supreme Court approved the new requirement Tuesday, calling for all judges and judicial candidates to report the same information that all other statewide officials must already disclose, according to the clerk’s office.

Montana had been one of just three states nationwide that had not required its judges to file personal financial disclosures, according to the Center’s findings in its Dec. 4 'Justice Obscured' investigation. The reforms, however, don’t go as far as most states’ requirements.

Under the new rule, all judges and judicial candidates will now have to disclose investments they own worth more than $1,000 and the source of any income they receive. They will also have to report real estate holdings beyond their primary residence.

Montana Supreme Court justices, who are elected to eight-year terms, already must report any campaign contributions and expenditures when they file to run for office. 

The new information is expected to be posted online by the Office of the Commissioner of Political Practices, according to program supervisor Mary Baker. Only a handful of states post such reports online.

Even under the new standards, Montana still fails the Center’s test for transparency. It would earn at most 17.5 points out of a possible 100, because the forms don’t ask about gifts the judges receive, debts the judges owe or the financial ties of the judges’ spouses and dependent children. Also, judges will disclose their personal finances every other year, rather than annually as most states require. (Judicial candidates would have to report within five days of filing for office.)

A score of 17.5 would put Montana in a tie with Iowa and Minnesota for 45th place, continuing to rank among the worst nationwide.

The Center evaluated the disclosure rules in all 50 states and the District of Columbia and compared them with those that federal judges face. It then reviewed disclosure reports of more than 300 top judges to flag potential conflicts of interest involving their finances and caseloads.  

Such disclosure helps maintain public confidence in the judicial system by providing transparency about judges' financial ties, ethics experts say.

But Montana court officials had been resistant to sharing information about judges’ personal finances, noting that judges already faced rules on when to step aside in cases where a conflict might arise.

Even after the Center’s report, Montana State Supreme Court Chief Justice Mike McGrath told the Associated Press that by following a strictly enforced code of judicial conduct, the court had “moved sort of beyond mere disclosure.”

Judicial experts and local newspaper editorials, however, called for disclosure so the public could evaluate those financial ties, too.

The new rule puts Montana a step ahead of at least Utah and Idaho, states where judges still are not required to publicly disclose any information about their personal finances.

Idaho has been considering adding some disclosure requirements. But Jim Carlson, executive director of the Idaho Judicial Council that proposed the changes, told the Center this week that no changes will occur for at least another five months. “Obviously, it’s an ongoing process,” he said.

Until last year, Wisconsin attorney Christine Bremer Muggli had never donated to a super PAC.

But records show she contributed $100 to a super PAC called Ready for Hillary in August. Then, in September, she gave the group another $100. And by the end of December, she had given $400 to the nascent organization that wants Democrat Hillary Clinton to again occupy White House — this time as commander in chief.

“Hillary Clinton deserves to be the first woman president,” Bremer Muggli told the Center for Public Integrity. “I wanted to jump in early and say ‘Please run’ right away.”

Like other super PACs, Ready for Hillary can trace its origins to the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in 2010, which helped paved the way for political action committees to raise unlimited sums of money to call for the election or defeat of candidates.

President Barack Obama, under whom Clinton served as secretary of state, said in 2010 that he couldn’t “think of anything more devastating to the public interest” than Citizens United.

But unlike most other super PACs, Ready for Hillary is attempting to convert rank-and-file Democratic donors — who, like Obama, have generally expressed skepticism, if not outright hostility, toward super PACs and the Citizens United decision — into financial backers.

That means finding a lot more people like Bremer Muggli — passionate supporters willing to give their money to an unproven but unfettered outside operation, instead of, or in addition to, a political party or authorized campaign committee. It’s also a super PAC with no guarantees, as Clinton herself could choose not to run.

So far, in this regard, financial filings suggest Ready for Hillary is succeeding. And as Ready for Hillary continues to win over grassroots donors, it is helping mainstream the Democratic Party’s embrace of super PACs.

Even as Bremer Muggli — a die-hard Democrat who serves on the Democratic National Committee — says she’d prefer to see publicly funded elections, she also sees the value in co-opting the political tools so often wielded by billionaires such as Republican casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson.

“Super PACs can be anything,” she said. “Until we have a change in the law, we have to do what we can.”

Displays of faith

Conceived in January 2013, Ready for Hillary raised $4 million last year. Although it is permitted to raise unlimited amounts of money, it imposed a voluntary $25,000 cap on contributions. 

Nevertheless, its haul ranked it among the highest-grossing super PACs in the country, raising roughly the same amount in 2013 that conservative juggernaut American Crossroads did.

Despite the fact that Clinton is neither an official candidate nor is the 2016 election imminent in any sense of the word, Joanne Skillings, a health industry consultant in Maine, told the Center for Public Integrity that she was “willing to take the risk” in order to make a gesture of support.

“I really want to see her succeed,” said Skillings, who gave Ready for Hillary $220 last year.

“Even though I don’t like super PACs, let’s play within the rules,” added Jennie Sweet-Cushman, a political science professor at Chatham University in Pennsylvania. “It is crucial that women do more to support candidates financially.”

A self-identified “long-time supporter of Hillary Clinton,” Sweet-Cushman gave $450 to Ready for Hillary last year in installments of $50 a month, according to FEC records.

Paul Lemieux, the president of a beauty salon in Massachusetts, said he gave $500 to Ready for Hillary in September as a sign of “encouragement” and a “display of faith.”

“I donated more than just a little because I wanted it to hopefully have some effect,” he said, adding that he didn’t realize he was contributing to a super PAC. “I want her to be president.”

The super PAC can already claim financial backers from every U.S. state — although New Yorkers and Californians account for nearly half of the money it raised in 2013, according to figures provided to the Center for Public Integrity by the super PAC.

Residents of New York combined to give just shy of $1 million last year, as did residents of California.

Only in seven states — Alaska, Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming — did fewer than 100 people donate to Ready for Hillary last year.

In all, Ready for Hillary boasted more than 33,600 donors in 2013 — who gave an average of about $120, according to figures provided by the super PAC.

Federal campaign finance records show that about 25 percent of the $4 million Ready for Hillary raised last year came from donors who gave $200 or less.

“We knew there was tremendous grassroots enthusiasm for a potential Hillary Clinton candidacy and that people were looking for a vehicle to express that support,” said Ready for Hillary spokesman Seth Bringman.

Meanwhile, about 37 percent came from five-dozen donors who hit the self-imposed ceiling of $25,000.

Billionaire investor George Soros*, Salesforce.Com CEO Marc Benioff and philanthropist Susie Tompkins Buell — who is a founding co-chair of the Ready for Hillary finance council — all ranked among the Democratic bigwigs who have already cut checks at the $25,000 level.

What if there’s no Hillary campaign to be ready for?

On its website, Ready for Hillary promises that contributions to the super PAC “will help ensure that we have everything we need to reach voters and mobilize support for the woman we all know is ready to do the job.”

But for now, there’s not much direct advocating to be done for a woman who is not an official candidate.

In 2013, about one in three dollars Ready for Hillary spent — more than $1 million — went toward online advertising through the firm Rising Tide Interactive LLC, which is largely staffed by former Democratic Party campaign operatives.

The super PAC also aided Democrat Terry McAuliffe — a long-time friend of the Clintons — during his successful bid last fall to be Virginia’s next governor. It sent canvassers to the Old Dominion and urged its donors to financially support McAuliffe’s campaign.

In 2014, it plans to continue to mobilize its supporters on behalf of Democratic candidates who have been endorsed by Clinton.

But even if Clinton herself decides not to run in 2016, her super PAC supporters don’t see much of a downside to Ready for Hillary’s activities — or their personal investments in the group.

Bringman, the super PAC spokesman, said Ready for Hillary would still be “incredibly valuable” in 2016, even if Clinton didn’t run. The group, he said, would offer up “a network of millions of Americans who are organized and ready to support the Democratic nominee” — whoever that be.

As for the super PAC’s donors?

“I will have absolutely no regrets if she doesn’t run,” Bremer Muggli, the Wisconsin attorney, said of her donations.

Similarly, none of the other Ready for Hillary donors contacted by the Center for Public Integrity said they would lament their super PAC contributions if Clinton opts against a second White House bid.

“It’s not like I can call up Ready for Hillary and ask for a refund,” said Sweet-Cushman, the political science professor.

“I’m not too concerned,” Sweet-Cushman continued. “I’m a fairly strong partisan.”

* The Center for Public Integrity has received financial support from Soros’ Open Society Foundations. See the Center’s list of donors here.

Did a foster-care teen need to be arrested by school police this month for alleged battery on a school bus? And then jailed for more than two weeks with adults long after a judge ordered her released?

The questions swirling around Selina Garcia, 17, of Raleigh, N.C. are part of a broader national debate over treatment of foster kids and the role of school police. Garcia is still confined to an adult jail because no one from the Wake County, N.C., social services department has come to get her. She was arrested on March 7 by a school resource officer after allegedly striking another student on a bus during an altercation. A judge freed her on March 10 pending a court appearance scheduled for Thursday.

Part of the problem is that Garcia is both an adult and a minor in North Carolina. Once they’re 16, youths in the state are put automatically into the adult legal system if charged with crimes, including misdemeanors. A 17-year-old, however, is still a minor under the state’s social services system. As a foster child, Garcia can only be released from jail and into the custody of the county, which is her legal guardian.

The twisted case exemplifies a systemic failure on the part of adults who are tasked with helping foster children — some of society’s most vulnerable kids — as well as an urgent need to review the role of school police in Wake County, according to Jennifer Story, an attorney with Legal Aid of North Carolina’s Advocates for Children’s Services.

“You cannot use jail as a boarding house for foster children,” said Story, who has been representing Garcia in efforts to obtain individual learning services for the teen from the Wake County School District.

Story also said that Garcia’s arrest by school police — a discretionary act on the part of an officer — illustrates the “unintended consequences” of funneling students into a legal system for incidents that might be better handled by school staff. Garcia is being held with adults accused of a range of crimes, and the jail is an unsavory environment for a girl who has struggled since a small child with abuse, Story said.

Spokeswoman Sarah Williamson-Baker said the county cannot give out information about individual clients. In a statement, she said: “When a child in our custody is arrested, we assess the individual circumstances and whether it is safe and appropriate for the child to return to the previous placement. If not, we attempt to secure a new placement and supporting services that meet the child's needs for treatment and are consistent with the safety of the child and the public.”   

Stella Shelton, interim chief of communications for the Wake County School District, also said that she can’t discuss, due to privacy restrictions, a student’s case. She said the district, like other districts nationally, grapples with how to handle disruptions on campus.

“I’d have to leave that to the school resource officer's judgment,” Shelton said, commenting on whether it was appropriate to have Garcia arrested for an incident on a school bus.

In January, Legal Aid of North Carolina and other groups filed a civil rights complaint against the Wake County School District and a number of law-enforcement agencies that supply officers to campuses there. The district has been disproportionately suspending ethnic minority students for minor misbehavior and referring such students to law enforcement, alleges the complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Educational Opportunities Section of the Civil Rights Division.

Garcia, who is black and Latina, is a high school senior who suffered years of abuse as a small child in another state, according to Story. The girl was placed with a family member in North Carolina. She said Garcia wants to disclose what has happened to her; fellow students have rallied to her defense and appealed to the county’s Board of Education this month to help free her, as local TV and other media have reported.

A couple of years ago Garcia entered the Wake County foster-care system and has been transferred from group homes to individual homes and among three different high schools in less than two years, Story said. Garcia gets no counseling at school, Story said. And since January, Story said, the teen has been cut off from the counseling she was previously receiving as a foster child because she was placed in an individual home that’s far from town and has been provided no transportation.

 That’s been tough on the teen because she had finally built some trust with the counselor, Story said.

On March 7, Garcia got into an altercation with another girl on a school bus. Story says Garcia has been bullied at school by other kids. The school system won’t comment on Garcia’s individual history. The Raleigh Police Department — which assigns school resource officers to schools — says that Garcia struck the other girl multiple times but that the other girl did not suffer serious injuries.

A school resource officer, according to Story, made a judgment call to arrest Garcia for simple battery. The teen was charged before for making threats to a teacher at school, Raleigh police spokesman Jim Sughrue said. Police records show she was given a ticket in connection for an alleged altercation at school previously. Because Garcia is older than 15, she was booked and taken to the Wake County Detention Center and placed among adult women.

“I urged him to let me pick her up,” Story said, explaining a conversation with the police officer who arrested Garcia after the bus incident.

Story said that the officer told her he felt that Garcia needed “to learn a lesson.” In the meantime, the school district convened a meeting, Story said, to review the bus incident. School officials originally labeled the teen’s infraction as a “level two” out of five levels of misbehavior, with five being the most serious on the scale. A level-two punishment is a maximum of five days suspension. But the review concluded that Garcia’s behavior stemmed from “underlying trauma” and that she should not be suspended at all as punishment.

Yet she remained jailed.

 “All she has been doing in jail is writing,” Story said. “When I go to see her in jail she hands me wads of paper.” Story said shelters are available where Garcia could be placed instead of keeping her in jail.

On Tuesday, Wake County students and parents joined students from other states to visit federal officials in Washington, D.C. to discuss concerns about school discipline policies they complain are criminalizing kids for schoolyard fights and other misbehavior better handled with in-school counseling sessions that get to the root of conflicts.

The event was organized by the Dignity in Schools Campaign. The group met with federal education and justice officials to urge that more be done to get schools to adopt unprecedented Federal School Discipline Guidance released by the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice in January.

The campus of Koch Brothers Academy spans a nation.

Learn about the “role of government institutions in a capitalistic society” at South Carolina’s College of Charleston.

Dive into the “integrated study of philosophy, politics and economics” at Duke University and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

And philosophize about the “moral imperatives of free markets and individual liberty” at the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University in Alabama.

Billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch may rank among the nation’s biggest bankrollers of conservative causes and Republican campaign vehicles. But Koch proselytizing of government deregulation and pro-business civics is increasingly targeted not just at creatures of Capitol Hill, or couch sitters in swing states, but at the hearts and minds of American college students, as well.

In all, two of the six private charitable foundations the Koch brothers control and personally fund combined in 2012 to infuse colleges and universities with more than $12.7 million, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of Internal Revenue Service tax filings.

The vast majority of this cash was spread among 163 U.S. colleges and universities — many with reputations for liberal faculty and left-leaning patrons — throughout 41 states and the District of Columbia. It came on top of tens of millions of dollars more Koch foundations have given colleges and universities during the past decade, tax filings show. 

The Koch foundations together have also spent millions more to fund dozens of academic scholarships and internships, numerous think tanks and education-focused organizations, such as the Philadelphia-based Jack Miller Center. The latter is a nonprofit that used $250,000 in Koch money to help bankroll academic programs that “reinvigorate the teaching of America’s founding principles and history” at 45 institutes of higher education, from Harvard University to American University to the University of California, Los Angeles.  

In 2012, the Koch foundations sent six- or seven-figure donations to 12 colleges and universities, including big-name schools such as George Mason University in Virginia, Southern Methodist University in Texas, West Virginia University, Florida State University, Utah State University, Kansas State University and the University of Arizona.

Most of the 20 officials interviewed at various schools receiving Koch foundation grants were adamant that this money did not color classroom curricula — nor did money from any other donor, liberal or conservative. Several specifically said such funds arrive with “with no strings attached” beyond being directed at a certain program or center. They further noted that their universities received hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of different grants from private foundations.

A $100,000 grant the University of North Carolina’s Philosophy, Politics and Economics Program received from the Charles Koch Foundation for a visiting faculty position “has had no impact on the program’s goals or on its curriculum … it is crucial that the funding we receive is entirely free of political requirements or ideological litmus tests,” program director Geoffrey Sayre-McCord said.

“Donor gifts, regardless of their size, have always been accepted with the clear understanding that the gift will not compromise academic integrity or infringe on the academic freedom of our faculty,” said Florida State University spokesman Dennis Schnittker, whose school in 2012 received more than $297,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation that primarily funded graduate student fellowships in its economics department.

But this isn’t always clear.

When, for example, the Charles Koch Foundation in 2011 pledged $1.5 million to Florida State University’s economics department, a contract between the foundation and university stipulated that a Koch-appointed advisory committee select professors and conduct annual evaluations, the Tampa Bay Times reported.

And to be sure, the Koch foundations’ educational grants, regardless of whether they’re made with conditions, aren’t exactly supporting studies of, say, proletarian emancipation or historical materialism.

Instead, they routinely support academic programs or centers that teach theories and principles aligned with the Kochs’ convictions about economics and public policy.

Troy University’s $274,500 Charles Koch Foundation gift helped establish the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy, spokesman Andy Ellis said. The center describes itself as being “built on the assumption that liberty is valuable in its own right and plays a crucial role in economic development” and “committed to advancing our understanding about the role free markets and capitalist institutions play in promoting prosperity.”

At Ohio State University, $100,000 in Charles Koch Foundation money funds a senior lecturer position in its economics department, university spokesman Gary D. Lewis Jr. confirmed.

New York University’s $35,500 grant from the Charles Koch Foundation meanwhile helped fund a two-year legal studies research fellowship.

No such level of detail is supplied by the Koch foundations in their federal tax filings, with grants typically listed as going toward “general support” or “educational programs.”

The Charles Koch Foundation, which among the various Koch-connected private foundations spent the most on higher education, did tell the IRS in a 2012 filing that it primarily supports “research and education programs that analyze the impact of free societies” and focuses on “a select number of programs where it believes it is best positioned to support positive social change.”

Charles Koch in 2012 contributed more than $60 million to his eponymous foundation, which ended that year with more than $216 million in reported assets.

Officials representing the various Koch foundations, as well as those at Koch Industries Inc., did not respond to phone and email requests seeking comment about their education-related giving.

Competition from Democratic political bankrollers

The Kochs are hardly alone in funding academia: Other prominent political donors — liberal and conservative both — operate private charitable foundations that in part support educational programs and institutions.

Billionaire financier and Democratic megadonor George Soros is chief among them. He’s pumped tens of millions of dollars into educational interests in recent years through a network of private foundations that together boast several times the reported assets that the Koch foundations do.

But the most significant educational contributions Soros made either in 2011 or 2012, when most recent tax forms are available, didn’t fund U.S. colleges and scholars like the Kochs, but foreign ones.

Central European University, an English-language university in Hungary that Soros himself founded, leads all his recipients, taking almost $9 million from the Soros-funded Foundation to Promote Open Society. The university describes itself as promoting “the pursuit of truth wherever it leads, respect for the diversity of cultures and peoples, and commitment to resolve differences through debate not denial.”

The Open Society Institute, another Soros-fueled private foundation, spread about $9.43 million through 900 foreign student grants. The students received the money with the charge they “improve academic, social and democratic environments in home countries,” according to the organization’s tax filings.

Soros’ domestic educational investments, while significant, aren’t as sizable.

The Foundation to Promote Open Society’s roughly $4 million in higher education-related grants were divided among a handful of schools frequently funded programs that focused on racial minorities, foreign affairs and journalism.

American University in Washington, D.C., received about $438,000 for studies on sex crimes, war crimes, human rights violations and government secrecy. George Washington University in Washington, D.C., took in $387,000 to support drug addiction and recovery studies. The University of California, Los Angeles, for example, took in $300,000 to support programs for black workers in Los Angeles.  

The Soros Fund Charitable Foundation — a private charity worth about $159.3 million at the beginning of 2013 — directed more than $1 million to more than two-dozen colleges and universities during 2012.

Recipients include Princeton University in New Jersey ($249,150) and Yeshiva University in New York City ($106,350), according to the foundation’s 2012 tax return. It also divvied hundreds of thousands of dollars up among various primary and secondary schools.

The bulk of its $8.62 million in total grant spending, like that of other Soros-connected private foundations, was divided among dozens of primarily health, civic, religious, media and arts charities.

(The Center for Public Integrity receives funding from the Open Society Foundations, which Soros funds. A complete list of Center for Public Integrity funders is found here.)

Meanwhile, movie producer and Democratic bankroller Jeffrey Katzenberg — his political spending last election cycle included $3 million in contributions to pro-Barack Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action — made small contributions to the Oakland (Calif.) School for the Arts and the Pasadena (Calif.) Waldorf School.

Texas attorney Steve Mostyn, who with his wife, Amber, also donated more than $3 million to Priorities USA Action, has recently donated tens of thousands of dollars through his private foundation to various Texas school districts to aid children with special needs.

Billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the Republicans’ biggest political financier last election cycle who donated nearly $100 million to various conservative super PACs, made a $1.07 million contribution through the Adelson Family Foundation to the Rashi School of Newton, Mass. — a kindergarten-through-eighth grade academy that touts its “joyfully Jewish approach to learning.”

Adelson and his wife, Miriam, personally donated $45.3 million in 2012 to the foundation, which ended that year with about $57,000 cash on hand after making tens of millions of dollars in contributions to other interests, including $32 million to the Birthright Israel Foundation, which offers free, 10-day trips to Israel to Jews ages 18 to 26.

The Adelsons are also benefactors of the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Educational Campus in Las Vegas, a pre-kindergarten through high school facility with a mission to “instruct and inspire new generations of students who will draw strength from a rich Jewish heritage, use their knowledge, values and vision to fulfill their own potential, and build a better world.”

Kochs still top of the class

But none of the private foundations controlled by these political powerhouses approach the depth and breadth of Koch-connected foundations’ recent investments in American education.

George Mason University is exemplary.

The Charles Koch Foundation poured $8.49 million into the school during 2012, tax filings show, after it had already invested tens of millions of dollars into programs during recent years at this public school of about 34,000 students 20 miles west of Washington, D.C.

The Koch money largely is earmarked for George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, which describes itself as the “world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas,” and its Institute for Humane Studies, which specializes in researching the “the practice and potentials of freedom” and operates 14 research projects and initiatives.

Charles Koch himself is chairman of the Institute for Humane Studies’ board of directors and a Mercatus Center board member.

Koch Industries Executive Vice President Richard Fink is a Mercatus Center and Institute for Humane Studies board member.

Fink also serves as a board member of three Koch private foundations, plus Americans for Prosperity, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization that during the 2012 election cycle spent at least $33.5 million just on advertisements attacking President Barack Obama, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

In all, Americans for Prosperity spent $122 million during 2012 — more than it had from its formation in 2004 through 2011. And that’s just a slice of the more than $407 million a complex and secretive network of Koch-connected nonprofits active during the 2012 elections raised.

This year, the Koch brothers are telegraphing their intentions to remain among the nation’s top political actors for years to come. Democrats have made the Kochs their designated bogeymen, demonizing them in fundraising pleas and Senate floor speeches as amoral, self-serving oligarchs — all while public awareness of who the Kochs even are remains spotty, according to a new poll.

George Mason University donors “respect our academic freedom and understand they can’t influence what we do,” university spokesman Michael Sandler said. “Our president [Angel Cabrera] has made clear that if any donor ever threatened our academic freedom, we wouldn’t take their money.”

In an April 2013 question-and-answer session on Reddit.com, Cabrera said as much while responding to a question about Charles Koch’s involvement in George Mason University’s affairs.

Jennifer N. Victor, a George Mason University politics professor who specializes in how individuals and groups influence government, is nevertheless concerned.

George Mason University, she says, is earning a reputation for advocating political conservatism and libertarianism — a reputation she argues is “absolutely unwarranted,” as she’s sensed no pressure to teach a certain way or publish research that clings to a particular philosophy.

“It’s potentially damaging to the image and the reputation of the university and academia, rightly or wrongly, to be associated with ideological anything,” Victor said. “It’s contrary to what the goal of higher education is.”

Student leaders and activists interviewed at 10 colleges receiving Koch foundation funding were generally unaware of the donations.

Some expressed indifference to them, or had more questions than answers.

“The fact of the matter is that, at the end of the day, the political leanings of the organizations which donate to us do not affect the political climate of our student body,” said Jaywin Singh Malhi, student body vice president at Southern Methodist University.

Billy Cerullo, Student Government Association president at Suffolk University in Boston, says the $44,700 donation his school received from the Charles Koch Foundation in 2012 isn’t much discussed — probably because few people know about this or any other private foundation grant.

“It’s probably beneficial for us to know more about how we’re funding moving forward, and that’s something we can definitely bring up to upper administration,” Cerullo said.

Others, however, say they’re upset with Koch cash on their campus.

“I definitely have a problem with it, and it makes me wonder what they’re dictating to the university,” said Ohio State University College Democrats President Vince Hayden. “The major donors here are obvious because they have buildings named after them, but for other donors, the university should be more transparent about who they are. Donors over a certain dollar amount should be published on an easily accessible list.”

Nick Mahon, president of the University of Arizona Young Democrats, says he’s not concerned with any political actor making general support donations or funding capital projects.

“But when they’re funding particular programs, that’s where I think they cross the line, if they’re trying to affect the academic nature of the university,” Mahon said.

Diverse causes supported

The six Koch-led private foundations serve somewhat different purposes and support a variety of endeavors, according to IRS filings.

Among them:

• Charles Koch Foundation, the primary vehicle for funding colleges and universities. It also made grants to non-educational entities that include the American Legislative Exchange Council ($71,100) and Center for Competitive Politics ($34,800), a nonprofit that advocates against campaign finance regulations. Joe Trotter, a spokesman for the Center for Competitive Politics, said its grant specifically paid for the salaries of two interns and a temporary employee. It also reported a $11,000 donation to the Daily Caller News Foundation, the nonprofit sister organization of the Daily Caller that, spokeswoman McKenzie Vaughn confirmed, produces original news content available without charge to news publishers that can guarantee a large audience. The Charles Koch Foundation reported spending about $14 million overall in 2012 and ended the year with $216.3 million in assets.


• Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, which generally funds conservative think tanks. Charles Koch is a director. In 2012, grantees included the Heritage Foundation ($650,000), Federalist Society ($265,000), Manhattan Institute for Policy Research ($175,000), and the American Legislative Exchange Council ($150,000). It also gave $125,000 to the Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason magazine. It reported making $2.23 million in contributions and grants during 2012 and ended the year with about $4.2 million in reserve.


• David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, which focuses on the arts. David Koch is its president. In 2012, it spent $10 million — and authorized an additional $55 million in future spending — for renovations of the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City. The foundation also sent $500,000 to the New York City Opera, but the money wasn’t enough to keep the struggling company afloat: It declared bankruptcy and closed late last year. The foundation reported $10.5 million in contributions and ended the year with more than $71 million in assets.


• Knowledge and Progress Fund, of which Charles Koch is chairman. In 2012, it made a lone $800,000 grant for “general operating support” to Donors Trust, a tax-exempt, Virginia-based charity that in turn funds pro-free market think tanks throughout the nation. It also is the primary funder of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, which runs online news outlets in state capitals across the country. It ended 2012 with $21.6 million in reported assets.


• Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation, which focused its spending on schools and arts organizations mostly located in Kansas. Top recipients in 2012 included the Youth Entrepreneurs of Kansas ($626,000), the Bill of Rights Institute of Virginia ($246,000), the Kansas State University Foundation ($149,000) and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City ($60,000). The foundation distributed more than $2 million in grants during 2012 and ended the year with more than $30.4 million in assets.


• Koch Cultural Trust, which received almost all of its $164,000 in revenue during 2012 from funds transferred to it by the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation. The Koch Cultural Trust, in turn, provided 34 students from Kansas with grants ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 to pursue studies in music, dance, theater, art or screenwriting. Several grants also went toward students’ musical instrument purchases. It made almost $100,000 in grants during 2012 and ended the year with about $4,000 cash on hand.

Charles Koch also operates the Charles Koch Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit group that recently split from the Charles Koch Foundation and exists to promote “advancement of liberty and economic freedom by educating students in a classroom.” It spent $8.57 million during 2012, according to tax filings, and funds hundreds of internships, fellowships and associate placements.

The IRS doesn’t require Koch-related foundations to reveal until late this year how much money they spent on education — or anything else — during in 2013. Grants made during 2014 don’t have to be revealed until late 2015.

But expect a host of new schools not among 2012 Koch cash recipients to rank among those receiving support, according to a document posted on the Koch Family Foundations & Philanthropy website.

While the document doesn’t include dollar figures, it does indicate that big-name colleges such as Brown University, Dartmouth College, Georgetown University, Syracuse University and Texas Tech University are due to receive Koch foundation donations.