Billionaire Koch brothers try to buy state’s court

Koch Brothers

September 29, 2012, Miami Herald

The new stealth campaign against three Florida Supreme Court justices is being backed by those meddling right-wing billionaires from Wichita, Charles and David Koch. 

 Last week they uncorked the first of a series of commercials from their political action committee, Americans for Prosperity. The targets are Justices R. Fred Lewis, Barbara Pariente and Peggy Quince. They were three of the five-vote majority that in 2010 knocked down a half-baked amendment slapped together by state lawmakers seeking to nullify the federal Affordable Health Care Act. 

The Florida Supreme Court upheld lower court decisions in finding that the proposed amendment contained “misleading and ambiguous language,” the hallmark of practically everything produced by this Legislature. 

On the November ballot, Lewis, Pariente and Quince are up for merit retention, meaning voters can choose to retain them or not. This simple system was put in place to keep the state’s high court above the sleaze of political races.  

The mission of the Kochs, hiding as always behind their super PAC, is to get the three justices dumped at the polls so that Gov. Rick Scott can appoint replacements. 

The last thing these guys want is fair judges who know the law; they want partisan judges who’ll obediently support their political agenda. It’s worse than just trying to buy an election. It’s trying to hijack Florida’s justice system at the highest levels.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the control of elections by corporations and rich individuals, click here.

Study: Scientific research fraud on the rise

Fraud in scientific research, while still rare, is growing at a troubling pace, a new study finds. A review of retractions in medical and biological peer-reviewed journals finds the percentage of studies withdrawn because of fraud or suspected fraud has jumped substantially since the mid-1970s. 

In 1976, there were fewer than 10 fraud retractions for every 1 million studies published, compared with 96 retractions per million in 2007. The study authors aren't quite sure why this is happening. But they and outside experts point to pressure to hit it big in science, both for funding and attention, and to what seems to be a subtle increase in deception in overall society that science may simply be mirroring. 

Fraud in life sciences research is still minuscule and committed by only a few dozen scientific scofflaws. However, it causes big problems, said Arturo Casadevall, a professor of microbiology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. 

Casadevall is the lead author of the study which looked at the reasons for 2,047 retractions among many millions of studies published in journals and kept in a government database. Fraud was the No. 1 cause of retractions, accounting for 43 percent of them. 

When fraud was combined with other areas of misconduct, such as plagiarism, it explained about 2 out of 3 retractions, the study found. "Very few people are doing it, but when they do it, they are doing it in areas that are very important," Casadevall said. "And when these things come out, society loses faith in science."

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on corruption in science, click here.

How lawmakers and lobbyists keep a lock on the private prison business

The three largest private prison companies in the US
spent $45m on lobbying over the last decade.
Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

Private prison corporations say they don't lobby on custodial policy. They seem to find legislators with views aligne

• 
• • Sadhbh Walshe
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 27 September 2012 09.55 EDT 

America's three largest private prison companies ... spent in the region of $45m over the past 10 years in lobbying state and federal governments. During the same period, these companies saw their profits soar as they scored more government contracts. [Also] during the same period, various pieces of legislation got passed ensuring that immigrant detention, in particular, would remain a lucrative growth market.

Thanks to mandatory sentencing laws and the "war on drugs", the prison population has exploded over the past 30 years – to the point where it has become an untenable burden on state budgets. The private prison business [is] reliant on state and federal governments to provide them with their customer base: that is, bodies to fill their cells.

The companies maintain that their lobbying efforts have nothing to do with this expansion and insist that it is their policy to "expressly prohibit their lobbyists from working to pass or oppose immigration legislation", such as the Arizona immigration bill SB1070, which provides for the mandatory detention of immigrants who cannot produce papers on request. [Then] where are the private prison firms spending those millions of lobbying dollars?

A report compiled by the Justice Policy Institute issued in 2011 and using data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics found that between 2003 and 2010, the [Corrections Corporation of America] contributed a total of $1,552,350 to state election campaigns.

Approximately half was to candidates, more than a third was to party committees and around one tenth was spent on ballot measures. Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on corruption in the prison/industrial complex, click here.

Intelligence Effort Named Citizens, Not Terrorists

This Aug. 25, 2004 file photo shows unidentified analysts
at the Combined Intelligence and Fusion Center for
NORAD/Northcom in Colorado Springs, Colo. A
multibillion-dollar information-sharing program that was
created in the aftermath of 9/11 has improperly collected
information about innocent Americans and produced no
valuable intelligence on terrorism, according to a Senate
report that describes an effort that ballooned far beyond
anyone’s ability to control. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski/File)

A multibillion-dollar information-sharing program created in the aftermath of 9/11 has improperly collected information about innocent Americans and produced little valuable intelligence on terrorism, a Senate report concludes. 

It portrays an effort that ballooned far beyond anyone's ability to control. What began as an attempt to put local, state and federal officials in the same room analyzing the same intelligence has instead cost huge amounts of money for data-mining software, flat screen televisions and, in Arizona, two fully equipped Chevrolet Tahoes that are used for commuting, investigators found. 

 The report underscores a reality of post-9/11 Washington: National security programs tend to grow, never shrink, even when their money and manpower far surpass the actual subject of terrorism. 

When fusion centers did address terrorism, they sometimes did so in ways that infringed on civil liberties. The centers have made headlines for circulating information about Ron Paul supporters, the ACLU, activists on both sides of the abortion debate, war protesters and advocates of gun rights. 

One fusion center cited in the Senate investigation wrote a report about a Muslim community group's list of book recommendations. Others discussed American citizens speaking at mosques or talking to Muslim groups about parenting. No evidence of criminal activity was contained in those reports. The government did not circulate them, but it kept them on government computers. The federal government is prohibited from storing information about First Amendment activities not related to crimes.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on civil liberties, click here.

Energy firm uses 'land grabs' to secure fracking rights from reluctant landowners

Ranjana Bhandari and her husband, Kaushik De,
stand near a Chesapeake Energy gas well in Arlington,
Texas, on Sept. 16, 2012.

October 2, 2012, NBC News

Ranjana Bhandari and her husband knew the natural gas beneath their ranch-style home in Arlington, Texas, could be worth a lot - especially when they got offer after offer from Chesapeake Energy Corp. 

Their repeated refusals didn't stop Chesapeake, the second-largest natural gas producer in the United States. 

This June, after petitioning a Texas state agency for an exception to a 93-year-old statute, the company effectively secured the ability to drain the gas from beneath the Bhandari property anyway -- without having to pay the couple a penny. 

In fact, since January 2005, the Texas agency has rejected just five of Chesapeake's 1,628 requests for such exceptions. Chesapeake's use of the Texas law is among the latest examples of how the company executes what it calls a "land grab" -- an aggressive leasing strategy intended to lock up prospective drilling sites and lock out competitors.  

Chesapeake has become the principal player in the largest land boom in America since the California Gold Rush of the late 1840s and ‘50s, amassing drilling rights on more land than almost any U.S. energy company. After years of leasing tracts from New York to Wyoming, the company now controls the right to drill for oil and gas on about 15 million acres -- roughly the size of West Virginia.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on corporate corruption, click here.

Pesticide use ramping up as GMO crop technology backfires: study

U.S. farmers are using more hazardous pesticides to fight weeds and insects due largely to heavy adoption of genetically modified crop technologies that are sparking a rise of "superweeds" and hard-to-kill insects, according to a newly released study. 

Genetically engineered crops have led to an increase in overall pesticide use, by 404 million pounds from the time they were introduced in 1996 through 2011, according to the report by Charles Benbrook, a research professor at the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University.
 

Of that total, herbicide use increased over the 16-year period by 527 million pounds while insecticide use decreased by 123 million pounds. 

Herbicide-tolerant crops were the first genetically modified crops introduced to world, rolled out by Monsanto Co. in 1996, first in "Roundup Ready" soybeans and then in corn, cotton and other crops. Roundup Ready crops are engineered through transgenic modification to tolerate dousings of Monsanto's Roundup herbicide. 

In recent years, more than two dozen weed species have become resistant to Roundup's chief ingredient glyphosate, causing farmers to use increasing amounts both of glyphosate and other weedkilling chemicals to try to control the so-called "superweeds. Resistant weeds have become a major problem for many farmers reliant on GE crops, and are now driving up the volume of herbicide needed each year by about 25 percent," Benbrook said.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the environmental and health risks posed by GMO foods, click here.

Letters by Sandusky, wife blame everyone else

Jerry Sandusky

By Ann O'Neill, CNN
updated 12:52 AM EDT,
Thu October 11, 2012

Bellefonte, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- When all was said and done, Jerry and Dottie Sandusky did not ask the judge for mercy. They did not try to extol Jerry's virtues, list good deeds or express regret. Instead, they depicted the boys he sexually assaulted as ungrateful and called them liars.

They blamed the young men -- including their own adopted son, Matt, who now claims he, too, was molested -- for their downfall.

In letters to the judge who would sentence the former coach, the Sanduskys portrayed themselves as virtuous victims of a vast conspiracy. They blamed powerful, image-conscious forces at Penn State University, lying cops, ambitious prosecutors and a scandal-hungry news media.

Victims angrily confront Sandusky at sentencing 

The couple's letters were mentioned in court on Tuesday but not read aloud. Judge John Cleland and the Centre County courts made them public, and CNN obtained copies.  In them, Jerry Sandusky expressed little sympathy for the 10 boys he was convicted of molesting. As he wrote about their families, he tried to shift the blame, pointing out that the boys came from unstable homes.

"Nobody mentioned the impact of abandonment, neglect, abuse, insecurity and conflicting messages that the biological parents might have had in this," he wrote. He said nothing about the damaged lives and institutions his molestation case left in its wake.  READ MORE