Corporate Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key Corporate Corruption News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

Nuclear plants in the United States last year experienced at least 14 "near misses," serious failures in which safety was jeopardized, at least in part, due to lapses in oversight and enforcement by US nuclear safety regulators, says a new report. They occurred with alarming frequency – more than once a month – which is high for a mature industry, said the study of nuclear plant safety performance in 2010 by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based nuclear watchdog group. The report, the first in what the UCS expects will become an annual study, details both successes and failures by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which it calls "the cop on the beat." Charged with overseeing America's fleet of 104 nuclear reactors, the NRC made some "outstanding catches," but was also inconsistent in its oversight, seeming at times to nod off when most needed. "The chances of a disaster at a nuclear plant are low," the report states. "But when the NRC tolerates unresolved safety problems – as it did last year at Peach Bottom, Indian Point, and Vermont Yankee – this lax oversight allows that risk to rise. The more owners sweep safety problems under the rug and the longer safety problems remain uncorrected, the higher the risk climbs."

Note: For many reports from reliable sources on government corruption, click here.

Carlos Lam, a Republican activist and Indiana deputy prosecutor, has resigned amid revelations that he sent an email calling for a fake attack on Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker designed to discredit union protesters. Walker, a Republican, was the target of protests for his efforts to roll back many union collective bargaining rights in his state. In a Feb. 19 email uncovered by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, Lam apparently told Walker he had a "good opportunity" to win public sympathy with a "'false flag' operation." "If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions' cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the unions," read the email. Lam initially denied having sent the email. He [claimed] he had been shopping for a minivan with his family when it was sent, and suggested his email account had been infiltrated by his political enemies. Lam resigned as deputy prosecutor on Thursday morning, however, reportedly telling his boss he had indeed sent the email. Last month, another Indiana official -- Deputy Attorney General Jeff Cox - lost his job for calling on law enforcement to "use live ammunition" on Wisconsin protesters. Also in February, Walker was the victim of a prank call by a liberal journalist pretending to be billionaire conservative activist David Koch. When the journalist suggested planting people among the protesters to stir up trouble, Walker responded that "we thought about that" but added that he had decided against it.

Note: To learn more about the prevalence of "false flag" operations in politics with links to reliable, verifiable sources, click here. For more on this official's call for a false-flag attack, click here.

This week, the Michigan legislature passed – and the governor signed into law – a bill that would permit Governor Rick Snyder to push aside elected city officials and replace them with emergency financial managers in any municipality or school district facing financial difficulties. The law would include virtually every town and city in the state as those cities that aren’t bankrupt already soon will be once the governor’s proposed budget – which cuts billions in aid to municipalities and school districts – is approved by the legislature. One of the most shocking, Draconian, democracy-destroying measures in the history of this country has became law – and the nation has seemingly slept through it. The new law, described by one of the GOP legislators sponsoring the bill as “financial martial law”, empowers the governor’s appointees [referred to as ‘Emergency Financial Managers’] to fire duly elected local officials, cancel labor contracts and even dissolve entire communities and school districts. This is about so much more than collective bargaining agreements and unions. This law gives an appointee of the governor – which, by the way, may be a corporation – the authority to dismiss any or all of a municipality’s elected government officials.

Note: For a treasure trove of reports by major media sources on the collusion between government and financial powers against the public interest, click here.

Anonymous, an online hacker group, released a string of e-mails last week that purportedly show mortgage document fraud at Bank of America. Many people yawned. After all, there have been well-documented cases of mortgage fraud and illegal foreclosures, and little has been done to punish Bank of America or any of the banks for their behavior. But just because the federal government has been slow to act on the mortgage crisis doesn't mean that these e-mails are any less valuable. The e-mails are a chain showing requests for Balboa Insurance employees to remove document tracking numbers from the system of record. Balboa Insurance became a division of Bank of America after the bank bought the bankrupt home loan company Countrywide Financial. The idea suggested in the e-mails was to misplace individual documents away from matching loans. This would make it harder for federal auditors to investigate individual loans. It would also make it far more difficult for individual homeowners to dispute or question bank action on their loans - and therefore obtain mortgage modifications or a stay on bank foreclosure. The Anonymous e-mails are serious indeed. They're a snapshot into why the mortgage mess spiraled out of control. While they don't tell the whole story, they point to the need for further investigation and possible action on behalf of the federal government. When people are losing their homes, the banks shouldn't be allowed to get away with deception.

Note: For a treasure trove of reports by major media sources on the collusion between government and banks against the public interest, click here.

"The facts in the report speak for themselves, but the principles it describes could apply to funds throughout the United States and overseas." That's attorney Philip Khinda, talking about the 75-page report he delivered last week to the California Public Employees' Retirement System on dealings involving former senior executives and board members with so-called placement agents, and how the latter got tens of millions of dollars in questionable fees for their services. The report is the culmination of a 17-month investigation headed by Khinda, a partner at the Washington law firm Steptoe & Johnson, which was hired by CalPERS for the job. Citing the $800 million a year CalPERS was paying out in fees, the report concludes that "the excessive nature created an environment in which external managers were willing and able to pay fees at a level that bore little or no relationship to the services apparently provided by the placement agents ... Many of the abuses relating to placement agent arrangements were, in a sense, a symptom of a larger problem." That larger problem applies, in part, to funds throughout the United States and overseas, ranging from other public pension funds to sovereign wealth funds investing in the United States. With the amount of money at stake, the fat fees involved, and the various middlemen looking for a piece, events similar to what transpired at CalPERS could just as easily appear elsewhere.

Note: For a treasure trove of reports by major media sources on the collusion between government and financial corporations against the public interest, click here.

A Pentagon audit has found that the federal government overpaid a billionaire oilman by as much as $200 million on several military contracts worth nearly $2.7 billion. The audit by the Defense Departments inspector general ... estimated that the department paid the oilman $160 [million] to $204 million more for fuel than could be supported by price or cost analysis. The study also reported that the three contracts were awarded under conditions that effectively eliminated the other bidders. Harry Sargeant III, a well-connected Florida businessman and once-prominent Republican donor, first faced scrutiny over his defense work in October 2008, when he was accused in a congressional probe of using his close relationship with Jordans royal family to secure exclusive rights over supply routes to U.S. bases in western Iraq. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), who led the probe, ... said in a statement Thursday that the report confirmed what we found in 2008: the International Oil Trading Company overcharged by hundreds of millions of dollars while the Bush administration looked the other way. Waxman called on Sargeant to repay the Pentagon.

Note: For many reports from reliable sources on government corruption, click here.

U.S. government officials, in private sessions on Capitol Hill [on Friday, March 18], repeatedly declined to give details of radiation measurements at the stricken Japanese nuclear complex, saying the situation is shrouded in a "fog of war." Separately, the Obama administration said ... "miniscule quantities" of radiation from the Japanese nuclear accident were detected Friday at a monitoring station in Sacramento, Calif., a day after similar traces of radiation were detected in Washington state. The administration said the levels of the radioactive isotope xenon 133 were approximately equivalent to one-millionth the dose received from the sun, rocks or other natural sources. The Obama administration's reluctance to detail in public what it is learning from radiation-detection operations around the damaged Fukushima Daiichi complex in Japan ... comes after statements Wednesday by the head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission that painted a grimmer picture of the nuclear crisis than Japanese officials had offered, and suggested that the U.S. didn't trust the information coming from the Japanese government.

Note: Shouldn't the title be something more like "U.S. Refuses to Give Radiation Details for Fear of Industry Repercussions"? How sad that money often continues to trump public health in matters like this.

Thirty-five years ago, Dale G. Bridenbaugh and two of his colleagues at General Electric resigned from their jobs after becoming increasingly convinced that the nuclear reactor design they were reviewing -- the Mark 1 -- was so flawed it could lead to a devastating accident. Five of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which has been wracked since Friday's earthquake with explosions and radiation leaks, are Mark 1s. "The problems we identified in 1975 were that, in doing the design of the containment, they did not take into account the dynamic loads that could be experienced with a loss of coolant," Bridenbaugh [said]. "The impact loads the containment would receive by this very rapid release of energy could tear the containment apart and create an uncontrolled release." Questions persisted for decades about the ability of the Mark 1 to handle the immense pressures that would result if the reactor lost cooling power. In 1986, for instance, Harold Denton, then the director of NRC's Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, spoke critically about the design during an industry conference. Today that design is being put to the ultimate test in Japan.

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on government and corporate corruption, click here and here.

Behind Japan's escalating nuclear crisis sits a scandal-ridden energy industry in a comfy relationship with government regulators often willing to overlook safety lapses. Leaks of radioactive steam and workers contaminated with radiation are just part of the disturbing catalog of accidents that have occurred over the years and been belatedly reported to the public, if at all. In one case, workers hand-mixed uranium in stainless steel buckets, instead of processing by machine, so the fuel could be reused, exposing hundreds of workers to radiation. Two later died. "Everything is a secret," said Kei Sugaoka, a former nuclear power plant engineer in Japan who now lives in California. "There's not enough transparency in the industry." In 1989 Sugaoka received an order that horrified him: edit out footage showing cracks in plant steam pipes in video being submitted to regulators. Sugaoka alerted his superiors in the Tokyo Electric Power Co., but nothing happened — for years. He decided to go public in 2000. Three Tepco executives lost their jobs. The legacy of scandals and cover-ups over Japan's half-century reliance on nuclear power has strained its credibility with the public. That mistrust has been renewed this past week with the crisis at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant. The vagueness and scarcity of details offered by the government and Tepco — and news that seems to grow worse each day — are fueling public anger and frustration.

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on government and corporate corruption, click here and here.

For 18 months, operators at the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant near San Luis Obispo didn't realize that a system to pump water into one of their reactors during an emergency wasn't working. It had been accidentally disabled by the plant's own engineers, according to a report ... from the Union of Concerned Scientists watchdog group, [which] lists 14 recent "near misses" - instances in which serious problems at a plant required federal regulators to respond. The report criticizes both plant operators and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for allowing some known safety issues to fester. The problem at Diablo Canyon ... involved a series of valves that allow water to pour into one of the plant's two reactors during emergencies, keeping the reactor from overheating. A pair of remotely operated valves in the emergency cooling system was taking too long to move from completely closed to completely open. So engineers shortened the distance between those two positions, according to the report. Unfortunately, two other pairs of valves were interlocked with the first. They couldn't open at all until the first pair opened all the way. No one noticed until the valves refused to open during a test in October 2009, 18 months after the engineers made the changes.

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on government and corporate corruption, click here and here.

The horrible and heartbreaking events in Japan present a strange concatenation of disasters. Succumbing to the one-two punch of the earthquake and the tsunami, eleven of Japan’s 54 nuclear power reactors were shut down. Three of them have lost coolant to their cores and have experienced partial meltdowns. The same three have also suffered large explosions. The spent fuel in a fourth caught fire. Now a second filthy wave is beginning to roll — this one composed of radioactive elements in the atmosphere. They include unknown amounts of cesium-137 and iodine-131, which can only have originated in the melting cores or in nearby spent fuel rod pools. The Japanese government has evacuated some 200,000 people in the vicinity of the plants. The second shock was, of course, different from the first in at least one fundamental respect. The first was dealt by Mother Nature, who has thus reminded us of her sovereign power to nourish or punish our delicate planet, its axis now tipping ever so slightly in a new direction. No finger of blame can be pointed at any perpetrator. The second shock, on the other hand, is the product of humankind, and involves human responsibility. Until the human species stepped in, there was no appreciable release of atomic energy from nuclear fission or fusion on earth.

Note: For an excellent list of experiments in which humans, either individually or collectively as a species, are being used as guinea pigs in most unethical and dangerous ways, click here.

The U.S. Supreme Court let stand a ruling that drug companies can pay rivals to delay production of generic drugs without violating federal antitrust laws. The justices refused to review a federal appeals court ruling that upheld the dismissal of a legal challenge to a deal between Bayer AG and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd's Barr Laboratories. Bayer paid Barr to prevent it from bringing to market a version of the antibiotic drug Cipro. The deal, involving Bayer's 1997 settlement of patent litigation with Barr, was challenged by a number of pharmacies, which appealed to the Supreme Court. More than 30 states and various consumer groups supported the appeal. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has opposed such deals, saying they violate antitrust law and cost consumers an estimated $3.5 billion a year in higher prescription drug prices. It has supported legislation pending in Congress to prohibit such settlements, which it says have increased in recent years. The New York-based appeals court, in its ruling last year, cited its similar 2005 decision involving the drug Tamoxifen, used to treat breast cancer, infertility and other conditions. The Supreme Court declined to review that case. In the Cipro case, the Supreme Court rejected the appeal by the pharmacies without comment.

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on government and corporate corruption, click here and here.

People who down several diet sodas per day are hardly rare. Government surveys have found that people who drink diet beverages average more than 26 ounces per day (some drink far more) and that 3% of diet-soda drinkers have at least four daily. Are these diet-soda fiends true addicts? And if so, what are they addicted to? Research suggests that the artificial sweeteners in diet soda (such as aspartame) may prompt people to keep refilling their glass because these fake sugars don't satisfy like the real thing. "Your senses tell you there's something sweet that you're tasting, but your brain tells you, 'Actually, it's not as much of a reward as I expected,'" says Martin P. Paulus, MD, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Diego, and one of the authors of the study. "The consequence might be that the brain says, 'Well, I'll have more of this.'" In other words, artificial sweeteners may spur drinkers -- or their brains -- to keep chasing a "high" that diet soda keeps forever just out of reach. It's not clear that this teasing effect can lead to dependence, but it's a possibility, Dr. Paulus says. "Artificial sweeteners have positive reinforcing effects -- meaning humans will work for it, like for other foods, alcohol, and even drugs of abuse," he says. "Whenever you have that, there is a potential that a subgroup of people ... will have a chance of getting addicted."

Note: This article fails to mention the many scientists and brain surgeons who have gone on record describing the incredible dangers of aspartame, the main ingredient in most artificial sweeteners. To educate yourself on the serious health risks of aspartame, watch the very well researched documentary at this link.

"Forgive me," said Berkeley filmmaker Charles Ferguson upon receiving an Academy Award on Sunday night for his documentary "Inside Job." "I must start by pointing out that three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail - and that's wrong." A number of people would agree, including a majority of Americans, according to opinion polls, who blame U.S. banks and other private institutions for the 2007-08 financial meltdown documented in Ferguson's film. "He raised exactly the right question," said William Black, a senior regulator at the former Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp., which helped clean up the far less costly S&L crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s. More than 1,800 S&L officials were convicted of felonies in its aftermath, with more than 1,000 jailed. But the difference between then and now - and with the 1929 crash, which saw a number of bankers go to jail - is open to much debate. "We had well over 10,000 criminal referrals from regulators in the S&L crisis," said Black, now an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. "This time, zero."

Note: For other major media articles revealing the vast extent of unmitigated corruption related to the banking bailouts, click here. For reliable, eye-opening information on how the public is continually deceived about banking, click here. And for an excellent study guide on the facts presented in this revealing film, click here.

When it comes to paychecks, Wall Street's law of gravity is back in full force: What goes down must come back up. In 2010, total compensation and benefits at publicly traded Wall Street banks and securities firms hit a record of $135 billion, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal. The total is up 5.7% from $128 billion in combined compensation and benefits by the same companies in 2009. At 25 large financial firms that have reported full-year results, revenue rose to $417 billion, another all-time high. "Things are shifting back to where they were before," said J. Robert Brown, a law professor at the University of Denver who studies compensation and corporate-governance issues. Buried in the numbers, though, are signs of how Wall Street's pay culture is bending in response to pressure from regulators and shareholders. Last year, deferred compensation made up as much as half of total pay, up from about a third previously, estimates Alan Johnson, managing director of Johnson Associates Inc., a New York pay consultant. Banks and securities firms are deferring a larger percentage of compensation than they used to, trying to counter criticism that yearly cash bonuses encourage unwise risk-taking by executives, traders and other employees aiming for a big payday.

Note: For the NY State Comptroller's analysis of Wall Street bonuses in 2010, click here and here.

The American who shot dead two men in Lahore, triggering a diplomatic crisis between Pakistan and the US, is a CIA agent who was on assignment at the time. Raymond Davis has been the subject of widespread speculation since he opened fire with a semi-automatic Glock pistol on the two men who had pulled up in front of his car at a red light on 25 January. Pakistani authorities charged him with murder, but the Obama administration has insisted he is an "administrative and technical official" attached to its Lahore consulate and has diplomatic immunity. Based on interviews in the US and Pakistan, the Guardian can confirm that the 36-year-old former special forces soldier is employed by the CIA. "It's beyond a shadow of a doubt," said a senior Pakistani intelligence official. Washington's case is hobbled by its resounding silence on Davis's role. He served in the US special forces for 10 years before leaving in 2003 to become a security contractor. A senior Pakistani official said he believed Davis had worked with Xe, the firm formerly known as Blackwater. Pakistani suspicions about Davis's role were stoked by the equipment police confiscated from his car: an unlicensed pistol, a long-range radio, a GPS device, an infrared torch and a camera with pictures of buildings around Lahore.

Note: For further details on Raymond Davis' work for the CIA and Blackwater Corp., click here. Discussing the two Pakistanis killed by Davis, an ABC News blog states, "Pakistani government officials have told ABC News that the two were working for that country's intelligence agency, Inter-Service Intelligence, and were also conducting surveillance." Click here for that article.

Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a top scientist's video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn't degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor. That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012. At a science conference in Washington Saturday, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn't. "There's some sort of a bottleneck we have yet to identify for why this stuff doesn't seem to be degrading," Joye told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington.

As leak enthusiasts go, few resemble Julian Assange less than Daniel Domscheit-Berg. The wide-eyed and softspoken German left WikiLeaks in September to start his own leak-focused organization known as OpenLeaks. Like its parent organization, OpenLeaks will solicit secret documents from leakers in government and business. But instead of publishing the leaks on its site — a strategy that has made WikiLeaks the target of cyber- and legal attacks since it began posting a quarter-million secret cables from the U.S. State Department last month — OpenLeaks will function as a secure tip box that passes leaked files on to whatever media outlet or NGO the leaker chooses. OpenLeaks is just one of a bumper crop of WikiLeaks-inspired sites popping up across the globe, borrowing various pieces of the original site's model of anonymous submissions and online publishing. That's good news for WikiLeaks, too, as Assange himself said in an interview last month. "The supply of leaks is very large," he said. "It's helpful for us to have more people in this industry. It's protective to us." In the long term, Domscheit-Berg argues, WikiLeaks' greatest impact may not be any particular document release but the entire movement of second-generation sites like OpenLeaks that it has spawned.

More than a year and a half after Iceland's major banks failed, all but sinking the country's economy, police have begun rounding up a number of top bankers while other former executives and owners face a $US2 billion ($2.24 billion) lawsuit. Since Iceland's three largest banks - Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitnir - collapsed in late 2008, their former executives and owners have largely been living untroubled lives abroad. But the publication last month of a parliamentary inquiry into the island nation's profound financial and economic crisis signalled a turning of the tide, laying much of the blame for the downfall on the former bank heads who had taken "inappropriate loans from the banks" they worked for. Overnight, the administrators of Glitnir's liquidation announced they had filed a $US2 billion lawsuit in a New York court against former large shareholders and executives for alleged fraud. "I think this lawsuit is without precedence in Iceland," Steinunn Gudbjartsdottir, who chairs Glitnir's so-called winding-up board, told reporters in Reykjavik. The bank also said it was "taking action against its former auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for facilitating and helping to conceal the fraudulent transactions engineered by [its principal shareholder] and his associates, which ultimately led to the bank's collapse in October 2008."

Note: Yet American and British bankers who played a major role in the economic collapse are getting record pay. For an incisive article in Rolling Stone titled "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?" click here. For key reports on financial fraud from major media sources, click here.

Take a walk down the street or through the park and you'll see them – people of all ages toting bottles of water. Last year, Americans drank nine billion gallons out of those little plastic bottles. Sure, it's healthier than soda, but all that plastic is just as bad for the environment, creating an estimated 1.5 million tons of waste each year. So, more and more places are banning bottled water. Washington University in St. Louis will end almost all sales by the end of this semester. San Francisco declared it a no-no in city offices last year. Other local governments may do the same. Some brands, including Coca-Cola's Dasani and Pepsi's Aquafina, come from the tap – and supporters of these measures argue you're better off just filling a reusable container at the water fountain for free. A cheap, calorie-free alternative that doesn't hurt the environment. Now, I'll drink to that.

Note: For a powerful six-minute trailer to the movie "Tapped," which exposes the many scams around bottled water, click here. For more on this, click here.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.