Government Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key Government Corruption News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on government 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.

Wall Street is its own worst enemy. It's busily shredding new regulations and making the public more distrustful than ever. The Street's biggest lobbying groups have just filed a lawsuit against the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, seeking to overturn its new rule limiting speculative trading in food, oil and other commodities. The Street makes bundles from these bets, but they have raised costs for consumers. In other words, a small portion of what you and I pay for food and energy has been going into the pockets of Wall Street. Just another redistribution from the middle class and the poor to the top. The Street argues that the commission's cost-benefit analysis wasn't adequate. Putting the question into the laps of federal judges gives the Street a huge tactical advantage because the Street has almost an infinite amount of money to hire so-called "experts" who will say benefits have been exaggerated and costs underestimated. But when it comes to regulating Wall Street, one big cost doesn't make it into any individual weighing: the public's mounting distrust of the entire economic system, generated by the Street's repeated abuse of the public's trust. Wall Street's shenanigans have convinced a large portion of America that the economic game is rigged. Wall Street has blanketed America in a miasma of cynicism.

Note: The author of this analysis, Robert Reich, is a former U.S. secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at UC Berkeley and the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future. He blogs at www.robertreich.org.

When I was 14, my mother told me not to panic if a police officer stopped me. And she cautioned me to carry ID and never run away from the police or I could be shot. In the nine years since my mother gave me this advice, I have had numerous occasions to consider her wisdom. One evening in August of 2006, I was celebrating my 18th birthday with my cousin and a friend. We were ... enjoying the evening when suddenly, and out of nowhere, squad cars surrounded us. A policeman yelled from the window, "Get on the ground!" Then I was on the ground - with a gun pointed at me. In the spring of 2008, N.Y.P.D. officers stopped and frisked me, again. I was stopped again in September of 2010. It was the same routine: I was stopped, frisked, searched, ID'd and let go. For a black man in his 20s like me, it's just a fact of life in New York. Here are a few other facts: last year, the N.Y.P.D. recorded more than 600,000 stops; 84 percent of those stopped were blacks or Latinos. Police are far more likely to use force when stopping blacks or Latinos than whites. These stops are part of a larger, more widespread problem - a racially discriminatory system of stop-and-frisk in the N.Y.P.D. The police use the excuse that they're fighting crime to continue the practice, but no one has ever actually proved that it reduces crime or makes the city safer. Those of us who live in the neighborhoods where stop-and-frisks are a basic fact of daily life don't feel safer as a result.

Note: For key reports on government threats to civil liberties from reliable sources, click here.

If terrorists ever target Fargo, N.D., the local police will be ready. In recent years, they have bought bomb-detection robots, digital communications equipment and Kevlar helmets, like those used by soldiers in foreign wars. For local siege situations requiring real firepower, police there can use a new $256,643 armored truck, complete with a rotating turret. Until that day, however, the menacing truck is mostly used for training runs and appearances at the annual Fargo picnic, where it’s been displayed near a children’s bounce house. Fargo, like thousands of other communities in every state, has been on a gear-buying spree with the aid of more than $34 billion in federal government grants since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The federal grant spending, awarded with little oversight from Washington, has fueled a rapid, broad transformation of police operations in Fargo and in departments across the country. More than ever before, police rely on quasi-military tactics and equipment. A review of records from 41 states obtained through open-government requests, and interviews with more than two-dozen current and former police officials and terrorism experts, shows police departments around the U.S. have transformed into small army-like forces. Many police, including beat cops, now routinely carry assault rifles.

Note: For lots more on the militarization of US police from reliable sources, click here and here.

A Pentagon public relations program that sought to transform high-profile military analysts into "surrogates" and "message force multipliers" for the Bush administration complied with Defense Department regulations and directives, the Pentagon's inspector general has concluded after a two-year investigation. The inquiry was prompted by articles published in the New York Times in 2008 that described how the Pentagon, in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, cultivated close ties with retired officers who worked as military analysts for television and radio networks. In response to the articles, the Pentagon suspended the program, and members of Congress asked the Defense Department's inspector general to investigate. The results of the inquiry ... confirm that the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld made a concerted effort ... to build and sustain public support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The inquiry found that from 2002 to 2008, Rumsfeld's Pentagon organized 147 events for 74 military analysts. The inquiry confirmed that Rumsfeld's staff frequently provided military analysts with discussion points before their network appearances.

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

Since September, at least 60 people have died in 14 reported CIA drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal regions. The Obama administration has named only one of the dead, hailing the elimination of Janbaz Zadran, a top official in the Haqqani insurgent network, as a counterterrorism victory. The identities of the rest remain classified, as does the existence of the drone program itself. The administration ... has parried reports of collateral damage and the alleged killing of innocents by saying that drones, with their surveillance capabilities and precision missiles, result in far fewer mistakes than less sophisticated weapons. Yet in carrying out hundreds of strikes over three years — resulting in an estimated 1,350 to 2,250 deaths in Pakistan — it has provided virtually no details to support those assertions. The rapid expansion in the size and scope of the drone campaign as the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been winding down has led to increased criticism from human rights and international law experts, many of whom dispute the legal justification for the program. Much of the resistance to increased disclosure has come from the CIA, which has argued that the release of any information about the program, particularly on how targets are chosen and strikes approved, would aid the enemy. The Defense Department’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which has carried out strikes in Yemen and Somalia, refuses to discuss drones or any other aspect of its secret counterterrorism operations.

Note: For key reports from major media sources on government secrecy, click here.

Henry Ford [is] convinced that if Congress will complete and lease to him the water-power developments [at Muscle Shoals], he can make this whole section of the South more prosperous. Thomas A. Edison indorsed Mr. Ford’s views. He is very earnest in his support of Ford’s [proposal] to finance Muscle Shoals by an issue of currency ... directly by the Government. "If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill," said Mr. Edison. "[When Congress authorizes] an issue of bonds, it must go out to the money brokers. We then must pay interest to the money brokers for the use of our own money. In all our great bond issues, the interest is always greater than the principal. All of the great public works cost more than twice the actual cost on that account. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond ... whereas the currency pays nobody but those who directly contribute. Both are promises to pay: but one promise fattens the usurer, and the other helps the people. It is the money broker, the money profiteer, the private banker, that I oppose. It is a terrible situation when the Government ... must go into debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the [issuance of currency]. The people must pay any way: why should they be compelled to pay twice as the bond system compels them? [If] Government will adopt this policy of increasing its national wealth without contributing to the interest collector ... you will see an era of progress and prosperity in this country such as could never have come otherwise.” Mr. Edison reiterated his belief [that if] the currency method is tried in raising money for public improvements, the country will never go back to the borrow method.

Note: If the above link fails, you can read the a copy of the full, fascinating article at this link or this one. The entire article contains lots of amazing revelations of how big bankers keep us in debt. How fascinating that Ford and Edison, both ultra-wealthy businessmen, here are arguing strongly against the privately owned Federal Reserve system through which private bankers print US money and charge interest on it, and for the US government printing its own money. This would avoid US citizens having to pay the big bankers all of the interest on much of the national debt. For lots of evidence to support this way of thinking, click here.

No one could have known that when a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on fire in a public square in a town barely on a map, he would spark protests that would bring down dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and rattle regimes in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain. Or that that spirit of dissent would spur Mexicans to rise up against the terror of drug cartels, Greeks to march against unaccountable leaders, Americans to occupy public spaces to protest income inequality, and Russians to marshal themselves against a corrupt autocracy. Protests have now occurred in countries whose populations total at least 3 billion people, and the word protest has appeared in newspapers and online exponentially more this past year than at any other time in history. Everywhere, it seems, people said they'd had enough. They dissented; they demanded; they did not despair, even when the answers came back in a cloud of tear gas or a hail of bullets. The root of the word democracy is demos, "the people," and the meaning of democracy is "the people rule." And they did, if not at the ballot box, then in the streets. Protest is in some ways the source code for democracy — and evidence of the lack of it. For steering the planet on a more democratic though sometimes more dangerous path for the 21st century, the Protester is TIME's 2011 Person of the Year.

Note: For a treasure trove of reports from major media sources that explain why protestors worldwide have been occupying their cities, click here.

Rather than batons or rubber bullets, some police departments have started using an intense beam of sound to manage protesters, but the annoying tone has drawn criticism from some who say it can cause permanent damage. More U.S. police and emergency-response agencies are using the so-called Long-Range Acoustic Devices ... for crowd control. The leading manufacturer, LRAD Corp. of San Diego, said the product was developed as a nonlethal option for military use. Some people who have been on the receiving end call the devices "sound cannons." A woman is suing the city of Pittsburgh claiming the piercing tone from a police blaster during the 2009 G-20 summit permanently damaged her hearing. There were reports that New York City police used the punishing tone on protesters. The devices were developed for the U.S. Navy. They have also been used to deter pirates from attacking cruise ships. The products range from a 15-pound, battery-operated, hand-held unit to a 320-pound device with a range of nearly 2 miles. Even the smallest unit, the LRAD 100X, emits as much as 137 decibels at 1 meter, which is louder than a jet takeoff at 100 meters.

Note: For key reports from reliable sources on so-called "non-lethal" weapons, click here.

The Japanese government [has] declared that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant had reached a stable state known as “cold shutdown.” But the formal status change at the plant, experts cautioned, means only that its problems have become less dire; they have not disappeared. The plant still leaks radiation into the sea. Its makeshift cooling system is vulnerable to earthquakes. And the cleanup work remains dangerous, with many flooded and debris-strewn areas of the reactor buildings difficult even for robots to access. In normal circumstances, a reactor in cold shutdown mode is entirely stable, its fuel intact, with no chance of a chain reaction. To achieve its version of a cold shutdown at Fukushima Daiichi, ... Japan had to loosen the definition. Fukushima now meets the government’s requirements because temperatures at the bottom of the three damaged reactor pressure vessels have dropped below 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit). Airborne leaks into the environment have also been almost halted. The declaration poses new questions for many of the 80,000 people who fled towns around the plant ... since the government had made the cold shutdown a precondition for even considering reopening parts of the no-go zone to residents. Many areas within the no-entry zone — a 12-mile radius around the plant — will be uninhabitable for decades, maybe longer.

Note: For further information on the claim of "cold shutdown" at Fukushima, click here and here.

Just after 6 a.m. on Dec. 5, under cover of darkness, nine Greenpeace activists cut through a fence at the Nogent-sur-Seine atomic plant 95 kilometers (59 miles) southeast of Paris and headed for a domed reactor building. They scaled the roof and unfurled a “Safe Nuclear Doesn’t Exist” banner before attracting the attention of security guards. Two remained at large for four hours. On the same day, two more campaigners breached the perimeter of the Cruas-Meysse plant on the Rhone, escaping detection for more than 14 hours while posting videos of their sit-in on the Internet. The security lapses ... come at a time when debate has intensified on France’s reliance on atomic power for three-quarters of its energy needs in the run-up to next year’s presidential elections. They also preempt next month’s release of the results of safety checks at France’s 58 reactors, commissioned in the aftermath of the Fukushima tragedy. Greenpeace said its activists exposed the biggest security lapse to date at the reactors that are operated by Electricite de France SA.

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

Barack Obama has abandoned a commitment to veto a new security law that allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay. Human rights groups accused the president of deserting his principles and disregarding the long-established principle that the military is not used in domestic policing. The legislation has also been strongly criticised by libertarians on the right angered at the stripping of individual rights for the duration of "a war that appears to have no end". The law ... effectively extends the battlefield in the "war on terror" to the US and applies the established principle that combatants in any war are subject to military detention. The law's critics describe it as a draconian piece of legislation that extends the reach of detention without trial to include US citizens arrested in their own country. "It's something so radical that it would have been considered crazy had it been pushed by the Bush administration," said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. "It establishes precisely the kind of system that the United States has consistently urged other countries not to adopt. At a time when the United States is urging Egypt, for example, to scrap its emergency law and military courts, this is not consistent."

Note: The implications of the passage of this bill to authorize the US military to carry out domestic arrest and imprisonment of US citizens have hardly been reported on by the major media. The defense authorization bill undermines protections established by the Bill of Rights and the Posse Comitatus Act against use of US military forces in domestic control and arrest. For further analysis of the implications of this legislation, click here and here.

Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in [eastern North Dakota]. He called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties. He also called in a Predator B drone. Sophisticated sensors under the nose helped pinpoint the three suspects and showed they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare. But that was just the start. Local police say they have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have used Predators for other domestic investigations, officials said. The drones belong to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which operates eight Predators on the country's northern and southwestern borders to search for illegal immigrants and smugglers. The previously unreported use of its drones to assist local, state and federal law enforcement has occurred without any public acknowledgment or debate.

Note: "Looking for six cows," the Sheriff called in "a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties. He also called in a Predator B drone." Does that sound like a reasonable response to the problem of missing cows? Or could there be an agenda to establish aerial surveillance by drones as the norm in the US?

Imam Salahuddin Muhammad could hardly miss Shahed Hussain when he first appeared three years ago at his mosque in the dilapidated town of Newburgh, just 60 miles up the Hudson River from New York. Hussain was flash, drove expensive cars and treated people to gifts of cash and food. Hussain would make Newburgh's Muslim community famous when earlier this year four other black Newburgh Muslims were jailed for 25 years for a 2009 plot to fire a Stinger missile at US military planes. All four followed the instructions of Hussain, who meticulously organised the scheme: from getting the missile and bombs, to reconnaissance missions, to teaching the tenets of radical Islam. Hussain was a fake. In fact, Hussain worked for the FBI as an informant trawling mosques in hope of picking up radicals. Yet far from being active militants, the four men he attracted were impoverished individuals struggling with Newburgh's grim epidemic of crack, drug crime and poverty. Hussain offered the men huge financial inducements to carry out the plot – including $250,000 to one man – and free holidays and expensive cars. The Newburgh Four ... represent the most extreme form of a controversial FBI policy to use invented terrorist plots to lure targets. "There has been no case as egregious as this. It is unique in the incentive the government provided. A quarter million dollars?" said Professor Karen Greenberg, a terrorism expert at Fordham University.

Note: For a powerful BBC documentary showing clearly that much of the war on terror is a fabrication to forward a political agenda, watch Power of Nightmares at this link. For many reports from major media sources on the fake terror behind the "global war on terror", click here.

Silicon Valley technology firms that are lobbying Congress to slash taxes on money they bring home from abroad, arguing that doing so would help them create millions of jobs, already send more than half that money back to the United States without paying taxes, according to a Senate investigation. The corporate tax code permits Google, Cisco, Apple, Adobe Systems, Oracle and other U.S. multinational corporations surveyed to invest nearly $250 billion in the United States without paying the 35 percent corporate tax rate that applies to repatriated foreign earnings, according to the report by the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The corporations, which are not allowed to invest the money in their own companies, can escape the 35 percent tax if they invest in other domestic assets, such as stocks, bonds and bank deposits. Silicon Valley's technology giants have banded together with pharmaceutical companies and other multinationals in the Win America Coalition in an attempt to get Congress to cut their tax rate from 35 percent to just over 5 percent on overseas earnings they bring home. The survey data showed that Adobe, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco and Google have invested 76 to 100 percent of their foreign earnings in U.S. stocks, bonds, bank deposits and other domestic assets, a greater share than the other companies surveyed.

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

More than 400 sex-crimes reported to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office during a three-year period ending in 2007 — including dozens of alleged child molestations — ... were inadequately investigated and in some instances were not worked at all, according to current and former police officers familiar with the cases. Many of the victims, said a retired El Mirage police official who reviewed the files, were children of illegal immigrants. The botched sex-crimes investigations have served as an embarrassment to a department whose sheriff is the self-described "America's Toughest Sheriff" and a national hero to conservatives on the immigration issue. Bill Louis, then-assistant El Mirage police chief who reviewed the files after the sheriff's contract ended, believes the decision to ignore the cases was made deliberately by supervisors in Arpaio's office — and not by individual investigators. "I know the investigators. I just cannot believe they would wholesale discount these cases. No way," Louis said. "The direction had to come (from) up the food chain." Louis said he believes whoever made the decision knew that illegal immigrants — who are often transient and fear the police — were unlikely to complain about the quality of investigations.

Note: For powerful evidence from a suppressed Discovery Channel documentary showing that child sexual abuse scandals reach to the highest levels of government, click here.

The federal government has agreed to pay $2.5 million to the widow and children of the first person killed in the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, settling a lawsuit claiming that the Army did not adequately secure its supply of the deadly pathogen. The settlement with the family of Robert Stevens, a tabloid photo editor in Florida, follows an eight-year legal battle that exposed slack rules and sloppy recordkeeping at the Armys biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Md. As part of the agreement, Justice Department lawyers are seeking to have many documents that were uncovered in the litigation kept under court seal or destroyed. Mr. Stevenss widow, Maureen, filed suit against the government in 2003, as evidence accumulated that the anthrax powder in the lethal letters had come from an Army laboratory. Mr. Stevens, 62, died on Oct. 5, 2001, days after inhaling anthrax powder at work.

Note: Why would the government want these documents destroyed? Remember that these attacks, which happened within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, were at first attributed to terrorists. Now it is fully acknowledged they were the responsibility of someone in government. Hmmmmm.

Battlefield technology is coming to the streets of Los Angeles County. Starting this month, one of the nation's major military contractors is outfitting the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department's patrol cars with sophisticated computer systems and high-tech gadgetry that has been perfected for the battlefield. At a total cost to taxpayers of $20 million, Raytheon Co. promises to deliver technology that will enable deputies on the road to sort through key intelligence information in mere seconds. In a single roadside stop, they'll have the ability to run a background check using a searchable FBI database — or pull up a suspect's mug shots or even obtain biometric data, such as fingerprints — on the spot. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is the largest in the nation, covering more than 4,000 square miles and a population of more than 10 million. Daniel J. Crowley, president of Raytheon's Network Centric Systems, noted that ... the Sheriff's Department's new equipment is being used by security forces in the Green Zone in Baghdad to police the area. "The military's situation overseas may be much different from the Sheriff's Department, but the need is basically the same."

Note: For an illuminating article revealing that the Pentagon is supplying police departments across the US with military technology and supplies for no cost, click here.

The White House says it believes that Ahmed Wali Karzai is involved in drug trafficking, and American officials have repeatedly warned President Karzai that his brother is a political liability. Numerous reports link Ahmed Wali Karzai to the drug trade, according to current and former officials from the White House, the State Department and the United States Embassy in Afghanistan, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. Neither the Drug Enforcement Administration, which conducts counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan, nor the fledgling Afghan anti-drug agency has pursued investigations into the accusations against the president’s brother. Several American investigators said senior officials at the D.E.A. and the office of the Director of National Intelligence complained to them that the White House favored a hands-off approach toward Ahmed Wali Karzai. The concerns about Ahmed Wali Karzai have surfaced recently because of the imprisonment of an informant who tipped off American and Afghan investigators to [a] drug-filled truck outside Kabul in 2006. The informant, Hajji Aman Kheri, ... said he had been an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration and United States intelligence agencies, an assertion confirmed by American counternarcotics and intelligence officials. Ever since the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, critics have charged that the Bush administration has failed to take aggressive action against the Afghan narcotics trade.

Note: For revealing information suggesting the CIA is directly involved in the lucrative opium trade in Afghanistan, click here and here.

The Center for Disease Control's main mission is to prevent disease, and the agency has been credited with some terrific strides in public health. But a startling analysis from Congress says the CDC is squandering hundreds of millions of ... tax dollars. To talk about fat in the CDC budget, you can start 2,000 miles away in Hollywood, where CDC pays a liaison to help TV dramas and soap operas write accurate medical plots. The service is free of charge to Tinseltown moguls, through the generosity of $1.7 million of ... tax dollars. There's the new $109 million headquarters filled with nearly $10 million in furniture, which the report says works out to $12,000 per person in the building. A top Democrat, Sen. Thomas Harkin, gets his name on the new $106 million communications and visitors center, complete with waterfalls, plasma TV's and more. The $200,000 fitness center rivals the most posh private clubs with $30,000 saunas, "quiet rooms" and "zero gravity chairs" complete with "mood-enhancing light shows" for stressed out employees. As for disease prevention, your money's being spent there too, but too often with disappointing results, says the report. The CDC spent $5 billion over seven years on AIDS prevention, but the infection rate didn't drop a bit. After it spent $269 million tax dollars on an effort to eliminate syphilis, syphilis rates went up 68 percent.

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

Oops. That's the word that comes to mind when reading Michael Carroll's thoroughly nerve-wracking book, "Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory" ... about the federal germ facility on Plum Island. The island [is] home to some of the deadliest microbes festering on the planet. According to Carroll's book, the island -- and laboratory -- are also home to slipshod construction, poor safeguards, and lax security. "Lab 257" claims errors at the facility caused Lyme disease outbreaks and health problems for the local population -- claims disputed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which ran the facility until recently. Carroll [said] that the point of the book was to expose the potential hazards of a poorly run institution; he has nothing against better-run, more secure institutions. "You have to know how things interact, germs, bacteria, etc. You [just] don't need to create millions of them to know how to create them and make them more virulent. Like other government scientific facilities, it's had an aura of mystery: Plum Island earns a mention in "The Silence of the Lambs," and thriller writer Nelson DeMille set a novel there. Much of Carroll's research was done through interviews with nearby residents, as well as documents and reports. While the government was "cooperative at the outset," Carroll said ... he was later denied access to the facility. Carroll isn't the first to offer criticism. In 2002, after a power outage on the island, New York's WABC-TV did a story on whether containment procedures worked; several employees questioned the lab's safety. In 2003, the General Accounting Office listed security problems on the island, partially prompted by a whistleblower, Jim McCoy, who protested the management of a private concern.

Note: At the northernmost tip of Long Island, Plum island sits directly across from the town of Lyme, Conn., famous as the epicenter of the Lyme disease outbreak. For a powerful, multiple award-winning film showing shocking ignorance and even political corruption on the part of the medical community about the Lyme disease epidemic spreading across the US and even around the world, click here. It shows evidence that Lyme may be even the cause of many cases of ALS, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's disease.

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.