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.

A case about pollution, big business and the movies has reopened longstanding debates about who is a journalist and how far parties to a lawsuit can reach when seeking ammunition for their side. The case involves a documentary, “Crude,” that tells the story of a long-running legal battle in which Ecuadorean plaintiffs are suing Chevron over the pollution of the Amazon rain forest. As part of its defense, Chevron demanded 600 hours of outtake footage from “Crude,” saying it could help the company show corruption and misconduct by the plaintiffs. The filmmaker argued that his work was protected by journalist privilege, which protects reporters and others in the newsgathering business from being compelled to reveal confidential sources or divulge confidential material. On [May 6], Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in New York granted the request for the subpoena. The judge’s decision sparked outrage among documentary filmmakers, who said it endangered their form of journalism. The filmmaker Michael Moore said the decision could have “a chilling effect.” “If something like this is upheld, the next whistle-blower at the next corporation is going to think twice about showing me some documents if that information has to be turned over to the corporation that they’re working for,” Mr. Moore said.

Note: For lots more from reliable souces on government corruption and collusion with industries it is supposed to be regulating, click here.

Jason Brannigan's eyes widened as he relived the day he says prison guards pepper-sprayed his face at point-blank range, then pulled him through the cellblock naked, his hands and feet shackled. "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!" Brannigan recalled gasping in pain and humiliation during the March 2007 incident. "They're walking me on the chain and it felt just like ďż˝ slaves again," said the African American inmate, interviewed at the Sacramento County jail. "Like I just stepped off an auction block." Brannigan, 33, said the incident occurred in the behavior modification unit at High Desert State Prison in Susanville, where he was serving time for armed assault. He is one of more than 1,500 inmates who have passed through such units in six California prisons. A Bee investigation into the behavior units, including signed affidavits, conversations and correspondence with 18 inmates, has uncovered evidence of racism and cruelty at the High Desert facility. Inmates described hours-long strip-searches in a snow-covered exercise yard. They said correctional officers tried to provoke attacks between inmates, spread human excrement on cell doors and roughed up those who peacefully resisted mistreatment. Many of their claims were backed by legal and administrative filings, and signed affidavits, which together depicted an environment of brutality, corruption and fear.

In a move that will stoke a battle over the future of the Internet, the federal government plans to propose regulating broadband lines under decades-old rules designed for traditional phone networks. The decision, by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, is likely to trigger a vigorous lobbying battle, arraying big phone and cable companies and their allies on Capitol Hill against Silicon Valley giants and consumer advocates. He wants to adopt "net neutrality" rules that require Internet providers like Comcast Corp. and AT&T Inc. to treat all traffic equally, and not to slow or block access to websites. Internet giants like Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc., which want to offer more Web video and other high-bandwidth services, have called for stronger action by the FCC to assure free access to websites. Cable and telecommunications executives have warned that using land-line phone rules to govern their management of Internet traffic would lead them to cut billions of capital expenditure for their networks, slash jobs and go to court to fight the rules. Consumer groups hailed the decision ..., an abrupt change from recent days, when they [had] bombarded the FCC chairman with emails and phone calls imploring him to fight phone and cable companies lobbyists.

As a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter claimed to have seen a UFO. As president, Ronald Reagan mused openly on how petty differences among nations might evaporate in the face of an extraterrestrial threat. And no one has done more to turn up the speculative heat than retired Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, who held a slew of top intelligence posts, including deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In a Learning Channel documentary, Inman said – but has since repeatedly and vigorously denied – that the military is attempting to use technology from unspecified "recovered vehicles." The most perplexing UFO mystery of all began in the desert north of Roswell, NM. Ideas of what happened here during the first week of July 1947 range from the simple – a weather balloon crash – to the downright silly – Earth was being scouted for an intergalactic invasion. The latest official government explanation – there have been three thus far – is that the recovered debris came from a Project Mogul balloon that was carrying instruments to detect Soviet nuclear tests. After interviewing witnesses who had seen and handled crash-site debris, and reviewing [classified documents], we have concluded that there really was a crashed disc, dead bodies and a secret that could have been politically deadly to presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Note: If the above link fails, click here or here. This well researched article raises more questions than it answers, yet it leaves virtually no doubt that there was a major cover-up. For lots more intriguing media articles suggesting a major cover-up of UFOs and related phenomena, click here.

Federal regulators warned offshore rig operators more than a decade ago that they needed to install backup systems to control the giant undersea valves known as blowout preventers, used to cut off the flow of oil from a well in an emergency. The warnings were repeated in 2004 and 2009. Yet the Minerals Management Service, the Interior Department agency charged both with regulating the oil industry and collecting royalties from it, never took steps to address the issue comprehensively, relying instead on industry assurances that it was on top of the problem, a review of documents shows. In the intervening years, numerous blowout preventers and their control systems have failed, though none as catastrophically as those on the well the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig was preparing when it blew up on April 20, leaving tens of thousands of gallons of oil a day spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. Agency records show that from 2001 to 2007, there were 1,443 serious drilling accidents in offshore operations, leading to 41 deaths, 302 injuries and 356 oil spills. Yet the federal agency continues to allow the industry largely to police itself. Critics say that, then and now, the minerals service has been crippled by this dependence on industry and by a climate of regulatory indulgence.

Note: For lots more from reliable souces on government corruption and collusion with industries it is supposed to be regulating, click here.

Since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded on April 20, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico. The waivers were granted despite President Barack Obama’s vow that his administration would launch a “relentless response effort” to stop the leak and prevent more damage to the gulf. One of them was dated Friday — the day after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he was temporarily halting offshore drilling The exemptions, known as “categorical exclusions,” were granted by the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) and included waiving detailed environmental studies for a BP exploration plan to be conducted at a depth of more than 4,000 feet and an Anadarko Petroleum Corp. exploration plan at more 9,000 feet. “Is there a moratorium on off shore drilling or not?” asked Peter Galvin, conservation director with the Center for Biological Diversity, the environmental group that discovered the administration’s continued approval of the exemptions. “Possibly the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history has occurred and nothing appears to have changed.”

Note: For lots more from reliable souces on government corruption and collusion with industries it is supposed to be regulating, click here.

Petrochemical giant BP didn't file a plan to specifically handle a major oil spill from an uncontrolled blowout at its Deepwater Horizon project because the federal agency that regulates offshore rigs changed its rules two years ago to exempt certain projects in the central Gulf region, according to an Associated Press review of official records. The Minerals Management Service, an arm of the Interior Department known for its cozy relationship with major oil companies, says it issued the rule relief because some of the industrywide mandates weren't practical for all of the exploratory and production projects operating in the Gulf region. Robert Wiygul, an Ocean Springs, Miss., environmental lawyer, said the lack of a blowout scenario "is kind of an outrageous omission, because you're drilling in extremely deep waters, where by definition you're looking for very large reservoirs to justify the cost. If the MMS was allowing companies to drill in this ultra-deep situation without a blowout scenario, then it seems clear they weren't doing the job they were tasked with," he said. "The MMS can't change the law just by telling people that they don't have to comply with it."

Note: For lots more from reliable souces on government corruption and collusion with industries it is supposed to be regulating, click here.

Americans are being "bombarded" with chemicals, gases and radiation that can cause cancer, and the federal government must do far more to protect them, presidential cancer advisers said. The panel said many avoidable cancers were also caused by pollution, radon from the soil and medical imaging scans. Since so little is known about the possible risks of cell phones, people would be prudent to wear headsets and make calls quickly ... the panel advised. "The panel was particularly concerned to find that the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated," they wrote in the report. It is the first time the panel has taken such a sharp turn into what had long been disputed territory — whether pollution, cell phones and even household objects, such as water bottles, can cause cancer. Cancer is the No. 2 killer of Americans, after heart disease. "The incidence of some cancers, including some most common among children, is increasing for unexplained reasons," the report reads. "With nearly 80,000 chemicals on the market in the United States, many of which are used by millions of Americans in their daily lives and are un- or understudied and largely unregulated, exposure to potential environmental carcinogens is widespread," it adds.

Note: To read the President's Cancer Panel report, Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk, click here. For many other important reports from major media sources on potential cancer cures and treatments, click here.

The President’s Cancer Panel is the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream, so it is astonishing to learn that it is poised to join ranks with the organic food movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies. The cancer panel is releasing a landmark 200-page report ... warning that our lackadaisical approach to regulation may have far-reaching consequences for our health. It calls on America to rethink the way we confront cancer, including much more rigorous regulation of chemicals. The President’s Cancer Panel suggests ... giving preference to organic food, checking radon levels in the home and microwaving food in glass containers rather than plastic. In particular, the report warns about exposures to chemicals during pregnancy, when risk of damage seems to be greatest. Noting that 300 contaminants have been detected in umbilical cord blood of newborn babies, the study warns that: “to a disturbing extent, babies are born ‘pre-polluted.’” The report blames weak laws, lax enforcement and fragmented authority, as well as the existing regulatory presumption that chemicals are safe unless strong evidence emerges to the contrary. “Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety,” the report says. It adds: “Many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated.”

Note: To read the President's Cancer Panel report, Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk, click here. For many other important reports from major media sources on potential cancer cures and treatments, click here.

The CIA received secret permission to attack a wider range of targets, including suspected militants whose names are not known, as part of a dramatic expansion of its campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan's border region. The expanded authority, approved two years ago by the Bush administration and continued by President Obama, permits the agency to rely on what officials describe as "pattern of life" analysis ... to target suspected militants, even when their full identities are not known, the officials said. Previously, the CIA was restricted in most cases to killing only individuals whose names were on an approved list. Instead of just a few dozen attacks per year, CIA-operated unmanned aircraft now carry out multiple missile strikes each week against safe houses, training camps and other hiding places used by militants in the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan. "There are a lot of ethical questions here about whether we know who the targets are," said Loch Johnson, an intelligence scholar at the University of Georgia and a former congressional aide. President Bush secretly decided in his last year in office to expand the program. Obama has continued and even streamlined the process, so that CIA Director Leon E. Panetta can sign off on many attacks without notifying the White House beforehand, an official said.

Note: How can the CIA be allowed to kill people whose names aren't even known? Why are they allowed to kill anyone without some form of judicial process? For more on this secret and expanding CIA assassination program, click here. For analysis, click here.

Capitalism is dead. The economy has a new Invisible Hand, the Goldman Conspiracy of Wall Street bankers. This transfer of power happened suddenly. As recently as late 2008 the Invisible Hand was on life support, near death. Suddenly, miraculously the Treasury secretary, Goldman's former CEO, transferred the power into a new Invisible Hand of God, the free-market ideology of Reaganomics ... a power absolutely essential to the survival of Wall Street's mega-bonus culture. Yes, that's why the Goldman Conspiracy must kill financial reforms ... why they will kill effective reform with the backroom support of Obama. This was predicted back in late 2008, even before the bailouts, back when we thought Reaganomics dead. Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein warned: "Free market ideology has always been a servant to the interests of capital ... During boom times it's profitable to preach laissez faire, because an absentee government allows speculative bubbles ... When those bubbles burst, the ideology becomes a hindrance and goes dormant while big government rides to the rescue," then a neo-Reaganomics "ideology will come roaring back when the bailouts are done. The massive debts the public is accumulating to bail out the speculators will then become part of a global budget crisis," setting up a new bubble, bigger meltdown, and the Great Depression 2 the world narrowly avoided in 2008.

Note: For a wealth of key reporting on the hidden realities of the Wall Street's shadowy operations, click here.

Russia has never been immune to spies and informers, but the latest claim must have struck President Medvedev as a little bizarre: he has been urged to investigate whether a regional politician passed official secrets to a group of aliens. The request came after Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the millionaire President of Kalmykia, claimed on state television that he had been visited by aliens at his Moscow apartment several years ago and had spent hours in discussions with them on board their spaceship. The head of the republic said that the humanoid figures wore yellow spacesuits and gave him a tour of their craft, which he described as a “semi-transparent half-tube”. They had brought him home in the morning, just as his worried driver and two advisers were about to call a citywide search after finding his apartment empty. “I am often asked which language I used to talk to them. Perhaps it was on a level of the exchange of ideas,” Mr Ilyumzhinov, who is also president of the international chess federation FIDE, told the Vladimir Pozner programme on Russia’s main First Channel. Mr Ilyumzhinov told his interviewer that his encounter had taken place in 1997. “I would not have believed it, if I had not had three witnesses.”

Note: For lots more on UFOs, check out our information-packed UFO Information Center.

Ten years and 1.5 billion Norwegian kroner ($252 million) in the making, [Halden Fengsel, Norway's newest prison,] is spread over 75 acres (30 hectares) of gently sloping forest in southeastern Norway. The facility boasts amenities like a sound studio, jogging trails and a freestanding two-bedroom house where inmates can host their families during overnight visits. The scent of orange sorbet emanates from the "kitchen laboratory" where inmates take cooking courses. "In the Norwegian prison system, there's a focus on human rights and respect," says Are Hoidal, the prison's governor. "We don't see any of this as unusual." Halden ... embodies the guiding principles of the country's penal system: that repressive prisons do not work and that treating prisoners humanely boosts their chances of reintegrating into society. "When they arrive, many of them are in bad shape," Hoidal says, noting that Halden houses drug dealers, murderers and rapists, among others. "We want to build them up, give them confidence through education and work and have them leave as better people." Within two years of their release, 20% of Norway's prisoners end up back in jail. In the U.K. and the U.S., the figure hovers between 50% and 60%.

While Goldman Sachs' lawyers negotiated with the Securities and Exchange Commission over potentially explosive civil fraud charges, Goldman's chief executive visited the White House at least four times. White House logs show that Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein traveled to Washington for at least two events with President Barack Obama, whose 2008 presidential campaign received $994,795 in donations from Goldman's employees and their relatives. He also met twice with Obama's top economic adviser, Larry Summers. Meanwhile, however, Goldman is retaining former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig as a member of its legal team. In addition, when he worked as an investment banker in Chicago a decade ago, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel advised one client who also retained Goldman as an adviser on the same $8.2 billion deal. Goldman's connections to the White House and the Obama administration are raising eyebrows at a time when Washington and Wall Street are dueling over how to overhaul regulation of the financial world. Lawrence Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political scientist, said that "almost everything that the White House has done has been haunted by the personnel and the money of Goldman ... as well as the suspicion that the White House, particularly early on, was pulling its punches out of deference to Goldman and its war chest."

Note: For lots more from major media sources on the corrupt relationship between the biggest financial firms and government, click here.

The Obama administration is seeking to compel a writer to testify about his confidential sources for a 2006 book about the Central Intelligence Agency, a rare step that was authorized by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. The author, James Risen, who is a reporter for The New York Times, received a subpoena on [April 26] requiring him to provide documents and to testify May 4 before a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., about his sources for a chapter of his book, State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration. The chapter largely focuses on problems with a covert C.I.A. effort to disrupt alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research. Mr. Risen referred questions to his lawyer, Joel Kurtzberg, ... who said that Mr. Risen would not comply with the demand and would ask a judge to quash the subpoena. �He intends to honor his commitment of confidentiality to his source or sources,� Mr. Kurtzberg said. �We intend to fight this subpoena.� The subpoena comes two weeks after the indictment of a former National Security Agency official on charges apparently arising from an investigation into a series of Baltimore Sun articles that exposed technical failings and cost overruns of several agency programs that cost billions of dollars.

Note: For many key major media articles on the efforts of the government to maintain secrecy, click here.

The torture of Iraqi detainees at a secret prison in Baghdad was far more systematic and brutal than initially reported, Human Rights Watch reported. Human Rights Watch ... documented its findings, which it described as “credible and consistent,” in a draft report provided to The New York Times. The group said it had interviewed 42 detainees who displayed fresh scars and wounds. Many said they were raped, sodomized with broomsticks and pistol barrels, or forced to engage in sexual acts with one another and their jailers. All said they were tortured by being hung upside down and then whipped and kicked before being suffocated with a plastic bag. Those who passed out were revived, they said, with electric shocks to their genitals and other parts of their bodies. “The horror we found suggests torture was the norm in Muthanna,” said Joe Stork, deputy director of the Middle East program at Human Rights Watch. “Security officials whipped detainees with heavy cables, pulled out finger and toenails, burned them with acid and cigarettes, and smashed their teeth,” Human Rights Watch said.

Note: For more on the atrocities committed by the US and its recent wars, click here.

Small farmers in California who have led a national movement away from industrial agriculture face a looming crackdown on food safety that they say is geared to big corporate farms and will make it harder for them to survive. The small growers, many of whom grow dozens of different kinds of vegetables and fruits, say the inherent benefits of their size, and their sensitivity to extra costs, are being ignored. They are fighting to carve out a sanctuary in legislation that would bring farmers under the strict purview of the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA would gain greater authority to regulate how products are grown, stored, transported, inspected, traced from farm to table and recalled when needed. But ... organic growers argue that the problems that have plagued the food industry lie elsewhere. They point to the sale of bagged vegetables, cut fruit and other processed food in which vast quantities of produce from different farms are mixed, sealed in containers and shipped long distances, creating a host for harmful bacteria. The legislation does not address what some experts suspect is the source of E. coli contamination: the large, confined animal feeding operations. "It does not take on the industrial animal industry and the abuses going on," said Tom Willey of T&D Willey Farms in Madera.

Note: For an amazing trove of articles from reliable sources detailing the FDA's corruption in the interest of major corporations, click here.

You'd think that General Motors Co., having been rescued by U.S. taxpayers, would be more up-front with them. In an ad that has been blanketing the airwaves since last week, General Motors Chairman and chief executive Ed Whitacre boasts that "we have repaid our government loan, in full, with interest, five years ahead of the original schedule." In a press release, Whitacre said GM was able to repay the loans "because more customers are buying vehicles like the Chevrolet Malibu and Buick LaCrosse." Neither the ad nor the press release mentioned that GM repaid its government loan with other government money, or that U.S. taxpayers could lose money on the roughly $50 billion they still have invested in General Motors. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner last week, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said the repayment "appears to be nothing more than an elaborate TARP money shuffle."

Note: For lots more on the bailout shell game from reliable sources, click here.

The Securities and Exchange Commission suspected Texas financier R. Allen Stanford of running a Ponzi scheme as early as 1997 but took more than a decade to pursue him seriously. The report by the SEC's inspector general says SEC examiners concluded four times between 1997 and 2004 that Mr. Stanford's businesses were fraudulent, but each time decided not to go further. It singles out the former head of the SEC's enforcement office in Fort Worth, Texas, accusing him of repeatedly quashing Stanford probes and then trying to represent Mr. Stanford as a lawyer in private practice. The former SEC official, Spencer Barasch, is now a partner at law firm Andrews Kurth LLP. The inspector general referred Mr. Barasch for possible disbarment from practicing law. Mr. Stanford was indicted last June and accused of orchestrating a Ponzi scheme that swindled investors out of $7 billion. SEC Inspector General David Kotz's report suggests the agency's mistakes in the Stanford case were in part the result of a culture that favored easily resolved cases over messier ones. Cases such as the alleged Stanford fraud weren't considered "quick-hit" and "slam-dunk," and examiners were discouraged from pursuing them, Mr. Kotz found.

Note: For many more examples from major media sources of the astonishing performance of the SEC in the runup to the Wall Street crisis, click here.

A huge, 30-year study called COSMOS has been launched in Europe to determine whether cell phones cause cancer and other health problems. Meanwhile, policymakers in Sacramento are considering legislation to ensure people know how much radiation their cell phones emit. The wireless industry vigorously opposes such legislation. It argues that its phones comply with regulations, and there is no consensus about risks so people don't need to know this. Our research review published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found alarming results to the contrary. We reviewed 23 case-control studies that examined tumor risk due to cell phone use. Although as a whole the data varied, among the 10 higher quality studies, we found a harmful association between phone use and tumor risk. The lower quality studies, which failed to meet scientific best practices, were primarily industry funded. The 13 studies that investigated cell phone use for 10 or more years found a significant harmful association with tumor risk, especially for brain tumors, giving us ample reason for concern about long-term use. Nine nations have issued precautionary warnings. It is time for our government to require health warnings and publicize simple steps to reduce the health risks of cell phone use.

Note: For key reports on health issues from reliable sources, 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.