The Center for Public Integrity

A pro-Obama TV ad says that “big oil” pledged $200 million to help Mitt Romney, making him the industry’s “$200 million man.” But that’s a pretty slippery claim. The fact is that there is no evidence that truly big oil companies like BP, Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. are behind the money in question. Rather, it’s a funding goal of the Koch brothers, the libertarian billionaires whose diversified corporation has fingers in lumber, commodity trading, ranching, fertilizers, pollution control and coal, besides interests in pipelines and oil refining.

The ad’s claim is based on a news story that said the Koch brothers plan to direct $200 million or more to conservative groups this fall. But the oil interests of Koch Industries are tiny in comparison to those of the better known multinationals that dominate the industry, which also include Royal Dutch Shell, ConocoPhillips and the French-based Total.

This latest ad attempting to link Romney to the oil and gas industry is a joint collaboration between the League of Conservation Voters Victory Fund and Priorities USA Action, the super PAC supporting President Barack Obama. The groups are spending $1 million to air the ad in Colorado and Nevada.

The ad claims that “big oil’s pledged 200 million to help Mitt Romney,” and that, in return, Romney has “pledged to protect their profits and billions in special tax breaks.”

The Department of Labor reported today that 4,690 U.S. workers suffered fatal injuries in 2010, a 3 percent increase from 2009.

The higher number in part reflects a string of high-profile disasters in 2010: An explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia that killed 29; BP’s Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11; and a blast at the Tesoro Corp.’s oil refinery in Washington State that killed seven.

Even discounting the 47 deaths from those three events, the toll rose in 2010. In 2009, 4,551 workers died, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The fatality rate rose slightly as well, from 3.5 fatal injuries per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers to 3.6.

The number of workers killed in fires or explosions jumped from 113 in 2009 to 191 in 2010. Work-related transportation deaths increased from 1,795 to 1,857, suicides from 263 to 270.

The number of construction-related deaths fell from 834 to 774 — a probable reflection of a weak housing market and a generally rotten economy in 2010.

“It’s disturbing that there hasn’t been any improvement in workplace fatalities in several years,” said Peg Seminario, director of health and safety for the AFL-CIO. “It seems like progress has stalled.”

In the Mississippi River town of Muscatine, Iowa, concerns about a corn processing plant that belches smoke and ash over the South End neighborhood have festered for years.

On Monday, those living in the plant’s shadow took a step that, until recently, would have seemed unlikely at best: They sued the plant’s owner, Grain Processing Corp. — a vital piece of the town’s economy and a political force in Iowa.

For years, the lawsuit alleges, residents have put up with constant pollution that has damaged their property and affected their health. The Center for Public Integrity detailed the persistent haze hanging over the community and the company’s long history of run-ins with regulators as part of its “Poisoned Places” series with NPR last year.

“We’ve reached a tipping point in Muscatine,” said Tony Buzbee, a Houston lawyer with a history of winning high-profile environmental cases who has agreed to represent the residents. “I think that you’re going to see hundreds and hundreds of people who have the courage to stand up and say, ‘We’re in the right, and we’re not going to take it anymore.’ ”

Buzbee joins Jim Larew, who was general counsel to former Gov. Chet Culver, and Des Moines lawyer Andrew Hope in representing the residents, who are seeking to make the case a class action that anyone living within three miles of the plant could join.

The petition filed Monday, Buzbee said, is “just the tip of the iceberg.”  He plans to file hundreds more cases. “It’s going to cost a lot of money,” he said. “It’s going to be a big fight.”

As aggressive, unregulated fishing continues in the South Pacific, BBC World News will broadcast this weekend a documentary that features the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ recent probe into the plundering of jack mackerel, once one of the world’s most abundant fish.

Jack mackerel might not be familiar at the supermarket fish counter, but you have probably eaten it unaware in bites of farmed salmon. Much of jack mackerel is reduced to feed for pigs and aquaculture. It can take more than 5 kilos of jack mackerel to raise a single kilo of salmon.

The ICIJ investigation revealed that greed, mismanagement and lack of regulation have devastated the fishery — it went from 30 million metric tons to 3 million in just two decades.

The world’s largest trawlers, after depleting other fisheries, headed south to scoop up their catch before regulations were passed. But it’s been seven years since efforts started to create a regional fisheries management organization, and key fishing nations still have not ratified the convention, notably Peru, Chile and China.

Without binding limits, industrial fleets bound only by voluntary restraints compete in what amounts to a free-for-all in no man’s water.

The documentary “Looting the Pacific” was produced by London-based tve for BBC World News.

"Looting the Pacific" will broadcast at the following times:

Saturday, April 21, at 9:30 a.m. and 9:30 p.m.

Sunday, April 22, at 2:30 am, 3:30 p.m. (all times GMT)

I set off after the vanishing jack mackerel with trepidation. Who would care? It’s hard to love a bony fish with oddly shaped fins and oily flesh that swims in shoals far away in the southern Pacific. But as oceanographer Daniel Pauly told me, they are the last buffalo. Industrial fleets, moving southward, have hammered one fishery after another. When the jack mackerel are gone, Pauly said, everything will be gone because the expansion will be finished.

Ten months later, I wrapped up tve’s BBC documentary with this alarming but unavoidable conclusion:

“People keep saying we’ll find something else .. We’re at the point where there really is nothing else ... Once these fish stocks collapse, we won’t have them. The only solution is for us to get real, to understand the problem at whatever level and whatever way — to get it, to finally get it that this is not limitless. This is not limitless.”

This was the third and final part of “Looting the Seas,” by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Earlier award-winning installments looked at the Mediterranean bluefin tuna and depredation around the world by Spanish fleets.

Mar Cabra, a Spanish-based ICIJ reporter, dug deeply in Europe and plumbed arcane databases. We relied heavily on two hard-nosed investigative reporting groups, CIPER in Chile and IDL-Reporteros in Peru. I spent a month in South America and then went to New Zealand. In Hong Kong and Holland, I talked to main players: heads of giant fishing companies. On tiny islands at extremes of the earth — above the Arctic Circle and off New Zealand, eccentric ex-sailors showed me how they track fleets that catch jack mackerel.

Mitt Romney railed against the “Obama EPA” and “how the Obama government interferes with personal freedom” — using as his example an EPA action taken in 2007, under President George W. Bush.

Furthermore, it was a Republican-nominated federal judge who made the initial ruling — in EPA’s favor — that was overturned recently by the Supreme Court.

At issue was a longstanding Environmental Protection Agency precedent regarding a property owner’s right to challenge an EPA compliance order in court, a policy that had been upheld in at least four other court challenges over the last two decades.

Romney outlined the case during an address to the National Rifle Association on April 13.

Romney, April 13: "Mike and Chantell Sackett have seen firsthand how the Obama government interferes with personal freedom. They run a small business in Idaho. They saved enough money to buy a piece of property and build a home. But days after they broke ground, an EPA regulator told them to stop digging. The EPA said they were building on a wetland. But the Sackett’s property isn’t on the wetlands register. It sits in a residential area. Nevertheless, the EPA wouldn’t even let them appeal the decision. Fortunately, the Constitution confronted the Obama administration: The Supreme Court ruled unanimously for the Sacketts and against the Obama EPA."

Wading into a decade-old controversy, former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman has urged current EPA administrator Lisa Jackson to close loopholes in a 2006 chemical security law “before a tragedy of historic proportions occurs.”

Whitman, who led the EPA under George W. Bush, suggests the agency use its authority to seal gaps in Department of Homeland Security rules adopted in 2007, according to her April 3 letter to Jackson, obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

Those rules are “extremely limited,” Whitman wrote, barring DHS from requiring industry to take specific measures to prevent accidental or terrorism-related toxic releases. The rules, she wrote, exempt “thousands of chemical facilities, including all water treatment plants and hundreds of other potentially high-risk facilities, such as refineries located on navigable waters.”

The EPA has the power to regulate chemical security under 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, Whitman noted, writing that that the act’s “general duty” clause “obligates chemical facilities handling the most dangerous chemicals to prevent potentially catastrophic releases to surrounding communities.

“Facilities with the largest quantities … should assess their operations to identify safer cost-effective processes that will reduce or eliminate hazards in the event of a terrorist attack or accident,” Whitman wrote. “This has never been required and today hundreds of these facilities continue to put millions of Americans at risk.”

According to DHS testimony this year, there are 4,458 high-risk facilities nationwide.

Three separate Center for Public Integrity investigations examining toxic air, green energy contracts and hazards in oil refineries have won 1^st place honors in the Society of Professional Journalists’ prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Awards.

The prizes, among the national winners in a contest attracting more than 1,700 entries, were awarded for:

• Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities: Produced in partnership with National Public Radio and the Investigative News Network — won top honors for Public Service in Online Journalism. The series explored how, more than two decades after enhancements to the Clean Air Act, many communities still suffer poisoned air and regulatory neglect. The Center’s main stories were written by Jim Morris, Chris Hamby, Ronnie Greene, Elizabeth Lucas and Emma Schwartz.
• Green Energy: Contracts, Connections and the Collapse of Solyndra: Written by Ronnie Greene in partnership with ABC News, won the top honor for Online Investigative reporting. The series of reports documented breakdowns in the process by which the Department of Energy awarded lucrative green energy grants and loans.
• Fueling Fears: Written by Jim Morris and Chris Hamby, won top honors in Online Non-deadline reporting. The reports examined worker and environmental hazards at America’s aging oil refineries.

The national prizes were announced this week, and will be presented at a July 20 ceremony at the National Press Club.