Political MoJo

Rand Paul Wants to Loosen Laws on Offshore Tax Evasion

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| Thu May. 9, 2013 7:45 AM PDT
Somewhere that looks like the Cayman Islands, home to thousands of US tax cheats. Candis Davis/Shutterstock

Late Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) introduced a bill that would repeal part of a law aimed at fighting offshore tax evasion.

The law, called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, was passed in 2010 and is supposed to go into effect on January 1, 2014. It requires foreign financial institutions to report information about Americans with accounts worth more than $50,000 to the IRS. Firms that don't comply will be fined.

Tax policy watch dogs say the FATCA is essential to rooting out tax cheats. "The increased bilateral exchange of taxpayer information that...[is] crucial to cleaning up the worldwide shadow financial system," Heather Lowe, director of government affairs for the advocacy organization Global Financial Integrity told Accounting Today earlier this month. "[F]oreign financial institutions should not harbor the illicit assets of U.S. tax evaders."

But Paul's bill to weaken the law was immediately hailed as "heroic" by the biggest independent financial advisory firm in the world. In an email press release from the deVere group, chief executive Nigel Green said, "Senator Paul’s heroic stance against this toxic, economy-damaging tax act is a landmark moment in the mission to have it repealed. He has taken a courageous stand against FATCA, [a law that] will impose unnecessary costs and burdens on foreign financial institutions."

Paul, generally a die-hard anti-taxer, says the intent of his bill "is not to disrupt legitimate tax enforcement." Instead, he says he objects to FATCA because it "violates important privacy protections," by giving foreign governments too much access to US citizens' tax information. Paul says he is only in favor of repealing those provisions.

But Paul has a long history of fighting the offshore-tax evasion law. Since FATCA was signed, the Treasury Department has been negotiating and signing treaties with over 50 countries to implement the law's provisions. Paul has put a hold on Senate approval of all tax treaties since he was elected in 2010, and as such has been blamed for trying to block FATCA.

A companion version of Paul’s bill is expected to be introduced in the House soon.

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Want to Track Deaths Along the Border? There's an App for That

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| Thu May. 9, 2013 3:00 AM PDT
Every documented migrant death in Pima County, Arizona, from 2001 to 2013 Courtesy of Humane Borders

Pima County, Arizona, has found a new tool in the quest to save lives along the US-Mexico border: data. On Monday, the county medical examiner's office and Humane Borders, a human rights group based in Tucson, unveiled the Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants, an online mapping tool that allows anyone to search the hundreds of known deaths of migrants in the county since 2001.

The app, based on information compiled by the medical examiner and other sources and made possible by an anonymous $175,000 grant to the county, could help identify the unclaimed bodies of migrants and reunite them with their families. The data can be sorted by gender, cause of death, approximate location, and the victim's last name, if known. The medical examiners "get these calls from people—'My loved one disappeared three months ago, five months ago, at this point,'" says John Chamblee, a researcher at the University of Georgia who helped create the app. "Or they'll get a call like, 'The smuggler called me,' and they left their loved one at this point and they try to find out about them." Now can just create a custom map using whatever information they have, and sift through the results.

The Pima County data's impact is potentially far-reaching. Humane Borders hopes better tracking will help reduce the number of fatalities across the borderlands by giving aid workers an idea of where to place food and water. The data can also be used to trace shifts in migrant traffic and how policing strategies affect migrant safety. In Texas' Rio Grande Valley, the number of migrant deaths jumped from 52 in 2011 to 129 last year, an alarming increase immigration experts attributed to more effective strategies to block crossings in Arizona. Researchers like Princeton University sociologist Douglas Massey have attributed the swelling number of deaths along to the militarization of the border: With easily followed geographic corridors closed off, migrants are forced to travel through less navigable terrain, where they may become lost or run out of supplies. According to the Border Patrol, there were 463 migrant deaths in the Southwest in 2012, the highest total since 2005.

But Pima County is mostly alone in its quest for better information on migrant deaths. Only a handful of other counties, such as Imperial in southeastern California, have even produced reliable data. Data collected by the Border Patrol is unreliable, and not very specific. (One of Chamblee's challenges was to reconcile often contradictory data sets maintained by the border patrol, foreign consulates, and the Pima County medical examiner.) As Mother Jones has reported before, the Pima County medical examiner is unique because it is wholly independent of law enforcement, which means it faces less political pressure and fewer distractions. In some smaller counties in Texas, for instance, coroner is just a part-time job.

It's not that officials in other counties don't care about the issue; they're just worried that the data would be misused. "Some of them think politically don't think it's a good idea to create this," said Kat Rodriguez, a program director at Coalición Derechos Humanos Arizona. "Suddenly the narrative would be, 'Oh my God, look how much money is being spent on these illegals.'"

The Pima County project looks at a slice of a larger dataset that does not exist for now. Draft legislation floated by the White House in February included language requiring US Customs and Border Protection to collect statistics on deaths along the border. It would be required to publish those statistics at least once a quarter and issue a report within one year of the bill's passage analyzing any trends and recommending actions to prevent such deaths. The draft immigration bill being considered in the Senate has no such provision, nor do any proposed amendments. In the meantime, Pima County's program will have to do.

Koch-Linked Women's Group Takes Credit for Mark Sanford's Win

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| Wed May. 8, 2013 3:00 PM PDT
Incoming Congressman Mark Sanford.

Soon after Mark Sanford, the former governor of South Carolina who resigned in disgrace in 2009, pulled off an upset win in his congressional race on Tuesday, a conservative group called the Independent Women's Voice boasted of its role in his victory. "Independent Women's Voice was the only outside group supporting Sanford on a significant scale, by educating voters about the facts about the Democratic candidate," IWV president Heather Higgins said in a statement. IWV spent $250,000 on TV and print ads in the last week of the election, helping to power Sanford to victory over Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch in a special election in South Carolina's 1st Congressional district.

And if the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch are encouraged by Sanford's win, they, too, can claim a degree of credit, for IWV has plenty of ties to the Koch political network.

IWV, a nonprofit group that doesn't have to name its funders (and can't make politics the majority of what it does), is the sister organization of the Independent Women's Forum, another nonprofit focused more on policy issues. Higgins, who chairs IWF's board, has staked out a position as a leading critic of Obamacare. She also argues that independent women voters are not destined to vote Democratic and, instead, these women are up for grabs on political and policy matters and can be won over by Republicans—if GOPers get their messaging right.

When IWV applied for tax-exempt status in September 2004, it listed Nancy Pfotenhauer, a former Koch Industries lobbyist, as its president. (She also had a leadership position at Independent Women's Forum.) Pfotenhauer, who is currently a Koch spokeswoman, has filled a number of roles with Koch-linked groups. She was formerly the president of Americans for Prosperity, the Kochs' flagship advocacy organization, and is now a director at AFP. She was a vice president for Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Koch-backed predecessor to AFP. She also advised John McCain's during his 2008 presidential campaign.

IWV does not have to disclose its donors, but the group received $250,000 in 2009 from the Center to Protect Patient Rights, a money conduit for conservative nonprofits run by Koch operative Sean Noble. As the Center for Responsive Politics has reported, the Center to Protect Patient Rights handed out $44 million in 2010 and nearly $15 million in 2011 to an array of nonprofit groups including Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform and the 60 Plus Association, which describes itself as the "conservative alternative" to the AARP. Noble spoke at a 2010 Koch donor retreat (PDF) in Aspen, Colorado. Pfotenhauer spoke at the same retreat, as did Higgins.

Higgins also briefly served on the board of the Center to Protect Patient Rights. There is no public information revealing whether IWV still receives financial support from Koch-linked sources.

There's another curious wrinkle about IWV. In its 2004 application for tax-exempt status, the group said it would not spend "any money" on influencing elections. Yet in later tax filings, IWV changed its tune and told the IRS it spent $772,435 on elections in 2010. There are no tax filings available yet detailing IWV activity in 2012 or 2013.

IWV's six-figure spending on Mark Sanford's behalf was anything but a safe bet. But as it turns out, it was money very well spent.

Issa Tweets Story Saying Benghazi Testimony Will Yield No "Major Revelations"

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| Wed May. 8, 2013 1:39 PM PDT
Former deputy chief of mission in Libya Gregory Hicks testifies before the House Oversight Committee.

This week, several top Republicans have claimed that a supposed White House administration cover-up of the September 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, would soon bring down the Obama administration, and on Wednesday, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House oversight committee, held a much-ballyhooed hearing featuring testimony from three witnesses whom he said would "expose the full truth of what happened both before and after the attacks." Yet while the hearing was underway, Issa tweeted a link to a Washington Post story that undercut his own claim.

As he chaired the hearing, Issa sent out this tweet: "MUST READ: breaks down 's hearing" and linked to a Post story filed as the hearing was happening. The article reported what was under way in the hearing room, but it also noted, "the witnesses' prepared testimonies do not include major revelations about the attacks." Major revelations were what the Benghazi critics were breathlessly awaiting.

The Post story did say that the witnesses' "accounts are likely to shed new light on the oversights that made the facilities in Benghazi easy targets"—and to that extent Republicans got what they wanted. The witnesses—State Department officials Gregory Hicks, Eric Nordstrom, and Mark Thompson—presented emotional, long-awaited accounts of the attack and its aftermath. They alleged that requests for additional security before the attack and access to classified State Department documents after the attack fell on deaf ears.

Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission for the US in Libya, echoed the critics' common complaints about the administration's public response to the assault, slamming UN ambassador Susan Rice for initially blaming the attack on an anti-Muslim video that led to protests throughout the region. "I was stunned," he said. "My jaw dropped. I was embarrassed." He also testified that he was told by the State Department not to meet with members of Congress investigating the attack.

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, another top target of Republican criticism, was not mentioned until an hour into the hearing, when Hicks referred to a 2:00 a.m. phone call he received from her seeking details after the attack and shortly before the Libyan prime minister called to inform him of Stevens' death.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the committee, disputed allegations that the State Department's response to the attacks had been misleading. He called the idea that relief efforts had been inadequate—a theory that's been promoted by House Republicans—the "most troubling" of "all the irresponsible allegations" about the Benghazi episode.

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) sympathized with the witnesses by recalling how she had been shot five times during a fact-finding mission in 1978, while leaving the Jonestown cult settlement in Guyana. She said she had reservations about the level of security provided at that time, when California Democrat Rep. Leo Ryan became the only member of Congress to die in the line of duty in US history.

At his daily briefing, White House press secretary Jay Carney dismissed the Benghazi hearing as an "effort to chase after what isn't the substance here." He defended Hillary Clinton's handling of the consulate attack and said, "This is a subject that has from its beginning been subject to attempts to politicize it by Republicans, while in fact what happened in Benghazi was a tragedy."

Nevertheless, Issa hinted there may be more testimony in the future. "Our committee has been contacted by numerous other individuals who have direct knowledge of the Benghazi terrorist attack, but are not yet prepared to testify," he said in a statement.

Bills That Would Gut Wall Street Reform Overwhelmingly Pass House Committee

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| Wed May. 8, 2013 9:49 AM PDT

On Tuesday, three bills that would gut the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill passed the House Financial Services Committee (HFSC) in decisive fashion, with just six members of the 61-member committee voting against all of them.

The three bills passed over serious objections from the Obama administration. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew wrote a letter to Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), the chairman of the committee, urging "members to oppose these bills and others like [them] that would weaken the important regulatory changes that Wall Street Reform has made to the derivatives market." A year ago, former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner made a similar statement against a slate of nearly identical bills.

Financial reform advocates say that the three bills would do serious damage to parts of Dodd-Frank that deal with derivatives, which are financial products with values based on underlying numbers, like crop prices or interest rates.

Only six of the 28 Democrats on the committee voted against all three of the bills—Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the senior Democratic member of the committee; Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.); Mike Capuano (D-Mass.); Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.); Al Green (D-Tex.); and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.). Another six Democrats voted against some of the bills. Sixteen Dems voted in favor of all three bills. Thirty-one of the 33 Republicans on the committee voted for all the bills; Reps. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.) and Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) abstained on two of the bills.

House Financial Services Committee members received some $14.8 million in contributions from the financial services and banking sectors during the last election cycle.

One of the offending bills would allow certain derivatives that are traded within a corporation to be exempt from almost all new Dodd-Frank regulations. The second would expand the types of trading risks that banks can take on. The third would allow big US-based multinational banks to escape US regulations by operating through international subsidiaries. Financial reform advocates say it is way too early to start messing with Wall Street reform, especially since key parts of Dodd-Frank have yet to go into effect.

In an opening statement before the vote, Waters listed a series of financial scandals in the wake of the 2007 crisis that she argues make strong financial regulations imperative. "These scandals include, but aren’t limited to, money laundering to drug cartels, Libor [interest rate] manipulation, and the case of the 'London Whale,'" the nick-name for JPMorgan's massive trading loss last year, she said.

The bills will now head to the House floor for consideration, and have a good chance of being taken up in the Senate.

This Is How the NRA Lies to Gun Owners About Obama's Agenda

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| Wed May. 8, 2013 8:29 AM PDT

The National Rifle Association, which thwarted new background check legislation in Congress, recently mailed a "survey" to gun owners with 12 questions related to gun rights, gun laws, and politics. I use scare quotes above because this NRA document (read it here) is a deeply misleading push poll, not an actual survey—and it lies about President Barack Obama's positions on gun control.

The survey, provided to Mother Jones by a reader, claims that "President Obama has supported a national gun registration system allowing federal government officials to keep track of all your firearm purchases." This is an all-too-common NRA talking point. NRA honcho Wayne LaPierre echoed it in January, saying that Obama "wants to put every private, personal transaction under the thumb of the federal government, and he wants to keep all those names in a massive federal registry."

That's not true.

Federal law has long banned a national gun registry. And the recent gun control bill that died in Congress, which was cosponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) and fully supported by Obama, did not create a national gun registry. In fact, the bill expressly prohibited such a registry. Obama emphasized this point repeatedly, and award-winning mainstream media fact-checkers backed him up.

Last January, Time's Michael Scherer pressed the NRA on its repeated accusation that Obama aims to set up a gun registry, and a spokesman for the group referred him to a statement Obama made as a state senator in 2001: "Too many of these guns end up in the hands of criminals even though they were originally purchased by people who did not have a felony. I'll continue to be in favor of handgun law registration requirements and licensing requirements for training." Yet as a presidential candidate, Obama ruled out a gun registration system, and as president, he has never proposed a national gun registry.

The NRA, in its survey, also refers to the "Obama gun-ban agenda." That's wrong, too. Last year, PolitiFact took a look at a similar claim in which the NRA asserted that "Obama admits he's coming for our guns, telling Sarah Brady, 'We are working on (gun control), but under the radar.'" PolitiFact rated that charge "Pants on Fire." As FactCheck.org notes, Obama is not trying to seize guns already owned by Americans. He supports reinstating the 1994 assault weapons ban, but that's a position he's held for many years.

The NRA's survey is riddled with bad information and leading questions designed to make recipients fear the worst. The goal, it seems, is not to gather information but to spread disinformation—and to recruit new members. At the end of the survey, recipients are asked to sign up with the NRA and "tell gun banners in Congress and my state legislature to keep their hands off my guns and my rights!" And there's a nifty form of encouragement for those who do enlist: a free NRA pocketknife.

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GOP Senator Wants the Feds to Register Their Guns

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| Wed May. 8, 2013 8:21 AM PDT

UPDATE, Wednesday, May 8, 1:05 p.m.: Sen. Coburn has withdrawn his gun registry amendment, the Huffington Post reports, "as a goodwill gesture" to water resources bill sponsor Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).

ORIGINAL POST: For the first time since it rejected a compromise on expanded background checks in April, the Senate will take up gun control again Wednesday afternoon. Sort of, anyway: Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has proposed two gun amendments to a water resources bill, one to relax laws against gun owners carrying their firearms in recreational areas and the other to create a national gun and ammo registry—but just for the federal government.

Coburn's first amendment would allow guns on lands operated by the US Army Corps of Engineers, "just like everywhere else," as Coburn told the Huffington Post. (The water resources bill, typically voted on every other year, authorizes Army Corps projects.) That's long been a goal of the National Rifle Association and other gun rights advocates. The other amendment is weirder: It would require the federal government to submit reports to Congress detailing all guns and ammo it purchased in the past year and how many were stolen or otherwise unaccounted for, with an exception for matters of national security (PDF).

Coburn's gun registry amendment plays into a specious theory advanced by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who have alleged that the feds are buying up ammo to create a shortage and keep it out of the hands (and guns) of private citizens. Should that happen, gun hardliners argue, it's a big step down the road to a dystopian future that would mirror how Hitler supposedly carried out the Holocaust by disarming Jews (a reductive argument that fails to contextualize how Jews were systematically deprived of all their rights).

The Senate is scheduled to vote on Coburn's amendments on Wednesday afternoon. Most of the gun-related proposals that the Senate has voted on this year to either expand or roll back gun rights have been rejected.

Meanwhile, Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) are continuing their efforts to further revise their background check amendment that fell five votes short of the 60-vote filibuster-proof threshold. The Huffington Post reported on Tuesday that two unnamed senators would drop their opposition to a new Manchin-Toomey bill with "minor, superficial changes."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) hinted that Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), whose approval rating fell 15 points after she voted against the Manchin-Toomey bill, might be one of the unnamed lawmakers. Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), one of four Democrats who voted against the bill, has also considered changing course. And gun reform advocates have their eyes on Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who promised the mother of an Aurora mass shooting victim he would vote for expanded background checks before voting against the bill and taking lots of heat as a result.

The Downton Abbey Exception and 4 Other Stupid Immigration Amendments

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| Wed May. 8, 2013 7:42 AM PDT

Defying expectations, Congress is poised to take a serious shot at immigration reform. A bipartisan group of eight Senators has agreed on a bill. One of the GOP's brightest young stars, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), has linked his political future to passage of the bill, and so far managed to wade through a flood of harsh criticism from the right. When the Heritage Foundation, the most influential think-tank in the conservative movement, released a dubious study Monday alleging immigration reform would cost trillions of dollars, it was attacked by not only liberals but also conservatives who are supporting the immigration effort.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will be taking its first crack at the bill Thursday. Republicans opposed to reform have now turned to a time honored tradition of oppositional behavior in the Senate: Offering a whole bunch of amendments to slow down the process and. If they're lucky, they'll be able to slip in a poison pill amendment—a change so noxious that it makes the entire bill harder to pass.

How many amendments? Well, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is currently leading the pack with seventy-seven. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has proposed 49, and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) is bringing up the rear with 24.

Here are some of the worst and most random amendments proposed:

Eliminating the path to citizenship

The centerpiece of immigration reform is a long, arduous path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) doesn't want that to happen. So he proposed an amendment that would make all undocumented immigrants in the US ineligible for the path to citizenship outlined in the bill. If passed, this is the sort of poison pill that would effectively kill the reform bill.

Beef with South Korea

Grassley has had long-running beef with South Korea since it placed tough restrictions on imports from the United States over worries about mad cow disease in 2003. Grassley's stampede of amendments includes one that would prevent South Koreans from obtaining visas designed to steer foreign investors to the US until the East Asian country "fully removes age-based import restrictions on beef from the United States." Though South Korean restrictions on US beef had once ground imports to a halt, most of the restrictions have been lifted as the result of a free trade agreement. (The GOP is in hock to the US beef industry).

But who can I underpay to cut my grass or drive my limo?

It's apparently really hard to find good (cheap) help these days, so Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has a modest proposal: Let's allow unauthorized immigrants to work—but only if they're doing low-paid domestic service jobs. Lee's amendment would exempt "services performed by cooks, waiters, butlers, housekeepers, governessess, maids, valets, baby sitters, janitors, laundresses, furnacemen, care-takers, handymen, gardeners, footmen, grooms, and chauffeurs of automobiles for family use" from "prohibitions on unlawful employment of unauthorized aliens."  Next: An amendment that would allow employers to feed said domestic workers stale cake.

No welfare for terrorists

You may have heard that story about how that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who are suspected of bombing the Boston Marathon, received public assistance. Sessions is graciously placating the conservatives for whom allegedly blowing up a crowd of innocent people wasn't enough of an outrage by proposing an amendment that would deny "terrorist aliens" welfare benefits. Some of you might be asking, "But didn't the Tsarnaevs receive public assistance before anyone knew they were terrorists?" Stop asking questions! Why do you love the terrorists so much?

Another welfare amendment (really!)

The immigration bill does not allow undocumented immigrants seeking legal status to receive welfare benefits. But that's not good enough for Sessions, who has proposed an amendment that would deny the path to citizenship to those deemed "likely" to receive "means-tested public benefits" at "any point in the future." If this sounds subjective and impossible to enforce, you're forgetting about the Department of Homeland Security's psychics.

All told there are now more than 300 proposed amendments to the bill, most of them from Republicans. (Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) has also proposed 24.) Many have been filed with the sole purpose of gumming up the works and making it harder to pass an immigration bill.

Sexual Assaults in Military Keep Rising—And Nearly 90 Percent Never Report It

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| Wed May. 8, 2013 7:19 AM PDT

The number of servicemembers who reported being sexually assaulted rose consistently over the past four years, according to an internal Pentagon report released Tuesday, despite recent efforts by the Obama administration to address the problem. But because only a fraction of servicemembers ever report assaults to their superiors, the Pentagon also conducts an anonymous survey to estimate the true scope of the problem, and those reveal a much larger number: For 2012, for example, the report estimates that the real number servicemembers experiencing "unwanted sexual contact" is closer to 26,000, which means about 90 percent of servicemembers assaulted kept quiet about it. (The DoD data only provide estimates for 2006, 2010, and 2012.)

This problem has persisted for years—in 2008 then Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) wrote that women in the military were more likely to be raped by fellow servicemembers than killed by enemy fire. The news comes two days after the Air Force official charged with preventing sexual assault, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, was himself charged with sexual battery. The administration's nominee for vice commander of the Air Force Space Command is being held up in the Senate following revelations that she promoted an officer convicted of sexual assault.

The Pentagon report states that "[c]losing the gaps between prevalence and reporting will remain a key factor in determining success of our efforts." As you can see, so far they haven't made a tremendous amount of progress. Tuesday Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced a new set of measures to improve the military's handling of sexual assault, saying that "we know we've got big problems. We know that. And we've addressed that, and we'll continue to address it."

Note: This chart is based on one presented in the secretary of defense's sexual assault prevention and response memo released by the Pentagon yesterday.

4,693 People in America Died on the Job in 2011

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| Tue May. 7, 2013 12:14 PM PDT

Workplaces dangers have been in the news more than usual lately, from the deadly explosion at the West, Texas, fertilizer plant to the garment factory collapse in Bangladesh, where the death toll is now more than 700. In light of the latter, there is the temptation to say that what happened in Texas was an anomaly, and that conditions in US factories are so much better than in the developing world. But not so fast: A new report from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the nation's largest affiliation of unions, shows that 4,693 people died the job in the US in 2011 (the most recent year for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics has released figures).

According to the "Death on the Job" report, the most dangerous occupations in the US in 2011 were in the agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting sectors; mining and transportation were also near the top of the list. The average fatality rate across all occupations was 3.5 deaths per 100,000 workers.

While the numbers are much lower than they were back in 1970, when 13,800 employees died on the job, the AFL-CIO notes that that fatality rate has not improved since 2008. And another estimated 50,000 workers die each year from work-related diseases like cancers and lung ailments.

Part of the issue, the AFL-CIO concludes, is that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) remains underfunded and understaffed, and that penalties are too low to deter violations:

Because of the underfunding, federal OSHA inspectors can only inspect workplaces once every 131 years on average, and state OSHA inspectors would take 76 years to inspect all workplaces.
OSHA penalties are too low to be taken seriously, let alone provide deterrence. The average penalty is only $2,156 for a serious federal health and safety violation, and only $974 for a state violation. Even in cases involving worker fatalities, the median total penalty was a paltry $5,175 for federal OSHA and $4,200 for the OSHA state plans. By contrast, property damage valued between $300 and $10,000 in the state of Illinois is considered a Class 4 felony and can carry a prison sentence of 1 to 3 years and a fine of up to $25,000.
Criminal penalties under OSHA are also weak. While there were 320 criminal enforcement cases initiated under federal environmental laws and 231 defendants charged in FY 2012, only 84 cases related to worker deaths have been prosecuted since 1970.

Read the full report here. Also be sure to check out the Center for Public Integrity's reporting on workplace safety in the chemical, steel, and fishing industries.

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