Koch Industries won contracts with bribes and sold millions of dollars worth of petrochemical equipment to Iran, according to a new expose by Asjylyn Loder and David Evans of Bloomberg.

The politicking of oil baron brothers Charles and David has made the Koch name (pronounced “Coke”) a household word. Koch Industries has spent over $50 million on federal lobbying since 2006. Koch charities have spent millions more on infrastructure for the conservative movement. Koch-funded academies have trained a generation of Tea Party activists.

Loder and Evans reveal that Koch Industries bribed company officials overseas to secure contracts with their firms. The illegal payments were made through the French-owned subsidiary, Koch-Glistch, but when the nefarious activity came to light in French labor courts, whistleblowers convinced the courts that the wrongdoing reached far up the chain of command. Koch Industries also used foreign subsidiaries to circumvent the U.S. ban on trading with Iran, an officially recognized state sponsor of terrorism.

Those are just the new allegations of wrongdoing by Koch Industries. Bloomberg also summarizes a littany of misdeeds that the company has already been caught and fined for or settled with victims over the past several decades. The story documents how regulations and torts have cost Koch Industries millions of dollars.

Loder and Evans flesh out a rapsheet decades in the making. Offenses include leaking 91 metric tons of the carcinogen benzene into the air and lying about it, bilking Native Americans out of oil royalties, negligently allowing a pipeline to corrode until leaking gas burned two teenagers to death, and much more.

Loder and Evans write:

For six decades around the world, Koch Industries has blazed a path to riches – in part, by making illicit payments to win contracts, trading with a terrorist state, fixing prices, neglecting safety and ignoring environmental regulations. At the same time, Charles and David Koch have promoted a form of government that interferes less with company actions.

This story is a courageous and damning indictment of Koch Industries. What’s more, the authors explicitly link the Koch Brothers’ philosophy of unfettered capitalism and their unethical business practices.

There’s no point in speculating about whether the Koch’s investment in the anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-tort activism is fuelled by greed or sincere conviction. From a citizen’s perspective, it makes no difference whether they are driven by pure profit, or whether they sincerely believe that their property entitles them to i) swindle other companies by bribing their employees to make contracts that never would have survived in the free market, ii) to trade with an enemy of the United States, iii) to pollute our environment, and iv) to steal natural resources from their rightful owners. The only question is whether we, the people, think they’re so entitled, and if not, what we are going to do about it?

[Photo credit: Sue Peacock, Creative Commons.]

Private companies are reaping huge profits from immigration crackdowns worldwide, Hillman Prize winner Nina Bernstein reports for the New York Times. Bernstein documents how the detention of asylum-seekers and people awaiting deportation has become big business in the United States, the United Kingdom, and especially in Australia:

In the United States — with almost 400,000 annual detentions in 2010, up from 280,000 in 2005 — private companies now control nearly half of all detention beds, compared with only 8 percent in state and federal prisons, according to government figures. In Britain, 7 of 11 detention centers and most short-term holding places for immigrants are run by for-profit contractors.

No country has more completely outsourced immigration enforcement, with more troubled results, than Australia. Under unusually severe mandatory detention laws, the system has been run by a succession of three publicly traded companies since 1998. All three are now major players in the international business of locking up and transporting unwanted foreigners.

Bernstein doesn’t shy away from the detention industry’s appalling health and safety record. She notes that private immigration prisons have been plagued by riots, epidemics of self-harm by inmates, and even child abuse. You’ll be shocked to learn that not everyone who hangs out a shingle as a for-profit detention facility is qualified to do so:

But the ballooning of privatized detention has been accompanied by scathing inspection reports, lawsuits and the documentation of widespread abuse and neglect, sometimes lethal. Human rights groups say detention has neither worked as a deterrent nor speeded deportation, as governments contend, and some worry about the creation of a “detention-industrial complex” with a momentum of its own.

Matthew J. Gibney of Oxford University offers an incisive quote to explain what’s gone wrong with the immigration detention service over the last 15 years: “When something goes wrong — a death, an escape — the government can blame it on a kind of market failure instead of an accountability failure.” In other words, part of what the government is paying for when it privatizes detention is plausible deniability.

[Photo credit: Thomas Hawk, Creative Commons]

Why did a deputy inspector for the NYPD pepper spray a group of women on the sidewalk after they had already been penned in with crowd control mesh? Joseph Goldstein of the New York Times thinks it’s their terrorism training:

When members of the loose protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street began a march from the financial district to Union Square on Saturday, the participants seemed relatively harmless, even as they were breaking the law by marching in the street without a permit.

But to the New York Police Department, the protesters represented something else: a visible example of lawlessness akin to that which had resulted in destruction and violence at other anticapitalist demonstrations, like the Group of 20 economic summit meeting in London in 2009 and the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999.

The Police Department’s concerns came up against a perhaps milder reality on Saturday, when their efforts to maintain crowd control suddenly escalated: protesters were corralled by police officers who put up orange mesh netting; the police forcibly arrested some participants; and a deputy inspector used pepper spray on four women who were on the sidewalk, behind the orange netting.

The police’s actions suggested the flip side of a force trained to fight terrorism, in a city whose police commissioner acknowledges the ownership of a gun big enough to take down a plane, but that may appear less nimble in dealing with the likes of the Wall Street protesters. So even as the members of Occupy Wall Street seem unorganized and, at times, uninformed, their continued presence creates a vexing problem for the Police Department.

This argument about terrorism is a complete non sequitur. The Occupy Wall Street protesters had been camped out since September 17, so the police had had ample opportunity to observe that these protesters were neither terrorists nor window-smashing anarchists.

It’s not like protests are a rare event in New York. In a city this size, with this many opinionated residents, someone is bound to be protesting something on any given day. Crowd control is the NYPD’s bread and butter. Saturday’s breakaway march to Union Square, while un-permitted, wasn’t even particularly large by New York standards.

Pepper spraying an immobilized person would be against NYPD policy, even if the target were a suspected terrorist.

As Goldstein notes later in the article, the NYPD has clear guidelines on the use of pepper spray:

According to the Police Department’s patrol guide, officers may use pepper spray under certain conditions, including “when a member reasonably believes it is necessary to effect an arrest of a resisting suspect.” The guide also advises that the spray should “not be used in situations that do not require the use of physical force.”

The video shows the officer spraying the women and walking away. He doesn’t make any effort to arrest them, and none of the other officers do either. He just leaves the victims writhing in their orange cage.

The fight to save Troy Davis from lethal injection has been called “the most extraordinary and controversial legal odyssey” in the history of the state of Georgia. That fight came to an end on Wednesday with Davis’s execution, twenty years after he was sentenced to death for the murder of an off-duty police officer. There was no physical evidence linking Davis to the shooting of Mark MacPhail and seven of the nine witnesses who claimed to have seen him do it ultimately recanted their testimony. Davis’ case has catalyzed widespread doubts about the validity of eyewitness testimony and the death penalty itself. Here’s a roundup of some the best coverage of this story.

-“Fourteen bankers boxes filled with petitions containing 663,000 signatures were delivered to the [Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles] on Thursday; more petitions delivered over the weekend and earlier this morning brought the total number of people asking for clemency up over 800,000,” reported Kung Li of Facing South, noting that such high-profile figures as Bishop Desmond Tutu, former FBI Director William Sessions and Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr., had publicly called for clemency for Davis.

-Legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick of Slate asked whether the uncertainty over Davis’ guilt would turn public opinion against the death penalty.

-Political scientist Scott Lemieux discusses how the legal system’s faith in eyewitness testimony, which was all the evidence there was against Troy Davis, has been profoundly shaken in the years since Davis was convicted. Lemieux argues that new understanding of the limitations of eyewitness evidence created significant doubts about Davis’ guilt, but the justice system proved itself incapable of responding appropriately.

If the system isn’t flexible enough to respond to new knowledge, which tends to pile up in the years or decades between conviction and execution, maybe it doesn’t deserve to wield the power of life and death.

-Troy Davis, a black man, was denied clemency by the same parole board that granted last-minute clemency to a white murderer three years ago. Samuel Crowe confessed to hacking a store manager with a crowbar and shooting him. Crowe reportedly turned his life around in jail, but Davis also changed for the better in jail. The two main differences were race and the fact that Crowe expressed remorse while Davis proclaimed his innocence. At the very least, this is evidence of the perverse logic of a justice system that rewards the outwardly remorseful guilty while punishing those who refuse to admit their guilt (perhaps because they are innocent and honest).

-On the night of the execution, Rutgers historian William Jelani Cobb stood with the crowd keeping a vigil outside the prison where Davis was put to death. “But what was most surprising and disturbing is that the group was more than 90% black. For all the discussion about the implications of the death penalty for the country at large this broke down, as always, to an issue of race and black people would have to do the heavy lifting if any change were going to occur. The racial balance skewed so heavily that when a young white couple sat down on the grass next to me I asked them what organization they were with. The woman’s reply hit me hard: ‘We’re not with an organization. I know Troy Davis – my brother is on death row with him,’” he wrote for Ta-Nehesi Coates’ blog at the Atlantic.com.

Photo credit: Facing South.