Investigating Power
ALEC’s annual economic survey ranks states “rich” based on how closely states track the corporate pay-to-play group’s preferred tax and labor policies as opposed to actual quality of life factors such as wages, poverty rates, and access to healthcare.
When the next big disaster unfolds due to deregulation, don’t be fooled. Republicans are deflecting blame by attacking the Biden administration as insufficiently populist, but the seeds of the East Palestine train derailment and Silicon Valley Bank bailout were sown under the Trump deregulatory regime and more broadly by the anti-government ethos of the GOP and its Big Money donors.
Florida’s 2023 legislative session has kicked off with a pair of bills chock full of new labor regulations long sought after by anti-union activists.
One in every four members of the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF)—the group of Republican state treasurers, auditors, and other financial officers on the frontlines of the campaign against “woke capitalism”—has been a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Center for Media and Democracy has found.
In his keynote address at The Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change, Utah Treasurer Marlo Oaks—a longtime investment banker prior to being appointed state treasurer in 2021—proclaimed key similarities between Hitler’s drive to create a uniform Aryan society and the desire of “global elites” to implement uniform investment practices.
The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) is launching a new website, SFOFExposed.org, to expose the State Financial Officers Foundation’s role in legitimizing the latest front in the Right’s culture wars.
The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a right-wing think tank that was instrumental in getting Michigan’s right-to-work legislation passed, announced the creation of a new spin-off last month that is legally able to raise and spend unlimited amounts of dark money to influence legislation and ballot measures.
An oil and gas industry group recently urged the board of directors of the American Legislative Exchange Council—the right-wing corporate bill mill—to reconsider adopting a model policy that would blacklist companies that limit their business with fossil fuels
Koch Industries and its funding vehicles funnel millions to groups that are decrying “woke capitalism” and attacking the investment giant BlackRock for its leading role in ESG investing. Yet that hasn’t stopped the company’s subsidiaries from partnering with BlackRock to invest in technology startups.
Koch Industries reaps the benefits of more than $38 million in local and state tax rebates, tax reductions, and grants in 2021 and 2022.