Investigating Power
Investigations exposing attorneys general-fossil fuel alliance provide key context for clean power plan fight.
Before an audience of students, faculty and members of the UW-Madison community, Lisa Graves, executive director of Center for Media and Democracy, spoke about the corruption of what the UW System considers a great pride: the Wisconsin Idea.
The conservative group at the center of Gov. Scott Walker’s political operation during the 2011 and 2012 recalls may have flouted IRS rules by providing a private benefit.
Coal companies met with GOP attorneys general to stop the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.
Fossil-fuel companies Murray Energy and Southern Company paid for private meetings with Republican state attorneys general to discuss opposition to the EPA’s Clean Power Plan less than two weeks before the same officials asked a federal judge to block the measure.
Leaked court documents from ‘John Doe investigation’ in Wisconsin lay bare pervasive influence of corporate cash on modern US elections.
Sealed Wisconsin court documents from Scott Walker investigation expose extent of corporate influence on democratic process rarely seen by the public.
Exposé speaks to ‘mounting sense of public unease about the cozy relationship between politicians and big business,’ writes the Guardian.
Stories of elected officials selling influence to special interests have become a fact of life in American politics. But there are still some public officials whom voters typically expect to be immune from the influence of donors.
Local governments want to set their own minimum wages, gun laws, and smoking bans. And statehouses have methodically stripped away their powers to do so.