Investigating Power
The PR Watch report stated that the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) showed the three top holders of Harley Davidson stock made “an additional $5 million above what they would have made last quarter without the tax cut, even as the 800 Kansas City machinists and steelworkers received pink slips.”
ALEC, Democracy, Economy, Koch, SPN
The In These Times article, written by Mary Bottari of the Center for Media Democracy, is entitled “Behind Janus: Documents Reveal Decade-Long Plot to Kill Public-Sector Unions.” Janus refers to the case currently before the Supreme Court, Janus v. AFSCME. The plaintiff challenges union security—the right of unions to collect “fair share” fees for collective bargaining from bargaining-unit workers who have chosen not to join the union. This opting out, known also as freeloading, means fewer union resources are available to unions to represent workers, file grievances and bargain with employers. Meanwhile, these workers benefit from wage gains, benefits and working conditions won by the union.
In 2011, Madison’s own Center for Media and Democracy investigated the uncanny commonalities in radical state legislative proposals emerging across the nation and uncloaked the pernicious role that multibillionaire brothers Charles and David Koch had played in funding the American Legislative Exchange Council to formulate such proposals and strategies.
Providing gifts to the charter school industry is expected from the secretary of education, regardless of who holds the position. Bryant mentions a report from the Center for Media and Democracy which “found that over the past 20 years the federal government has sent over $3.3 billion to the charter school industry with virtually no accountability.” The report states that “the federal government maintains no comprehensive list of the charter schools that have received and spent these funds or even a full list of the private or quasi-public entities that have been approved by states to ‘authorize’ charters that receive federal funds.”
Each state has its own watchdog groups, and the Center for Media and Democracy’s SourceWatch has a handy directory you can use to start to look for information.
I know this because in late 2017 my organization, the Bioscience Resource Project, collaborated with the Center for Media and Democracy to rescue and digitize the Poison Papers. These documents come mainly from the barn of longtime pesticide campaigner Carol Van Strum, whose homesteading family and their neighbors were repeatedly sprayed in the 1970s by what turned out to be Agent Orange.
Donald Trump has had deep and sometimes secret ties with The Daily Caller. A 2017 report from the Center for Media and Democracy found that The Daily Caller received an undisclosed $150,000 payment from Donald Trump’s campaign for access to the site’s mailing list. In the final two months of the election, Trump’s campaign sent at least 25 emails to the mailing list, the report found.
Pruitt’s emails, which were revealed after a suit from the Center for Media and Democracy, expose his coziness and collusion with the fossil-fuel industry. He has insisted that climate change is a “hoax,” despite the overwhelming scientific consensus in its favor. And he has been an enormously destructive EPA administrator, gutting rules, budgets, and staff alike.
Recently, the number of studies suggesting that sugar has negative effects on the body have grown exponentially. Obesity, diabetes and osteoporosis are just a few of the negative consequences that arise from consuming too much sugar. As a result of increasing evidence against the sweet substance, soda tax bans are finding growing acceptance in the public. A new report on PRWatch.org found that the beverage industry is aggressively fighting back with moves learned from big tobacco.
What these documents — a group of several dozen emails obtained by the progressive watchdog group, Center for Media and Democracy — show is that, when ambition reared its ugly head, Reyes put political calculations ahead of the interests of the agency heads his office is supposed to represent.