Investigating Power
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.
One way to invest more in books, schools and teachers would be to raise taxes. But most of the states with striking teachers face a special obstacle that makes that nearly impossible: “Supermajority” tax measures, which require a wider-than-normal margin of legislators to vote for tax increases. Cutting taxes in these states is easy, but reversing those cuts to fix problems like underfunded schools, is tough.
As Oklahoma attorney general, Pruitt used multiple email accounts, including his personal one, for official business. The Center for Media and Democracy is in an ongoing legal battle with the Oklahoma attorney general’s office to release thousands of Pruitt’s emails with fossil fuel companies and others in response to their open records request.
The poison papers were analyzed and published by the Center for Media and Democracy and Dr. Jonathan Latham. They are a compilation of over 20000 documents obtained from federal agencies and chemical manufacturers via open records requests and public interest litigation. They include internal scientific studies and summaries of studies, internal memos and reports, meeting minutes, strategic discussions, and sworn testimonies.
Climate, Democracy, Environment
The emails were obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, or CMD, a progressive watchdog group that sued to force Pruitt to release thousands of similar emails that outlined his close ties with the oil industry.
To learn more about the Koch agenda, check out the Center for Media and Democracy’s work at www.exposedbycmd.org/Koch