Investigating Power
The Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy today are releasing a trove of rediscovered and newly digitized chemical industry and regulatory agency documents stretching back to the 1920s. The documents are available at PoisonPapers.org.
As of today, those documents and others that have been collected by environmental activists will be publicly available through a project called the Poison Papers. Together, the library contains more than 200,000 pages of information and “lays out a 40-year history of deceit and collusion involving the chemical industry and the regulatory agencies that were supposed to be protecting human health and the environment,” said Peter von Stackelberg, a journalist who along with the Center for Media and Democracy and the Bioscience Resource Project helped put the collection online.
Experiencing ALEC is like diving into a swamp inhabited by creatures of the past. ALEC pushes policies that take us back to a federal government sitting on the sidelines while people suffered and starved, drank contaminated water and sustained injuries at work with no recourse. They are still lamenting the 1965 law that created the Medicaid and Medicare programs, as this, according to Avik Roy of the conservative Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, was the “real government takeover of health care.”
The Trump administration has set up what Trump calls a “voter fraud panel.” Billed as an official “Advisory Commission on Election Integrity Resources,” the commission is being met with stiff resistance from many states, lawsuits by civil rights, and privacy watchdogs, and it is even prompting some worried voters to take the names off the voter rolls.
Koch Family Foundations have provided a massive stream of funding to IHS over the years — more than $30 million, according to Greenpeace. Charles G. Koch has been actively involved in IHS, serving as a board member or board chair for decades. Emails obtained by the Center for Media and Media and Democracy and reviewed by this writer show that the equally far-right Bradley Foundation has also been funding IHS.
The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) filed the lawsuit Monday in state court after the office of Attorney General Sean Reyes (R) refused to comply with public records requests for email communications and documents that would show a relationship between Reyes and the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) and the Rule of Law Defense Fund, RAGA’s advocacy arm.
DeVos was in friendly territory when she spoke in Denver at the annual conference of ALEC, a powerful organization of corporate lobbyists and conservative state legislators who craft “model legislation” on issues important to them and then help shepherd through legislatures. ALEC calls itself “the largest nonpartisan, voluntary membership organization of state legislators dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism,” while it has been called a “stealth business lobbyist” by the New York Times and “a corporate bill mill” by the watchdog nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy.
ALEC created the original school voucher bill in 1984. Free-market economist Milton Friedman, widely credited as the originator of the idea, spoke at the annual gathering in 2006. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, an organization critical of ALEC, Friedman said the ultimate goal was “abolishing the public school system,” but that vouchers form a “politically feasible” way of getting there.
Past funding for ALEC, in addition to dues paid by legislators, has come from conservative foundations associated with the Koch family, trade associations like the American Petroleum Institute and corporations like Exxon Mobil Corp., according to studies by the Center for Media and Democracy.
ALEC, Democracy, Economy, Education, Environment
The Center for Media and Democracy reported that there will be a debate on the ALEC draft model bill to repeal the 17th Amendment, but many other controversial issues will be on the ALEC agenda as the meeting gets underway tomorrow. ALEC will be debating bills related to sexual assault on college campuses, campus protest, taxpayer vouchers for private schools and well-off families, the rollback of popular renewable energy programs, the dismantling the Affordable Care Act and more.