Search Results for

The Biden Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is in the process of finalizing its Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles. The standard is a little known, but massively important, part of the process necessary to push industrial progression toward a cleaner future. 

Jeff Landry’s time spent helming Louisiana’s Attorney General office was defined by a litany of ethical failings. Over the course of 15 years spent running for public office, Landry funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign dollars back into the coffers of his own staffing company – whose staff lists are not public – in an apparent circumvention of standard public transparency practices. During his time at the AG, Landry was also accused of giving preferential treatment to a pedophile with political connections, which ultimately led a former prosecutor to sue the Attorney General.

Alabama’s Attorney General, Steve Marshall, has spent his time in office funneling tens of millions of dollars to outside counsel in order to defend the state’s litany of laws prohibiting gender affirming care and Alabama’s notoriously violent prisons. Alabama, under Marshall’s stewardship, earmarked no less than $14.9 million to a single attorney to represent the state against DOJ prison suits over the next two years, even though that same attorney has already received $17.8 million from state coffers over the past five. That single attorney, Bill Lunsford, also donated $1000 to Marshall’s campaign in 2018. 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been scandal-plagued for years. Paxton’s most recent slate of scandals include his impeachment in May of 2023 – which resulted in his removal from office for more than three months – due to alleged bribe-taking and Paxton’s questionable relationship to Texas GOP mega-donor Nate Paul. Paxton was ultimately acquitted by the Texas State Senate, after his billionaire backers threatened to primary anyone who voted against him, leading to none of his impeachment articles receiving the 21 votes required to convict. Relatedly, Paxton was also previously accused of retaliatory firings relating to FBI whistleblowers, and the resulting $3.3 million settlement from that inquiry (a number that Paxton wanted Texas taxpayers to foot for him) is what triggered the impeachment inquiry in the first place. That money has not yet been approved by the Texas legislature, and its withholding re-sparked whistleblowers’ lawsuit against Paxton to continue in November 2023. 

In October of 2021, the Federal Reserve was embroiled in scandal. The heads of the Boston and Dallas Feds resigned following personal trading scandals that raised concerns about conflicts of interest and lax ethics guidelines. Further reports of potentially inappropriate trading by Chair Jerome Powell and Vice Chair Clarida rocketed across the business media due to these officials’ immense access to sensitive financial information and influence on monetary policy. Despite their decidedly questionable profiteering off pandemic panic, Powell and Clarida have since had their reputations effectively laundered by the media in a whitewashing effort that has attempted to clear them of all wrongdoing. To make matters worse, the Fed’s FOIA office is doing everything in its power to prevent internal documents relating to the scandals from reaching the light of day.

The Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) is a national organization dedicated to electing and reelecting state-level Republican Attorneys General. It is a partisan political  organization, but it also functions as a dark money influence machine selling access to AGs, their staff, and their offices. 

Ever wonder who’s behind gross smear campaigns to sink qualified Biden administration nominees? Look no further than the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), a little-known rightwing opposition research organization housed under the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) umbrella. The oppo shop was founded in 2021 with a simple goal: “to take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden administration.” Since then, AAF has targeted over twenty nominees with slanderous, bad-faith attacks. The strategy has been relatively successful thus far, especially in derailing racial and ethnic minority and female nominees, including Saule Omarova, Sarah Bloom Raskin, Carlton Waterhouse, and Gigi Sohn.   

In efforts to reduce average emissions across the incredibly pollutive transportation sector, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a new tailpipe emissions standard. The new rule functionally mandates automakers to electrify portions of their fleets in order to comply with a reduced average emissions standard for vehicles starting with 2027 new vehicle classes. The proposal, while one of the most significant of the administration’s forays into regulating pollution reductions, has also faced steep criticism from some environmentalists for not going nearly far enough in achieving the 75 percent pollution cut necessary to actually address the climate crisis. On July 11, 2023, however, the American Petroleum Institute (API) led a sign-on letter campaign asking the EPA to roll over to industry on the rule. For far too long corporate feedback has been hugely – and disproportionately – influential for regulators. It shouldn’t be.

TIME released its inaugural TIME100 Climate list last week, which included an eclectic list of business leaders, politicians, artists, and other “leaders” that TIME reporters and editors (and Deloitte, their sponsor) sought to elevate and celebrate for “making significant progress in fighting climate change by creating business value.” 

On November 7th, Atlanta saw nearly 60 people arraigned on an assortment of charges, including racketeering. The arraignment is the next step in the legal process begun last month when Georgia’s Republican State Attorney General Chris Carr filed racketeering charges against 61 people, most of whom were or are associated with the 2020 George Floyd protests in Atlanta and/or the Stop Cop City movement in the city.

The Biden Administration announced last month that it had deemed it “necessary” to waive 26 federal laws, including the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, amongst others, in order to move forward with the construction of Trump’s infamous border wall along the US-Mexico border. This decision came after Biden vowed during his 2020 campaign that there would “not be another foot of wall constructed” during his presidency.