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One of the defining characteristics of American life in the twenty-first century is its extreme imbalance: excess amid scarcity. While the world teems with a surplus of disposable consumer goods, essentials like healthcare, housing, education, and energy are prohibitively expensive. Much of this imbalance is by design. Powerful corporations profit from distorting public goods into private commodities, and individual and collective choices are replaced by corporate prescriptions that do not meet our needs. This dynamic is particularly visible in the tech industry forcing artificial intelligence into every corner of our lives, regardless of whether it is wanted.

Welcome back to the Revolving Door Project’s weekly newsletter, which is getting a new name: Watchdog Weekly. We’ve been writing this newsletter since the end of 2018, through three presidential administrations, two general elections, and an ongoing crisis of corporate accountability. Since the beginning, we’ve scrutinized the subtle ways in which corporate wealth shapes our politics: not only through direct spending and lobbying, but via the revolving door between industry and government, through interest groups and formal and informal networks, media influence, and more. We exist to help fill the vacuum of knowledge about who holds power and how power is wielded. We are watchdogs, and we wanted a name for this newsletter that reflects our mission to shed light on the ways that money corrupts politics which may otherwise evade scrutiny.

It’s been seven years since Boulder, Colorado, took oil companies Exxon and Suncor to court for decades of lying about the dangers of their products, one of dozens of parallel lawsuits brought by local, state, and tribal governments against fossil fuel companies. In May, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the case could move toward discovery and trial, something the companies are desperate to avoid. Now, Exxon and Suncor are once again seeking refuge at the Supreme Court.

While nearly 7 million Americans marched in “No Kings” protests on Saturday to protest Trump’s lawlessness, the president reposted an AI-generated video of himself in a fighter jet wearing a crown and dumping massive quantities of feces on protestors below. 

Methane makes up a small portion of greenhouse gas emissions in terms of quantity, but it is one of the most important drivers of climate change, as it’s over 80 times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide in its first 20 years in the atmosphere. A significant amount of the extreme warming that we will experience in our lifetimes, and the planetary tipping points that we breach, will be propelled by methane—and emissions are rising faster than ever.

This report sets out to excavate the proposed policy prescriptions of the broader abundance movement, and thoroughly address their flaws.

As the Trump administration continues to expand the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in its operations, we are cataloguing examples of how AI is being deployed by federal agencies to replace human workers and undermine transparency and due process.

“We’ve lost the culture war on climate,” Harvard law professor and former Obama administration adviser Jody Freeman told Politico last Wednesday. The article amounts to a dry eulogy for efforts to combat climate change, with Freeman’s refrain that the climate movement failed to go mainstream in the background. What goes unmentioned: Freeman’s extracurricular work as oil industry whisperer.

In the months before the re-election of Donald Trump precipitated our rapid descent into authoritarianism, two books were being written about the idea that progressivism went astray in the 1960s and 1970s. In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson describe a drift into a “politics of scarcity,” and in Why Nothing Works, Marc Dunkelman calls it a “cultural aversion to power.” Both books ask a pertinent question: Why doesn’t the government do big, bold things, quickly, to address the pressing issues of our time? We have an abundance of viewpoints and veto points, they argue, but a shortage of affordable housing and transmission lines. Something’s got to give. The unstated question, of course, is who must give.