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It’s hard times at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), one of the three principal bank regulators in the country, along with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Federal Reserve. All three, plus other financial institution regulators at the National Credit Union Administration and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, have been gutted to varying degrees over the first year of Trump 2.0.

The administrative state’s Kafkaesque transmogrification into the mafia state

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.

For far too long, the wealthy and powerful faced no consequences for even the most egregious acts. Working class Americans, doing their best to get by, are shown every day that they live in a country that bends over backwards to serve a privileged few.

A Department of Justice official managed to serve in Trump’s administration without disclosing his financial entanglements publicly – and now, only after his departure, can we highlight his conflicts of interest.

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.

Scrutinizing the “ideological warfare” a business community mouthpiece says drove Corporate America into the arms of a fascist.

HHS fired CDC Director Susan Monarez after she refused to implement vaccine policy changes directed by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Before DOGE’s lawbreaking spree, there was ‘blitzscaling.’