#Corporations (special interest group) write the legislation | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sparky7u · 1 year

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------- ALEC is a dangerous organization that is paid for by BIG MONEY and of course special interests. They actually have very educated and skilled people "WRITING LEGISLATION" ---- your read it correctly ............writing the legislation that will be implemented after being voted on...........It is crafted of course to slant everything toward the folks that support ALEC...............and they are not your average JOE AMERICAN .............I can guarantee you that....................WAKE UP AND KEEP AND EYE ON THESE SOB's.-----

------------ COMMON CAUSE --->>>

====== Some of the most important upcoming fights for our democracy will happen in the states – not in Washington, D.C.

And one major threat is a group you may never have heard of: ALEC.

ALEC is the acronym for the innocent-sounding American Legislative Exchange Council. Except in reality... it’s anything but. Beneath the benign name lies an extremist group of lobbyists funded by the Kochs and big corporations, working to ram far-right legislation through state legislatures.

ALEC is responsible for some of the most extreme, ultra-conservative state laws passed in the last decade: disinformation-fueled voter suppression laws, “Stand Your Ground” gun legislation, handouts to polluting corporations, and blocking the Affordable Care Act at the state level, among others.

As I write, ALEC is getting ready for the 2023 legislative sessions in the states – and planning even more extreme laws in states across the country. Stifling the right to peaceful protest. Advancing a dangerous Article V Constitutional Convention. Radical attacks against LGBTQ+ people.

We're mobilizing to stop them – and defend our civil rights, voting rights, and every other right you and I hold dear.

ALEC’s member companies pay top dollar for direct access to state lawmakers – whoallow lobbyists to write corporate dream legislation into ALEC “model bills.” Then, ALEC-backed legislators rush those bills through their state houses, churning out laws that enrich corporations and hurt the rest of us.

But we’re advancing our plan to stop ALEC… and it’s working. You see, major companies don’t want to be publicly associated with ALEC’s overwhelmingly unpopular and extreme agenda. And up until very recently, ALEC has been able to operate from the shadows – quietly pulling the strings to advance their right-wing policies.

But in the past few years, people’s action groups like Common Cause have exposed ALEC for what it is – and put MAJOR pressure on companies to cut ties with them.

Already, some of ALEC’s biggest funders – AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and Pfizer – responded to our demands by canceling their ALEC membership. They’ve joined Google, Coca-Cola, and other major companies in a sweeping exodus from ALEC’s toxic brand.

Now, as we’re strengthening our strategy to STOP ALEC, I’m asking every Common Cause Member to chip in – and help us shut them out for good.

Sen Bernie Sanders For President 2024 !!!

Jimmy Wilson Landing Guitars · 10h ·

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centinel2001 · 4 years

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Oh Dear, Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie Touches the Third Rail – Reveals DC’s Biggest Secret…

Posted originally on The Conservative Tree House on April 28, 2020 by sundance

With congress saying they will not be returning to work next week, it appears Kentucky representative Thomas Massie has decided to use the opportunity to expose Washington DC’s biggest secret. Something 99% of American voters do not understand:

Oh dear, he’s telling secrets. You see, congress doesn’t actually write

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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The Dems' most secret Congressional committee

“Personnel is policy”: the leader of an organization can set its tenor, priorities, and culture. That’s especially true when it comes to Congressional committee leadership. Committee chairs decide when to hold hearings, which witnesses to call, whether to advance a bill or tie it up.

Committee chairs are set by each party’s Steering and Policy Committee. Obviously, the leadership and composition of this committee matters. A lot. If personnel is policy, then the personnel who set policy about personnel is really important policy.

The Congressional GOP splits its Steering and Policy Committee into two parts. There’s a Policy Committee, whose website lists its members:

https://republicanpolicy.house.gov/about/history-committee-membership

And there’s a Steering Committee, which also has a website:

https://www.gop.gov/steering-committee/

Both committees follow the standard rules, the same ones that congressional committees follow.

How about the Dems?

Well…

As Donald Shaw writes for Sludge in The American Prospect, the Democratic Congressional Steering and Policy Committee is a secret.

https://prospect.org/power/secretive-group-steering-the-dems/

Its membership is secret. The identity of its chair? Also a secret. It runs on secret rules, and takes secret notes. It’s part of Congress, so its minutes can’t be obtained through public records requests.

This is the committee that elevated Rep Kathleen Rice to a seat on the Energy and Commerce Committee and denied a seat to AOC. Rice went on to use that seat to kill drug price reform in the Build Back Better Act.

This is the committee that denied Rep Katie Porter a seat on the Finance Committee, despite (or, less charitably, because of) her excellent qualifications and popular ideas for financial reform to protect working Americans.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/16/speaker-willie-sutton/#swampgator

This secret committee doesn’t just choose the leaders of other committees — it also sets the ground-rules and agenda for Democrats in Congress, with duties including assisting in:

“the establishment and implementation of a Democratic policy agenda and legislative priorities”

“policy development and implementation, and message coordination efforts between the Caucus, the whip organization, Members of standing committees, and other Caucus entities”

“ongoing policy development by the Chairs of each of the standing committees”

If the GOP can tell us who’s calling the shots in its Congressional caucus, we should accept no less from the Dems.

That is, if we want the Dems to retain their control over the House, Senate and White House, we need insight into their internal machinations. Otherwise, we’re left to be blindsided by the likes of Kyrsten Sinema, who lied about her willingness to support Biden’s signature legislation and is now refusing to talk about.

After all, politics are changing. As Ryan Grim writes, Synema’s legislation-for-sale “model of politics is outdated, though it has been the dominant form for most of her life.”

https://badnews.substack.com/p/kyrsten-sinemas-long-march-through

The dying model (“the PAC model”) was adopted by Dems in the wake of the Reagan Revolution, led by pro-business “New Democrats.” They repudiated “special interests” (unions, civil rights groups, environmentalists) and courted big corporate dollars.

But the ability of candidates — starting with Howard Dean, then perfected by Obama — to raise giant sums in small-dollar donations sparked a change in Dem politics that’s still underway today. Rather than selling out to wealthy corporations and individuals, they can go to the voters. Voters want policy. Rich people and lobbyists “require coddling, demand intimate access, want internships for their kids, want a dinner and a speech and photo.”

In other words, doing the people’s business in Congress is efficient. Even Chuck Schumer, once proudly known as “Wall St Chuck” is pursuing small-dollar donors in preference to the kinds of big money corruptors who want to call the shots.

Synema’s sellout is hard work. Grim points out “endless stories about Sinema skipping important events in Washington to be at this or that fundraiser and even leaving the country to go to Paris to raise money.”

It netted her $1.1m. By contrast, when Synema was running as a progressive who would tax the rich and promote a progressive agenda, she raised $7m. This is a nationwide phenomenon: backing popular policies makes politicians into small-dollar fundraising powerhouses. Mark Kelly backed the whole Build Back Better agenda and raised $8.2m last quarter. His likely GOP rival, who fundraised on how dangerously radical Kelly is, raised $0.5m.

Synema has been abandoned by the people. Out of her $1.1m raise, only $31.6k came from small-dollar donations. Taking money to do unpopular things is…unpopular?

AOC raised $1.6m backing everything that Synema blocked. Her small-dollar raise is bigger than the entire sum that Synema raised.

In other words: Dems who promote policies that Americans want and need do well. Dems who sell out to big corporations are flailing. But because so much of the Democratic Caucus’s real policy is being made in secret, it’s hard to know which is which.

If we want to fix the Democratic party — turn it into an election-winning, planet-saving, people-first party — we have to know who’s calling the shots, and which shots they’re calling.

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msclaritea · 4 years

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By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 17, 2020 ~

Donald Trump is the man that the libertarian billionaire Charles Koch reluctantly accepted to play Hank Rearden in the Oval Office. Rearden was the fictional character in Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged. The libertarian story line of the novel is that a federal government that grows too big with too many regulations is anathema to the corporate geniuses that should be running the country.

According to Nicholas Confessore, writing for the New York Times in January 2015, the Koch Brothers (Charles and David) and their billionaire minions that meet secretly twice a year at tony resorts to strategize on running the country, agreed to spend upwards of $900 million “to shape a presidential election that is already on track to be the most expensive in history.” This, writes Confessore, would allow the Koch machine to “operate at the same financial scale as the Democratic and Republican Parties.”

Once Trump was in the Oval Office, the Koch machine, known then as Freedom Partners, wasted no time in laying out its agenda for Trump to follow. In a document titled “Roadmap to Repeal: Removing Regulatory Barriers to Opportunity,” the Koch front group lists the laws and regulations it expects to be repealed in the first 100 days of his administration. And like a dutiful courtier, the Trump administration responded quickly. Repeal the Paris Climate Accord – done. Tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy – done. Gutting federal regulations and the Environmental Protection Agency – lots accomplished there.

Not only did Freedom Partners get its wish list checked off but its minions were invited into key jobs in the Trump administration to hasten the agenda. SourceWatch reported that as of April, 2018, 12 people who previously worked at Freedom Partners were working in the Trump administration.

One of those was Marc Short, previously President of Freedom Partners, who became Director of Legislative Affairs for Trump. Short is now Chief of Staff to Vice President Mike Pence.

Kellyanne Conway, the TV defender-in-chief for the Trump administration, previously consulted for Freedom Partners, according to the public watchdog, Public Citizen. Then there was that inexplicable hiring by Trump of 12 Jones Day lawyers on the very day of his inauguration on January 20, 2017. According to Public Citizen, two of the main hires from Jones Day, White House Counsel Don McGahn and Ann Donaldson, Chief of Staff to McGahn, both previously represented Freedom Partners.

The Koch brothers (David died on August 23, 2019) were majority owners of the private fossil fuels company, Koch Industries. Charles Koch remains its Chairman and CEO. In July of 2018, when we investigated Freedom Partners and the Koch’s massive voter data operation called i360 for the news site CounterPunch, we found this:

“All but one of Freedom Partners’ 9-member Board of Directors is a current or former Koch company employee. The Board Chair is the same Mark Holden that is the General Counsel of Koch Industries.”

A previous Koch-related corporate front group, Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), which split into Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks in 2004, was established in 1984 by David Koch and Richard Fink, who worked as an executive for Koch Industries from 1990 until his retirement in 2016. According to the in-depth research report, “To quarterback behind the scenes, third-party efforts’: the tobacco industry and the Tea Party,” Citizens for a Sound Economy “supported the agendas of the tobacco and other industries, including oil, chemical, pharmaceutical and telecommunications, and was funded by them.”

According to a recent report by Reuters, the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) took up to $1 million from the Paycheck Protection Program. The nonprofit has been heavily funded by Koch foundation money for years as well as other corporate interests. According to ARI’s 2019 Annual Report, as a result of its shipping out free Ayn Rand books like Atlas Shrugged to high school and college students for years, it estimates “that more than 300,000 students now read Ayn Rand each year.”

In 2010 it was revealed that corporate money was contractually mandating the reading and teaching of Ayn Rand books at publicly funded universities. Gary H. Jones, an Associate Professor in the College of Business at Western Carolina University, wrote about the scandal in the July-August 2010 issue of Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors. Jones wrote this:

“Recent donations from the charitable arm of BB&T, one of the nation’s largest banks, have raised the issue of external influence…At the center of the concerns about these donations is the requirement that objectivist Ayn Rand’s novels be taught in special courses extolling capitalism and self-interest…the BB&T gifts raise questions of both substance and procedure. Faculty members at several universities did not even know of the gifts or that BB&T’s donations had curricular implications until after the agreements were signed. At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, for example, three years passed before faculty members learned that a million-dollar gift agreement establishing a new course contained language requiring both that Rand’s lengthy paean to laissez-faire capitalism, Atlas Shrugged, be assigned reading and that professors who teach that course ‘have a positive interest in and be well versed in Objectivism.’ ”

If Trump allowed the federal government to become the hero in saving the American people from the ravages of COVID-19, he would be undermining decades of Koch money infused into politics and the economics departments of colleges and universities across America to brainwash the public that big government is evil and only the corporations can save us.

So this is what Trump did: he refused to formally invoke the Defense Production Act but allowed all of the wonderful Hank Reardens in corporate America to voluntarily manufacture masks and ventilators.

Trump refused to issue a federal order for mask wearing because that is a federal regulation and he was put in the Oval Office to gut federal regulations, not impose more.

Even after a study by Victor Chernozhukov of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Hiroyuki Kasahara and Paul Schrimpf of the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver School of Economics found that 40,000 lives could have been saved in a two-month period if there had been a federal mandate for employees working in public-facing businesses to wear masks, and the policy had been strictly obeyed, Trump issued no federal order on masks.

In fact, until just recently, Trump undermined the public’s wearing of masks by repeatedly appearing in public, and at mass indoor rallies, without wearing a mask.

He did this because this is what Kochs’ money infused into right-wing groups like the Tea Party for decades necessitated that he do. Without those right-wing supporters, there would be no one showing up at his rallies or voting for him on November 3.

Until mainstream media accurately confronts the corporate demons that reside in Donald Trump’s head, the nation will continue sliding into the pandemic pit from hell.

#Trump #doing the bidding of rich Libertarians #Koch Oil #Data collecting #Ayn Rand Brainwash #covid_19

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theculturedmarxist · 3 years

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Powerful hospital and physician groups that tied up Congress for nearly two years on how to end “surprise” medical bills saw their efforts pay off with the compromise lawmakers inserted in the giant year-end spending package.

The health care providers — including private-equity backed physician staffing groups — chipped away at leading legislative proposals through high-profile lobbying and tens of millions of dollars worth of attack ads while promoting a solution that would submit their payment feuds with insurers to independent mediators.

The compromise in the year-end package settles what was supposed to be health care’s “easy fix” in the 116th Congress and ensures patients will no longer have to pay huge bills from out-of-network specialists, air ambulances and other clinicians. But it also underscores the clout of corporate medicine at a time when the health system and safety net programs are reeling from the effects of the pandemic.

Elizabeth Mitchell, president of the Pacific Business Group on Health, which represents large employers including Walmart and major tech companies, predicted the legislation will yield an “opaque, expensive bureaucratic process” favoring “those with the resources to navigate that most effectively.”

“These bills will still end up driving up premiums overall,” Mitchell said.

Patient advocates and policy experts have framed the policy battle over these reforms as a microcosm for why fixes to the U.S. health care system are so hard — and a grim harbinger for more ambitious overhauls, like President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign promise to create a public health insurance option.

There was always strong bipartisan interest in addressing the billing issue. The problem was the way it divided health interests intent on avoiding picking up the extra cost of holding patients harmless.

Last year, leaders of the House Energy and Commerce and Senate health committees proposed settling disputes by pegging payments for providers to a federal benchmark payment based on in-network rates insurers paid for services and procedures. Doctor and hospital groups quickly raised the specter of “government rate-setting.” Meanwhile, conservatives pounced on the approach as the equivalent of price controls, saying it could also be a prelude to “Medicare for All.”

“There was a great amount of emphasis placed on making the term government rate-setting a politically toxic term,” said a consultant to provider groups.

The idea of outside arbitration instead played well with a vocal contingent of physician-lawmakers in Congress who backed a federal replica of New York’s own approach to settling billing disputes — using “baseball-style arbitration.” Critics say that policy has encouraged hospitals to charge more for care, which patients eventually pay for in the form of higher premiums.

Even in the last few days, providers secured changes from Congress to adjust the arbitration process and help boost their profits. Technical fixes, obtained Sunday by POLITICO, prevent independent mediators from considering the lower rates of Medicare and Medicaid when deciding how much money providers should get for their services.

Chip Kahn, CEO of the Federation of American Hospitals representing for-profit chains, said negotiators "came a long way” in recent days. He said his group could endorse the final version after it eliminated what he termed efforts to influence the payments providers get from the insurers in their network or insurers they're contracted with. “That wasn’t appropriate,” Kahn said.

Other provider groups like the private equity-backed physician staffing firm TeamHealth, which spent millions of dollars attacking the benchmark payment approach, have praised the agreement — while health insurer and employer lobbyists see it as a Pyrrhic victory.

One insurance lobbyist said the outcome showed how private equity-backed physician groups and hospitals dictate policy, adding,“For consumers, this will mean higher and higher costs, year over year, forever.”

The grinding nature of the debate and the tight congressional schedule also worked in the providers' favor. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, tired of infighting among powerful committee leaders, forced Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.) back to the negotiating table just days after he said he wanted to punt on addressing sky-high medical bills until next year, according to multiple sources. Neal's efforts were essential to making the bill more friendly to doctors and hospitals.

The fighting won’t end once the legislation is signed. Since the federal health agencies will have the ultimate say in how the mediation system works, the special interest lobbying will turn next to the executive branch, where the incoming Biden administration will be in charge of writing the rules. And the legislation still doesn't bar ground ambulances from sending massive bills to insured patients.

“Who ultimately wins and loses is something we’ll not know for years,” said Benedic Ippolito, an economist with the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute who consulted with key health committees on the legislation. “And what I worry about is, what does an arbitration system look like in five to 10 years when this isn’t under a microscope?”

The spending deal puts guardrails in place. Mediators can't weigh the sky-high charges providers bill when settling on the amount insurers will have to pay for their customers’ out-of-network care. But arbitrators also can't consider Medicare rates, which employer groups and others wanted to serve as the price peg in order to curb costs.

Loren Adler, who also consulted with Congress on the reforms as associate director for the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy, is optimistic the system will work out as envisioned. While an arbiter adds complexity to the process, he sees the rules Congress put in place as sufficient to keep costs in check.

For instance, he noted, providers have to space out their appeals of settlements, meaning their incomes would dry up if they fought every payment. “It’s unclear how a provider can game the process,” Adler said.

House Energy and Commerce Chair Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), who helped steer the reforms over the past 18 months, heralded the compromise as “the biggest victory for consumers” since Obamacare for the way it relieves patients from having to worry about getting shocked with a huge bill.

And though surprise billing headlined a host of patient protection reforms originally pushed by Senate health committee Chair Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.), other policy changes aimed at stopping anti-competitive practices among health insurers, hospitals, prescription drug middlemen and the pharmaceutical industry were either watered down or axed — to the chagrin of employer and patient groups that badly wanted them.

“They folded on every single issue that mattered to those of us who actually wanted to lower health care costs,” one employer lobbyist said.

#democrats #us healthcare #universal healthcare #universal health insurance #universal health coverage #universal health services

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antoine-roquentin · 5 years

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Each year, state lawmakers across the U.S. introduce thousands of bills dreamed up and written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks.

Disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called “model” bills get copied in one state Capitol after another, quietly advancing the agenda of the people who write them.

A two-year investigation by USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic  and the Center for Public Integrity reveals for the first time the extent to which special interests have infiltrated state legislatures using model legislation.

USA TODAY and the Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.

The investigation examined nearly 1 million bills in all 50 states and Congress using a computer algorithm developed to detect similarities in language. That search – powered by the equivalent of 150 computers that ran nonstop for months – compared known model legislation with bills introduced by lawmakers.

The phenomenon of copycat legislation is far larger. In a separate analysis, the Center for Public Integrity identified tens of thousands of bills with identical phrases, then traced the origins of that language in dozens of those bills across the country.

Model bills passed into law have made it harder for injured consumers to sue corporations. They’ve called for taxes on sugar-laden drinks. They’ve limited access to abortion and restricted the rights of protesters.

In all, these copycat bills amount to the nation’s largest, unreported special-interest campaign, driving agendas in every statehouse and touching nearly every area of public policy.

The investigation reveals that fill-in-the-blank bills have in some states supplanted the traditional approach of writing legislation from scratch. They have become so intertwined with the lawmaking process that the nation’s top sponsor of copycat legislation, a member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, claimed to have signed on to 72 such bills without knowing or questioning their origin.

For lawmakers, copying model legislation is an easy way to get fully formed bills to put their names on, while building relationships with lobbyists and other potential campaign donors.

For special interests seeking to stay under the radar, model legislation also offers distinct advantages. Copycat bills don’t appear on expense reports, or campaign finance forms. They don’t require someone to register as a lobbyist or sign in at committee hearings. But once injected into the lawmaking process, they can go viral, spreading state to state, executing an agenda to the letter.

USA TODAY’s investigation found:

•Models are drafted with deceptive titles and descriptions to disguise their true intent. The Asbestos Transparency Act didn’t help people exposed to asbestos. It was written by corporations who wanted to make it harder for victims to recoup money. The “HOPE Act,” introduced in nine states, was written by a conservative advocacy group to make it more difficult for people to get food stamps.

•Special interests sometimes work to create the illusion of expert endorsements, public consensus or grassroots support. One man testified as an expert in 13 states to support a bill that makes it more difficult to sue for asbestos exposure. In several states, lawmakers weren’t told that he was a member of the organization that wrote the model legislation on behalf of the asbestos industry, the American Legislative Exchange Council.

•Bills copied from model legislation have been used to override the will of local voters and their elected leaders. Cities and counties have raised their minimum wage, banned plastic bags and destroyed seized guns, only to have industry groups that oppose such measures make them illegal with model bills passed in state legislatures. Among them: Airbnb has supported the conservative Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, which pushed model bills to strike down local laws limiting short-term rentals in residential neighborhoods in four states.

•Industry groups have had extraordinary success pushing copycat bills that benefit themselves. More than 4,000 such measures were introduced during the period analyzed by USA TODAY/Arizona Republic. One that passed in Wisconsin limited pain-and-suffering compensation for injured nursing-home residents, restricting payouts to lost wages, which the elderly residents don’t have.

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azspot · 5 years

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Each year, state lawmakers across the U.S. introduce thousands of bills dreamed up and written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks.

Disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called “model” bills get copied in one state Capitol after another, quietly advancing the agenda of the people who write them.

#cultureofcorruption #corporatism

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berniesrevolution · 5 years

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IN THESE TIMES

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE ESTABLISHED ORDER ARE CRACKING.

The day after democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her Democratic primary last June, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary reported a 1,500 percent increase in searches for the word “socialism” on its website. Overall, socialism and fascism have become its most-searched words—a telling commentary. In the midterm elections, Ocasio-Cortez and another charismatic democratic socialist, Rashid Tlaib (D-Mich.), won seats in the House, and universal healthcare emerged as a potent, unifying issue that helped deliver Democrats control of that chamber.

The cornerstone of the passing era is hostility toward taxes, regulation and public investment. The era began with the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980, but it was a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who expressed its motto most memorably. “The era of big government is over,” Clinton proclaimed in his 1996 State of the Union. The white flag of surrender has flown over the Democratic Party ever since, with an all-too-brief interlude during Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign.

Perversely, it was a demagogic Republican who sensed the emergence of a new era and rode its currents to the White House. He may be a liar and a charlatan, but Donald Trump’s election-turning insight was that voters don’t want smaller government. They want government that works for them—and not for corporations. In addition to xenophobia and white Christian nationalism, Trump campaigned on massive infrastructure investment, “great” healthcare for everyone, taking on the pharmaceutical industry and “draining the swamp” of political corruption. Similar (but authentic) platforms of robust public investments and checks on corporate power have turned Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders into political sensations.

At least on paper, even the Democratic Party seems to be catching on that corruption—defined as the capture of government by wealth and special interests—is the new “big government.” In May, Democratic leadership released a three-page plan for “fixing our broken political system and returning to a government of, by, and for the people,” promising to beef up ethics laws and “combat big money influence.” If these promises are to be anything more than empty gestures, though, there is a long way to go. A May analysis by OpenSecrets showed that incumbent congressional Democrats had taken an average of $29,000 apiece from lobbyists since 2017, while Republicans had taken $30,000. In August, the Democratic National Committee overturned a ban on contributions from fossil fuel companies.

Universal healthcare is a case study in how the current system saps the energy for pushing major legislation through Congress. The majority of Democrats claim to want Medicare for All, but centrist Democrats, beholden to the insurance and hospital industries, are content to tweak Obamacare; they only support universal coverage by some vague mechanism, at some uncertain point.

Progressives, meanwhile, began rallying behind specific legislation in 2015: Medicare for All bills in the House and Senate. Local chapters of organizations like Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and National Nurses United began pushing for single-payer bills in individual states, helping move the issue into the national debate.

That split within the Democratic Party, multiplied across a range of issues, is an unmistakable sign of transformation. The Left is in a phase of intense institution-building similar to that of the Right in the 1970s and ’80s, with new and newly energized think tanks—Demos, Data for Progress, the Roosevelt Institute and the Democracy Collaborative, among others—and an electoral infrastructure made up of groups like DSA, People’s Action, Justice Democrats, Our Revolution and Working Families Party.

This progressive resurgence is reflected, as well, in the landscape of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. The five probable contenders in the Senate—Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren—have among the Senate’s most left-leaning voting records, and they’re vying to distinguish themselves by introducing progressive legislation.

Gillibrand is the most striking example, and the best measure of where the Democratic Party’s energy lies. Once a centrist, she has tacked steadily left in recent years and is now one of the party’s leading voices for the #MeToo movement and immigration reform, in addition to becoming an energetic economic populist. In April, for example, she introduced a bill to require that post offices offer basic banking services, like checking and savings accounts and low-interest loans. It’s a partial solution to the abuses of the payday loan industry that could help the estimated 9 million “unbanked” people in the United States.

The effects of all this, as with the effects of the “Reagan revolution” of 1980, will take decades to fully manifest. But they will likely radiate out and reshape our politics for a generation and beyond.

“VALUE VOTERS”

The Republican ascendancy of the past 40 years has been driven by a network of institutions bankrolled by wealthy donors and corporate interests, harnessed to the conservative movement’s passion for a few key issues, especially its hatred of abortion, same-sex marriage and public education. Over the decades, the Heritage Foundation and other quasi-scholarly institutions, in sync with popular rightwing media operations, have given conservatives a unified agenda and framed it as an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. Broadly, the goal was to radically limit the federal government’s involvement in the economy and vastly expand its power to legislate Christian Right morality.

In the 1990s, the Democratic establishment’s “third way” exposed the party’s lack of a similar set of principles. The heart of the third-way paradigm was the idea that the Democratic Party could survive the libertarian and “values voter” onslaught only by meeting the GOP halfway, tacking between right-wing interests and the common good. Bill Clinton’s most influential policy successes, like the North American Free Trade Agreement, the welfare reform bill of 1996 and deregulation of the financial services sector, tended to serve corporate interests while betraying working-class and minority voters.

The Occupy movement of 2011, which pushed economic inequality front and center, was the first sign of a tectonic shift in our politics. The Sanders campaign of 2015-16 was the second. Both cast inequality as a moral outrage, with the same urgency and fierceness that evangelicals bring to the abortion debate. Writing in the Guardian, Sanders denounced oligarchy and called income inequality “the great moral, economic and political issue of our time.”

And it isn’t only about economic inequality. The nation’s moral imagination is broadening as inequality writ large takes center stage. We know too much about the consequences of climate change, especially in the most vulnerable communities, for it not to be a moral issue. The same is true of access to quality education. The many videos of police abuse, the stories of sexual assault, and the protests and movements they spawned—#MeToo, Black Lives Matter, NFL players taking a knee— have helped to galvanize and focus the progressive resurgence, along with Trump’s demonization of racial and religious minorities and his pride in sexual assault and misogyny.

“The old perceived trade-off, between appealing to a broad middle of the electorate and having a transformative agenda, is becoming outdated as progressives coalesce around ideas that speak to the people who’ve been excluded from our system,” says Adam Lioz, political director at Demos Action. “It’s an exciting moment in progressive politics, in that candidates recognize that putting forward a bold platform is actually the pragmatic thing to do.”

This is how new political eras emerge. Just as the capture of government by special interests in the 19th century provoked the rise of the Progressive movement, the pervasive corruption of our politics is now reinvigorating it. The evangelical Right's passion hasn’t faded, but its focus on sex and reproduction no longer dominates national discussions about morality. To talk about inequality and corruption is to talk about right and wrong, fairness and justice. We are all “values voters” now.

Translating progressive values and votes into policy is the task ahead. That can seem like a nearly hopeless prospect, given the current makeup of Congress and the Supreme Court. But it starts with putting forward a strong agenda to frame the debate. That’s what the conservative movement did for the Republican Party in the 1970s and ’80s. Across a range of issues—notably economic injustice, climate change, state violence against minorities and corrupt elections—it’s what the progressive movement is doing for the Democratic Party right now.

ECONOMIC INJUSTICE

With about 28 million people still uninsured in the United States—and with medical bills the leading cause of bankruptcy—the radical inequalities of the healthcare system remain one of the nation’s great moral failures. The number of cosponsors of the single-payer Medicare for All bill in the House, HR 676, is a measure of how decisively leftward the consensus has shifted. From 2013 to 2015, the number of cosponsors fell by one, from 63 to 62. It has since nearly doubled, to 123.

The campaign for a higher minimum wage, led most prominently by Fight for $15, has, since 2014, put struggles of minimum-wage workers front and center, winning a $15 wage in at least 35 cities, states and counties. In 2017, Democrats in the House and Senate introduced the Raise the Wage Act, which would hike the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2024 and index it to the median wage after that.

Warren and Sanders are the highest-profile progressive advocates in this realm. If either runs in 2020, they will help to set the terms of the debate. Warren has already released a proposal requiring that 40 percent of a corporation’s board of directors be elected by workers, known as “codetermination.” It would also require that social interests, not just shareholder interests, be a key factor in corporations’ decision making.

Warren’s proposal has no chance of becoming law anytime soon, but it has planted a flag for a radical idea (in the U.S. context), attracted media coverage, provoked discussion and shaped the debate over how capitalism is practiced. It’s a prime example of how ideas become mainstream, legislative agendas are formed, and a party out of power remains relevant.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #in these times #progressive #progressive movement #2020 election #democrats #democratic party #bernie sanders #elizabeth warren #alexandria ocasio-cortez #democratic socialism

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awriter314 · 5 years

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Welcome to the party, USA Today. Many of us noticed this phenomenon about twenty years ago, albeit those laws were written by special interest groups like the NRA instead of for-profit corporations, though the latter have always felt free to share their “expertise” with legislators.

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baddog9876 · 3 years

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CTH 2.0 Site Status Update, Information, User Issue Reporting Thread…

Posted originally on The conservative Tree house on December 2, 2020 by Sundance As we work through bugs associated with CTH 2.0 launch, consider this a thread to provide information, report user issues, ideas and concerns. Please read the information provided below as it might answer many questions in advance. Today, December 2nd, was our official eviction date as established by…

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centinel2001 · 4 years

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Oh Dear, Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie Touches the Third Rail – Reveals DC’s Biggest Secret…

Posted originally on The Conservative Tree House on April 28, 2020 by sundance

Oh dear, he’s telling secrets. You see, congress doesn’t actually write

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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Dems want to give $600b to the one percent

Remember when a group of establishment Congressional Democrats vowed that they would add means-testing to the emergency relief checks so that "the money wouldn't go to people who didn't need it?"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/03/biden-stimulus-checks-what-you-need-to-know/

The argument that federal relief should target the 99% and not the 1% is a familiar - and defensible - one. The Trump #taxscam handed trillions to the richest Americans, triggering stock buybacks:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/23/business/investment-boom-tax-cuts-economy/index.html

and a superyacht bubble:

https://www.propublica.org/article/superyacht-marina-west-palm-beach-opportunity-zone-trump-tax-break-to-help-the-poor-went-to-a-rich-gop-donor

But it delivered no meaningful benefit to everyday Americans.

Now, that said, there *was* one area of the Trump tax bill that targeted the wealthy: the State and Local Tax (SALT) Cap, which capped SALT deductions at $10,000.

That meant that taxpayers could only write off the first $10k of their state and local tax. In practice, this affected very wealthy Americans, predominantly those living in large, high-property-value cities, which has substantial overlap with rich Democratic donors.

That's the only reason for Trump's SALT Cap, and it's a stupid and spiteful reason: passing a tax that targets the wealthy because of partisanship is bad.

But taxing the wealthy is, in fact, good. Trump set out to do something bad and did something good, in other words.

Now, a group of Dems - many of the same Dems who held up the stimulus because they didn't want to send $1600 to the underserving wealthy - are holding the $2t infrastructure plan hostage and demanding that the SALT Cap be repealed.

And while they claim a SALT Cap repeal would benefit the middle class, it disproportionately and vastly benefits the ultra-rich: 86% of the benefit of the repeal would go to the top 5% of US earners.

https://itep.org/salt-cap-repeal-has-no-place-in-covid-19-legislation-national-and-state-by-state-data/

Under a SALT Cap repeal, households earning more than $1m/year getting $48k in extra cash:

Meanwhile, 98% of middle-class households with incomes of $50-75k would get *nothing*. The 2% who got something would average *$250*.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/salt-cap-repeal-would-overwhelmingly-benefit-high-income-households

Lifting the SALT Cap is a powerfully regressive move. It is *three times more regressive* than the Trump tax plan - that is 300% more tilted in favor of the wealthy.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/09/04/the-salt-tax-deduction-is-a-handout-to-the-rich-it-should-be-eliminated-not-expanded/

Lifting the SALT Cap has nothing to do with the middle class. For starters, the SALT deduction only applies to people who itemize expenses, rather than taking the standard deduction. 92% of the top 1% of earners do that (it's only 5% of the 40th-60th earning percentile).

It's possible that there are people in especially expensive cities in "blue states" for whom the SALT Cap is a burden - people at the lowest threshold of beneficiaries of a repeal who really are financially stretched.

If that's our concern, there's an easy, non-regressive fix - *raise*, but don't repeal, the cap. If $10k is too low, make it $15k, or even $20k. But by making the cap unlimited, we ensure that the wildly disproportionate beneficiaries of the change are the ultra-*ultra* rich.

As David Sirota points out, this maneuver - claiming that a tax-break for the super-rich is really about the middle class - comes straight out of the GOP playbook. It's how Republicans sold cuts to the estate tax:

https://www.dailyposter.com/p/dems-somehow-pretend-this-mostly

That move - like the ones Dems are making now - made it much easier for the ultra-wealthy to make vast, tax-advantaged intergenerational wealth transfers, creating the rentier dynasties that now crouch on the political system's chest, sucking up all the oxygen.

Just to be clear: "there is no state where this is a primarily middle-class issue."

https://itep.org/dems-dont-repeal-the-salt-cap-do-this-instead/

The cuts will transfer $600b, primarily to the highest earners, over the next 9 years:

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/model-estimates/repeal-10000-state-and-local-tax-salt-deduction-limitation-sep-2018/repeal-10000

That's $600b worth of giveaways to the rich from the party that couldn't muster the political will to include a $15 minimum wage and that fretted endlessly about whether the $1400 stimulus (down from $2000) might go to someone in the middle class.

And while the "SALT Caucus" of Dems who are holding the infrastructure bill hostage to the super rich are a rogues' gallery of establishment, corporate Dems from high-tax states (Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, etc), the roster includes some otherwise progressive heroes.

Progressive Californian lawmakers like Ro Khanna and Katie Porter have both called on Biden to lift the cap entirely (though they've stopped short of promising to hold up the infrastructure bill), as have NY Democratic "insurgents" like Jamaal Bowman and Mondaire Jones.

Some progressives, though, have kept the faith. Even as the entire NY Democratic caucus signed a letter calling for a SALT Cap repeal, AOC and Kathleen Rice refused.

https://www.salon.com/2021/04/28/key-democrats-want-to-keep-most-of-trumps-corporate-tax-cut--and-slash-more-taxes-for-the-rich/

Trump's tax cuts supercharged inequality and created a destructive, speculative finance-bubble by handing permanent tax gifts to the people who needed them the least. A full repeal of the SALT Cap is even more plute-friendly than Trump's plan.

The fact that Trump passed a SALT Cap out of spite is irrelevant. America's inequality crisis demands an end to regressive measures, including the special treatment of capital gains and carried interest, which gives tax advantages to speculators and punishes wage-earners.

Democrats will not win elections or change our political conversation with business-as-usual handouts to the super-rich in the hopes of winning campaign contributions. They have the money, we have the people.

Dems cannot win by being the party of the wealthy. The Republicans have that one on lock.

Image: Andrey Korchagin (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/peer_gynt/34760026411

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

#pluralistic

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theliberaltony · 5 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to a weekly collaboration between FiveThirtyEight and ABC News. With 5,000 people seemingly thinking about challenging President Trump in 2020 — Democrats and even some Republicans — we’re keeping tabs on the field as it develops. Each week, we’ll run through what the potential candidates are up to — who’s getting closer to officially jumping in the ring and who’s getting further away.

There are still a number potential candidates whose entrance into the 2020 field could shake up an already crowded race, and it appears many of them are coming close to revealing their plans.

There’s former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who ruled out a 2020 Senate run this week, but whose celebrity status and fundraising ability could catapult him to the top of the field.

There’s former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is reportedly looking at New York City campaign office space. And his appeal to political moderates and billions of dollars would allow him to run a self-funded campaign, where he would not be beholden to donors and money would never be a concern.

And there’s former Vice President Joe Biden, who said his family is on board, and whose strength in name-recognition and political experience has made him a de facto favorite since the day President Donald Trump won election in 2016.

While other presidential candidates are beginning to settle into their campaign routines, it won’t be long until the decisions of these three players, and several more, refresh the field and force everyone else to recalibrate their strategies.

Here’s the weekly candidate roundup:

Feb. 22-28, 2019

Stacey Abrams (D) In a podcast interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Abrams said that she is “considering” a run for Senate in 2020 against incumbent Georgia Republican Sen. David Perdue.

Michael Bennet (D) During a trip to Iowa last weekend, Bennet told the Des Moines Register that he is “leaning toward” entering the presidential race. The newspaper also reported that he spent much of his four stops in the Hawkeye State speaking about education — Bennet was the superintendent of Denver Public Schools for four years.

“I think we need an education president,” Bennet told the Register. “There’s no public good that’s more important than education.”

Joe Biden (D) Biden said Tuesday at a University of Delaware event that his family has signed-off on a presidential run, explaining that after a “family meeting,” there was a “consensus.”

“The most important people in my life want me to run,” the former vice president said.

As for the timeline of his own decision, Biden revealed that he is in the “final stages” of the process and told the New York Times that a potential campaign would begin during the year’s second quarter.

“It’s something that I have to make sure that I could run a first-rate effort to do this and make clear where I think the country should go and how to get there,” he said publicly. “That’s the process going on right now. That’s as straightforward as I can be. I have not made the final decision, but don’t be surprised.”

Michael Bloomberg (D) Bloomberg picked up a preemptive endorsement from fellow billionaire Warren Buffett, who revealed his affinity for the former New York City mayor in an interview with CNBC.

“I think that he knows how to run things, I think that he’s got the right goals for America, he understands people, he understands the market system,” Buffett said.

Politico reported Thursday that representatives of Bloomberg were beginning to look at office space in New York City and interviewing potential staffers.

Bloomberg stopped in Nevada Tuesday to praise the state’s new gun background check law. During a news conference related to the legislation he noted that he was still undecided on a presidential run.

(Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada via AP) Former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg addresses a group of business and government leaders at the Asia Pacific Foundation in Toronto, Jan. 15, 2019.

Cory Booker (D) Booker introduced legislation Thursday that would legalize marijuana at the federal level, and was joined by several 2020 rivals, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Kristen Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who cosponsored the bill.

In a statement, the New Jersey senator noted that the “war on drugs,” disproportionately affected “people of color and low-income individuals.”

On Tuesday, Booker earned the first endorsement from an Iowa state lawmaker, courtesy of state Rep. Amy Nielsen, who pointed to their shared experiences as mayors and his “message of optimism and unity.”

After making his first visit to Nevada last weekend, Booker travels to South Carolina Friday and Saturday and will speak in Selma, Alabama Sunday in commemoration of the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” march.

Sherrod Brown (D) Brown took his “dignity of work” message to Nevada earlier this week, where he said that if he chooses to run for president, he’ll be “the most pro-union candidate.”

“We will have a government on the side of workers, not a government on the side of big corporations,” the Ohio senator told members of the Culinary Union Saturday in Las Vegas.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, however, Brown said he has yet to reach a final decision on a presidential run, but would do so by the end of March.

Pete Buttigieg (D) During a visit to California, the South Bend, Indiana mayor told the San Francisco Chronicle that Democrats need to talk more about their values, and ultimately could make the presidential election solely a referendum about Trump.

“We’ve got to have a message that makes sense and that recognizes that this president is going to come and go. So it can’t be all about him,” Buttigieg said.

Buttigieg heads back to Iowa Monday for his second visit since announcing his presidential exploratory committee, with events in Davenport, Iowa City and Cedar Rapids.

Julian Castro (D) Castro described himself as the “antithesis of Donald Trump” in an interview with the Salt Lake Tribune, saying that he was working to end the country’s divisions and demonstrate “honesty and integrity.”

The former Housing and Urban Development secretary further said he was going to visit all 50 states as part of his presidential campaign, adding four to his list in the past week with stops in Utah, Idaho and Nevada after a road trip through Iowa last weekend.

(Mary Schwalm/AP) Julian Castro, former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, speaks at Saint Anselm College, Jan. 16, 2019, in Manchester, N.H.

Bill de Blasio (D) The New York City mayor visited Iowa last weekend, where he spoke to a crowd of 40 people at a union hall and met with former Gov. Tom Vilsack.

De Blasio acknowledged that he is “not a candidate at this moment,” but argued that Democrats “have to have a progressive as our nominee.”

“We have to be able to speak to working people across our whole country,” he continued. “We also have to have a nominee who is believable as a leader in such an important position.”

John Delaney (D) Delaney visited Clemson University in South Carolina Wednesday where he shared his idea for a national service program, discussed developing a national artificial intelligence strategy and was complimentary of the Trump administration’s efforts to engage with North Korea — though noted he was concerned the president would make a “terrible deal,” according to The Greenville News.

Kirsten Gillibrand (D) Gillibrand defended a planned fundraiser at a pharmaceutical executive’s home where tickets cost upwards of $1,000 during a Fox News interview on Monday, saying that the executive in question was a long-time friend and that it was the influence of corporate political action committees that was more problematic.

“I think you do need to get money out of politics,” the New York senator said. “The most important thing we have to do is upend the way our democracy functions. Today, the wealthiest most powerful lobbyists and special interests groups get to write bills in the dead of night.”

In the interview, Gillibrand further labelled climate change “the greatest threat to humanity we have” and compared ambitious efforts, such as the Green New Deal, to combat the issue to the challenge of putting a man on the moon in the 1960s.

Kamala Harris (D) The California senator made headlines Tuesday when she told The Root that she believed sex work should be decriminalized, though cautioned that the issue wasn’t “as simple as that.”

“There is an ecosystem around that that includes crimes that harm people, and for those issues, I do not believe that anybody who hurts another human being or profits off of their exploitation should be free of criminal prosecution,” Harris said. “But when you’re talking about consenting adults, we should consider that we can’t criminalize consensual behavior.”

After spending last weekend in Iowa, Harris made her first visit to Nevada as a presidential candidate Thursday to hold a town hall and participate in the Black Enterprise Women of Power Summit.

John Hickenlooper (D) The former Colorado governor continues to take steps towards a presidential run, expected to be announced some time in early March. Last weekend, Hickenlooper held meet-and-greet events in Sioux City and Carroll, Iowa, and spoke at the Story County Democrats’ Annual Soup Dinner.

A spokesperson for Hickenlooper told the Associated Press that he has raised over $1 million for his political action committee.

(Brennan Linsley/AP Photo) Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper delivers his annual State of the State address to lawmakers and guests, inside the state legislature, in Denver, Jan. 14, 2016.

Larry Hogan (R) As speculation grows that the Maryland governor could launch a challenge to Trump, Hogan asked in a Washington Post interview why the Republican National Committee was taking steps to declare its support for the president and potentially shutdown primaries.

“If he has unanimous support and everybody is on board, why shut down the normal process?” Hogan said. “It’s almost like a hostage situation.”

Referring to the governor specifically on Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel said that any other potential challengers to Trump “have the right to jump in and lose.”

Jay Inslee (D) The Washington governor is expected to launch a presidential campaign within days, teasing as much during an appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation” last weekend, and telling NBC that he’s made up his mind.

“I’ve been pleased by what I’ve been hearing across the country, that people do want a president that will act on a real emergency which is climate change,” Inslee said on CBS. “Look, we’re fighting real emergencies. The forest fires that are consuming the western United States. They need a president who will rally the nation to a clean energy economy.”

The governor went on to say that climate change would be his “number one priority.”

Amy Klobuchar (D) Klobuchar faced criticism after a New York Times report last Friday detailed her treatment of her staff, including throwing binders and phones in frustration and forcing an aide to clean a comb she used to eat a salad on a plane when it was brought to her without a fork. The senator’s defenders have characterized the anecdotes as inflated and claimed that as a female politician, Klobuchar was being held to a higher standard of behavior than her male counterparts.

The senator spent last weekend campaigning in South Carolina and New Hampshire, after a visit to Georgia where she met with former President Jimmy Carter.

Beto O’Rourke (D) The former Texas congressman said Thursday that he has reached a decision about his political future, but that it won’t include a challenge of Republican Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who is up for reelection in 2020.

Though O’Rourke did not yet reveal whether that decision includes a presidential campaign, The Dallas Morning News reported that he is likely to enter the race and could make such an announcement in the next few weeks.

Bernie Sanders (D) During a CNN town hall, Sanders shared rare praise for Trump, ahead of his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, describing the summit as a “good idea” if it leads to eventual denuclearization. The Vermont senator further outlined his Medicare-for-all plan, pledged higher corporate tax rates and said that the allegations of sexual harassment within his 2016 campaign were “very painful” and “will not happen again.”

Sanders also pledged to support the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nominee, no matter who that person is, because “Trump has got to be defeated.”

Just over one week after launching his campaign, Sanders is holding rallies in Brooklyn and Chicago this weekend, with a stop in between in Selma, Alabama to speak at the Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King Unity Breakfast, which is honoring his former 2016 rival Hillary Clinton.

(AP) In this Oct. 30, 2018 file photo, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks at a campaign rally in Bethesda, Md.

Elizabeth Warren (D) Warren announced Monday that she will not hold private events that are limited to major donors.

“That means no fancy receptions or big money fundraisers only with people who can write the big checks,” she wrote in a post on Medium. “And when I thank the people giving to my campaign, it will not be based on the size of their donation. It means that wealthy donors won’t be able to purchase better seats or one-on-one time with me at our events. And it means I won’t be doing “call time,” which is when candidates take hours to call wealthy donors to ask for their support.”

In the midst of Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen’s testimony on Capitol Hill Wednesday, the Massachusetts senator said that if she is elected president “there will be no pardons for anyone implicated in these investigations.”

After visiting New Hampshire last weekend, Warren will spend Friday and Saturday in Iowa, with events in Dubuque, Elkader and Waterloo.

Andrew Yang (D) In an interview with WMUR in New Hampshire, Yang said he was concerned about the ages of some of his presidential opponents and potential rivals, citing Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and former Vice President Joe Biden, who are 77 and 76 years old, respectively. He added that Trump’s 72 years are “probably playing into his mental health.”

“I do think that given the importance of the position, it would make sense to have some sort of transparency where if someone is past a certain age, then there should be some sort of physical or some sort of health report,” Yang added.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Adam Kelsey

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americanmysticom · 2 years

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Copy, Paste, Legislate

You elected them to write new laws. They’re letting corporations do it instead.

Each year, state lawmakers across the U.S. introduce thousands of bills dreamed up and written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks.

Disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called “model” bills get copied in one state Capitol after another, quietly advancing the agenda of the people who write them.

About this report

This story was produced as part of a collaboration between USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity. More than 30 reporters across the country were involved in the two-year investigation, which identified copycat bills in every state. The team used a unique data-analysis engine built on hundreds of cloud computers to compare millions of words of legislation provided by LegiScan.

A two-year investigation by USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity reveals for the first time the extent to which special interests have infiltrated state legislatures using model legislation.

USA TODAY and the Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.

The investigation examined nearly 1 million bills in all 50 states and Congress using a computer algorithm developed to detect similarities in language. That search – powered by the equivalent of 150 computers that ran nonstop for months – compared known model legislation with bills introduced by lawmakers.

Model bills passed into law have made it harder for injured consumers to sue corporations. They’ve called for taxes on sugar-laden drinks. They’ve limited access to abortion and restricted the rights of protesters.

In all, these copycat bills amount to the nation’s largest, unreported special-interest campaign, driving agendas in every statehouse and touching nearly every area of public policy.

https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-paste-legislate/you-elected-them-to-write-new-laws-theyre-letting-corporations-do-it-instead/

OUR COURTS, CORPORATIONS AND BUREAUCRACIES NEED TO BE AMERICAN AGAIN

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KNOW THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

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https://hannenabintuherland.com/usa/color-revolutions-george-soros-and-how-he-pays-loyal-followers/

https://thenewamerican.com/un-agenda-2030-a-recipe-for-global-socialism/

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CAMPAIGN https://campaigns.dailyclout.io/campaign/home

ONE CORPORATION AT A TIME - The Great Patriot Protest & Boycott Book

[The only way through the madness is coming close to G-d, through true repentance and G-ds saving grace.

G-d wants you to curb your selfish ambitions.

NO-one is free without G-d.

Time does not end,

Christ made this plain.]

#model legislation #political corruption #political malfeasance #american transnational criminal organization #corporate fascism #corporate liability #medical fascism #medical malfeasance #medical atrocity #covid vaccine fraud #American Resistance

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