<![CDATA[ The Lever ]]> https://www.levernews.com https://www.levernews.com/favicon.png The Lever https://www.levernews.com Fri, 29 Mar 2024 01:35:16 -0600 60 <![CDATA[ The Police Have A Dark Money Slush Fund ]]> https://www.levernews.com/the-police-have-a-dark-money-slush-fund/ 6605961c954bf80001de097c Fri, 29 Mar 2024 01:35:06 -0600 Private donors including big-box stores, fossil fuel companies, and tech giants are secretly giving hundreds of millions of dollars annually to law enforcement agencies and related foundations, allowing police to buy specialized weapons and technology with little public oversight.

Experts say this huge deluge of police “dark money” funding, detailed in a new University of Chicago working paper and in an additional analysis shared exclusively with The Lever, leaves law enforcement beholden to the companies and powerful donors bankrolling them, rather than the communities that officers are sworn to serve.

“The big-picture finding is that the world of private donations to police is a lot bigger and more complex than previously estimated,” said Robert Vargas, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the study. 

The study, which analyzed a database of nonprofit tax returns, found that from 2014 to 2019, more than 600 private donors and organizations collectively funneled $461 million to police and to other nonprofits supporting police — a figure that, Vargas said, was “without a doubt an undercount,” as it was based on organizations’ own disclosures about their giving. 

The private money comes in part from big retailers like Target and Walmart; oil companies like Chevron and Shell; and Microsoft and other Big Tech players — companies that have touted their support of law enforcement for years. 

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The new research exposes how easily private donors can secretly funnel money to police. Anonymous donors use asset managers like Fidelity Investments to fund the litany of police foundations and other opaque nonprofit organizations that support police work, the researchers found. The clandestine funds have made Fidelity’s charitable arm one of the largest private donors to police in the country.

In many jurisdictions, private funding for police comes with virtually no oversight, and can be used to buy surveillance technology, high-tech weapons, and other items that agencies might otherwise struggle to justify. 

For instance, the Baltimore Police Department for years used private money to fund a secret aerial surveillance program that could track the locations of people throughout the city in real time. Billionaire philanthropists in Texas provided money for the program, but routed the funds through a nonprofit in Baltimore, which allowed the program to stay, for a time, out of the public eye. When news of the program became public, it caused an outcry, and was eventually ruled unconstitutional in court.

In Los Angeles, the city’s police department used money from Target — also routed through a local police foundation — to purchase software from Palantir, venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s data analytics company, that provides police massive amounts of sensitive data and purports to identify crime “hot spots.” 

In Philadelphia, privately funded police nonprofits have purchased ballistic helmets, drones, motorcycles, and even horses for the city’s police department. 

Such surveillance technology and military gear is deployed disproportionately in Black communities and low-income neighborhoods. The heightened surveillance intensifies local policing, which research has shown can harm community health and well-being.

Private funding represents a tiny fraction of the money that states and cities spend on police, which by some estimates amounts to more than $100 billion annually

“In comparison to their municipal budgets, it seems like a drop in the bucket,” said Gin Armstrong, the executive director of LittleSis, a group that researches corporate power and influence.

But the money has an outsized impact, Armstrong argued.

“It’s really important to look at how this [private] money is being spent,” she said. “Most of the money in municipal budgets is going to salaries and benefits. This is going to equipment and experimental technology, and it’s all outside of public discussion, and often even outside of public reporting.” It was, Armstrong continued, a “huge slush fund that is completely unaccountable.”

“Now we have a sense of just how big that slush fund is,” she said.

“A Kind Of Shell Corporation”

One of the most common ways that private donations, whether from oil companies, billionaires, or big-box retailers, make their way to law enforcement is through police foundations, nonprofits established to support law enforcement in a particular city, such as the New York City Police Foundation and the Los Angeles Police Foundation. 

According to public data from the city of New York, the New York City Police Department reported $30 million in private donations from 2019 to 2022, of which $26.8 million — nearly 90 percent — came from the New York City Police Foundation.

Police foundations position themselves as charities, soliciting donations and then providing that money to local law enforcement. Their supporters say that the work can improve officer morale, and that the additional funding can supplement strained public budgets — although municipal police tend to be flush with public resources.

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“I refer to [police foundations] as a kind of shell corporation,” said Kevin Walby, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Winnipeg who studies police foundations in the United States and Canada. “They can move money around in ways that public bodies can’t. They don’t really have robust reporting or disclosure mechanisms.” The term “dark money,” he said, was an appropriate way to describe their support.

Police foundations, like most charities, do not have to publicly report their donors. Until an exposé from The Intercept, for instance, the New York City Police Foundation did not disclose that it received a $1 million donation from the United Arab Emirates in 2012, even when that money was passed directly along to the police to support “criminal investigations” in the city.

There are some 250 police foundations in the U.S., of which nearly 80 percent say that they fund technology and equipment for police, as well as programming for officers and public relations campaigns. While such organizations have been around for decades, Walby said they have grown steadily since the 1990s, particularly in response to calls to limit the ever-increasing public funding for police, which has nearly tripled over the last several decades. Research has documented increasing revenues for police foundations year after year. 

“A big period of growth happened after 2020,” Walby said, adding that it was in “direct response” to the protests over the murder of George Floyd in May of that year. “They were using corporate money as a kind of backstop to buttress themselves against the defund [the police] movement.”

The corporate bankrollers of police foundations often appear to get a good return on their investments. Target, for instance, has long funded surveillance and anti-crime programs in cities across the country, successfully promoting crackdowns on retail theft and petty crime in disinvested neighborhoods over other, arguably more pressing, community concerns. 

In St. Louis, the city’s police chief receives $100,000 a year directly from the local police foundation in addition to his salary, an arrangement that critics say has ensured that the department is beholden to local business interests. 

“No Paper Trail”

Previous research has shown that police foundations receive tens of millions of dollars annually from private donors. But the new research by Vargas and his co-authors shows that such local foundations are in fact part of a far broader network of nonprofits and funds dedicated to funneling private money and in-kind gifts to police — one that involves hundreds of millions of dollars.

The new study identified hundreds of dark-money organizations that finance police departments — sometimes donating directly to law enforcement, and sometimes donating to other police nonprofits, creating a tangled web of donors and intermediaries. 

Collectively, those organizations gave more than $826 million in donations over a six-year period, and reported revenues of more than $16 billion, according to additional analysis that the researchers shared with The Lever.

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The organizations include associations of sheriffs and police chiefs, national nonprofits like the police charity 100 Club, and private foundations like that of wealthy police advocate Howard Buffett, the son of billionaire Warren Buffett. Furthermore, the researchers found, some police foundations — like those in New York City, St. Louis, and San Diego — donated not only to the police agency in their own city, but to other law enforcement agencies around the country.

“This is an important set of findings because it reveals in real terms the amount of capital that is flowing, and it reveals the number of corporate nodes in the network,” Walby said.

Financial services companies like Fidelity Investments and Charles Schwab also appear in the data as some of the biggest donors to police dark-money groups. Both companies allow wealthy individuals to funnel money to nonprofits through “donor-advised funds,” charitable investment accounts that are an increasingly popular way to anonymize donations and get a tax break at the same time. Various police foundations have begun advertising this funding arrangement as one way to donate.

“The truth is that if somebody wanted to donate a lot of money and hide their tracks, all they would do is make a donation to a police nonprofit from a donor-advised fund, and then there’s essentially no paper trail,” Vargas said. 

While critics have pushed for additional transparency and regulation around donor-advised funds, describing them as an unaccountable form of billionaire philanthropy, federal regulators have appeared hesitant to launch a major crackdown. Last November, the Internal Revenue Service proposed some modest limitations on their use to rein in spending on lobbying and other noncharitable causes — and police charities are among the entities that have opposed the new rules.

Police foundations and other private donors have also found ways to limit disclosure about the gifts they provide to police, the researchers found. When the researchers looked at Chicago as a case study, they found that 90 percent of private donations to police went unreported, revealing, they wrote, “police finance organizations’ interest in keeping their funding of police secret.”

A Push For Accountability

For the most part, the millions in dark-money funding that police agencies receive each year is perfectly legal — presenting a challenge for those who want to see greater transparency. 

“There are largely no laws or policies governing foundation donations to the police,” said Evan Feeney, the deputy senior campaign director at Color of Change, an advocacy group that has opposed corporate backing of police.

The foundations have thus created a kind of loophole, one that “legally allows officers and departments to take gifts from vendors, sidestepping conflict of interest and donor disclosure rules,” Feeney said. Palantir, for instance, has donated to police foundations that subsequently funded law enforcement purchases of Palantir’s own data analytics technology.

Even in places that require official city approval of gifts from foundations, like Los Angeles, such a process has often appeared to be a formality, with gifts being rubber-stamped by local officials over the opposition of local communities and activists.

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“Cities must end these untraceable donations and require that any equipment, device, technology, or software that is purchased or donated through a police foundation is subject to disclosure, oversight, and accountability laws,” Feeney said.

There has been some movement on the issue. In January, New York City enacted a law, with the grudging support of the local police, that will require the police department to provide an annual report on how it spends the millions in private donations that it receives, both from the foundation and other sources. Unlike its use of public dollars, the department has not previously been required to disclose how it uses private funding.

The law also requires the New York Police Department to provide information on its private donors. But because many of these donations are routed through the New York City Police Foundation, the donors will likely still remain anonymous.

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<![CDATA[ SIROTA’S SIGNALS: This Graph Explains The Discontent ]]> https://www.levernews.com/sirotas-signals-this-graph-explains-the-discontent/ 66049c54954bf80001dc6756 Thu, 28 Mar 2024 05:31:56 -0600 What data point illustrates why so many Americans are unhappy with the economy? Who is hiring lobbyists to fight attempts to stop tech giants from preying on your kids? How did Big Ag use academia to avoid climate accountability? Which government agency may help you comparison shop for lower-interest credit cards? Which nonprofit health care system secretly become a predatory debt collector? Why should your lungs celebrate a new federal rule?

The answers to these questions and much more can be found below in today’s edition of Sirota’s Signals, a weekly dose of must-read stories, missed nuggets, and fun-but-worthwhile distractions from Lever founder David Sirota, exclusively for paid subscribers. 

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<![CDATA[ Feds Recently Hit Cargo Giant In Baltimore Disaster For Silencing Whistleblowers ]]> https://www.levernews.com/feds-recently-hit-cargo-giant-in-baltimore-disaster-for-silencing-whistleblowers/ 66032e8c954bf80001dac6c6 Tue, 26 Mar 2024 15:11:01 -0600 The company that chartered the cargo ship that destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was recently sanctioned by regulators for blocking its employees from directly reporting safety concerns to the U.S. Coast Guard — in violation of a seaman whistleblower protection law, according to regulatory filings reviewed by The Lever.

Eight months before a Maersk Line Limited-chartered cargo ship crashed into the Baltimore bridge, likely killing six people and injuring others, the Labor Department sanctioned the shipping conglomerate for retaliating against an employee who reported unsafe working conditions aboard a Maersk-operated boat. In its order, the department found that Maersk had “a policy that requires employees to first report their concerns to [Maersk]... prior to reporting it to the [Coast Guard] or other authorities.”

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<![CDATA[ This New Lawsuit Could Rescind Your Health Care Benefits ]]> https://www.levernews.com/this-new-lawsuit-could-rescind-your-health-care-benefits-email/ 6601f94343badc00018d509d Tue, 26 Mar 2024 05:31:53 -0600

This New Lawsuit Could Rescind Your Health Care Benefits

By Merrill Goozner

A patient, who is wearing a shirt with a stylized American flag on it, has their blood pressure checked.
(AP Photo/Toby Talbot)
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Earlier this month, a three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit signaled it will affirm a lower-court ruling striking down the Affordable Care Act (ACA)’s requirement that private insurance plans cover preventive services at no cost to patients. Once the Fifth Circuit issues its expected ruling, the Supreme Court will get another chance to strike a grievous blow to the public’s health.

In September 2022, Judge Reed O’Connor of the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Texas (the court where many anti-ACA rulings originate) declared that the executive branch could not use the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force to determine which services would be covered by the mandate. The 2010 ACA said all services given an “A” or “B” rating by the task force must be covered without copays or deductibles. After the ruling, the government appealed to the Fifth Circuit.

The Fifth Circuit (six of whose 26 judges were appointed by Donald Trump, and two of whom sat on the panel) is the same court that in 2022 ordered a lower court to review whether the United Airlines requirement that its employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 violated their religious rights. In areas outside health care, the Fifth Circuit, whose judges, like Supreme Court justices, are appointed for life, slapped limits on the authority of federal agencies as diverse as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

As lawyer-journalist Jeffrey Toobin recently noted in the New York Review of Books, “The most striking part of the court’s emerging agenda involves the usually staid realm of administrative law, where it is challenging the very structure of American government. The judges of the Fifth Circuit are seeking, it appears, to declare significant parts of the executive branch unconstitutional.”

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Verbal Sparring Ignored Health

I listened to the Fifth Circuit oral arguments in Braidwood Management v. Becerra (for those looking for more background on this case’s impact on prevention and public health, see my posts here and here). I did not hear a single word about what effect repealing the requirement would have on health — not from the plaintiffs who brought the case, not from the government lawyers who defended the law, not from the judges.

Rather, the anti-prevention arguments and counter arguments turned on whether the Constitution’s appointments clause, which says presidential advisers must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, govern appointments to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.

Braidwood lawyer Jonathan F. Mitchell made the anti-prevention argument. Mitchell is a former Texas solicitor general, a member of the Federalist Society, and recipient in 2022 of more than $400,000 from America First Legal Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group run by Stephen Miller, who served as the anti-immigration czar during the Trump administration. 

To counter, the government’s attorneys argued that because task force members were subordinate or “inferior” advisers appointed by a cabinet secretary, they could serve without confirmation hearings.

If the right-wing arguments prevail, it could call into question the entire structure of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which governs the appointments and actions of the more than 900 committees that provide scientific, technical, and policy advice to virtually every executive branch agency. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, in particular, frequently rely on the deliberations of their advisory committees. Federal Advisory Committee rules include prohibitions on conflicts of interest (with exceptions for necessary expertise), requirements for public meetings and public input, and measures designed to limit bias and protect the integrity of the advice provided to the federal agencies.

The 16-member U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, whose delegates are appointed to four-year terms by the Health and Human Services secretary, was created in 1984. The job of this independent, volunteer panel of national experts is to rate the medical value of various clinical prevention services. How well does it work? What harms might occur? When and to whom should it be deployed?

Its findings are published in peer-reviewed journals. The architects of the ACA chose the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force to determine which preventive services would automatically be covered without cost in the belief those choices would be insulated from political pressure or the appearance of political influence.

“That attempt to insulate it from political pressure has become its Achilles heel,” said Nicholas Bath, who served on the staff of the Senate Health Committee when the ACA was written and is now a lawyer with Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. He spoke at a recent online forum convened last week by the University of Michigan’s Center for Value-Based Insurance Design. “If they simply declare it unconstitutional, it will allow payers to do what they will.”

Anand Parekh, a physician who specializes in prevention and runs the health policy shop at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank in Washington, warned that some employers and their insurers (or third-party administrators if they are self-insured) would begin setting their own rules, even though most employers who buy health insurance support the mandate. “They continue to advocate and support these services and people obtaining them without cost sharing,” he said.

“But if this goes away, you could lose that uniformity,” he said. “There would be a lot of people who might not be able to access these services without cost sharing again. We could go back to the days when a doctor recommends that it’s important to get a colorectal cancer screening, but the response may be, ‘I don’t have the $500 to pay for that.’”

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ACA Spurred Growth In Prevention Services

In the 14 years since the ACA passed, use of preventive services has grown due to the elimination of copays. About 75 percent of all adults now undergo routine cardiovascular screening. Cancer screening (all types) now reaches 60 to 70 percent of the adult population. 

But prevention still lags in many areas. For instance, only 30 to 40 percent of people are screened for substance abuse and mental health conditions, Parekh said. 

“There has been a spillover effect from the politicization of the COVID vaccine,” said Parekh. “We really don’t do as well as we need to.”

Bath said that if the Fifth Circuit and Supreme Court rule as expected, it will require an act of Congress to correct the situation. He’s hopeful. 

“Bipartisan support is possible,” he said. “There is the obvious health-enhancing effect. People like it. And people don’t like it when you take away something they have, in health care especially. There is lack of concentrated opposition, the lawsuit notwithstanding. There is no loud lobbying coalition against prevention.”

A legislative fix could take two paths. It could codify that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is merely advisory and empower the Health and Human Services secretary to make the decision as to what services are covered. Or a clarifying law could subject task force members to the presidential appointment and Senate confirmation process.

“That would flip the intention of the original law on its head,” Bath said. But “it would make the process more politically accountable. Sure, it opens it to political pressure, but it also opens the process to transparency and political accountability.”

However, those assumptions hold only if we have a Congress interested in holding meaningful confirmation hearings and a Health and Human Services secretary interested in making science-based medical decisions. What prevention services would be covered if Stephen Miller, the bigot behind the America First Legal Foundation, once again sits at the right hand of the president and has the power to give orders to Health and Human Services?

The America First Legal Foundation described its case on its website this way: “The Affordable Care Act empowers the ‘U.S. Preventive Services Task Force,’ the ‘Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices,’ and the ‘Health Resources and Services Administration’ to unilaterally decide the ‘preventive care’ coverage that Americans must pay for in their health-insurance plans. Among other things, these bureaucrats decided that every private health-insurance plan must cover FDA-approved contraceptive methods and HIV ‘pre-exposure’ drugs (PREP) without any cost-sharing arrangements such as copays or deductibles, regardless of whether a beneficiary wants or needs such coverage.”

So under a Trump/Miller regime, no guaranteed insurance coverage for PREP; no guaranteed coverage without copays for contraception.

The growing right-wing attack on the administrative state in the name of “freedom” is duplicitous. They don’t plan to get rid of the bureaucrats. They intend to ignore science and use the power of the administrative state to impose their own religion-based ideology on the American people. 

That will not only worsen the health of the American people, it will cost the health care system dearly, because in the long run, as even a grade-school child knows, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.


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<![CDATA[ This New Lawsuit Could Rescind Your Health Care Benefits ]]> https://www.levernews.com/this-new-lawsuit-could-rescind-your-health-care-benefits/ 6601f78243badc00018d502e Tue, 26 Mar 2024 01:31:14 -0600 Earlier this month, a three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit signaled it will affirm a lower-court ruling striking down the Affordable Care Act (ACA)’s requirement that private insurance plans cover preventive services at no cost to patients. Once the Fifth Circuit issues its expected ruling, the Supreme Court will get another chance to strike a grievous blow to the public’s health.

In September 2022, Judge Reed O’Connor of the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Texas (the court where many anti-ACA rulings originate) declared that the executive branch could not use the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force to determine which services would be covered by the mandate. The 2010 ACA said all services given an “A” or “B” rating by the task force must be covered without copays or deductibles. After the ruling, the government appealed to the Fifth Circuit.

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<![CDATA[ LEVER WEEKLY: Corruption Rules Everything Around Me ]]> https://www.levernews.com/lever-weekly-corruption-rules-everything-around-me/ 65fdfd7c43badc00018a13ba Sun, 24 Mar 2024 07:01:04 -0600 What The Lever Published This Week:

The Lie Banks Use To Protect Their Late-Fee Profits — Corporations think they’re entitled to sky-high profits, and it’s destroying the economy.

Fossil Fuel Cash Is Fracking Democrats' Climate Support — After Biden paused liquid natural gas exports, fossil fuel-backed Democrats have worked to undo the climate win.

The Supreme Court Case Designed To Legalize Bribery Snyder v. United States could make it legal for public officials to accept rewards for their corrupt actions.

Sirota’s Signals: Protecting Yourself From The Great Bank Robbery Plus, credit card predators hit an obstacle, the Biden admin waives ethics rules for a former Boeing official, and SCOTUS justices face questions about their taxes.

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT: The Real Estate Cartel Takes The L Plus, immigrants catch a break in some states, Delaware tightens gun control, and federal regulators combat cancer at the source.


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<![CDATA[ YOU LOVE TO SEE IT: The Real Estate Cartel Takes The L ]]> https://www.levernews.com/you-love-to-see-it-the-real-estate-cartel-takes-the-l/ 65fdfa4043badc00018a1340 Sat, 23 Mar 2024 07:01:31 -0600 Good things are happening! A landmark settlement could transform the real estate market, and immigrants in many states may soon find a warmer welcome in new policies. Also, environmental regulators are taking measures to fight cancer, and more states are amping up gun control efforts despite legal challenges.

Breaking Up The Real Estate Cartel

Home sales could soon become more affordable for both sellers and buyers, shaking up the real estate business model of charging a fixed percentage of commissions with little room for negotiation. A new landmark settlement by a real estate trade group will eliminate the sales commissions home sellers have to pay real estate agents and that are usually factored into the cost of a house.

Commission fees can be very costly. Americans pay around $100 billion in real estate commissions annually, and most agents require a commission of five or six percent for the seller, which is higher than most other countries. Even for a home sold at the median cost of $400,000, commission fees can still amount to $24,000. By making it harder for first-time home buyers to afford property, these commissions are contributing to the housing crisis playing out across the nation.

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<![CDATA[ SIROTA’S SIGNALS: Protecting Yourself From The Great Bank Robbery ]]> https://www.levernews.com/sirotas-signals-protecting-yourself-from-the-great-bank-robbery/ 65fb4c846a15bb0001cf80de Thu, 21 Mar 2024 05:31:00 -0600 How can you protect yourself from the Great Bank Robbery of 2024 — which is now getting even bigger? Where are big tech predators fighting back against common-sense legislation to protect your kid? Which Kennedy scion got a special ethics waiver to continue helping Boeing? Who on the Supreme Court avoided paying  taxes on those billionaire gifts? How does a mundane budget fight threaten to permanently cover up the horrors of the Bush and Obama administrations? 

The answers to these questions and much more can be found below in today’s edition of Sirota’s Signals, a weekly dose of must-read stories, missed nuggets, and fun-but-worthwhile distractions from Lever founder David Sirota, exclusively for paid subscribers. 

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<![CDATA[ The Lie Banks Use To Protect Their Late-Fee Profits ]]> https://www.levernews.com/the-lie-banks-use-to-protect-their-late-fee-profits/ 65fb2d986a15bb0001cf7e72 Wed, 20 Mar 2024 12:49:41 -0600 Much of modern economics borrows from physics. Some of these appropriations, like how the scientific concept of maximum energy has influenced the study of consumer behavior, proved immensely valuable. But somewhere along the way, neoliberals and economic pundits misappropriated a physics concept — the conservation of energy — to fend off any attack on hidden fees or ill-gotten profits. 

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<![CDATA[ Fossil Fuel Cash Is Fracking Democrats’ Climate Support ]]> https://www.levernews.com/fossil-fuel-cash-is-fracking-democrats-climate-support/ 65f9f5bf6a15bb0001cde4d7 Wed, 20 Mar 2024 01:31:18 -0600 When President Joe Biden announced in January that he was temporarily halting approvals of new liquefied natural gas exports and processing terminals, Emma Guevara welcomed the news. 

A resident of Brownsville, Texas — a historically poor city and fossil-fuel hotspot on the Gulf of Mexico — Guevara is concerned about two multibillion-dollar proposed liquid natural gas terminals for the area. Beyond the projects’ potential impacts on nearby ecosystems, air, and water quality, Guevara is worried about how carbon emissions from the projects would impact the planet — and her home.

“We’re on the coast,” said Guevara, a local Sierra Club organizer. “And we’re a really marginalized community that can barely handle regular natural disasters, let alone what we’re looking at in the next 10 years.”

But Biden’s pause on such fossil fuel projects isn’t just being opposed by Republicans — it’s also facing pushback from some Democrats, including Guevara’s own Democratic Congressman, Vicente Gonzalez.

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<![CDATA[ The Supreme Court Case Designed To Legalize Bribery ]]> https://www.levernews.com/the-supreme-court-case-designed-to-legalize-bribery/ 65f8f2cdbce00a0001fd8c29 Tue, 19 Mar 2024 01:30:01 -0600 The U.S. Supreme Court is about to hear an obscure case that could legalize corporations enriching public officials in exchange for lucrative government contracts and other favors. 

Though political corruption prosecutions and convictions are already near a historic low, conservative groups are pressuring justices to deliver a far-reaching precedent that would make it much more difficult for law enforcement to prosecute bribery charges against politicians who seek financial remuneration for official actions they take.

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<![CDATA[ LEVER WEEKLY: Bad Medicine ]]> https://www.levernews.com/lever-weekly-bad-medicine/ 65f4bb7abce00a0001f8bc73 Sun, 17 Mar 2024 07:01:49 -0600 What The Lever Published This Week:

Pharma’s Dems Are Doing Trump’s Dirty Work On Drug Pricing — As the first-ever Medicare drug-price negotiations take shape, Big Pharma-backed Democrats want to limit the number of costly medicines regulators can target.

Pharma’s Secret Middlemen Are Poisoning Health Care — Following a lobbying blitz, Congress might punt all efforts to stop shadowy pharmacy benefit managers from inflating drug prices and killing small pharmacies.

Banks Want To Protect Their Junkiest Junk Fee Banks are fighting a rule that would stop predatory fees they claim they don’t even charge.

The Killer-Sunshine State A state effort to outlaw workplace heat-protection standards is a preview of what will happen as the GOP’s war on workers collides with our climate reality.

Sirota’s Signals: How Much Does Microsoft Know? Plus, conservatives declare war on “recreational sex,” lawmakers may hide their NFL handouts, and Larry Summers mimics the hot dog guy.

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT: An End To The Judge Shopping Spree Plus, Apple’s favorite repair restriction may soon be banned, college athletes score a historic labor win, and the tide may be turning on anti-LGBTQ bills.


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<![CDATA[ YOU LOVE TO SEE IT: An End To The Judge Shopping Spree ]]> https://www.levernews.com/you-love-to-see-it-an-end-to-the-judge-shopping-spree/ 65f496d8bce00a0001f8b921 Sat, 16 Mar 2024 07:01:55 -0600 Good things are happening! Conservative litigants may soon find it more difficult to handpick their judges. Also, Oregon could change Apple’s global business model, college basketball players vote to unionize, solar energy hits its biggest milestone since World War II, and dozens of rejected anti-LGBTQ bills may signal shifting political tides.

An End To The Judge Shopping Spree

Corporations and conservative activists looking for a leg up in court may soon be out of luck. On March 12, the federal judiciary’s policymaking body adopted a new policy to promote random judge assignment — and close a loophole that allows lawyers, interest groups, and states to select amenable judges to oversee their cases. 

Such tactics have been repeatedly used by conservatives in recent years to knock a key abortion drug off the market, challenge the Biden administration’s immigration policies, and whittle away gun-safety regulations, among other issues. These cases have all been filed in federal judicial divisions where they are more likely to be assigned to conservative judges, especially in conservative-leaning courts like the Northern District of Texas, where some courts only have a single sitting judge — meaning litigants know exactly who will be considering their case. When activists can choose to file their case with a judge they know would be friendly to their opinions, that greatly increases the likelihood of a favorable outcome. 

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<![CDATA[ The Great Unknown About The U.S. Weapons Deluge In Ukraine ]]> https://www.levernews.com/the-great-unknown-about-the-u-s-weapons-deluge-in-ukraine/ 65f4b584bce00a0001f8bba7 Fri, 15 Mar 2024 14:59:36 -0600 The Defense Department is not conducting adequate oversight of the unprecedented deluge of weapons it’s been sending to Ukraine since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, according to a new government report reviewed by The Lever. That means the end-use of billions of dollars’ worth of arms is at risk of being unaccounted for in a country that was previously a hub for the illicit arms trade.

The report was published a day before the Biden administration announced it would be sending another $300 million in weapons to Ukraine and urged passage of an aid bill held up in Congress that would deliver an additional $60.1 billion to the country. 

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<![CDATA[ SIROTA’S SIGNALS: What Is Microsoft Hiding About AI? ]]> https://www.levernews.com/sirotas-signals-what-is-microsoft-hiding-about-ai/ 65f370f8bce00a0001f70a8c Fri, 15 Mar 2024 05:31:21 -0600 Who is hiding the huge energy and water costs of the artificial-intelligence buildout? What was the exact moment the Democratic Party began losing working-class voters, especially in the South and Midwest? Why is a powerful right-wing think tank demanding an end to recreational sex? Where are lawmakers considering legislation to hide the details of public subsidies to billionaires? How much does it now cost to experience the traditional American Dream? And when will someone finally make Larry Summers put on the hot-dog-guy costume?

The answers to these questions and much more can be found below in today’s edition of Sirota’s Signals, a weekly dose of must-read stories, missed nuggets, and fun-but-worthwhile distractions from Lever founder David Sirota, exclusively for paid subscribers. 

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