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April 13, 2024 | Talking Points Memo

Toni Aguilar Rosenthal

Op-Ed Climate and EnvironmentIndependent AgenciesState Attorneys General

Republican AGs Are Teaming Up With The Corporations Poisoning Their States To Gut The Clean Air Act. Why?

More than 8 million people die from air pollution and fine particulate matter globally every year, according to the BMJ, a peer reviewed medical journal. Of that number, over 5.13 million people die from ambient air pollution resulting from fossil fuels use. Experts say that deaths from air pollution are also on the rise, and are currently expected to double by 2050. In the U.S. alone “350,000 may die annually from pollution produced by the burning of fossil fuels.” According to the American Lung Association (ALA) more than one-fourth of Americans live with “air pollution that can hurt their health and shorten their lives.” Of course, risk and exposure are themselves not borne equally; cities in the western U.S., along with communities of color, disproportionately bear the brunt of air pollution’s public health harms.

April 09, 2024 | The Texas Observer

Toni Aguilar Rosenthal

Op-Ed Ethics in GovernmentState Attorneys General

TPPF’S LONG LOVE AFFAIR WITH KEN PAXTON

The attorney general’s close ties to Texas’ right-wing think tank and its large network of uber-wealthy donors and special interests.

Ken Paxton has spent almost the entirety of his decade leading the Office of the Texas Attorney General while also under felony indictment for alleged securities fraud. Yet, like every other time Paxton has faced allegations of wrongdoing, including misuse of office, retaliatory firings, and criminal misdeeds, he has once again managed to evade real punishment. By no small measure, this has been enabled by Paxton’s masterful use of state resources to court (and to bolster) the influence of extremely well-funded conservative legal organizations and networks, at the expense of the public interests he is supposed to represent, and to defend.

March 29, 2024 | The American Prospect

Timi Iwayemi Alex Moss

Op-Ed Congressional OversightEthics in GovernmentPatent and Trademark OfficePharmaRevolving Door

Senators’ Latest Attempt to Enrich Big Pharma Must Not Prevail

The patent system exists to promote scientific innovation to benefit the public, not to enrich private interests regardless of the merits of their scientific contributions. Yet that is precisely what PERA and PREVAIL would do by granting Big Pharma even more sweeping government monopolies and associated price-gouging power.

March 25, 2024 | The American Prospect

Hannah Story Brown

Op-Ed Climate and EnvironmentIndustry InfluenceRevolving Door

Tim Ryan’s Natural Gas Advocacy Makes a Mockery of Public Service

If meteorologists could gauge the pressure of climate denial with their barometers, they’d surely have picked up on a remarkable atmospheric phenomenon over Houston, Texas. The annual confab of oil and gas industry executives known as CERAWeek—a safe place for fossil fuel aficionados guarded by exorbitant ticket prices and a no-entry policy for environmentalists—has just wrapped.

March 15, 2024 | The American Prospect

Toni Aguilar Rosenthal

Op-Ed Project 2025State Attorneys General

Ken Paxton, America First Legal, and Premonitions of Project 2025

Over his nearly ten years serving as the attorney general of Texas—almost nine of which he has been under criminal indictment—Ken Paxton has pushed steadily more extreme, right-wing policies to deprive Texans of their rights. Be it their right to clean air or water, their right to basic democratic participation, or their right to not face discrimination, Paxton has attacked them all.

March 05, 2024 | The Sling

Dylan Gyauch-Lewis

Op-Ed Anti-MonopolyFinancial Regulation

The Proposed Merger of Capital One and Discover Deserves Rigorous Scrutiny

Last month, Capital One announced that it plans to purchase Discover in a deal worth $35.3 billion. For their campaign to secure regulatory approval, Capital One is trying to act like a benevolent pro-consumer company that will use economies of scale to lower interest rates and ramp up competition with Visa and Mastercard. But that’s probably baloney.