Corporate Enablers

These individuals and associations are at the forefront in the battle to dismantle agencies and laws developed over the years to protect our environment and our democracy. Call them corporate enablers.

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President Obama

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers “at the expense of hardworking Americans.” Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it’s not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.  Then he got elected.  (From Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, “How Obama Sold Out America.”)

 

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Koch Brothers

Their wealth is being used to establish a reactionary platform designed to keep the 2% oligarchy in place in America. They are an extreme danger to our freedoms and should not be dismissed as simple Tea Party kooks. The Koch brothers are at the core of the movement to “take back” America…take it back, that is, for the corporate state and forgo and dismiss the rights of the individual.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

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Larry Summers

As a rising economist at Harvard and at the World Bank, Summers argued for privatization and deregulation. Summers oversaw passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed Glass-Steagall, permitted the previously illegal merger that created Citigroup, and allowed further consolidation in the financial sector. He also successfully fought attempts by Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the Clinton administration, to regulate the financial derivatives that would cause so much damage in the housing bubble and the 2008 economic crisis. He then oversaw passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which banned all regulation of derivatives, including exempting them from state anti-gambling laws.

After Summers left the Clinton administration, his candidacy for president of Harvard was championed by his mentor Robert Rubin, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, who was his boss and predecessor as treasury secretary. Rubin, after leaving the Treasury Department—where he championed the law that made Citigroup’s creation legal—became both vice chairman of Citigroup and a powerful member of Harvard’s governing board.

Under the stewardship of Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke, the Obama administration adopted policies as favorable toward the financial sector as those of the Clinton and Bush administrations. Never once has Summers publicly apologized or admitted any responsibility for causing the crisis. And now Harvard is welcoming him back.

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Alan Greenspan

Greenspan noted that he had made a mistake in believing that banks would be rationally compelled, through self-interest, to protect their institutions and shareholders. This belief is a key foundation of free-market capitalist ideology — that individuals will act rationally to pursue their own self interest and that financial institutions would magnify this rational thought to result in long-term economic growth and increasing general prosperity. What ended up happening, instead, is that both individuals and institutions ignored severe risk in order to pursue massive short-term gains. In this sense, rational self interest rapidly turned into irrational greed. While a few individuals who had gained access and control of key institutions were enriching themselves, the rest of the economic system was isolated, neglected, and suffered increasingly severe strains and failures. Furthermore, private-backed predatory lending exploited the vehicle of sub-prime mortgages and rapidly toxified a massive segment of the international financial system. Greenspan described these failures as resulting from “a flaw in the model… that defines how the world works.”

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Angelo R. Mozilo

CEO and Chairmen of the board at Countrywide Financial On June 4th, 2009, the SEC charges Mozilo with insider trading and securities fraud for selling $130 million in company stock before the financial crisis of 2008.

October 15, 2010, Mozilo settles with SEC for $67.5 million in fines and accepted a lifetime ban from serving as an officer or director of any public company. Countrywide will pay $20 million of the $67.5 million penalty because of an indemnification agreement that was part of Mozilo’s employment contract. So in reality, $47.5 million fine for illegal gains of $130 million, and the $67M is tax deductible!

Since Countrywide was listed as a public company in 1984, Mozilo has sold $406 million worth of its stock, of which $129 million was realized in the 12 months ending August 2007, which is the only portion the SEC is investigating Mozilo’s compensation during the housing bubble of 2001–06 (including salary, bonuses, options, restricted stock and dues for 3 country clubs) approached $470 million. This came under scrutiny, in March 2008, when the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform called his pay as “gossly exaggerated”. Mozilo defended his pay saying the compensation was a function of how the company did ahead of the mortgage crisis.

On January 11, 2008 Bank of America bought Countrywide for cents on the dollar at a price of $4.1 billion in stock which allowed Mozilo to collect an additional $112 million in severance. According to the company’s proxy statements before the BofA acquisition, if Countrywide is acquired and Mozilo leaves, he is entitled to a cash severance of $88 million. He would also receive a retirement package worth $24 million.

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George W. Bush

As incoming governor of Texas, Bush declared tort reform, “an emergency”, appointing judges who made it all but impossible to bring a class action lawsuit against polluters. In 1995 he pushed through the Private Real Property Rights Preservation Act, making taxpayers pay polluter’s cost of complying with pollution laws. He installed the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission to run the states environmental agency, then cut funding to that agency, making it impossible to fulfill its duty as the states environmental watchdog.

In 1995 he pushed through the Texas Audit Privilege and Immunity Law, and the Voluntary Emissions Reduction Permit Program, making it possible for his biggest benefactors, TXI Corporation, Alcoa, Exxon, Shell, Amoca, Enron, Dow Chemicals, and others, to escape public disclosure of their environmental record, fines, and avoid any government follow-up.

In 2000, more than 200 ”Pioneers” narrowly helped put him in the White House, George W. Bush has rewarded at least 43 of these elite fundraisers with federal appointments. The Bush ”Pioneers” raised a minimum of $100,000 for Bush by bundling together contributions of up to $1,000 (the legal limit) from other individuals. Bush’s 43 Pioneer appointees delivered more than $4.3 million to Bush’s presidential race. Collectively they also gave $204,000 to Bush’s two gubernatorial races.

”Political patronage is alive and well in the Bush White House,” said Craig McDonald, Director of Texans for Public Justice. ”Rewarding big donors with ambassadorships is a surefire way to keep the campaign money rolling in. If Congress outlaws soft money, Pioneer bundling will become a blueprint for the future of special-interest politics in Washington.”

The highest-ranking Pioneers are Terrorism Czar Tom Ridge (a former Pennsylvania Governor) and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao (an ex-Heritage Foundation Fellow and the wife of US Senator Mitch McConnell).

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Dick Cheney

Documents released under America’s Freedom of Information Act reveal that an energy task force led by vice-president Dick Cheney was examining Iraq’s oil assets two years before the latest war began. The Sierra Club is suing Vice President Cheney and the Energy Task Force under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), seeking an accounting of energy industry participation in crafting the Bush Administration’s destructive energy policy, which relies on subsidies to polluting and outdated fossil fuel industries. The District Court ordered the Administration to provide information about participation from these industries, which the Bush Administration refused to do, claiming Constitutional immunity from such inquiries. The District Court rejected that contention, pointing out that the Administration was attempting to “cloak what is tantamount to an aggrandizement of Executive power with the legitimacy of precedent where none exists.” The Administration appealed, asking the DC Circuit to make new law that would effectively shield it from any legal scrutiny. The Circuit Court and Appeals Court have now twice denied their request.

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Darleen Druyun

The former weapons buyer for the U.S. Air Force, checked into a special women’s prison this January 2005, about 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico in the heart of Florida’s Panhandle region, for a nine month stay, after pleading guilty to giving Boeing special treatment on an $23.5 billion government contract. Her crime? Violating conflict of interest laws. Druyun had been talking about possible job opportunities with Boeing at the same time she was negotiating a contract that would let Boeing pump up the price tag by $6 billion on a lease agreement for one hundred 767s tankers.

Once a Pentagon star, Druyun, 57, spent most of her adult life climbing the rungs of the male-dominated Pentagon where she publicly cultivated an image as a hard-knuckled bargainer on billions of dollars in defense contracts with the nation’s largest defense companies. She was called the “Dragon Lady,” but behind closed doors Druyun exercised a much cozier relationship when spending $30 billion a year, she admitted at her sentencing last fall. Since 2000, she gave special consideration on other billion-dollar contracts awarded to Boeing, a company where her daughter and future-son-in-law were given jobs, Druyun told the court.

Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs May be the most anti-democratic institution in government. Once headed by John Graham, this office, part of our government, then operated in virtual secrecy. Created by Congress in 1980 to review proposed regulation, under Graham’s direction, the office has became a virtual shredder for any progressive regulations passed by congress.

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Joseph Coors

Conceived the unholy alliance between polluting industries and the radical right. In 1976 Coors founded the Mountain States Legal Foundation to challenge environmental laws. Funded by multinational polluters such as Phillips Petroleum, Exxon, Texaco, Amoco, Shell, Ford Motor Company, and Chevron, the MSLF filed suits intended to block efforts by environmentalists, unions, minorities, and handicapped Americans that might cut into corporate profit taking.

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Milton Friedman

Friedman first learned how to exploit a large-scale shock or crisis in the mid-seventies, when he acted as adviser to the Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet. Not only were Chileans in a state of shock following Pinochet’s violent coup, but the country was also traumatized by severe hyperinflation. Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy—tax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation.… It was the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere…. Friedman predicted that the speed, suddenness and scope of the economic shifts would provoke psychological reactions in the public that “facilitate the adjustment.” He coined a phrase for this painful tactic: economic “shock treatment.” In the decades since, whenever governments have imposed sweeping free-market programs, the all-at-once shock treatment, or “shock therapy,” has been the method of choice.

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Ronald Reagan

The Reagan administration routinely made common cause with tyrants. It got cozy with the fascist, anti-Semitic, and torture-fancying generals of the Argentine junta and backed human-rights abusing governments throughout Latin America. The administration tried to cover up a massive massacre of civilians in El Salvador, because it was backing the rightwing military there. It resisted efforts to oppose and isolate the racist leaders of apartheid South Africa, instead opting for “constructive engagement” with the white minority government of Pretoria. It enthusiastically endorsed the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, with Vice President George H.W. Bush in 1981 toasting Marcos, “we love your adherence to democratic principles and the democratic process.” (Five years later, when a popular uprising threatened Marcos, the Reagan administration did cut him loose.) Much of this despot-coddling was done in the name of anti-communism, revealing that Reagan and his crew had a rather narrow and situational approach to championing freedom and democracy.

– Its crusade against communism led the Reagan administration to support a not-too-secret secret war in Central America, aiding the Nicaraguan contras fighting against the socialist government of Nicaragua. Reagan referred to the contras as “freedom fighters,” but his fondness for them led the U.S. government down the road to hypocrisy — and worse. The CIA produced an “assassination manual” for the contras. And as a CIA inspector general report later acknowledged, the agency, in supporting the contras, worked with individuals it suspected of being involved in drug-dealing. Ponder this contradiction: As Nancy Reagan was preaching, “Just Say No,” the CIA, implementing administration policy, was knowingly using suspected drug-runners in this secret war. Of course, the administration’s involvement in this covert war partly led to the Iran-contra scandal, during which the administration secretly sold weapons to Iran to gain the release of hostages held by terrorist groups — even while the administration was strenuously pressuring NATO allies not to sell such weapons to Iran, and while proclaiming an official position of never negotiating with terrorists. Working out of the White House, Reagan aides funneled the money raised in these Iranian arms deals to furnish munitions to the contras, all as a way of circumventing a congressional ban on such support.

– Scandals galore marked the Reagan years. The 1980s savings and loan scandal — partly caused by the administration’s aversion to even minimal regulation — resulted in a bailout that transferred hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayers to S&L scammers. Top Reagan aide Michael Deaver was convicted of perjury related to influence-peddling. At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Republican-wired consultants pocketed millions for rigging contracts.

The Reagan years were a time of fierce and divisive controversies, over policy and politics. Ronald Reagan’s administration more than once resorted to skulduggery to get its way. Overseas, it sided with brutes. At home, it gave tax credits to private schools that segregated. The depiction of Reagan as one of the nation’s most glorious leaders is but a conservative cartoon. His legacy is far more complicated — and blemished. Next week will be an appropriate time to remember that. But I’ll bet Sarah Palin doesn’t get around to mentioning any of this.

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Tom DeLay

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_DeLay

There is simply not enough room for all there is on this guy!

 

 

 

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Jack Abramoff

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Abramoff_Indian_lobbying_scandal

There is simply not enough room for all there is on this guy

 

 

 

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Ben Bernanke

Thanks to tremendous public pressure and the recently passed Wall Street reform bill, the U.S. Federal Reserve was forced to reveal the details of its emergency bailout of the financial sector for the first time yesterday. From a quick review of the data now available on the Federal Reserve website, we can see that the Fed took an expansive internationalist view of its role, prompting U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders to ask: “Has the Federal Reserve become the Central Bank of the world?”

When AIG was bailed out out in Sept. 2008 and immediately passed on huge sums to overseas counterparties including Société Générale (France) and Deutsche Bank (Germany), there was a public uproar. The Fed data out today confirms what many suspected. This back-door bailout of foreign banks was just the tip of the iceberg. The Fed data covers 13 programs amounting to some $3.3 trillion in loans. We could only look at a few, but in every program examined foreign banks were huge beneficiaries of a taxpayer-funded lifeline.

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Rupert Murdock

In recent years, Australian-born billionaire Rupert Murdoch has used the U.S. government’s increasingly lax media regulations to consolidate his hold over the media and wider political debate in America. Consider Murdoch’s empire: According to Businessweek, “his satellites deliver TV programs in five continents, all but dominating Britain, Italy, and wide swaths of Asia and the Middle East. He publishes 175 newspapers, including the New York Post and The Times of London. In the U.S., he owns the Twentieth Century Fox Studio, Fox Network, and 35 TV stations that reach more than 40% of the country…His cable channels include fast-growing Fox News, and 19 regional sports channels. In all, as many as one in five American homes at any given time will be tuned into a show News Corp. either produced or delivered.” But who is the real Rupert Murdoch? As this report shows, he is a far-right partisan who has used his empire explicitly to pull American political debate to the right. He is also an enabler of the oppressive tactics employed by dictatorial regimes, and a man who admits to having hidden money in tax havens. In short, there more to Rupert Murdoch than meets the eye.

In 2003, Rupert Murdoch told a congressional panel that his use of “political influence in our newspapers or television” is “nonsense.” But a close look at the record shows Murdoch has imparted his far-right agenda throughout his media empire.

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Hank Paulson

In making his push to administer the largest federal bailout of Wall Street in history, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is seeking unfettered authority. McClatchy poses the question today, “CEO of Goldman Sachs: But the conflicts are also visible. Paulson has surrounded himself with former Goldman executives as he tries to navigate the domino-like collapse of several parts of the global financial market. And others have gone off to lead companies that could be among those that receive a bailout.

In late July, Paulson tapped Ken Wilson, one of Goldman’s most senior executives, to join him as an adviser on what to about problems in the U.S. and global banking sector. Paulson’s former assistant secretary, Robert Steel, left in July to become head of Wachovia, the Charlotte-based bank that has hundreds of millions of troubled mortgage loans on its books. Goldman Sachs cashed in under Paulson, with earnings in 2005 of $5.6 billion; Paulson made more than $38 million that year. A 2005 annual report shows that “Goldman was still a significant player” in issuing mortgage bonds. The conflict of interest is increasingly clear today, as Bloomberg reports that “Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley may be among the biggest beneficiaries” of Paulson’s bailout plan:
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley may be among the biggest beneficiaries of the $700 billion U.S. plan to buy assets from financial companies while many banks see limited aid, according to Bank of America Corp.

“Its benefits, in its current form, will be largely limited to investment banks and other banks that have aggressively written down the value of their holdings and have already recognized the attendant capital impairment,” Jeffrey Rosenberg, Bank of America’s head of credit strategy research, wrote in a report today, without identifying particular investment banks.”

The conflict of interest provides all the more reason for the bailout legislation in Congress to have more stringent oversight that the administration opposes.

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Tim Geithner

Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and chief executive officer of NBC parent company General Electric (GE), was on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose president was at the same time,  Timothy Geithner.It is also interesting to note that a subsidiary of GE, GE Capital, is getting some of the federal bailout money that Geithner essentially  managed. Conflict of interest, anyone?

Connections like this help explain why Geithner’s tax problems won’t become a scandal or even much of a controversy for major elements of the media. But GE’s media properties, including NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC, won’t be alone in trying to put this scandal to rest.

Another member of the board of the New York Fed is Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, who serves on the board of the Washington Post Company. This is the media conglomerate whose media properties include the Washington Post newspaper, Newsweek, and Slate.

From the point of view of the major media, it’s better to remain on the good side of Geithner as well as Obama. That is why Geithner’s tax problems have to be whitewashed and senators of both parties have to be provided with an excuse to confirm him.

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John Ashcroft

When President Bush chose former Senator John Ashcroft to be attorney general in 2001, a common refrain among Missourians was that had they known, they would not have elected a dead man (Governor Mel Carnahan) as their senator over the incumbent, John Ashcroft. Several of Mr. Ashcroft’s former colleagues in the Senate shared Missourians’ doubts about him when they confirmed him on February 1, 2001, as attorney general with only 58 votes, the fewest in the history of the office. (Attorney General Alberto Gonzales received the second-fewest votes – 60.) At Ashcroft’s Judiciary Committee hearing prior to the vote, Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy, said: “We know that while serving in high office, he has time and again aggressively used litigation and legislation in creative and inappropriate ways to advance his political and ideological goals. How can we have any confidence at all that he won’t do the same thing with the vast new powers he will have at his disposal as attorney general of the United States?

Before September 11, 2001, Attorney General Ashcroft failed to make counterterrorism a priority or to grant the FBI the counterterrorism funding it claimed to need. (See his May 10, 2001, memo here (.pdf)) After September 11th, under the guise of fighting terrorism, Attorney General Ashcroft and his Justice Department drafted laws and enacted policies that granted sweeping new powers to the executive branch while reducing the powers of the judiciary and Congress and curtailing the rights of the people. To avoid meaningful debate, he capitalized on fears of terrorism and characterized himself and supporters of the new laws and executive branch policies as the true patriots who were doing everything possible to protect their country. In contrast, he accused those who cast doubt on the constitutionality of the new laws and policies of aiding the terrorists.

The naming of the USA PATRIOT Act was Mr. Ashcroft’s “doublespeak” at its best. It was a resounding success in Congress, where it helped speed the Act’s passage without committee mark-up or debate. But after its passage, as people gradually began to see the act’s name as a disguise concealing its un-American contents, “USA PATRIOT Act” became synonymous with all the unjust laws, orders, practices, and policies the administration used after 9/11 to deny people their constitutional rights. Ashcroft and the DOJ staff have used the misleading phrase “terrorism related investigations” to give the American people the false impression that the thousands of men whom it detained had some connection to terrorism. In an article in The Nation, Georgetown University Law Center Professor David Cole notes that Mr. Ashcroft’s record in so-called “terrorism” cases is “0 for 5,000″.

Recognizing that knowledge is power, Mr. Ashcroft alternately concealed and revealed information to bolster his image. In November, he claimed his department was holding al-Qaeda members and would soon release their names. When none of the detainees apparently turned out to be members of al-Qaeda, he simply classified the list of names, claiming that he didn’t want to reveal to al-Qaeda which of their members were in U.S. custody (http://www.cnss.org/agrelease.htm). On the other hand, he declassified a DOJ memo from the Clinton era written by 9/11 Commission member Jaime Gorelick to support his claim that the Clinton Administration had erected “the wall” between intelligence and law enforcement, and therefore, deserved blame for failing to prevent the September 11th attacks.

At his frequent news conferences, Mr. Ashcroft was a master of hyperbole, trumpeting his department’s successes in unraveling imaginary terrorist threats and sleeper cells, such as Jose Padilla’s foiled “dirty bomb” plot that was never actually planned, and probably didn’t involve a dirty bomb. But when things did not go his way, such as when the Detroit convictions he had touted were overturned because of prosecutorial misconduct, he was silent. When silence wasn’t an option, he simply lied. He assured the American people that the post-9/11 detainees were allowed access to attorneys, a claim later refuted by a DOJ Inspector General’s report. And just days before a copy of the DOJ-drafted Domestic Security Enhancement Act (AKA “Patriot II”) landed in the hands of the Center for Public Integrity, Mr. Ashcroft denied to a member of Senator Leahy’s staff that his department was drafting such a bill.

Mr. Ashcroft believes his greatest failure was not fully explaining to the American people how the USA PATRIOT Act has helped in the “war on terrorism.” Many more would say he failed his country by placing his loyalty to the president and personal ambition above his duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. system of justice. His loyalty even caused him to argue forcefully for policies he personally opposed, such as the indefinite detentions at Guant?namo without legal recourse, and military tribunals. Toward the end of his term, he prevented the Senate from seeing documents that might have shed light on Alberto Gonzales’s and Michael Chertoff’s actions, positions, and statements on the use of torture in interrogations.

But through his many failures, Mr. Ashcroft has reminded millions of us that, as Thomas Jefferson warned, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilence.” Across the country, nearly four hundred communities and four state legislatures have passed resolutions or ordinances affirming the constitutional rights of their 56 million residents. Hundreds more resolutions are in progress. Grassroots groups across the country will participate in a national debate this year over reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act’s portions that sunset and other civil liberties abuses.

They are the legacy of John Ashcroft.

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Phil Gramm

Gramm’s long been a handmaiden to Big Finance. In the 1990s, as chairman of the Senate banking committee, he routinely turned down Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt’s requests for more money to police Wall Street; during this period, the sec‘s workload shot up 80 percent, but its staff grew only 20 percent. Gramm also opposed an sec rule that would have prohibited accounting firms from getting too close to the companies they audited—at one point, according to Levitt’s memoir, he warned the sec chairman that if the commission adopted the rule, its funding would be cut. And in 1999, Gramm pushed through a historic banking deregulation bill that decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms—setting off a wave of merger mania.

But Gramm’s most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry—friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career—came on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered dead—even by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. “Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it,” says a congressional aide familiar with the bill’s history.

Scott Walker

Reports are surfacing that Scott Walker is now preparing his next assault on the democratic political process in the State of Wisconsin.Following the lead of Michigan GOP Governor Rick Snyder, Walker is said to be preparing a plan that would allow him to force local governments to submit to a financial stress test with an eye towards permitting the governor to take over municipalities that fail to meet with Walker’s approval.

According to the reports, should a locality’s financial position come up short, the Walker legislation would empower the governor to insert a financial manager of his choosing into local government with the ability to cancel union contracts, push aside duly elected local government officials and school board members and take control of Wisconsin cities and towns whenever he sees fit to do so.

Such a law would additionally give Walker unchallenged power to end municipal services of which he disapproves, including safety net assistance to those in need.

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Mountain States Legal Foundation Founded in 1976 by Joseph Coors, owner of one of Colorado’s biggest polluters to challenge environmental laws. Funding comes from multinational polluters like Phillips Petroleum, Exxon, Texaco, Amoco, Shell, Ford Motor Company, and Chevron. The MSLF filed suits intended to block efforts by environmentalists, unions, minorities, and handicapped Americans that might cut into corporate profit taking.

Heritage Foundation

Founder, Joseph Coors. This foundation provides the philosophical underpinning of the anti-environmetal movement to the radical right. Through clever invocations of patriotism, Christianity, and laissez-faire capitalism, Heritage offers pithy philosophical justifications for national policies that promote the narrow interests of a wealthy few. Funding comes from several right wing foundations, all funded by major corporate polluters.

Anne Gorsuch

Handpicked by Joseph Coors to administer the EPA under Secretary of the Interior James Watt, then appointed by Reagan in 1982. She cut the agency’s budget by 39%, destroyed the Superfund program at it’s birth, appointed lobbyists fresh from their private sector jobs in the paper, asbestos, chemical, and oil industries to run each of the principal agency departments. Her chief of staff was a timber-industry lawyer; her enforcement chief was from Enron.

Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation

Wise Use funder, Bush megadonor, and owner of the country’s largest privately held oil company, Koch Industries. KI was found guilty by the government of discharging 90 metric tons of carcinogenic benzene at a refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, with $352 million in fines brought against the company as a result. The Bush justice department reduced the fines to $20 million.James

Gale Norton

In 1979, she worked for the Mountain States Legal Foundation, filing several lawsuits to dispute federal grazing limits, impede EPA clean air rules, and to support oil and gas drilling offshore, in wilderness areas, and in wildlife refuges. Each of these lawsuits promoted the interests of MSLF funders, Exxon, Burlington Northern, the Independent Petroleum Association, and the Rocky Mountain Oil & Gas Association.

The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition

Actually a junk-science think tank led by Monsanto lobbyist Steven Malloy. TASSC receives it’s funding from Philip Morris, Exxon, Proctor & Gamble, Dow, and 3M. Gale Norton serves as an adviser to the Coalition.

Public Lands Council

The Taylor Grazing Act grants the Secretary of the Interior authority to divide the public rangelands into grazing districts, to specify the amount of grazing permitted in each district, and to issue grazing leases or permits to “settlers, residents, and other stock owners.” When Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt announced new regulations governing the administration of livestock on 170 million acres of public range, the Public Lands Council (Council), a group of nonprofit ranching-related organizations, objected. The Council’s members who held grazing permits brought an action against Secretary Babbitt challenging 10 of the new federal grazing regulations issued by the Secretary in 1995. The Council claimed that the Secretary acted beyond his power in regulating the grazing patterns. The District Court found 4 of the 10 regulations unlawful. Reversing in part, the Court of Appeals upheld three previously overturned regulations, which changed the definition of “grazing preference,” permitted those who were not “engaged in the livestock business” to qualify for grazing permits; and granted the United States title to all future range improvements.

National Public Lands Grazing Campaign (NPLGC)

This group is lobbying Congress to provide funds to compensate federal grazing permitees who voluntarily return their federal grazing permits to the federal government. The NPLGC is proposing a compensation rate of $175 per animal unit month (AUM). If approved, the program could cost the American Taxpayer over 3.2 billion dollars.

Steven Griles

As Deputy Director of Surface Mining, Griles gutted strip-mining regulations and was a relentless booster of the oil-shale scheme, one of the most outlandish giveaways and environmental blunders of the last century. He also pushed to overturn the popular moratorium on off shore oil drilling on the Pacific Coast, a move of such extreme zealotry in the service of big oil that it even caught Reagan off guard.

John Graham

Founder of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, 1989, and head of the OIRA under Bush. Amoung regulation Graham targeted for the shredder were laws establishing safe levels of arsnic in drinking water, the preservation of roadless areas in forests,the prohibition of snowmobiles in Mational Parks, and rules controlling coal-burning power plants.

Harvard Center for Risk Analysis

Funding comes from Monsanto, Dow Chemicals, Exxon, General Electric, Union Carbide, Boise Cascade, The American Petroleum Institute, and the American Chemistry Institute. No consumer or environmental groups are represented.

Citizens For the Environment

This front group actually has no citizen membership and gets it’s support from a long lilst of corporate sponsors who use the organization to lobby against the Clean Air Act and other environmental regulations.

Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy

The advisory board is stacked with powerhouse corporate crusaders like Newt Gingrich. It’s funding comes from Coors, Amoca, ARCO, the American Forest and Paper Association, and the Chemical Manufacturers Association

John M. Olin Foundation

Watt

National Cattelmen’s Beef Association.The Castle Rock Foundation

Sarah Scaife Foundation

The Bradley Foundation

Competitive Enterprise Institute

A timber-Industry mouthpiece that promotes the idea that clear-cut logging is beneficial to the environment.

Citizens for Sensible Control of Acid Rain

A front group for the oil and electric industries that is opposed to all controls of acid rain.

The American Enterprise Institute

The Reason Foundation

The Federalist Society

The Marshall Institute

Mercatus Center

Bob Grant

 

 

 

Defenders of Property Rights

James E. Carson

David Drier

The American Petroleum Institute

American Chemistry Council

Christine Todd Whitman

James Connaughton

West Virginia Coal Association

William D. Raney

Quin Shea

Elaine Chao

Sen. Mitch McConnel

Dave Laurisky

John Caylor

John Cornell

Tim Thompson

Jeffery Holmstead

American Farm Bureau Federation

Alliance for Constructive Air Policy

Mike Leavitt

Jim Sims

Billy Tauzin

Pete Domenici

James Conrad

Fred Webber

National Propane Gas Association

Amy Ridenour

National Center for Public Policy Research

Jeb Bush

More to come…