New Posts

Feb 8, 2016

Top 400 Taxpayers See Tax Rates Rise, But There’s More to the Story

As Americans were gathering party supplies to greet the New Year, the Internal Revenue Service released their annual report of cumulative tax data reported on the 400 tax r...

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Feb 4, 2016

Chlorine Bleach Plants Needlessly Endanger 63 Million Americans

Chlorine bleach plants across the U.S. put millions of Americans in danger of a chlorine gas release, a substance so toxic it has been used as a chemical weapon. Greenpeace’s new repo...

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Jan 25, 2016

U.S. Industrial Facilities Reported Fewer Toxic Releases in 2014

The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data for 2014 is now available. The good news: total toxic releases by reporting facilities decreased by nearly six percent from 2013 levels. Howe...

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Jan 22, 2016

Methane Causes Climate Change. Here's How the President Plans to Cut Emissions by 40-45 Percent.

  UPDATE (Jan. 22, 2016): Today, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released its proposed rule to reduce methane emissions...

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Some climates never change

So, the White House politico who was discovered to have doctored a climate change report -- even though he has no scientific training -- and then left (coincidentally, ahem) his job when the news broke has just days later taken a job at ExxonMobil. No wonder he went to ExxonMobil in particular: as the Wall Street Journal points out, "Openly and unapologetically, the world's No. 1 oil company disputes the notion that fossil fuels are the main cause of global warming. Along with the Bush administration, Exxon opposes the Kyoto accord and the very idea of capping global-warming emissions....

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Congress Grapples With Industry Influence at FDA

Efforts to free the Food and Drug Administration from the pharmaceutical industry's excessive influence seesawed between success and failure in the same week, as the House voted to ban drug company scientists from FDA advisory committees while an agency whistleblower revealed that a new drug safety board has been tilted in favor of the drug companies. New Drug Safety Board Biased Towards Industry

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Washington: Open for business

The Christian Science Monitor has nice coverage of what we have been reporting for some time now: that the Bush administration and the GOP-controlled Congress are making Washington “more open to business than usual.” The article takes a big picture approach: In what could be the most business-friendly climate since the days of President McKinley, President Bush and the GOP-controlled Congress are moving to extend corporate ta

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NAS suppresses science paper at admin's request

The Associated Press is reporting that the National Academy of Sciences has suppressed a scientific assessment of the dairy industry's vulnerability to bioterror, after the administration requested the paper be delayed. The authors have argued elsewhere that these vulnerabilities demand government action to make us safer. It is only the latest example of the many ways that the homeland remains unsecured long after 9/11, because the Bush administration refuses to regulate the industries whose campaign funding propelled it into office.

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House Hearing Reveals Unethical Marketing of Vioxx

During a congressional hearing on May 5, the House Government Reform Committee harshly criticized both the Food and Drug Administration and drug makers for their role in approving and marketing Vioxx, an arthritis painkiller linked to heart disease.

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Special Interest Takeover: The Bush Administration and the Dismantling of Public Safeguards

SpecialInterest The Bush administration's first term was marked by a historic effort to eliminate the public's protections.

Download the full report.

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Anti-Regulatory Hit List Debated in House Hearing

The Bush administration again defended its anti-regulatory hit list to Congress, this time presenting the initiative as a boon to small manufacturers in a hearing before the House Small Business Committee that also featured renewed calls for regulatory sunsets. The committee's Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform and Oversight held a hearing on April 28 to discuss the White House's hit list of regulatory protections to be weakened or eliminated supposedly for the benefit of the manufacturing sector.

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Testimony on Hit List Before the House Small Business Committee

Download testimony of Robert Shull before the House Small Business Committee's Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform and Oversight, concerning the OMB anti-regulatory hit list.

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House Considers Anti-Regulatory Hit List

The White House's anti-regulatory hit list took center stage in a House committee hearing, during which GOP members and White House regulatory czar John Graham praised the hit list as a gift to the manufacturing sector while Democratic members criticized the entire project as yet another example of a corporate special interest takeover of government.

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Corporate-Conservative Alliance Plots Attack on Safeguards

From many small and supposedly disconnected proposals, a larger pattern is emerging: corporate special interests and conservative lawmakers are conspiring to mount a comprehensive assault on regulatory protections, on a scale equivalent to the broad-based attacks of the Contract With America.

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Resources & Research

Living in the Shadow of Danger: Poverty, Race, and Unequal Chemical Facility Hazards

People of color and people living in poverty, especially poor children of color, are significantly more likely...

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A Tale of Two Retirements: One for CEOs and One for the Rest of Us

The 100 largest CEO retirement funds are worth a combined $4.9 billion, equal to the entire retirement account savings of 41 percent of American fam...

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