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Julia Rock is a reporter for the Lever.
Elected officials in Cincinnati are considering a lucrative deal with rail executives that would sell one of the last publicly owned stretches of rail line in the US to Norfolk Southern, the company behind the disastrous train derailment in Ohio last winter.
Supreme Court justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito own shares in a combined 19 companies that could receive more than $30 billion in tax relief if the court issues a broad ruling in a major tax case.
Sensing its popularity, Obama’s former Supreme Court lawyer and a Louisiana Democrat are using an obscure corporate taxation case to try to make a federal wealth tax illegal before it even exists.
GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has leveraged relationships in the right-wing dark money world to win lucrative public pension investments and consulting business from state financial officers — possibly violating ethics rules around lobbying.
For years, Allyson Ho has received payments from the Alliance Defending Freedom. When the right-wing advocacy group argued a case in her husband’s court, Judge James Ho cast a decisive vote to cut off remote access to the abortion pill mifepristone.
Two landlord lobbying groups are petitioning the Supreme Court to overturn New York City’s rent stabilization law, which would allow further countrywide challenges to rent control. Real estate billionaires friendly with court justices are backing the move.
The Trump-linked private equity firm Apollo is now benefitting from a bailout Donald Trump orchestrated in 2020 for the trucking company Yellow. As the company files for bankruptcy, truckers are getting crushed and Apollo is enjoying a publicly funded cushion.
In February, a train derailment exposed the town of East Palestine, Ohio, to toxic vinyl chloride. Since then, the company that made the chemicals has spent millions to stop railway legislation that could help prevent another disaster.
In refusing to acknowledge his past climate denial and promotion of oil interests, Obama is relying on liberals forgetting his actual environmental record. Worse, he’s telling other Democratic leaders that lip service can stand in for action.
Disney is removing original content from its streaming platforms to cut spending on residual payments to writers and actors. The company is also claiming the purge will result in $1.5 billion in losses — which could amount to a substantial tax break.
Amid extreme heat and wildfires, President Joe Biden could free up disaster relief funds and slash carbon emissions by declaring a climate emergency. But last month, a group of GOP lawmakers introduced a bill to prevent him from making such a declaration.
In the early 1980s, Chief Justice John Roberts, then a young lawyer, worked with the Reagan administration to strip power from a liberal judiciary. Today he has reversed course to shield the Supreme Court’s absolute power.
The Supreme Court has just agreed to hear a case designed to preemptively block a wealth tax — another potentially lucrative gift for the conservative justices’ billionaire benefactors.
The hedge fund Elliott Management, whose owner has lavishly entertained Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, has argued that recent anti-fraud rules from the SEC are unconstitutional — and could try to bring a case before Alito to strike them down.
Republican senator J. D. Vance quietly amended his rail safety bill to allow the same unsafe tank cars that leaked chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio, to continue circulating through US cities until as late as 2028, just as rail and chemical lobbies asked.
As part of the debt ceiling deal, Joe Biden forfeited his authority to help student debtors and set a ticking time bomb for tens of millions of Americans whose student loan payments are about to restart.
The deal struck by Joe Biden and congressional Republicans to avert a default on the national debt includes provisions that expedite construction of a greenhouse-gas-spewing pipeline and even attempt to block courts from hearing challenges to its legality.
In the debt ceiling standoff, Republicans have held the global economy hostage, demanding a ransom payment that consists of cuts to the US social safety net, rapid approval of fossil fuel projects, and more. Joe Biden is mostly letting the GOP get its way.
Republican lawmakers are refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless Democrats accept sweeping spending cuts and expanded work requirements on social programs — an agenda borrowed from a dark money–funded think tank that has pushed to loosen child labor laws.
The Biden administration has laid the groundwork for a financial firm to use the fragile Colorado River as a route for oil trains — amid heightened concerns about derailments that could cause untold environmental damage in a drought-prone area.