Tag: lobbyists

‘Dance You Monkey’: Emails Show Biden Clean Air Official Took Commands From Chemical Lobbyist

President Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate Joe Goffman to lead the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation on March 8, 2022. That same day, Goffman wrote to Rich Gold, a major Democratic donor and Holland & Knight lobbyist who represents clients including the American Chemistry Council, oil and gas companies, and the timber industry, to thank him.

“It’s live,” Goffman said of the job announcement, text messages reviewed by The Daily Wire show. “Will I ever be able to thank you enough?”

“Gotta get good people in these jobs,” the lobbyist said. “And need to chat next steps.”

Goffman said he would call the lobbyist “tomorrow morning so I can give you a heads up about something.”

Messages between Goffman and Gold, obtained by the watchdog group Functional Government Initiative under the Freedom of Information Act and shared with The Daily Wire, suggest that Goffman did pay the favor back. In the ensuing months, Goffman shared intimate information about dynamics within the EPA, and in one case promised to “pull a rabbit out of the hat” for Gold.

In June 2022, Gold complained that Goffman’s staff had cancelled a meeting with the American Forest & Paper Association, which paid Gold $200,000 the year prior. Goffman agreed to undo the cancellation, despite having important business to do that day.

“What do I need to do?” the EPA official asked the lobbyist.

“Dance you monkey, dance,” came the reply. “I”ll be there. With tomatoes.”

The messages do not explain what Gold did to help Goffman secure the nomination from Biden. Responding to this story, EPA spokesman Nick Conger told The Daily Wire “A wide array of people supported Joe Goffman prior to and following his nomination as Assistant Administrator in the Office of Air and Radiation. Mr. Goffman engages regularly with a variety of stakeholders – including those from the regulated community – as part of his work to protect public health and the environment.” Goffman did not comment.

The relationship is an example of the “revolving door” in which entrenched Washington insiders use connections made from brief stints in government to fuel lucrative careers peddling access to their successors. Gold worked as a special assistant to the EPA administrator from 1993 to 1994, and has been a lobbyist ever since.

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Israel lobby spends millions to unseat US lawmaker critical of Gaza war

The pro-Israel lobby in the US is pouring millions into a campaign to unseat an African-American Congresswoman from Missouri, Cori Bush, as part of a broader effort to replace critics of Israel’s war in Gaza with more Israel-friendly Democrats, The Washington Post reported on 6 August.

“It’s because I called for a cease-fire in Gaza,” Bush told a potential voter as she campaigned door-to-door in her district. “That’s where all of this started.”

Bush is facing a tight primary contest Tuesday against St Louis County Prosecutor and fellow African-American and Democrat Wesley Bell, who is supported by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the largest and most powerful pro-Israel group in the US.

Whoever wins the primary will run against the Republican party’s candidate for the congressional seat in November.

Outside groups have already spent over $15 million in Missouri’s 1st Congressional district race, with 80 percent of the funds going toward ads opposing Bush and supporting her AIPAC-backed opponent.

In June, AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups spent $17 million to help defeat another progressive African-American member of the US Congress who was critical of the Gaza war, Democrat Jamaal Bowman from New York.

The Washington Post adds that the National Black Empowerment Action Fund (NBEA), founded by AIPAC veteran Darius Jones, donated $1 million to the campaign against Bush last week.

Most of the voters in Bush’s district with whom the Washington Post spoke said they did not know that AIPAC and other Israel lobby groups were so involved in tipping the race.

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USDA Adds Another Hemp Industry Representative To Trade Committee To Promote The Crop Globally

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) have added another hemp industry executive to a federal trade advisory committee to help bolster efforts to promote U.S.-grown cannabis around the world.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and USTR Representative Katherine Tai announced on Thursday that they have appointed Dylan Summers, vice president of government affairs for the CBD company Lazarus Naturals, to their Agricultural Technical Advisory Committee (ATAC) for Trade in Tobacco, Cotton, Peanuts and Hemp.

Summers is one of four hemp industry stakeholders on the 14-member ATAC, alongside National Industrial Hemp Council (NIHC) President Patrick Atagi, NIHC board member Patricia Sheikh and the Oregon Hemp Commission’s Eric Pike, who also founded the CBD company Root Origins.

The ATAC focused on tobacco, cotton, peanuts and hemp is one of six advisory committees under USDA and USTRE that offer the government technical advice about specific agricultural commodities and products.

A former marketing executive at NIHC, Kevin Latner, was appointed to a separate ATAC focused on processed foods in 2020. But he’s since left NIHC and is now affiliated with a group that deals with leather materials, while still serving on the committee.

As the latest member, Summers will serve as a hemp representative on the ATAC until at least 2028.

“The advisory committee system was created by Congress to ensure that U.S. agricultural stakeholders have input and insight into U.S. trade policy and negotiating objectives,” USDA said in an advisory. “Applications for committee membership are encouraged at any time and will be considered for future appointments.”

In recognition of hemp’s growing role in the agriculture sector, USDA and USTR formally renamed the ATAC to include last year to include the name of the crop. Previously, the first hemp appointees served on what was then called the ATAC for Trade in Tobacco, Cotton and Peanuts.

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Israel Lobby Funded Half of New UK Cabinet

Pro-Israel lobbyists have donated to 13 out of Labour’s 25 cabinet members since they were first elected to parliament, Declassified can reveal.

The list of recipients includes Prime Minister Keir Starmer, his deputy Angela Rayner,  Chancellor Rachel Reeves, Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.

Jonathan Reynolds, who will oversee arms exports to Israel as U.K. trade secretary, is another beneficiary, alongside Labour’s election mastermind Pat McFadden, whose responsibilities now include national security.  

Some of the donations were provided by Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), a lobby group which takes MPs on “fact-finding” missions to the region.

Reeves, McFadden, Reynolds and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle were recently listed as vice-chairs of LFI.

Other major funders include pro-Israel businessmen Gary Lubner, Trevor Chinn, and Stuart Roden.

The total value of the donations amounts to over £600,000.

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Time for outrage over Israel’s meddling in European affairs

Lobbying for Israel can be lucrative.

David Siegel heads the organization called Friends of the European Leadership Network. He commands an annual salary exceeding $350,000.

Over the past few days, Siegel has been thanking those Western politicians who are willing to criticize the International Criminal Court after its chief prosecutor sought warrants for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, Israel’s prime minister and defense minister, as well as leading players in Hamas. Outrage at the ICC’s move is proof of “moral clarity,” Siegel has contended.

Siegel has spent most of his career working for the Israeli government and the lobby which backs it up. Before taking up his current position, he was Israel’s top representative in the southwestern United States (a region that includes California, Arizona, Colorado and Hawaii).

Friends of the European Leadership Network – based in Skokie, a Chicago suburb – helps marshal elite support for Israel.

According to a “transparency register” run by the Brussels bureaucracy, Siegel’s outfit finances almost the entire budget of the European Leadership Network (Elnet), a key pro-Israel group.

It is no accident that Elnet is funded primarily from the US. For years, Elnet has copied the modus operandi of the Israeli lobby across the Atlantic.

A core activity has been buying influence from lawmakers and other establishment figures by bringing them on expenses-paid propaganda trips.

More than 20 such visits to the Middle East have been organized by Elnet since Israel began its genocidal war against Gaza in October.

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Lobbyists Call For Increased Digital ID Funding

Washington-based Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) has called for more money to be set aside for digital public infrastructure (DPI) including one of its elements, digital ID – and this means not only the funds earmarked for the technology portion of it.

Currently, DPI projects can count on $400 million by the end of the decade – that is the figure “stakeholders” have already committed to “the cause.”

Essentially, DIAL is advocating for money to be steadily spent on promotion of its mission via seemingly “trustworthy” messengers such as civil societies, academics, etc. Apparently, this would also allow their participation in governance, as well as the design and deployment of various DPIs.

Among those sitting on DIAL’s board are the director of USAI, an organization known for its involvement in setting up the digital ID in Ukraine, as well as the president and CEO of the UN Foundation, and a Gates Foundation senior adviser.

In what reports say is an expert comment, originally published in late September, DIAL wants this financing to be “sustainable,” and claims that not just businesses and economies, but also individuals, would reap the benefits.

Other than places like Ukraine, DIAL is “probing” and basing its comments drawn from a report compiled in Sierra Leone in Africa, and others, while those “interviewed” are 25 groups and entities.

Among them are government representatives of said countries, but also the Gates Foundation, UN’s UNDP agency, the World Bank, and the Africa Digital Rights Hub.

DIAL wants to see money spent on coordination between ministries, while “communities need to be engaged early on, particularly those that are more likely to be excluded,” say reports.

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Profiteers of Armageddon

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you’re undoubtedly aware that award-winning director Christopher Nolan has released a new film about Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb” for leading the group of scientists who created that deadly weapon as part of America’s World War II-era Manhattan Project.

The film has earned widespread attention, with large numbers of people participating in what’s already become known as “Barbieheimer” by seeing Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie and Nolan’s three-hour-long Oppenheimer on the same day.

Nolan’s film is a distinctive pop cultural phenomenon because it deals with the American use of nuclear weapons, a genuine rarity since ABC’s 1983 airing of “The Day After” about the consequences of nuclear war. (An earlier exception was Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, his satirical portrayal of the insanity of the Cold War nuclear arms race.)

The film is based on American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.

Nolan made it in part to break through the shield of antiseptic rhetoric, bloodless philosophizing, and public complacency that has allowed such world-ending weaponry to persist so long after Trinity, the first nuclear bomb test, was conducted in the New Mexico desert 78 years ago this month.

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Here’s The Lawmaker Who Accepts More BlackRock Money Than Any Other Member Of Congress

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) accepted more donations in the last election cycle from BlackRock and individuals affiliated with the firm than any other member of Congress.

The connection between the lawmaker and the asset management company was noted by the American Accountability Foundation, a non-profit government oversight and research organization, after Schumer rebuked efforts to scrap a Labor Department rule that would allow retirement fiduciaries to allocate funds in accordance with the environmental, social, and corporate governance movement, also known as ESG. Both the House and Senate passed a resolution opposed to the rule, which President Joe Biden is expected to veto.

BlackRock is a leading proponent of the ESG movement, which critics say mingles political and social causes such as decreasing carbon emissions and achieving racial diversity in a manner that compromises or distracts from profitability. Schumer nevertheless accepted $103,950 from individuals associated with BlackRock and $10,000 from a political action committee controlled by the company, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets.

“ESG opponents are trying to turn it into a dirty acronym, deploying attacks they’ve used for elements of a so-called woke agenda,” Schumer said on social media this week as the resolution moved through Congress. “They call ESG wokeness. They call it a cult. They call it an incursion into free markets. I say ESG is just common sense.”

Candidates from both parties benefit from BlackRock money, with Republicans getting $639,000 and Democrats getting $453,000 in the most recent midterm election cycle. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) were the second and third-largest individual recipients of funds from BlackRock and individuals associated with BlackRock.

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These Five Lawmakers Received Over $50,000 From Railroad PACs Last Year

Atrain carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3, leading to the evacuation of about 5,000 people.

Rescue workers blew holes in five railway cars carrying vinyl chloride, a potentially dangerous gas, allowing it to be destroyed via controlled burning.

The crash sparked a renewed interest in lobbying and campaign donations from railway-associated political action committees (PACs). It has emerged that the Trump administration rescinded a safety rule in 2017 following pressure from the industry. Steven Ditmeyer, a former senior figure at the Federal Railroad Administration, told investigative news outlet The Lever that this could have increased the “severity” of the accident.

PACs and individuals associated with the rail industry donated $3,190,763 in total to political candidates in 2021-22. This data comes from OpenSecrets, a non-profit organization that tracks the impact of money on American politics. Of this total, $1,764,695 was given to Republican candidates, $1,408,068 to their Democratic rivals.

OpenSecrets identified 16 railway-related PACs that had been donating to candidates, of which three gave at least $500,000 in total. These were the Union Pacific Corp, Norfolk Southern and BNSF Railway.

Newsweek has gone through the OpenSecrets data to list the five members of Congress who received more than $20,000 from railway-related PACs and individuals, during 2021-22. The analysis is based on statistics from the Federal Election Commission, which recorded all campaign donations of $200 or more.

There is no suggestion that any of these lawmakers behaved improperly, either in receiving or recording these campaign donations.

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Rail Companies Blocked Safety Rules Before Ohio Derailment

Before this weekend’s fiery Norfolk Southern train derailment prompted emergency evacuations in Ohio, the company helped kill a federal safety rule aimed at upgrading the rail industry’s Civil War-era braking systems, according to documents reviewed by The Lever.

Though the company’s 150-car train in Ohio reportedly burst into 100-foot flames upon derailing — and was transporting materials that triggered a fireball when they were released and incinerated — it was not being regulated as a “high-hazard flammable train,” federal officials told The Lever.

Documents show that when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the transport of hazardous compounds. The decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials — including the one in Ohio — from the “high-hazard” classification and its more stringent safety requirements.

Amid the lobbying blitz against stronger transportation safety regulations, Norfolk Southern paid executives millions and spent billions on stock buybacks — all while the company shed thousands of employees despite warnings that understaffing is intensifying safety risks. Norfolk Southern officials also fought off a shareholder initiative that could have required company executives to “assess, review, and mitigate risks of hazardous material transportation.”

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