May 10, 2017

After Comey: How To Be a Patriotic Insider

With unprecedented secrecy and increasingly disturbing acts inside the Trump administration, how can federal employees expose the truth? On April 27, Donald Trump signed an executive order creating within the Department of Veterans Affairs a new office charged with protecting whistleblowers, that is, Department staff who want to report wrongdoing inside the VA.  The administration trumpeted this
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May 9, 2017

New Report: How electric utility customers are forced to fund the Edison Electric Institute and other political organizations

The Edison Electric Institute is an inherently political organization, and a powerful one. At $90 million, its budget is the highest it has been in over a decade – a budget that the nation’s electric ratepayers have helped fund. The Energy and Policy Institute’s latest report explores how regulated investor-owned utility companies are including their
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April 26, 2017

Maryland Governor Candidate Backed Predatory Colleges

Alec Ross today announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for governor of Maryland. On his new campaign website, Ross includes a bio that cites impressive and admirable accomplishments — former Baltimore City middle school teacher, Obama 2008 campaign staffer, Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, author, Senior Fellow at Johns
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April 20, 2017

Earth Day 2017: The New EPA and the Looming Climate Apocalypse

This is a guest post by Dick Russell, author of a new book, coming out next week: Horsemen of the Apocalypse: The Men Who Are Destroying Life On Earth – And What It Means To Our Children, edited and with an Introduction by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.   Closing in on half-a-century since the first Earth
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April 17, 2017

Chemical Security: Protecting Syrians, But Leaving Americans Exposed

  This piece was written by Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré, US Army (Ret), the former commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, and founder of the GreenARMY; Major General Randy Manner, US Army (Ret), a former acting director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency; and David Halperin, a lawyer and former staff member of the National
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March 29, 2017

Breaking: DeVos Opposes Court Challenge to Obama Rule on For-Profit Colleges

It might just be career government lawyers doing their jobs, and doing them well, until the Trump Administration can catch up and work its malevolence, but in court papers filed today, the Trump Justice Department defended the Obama Administration’s gainful employment rule, a measure aimed at curbing predatory abuses by for-profit colleges. The rule penalizes
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March 16, 2017

Operator of Corinthian Campuses in Public Tussle With Overseer

ECMC, the student debt collection operation that took over many of the campuses of notorious, collapsed for-profit Corinthian Colleges, is in a public spat with Clark Kent Ervin, the well-regarded lawyer charged with monitoring the integrity of programs at ECMC’s education subsidiary, Zenith. The dispute — a sharp back-and-forth in written exchanges — suggests what can
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March 13, 2017

For-Profit Colleges Renew Efforts to Destroy Key Accountability Rule

Buoyed by the ascendancy of Donald Trump, America’s predatory for-profit colleges are renewing their multi-front fight to destroy a key measure to hold them accountable: the gainful employment rule. The new battle plan includes pushes in Congress and before the Betsy DeVos Department of Education, plus two new lawsuits aimed at the regulation, including one, in Arizona,
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