SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
Vote on SEC Nominees Postponed as Schumer, Menendez, Merkley and Warren Record 'No Votes' - Highlighting the Call for Strong Support of Corporate Spending Disclosure Rule
Statement of Lisa Gilbert, Director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch Division
WASHINGTON
Today, members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs postponed votes on a block of banking nominees based on concerns about the two U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) nominees.
During a March 15 confirmation hearing, Hester Peirce, a Republican, and Lisa Fairfax, a Democrat, fielded sharp questions on corporate political spending. U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), began his questions by saying, "a giant hole was ripped in our democracy by Citizens United. It has had a corrosive effect on our country. The SEC has a role to play." Also during that hearing, U.S. Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) spent the bulk of their time discussing the need for a rule requiring publicly held corporations to disclose political spending. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) raised the issue as well, with Warren highlighting the obvious conflict between the nominees' stated support of the SEC's mandate - investor protection - and whether either of them would eventually choose to ignore the 1.2 million investors that have supported and requested this rule.
Statement of Lisa Gilbert, Director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch Division
The message to the SEC nominees is loud and clear: For the sake of a functioning corporate democracy, the SEC must issue a rule requiring disclosure of corporate political spending.
As they move through the process, Peirce and Fairfax will continue to hear from banking committee senators that SEC commissioners should protect investors and make political disclosure a priority. Today, U.S. Sens. Schumer, Menendez, Merkley and Warren all opposed the nominees based on the need for stronger responses on this issue.
We urge the banking committee Democrats to continue to question both Peirce and Fairfax on the critical need for this rule and to make it an issue throughout the confirmation process.
Public Citizen expects the nominees to do the right thing if and when they become SEC commissioners.
Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people - not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country.
(202) 588-1000LATEST NEWS
Trump’s Climate Policies Could Cause Mass Death of Global Poor, Analysis Warns
"These are people with lives," said a spokesperson for the US Climate Action Network. "They are people like us, even if they happen to live in a different part of the world."
Nov 19, 2025
As he skips out on this year’s annual climate summit in Brazil to the chagrin of world leaders, a new analysis shows that President Donald Trump’s climate agenda will cause a massive increase in excess deaths in the poor nations least equipped to deal with—and least responsible for—rising temperatures.
The analysis, published Wednesday by The Guardian and ProPublica, found that the emissions released over the next decade due to Trump's acceleration of fossil fuel usage, combined with his killing of renewable energy, will result in an estimated 1.3 million more preventable heat-related deaths worldwide over the next 80 years.
Most of them will occur in poor, hot countries in Africa and South Asia, which the report notes "emitted relatively little of the pollution that causes climate change," but "are least prepared to cope with the increasing heat." On the contrary, the US, which has just 4% of the world's population, has emitted around 20% of the world's greenhouse gases.
The estimate of excess deaths is based on a widely recognized peer-reviewed metric known as the "mortality cost of carbon," which finds that every 4,434 metric tons of greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere translates to about one additional excess death. Notably, that metric only includes direct temperature-related deaths from conditions like heat stroke, while not taking into account indirect deaths from drought, famine, disease, wildfires, and other disasters that climate change is worsening.
An analysis from Carbon Brief, based on modeling from Princeton University, found that an additional 7 billion metric tonnes of carbon—roughly the equivalent of Indonesia, the world’s sixth-largest emitter—will be released through 2030 as a result of Trump’s policy actions. These have included the shredding of pollution regulations; the near-total elimination of investment in wind, solar, and electric vehicles; and the dramatic expansion of oil and coal extraction.
As the rest of the world makes great strides toward a renewable future, the global Climate Action Tracker says Trump is carrying out “the most aggressive, comprehensive, and consequential climate policy rollback” it has ever analyzed.
"We are quickly emerging as the planet’s rogue nation, determined to deny climate and slow the energy transition as best we can," wrote environmental journalist Bill McKibben last month in Common Dreams.
The new analysis follows research published last month by the University College of London, which found that the climate crisis has already led to a huge spike in excess deaths. An average of more than half a million preventable heat-related deaths occurred globally each year between 2012 and 2021, a 23% increase since the 1990s.
While still an unfathomable loss of life, the 1.3 million projected to die as a result of Trump's climate policies are a drop in the bucket on top of the 83 million excess deaths that the mortality metric predicts if emissions continue at the same rate.
“The sheer numbers are horrifying,” Ife Kilimanjaro, executive director of the non-profit US Climate Action Network, told The Guardian and ProPublica. "But for us, they’re more than numbers. These are people with lives, with families, with hopes and dreams. They are people like us, even if they happen to live in a different part of the world."
The report comes amid the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil, which the US was one of only four nations in the world to skip, drawing condemnation from numerous world leaders.
One of them was Maina Vakafua Talia, the climate envoy from Tuvalu, the small Pacific island nation that is expected to be one of the first countries to become uninhabitable due to sea level rise and fiercer storms, and has already begun planning for mass evacuations over the next two decades. Trump's pullout from the Paris Climate Accords, he said, demonstrated a “shameful disregard for the rest of the world."
But while the brunt of the climate emergency will be felt by the Global South, Americans will not be spared. Annual deaths from heat in the US have already increased by 50% since the year 2000, according to a recent Yale University study. A Texas A&M University study from 2023 projected that if global temperatures exceed 3°C above preindustrial levels, an additional 200,000 Americans could die annually due to changes that cause both hot and cold temperatures to become more extreme.
In an interview at COP30 with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Dutch climate envoy Prince Jaime de Bourbon de Parme likened Trump's denial of the climate emergency to ignoring an illness.
"If I’m sick, and I take my temperature, and I’ve got facts and figures that I’m sick, I can ignore it or not," he said. "So, it’s up to him to listen to the doctor or not. But it’s wise to listen to the facts. The science tells the story. I’m not telling it. It’s not my opinion. It’s just listening to the experts that tell us that climate is a fact."
The Guardian and ProPublica analysis came a day after the Brazilian COP30 Presidency released a draft text that campaigners warned did not go far enough in demanding a roadmap to transitioning away from fossil fuels. More than 80 countries at the conference on Tuesday joined a call for leaders to include tangible metrics and plans for the transition in the summit's final agreement.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Colossally Wrong Decision' as Facebook Parent Company Wins Instagram-WhatsApp Antitrust Case
"This court has effectively told every aspiring monopolist that our current justice system is on their side."
Nov 19, 2025
Anti-monopoly advocates are warning that a federal judge's ruling in favor of Facebook parent company Meta in a major antitrust case will have negative repercussions for US consumers by allowing Facebook to continue wielding monopoly power in the social media marketplace.
Judge James Boasberg in the District Court for the District of Columbia ruled Tuesday that the company’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp did not violate US antitrust policy.
Boasberg found that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had not proven Meta holds monopoly power in the personal social networking market, "largely because he folded TikTok and YouTube into the same market and concluded that their popularity reduces Meta’s share below illegal levels," said the American Economic Liberties Project (ALEP).
John Bergmayer, legal director at Public Knowledge, argued that Boasberg's ruling demonstrates a basic misunderstanding about the economics of the social media market.
"The court's opinion reflects a view of the market that is at odds with how digital-platform power operates today," he said. "Meta systematically acquired emerging competitors precisely because direct, head-to-head competition threatened its dominance. Meta’s consolidation strategy deprived consumers of innovative services and prevented the development of a truly competitive social-networking ecosystem."
Nidhi Hegde, executive director of ALEP, described the ruling as a "colossally wrong decision" that "turns a willful blind eye to Meta’s enormous power over social media and the harms that flow from it."
"These deals let Meta fuse Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp into one machine that poisons our children and discourse, bullies publishers and advertisers, and destroys the possibility of healthy online connections with friends and family," she said. "By pretending that TikTok’s rise wipes away over a decade of illegal conduct, this court has effectively told every aspiring monopolist that our current justice system is on their side."
Hegde added that it should now fall upon US Congress to "step in and break up Big Tech, prohibit addictive surveillance algorithms, and create the conditions for building a better future."
Open Markets Institute policy counsel Tara Pincock said Boasberg's ruling was "profoundly misguided," and accused the judge of blocking the FTC from reversing a mistake it made last decade when it signed off on Meta's purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp.
"Judge Boasberg erred in concluding that Facebook competes with TikTok and YouTube," said Pincock, a former state assistant attorney general in Utah. "I was part of the bipartisan coalition of states that brought this case alongside the FTC in December 2020, and the court’s framing misrepresents what is at stake. This case has never been about generic 'time and attention.' It is about how people connect, communicate, and build communities—and about how a powerful company abused its dominance to protect itself from competition."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Ocasio-Cortez Says ‘We Should Not Be Entertaining a Bailout’ of AI Industry as Bubble Fears Grow
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said no government rescue of artificial intelligence firms "as healthcare is being denied to everyday Americans."
Nov 19, 2025
US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Tuesday that the federal government should not consider a taxpayer bailout of the artificial intelligence industry as fears grow that the rapidly expanding sector poses systemic risks to the global economy.
"Should this bubble pop, we should not be entertaining a bailout," Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said during a House subcommittee hearing. "We should not entertain a bailout of these corporations as healthcare is being denied to everyday Americans, as SNAP and food assistance is being denied to everyday Americans, precipitating some of the very mental crises that people are turning to AI chat bots to try to resolve."
Ocasio-Cortez echoed the concerns of industry insiders and analysts who have warned in recent weeks that the AI investment boom created a bubble whose rupture would cause far-reaching economic carnage.
"We're talking about a massive economic bubble," the New York Democrat said Tuesday. "Depending on the exposure of that bubble, we could see 2008-style threats to economic stability."
Ocasio-Cortez's remarks came on the same day that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sounded the alarm about potential Trump administration plans to "use taxpayer dollars to prop up OpenAI and other AI companies at the expense of working class Americans."
"The Trump administration’s close ties with AI executives and donors—including millions of dollars of contributions to President Trump’s new ballroom project—raise concerns that the administration will bail out AI executives and shareholders while leaving taxpayers to foot the bill," Warren wrote in a letter to the White House's AI czar, David Sacks.
OpenAI, a firm at the center of the nascent industry, has reportedly been in discussion with the Trump administration about the possibility of receiving federal loan guarantees for the construction of chip factories in the United States. Robert Weissman, co-president of the watchdog group Public Citizen, warned earlier this month that "it is entirely possible that OpenAI and the White House are concocting a scheme to siphon taxpayer money into OpenAI’s coffers, perhaps with some tribute paid to Trump and his family."
"Perhaps not so coincidentally, OpenAI president Greg Brockman was among the attendees at a dinner for donors to Trump’s White House ballroom, though neither he nor OpenAI have been reported to be actual donors," Weissman added.
Writing for the Wall Street Journal last week, Sarah Myers West and Amba Kak of the AI Now Institute observed that "the federal government is already bailing out the AI industry with regulatory changes and public funds that will protect companies in the event of a private sector pullback."
"The Trump administration is rolling out the red carpet for these firms," they wrote. "The administration’s AI Action Plan aims to accelerate AI adoption within the government and military by pushing changes to regulatory and procurement processes. Government contracting offers stable, often lucrative long-term contracts—exactly what these firms will need if the private market for AI dips."
"Federal policy has jumped the gun: We don’t yet know if AI will transform the economy or even be profitable," West and Kak added. "Yet Washington is insulating the industry from all sorts of risk. If a bubble does pop, we’ll all be left holding the bag."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular