The corporate-backed front group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is again leading the charge for industry against environmental protections. Earlier this month, AFP kicked off its “Regulation Reality Tour” — a roadshow through the states of pivotal senators pressuring the Environmental Protection Agency not to regulate carbon emissions, as outlined by the Clean Air Act .

The campaign is part carnival, part sophisticated K Street lobbying. Attendees are welcomed by an inflatable moonbounce for children, free food and drinks, and AFP staff dressed as “carbon cops” distributing freebies to the crowd. The rallies serve as a platform for AFP to scare voters with stories of bureaucrats regulating churches and “radio controlled thermostats.” Moreover, operatives from AFP collect names and train attendees on how to lobby Congress to defeat clean energy reform.

The founder and chairman of Americans for Prosperity is oil baron David Koch, who is one of the richest men in the world because of his oil, chemicals, and manufacturing conglomerate Koch Industries. Koch Industries is a major polluter with an atrocious record of sloppy operations. According to the EPA, Koch Industries is responsible for over 300 oil spills in the US and has leaked three million gallons of crude oil into fisheries and drinking waters. They were fined a record $35 million dollars and an additional $8 million in Minnesota for discharging into streams. But AFP’s recent crusade against the EPA is just the latest in Koch’s twenty-year campaign to have unrestricted power to pollute. Some highlights of the timeline:

– David Koch pioneered front groups focused on organizing grassroots opposition to environmental regulations, opposition to climate science. Koch’s flagship organization, Citizens for a Sound Economy, now known as Americans for Prosperity, orchestrated everything from anti-tax protests aimed at opposing President Clinton to the current tea party movement aimed at President Obama.

– The same tactics Koch-funded groups are now using against clean energy reform were employed during the 1990′s against (highly successful) acid rain regulations, other EPA rules against pollution. In the field, Koch’s groups would use conspiracy theories to whip up right-wing hysteria against regulations, while other Koch groups would directly lobby, produce academic reports, and pay for advertisements.

– Koch helped anti-environment Republicans win policy battles and congressional elections in the 1990′s, elect Bush in 2000 and 2004. And how the Bush administration rewarded Koch by adopting his pro-pollution ideas and appointing his operatives to key positions. Koch is the most singular force for the rampant anti-environment, anti-climate science strain popular among the American right, which stands in contrast to conservative parties in Europe and the rest of the world which recognize the threat of manmade climate change.

Click here to read the Wonk Room report.

Evidently, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), who was leading Republican negotiations on financial regulatory reform until a few weeks ago, would really like to keep working toward a deal with Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT). Speaking at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management yesterday, he said that he would like to move the clock back three weeks, and pick up where he and Dodd left off before the bill passed out of committee (on a party line vote).

However, were Dodd to take Corker up on his offer, here’s what Corker plans to push for:

“I don’t want an overzealous consumer protection agency,” Corker said. “We need balance. Right now in the bill, there’s too much independence and too little coordination between the regulators and the consumer protection side.”

This week Corker pleaded with Dodd and the Democrats to refrain from bringing their bill to the floor and daring Republicans to vote against it. But if weakening Dodd’s proposed Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection is Corker’s goal, Dodd would do better to stay away.

After all, Dodd’s bill is already a departure from a completely independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) — which was included in the Obama administration’s regulatory reform plan and the reform bill passed by the House last year — because it would be housed in the Federal Reserve and could be overridden by a two-thirds vote of the proposed Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC). Since the FSOC will be largely composed of bank regulators, there will be ample opportunity for them to make their case. The legislation also explicitly directs the Bureau (in section 1015) to work with the regulators when designing new regulators.

Plus, Corker’s entire argument is based off of the faulty premise that consumer protection and bank safety and soundness are in some kind of conflict. But a bevy of former regulators have come forward to say that they don’t know of a single instance in which consumer protection and the soundness of banks were in tension.

“I would love to see one regulator provide a concrete example where safety and soundness and consumer protection are in conflict and it caused some difficulty. I can’t think of one,” said Kevin Jacques, a former official at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Just yesterday, the OCC flipped its long-standing opposition to an independent consumer agency, saying that “it’s unlikely there will be any meaningful conflicts between safety and soundness and consumer protection.”

Under Dodd’s current proposal, the Bureau has barely enough independence to fend off the pernicious influence of the Fed’s regulators. Watering the bill down in order to appease Corker is an unacceptable outcome. Instead, Dodd should do just what Corker doesn’t want him to: bring a bill to the floor and force the Republicans to side with either consumers or banks.

Now that the Senate Banking Committee has passed financial regulatory reform legislation — with Republicans deciding to offer all of their amendments before the full chamber, instead of during committee markup — more senators are crawling out of the woodwork to express their thoughts on the bill. Today, it’s Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-SC) turn, as he penned a Politico op-ed criticizing what he sees as the bill’s “runaway regulation.”

Not surprisingly, DeMint adopted GOP pollster Frank Luntz’s tactic, which is to portray regulatory reform as benefiting big banks and leading to more bailouts, regardless of what the legislation actually says. And amidst the usual, thoroughly debunked, conservative tropes about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac causing the financial crisis, DeMint made this strange claim:

The bill institutionalizes the concept of “too big to fail” by taxing banks that the Treasury, the Fed and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation says are too important to close. The money will create a $50-billion bailout slush fund that can be used to rescue them if needed. This essentially creates a circle of protection around big banks — a significant advantage over smaller banks and credit unions.

This is an odd mish-mash of conservative talking points, but let’s try to break it down. For starters, DeMint manages to claim that placing a tax on “too big to fail” banks somehow gives them a competitive advantage over smaller, untaxed banks. Last I checked, having to pay higher taxes than your competitors was a disadvantage, but DeMint seems to think otherwise.

Next, DeMint claims that the tax will go towards creating a “slush fund” that will be used to “rescue” banks that are “too important to close.” But Dodd’s legislation is explicit that the fund can only be used to liquidate a failed firm, and “not for the purpose of preserving the covered financial company.” It’s not that these banks are “too important to close,” it’s that they’re too interconnected to fall apart without bringing the entire system down with them.

The “slush fund” will actually ensure that its the banks themselves, not the taxpayers, who have to ante up to unwind a failed firm. CNBC’s Larry Kudlow — who is a big fan of DeMint — agrees on that front, as does Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN). Not singling out “too big to fail” banks for special treatment, including higher fees and more stringent standards, means either endorsing breaking them up or suffering through another Great Depression when they implode.

DeMint’s prescription, it seems, is to simply plug his ears and pretend that “too big to fail” banks don’t pose a threat to the economy. But as David Min pointed out, “whether the government acknowledges ‘too big to fail’ or disavows it as a nonexistent problem is irrelevant. As long as large financial institutions can single-handedly implode the U.S. economy by going insolvent, they will be seen as enjoying a de facto government backstop.” And that’s why a credible process for unwinding them, regardless of size, is necessary to secure the financial system.

Our guest blogger is Lisa Gilbert, a Democracy Advocate for U.S. PIRG.

Things in the world of campaign finance are getting, as Alice said, “curiouser and curiouser!”

As a nation, we have officially ventured down the rabbit hole of big corporate spending in political campaigns, as a Texas company recently placed the first campaign ad paid for solely by corporate profits. This ad comes as a direct result of the January 21 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission which ruled that corporations are “persons” and therefore have as much of a right to spend their money advocating for candidates as you and I.

When KDR Development placed an ad against state Rep. Chuck Hopson (R-TX), and paid for it directly from its company coffers, it gave our country the first glimpse of what many expect to be a landslide of corporate spending in elections. As Fred Wertheimer, veteran campaign finance reformer, testified before the Senate Rules Committee in February, “the 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case is the most radical and destructive campaign finance decision in the Court’s history.”

Congress is now actively engaged in looking for ways to address the problems the Supreme Court’s opinion created. We need a solution – and fast – to protect the upcoming midterm election from being bought and sold by corporate interests.

One critical component of any legislative solution needs to be shareholder approval.

The massive profits generated by corporations happen in part through investments by their shareholders. Now that corporations have been given the right to freely spend those investments in elections, they should also be required to disclose their political spending to their shareholders, and shareholders should be granted the right to consent or oppose that political spending through a vote.

Investing has expanded over the past few decades, and at this point nearly half of American households own stocks. So when we talk about protecting shareholders and giving them a say in how their money is spent, we are literally talking about a vast subset of the public, not some elite class. Read more