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People who treat our roads in the winter are up bright and early Tuesday morning.

An Emerson exit from St. Louis would mark a devastating blow to a region that has counted the industrial giant among its biggest corporate citizens for decades.

The four-team league is hoping to become a female version of the Mid States Club Hockey Association, primarily a boys league with a handful of female players that has existed since 1979

by Karim Doumar and Cynthia Gordy Giwa

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

There’s a phrase that pops up a lot when investigative journalists talk about politics: Follow the money.

For journalists, that often means looking at how political campaigns are funded and who’s paying for lobbyists. Today we’re going to talk about some of the methods we use to dig into those subjects.

This advice may not lead to you uncovering large-scale corruption — let us know if you do, though — but we hope to better acquaint you with which industries are donating to races you care about, how your candidates spend the money they raise and the oversized influence the ultrawealthy can have.

Campaign Finance Laws Are Meant to Increase Transparency

After the Watergate scandal (which, in addition to a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, involved campaign funds used toward the scheme), Congress strengthened laws requiring federal campaigns to report their political contributions and spending to the Federal Election Commission. This was designed as a check against corruption, but also as a way to keep voters reasonably informed about money in politics.

So, let’s take a look at what money does in a campaign. Seeing where a candidate’s money comes from, as well as which groups are spending on behalf of (or against) their campaign, helps you understand their beliefs, the advice they’re getting and the kinds of policies they’re likely to support.

What a Donation Gets Candidates:

Money can help someone win an election, though it’s not the only factor. By and large, donations get spent on the day-to-day expenses of running a campaign. You can use FEC data to research how candidates are spending their funds this election.

It’s probably garden-variety stuff: lunch, plane tickets, campaign ads, fundraising software, venue rentals for campaign events. In some cases, you might even see donations to the campaigns of other candidates they support. The choices candidates make tell you something about their priorities: where they’re spending their time, which voters they’re trying hardest to win over (older voters with TV ads or younger folks online) and how much they pay their staff.

Of course, sometimes candidates try to hide the true purpose of their campaign expenses. U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter of California was sentenced to 11 months in prison in 2020 for spending 2018 campaign donations on family trips to Hawaii and Italy and private school for his children.

What a Donation Gets Campaign Donors:

Individuals are allowed to contribute up to $2,900 per election to each candidate’s campaign. (A primary and a general election count as separate elections; so do runoffs.)

Campaign donations are not supposed to be transactional — that’s considered bribery, and it’s a crime. But they are a way of establishing a relationship and opening the door to conversations between the donor and the government. One example of this: In January 2021, The Intercept obtained a recording of a Zoom call Sen. Joe Manchin had with billionaire donors that shed light on the kind of access major funders get.

Most of the time these donors don’t see a direct “return” on their investment. If you donate to a candidate, chances are you’re getting one of two things:

1. The satisfaction of backing a potential winner who shares your values or goals.
2. Access. Academic research has shown that elected officials are more responsive to requests for meetings that come from donors to their campaigns. When you give money, the recipients know it, and while they may not agree with all your positions, they’re more likely to hear you out.

I know: It’s murky.

But, thanks to regulations in the ‘70s, we can at least see what’s behind the curtain. If you give $200 or more to a candidate, the campaign is required to report your name, address and employer or occupation to the FEC. Based on these FEC filings, along with similar disclosures from political action committees, the Center for Responsive Politics (through its site OpenSecrets.org) determines which industries are funding the candidates in your race, and you can look it up.

Take a close look at the types of sectors and interest groups donating to your candidates. These can signal who has their ear.

What a Donation Gets Super PAC Donors:

Some of the biggest players in the campaign landscape are super PACs. These are political action committees that don’t give directly to a candidate but spend independently in support of (or in opposition to) them. This outside spending is completely uncapped, freeing super PACs to raise any amount of money to influence any given race — and typically what super PACs spend money on are negative campaign ads. (You may balk at this, but, even if people claim to hate them, attack ads work.)

Think about the negative ads you’ve seen lately. Chances are they were funded by a super PAC that believe certain voters can be activated based on its message. Knowing who these groups are can help you better understand their motives and better assess whether you buy what they’re selling. You can browse our FEC Itemizer database to learn more about outside spending in specific races.

Super PACs tend to represent three main categories:

• Single-issue groups: Think advocacy groups that focus on abortion, the environment or taxes.

• Partisan groups: These are super PACs linked to key House and Senate leaders, like the Congressional Leadership Fund (affiliated with House Republican leaders) and the Senate Majority PAC (connected with Senate Democratic leadership). While lawmakers themselves are restricted from soliciting unlimited donations to the super PACs they’re tied to, the people running these groups can do so on their behalf.

• Family interests: Basically, this is when a wealthy family member donates money to a campaign or supportive PAC. For example, New Jersey congressional candidate Bob Healey’s campaign is supported by a Super PAC mostly funded by a $2 million donation from his mother.

Outside spending from super PACs can have a big impact on an election. For example, the Saving Arizona PAC, which is connected to tech mogul Peter Thiel, is pouring millions into ads supporting Republican Blake Masters, who is running to unseat Sen. Mark Kelly in Arizona. This comes after the Washington Post reported that Mitch McConnell asked Thiel to intervene in the race after he funded the Masters in the primary.

How Companies and Industries Grapple with Politicized Donations

A total of 147 members of Congress voted against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 election win. Pro-Trump Republicans had planned the vote for weeks, riding baseless claims of election fraud that had already been debunked in lawsuits, recounts and more. Until that moment, the certification vote had been symbolic. There was no procedural or democratic reason to vote against certifying election results, which were real, or state electors, who had already been sent by the states. A violent mob broke into and ransacked the U.S. Capitol, calling for Mike Pence’s hanging and other blood. In the aftermath, dozens of companies released statements that they’d no longer be donating to candidates who voted against certifying the election.

ProPublica focuses on accountability, so, naturally, we wanted to know whether they’d stuck to their word.

Sergio Hernandez, a news apps developer here, looked into it. Using publicly available campaign finance information, he found that Fortune 500 companies have given millions of dollars to election deniers who voted against certifying the 2020 election. You can look up each company’s top beneficiaries, individual contributions and whether they kept their promises.

What About Dark Money?

Transparency laws as they are written only bring us so much information. Since the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, dark money (money spent by political nonprofits or super PACs, which are not legally obligated to disclose donors) has been flowing fast. That’s one reason ProPublica is busy. Sometimes it takes intrepid journalists who investigate as their full-time jobs to unearth just some of the ways the ultrawealthy influence how the government operates.

In August, ProPublica and its partner The Lever exposed how an elderly, ultrasecretive business owner named Barre Seid gave the largest known political donation, worth $1.6 billion, to an advocacy organization run by Leonard Leo, one of the prime architects of the conservative effort to reshape the Supreme Court.

Seid, a later investigation found, has been quietly funding right-wing causes using a strategy he called “attack philanthropy.” Seid did much of his political funding while trying to remain below radar. That’s one reason you may have never heard of him. But the donors who help shape this country deserve as much scrutiny and publicity as the politicians they support. After all, this country belongs to all of us.

New York state-based artist Jean Shin, Laumeier’s 2022 Visiting Artist in Residence, describes her work as “giving new form to life’s leftovers.” Her sculptures and installations transform familiar objects into

The post Jean Shin: Home Base appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

A chorus of clicks and clacks from fingers speeding across keyboards, the hum of copiers shooting out freshly printed pages in rapid succession, echoes of laughter that carry down the hall from a meeting room where someone forgot to close the door behind them — it all sounds exactly like what you’d expect to find in just about any given office, on any given day. Until March 2020 at least. If you know anything about offices, or even just people in general, you’d also expect to observe at least…

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We’ve noted for several years how the “race to 5G” was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager to sell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it’s more of an evolution than a revolution. But that’s not what telecom giants […]

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by Alec MacGillis and Sergio Hernandez

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Last week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the reliably provocative Georgia Republican, declared on Steve Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,” that if her party wins back a House majority next week, as is quite likely, it will seek revenge on the corporations that curtailed contributions to the 147 congressional Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election results. “That’s not going to be forgotten by a whole bunch of my Republican colleagues,” she said.

It is not clear exactly what form such punishment would take. But there’s another complicating factor in this revenge scenario: Many of the corporations that announced with great fanfare their cutoff in contributions after the certification vote and storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have since resumed giving to some of those 147 Republicans. In other words, if Greene leads a quest for revenge on those companies, she’ll be taking aim at the very corporations that have funded many of her allies.

For some of the companies, the resumption of giving to the 147 Republicans (139 in the House, eight in the Senate) started only a few months after they vowed to stop. But ProPublica has now created a tool to track and assess this remarkable shift: an app that has collected all of the campaign contributions that Fortune 500 corporations made to the 147 over the past two years. All told, at least 228 of the Fortune 500 — representing more than two-thirds of the 300-odd companies that have political action committees — have given to the 147, for a total of more than $13 million. (This does not include millions in contributions made to Republican campaign committees for the House and Senate, much of which is making its way to those who voted against certifying the election results.)

That $13 million sum is a stark testament to business as usual in Washington. These members — more than half of the Republicans in Congress — decided to side with the baseless claim to victory by then-President Donald Trump, thereby exacerbating an unprecedented transition-of-power crisis that threatened to upend the political order. And yet those members have managed to resume receiving substantial contributions from the companies that depend on the stability of that political order, including companies that garnered public relations points after the Jan. 6 riots by saying they were cutting the 147 off.

Take, for instance, General Electric, which issued a particularly strong clarion call in announcing a new post-Jan. 6 policy for its GE Employee Political Action Committee. “The GEPAC board has voted to suspend donations to those who voted to oppose the Electoral College results,” said Meghan Thurlow, GE’s global director of public affairs. “This is not a decision we made lightly, but is one we believe is important to ensure that our future contributions continue to reflect our company’s values and commitment to democracy.”

Less than two years later, GE has made contributions to 11 of the Republicans who voted against certifying the results. The company’s explanation of the shift? “The GEPAC board’s broad suspension of donations to those who voted to oppose the Electoral College results remains in place,” said a company spokesperson. “However, like many other PACs, it will consider individual exceptions on a case-by-case basis.”

Among the lucky beneficiaries of those exceptions: Rep. Ken Calvert of California, who said after the 2020 election that Trump “has the right to ensure vote counts are complete, accurate and legal”; Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri, who tweeted, “I stand with President Trump. Every legal vote must be counted in complete transparency”; and Rep. Ron Estes of Kansas, who decried the FBI search for classified records in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home as an outrage that “undermines the credibility of the FBI.” All voted against certifying the election. All are also on committees of importance to GE: Calvert is on the appropriations subcommittees for defense and energy spending, Graves is the top Republican on the committee overseeing transportation and infrastructure, and Estes is on the ways and means subcommittee overseeing taxation.

Also among the companies jumping on the bandwagon was Home Depot. “We are pausing to take time to carefully review and reevaluate each of the members who voted to object to the election results before considering further contributions to them,” said Sara Gorman, the company’s senior director of corporate communications, on Jan. 27, 2021.

That pause, it turned out, lasted only a year, less than many home appliance warranties. Home Depot has given a total of $475,000 to 65 of the 147, making it the top donor to 2020 election deniers. Asked about this, Gorman said, “Our associate-funded PAC is bipartisan. It supports candidates and organizations on both sides of the aisle who champion pro-business, pro-retail positions that create jobs and economic growth.” No more mention of the 2020 election or the denial of such.

Standing in contrast are big companies that have not given to any of the 147 through their corporate PACs during this election cycle, which include tech giants like Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft and Wall Street powerhouses like JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and BlackRock.

But then there is Boeing, which in the idealistic days of early 2021 announced, through then-spokesperson Bradley Akubuiro, “Boeing strongly condemns the violence, lawlessness and destruction that took place in the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Given the current environment, we are not making political contributions at this time. We will continue to carefully evaluate future contributions to ensure that we support those who not only support our company, but also uphold our country’s most fundamental principles.”

Among those now apparently upholding the country’s most fundamental principles, in Boeing’s estimations, are 74 of the Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election results, who have received more than $390,000. Asked about the contributions, company spokesperson Connor Greenwood said, “We do not have anything to add to the story.”

Joining Boeing in announcing a hiatus in political giving in early 2021 were its competitors in the defense contracting realm: Northrop Grumman, which was “evaluating the way forward”; Lockheed Martin, which was updating its strategy to “reflect our core values”; and Raytheon, which needed to “reflect on the current environment.” All that evaluating and reflecting seems to have gotten old fast: Northrop has given $175,000 to 26 of the 147; Lockheed donated more than $366,000 to 90 of them; and Raytheon has given $309,000 to 66. None of the three companies responded to questions.

One other defense contractor did respond: General Dynamics, which has given more than $324,000 to 67 of the 147 Republicans. In response to questions about the contributions, spokesperson Jeff Davis noted that the company’s recent investor report stated: “Our employee PAC will not support members of Congress who provoke or incite violence or similar unlawful conduct.”

Asked to elaborate on how the company determined whether a member had provoked or incited violence, Davis said, “Sorry, I’m not able to help beyond what is already written there.”

American Airlines, meanwhile, had put an explicit three-month duration on its own pause in political giving after Jan. 6, but had said that when it resumed making contributions, it would make sure to focus its support on lawmakers who “support U.S. aviation, airline workers and our values, including bringing people together.” Those whom it deems to have “brought people together” now include 42 of the 147 Republicans, for a total of more than $128,000. The company had no comment.

Regions Financial, the bank holding company, also had strong feelings about national togetherness as it announced a halt to political giving in January 2021. “This is a time for us, as a nation, to come together and identify a united path forward,” said media and public relations manager Jeremy King in that halcyon moment.

That united path forward led Regions to give to 74 of the 147 Republicans, for a total of more than $258,000. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

ProPublica also reached out to more than a half dozen other companies that were either among the top 15 donors overall to the 147 or among the top 10 donors on the list of companies that had announced a halt to contributions after Jan. 6: AT&T, Comcast, Honeywell, L3Harris, Marathon Petroleum, Williams and UPS.

None responded to requests for comment, with the exception of L3Harris, where spokesperson Paul Swiergosz wrote back, “We will politely decline comment regarding this story.”

Politeness is certainly appreciated in this uncivil age. So are “commitment to democracy,” “a united path forward,” and concern for “our country’s fundamental principles,” especially if they endure for more than a news cycle or two.

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