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WASHINGTON — Americans for Prosperity — the group backed by David H. and Charles G. Koch that has been pouring millions of dollars into competitive Senate races to the rising alarm of Democrats — was also among the politically active groups on the ground in this month’s special House election on Florida’s Gulf Coast. But its agenda had little to do with the fate of David Jolly , the Republican candidate who won that race. The group’s ground troops — including those who knocked on doors, ran phone banks and reached out through social media to gauge ways to motivate voters — were part of a much greater project, with a prize much larger than a congressional seat. Americans for Prosperity turned the Florida contest into its personal electoral laboratory to fine-tune get-out-the-vote tools and messaging for future elections as it pursues its overarching goal of convincing Americans that big government is bad government. As the group emerges as a dominant force in the 2014 midterm … [Read more...] about Koch Group, Spending Freely, Hones Attack on Government

Britain's steel industry risks plunging into “irreversible decline” unless the Tories intervene, MPs warned tonight. A cross-party group has written to Rishi Sunak urging him to back moves to make the sector less polluting. A dozen Labour , Conservative and Welsh and Scottish nationalist Independent MPs have signed the letter, seen exclusively by the Mirror, calling on the Prime Minister to act. The letter warns the PM: “We are concerned that in the absence of government support the UK risks becoming the first G20 economy to see its domestic steel production go into irreversible decline.” Describing steel as “a vital, strategic industry in the UK”, the MPs call on Mr Sunak to “act now to safeguard the future of the industry”. Read More MPs have written to the Prime Minister highlighting the trouble the sector faces ( Image: AFP via Getty Images) The warning comes as 800 jobs hang in the balance at British Steel, and with 440 jobs under threat at Liberty … [Read more...] about UK steel industry on brink of ‘irreversible decline’, MPs warn Rishi Sunak

There is a lot of doom and gloom out there at the moment. The soaring cost of living , the ongoing war in Ukraine, the very uncertain future... it’s enough to make us all want to head to the jungle to eat bugs. No matter how many times someone says “we’ve got through worse”, it doesn’t seem to cut through the anxiety of coping with everything right now. But it is during such difficult times that magic can happen – when communities come together and work towards making other people’s lives better. A lot of fantastic initiatives were set up during the pandemic, showing a small contribution can make a big difference. Get all the latest news sent to your inbox. Sign up for the free Mirror newsletter Food banks help communities ( Image: Manchester Evening News) People volunteered their time and skills to help those struggling to make ends meet. Restaurants fed the hungry, people on local Facebook groups answered the call to deliver care packages or pick … [Read more...] about ‘Watching students work together to serve their local community gave me hope’

Around the world, nations make a call for their brave to uphold the freedom of mankind. Many of them fight for freedoms they can't use themselves. From the UK to the U.S. to France to Australia to Canada, countries honor the sacrifice of soldiers through observed holidays. As important as those holidays are in reaching veterans, how brands reach them when the world is not watching is often more important for the civically engaged consumer. I've learned this through my past work helping brands launch products and have collected my insight into how brands can reach this segment of consumers. Different Voices Acknowledging the different voices of veterans in a unifying message is key. Veterans like the rest of the world are dynamic in culture and sexual orientation. In essence, keeping LGBTQ, women and diverse groups in mind, while serving them and marketing to them, is of high importance. In the U.S. alone, the number of female veterans is projected to increase from around 2 … [Read more...] about The Global Veteran Consumer: Cause Meets Luxury

As companies from Coca-Cola to Amazon to Citigroup appear to be tripping over one another to declare that they are “pausing” or “reassessing” donations to Republicans who sought to overturn the election — and, in some cases, suspending giving to both parties — they might want to look at a company that didn’t say anything. That company is IBM . It didn’t need to issue a mea culpa for a simple reason. It doesn’t donate to candidates on either side of the aisle — at all, ever. IBM is one of only a handful of large companies in the United States that are not involved in direct political giving to candidates. It has no political action committee. Even when it gives money to trade groups, it restricts its money from being funneled to candidates. It was a policy put in place more than a century ago by Thomas J. Watson, the founding father of the modern IBM. “We should not use IBM time, money or materials for political purposes,” Mr. Watson’s son, Thomas J. Watson Jr., … [Read more...] about ‘An Epiphany Moment’ for Corporate Political Donors May Have Arrived

Here’s something odd: We’re getting worse at construction. Think of the technology we have today that we didn’t in the 1970s. The new generations of power tools and computer modeling and teleconferencing and advanced machinery and prefab materials and global shipping. You’d think we could build much more, much faster, for less money, than in the past. But we can’t. Or, at least, we don’t. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, productivity in the construction sector — how much more could be done given the same number of workers and machines and land — grew faster than productivity in the rest of the economy. Then, around 1970, it began to fall, even as economywide productivity kept rising. Today, the divergence is truly wild. A construction worker in 2020 produced less than a construction worker in 1970, at least according to the official statistics. Contrast that with the economy overall, where labor productivity rose by 290 percent between 1950 and 2020, or to the manufacturing sector, … [Read more...] about The Story Construction Tells About America’s Economy Is Disturbing

For the 26th time in two years, the Texas attorney general Ken Paxton recently filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging a Biden administration policy. The suit, which seeks to wipe out a new Labor Department rule about the investment of pension trust assets, wasn’t filed in Austin, the state capital, or in Dallas, where the Labor Department’s regional offices are, or anywhere else with a logical connection to the dispute. It was filed in Amarillo. Why Amarillo? By filing there, Mr. Paxton had a 100 percent chance of having the case assigned to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump in 2019 and a former deputy general counsel to the First Liberty Institute, which frequently litigates religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court. “Forum shopping” has long been a problem in civil litigation. Clever lawyers use procedural rules to file in courts deemed most likely to be sympathetic to their claims. But what Mr. Paxton and other plaintiffs are … [Read more...] about Don’t Let Republican ‘Judge Shoppers’ Thwart the Will of Voters

Doctors have long diagnosed many of our sickest patients with “ demoralization syndrome ,” a condition commonly associated with terminal illness that’s characterized by a sense of helplessness and loss of purpose. American physicians are now increasingly suffering from a similar condition, except our demoralization is not a reaction to a medical condition, but rather to the diseased systems for which we work. The United States is the only large high-income nation that doesn’t provide universal health care‌ to its citizens. Instead, it maintains a lucrative system of for-profit medicine. For decades, ‌ at least tens of thousands of preventable deaths have occurred each year because health care here is so expensive. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the consequences of this policy choice have intensified. One study estimates at least 338,000 Covid deaths in the United States could have been prevented by universal health care. In the wake of this generational catastrophe, many … [Read more...] about Doctors Aren’t Burned Out From Overwork. We’re Demoralized by Our Health System.

British Steel bosses were today urged to continue rescue talks with the Government amid plans to axe 800 hundred jobs. Business Minister Nusrat Ghani told MPs a "generous package of support" was under discussion with the manufacturing company, amid fears of redundancies at its plant at Scunthorpe, Lincs. Scunthorpe MP Holly Mumby-Croft said British Steel, owned by Chinese giant Jingye, should "immediately reconsider" the potential redundancies. "Jingye sat down yesterday with the unions and talked about laying off 800 British Steel workers,” she said in an emergency Commons debate. "I cannot and will not defend this decision which is unacceptable in every possible way for my constituents. "This is not a way to behave, it sends entirely the wrong message and breaches the spirit of negotiations, which I believe are the result of a level of government focus on steel and its wider issues, including energy and carbon costs, that are genuinely encouraging for the industry. Read … [Read more...] about British Steel owner faces calls to halt ‘unacceptable’ plan to cut 800 jobs