Skip to content
Grist home
All donations doubled!

Articles by Pat Garofalo

Pat Garofalo is economic policy editor for ThinkProgress.org and The Progress Report at American Progress. Pat’s work has appeared in The Nation, U.S. News & World Report, The Guardian, The Washington Examiner, and at AOL News and New Deal 2.0. He has been a guest on many radio shows and Al-Jazeera television.

Featured Article

Apparently their current amount of influence isn’t good enough.Cross-posted from the Wonk Room.

The American Petroleum Institute (API), Big Oil’s chief lobbying organization, will start directly backing political candidates in the second quarter of this year. API, whose membership includes oil giants like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron, already spends tens of millions of dollars every year on lobbying, advertisements, and Astroturf campaigns to support the the oil industry agenda. As the Center for American Progress’s Dan Weiss wrote, API “wants to drill in fragile, sensitive places, keep government tax breaks, expand offshore drilling without reforms, and block global warming pollution reduction requirements.”

“This is adding one more tool to our toolkit,” Martin Durbin, API’s executive vice president for government affairs, told Bloomberg News. “At the end of the day, our mission is trying to influence the policy debate.” As Bloomberg pointed out, oil-supported political action committees like the Independent Petroleum Association of America overwhelmingly donate to Republican candidates.

... Read more