Koch Bros Lose In Delaware Court In Try To Make Dark Money Even Darker:
The rules around campaign finance transparency in Delaware are unlikely to change ahead of the September primary elections after a judge denied a conservative foundation’s request for their immediate pause.
The Americans for Prosperity Foundation is a nonprofit founded by the Republican megadonor Koch brothers to promote free-market policies, individual liberty, and limited government. In April, the group sued Delaware, seeking to overturn the Delaware Elections Disclosure Act on the grounds that its extensive campaign finance transparency requirements serve to discourage political speech and thus violates the First Amendment.
The Delaware Elections Disclosure Act was passed by Gov. Jack Markell in 2012 in reaction to the landmark Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. That decision overturned traditional limitations on corporate spending in elections via political action committees (PACs), leading to several states implementing their own guardrails to mitigate the resulting impact on state elections.
Ross Connolly, the Northeast regional manager for the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, said the group is not currently working in Delaware due to its disclosure laws, but would like to get involved in ongoing education and property tax debates.
“We would like to be in Delaware,” he said. “We just will not put our small or large donors … at risk of being singled out in an unfair way and being attacked because they believe in the cause of Americans for Prosperity and they want to help us in our mission.”
A state judge in Delaware has dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought against the Guardian by the UnitedHealth Group.
Delaware superior court judge Calvin Scott’s ruling stemmed from a lawsuit that the US’s largest health insurance conglomerate pursued against the Guardian in May 2025 over an investigation by the outlet which reported that UnitedHealth secretly made payments to nursing homes to reduce hospital transfers for residents.
UnitedHealth brought the lawsuit against both the Guardian US and its UK parent.
In a ruling issued on Monday, Scott granted the Guardian’s motion to dismiss. And he dismissed all six defamation claims in the lawsuit.
“The article’s reporting of the bonuses as ‘secret’ or made ‘secretly’ or ‘quietly,’ is substantially true,” Scott wrote in one part of the ruling.
In another part, he added that the Guardian “is not required to publish facts just because United would have preferred more favorable facts”.
Scott added: “The omissions do not render the statements false.”
The Trump administration plans to announce Wednesday that it has reached a broad nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that could lead to the country enriching its own fuel for nuclear reactors, U.S. officials said.
The accord is intended to further bind the United States with the Saudi government as the war with Iran strains the relationship. The Trump administration, according to officials, estimates it will provide billions of dollars for the U.S. nuclear industry — starting with Westinghouse, which designs many of the reactors sold abroad.
The agreement will require review by Congress, which under the Atomic Energy Act has the power to vote a resolution of disapproval. But as a practical matter, the agreement would likely pass, because Congress would have to assemble a veto-proof majority to override Mr. Trump’s initiative.
Nonetheless, debate over the accord is likely to be fierce. To get the deal done with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s 40-year-old de facto leader, Mr. Trump had to agree to terms that may limit international inspectors from going to any sites in the country that they think could be a pathway to diverting fuel to weapons projects.
And he agreed that, after a joint study with Saudi Arabia on the economics of producing nuclear fuel, the Saudis may be allowed to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium on their soil.
Is it OK to write about Saudi Arabia without using the term ‘murderous regime’? Didn’t think so. But, hey, the WWE goes there twice a year, so they have effectively ‘sportswashed’ themselves clean. Although…turns out they’re deadbeats when it comes to paying LIV’s bills. Don’t be critical–Trump has done the same many times over. One reason why he likes them. Along with the ‘murderous regime’ stuff.
The American stock market is booming, thanks to artificial intelligence. Tech giants are borrowing billions to acquire AI talent, purchase chips and hardware, and construct data centers. And market watchers are starting to get worried. They see financiers bulldozing giant piles of money to private AI start-ups with no realistic path to profitability, tech companies reliant on other tech companies for revenue growth, and non-tech businesses without a lot to show for their AI investments. The value of AI-linked firms has climbed $27 trillion in the past three years—an astonishing amount, equivalent to 36 percent of the value of the entire U.S. stock market today. Although future earnings could justify those valuations, as Dominic Wilson and Vickie Chang of Goldman Sachs argued in a note to clients, the profit expectations require Panglossian optimism.
No less an authority than Sam Altman is arguing that we are in an AI bubble. The International Monetary Fund is citing it as a significant risk to financial stability and warning about what might happen when it bursts: diminished investment, tighter credit, reduced consumption, disrupted trade flows.
That’s pretty much what happens when any bubble pops, as a Dutch tulip obsessive could have told you in 1637 or a bitcoin evangelist could have told you in 2011, 2013, 2014, 2018, or 2022. Yet the AI bubble is no ordinary bubble. Hyper-rich corporations are stoking it, rather than kitchen-table investors. They’re blowing it up when credit is fairly expensive, not dirt cheap. That might make the bubble less fragile and longer lasting than those of the past. But it won’t make it any less painful when it pops.
The dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of the late aughts were remarkably broad-based compared with the AI bubble today. Uncle Ted got a hulking desktop computer, opened a newfangled E-Trade account, and started day-trading shares in Apple and Pets.com. The share of American households owning equities climbed 13 percentage points from 1995 to 2001, during which time more than 2,752 firms went public (far more than the 730 operating businesses that have IPOed in the past six years). A half decade later, Aunt Linda bought a condo with nothing down, flipped it, and mortgaged three new investment properties in the Phoenix suburbs, sight unseen. The homeownership rate rose 5 percentage points as the housing bubble inflated; 40 percent of mortgages issued at its height went to investment or vacation properties.
In both cases, regular people were staking their savings on what seemed like a winning bet: the internet changing everything, housing prices never going down. In both cases, cheap credit fueled the irrational exuberance. Low interest rates let venture capitalists fund nonsense web businesses and let banks provide junk loans to borrowers with terrible credit. In both cases, rising interest rates popped the bubble.
Tech companies are going to need to start generating huge revenues and huge profits to justify these valuations. OpenAI needs to spin up roughly $100 billion in free cash flow by 2030, according to calculations by Harrison Rolfes of PitchBook. Analysts expect it will lose $10 billion to $30 billion that year. If it does—or if more communities ban data centers, or if non-tech companies prove reticent about purchasing AI software, or if China develops AI models that do not require so much computing power—we could be in for a massive correction.
Tech companies are also going to need to start generating even bigger revenues and profits to pay off their debts. In the early days of AI, venture capitalists, wealthy individuals, and Big Tech firms used hard cash to invest in the new technology. But the build-out has proven so expensive that Silicon Valley has turned to corporate bonds and private credit, meaning loans made by entities other than banks. Thus, though the AI boom has happened while interest rates are fairly high, it still involves a lot of leverage. The deals are complicated, opaque, and structured so as to be invisible on traditional balance sheets, making the “ultimate distribution of risk less transparent,” Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh of Columbia Business School has found. Already, lenders are getting queasy—“buy-side indigestion,” as Morningstar describes the market’s recent reticence to meet Silicon Valley’s demands.
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Great stories by this news outlet. That Koch Brothers story was Supreme. The corporate press treats us like mushrooms.
Would be nice if you could release all names of Musk-Rat recipients at leg-hall that took the money?