Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is supposed to serve all the people, but she’s spending her time taking care of her powerful corporate friends instead.
Everyday Americans need leaders who will make the economy work for them. That’s why we’re keeping our eyes on Gina Raimondo and exposing her special interest ties.
When big business says "Jump," Gina Raimondo asks, "How high?"
The Commerce Secretary has turned her department into an exclusive club for Big Tech, Wall Street, and other special interests — so they and their super-rich friends can keep banking even fatter profits and winning government contracts and concessions, while ordinary Americans lose out.
Raimondo’s staff and senior advisors move back and forth through the revolving door, making money as they go.
Lobbyists and lawyers take jobs at Commerce so they can whisper in her ear. Wall Street bankers hijack her multibillion-dollar government grant programs. Fossil fuel execs, defense contractors, Big Pharma CEOs — she’s had more than a thousand meetings with big-money special interests.
No Cabinet Secretary loves special interests more than Gina Raimondo.
Gina Raimondo is a private-equity veteran who’s stocked the Department of Commerce with shills — for Big Tech, Wall Street, and all the other big-business special interests that depend on loose regulations, favorable trade policy, and billion-dollar handouts to enrich their shareholders.
Big Tech
Over and over, Raimondo and her staff take meetings with CEOs and execs at Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon — and push for the policies they ask for — even as the rest of the government is investigating them for squashing small businesses, invading your privacy, and endangering your kids.
Learn more about Raimondo's connections to big tech.
Wall Street
America’s financial fat cats — like the CEOs and board chairs of shadowy banks and investment firms like BlackRock, Carlyle, JPMorgan, and Bank of America — won’t stop talking about how much they love Raimondo, who’s a former private equity executive herself.
Learn more about Raimondo's connections to Wall Street.
Special interests: Big Pharma, defense giants, and more
Raimondo is “corporate America’s best friend in the White House,” one observer says. Climate scientists and union leaders can’t get in to see her, but she’s met more than a thousand times with CEOs, top executives, and industry trade groups. In just 7 months, she huddled with over 200 big-company execs — that’s more than one meeting per day.
Learn more about Raimondo's connections to special interests.While the Justice Department is investigating and prosecuting many of these very same companies for antitrust violations, invasions of privacy, and corporate crimes, Raimondo’s protecting them.
She speaks out against regulations Big Tech doesn’t like
She tosses deals to the same Wall Street and consulting companies that tanked the world economy in 2008
She shields Big Pharma’s patents and Big Healthcare’s profits — even at the cost of human lives
Meanwhile, as Raimondo protects the wealth of billionaires, the rest of us are paying the price.
Apple continues to treat the iPhone ecosystem as a license to take money from you, leading to a major Justice Department civil suit this year. Amazon beats up small merchants and puts them out of business. Google locks other companies out of the Google Play store. Facebook and Instagram sell your children’s personal data.
Source:The Providence Journal
Rhode Islanders warned us, but we didn’t listen.
When she was first floated for Commerce, 70% of poll respondents didn’t want Raimondo in any Cabinet position. That’s because as America’s most unpopular governor, she was already putting Wall Street and giant corporations ahead of ordinary Rhode Islanders:
Her state pension reform pushed workers’ money into risky hedge funds and cut benefits for schoolteachers, while it ramped up the management fees Wall Street raked in.
She legally shielded nursing homes and hospitals during the pandemic, so they couldn’t be sued if they didn’t protect your parents or grandparents from COVID-19. At the behest of lobbyists, she issued executive orders to shield nursing homes, hospitals, and other healthcare providers from liability.
She let health insurers hike rates by 10% in the midst of the pandemic, too, even as they saw record profits.
She proposed a $15.7 million giveaway to insurance companies, while slamming Medicare for All and cutting the Medicaid budget by $58.7 million.
She got herself into a contracting scandal, when big-name consulting firm Deloitte rolled out a disastrous public benefits software system, leaving needy beneficiaries shut out — and then she renewed the deal.
She ignored red-flags about Care.com and nevertheless partnered with the site during the COVID-19 pandemic. Care.com had already spent nearly half a million dollars to settle a lawsuit by the state of Massachusetts for misleading people about the quality of its background checks and misrepresenting the ease of unsubscribing from the service. Since then, the Federal Trade Commission has brought an enforcement action against the company, alleging that they deceived caregivers who were looking for jobs and failed to give clients a simple way to cancel paid subscriptions.
