Radley Balko, Veronique de Rugy Named to 'The Politico 50' List of Visionaries 'transforming American politics'
Magazine cites their roles in freeing a death row inmate and shuttering the Ex-Im Bank
Politico has published a list of 50 "thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics." Number 28 is former Reasoner Radley Balko, "The police state's grand inquisitor." From the write-up:
Long before Americans watched riot police suppress protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, using tear gas and tanks, Radley Balko could have told you America's police tactics were out of control. The native Tennessean with libertarian sensibilities, now at the Washington Post, has spent nearly two decades warning about America's burgeoning police state. His Huffington Post "Raid of the Day" feature highlighted how SWAT raids had become an everyday police tactic, while his reporting helped to free one Mississippi man from death row and earned the attention of Justice Stephen Breyer in a Supreme Court dissent on police raids.
Balko worked for Reason from 2006 to 2011. The death row inmate he helped free was Cory Maye, a process that began with this October 2006 feature for the magazine.
Clocking it at Number 42 is Reason columnist Veronique de Rugy and contributor Timothy P. Carney, for their influential work declaiming the Export-Import Bank. From the citation:
Carney first began following the little-known Ex-Im, which authorizes billions of dollars each year to subsidize foreign purchases of U.S. exports, as a young reporter in 2001, around the time de Rugy began honing anti-regulation and tax arguments at think tanks. By 2012, with their theories against corporate welfare swirling, a record 93 representatives in the House voted against the bank's reauthorization. By this summer, as Carney and de Rugy published at a feverish pace, conservatives in Congress banded together to buck the decades-long bipartisan consensus, allowing the bank's charter to expire for the first time ever.
Read Carney's January 2015 Ex-Im piece for Reason: "The Crony Capitalism Litmus Test." Then, while feasting on some de Rugian fury about Boeing's favorite government bank presented in chronological order below, please note the delicious irony that the top-50 list is sponsored by Boeing. It's right there at the top of the page.
* "The Constancy of Crony Capitalism," Oct. 15, 2012
* "Bipartisan Corporate Welfare," October 2013
* "The Crony Capitalism Machine," August 2014
* "You Want to Know Who Benefits from the Ex-Im Bank? Not Small Businesses," March 13, 2015
* "Big Data, Big Business, and Big Government," June 2015
* "End the Export-Import Bank," June 18, 2015
* "Beyond the Export-Import Bank: This Is the Next Corporate Welfare Program We Should Cut," July 2, 2015
