Fearing a blue wave in November, businesses are getting more ambitious in fighting progressive reforms.

This article by Micheal Hobbes was published in the Huffington Post on October 1st, 2018.

Ballot measures have produced a wave of ambitious progressive reforms in recent years, from legalizing marijuana to expanding voting rights to granting paid family leave. This year, corporations have become equally ambitious in fighting them ― and experts say they’re hitting new levels of audacity in doing so.

Dialysis companies, for example, have raised $53 million to fight a California proposition that would cap their profits at 15 percent. In Florida, Disney has teamed up with the Seminole tribe to make competition in the casino sector illegal. Mining companies in Alaska are working to defeat an effort to protect salmon habitats. And Coca-Cola and Pepsi are trying to persuade Washington and Oregon voters to prohibit any tax on groceries — a category that just so happens to include sodas.

“The success of minimum wage laws and soda taxes are an alarm bell for corporations that they could lose in this arena, so they’re getting in early to pre-empt them or roll them back,” said Nick Freudenberg, a professor at City University of New York who studies the impact of the private sector on policy.

A critical component of this effort, and a recent innovation in corporate lobbying, is using the mere threat of a ballot initiative to negotiate with lawmakers. In Seattle earlier this year, the city council decided to repeal the city’s “head tax” on large corporations rather than fight an Amazon- and Starbucks-backed ballot initiative reversing it. In Oregon, the governor reportedly agreed to drop a corporate-transparency initiative after Nike balked at having to disclose how much it pays in state and local taxes. MORE…