title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: On June 29, 2010, Tesla Motors launched its initial public offering on NASDAQ. 13,300,000 shares of common stock were issued to the public at a price of US$17.00 per share. The IPO raised for the company. It was the first American car maker to go public since the Ford Motor Company had its IPO in 1956, and by 2014 Tesla had market value half that of Ford. In early 2013, Tesla had problems producing the Model S, and was running out of money. Musk proposed a US$11 billion deal with Google, but improved production and a sales push gave Tesla its first profitable quarter, and the deal was abandoned.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: During November 2013, following news of a third Model S fire, Tesla's stock fell more than 20 percent. All of those Model S fires had developed several minutes after the cars had struck significant road debris at high speeds and all of the vehicles had provided warnings to the occupants of serious battery damage, advising that an immediate stop was required. All three owners ordered new Model Ss. In the following months Tesla developed a battery protection system as a no-cost retrofit to all Model Ss. No further regulatory action was taken, although there have been a few incidents since, most recently January 2016, with a Model S charging at a Norwegian Supercharger station. Despite the drop in stock price, Tesla was still the top performer on the Nasdaq 100 index in 2013. Tesla was seeking to sell 40,000 electric vehicles worldwide in 2014, adding China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Australia to the list of countries where it exports cars, but in November 2014 Tesla reduced its guidance on sales down to 33,000 units for 2014. , Tesla has a US Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) of 276 mpg.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: Tesla's production of cars began at the Tesla Factory in Fremont, California. In October 2015, Tesla Motor announced the company was negotiating with the Chinese government on producing cars in China. Local production in China has the potential to reduce the sales prices of Tesla models by a third; however, foreign automakers are generally required to establish a joint venture with a Chinese company to produce cars domestically. Elon Musk clarified at that time that production will remain in the U.S. in the foreseeable future, but if there's sufficient local demand for the Tesla Model 3 in China, a factory could be built in the country as soon as a year after the launch of the new model. Production in Europe will also depend on the region's demand for the Model 3. Tesla was also considering building a manufacturing plant in India, according to Tesla's Chief Information Officer, Jay Vijayan. This would help Tesla to avoid 100% import duty which is applicable on import of CBU (Completely Built Unit) cars in India. Tesla was also considering building a battery plant in India. "Given high local demand, a Gigafactory in India would probably make sense in the long term," Musk said in response to a specific question about whether he would consider a factory in India too.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: Tesla announced in November 2015 that during the third quarter of 2015 it produced a record 13,091 vehicles, and also revised its target sales for 2015 to between 50,000 and 52,000 vehicles, including both of its models available for retail sales. The company expects to achieve an average production and deliveries of 1,600 to 1,800 vehicles per week for Model S and Model X combined during 2016, adding up to 80,000 to 90,000 new Model S and Model X vehicles in 2016.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: Under a buyback program called the "Resale Value Guarantee" available in 37 U.S. states, a Tesla Model S sold new before July 1, 2016, included the right to return it after three years with reimbursement of 43% to 50% of its initial price. This reimbursement matched the trade-in values of competitive German luxury cars of that age. In addition to maintaining the resale value, Tesla hoped to secure a supply of used cars to refurbish and re-sell with warranty. According to Automotive News, the profit margin on used car sales in the U.S. is about triple that on new cars, and Tesla's direct sales would allow them to capture resale profits.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: In May 2015, Tesla started selling refurbished Model S cars in the U.S. and within a month sold 1,600 cars. As of July 2017, over 80 used Model S and Model X cars were for sale, with either a four-year, 50,000-mile warranty or a two-year, 100,000-mile warranty for vehicles above 50,000 miles. As of September 2015, similar programs existed in Canada, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Britain, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: In 2015, Tesla acquired Riviera Tool & Die (with 100 employees in Grand Rapids, Michigan), one of its suppliers of stamping items. They initially renamed the facility "Tesla Michigan", and subsequently refer to the facility as Tesla Tool and Die. In 2017, Tesla acquired Perbix Machine Company, a manufacturer of automated manufacturing equipment, that had been an equipment supplier for over three years.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: In December 2017, Tesla acquired the factory automation firm Compass Automation of Elgin, Illinois, with expertise in automated assembly and inspection systems; by the end of 2018 the company was working exclusively for Tesla.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: On August 1, 2016, Tesla agreed to acquire SolarCity Corp. for US$2.6 billion in stock. SolarCity was then the largest installer of rooftop solar systems in the United States. More than 85% of unaffiliated Tesla and SolarCity shareholders voted to approve the acquisition, which closed on November 21, 2016.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: After it acquired SolarCity, Tesla stopped using door to door sales tactics for solar systems; instead, it markets and sells its products at company showrooms. For a short time, Tesla partnered with Home Depot to sell solar and energy products through in store kiosks. At the time, it did not provide a leasing option for solar panels, and consumers had to purchase them.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: Model 3 was unveiled in March 2016. A week after the unveiling, global reservations totaled 325,000 units. As a result of the demand for Model 3, in May 2016, Tesla advanced its 500,000 annual unit build plan (for all models) by two years to 2018. This would in turn allow more Model 3 buyers to benefit from the full US$7,500 U.S. tax credit before the limit of 200,000 cars per maker since 2010 reduces the credit.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: On February 1, 2017, the company changed its name from Tesla Motors to Tesla. In late March 2017, Tesla Inc. announced that Tencent Holdings Ltd., at the time China's "most valuable company," had purchased a 5% stake in Tesla for US$1.8 billion. In 2017, Tesla surpassed Ford Motor Company and General Motors in market capitalization for a couple of months, making it the most valuable American automaker. In June 2017, Tesla appeared for the first time in the Fortune 500 list.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: In the week preceding the debut on July 7, 2017, of the Model 3 sedan, Tesla's stock-market value declined by more than US$12 billion from a previous value of US$63 billion. The loss was a result of a combination of factors that disappointed investors. Demand for Tesla's existing luxury models, Model S and Model X, did not grow in the second quarter. Brian Johnson of Barclays said that customer deposits for the Model S and Model X fell by US$50 million, potentially indicating that Tesla's introduction of the Model 3 could be adversely affecting their sales. Tesla predicted that luxury sales would reach 100,000 per year, below some analysts' expectations.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: Investors expressed concern about Tesla's plans for execution and its competitive risk, as Volvo Cars committed to introduce only electric and electric-assisted vehicles by 2019. Johnson claimed that "Tesla will face intense competition by the next decade."


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: Morningstar analyst David Whiston foresaw a revised, slower timetable for the Model 3 and a company acknowledgement of problems with building battery packs for its cars. In 2016 Musk predicted 100,000 Model 3 units would be sold in 2017, but that production may reach only 20,000 by December. Axel Schmidt, a managing director at consulting firm Accenture, said that Tesla's problems with Gigafactory 1 prove that increasing Model 3 production "remains a huge challenge". In October 2017, Tesla reported delivery of 220 Model 3 cars, acknowledging this was "less than anticipated due to production bottlenecks".


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: In early November 2017, Musk advised investors of a production delay that was primarily due to difficulties with the new battery that would allow Tesla to significantly reduce the manufacturing cost of the Model 3. The company was having difficulties with robots on the assembly line, but the most serious issue was with one of the four zones in the battery manufacturing, caused by a "systems integration subcontractor", according to Musk. "We had to rewrite all of the software from scratch for the battery module", he reported. He assured investors that Tesla had "reallocated" top engineers to work on achieving a solution. By that time, Jon Wagner, director of battery engineering, had left the company. Also in November, Musk postponed the target date for manufacturing 5000 of the vehicles per week from December 2017 to "sometime in March" 2018; about which an analyst with Cowan and Company commented that "Elon Musk needs to stop over promising and under delivering". On November 21, 2017, Bloomberg stated that "over the past 12 months, the electric-car maker has been burning money at a clip of about $8,000 a minute (or $480,000 an hour)" preparing for Model 3.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: In April 2018, Musk increased the 5000 per week number by 20%, forecasting Tesla could achieve 6,000 units per week by the end of June 2018. When asked when the company would reach a production level of 10,000 units per week, he declined to speculate.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: In 2016, BYD Auto was the world's top selling plug-in car manufacturer with 101,183 units sold, followed by Tesla with 76,243. However, Tesla revenues ranked first with $6.35 billion, while BYD notched $3.88 billion. Also in 2016, Tesla sold $1 billion worth of cars in China, the world's largest market for electric vehicles. In October of the following year it reached an agreement with the Chinese government to build a factory in Shanghai.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: After ranking third by brand in 2017, behind BYD and BAIC, Tesla ranked as the world's best selling plug-in passenger car manufacturer in 2018, both as a brand and by automotive group, with 245,240 units delivered, capturing a market share of 12% of all plug-in cars sold globally in 2018, followed by BYD Auto with 227,152 plug-in passenger cars delivered.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: In August 2015, Tesla launched a revamp of its stores to include interactive displays focused on safety, autopilot, charging network and motors. , Tesla operated about 260 galleries or retail locations in the United States. In June 2016, Tesla opened its first store-within-a-store: a small outpost within the Nordstrom department store at The Grove shopping mall in Los Angeles. In 2017, Tesla opened retail locations in Dubai and South Korea.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: Foreseeing Germany as its second market after the U.S. (and the largest in Europe), in 2016 Tesla stated the -issued Whole Vehicle Type Approval (WVTA) should be accepted as a legal compliance document, with no need to seek specific national type of approvals in EU member states. In 2017, Tesla had a $52 million marketing budget and used a referral program and word of mouth to attract buyers.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: In a tweet on August 7, 2018, Elon Musk said: "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." On Tesla's blog Musk elaborated that Tesla's status as a public company subjects it to the quarterly earnings cycle that puts enormous pressure on the company to make decisions that may be right for a given quarter, but not necessarily right for the company's long-term growth. Additionally, as the most shorted stock in the history of the stock market, being a publicly traded company means that there are large numbers of investors who may have the incentive to attack the company. Musk released a considerably more detailed statement on the Tesla Blog the following week indicating that the proposal was by him in his personal capacity, and not as CEO of Tesla. Furthermore, he indicated that he had high confidence in the funding being secured based on discussions with the managing director of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund who had requested Musk consider taking Tesla private and indicated strong capital support for doing so. On August 24, Musk released a statement indicating that both he and the Tesla Board of Directors had made the decision for the company to remain public. In September 2018, Musk was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for the tweet claiming that funding had been secured for taking Tesla private. The lawsuit characterized the tweet as false, misleading, and damaging to investors, and sought to bar Musk from serving as CEO for publicly traded companies. Musk settled with the SEC two days later. The settlement terms required Musk to step down as chairman, and prohibited him from running for chairman again for three years. Additionally, he and Tesla Inc. were fined US$20M each to reimburse investors who were harmed by Musk's tweet.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: Tesla has financed operations (production, development, administration, etc.) by sales income, stock offering and bond sales. In May 2013 Tesla raised US$1.02 billion (US$660 million from bonds) partially to repay the Department of Energy loans received from the ATVM loan program after their first profitable quarter. In February 2014 Tesla raised US$2 billion from bonds to build the first GigaFactory. In August 2015, Tesla raised US$738 million in stock to build the Model X. In May 2016, Tesla raised US$1.46 billion in stock to build the Model 3. By 2016, Tesla had raised over US$4.5 billion since its IPO in 2010.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: Tesla entered the Interbrand Top100 Best Global Brands in 2016 in position 100 with a brand valuation of US$4 billion. In 2020, Kantar rated Tesla's brand as worth US$11.35 billion, behind Toyota, Mercedes and BMW, but ahead of all other auto makers, and the only automotive brand whose value increased since the previous year.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: On October 26, 2016, Tesla posted a profitable quarter, their first in 8 quarters, defying industry expectations.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: According to the "Wall Street Journal", in September 2018, the company's stock fell to its lowest price in a year, around the time that CEO Elon Musk smoked marijuana during a live TV interview.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: On January 10, 2020, Tesla become the most valuable American automaker to ever exist, with a market capitalization of US$86 billion. On July 1, 2020, Tesla reached a market capitalization of US$206 billion, surpassing Toyota's US$202 billion to become the world's largest automaker by market capitalization.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: From July 2019 to June 2020, Tesla recorded four profitable quarters in a row for the first time, which made it eligible for inclusion in the S&P 500.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: Global sales passed 250,000 units in September 2017, and Tesla produced its 300,000th vehicle in February 2018. Tesla's global sales achieved the 500,000 unit milestone in December 2018. Tesla global vehicle sales increased 50% from 245,240 units in 2018 to 367,849 units in 2019. On March 9, 2020, the company produced its 1 millionth electric car. In September 2021, Tesla sold its 2 millionth electric car, becoming the first auto manufacturer to achieve such a milestone. At the end of 2021, Tesla's global sales since 2012 totaled 2.3 million units.


title: History of Tesla, Inc.

text: Tesla deliveries vary significantly by month due to regional issues such as car carrier availability and registration. Tesla does not follow the former auto industry standard of monthly reporting; GM and Ford changed from monthly to quarterly sales reporting in 2018 and 2019. Some monthly sales are estimated by media.


title: Homecoming

text: Homecoming is the tradition of welcoming back alumni or other former members of an organization to celebrate the organization's existence. It is a tradition in many high schools, colleges, and churches in the United States, Canada and Liberia.


title: Homecoming

text: Homecoming is an annual tradition in the United States. People, towns, high schools and colleges come together, usually in late September or early October, to welcome back former members of the community. It is built around a central event, such as a banquet or dance and, most often, a game of American football, or on occasions, basketball, ice hockey or soccer. When celebrated by schools, the activities vary widely. However, they usually consist of a football game played on a school's home football field, activities for students and alumni, a parade featuring the school's choir, marching band and sports teams, and the coronation of a homecoming queen (and at many schools, a homecoming king). A dance commonly follows the game or takes place the day after the game.


title: Homecoming

text: When attached to a football game, homecoming traditionally occurs on the team's return from the longest road trip of the season or the first home game of a season that falls after an away game. The game itself, whether it be football or another sport, will typically feature the home team playing a considerably weaker opponent. The game is supposed to be an "easy win" and thus weaker schools will sometimes play lower division schools.


title: Homecoming

text: The tradition of homecoming has its origin in alumni football games held at colleges and universities since the 19th century. Many schools including Baylor, Southwestern, Illinois, and Missouri have made claims that they held the first modern homecoming. The NCAA, "Trivial Pursuit" and "Jeopardy!" give the title to the University of Missouri's 1911 football game during which alumni were encouraged to attend. It appears to be the first homecoming-like event which was centered on a parade and a football game, such was the response and success it became an annual event.


title: Homecoming

text: The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign first held its homecoming event in 1910, celebrating the 100th anniversary in 2010. This event was held annually except for 1918 and 2020, when it was first canceled because of the influenza pandemic, then because of the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Homecoming

text: In 1891, the Missouri Tigers first faced off against the Kansas Jayhawks in the first installment of the Border War, the oldest college football rivalry west of the Mississippi River. The intense rivalry originally took place at neutral sites, usually in Kansas City, Missouri, until a new conference regulation was announced that required intercollegiate football games to be played on collegiate campuses. To renew excitement in the rivalry, ensure adequate attendance at the new location, and celebrate the first meeting of the two teams on the Mizzou campus in Columbia, Missouri, Mizzou Athletic Director Chester Brewer invited all alumni to "come home" for the game in 1911. Along with the football game, the celebration included a parade and spirit rally with a bonfire. The event was a success, with nearly 10,000 alumni coming home to take part in the celebration and watch the Tigers and Jayhawks play to a 3–3 tie. The Missouri annual homecoming, with its parade and spirit rally centered on a large football game is the model that has gone on to take hold at colleges and high schools across the United States.


title: Homecoming

text: At least two collegiate homecoming celebrations predate the University of Missouri football game homecoming event: Southwestern University, in Georgetown, TX and Baylor University, in Waco, Texas. By multiple historical accounts, Southwestern held the first Homecoming on record on Wednesday, April 21, 1909, in San Gabriel Park. Former students raised funds, provided homes, prepared and served a barbecue supper, and decorated the town buildings. Members of the senior class waited tables.


title: Homecoming

text: Northern Illinois University has one of the longest-celebrated homecoming traditions in the country. The alumni football game played on Oct. 10, 1903, began NIU's homecoming tradition.


title: Homecoming

text: Baylor's homecoming history dates back to November 1909 and included a parade, reunion parties, and an afternoon football game (the final game of the 1909 season), a tradition that continued and celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2009. There was a gap between 1910 and 1915 when there was no homecoming event, however there has been continuity since 1915.


title: Homecoming

text: The backings court is a representative group of students that, in a coeducational institution, consists of a king and queen, and possibly prince(s) and princess(es). In a single-sex institution, the homecoming court will usually consist of only a king and a prince (for an all-male school) or a queen and a princess (for an all-female school), although some schools may choose to join with single-sex schools of the other gender to elect the homecoming court jointly.


title: Homecoming

text: Generally, the king and queen are students completing their final years of study at their school (also called "seniors"), while the prince and princess are underclassmen often with a prince/princess for each grade. Recently, some high schools have chosen to add categories, such as duke and duchess, to extend the representation of students to include a category in which students with special needs are elected. In high school, 17- or 18-year-old students in their final year are represented by a king or queen; in college, students who are completing their final year of study, usually between 21 and 23 years old.


title: Homecoming

text: Local rules determine when the homecoming king and queen are crowned. Sometimes, the big announcement comes at a pep rally, school assembly, or public ceremony one or more days before the football game. Other schools crown their royalty at the homecoming football game, a dance, or other school event.


title: Homecoming

text: Often, the previous year's king and queen are invited back to crown their successors. If they are absent for whatever reason, someone else—usually, another previous king or queen, a popular teacher, or other designated person—will perform those duties. Usually, the queen is crowned first, followed by the king. The crowning method also varies by school.


title: Homecoming

text: Homecoming court members who are not crowned king or queen are often called escorts or royalty. They are often expected to participate in the week's activities as well. At some schools, a homecoming prince/princess, duke/duchess, etc. (often underclassmen nominated by their classmates) are crowned along with the king and queen; sometimes, middle school and junior high students may partake in the high school activities.


title: Homecoming

text: Many homecoming celebrations include a parade. Students often select the grand marshal based on a history of service and support to the school and community. The parade includes the school's marching band and different school organizations’ floats created by the classes and organizations and most of the sports get a chance to be in the parade. Every class prepares a float which corresponds with the homecoming theme or related theme of school spirit as assign by school administrators. In addition, the homecoming court takes part in the parade, often riding together in one or more convertibles as part of the parade. Community civic organizations and businesses, area fire departments, and alumni groups often participate as well. The parade is often part of a series of activities scheduled for that specific day, which can also include a pep rally, bonfire, snake dance, and other activities for students and alumni.


title: Homecoming

text: At most major colleges and universities, the football game and preceding tailgate party are the most widely recognized and heavily attended events of the week. Alumni gather from all around the world to return to their alma mater, reconnect with one another, and take part in the festivities. Students, alumni, businesses, and members of the community set up tents in parking lots, fields, and streets near the stadium to cook food, play games, socialize, binge drink, and even enjoy live music in many instances. These celebrations often last straight through the game for those who do not have tickets but still come to take part in the socializing and excitement of the homecoming atmosphere. Most tents even include television or radio feeds of the game for those without tickets.


title: Homecoming

text: Sometimes during the school week, a picnic can occur. The picnic is very similar to the tailgate party, but it occurs after school or during the school's lunch period.


title: Homecoming

text: Throughout the week, many schools (particularly high schools) engage in special dress-up days, sometimes called "Spirit Week", where students are allowed to wear clothing suitable to the theme (e.g., 1980s day, toga day, roll out of bed day, cowboy day, nerd day, pirate day, meme day, Rat Pack Day, flannel Friday, What-not-to-wear Wednesday) leading to the homecoming. Students traditionally wear clothing with their school's name, or clothing and makeup of their school's colors on Friday.


title: Homecoming

text: Many schools hold a rally during homecoming week, often one or more nights before the game. The events vary, but may include skits, games, introduction of the homecoming court (and coronation of the king and queen if that is the school's tradition), and comments from the football players or coach about the upcoming game.


title: Homecoming

text: At some schools, the homecoming rally ends with a bonfire (in which old wood structures, the rival school's memorabilia and other items are burned in a controlled fire). Many colleges and high schools no longer hold bonfires because of accidents that have occurred surrounding these events in the past. The most well known accident took place in 1999, when 12 students were killed and 27 others were injured at Texas A&M University when a pile of logs that had been assembled for a bonfire collapsed. However, this incident was not associated with homecoming—A&M is one of the few schools that do not organize a homecoming, although it has many unique traditions. The bonfire was associated with the annual rivalry game between A&M and the University of Texas.


title: Homecoming

text: The alumni band consists of former college and university band members who return for homecoming to perform with the current marching band (usually made up of recent graduates to members who graduated years or decades before) either during halftime as a full band or a featured section, e.g. the trumpet section or the tubas and drumline squads, as well as performing with the current band during the post-game concert.


title: Homecoming

text: The homecoming dance—usually the culminating event of the week (for high schools)—is a formal or informal event, either at the school or an off-campus location. The venue is decorated, and either a disc jockey or band is hired to play music. In many ways, it is a fall prom. Homecoming dances could be informal as well just like standard school dances. At high schools, the homecoming dances are sometimes held in the high school gymnasium or outside in a large field. Homecoming dance attire is less formal than prom. Females generally wear knee-length dresses with their hair down, and males generally wear a tucked-in dress shirt with pants. At prom, females generally wear a more formal gown that goes to the ground with hair up, and males wear suits and tuxedos.


title: Homecoming

text: Since most colleges are too large to facilitate a campus-wide dance, these events are usually handled instead by student organizations such as fraternities, sororities, and residential colleges. Because football and alumni events are the focal points of collegiate homecoming, dances often take place during a different week when schedules are more permitting, or not at all.


title: Homecoming

text: At the high school level, students generally compete by grade level in events such as the spirit days, parade floats, and powder puff football. The competition at the collegiate level is mainly between Greek-letter organizations and, to a lesser degree, residence halls. At most larger schools, fraternities and sororities compete on parade floats, house decorations, skits, talent competitions, and service events such as blood drives or food drives. On coronation night, some schools play games between classes. Such events include the pyramid, three-legged race, pop chug, and tug of war.


title: Homecoming

text: While most schools schedule their homecoming activities around football, smaller schools that do may not have field a football team may plan the annual event at another time of the year. In these instances, basketball, ice hockey or soccer serves as the "big boy game" for students and alumni. Often in smaller towns with smaller populations, the parade is omitted.


title: Homecoming

text: At schools without athletic programs, the centerpiece event is usually a banquet, where alumni are recognized. This format is also used for alumni events of high schools that have either closed or consolidated with other high schools; the high school classes continue to meet and celebrate their years at their now-defunct alma mater. In other cases, alumni of closed schools will participate in the consolidated school's homecoming, where special recognition is often given for alumni of the once-separate schools.


title: Homecoming

text: In some parts of the United States, high school basketball has gained a homecoming celebration of its own. Often referred to as "winter homecoming", "hoopcoming", "coronation", "snowcoming", "Colors Day", or "court warming" (the latter is especially prominent in parts of Missouri), it usually includes rallies, dress-up days, special dinners, king and queen coronations, and other winter-friendly activities typically associated with football homecoming.


title: Homecoming

text: In Newfoundland and Labrador, communities have a "Come Home Year" where people who have moved away from their town come back from across Canada. In 2000, there was a provincial "Come Home Year", where many people came back to visit their various communities.


title: Homecoming

text: Homecomings are rare in Canada, and typically only take place in high schools situated in the east of the country. Newmarket High School, London South Collegiate Institute, Banting Memorial High School, Earl Haig Secondary School and St. Michael's College School are examples of schools in Ontario known to arrange homecomings. Upper Canada College also has a longstanding homecoming tradition, although the event is referred to as "A-Day" (Association Day). St. Thomas More Collegiate in Burnaby, British Columbia hosts a Homecoming Event on the third Saturday of September.


title: Homecoming

text: Universities in Canada also known to host Homecomings. They generally take place in September. Universities such as The University of Guelph, Western University, Concordia University, Queen's University, and The University of British Columbia have hosted homecomings in the past.


title: Homecoming

text: The term "homecoming" can also refer to the special services conducted by some religious congregations, particularly by many smaller American Protestant churches, to celebrate church heritage and welcome back former members or pastors. They are often held annually, but are sometimes held as one-time-only events, to celebrate the occasion.


title: Stoichiometry

text: Stoichiometry refers to the relationship between the quantities of reactants and products before, during, and following chemical reactions.


title: Stoichiometry

text: Stoichiometry is founded on the law of conservation of mass where the total mass of the reactants equals the total mass of the products, leading to the insight that the relations among quantities of reactants and products typically form a ratio of positive integers. This means that if the amounts of the separate reactants are known, then the amount of the product can be calculated. Conversely, if one reactant has a known quantity and the quantity of the products can be empirically determined, then the amount of the other reactants can also be calculated.


title: Stoichiometry

text: Here, one molecule of methane reacts with two molecules of oxygen gas to yield one molecule of carbon dioxide and two molecules of water. This particular chemical equation is an example of complete combustion. Stoichiometry measures these quantitative relationships, and is used to determine the amount of products and reactants that are produced or needed in a given reaction. Describing the quantitative relationships among substances as they participate in chemical reactions is known as "reaction stoichiometry". In the example above, reaction stoichiometry measures the relationship between the quantities of methane and oxygen that react to form carbon dioxide and water.


title: Stoichiometry

text: Because of the well known relationship of moles to atomic weights, the ratios that are arrived at by stoichiometry can be used to determine quantities by weight in a reaction described by a balanced equation. This is called "composition stoichiometry".


title: Stoichiometry

text: "Gas stoichiometry" deals with reactions involving gases, where the gases are at a known temperature, pressure, and volume and can be assumed to be ideal gases. For gases, the volume ratio is ideally the same by the ideal gas law, but the mass ratio of a single reaction has to be calculated from the molecular masses of the reactants and products. In practice, due to the existence of isotopes, molar masses are used instead when calculating the mass ratio.


title: Stoichiometry

text: The term "stoichiometry" was first used by Jeremias Benjamin Richter in 1792 when the first volume of Richter's "Stoichiometry or the Art of Measuring the Chemical Elements" was published. The term is derived from the Ancient Greek words "stoicheion" "element" and "metron" "measure". In patristic Greek, the word "Stoichiometria" was used by Nicephorus to refer to the number of line counts of the canonical New Testament and some of the Apocrypha.


title: Stoichiometry

text: A stoichiometric amount or stoichiometric ratio of a reagent is the optimum amount or ratio where, assuming that the reaction proceeds to completion:


title: Stoichiometry

text: Stoichiometry rests upon the very basic laws that help to understand it better, i.e., law of conservation of mass, the law of definite proportions (i.e., the law of constant composition), the law of multiple proportions and the law of reciprocal proportions. In general, chemical reactions combine in definite ratios of chemicals. Since chemical reactions can neither create nor destroy matter, nor transmute one element into another, the amount of each element must be the same throughout the overall reaction. For example, the number of atoms of a given element X on the reactant side must equal the number of atoms of that element on the product side, whether or not all of those atoms are actually involved in a reaction.


title: Stoichiometry

text: Chemical reactions, as macroscopic unit operations, consist of simply a very large number of elementary reactions, where a single molecule reacts with another molecule. As the reacting molecules (or moieties) consist of a definite set of atoms in an integer ratio, the ratio between reactants in a complete reaction is also in integer ratio. A reaction may consume more than one molecule, and the stoichiometric number counts this number, defined as positive for products (added) and negative for reactants (removed). The unsigned coefficients are generally referred to as the stoichiometric coefficients.


title: Stoichiometry

text: Each element has an atomic mass, and considering molecules as collections of atoms, compounds have a definite molar mass. By definition, the molar mass of carbon-12 is 12 g/mol. The number of molecules per mole in a substance is given by the Avogadro constant. Thus, to calculate the stoichiometry by mass, the number of molecules required for each reactant is expressed in moles and multiplied by the molar mass of each to give the mass of each reactant per mole of reaction. The mass ratios can be calculated by dividing each by the total in the whole reaction.


title: Stoichiometry

text: Elements in their natural state are mixtures of isotopes of differing mass; thus, atomic masses and thus molar masses are not exactly integers. For instance, instead of an exact 14:3 proportion, 17.04 kg of ammonia consists of 14.01 kg of nitrogen and 3 × 1.01 kg of hydrogen, because natural nitrogen includes a small amount of nitrogen-15, and natural hydrogen includes hydrogen-2 (deuterium).


title: Stoichiometry

text: A stoichiometric reactant is a reactant that is consumed in a reaction, as opposed to a catalytic reactant, which is not consumed in the overall reaction because it reacts in one step and is regenerated in another step.


title: Stoichiometry

text: Stoichiometry is not only used to balance chemical equations but also used in conversions, i.e., converting from grams to moles using molar mass as the conversion factor, or from grams to milliliters using density. For example, to find the amount of NaCl (sodium chloride) in 2.00 g, one would do the following:


title: Stoichiometry

text: In the above example, when written out in fraction form, the units of grams form a multiplicative identity, which is equivalent to one (g/g = 1), with the resulting amount in moles (the unit that was needed), as shown in the following equation,


title: Stoichiometry

text: Stoichiometry is often used to balance chemical equations (reaction stoichiometry). For example, the two diatomic gases, hydrogen and oxygen, can combine to form a liquid, water, in an exothermic reaction, as described by the following equation:


title: Stoichiometry

text: Reaction stoichiometry describes the 2:1:2 ratio of hydrogen, oxygen, and water molecules in the above equation.


title: Stoichiometry

text: The molar ratio allows for conversion between moles of one substance and moles of another. For example, in the reaction


title: Stoichiometry

text: the amount of water that will be produced by the combustion of 0.27 moles of is obtained using the molar ratio between and of 2 to 4.


title: Stoichiometry

text: The term stoichiometry is also often used for the molar proportions of elements in stoichiometric compounds (composition stoichiometry). For example, the stoichiometry of hydrogen and oxygen in HO is 2:1. In stoichiometric compounds, the molar proportions are whole numbers.


title: Stoichiometry

text: Stoichiometry can also be used to find the quantity of a product yielded by a reaction. If a piece of solid copper (Cu) were added to an aqueous solution of silver nitrate (AgNO), the silver (Ag) would be replaced in a single displacement reaction forming aqueous copper(II) nitrate (Cu(NO)) and solid silver. How much silver is produced if 16.00 grams of Cu is added to the solution of excess silver nitrate?


title: Stoichiometry

text: For the mass to mole step, the mass of copper (16.00 g) would be converted to moles of copper by dividing the mass of copper by its molecular mass: 63.55 g/mol.


title: Stoichiometry

text: Now that the amount of Cu in moles (0.2518) is found, we can set up the mole ratio. This is found by looking at the coefficients in the balanced equation: Cu and Ag are in a 1:2 ratio.


title: Stoichiometry

text: Now that the moles of Ag produced is known to be 0.5036 mol, we convert this amount to grams of Ag produced to come to the final answer:


title: Stoichiometry

text: Stoichiometry is also used to find the right amount of one reactant to "completely" react with the other reactant in a chemical reaction – that is, the stoichiometric amounts that would result in no leftover reactants when the reaction takes place. An example is shown below using the thermite reaction,


title: Stoichiometry

text: This equation shows that 1 mole of and 2 moles of aluminum will produce 1 mole of aluminium oxide and 2 moles of iron. So, to completely react with 85.0 g of (0.532 mol), 28.7 g (1.06 mol) of aluminium are needed.


title: Stoichiometry

text: The limiting reagent is the reagent that limits the amount of product that can be formed and is completely consumed when the reaction is complete. An excess reactant is a reactant that is left over once the reaction has stopped due to the limiting reactant being exhausted.


title: Stoichiometry

text: Consider the equation of roasting lead(II) sulfide (PbS) in oxygen (O) to produce lead(II) oxide (PbO) and sulfur dioxide (SO):


title: Stoichiometry

text: To determine the theoretical yield of lead(II) oxide if 200.0 g of lead(II) sulfide and 200.0 g of oxygen are heated in an open container:


title: Stoichiometry

text: Because a lesser amount of PbO is produced for the 200.0 g of PbS, it is clear that PbS is the limiting reagent.


title: Stoichiometry

text: In reality, the actual yield is not the same as the stoichiometrically-calculated theoretical yield. Percent yield, then, is expressed in the following equation:


title: Stoichiometry

text: Consider the following reaction, in which iron(III) chloride reacts with hydrogen sulfide to produce iron(III) sulfide and hydrogen chloride:


title: Stoichiometry

text: Suppose 90.0 g of FeCl reacts with 52.0 g of HS. To find the limiting reagent and the mass of HCl produced by the reaction, we change the above amounts by a factor of 90/324.41 and obtain the following amounts:


title: Stoichiometry

text: The limiting reactant (or reagent) is FeCl, since all 90.00 g of it is used up while only 28.37 g HS are consumed. Thus, 52.0 − 28.4 = 23.6 g HS left in excess. The mass of HCl produced is 60.7 g.


title: Stoichiometry

text: Note: By looking at the stoichiometry of the reaction, one might have guessed FeCl being the limiting reactant; three times more FeCl is used compared to HS (324 g vs 102 g).


title: Stoichiometry

text: Often, more than one reaction is possible given the same starting materials. The reactions may differ in their stoichiometry. For example, the methylation of benzene (CH), through a Friedel–Crafts reaction using AlCl as a catalyst, may produce singly methylated (CHCH), doubly methylated (CH(CH)), or still more highly methylated (CH(CH)) products, as shown in the following example,


title: Stoichiometry

text: In this example, which reaction takes place is controlled in part by the relative concentrations of the reactants.


title: Stoichiometry

text: In lay terms, the "stoichiometric coefficient" of any given component is the number of molecules and/or formula units that participate in the reaction as written. A related concept is the "stoichiometric number" (using IUPAC nomenclature), wherein the stoichiometric coefficient is multiplied by +1 for all products and by −1 for all reactants.


title: Stoichiometry

text: For example, in the reaction , the stoichiometric number of CH is −1, the stoichiometric number of O is −2, for it would be +1 and for HO it is +2.


title: Stoichiometry

text: In more technically precise terms, the stoichiometric number in a chemical reaction system of the "i"th component is defined as


title: Stoichiometry

text: where formula_16 is the number of molecules of "i", and formula_17 is the progress variable or extent of reaction.


title: Stoichiometry

text: The stoichiometric number formula_18 represents the degree to which a chemical species participates in a reaction. The convention is to assign negative numbers to "reactants" (which are consumed) and positive ones to "products", consistent with the convention that increasing the extent of reaction will correspond to shifting the composition from reactants towards products. However, any reaction may be viewed as going in the reverse direction, and in that point of view, would change in the negative direction in order to lower the system's Gibbs free energy. Whether a reaction actually "will" go in the arbitrarily selected forward direction or not depends on the amounts of the substances present at any given time, which determines the kinetics and thermodynamics, i.e., whether equilibrium lies to the "right" or the "left" of the initial state,


title: Stoichiometry

text: In reaction mechanisms, stoichiometric coefficients for each step are always integers, since elementary reactions always involve whole molecules. If one uses a composite representation of an overall reaction, some may be rational fractions. There are often chemical species present that do not participate in a reaction; their stoichiometric coefficients are therefore zero. Any chemical species that is regenerated, such as a catalyst, also has a stoichiometric coefficient of zero.


title: Stoichiometry

text: in which since one molecule of B is produced each time the reaction occurs, while since one molecule of A is necessarily consumed. In any chemical reaction, not only is the total mass conserved but also the numbers of atoms of each kind are conserved, and this imposes corresponding constraints on possible values for the stoichiometric coefficients.


title: Stoichiometry

text: There are usually multiple reactions proceeding simultaneously in any natural reaction system, including those in biology. Since any chemical component can participate in several reactions simultaneously, the stoichiometric number of the "i"th component in the "k"th reaction is defined as


title: Stoichiometry

text: Extents of reaction provide the clearest and most explicit way of representing compositional change, although they are not yet widely used.


title: Stoichiometry

text: With complex reaction systems, it is often useful to consider both the representation of a reaction system in terms of the amounts of the chemicals present (state variables), and the representation in terms of the actual compositional degrees of freedom, as expressed by the extents of reaction . The transformation from a vector expressing the extents to a vector expressing the amounts uses a rectangular matrix whose elements are the stoichiometric numbers .


title: Stoichiometry

text: The maximum and minimum for any "ξ" occur whenever the first of the reactants is depleted for the forward reaction; or the first of the "products" is depleted if the reaction as viewed as being pushed in the reverse direction. This is a purely kinematic restriction on the reaction simplex, a hyperplane in composition space, or "N"‑space, whose dimensionality equals the number of "linearly-independent" chemical reactions. This is necessarily less than the number of chemical components, since each reaction manifests a relation between at least two chemicals. The accessible region of the hyperplane depends on the amounts of each chemical species actually present, a contingent fact. Different such amounts can even generate different hyperplanes, all sharing the same algebraic stoichiometry.


title: Stoichiometry

text: In accord with the principles of chemical kinetics and thermodynamic equilibrium, every chemical reaction is "reversible", at least to some degree, so that each equilibrium point must be an interior point of the simplex. As a consequence, extrema for the "ξ"s will not occur unless an experimental system is prepared with zero initial amounts of some products.


title: Stoichiometry

text: The number of "physically"-independent reactions can be even greater than the number of chemical components, and depends on the various reaction mechanisms. For example, there may be two (or more) reaction "paths" for the isomerism above. The reaction may occur by itself, but faster and with different intermediates, in the presence of a catalyst.


title: Stoichiometry

text: The (dimensionless) "units" may be taken to be molecules or moles. Moles are most commonly used, but it is more suggestive to picture incremental chemical reactions in terms of molecules. The "N"s and "ξ"s are reduced to molar units by dividing by the Avogadro constant. While dimensional mass units may be used, the comments about integers are then no longer applicable.


title: Stoichiometry

text: In complex reactions, stoichiometries are often represented in a more compact form called the stoichiometry matrix. The stoichiometry matrix is denoted by the symbol N.


title: Stoichiometry

text: If a reaction network has "n" reactions and "m" participating molecular species then the stoichiometry matrix will have correspondingly "m" rows and "n" columns.


title: Stoichiometry

text: This system comprises four reactions and five different molecular species. The stoichiometry matrix for this system can be written as:


title: Stoichiometry

text: where the rows correspond to S, S, S, S and S, respectively. Note that the process of converting a reaction scheme into a stoichiometry matrix can be a lossy transformation: for example, the stoichiometries in the second reaction simplify when included in the matrix. This means that it is not always possible to recover the original reaction scheme from a stoichiometry matrix.


title: Stoichiometry

text: Often the stoichiometry matrix is combined with the rate vector, v, and the species vector, x to form a compact equation describing the rates of change of the molecular species:


title: Stoichiometry

text: "Gas stoichiometry" is the quantitative relationship (ratio) between reactants and products in a chemical reaction with reactions that produce gases. Gas stoichiometry applies when the gases produced are assumed to be ideal, and the temperature, pressure, and volume of the gases are all known. The ideal gas law is used for these calculations. Often, but not always, the standard temperature and pressure (STP) are taken as 0 °C and 1 bar and used as the conditions for gas stoichiometric calculations.


title: Stoichiometry

text: Gas stoichiometry calculations solve for the unknown volume or mass of a gaseous product or reactant. For example, if we wanted to calculate the volume of gaseous NO produced from the combustion of 100 g of NH, by the reaction:


title: Stoichiometry

text: There is a 1:1 molar ratio of NH to NO in the above balanced combustion reaction, so 5.871 mol of NO will be formed. We will employ the ideal gas law to solve for the volume at 0 °C (273.15 K) and 1 atmosphere using the gas law constant of "R" = 0.08206 L·atm·K·mol:


title: Stoichiometry

text: Gas stoichiometry often involves having to know the molar mass of a gas, given the density of that gas. The ideal gas law can be re-arranged to obtain a relation between the density and the molar mass of an ideal gas:


title: Stoichiometry

text: In the combustion reaction, oxygen reacts with the fuel, and the point where exactly all oxygen is consumed and all fuel burned is defined as the stoichiometric point. With more oxygen (overstoichiometric combustion), some of it stays unreacted. Likewise, if the combustion is incomplete due to lack of sufficient oxygen, fuel remains unreacted. (Unreacted fuel may also remain because of slow combustion or insufficient mixing of fuel and oxygen – this is not due to stoichiometry). Different hydrocarbon fuels have different contents of carbon, hydrogen and other elements, thus their stoichiometry varies.


title: Stoichiometry

text: Note that oxygen makes up only 20.95% of the volume of air, and only 23.20% of its mass. The air-fuel ratios listed below are much higher than the equivalent oxygen-fuel ratios, due to the high proportion of inert gasses in the air.


title: Stoichiometry

text: Gasoline engines can run at stoichiometric air-to-fuel ratio, because gasoline is quite volatile and is mixed (sprayed or carburetted) with the air prior to ignition. Diesel engines, in contrast, run lean, with more air available than simple stoichiometry would require. Diesel fuel is less volatile and is effectively burned as it is injected.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Richard Blumenthal (; born February 13, 1946) is an American lawyer and politician who is the senior United States senator from Connecticut, a seat he has held since 2011. A member of the Democratic Party, he is one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, with a net worth over $100 million. He was Attorney General of Connecticut from 1991 to 2011.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Born in Brooklyn, New York, Blumenthal attended Riverdale Country School, a private school in the Bronx. He graduated from Harvard College, where he was editor-in-chief of "The Harvard Crimson". He studied for a year at Trinity College, Cambridge, in England before attending Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the "Yale Law Journal". From 1970 to 1976, Blumenthal served in the United States Marine Corps Reserve, attaining the rank of sergeant.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: After law school, Blumenthal passed the bar and served as administrative assistant and law clerk for several Washington, D.C. figures. From 1977 to 1981, he was United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut. In the early 1980s he worked in private law practice, including as volunteer counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal served one term in the Connecticut House of Representatives from 1985 to 1987; in 1986 he was elected to the Connecticut Senate and began service in 1987. He was elected Attorney General of Connecticut in 1990 and served for 20 years. During this period political observers speculated about him as a contender for governor of Connecticut, but he never pursued the office.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal announced his 2010 run for U.S. Senate after incumbent Senator Chris Dodd announced his retirement. He faced Linda McMahon, a professional wrestling magnate, in the 2010 election, winning with 55% of the vote. He was sworn in on January 5, 2011. After Joe Lieberman retired in 2013, Blumenthal became Connecticut's senior senator. He was reelected in 2016 with 63.2% of the vote, becoming the first person to receive more than a million votes in a statewide election in Connecticut.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jane ("née" Rosenstock) and Martin Blumenthal. At age 17, Martin Blumenthal immigrated to the United States from Frankfurt, Germany; Jane was raised in Omaha, Nebraska, graduated from Radcliffe College, and became a social worker. Martin Blumenthal had a career in financial services and became president of a commodities trading firm. Jane's father, Fred "Fritz" Rosenstock, raised cattle, and as youths Blumenthal and his brother often visited their grandfather's farm. Blumenthal's brother David Blumenthal is a doctor and health care policy expert who became president of the Commonwealth Fund.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal attended Riverdale Country School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. He then attended Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1967 with an A.B. degree "magna cum laude" and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. As an undergraduate, he was editorial chairman of "The Harvard Crimson". Blumenthal was a summer intern reporter for "The Washington Post" in the London Bureau. He was selected for a Fiske Fellowship, which allowed him to study at the University of Cambridge in England for one year after graduation from Harvard.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In 1973, Blumenthal received his J.D. degree from Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the "Yale Law Journal". At Yale, he was classmates with future President Bill Clinton and future Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. One of his co-editors of the "Yale Law Journal" was future United States Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. He was also a classmate of future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and radio host Michael Medved.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War, first educational deferments, then deferments based on his occupation. In April 1970 Blumenthal enlisted in the United States Marine Corps Reserve which, "The New York Times" reported, "virtually guaranteed that he would not be sent to Vietnam". He served in units in Washington, D.C., and Connecticut from 1970 to 1976, attaining the rank of sergeant.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: During his 2010 Senate campaign, news report videos that showed Blumenthal claiming he had served in Vietnam created a controversy. Blumenthal denied having intentionally misled voters, but acknowledged having occasionally "misspoken" about his service record. He later apologized to voters for remarks about his military service which he said had not been "clear or precise".


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal served as administrative assistant to Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff, as aide to Daniel P. Moynihan when Moynihan was Assistant to President Richard Nixon, and as a law clerk to Judge Jon O. Newman, U.S. District Court of the District of Connecticut, and to Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Before becoming attorney general, Blumenthal was a partner in the law firm of Cummings & Lockwood, and subsequently in the law firm of Silver, Golub & Sandak. In December 1982, while still at Cummings & Lockwood, he created and chaired the Citizens Crime Commission of Connecticut, a private, nonprofit organization. From 1981 to 1986, he was a volunteer counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: At age 31, Blumenthal was appointed United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut, serving from 1977 to 1981. As the chief federal prosecutor of that state, he successfully prosecuted many major cases involving drug traffickers, organized crime, white collar criminals, civil rights violators, consumer fraud, and environmental pollution.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In 1982, he married Cynthia Allison Malkin. She is the daughter of real estate investor Peter L. Malkin. Her maternal grandfather was lawyer and philanthropist Lawrence Wien.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In 1984, when he was 38, Blumenthal was elected to the Connecticut House of Representatives, representing the 145th district. In 1987, he won a special election to fill a vacancy in the 27th district of the Connecticut Senate, at age 41. Blumenthal resided in Stamford, Connecticut.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In the 1980s, Blumenthal testified in the state legislature in favor of abolishing Connecticut's death penalty statute. He did so after representing Joseph Green Brown, a Florida death row inmate who was found to have been wrongly convicted. Blumenthal succeeded in staving off Brown's execution just 15 hours before it was scheduled to take place, and gained a new trial for Brown.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal was elected the 23rd Attorney General of Connecticut in 1990 and reelected in 1994, 1998, 2002 and 2006. On October 10, 2002, he was awarded the Raymond E. Baldwin Award for Public Service by the Quinnipiac University School of Law.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In May 1995, Blumenthal and the state of Connecticut filed lawsuits challenging a decision by the Department of the Interior to approve a bid by the federally recognized Mashantucket Pequot for annexation of 165 acres of land in the towns of Ledyard, North Stonington and Preston. The Pequot were attempting to have the land placed in a federal trust, a legal designation to provide them with land for their sovereign control, as long years of colonization had left them landless. Blumenthal argued that the Interior Department's decision in support of this action was "fatally, legally flawed, and unfair" and that "it would unfairly remove land from the tax rolls of the surrounding towns and bar local control over how the land is used, while imposing [a] tremendous burden." The tribe announced the withdrawal of the land annexation petition in February 2002.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In 1997, Blumenthal and Governor John G. Rowland petitioned the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to address interstate air pollution problems created from Midwest and southeastern sources. The petition was filed in accordance with Section 126 of the Clean Air Act, which allows a state to request pollution reductions from out-of-state sources that contribute significantly to its air quality problems.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In 2003, Blumenthal and the attorneys general of eight other states (New York, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont) filed a federal lawsuit against the Bush administration for "endangering air quality by gutting a critical component of the federal Clean Air Act." The suit alleged that changes in the act would have exempted thousands of industrial air pollution sources from the act's New Source Review provision and that the new rules and regulations would lead to an increase in air pollution.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: While attorney general, Blumenthal was one of the leaders of a 46-state lawsuit against the tobacco industry, which alleged that the companies involved had deceived the public about the dangers of smoking. He argued that the state of Connecticut should be reimbursed for Medicaid expenses related to smoking. In 1998, the tobacco companies reached a $246 billion national settlement, giving the 46 states involved 25 years of reimbursement payments. Connecticut's share of the settlement was estimated at $3.6 billion.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In December 2007, Blumenthal filed suit against RJ Reynolds, alleging that a 2007 Camel advertising spread in "Rolling Stone magazine" used cartoons in violation of the master tobacco settlement, which prohibited the use of cartoons in cigarette advertising because they entice children and teenagers to smoke. The company paid the state of Connecticut $150,000 to settle the suit and agreed to end the advertising campaign.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In May 1998, Blumenthal and the attorneys general of 19 other states and the District of Columbia filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft, accusing it of abusing its monopoly power to stifle competition. The suit, which centered on Microsoft's Windows 98 operating system and its contractual restrictions imposed on personal computer manufacturers to tie the operating system to its Internet Explorer browser, was eventually merged with a federal case brought by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) under Attorney General Janet Reno.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: A 2000 landmark federal court decision ruled that Microsoft had violated antitrust laws, and the court ordered that the company be broken up. In 2001, the federal appeals court agreed, but rather than break up the company, it sent the case to a new judge to hold hearings and determine appropriate remedies. Remedies were later proposed by Blumenthal and eight other attorneys general; these included requiring that Microsoft license an unbundled version of Windows in which middleware and operating system code were not commingled.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In 2001, the Bush administration's DOJ settled with Microsoft in an agreement criticized by many states and other industry experts as insufficient. In November 2002, a federal court ruling imposed those same remedies. --> In August 2007, Blumenthal and five other states and the District of Columbia filed a report alleging that the federal settlement with Microsoft and court-imposed Microsoft remedies had failed to adequately reduce Microsoft's monopoly.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: On May 10, 2002, Blumenthal and Connecticut State Treasurer Denise L. Nappier helped to stop the hostile takeover of New Britain-based Stanley Works, a major Connecticut employer, by filing a lawsuit alleging that the move to reincorporate in Bermuda based on a shareholder's vote of May 9 was "rife with voting irregularities." The agreement to temporarily halt the move was signed by New Britain Superior Court Judge Marshall Berger. On June 3 Blumenthal referred the matter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for further investigation and on June 25 he testified before the U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means that "Longtime American corporations with operations in other countries can dodge tens of millions of dollars in federal taxes by the device of reincorporating in another country" by "simply [filing] incorporation papers in a country with friendly tax laws, open a post-office box and hold an annual meeting there" and that Stanley Works, along with "Cooper Industries, Seagate Technologies, Ingersoll-Rand and PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting, to name but a few, have also become pseudo-foreign corporations for the sole purpose of saving tax dollars." Blumenthal said, "Corporations proposing to reincorporate to Bermuda, such as Stanley, often tell shareholders that there is no material difference in the law", but said that this was not the case and was misleading to their shareholders. In order to rectify this situation he championed the Corporate Patriot Enforcement Act to close tax loopholes.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal was involved in a series of lawsuits against associates of Connecticut Governor Rowland and the various entities of the Tomasso Group over Tomasso's bribing of state officials, including Rowland, in exchange for the awarding of lucrative state contracts. Blumenthal subpoenaed Tomasso Brothers Inc.; Tomasso Brothers Construction Co.; TBI Construction Co. LLC; Tunxis Plantation Country Club; Tunxis Management Co.; Tunxis Management Co. II; and Tenergy Water LLC (all part of the Tomasso Group). Lawyers for the Tomasso Group argued that the attorney general had no special power to look into the operations of private firms under whistleblower law as no actual whistleblowers had come forward and all incriminating testimony was in related federal cases. Connecticut law requires the attorney general to both be the attorney for the state and investigate the state government's misdeeds, and the rules governing the office did not adequately address this inherent conflict of interest. The state's case against the Tomasso Group failed but federal investigations ended in prison sentences for the Group's president, for Rowland, and for a number of his associates. The Tomasso Group stopped bidding on state contracts to avoid a substantial legal challenge from Blumenthal under newly written compliance statutes.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In September 1999, Blumenthal announced a lawsuit against Robin Barnes, the president and treasurer of New Haven-based charter school the Village Academy, for serious financial mismanagement of the state-subsidized charitable organization. Citing common law, the suit sought to recover money misspent and serious damages resulting from Barnes's alleged breach of duty.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In a Connecticut Supreme Court decision, "Blumenthal v. Barnes" (2002), a unanimous court determined that the state attorney general could act using only the powers specifically authorized by the state legislature, and that since the attorney general's jurisdiction is defined by statute rather than common law, Blumenthal lacked the authority to cite common law as the basis for filing suit against Barnes. Despite this ruling, Blumenthal announced that he intended to pursue a separate 2000 lawsuit against the school's trustees filed on behalf of the State Department of Education.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In 2003 Blumenthal, former Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly, Rhode Island Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch, and consumer advocates from Connecticut, Maine, and New Hampshire opposed "the formation of a regional transmission organization (RTO) that would merge three Northeast and mid-Atlantic power operators, called Independent Service Operators (ISOs), into a single super-regional RTO." In a press release, he said, "This fatally flawed RTO proposal will raise rates, reduce accountability and reward market manipulation. It will increase the power and profits of transmission operators with an immediate $40 million price tag for consumers." The opposition was due to a report authored by Synapse Energy Economics, Inc. , a Cambridge-based energy consulting firm, that alleged that consumers would be worse off under the merger.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In 2004, Blumenthal sued Computer Plus Center of East Hartford and its owner, Gina Kolb, on behalf of the state. It was alleged that CPC overcharged $50 per computer, $500,000 in total, on a three-year, $17.2 million contract to supply computers to the state. Blumenthal sued for $1.75 million. Kolb was arrested in 2004 and charged with first-degree larceny. Kolb later countersued, claiming the state had grossly abused its power. Kolb was initially awarded $18.3 million in damages, but Blumenthal appealed the decision and the damages initially awarded were reduced to $1.83 million. Superior Court judge Barry Stevens described the jury's initial award of $18.3 million as a "shocking injustice" and said it was "influenced by partiality or mistake."


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal played a pivotal role in one of the biggest college athletics stories of the decade, the expansion of the Atlantic Coast Conference and the departures of Boston College, Miami, and Virginia Tech from the Big East. He led efforts by the Big East football schools (Virginia Tech, Rutgers, Pittsburgh, and West Virginia) in legal proceedings against the Atlantic Coast Conference, the University of Miami and Boston College, accusing them of improper disclosure of confidential information and of conspiring to dismantle the Big East. According to Blumenthal, the case was pursued because "the future of the Big East Conference was at risk—the stakes huge for both state taxpayers and the university's good name." The suits cost the schools involved $2.2 million in the first four months of litigation. The lawsuit against the ACC was initially dismissed on jurisdictional grounds but was subsequently refiled. A declaratory judgment by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts exonerated Boston College in the matter. Virginia Tech accepted an invitation from the ACC and withdrew from the suit to remove itself from the awkward position of suing its new conference. An out-of-court $5 million settlement was eventually reached, which included a $1 million exit fee that Boston College was required to pay the Big East under the league's constitution.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Some have speculated that the lawsuit was one of the biggest reasons that the University of Connecticut was not sought after by the ACC during its 2011 additions of then-Big East members Syracuse and Pittsburgh. UConn is a member of the less lucrative American Athletic Conference, the successor to the original Big East.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: On October 2, 2006, Blumenthal launched an investigation of a botched reconstruction project of Interstate 84 in Waterbury and Cheshire. The original contractor for the job, L.G. DeFelice, went out of business and it was later revealed that hundreds of storm drains had been improperly installed. Blumenthal subsequently announced lawsuits against L.G. DeFelice and the Maguire Group, the engineering firm that inspected the project. United States Fidelity & Guaranty, the insurer behind the performance bond for the I-84 construction, agreed to pay $17.5 million to settle the claims. Under the agreement, the state of Connecticut retained the right to sue L.G. DeFelice for additional funds. In 2009, the bonding company agreed to pay an additional $4.6 million settlement, bringing the total award to $22.1 million ($30,000 more than the repair costs).


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In November 2006, Blumenthal tried, as Paul A. Offit described it, "to legislate a disease, Chronic Lyme, into existence". He launched an antitrust investigation into the Infectious Diseases Society of America's (IDSA's) 2006 guidelines regarding the treatment of Lyme disease. Responding to concerns from chronic Lyme disease advocacy groups, Blumenthal claimed the IDSA guidelines would "severely constrict choices and legitimate diagnosis and treatment options for patients." The medical validity of the IDSA guidelines was not challenged, and a journalist writing in "Nature Medicine" suggested some IDSA members may not have disclosed potential conflicts of interest, while a "Forbes" piece described Blumenthal's investigation as "intimidation" of scientists by an elected official with close ties to Lyme advocacy groups. The "Journal of the American Medical Association" described the decision as an example of the "politicization of health policy" that went against the weight of scientific evidence and may have a chilling effect on future decisions by medical associations. In 2008, Blumenthal ended the investigation after the IDSA agreed to conduct a review of the guidelines. In 2010, an eight-member independent review panel unanimously agreed that the original 2006 guideline recommendations were "medically and scientifically justified" in the light of the evidence. The committee did not change any of the earlier recommendations but did alter some of the language in an executive summary of the findings. Blumenthal said he would review the final report.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In March 2006, Blumenthal noted that more than seven incidents of sexual assault in Connecticut had been linked directly to MySpace contacts. Earlier that year, Blumenthal and attorneys general in at least five other states were involved in discussions with MySpace that resulted in the implementation of technological changes aimed at protecting children from pornography and child predators on the company's website. At Blumenthal's urging, MySpace installed a link to free blocking software ("K9 Web Protection"), but in May 2006, Blumenthal announced that the site had failed to make the program easy to find and that it was not clearly labeled. He also urged MySpace to take further steps to safeguard children, including purging deep links to pornography and inappropriate material, tougher age verification, and banning users under 16.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal was co-chair, along with North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, of the State Attorney General Task Force on Social Networking. In 2008, the attorneys general commissioned the Internet Safety Technical Task Force report, which researched "ways to help squash the onslaught of sexual predators targeting younger social-networking clients".


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal's office subpoenaed MySpace for information about the number of registered sex offenders on its site. In 2009, MySpace revealed that over a two-year span it had roughly 90,000 members who were registered sex offenders (nearly double what MySpace officials had originally estimated one year earlier). Blumenthal accused MySpace of having "monstrously inadequate counter-measures" to prevent sex offenders from creating MySpace profiles.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal and Cooper secured agreements from MySpace and Facebook to make their sites safer. Both implemented dozens of safeguards, including finding better ways to verify users' ages, banning convicted sex offenders, and limiting the ability of older users to search for members under 18.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In March 2008, Blumenthal issued a letter to Craigslist attorneys demanding that the website cease allowing postings for erotic services, which he claimed promoted prostitution, and accused the site of "turning a blind eye" to the problem. He worked with Craigslist and a group of 40 attorneys general to create new measures on the site designed to thwart ads for prostitution and other illegal sexual activities. In April 2009, Craigslist came under the scrutiny of law enforcement agencies following the arrest of Philip Markoff (the "Craigslist Killer"), suspected of killing a 25-year-old masseuse he met through Craigslist at a Boston hotel. Blumenthal subsequently called for a series of specific measures to fight prostitution and pornography on Craigslist—including steep financial penalties for rule breaking, and incentives for reporting wrongdoing. He said, "Craigslist has the means—and moral obligation—to stop the pimping and prostituting in plain sight."


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Leading a coalition of 39 states, in May 2010 Blumenthal subpoenaed Craigslist as part of an investigation into whether the site was taking sufficient action to curb prostitution ads and whether it was profiting from them. He said that prostitution ads remained on the site despite previous assurances that they would be removed. The subpoena sought documents related to Craigslist's processes for reviewing potentially objectionable ads, as well as documents detailing the revenue gained from ads sold to Craigslist's erotic services and adult services categories. In August 2010, Blumenthal called on Craigslist to shut the section down permanently and take steps to eradicate prostitution ads from other parts of the site. He also called on Congress to alter a landmark communications law (the Communications Decency Act) that Craigslist has cited in defense of the ads.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Following continued pressure, Craigslist removed the adult services sections from its U.S. sites in September 2010 and from its international sites in December 2010. Blumenthal called the decision a victory against sexual exploitation of women and children, and against human trafficking connected to prostitution.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal and other state attorneys general reached a settlement with Craigslist on the issue; the settlement called for the company to charge people via credit card for any ads that were suggestive in nature so the person could be tracked down if they were determined to be offering prostitution. But Blumenthal remarked that after the settlement, the ads continued to flourish using code words.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In October 2007, Blumenthal and the attorneys general of four other states lobbied Congress to reject proposals to provide immunity from litigation to telecommunications firms that cooperated with the federal government's terrorist surveillance program following the September 11 attacks. In 2008 Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law a new terrorist surveillance bill including the telecom immunity provisions Blumenthal opposed.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In August 2008, Blumenthal announced that Connecticut had joined California, Illinois and Florida in suing subprime mortgage lender Countrywide Financial (now owned by Bank of America) for fraudulent business practices. The suit alleged that Countrywide pushed consumers into "deceptive, unaffordable loans and workouts, and charged homeowners in default unjustified and excessive legal fees." According to Blumenthal, "Countrywide conned customers into loans that were clearly unaffordable and unsustainable, turning the American Dream of homeownership into a nightmare" and when consumers defaulted, "the company bullied them into workouts doomed to fail." He also claimed that Countrywide "crammed unconscionable legal fees into renegotiated loans, digging consumers deeper into debt" and "broke promises that homeowners could refinance, condemning them to hopelessly unaffordable loans." The lawsuit demanded that Countrywide make restitution to affected borrowers, give up improper gains and rescind, reform or modify all mortgages that broke state laws. It is also sought civil fines of up to $100,000 per violation of state banking laws, and up to $5,000 per violation of state consumer protection laws.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In October 2008, Bank of America initially agreed to settle the states' suits for $8.4 billion, and in February 2010, Countrywide mailed payments of $3,452.54 to 370 Connecticut residents. The settlement forced Bank of America to establish a $150 million fund to help repay borrowers whose homes had been foreclosed upon, $1.3 million of which went to Connecticut.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal commented in defense of U.S. Senator and Senate Banking Committee chair Christopher Dodd, who had been harshly criticized for accepting a VIP loan from Countrywide, "there's no evidence of wrongdoing on [Mr. Dodd's] part any more than victims who were misled or deceived by Countrywide." In August 2010, Dodd was cleared by the Senate Ethics Committee, which found "no credible evidence" that he knowingly tried to use his status as a U.S. senator to receive loan terms not available to the public.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal has been a vocal advocate of the scientific consensus on climate change, that human activity is responsible for rising global temperatures and that prompt action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions must be taken. He has urged the Environmental Protection Agency to declare carbon dioxide a dangerous air pollutant. "I urge the new Obama EPA to declare carbon dioxide a danger to human health and welfare so we can at last begin addressing the potentially disastrous threat global warming poses to health, the environment and our economy. We must make up for lost time before it's too late to curb dangerous warming threatening to devastate the planet and human society." He has brought suit against a number of electric utilities in the Midwest, arguing that coal-burning power plants are generating excess emissions. In 2009, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to allow Blumenthal's lawsuit to proceed. Blumenthal has said, "no reputable climate scientist disputes the reality of global warming. It is fact, plain and simple. Dithering will be disastrous."


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal was often considered a top prospect for the Democratic nominee for governor of Connecticut, but never ran for the office.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: On March 18, 2007, "Hartford Courant" columnist Kevin Rennie reported that Blumenthal had become seriously interested in running for governor in 2010. On February 2, 2009, Blumenthal announced he would forgo a gubernatorial run and seek reelection that year as attorney general.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: After Chris Dodd announced on January 6, 2010, that he would retire from the Senate at the end of his term, Blumenthal told the Associated Press that he would run in the election for Dodd's seat in November 2010. Later that day, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden called Blumenthal to express their best wishes.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: The same day, Public Policy Polling released a poll they took on the two preceding evenings, including races where Blumenthal was paired against each of the three most-mentioned Republicans contending for their party's nomination for the seat. He led by at least 30% in each hypothetical race: against Rob Simmons (59%–28%), against Linda McMahon (60%–28%), and against Peter Schiff (63%–23%), with a 4.3% margin of error cited. Rasmussen Reports also polled after Blumenthal announced his candidacy and found a somewhat more competitive race, but with Blumenthal holding a strong lead.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: A February poll by Rasmussen found that Blumenthal held leads of 19 against Simmons and 20 against McMahon, and that Republicans had made up little ground since the initial Rasmussen poll after Blumenthal announced. On May 21, Blumenthal received the Democratic nomination by acclamation.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: "The New York Times" reported that Blumenthal misspoke on at least one occasion by saying he'd served with the military "in Vietnam". Video emerged of him speaking to a group of veterans and supporters in March 2008 in Norwalk, saying, in reference to supporting troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, "We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam." There were also other occasions where he accurately described his military service. At a 2008 ceremony in Shelton, Connecticut, he said, "I served during the Vietnam era... I remember the taunts, the insults, sometimes even physical abuse."


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal's commanding officer in 1974 and 1975, Larry Baldino of Woodbridge, addressed the controversy in a letter to the editor in the "New Haven Register". Baldino wrote that the misleading statement was too "petty" to be the basis for supporting or not supporting Blumenthal. Baldino further called Blumenthal "good-natured" and "one of the best Marines with whom I ever worked".


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Days after the nomination, Quinnipiac University Polling Institute polling indicated that Blumenthal held a 25-point lead over McMahon. The Cook Political Report changed its assessment of the race to "Leans Democratic", making Blumenthal the favored candidate over McMahon.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: August Wolf, a bond salesman and former Olympian, was the only declared Republican candidate running against Blumenthal in the 2016 Senate election.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In August 2015, economist Larry Kudlow threatened to run against Blumenthal if Blumenthal voted in favor of the Iran Nuclear Deal.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: According to a pair of Quinnipiac polls on October 15, 2015, Blumenthal had a 34-point lead over Kudlow and a 35-point lead over Wolf.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal was reelected with 63% of the vote against Republican state representative Dan Carter, becoming the first person in Connecticut's history to receive over a million votes in a single election.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In November 2020, Blumenthal announced that he would seek reelection in 2022. In the general election, he defeated Leora Levy, who defeated former Connecticut House Minority Leader Themis Klarides in the Republican primary.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal was sworn into the 112th United States Congress on January 5, 2011. He announced plans to return to Connecticut every weekend to join a "listening tour" of his home state.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In March 2012, Blumenthal and New York Senator Chuck Schumer gained national attention after they called upon Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice to investigate practices by employers to require Facebook passwords for employee applicants and workers.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal worked with Senator Mark Kirk to eliminate pensions for members of Congress who are convicted of felonies while serving in office.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In "Blumenthal v. Trump", Blumenthal and Representative John Conyers Jr. led a group of 196 congressmen in filing a federal lawsuit accusing President Trump of violating the emoluments clause of the US Constitution.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In the wake of the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol, Blumenthal blamed Trump, saying that Trump "incited, instigated and supported" the attack. He called for Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Blumenthal also requested an investigation into the lack of response from law enforcement and the military.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In December 2021, Blumenthal gave a speech honoring three local labor activists at an awards ceremony in New Haven that was hosted by the Connecticut People's World Committee, an affiliate of the Connecticut Communist Party. After criticism from national Republican politicians and conservative media outlets, Blumenthal said that he is "a strong supporter and believer in American capitalism" and would not have attended had he known of the group's Communist ties.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal is pro-choice. He supports efforts to make it a crime for demonstrators to block access to health clinics. He opposed efforts by Walmart to ban the sale of emergency contraception and supports requirements that pharmacies fill birth control prescriptions. He supports federal funding for family planning clinics. After "Roe v. Wade" was overturned in June 2022, Blumenthal said the decision "strips women of the freedom to make their own health care decisions & puts that power in the hands of the government."


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In March 2019, Blumenthal was one of 38 senators to sign a letter to United States Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue warning that dairy farmers "have continued to face market instability and are struggling to survive the fourth year of sustained low prices" and urging his department to "strongly encourage these farmers to consider the Dairy Margin Coverage program."


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In May 2019, Blumenthal and eight other Democratic senators sent Perdue a letter criticizing the USDA for purchasing pork from JBS USA, writing that it was "counterproductive and contradictory" for companies to receive funding from "U.S. taxpayer dollars intended to help American farmers struggling with this administration's trade policy." The senators requested the department "ensure these commodity purchases are carried out in a manner that most benefits the American farmer's bottom line—not the business interests of foreign corporations."


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In June 2019, Blumenthal and 18 other Democratic senators sent a letter to USDA Inspector General (IG) Phyllis K. Fong requesting that the IG investigate USDA instances of retaliation and political decision-making and asserting that not to conduct an investigation would mean these "actions could be perceived as a part of this administration's broader pattern of not only discounting the value of federal employees, but suppressing, undermining, discounting, and wholesale ignoring scientific data produced by their own qualified scientists."


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In June 2019, Blumenthal was one of six Democrats led by Amy Klobuchar to sign letters to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice recounting that many of them had "called on both the FTC and the Justice Department to investigate potential anticompetitive activity in these markets, particularly following the significant enforcement actions taken by foreign competition enforcers against these same companies" and requesting that both agencies confirm whether they had opened antitrust investigations into each of the companies and that both agencies pledge to publicly release any such investigations' findings.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal is one of Congress's most vocal critics of arbitration clauses and class action waivers. He was the leading Senate sponsor of the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, alongside Representative Hank Johnson, which would ban the use of the clauses in consumer contracts. Blumenthal additionally introduced separate legislation with Representative Conor Lamb aimed to prohibit Amtrak from enforcing such clauses in its customer agreements.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: Blumenthal called for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to temporarily ground all Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft in the United States until an investigation into the cause of the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 is complete.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In 2019, Blumenthal and 34 other senators introduced the Child Care for Working Families Act, a bill that created 770,000 new child care jobs and ensured families under 75% of the state median income did not pay for child care with higher-earning families having to pay "their fair share for care on a sliding scale, regardless of the number of children they have." The legislation also supported universal access to high-quality preschool programs for all 3- and 4-year-olds and changed the child care workforce compensation and training to aid both teachers and caregivers.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In 2019, following the Federal Communications Commission's announcement of rules changes to children's programming by modifying the Children's Television Act of 1990, Blumenthal and eight other Democratic senators signed a letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai that expressed concern that the proposed changes "would limit the reach of educational content available to children and have a particular damaging effect on youth in low-income and minority communities" and asserted that the new rules would see a reduction in access to valuable educational content through over-the-air services.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In April 2018, Blumenthal was one of five Democratic senators to sign a letter to FEMA administrator Brock Long calling on FEMA to enter an agreement with the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development that would "stand up the Disaster Housing Assistance Program and address the medium- and longer-term housing needs" of evacuees of Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The senators wrote that "FEMA's refusal to use the tools at its disposal, including DHAP, to help these survivors is puzzling—and profoundly troubling" and that hundreds of hurricane survivors were susceptible to being left homeless in the event that FEMA and HUD continued to not work together.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In February 2017, Blumenthal and 30 other senators signed a letter to Kaléo Pharmaceuticals in response to the opioid-overdose-reversing device Evzio rising in price from $690 in 2014 to $4,500 and requested the company provide the detailed price structure for Evzio, the number of devices Kaléo Pharmaceuticals set aside for donation, and the totality of federal reimbursements Evzio received in the previous year.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In March 2017, Blumenthal was one of 21 senators to sign a letter led by Ed Markey to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that noted that 12% of adult Medicaid beneficiaries had some form or a substance abuse disorder and that one third of treatment administered for opioid and other substance use disorders in the U.S. was financed through Medicaid and opined that the American Health Care Act could "very literally translate into a death spiral for those with opioid use disorders" due to inadequate coverage for substance abuse treatment.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In April 2019, Blumenthal was one of 11 senators to sign a letter to Juul CEO Kevin Burns asserting that the company had "lost what little remaining credibility the company had when it claimed to care about the public health" and that they would not rest until Juul's "dangerous products are out of the hands of our nation's children." The senators requested Juul list each of its advertising buys and detail the steps the company has taken to ensure its advertisements are not seen by people under 21 in addition to asking if Juul had purchased any social media influencers for product promotion.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In March 2019, Blumenthal led five Democratic senators in signing a letter to the Federal Trade Commission requesting it "use its rulemaking authority, along with other tools, in order to combat the scourge of non-compete clauses rigging our economy against workers" and arguing that incomplete clauses "harm employees by limiting their ability to find alternate work, which leaves them with little leverage to bargain for better wages or working conditions with their immediate employer." The senators added that the FTC had the responsibility of protecting both consumers and workers and needed to "act decisively" to address their concerns over "serious anti-competitive harms from the proliferation of non-competes in the economy."


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: On March 3, 2020, Blumenthal cosponsored a bill to make it difficult for people and organizations to use encryption under the EARN-IT Act of 2020.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In February 2022, Blumenthal and Lindsey Graham introduced bipartisan legislation, as part of the EARN IT Act, to incentivize tech companies to remove child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from their platforms and remove blanket immunity for violations of laws related to online child pornography.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In June 2019, Blumenthal was one of 44 senators to introduce the International Climate Accountability Act, legislation that would prevent Trump from using funds in an attempt to withdraw from the Paris Agreement and directing the Trump administration to instead develop a strategic plan for the United States that would allow it to meet its commitment under the Paris Agreement.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In April 2019, Blumenthal was one of 34 senators to sign a letter to Trump encouraging him "to listen to members of your own Administration and reverse a decision that will damage our national security and aggravate conditions inside Central America", asserting that Trump had "consistently expressed a flawed understanding of U.S. foreign assistance" since becoming president and that he was "personally undermining efforts to promote U.S. national security and economic prosperity" by preventing the use of Fiscal Year 2018 national security funding. The senators argued that foreign assistance to Central American countries created less migration to the U.S., citing the funding's help in improving conditions in those countries.


title: Richard Blumenthal

text: In April 2018, Blumenthal stated his support for "strong efforts to crack down on intellectual property theft and unfair trade practices by China or any other nation", but said that Trump was implementing "trade policy by tweet, reaction based on impulse and rash rhetoric that can only escalate tensions with all economic powers and lead to a trade war" and that U.S. actions through trade without a strategy or an endgame seemed "highly dangerous" to the American economy.