Our friend Gene Nichol at UNC Law School has an op-ed column in today’s News & Observer that not only says democracy is under attack by the money-is-speech ideologues on the US Supreme Court; his words (contrary to his everyday deeds) could even lead you to think it’s time to declare total defeat. Indeed, there is [...]
This is a level of corruption that we don’t often see: The new government in Nigeria wants to charge Dick Cheney, the former vice president and chairman of Halliburton, in connection with $180 million in bribes paid to Nigerian lawmakers. The lawmakers awarded a $6 billion construction contract for a natural gas pipeline to Halliburton [...]
The Nation Magazine has an important article that connects the rise of massive front-group spending in elections with the decline of the media’s coverage of political campaigns and policy issues. A front group’s distorting message becomes so much more effective when repeated frequently and when the media abandons its job, which is not gotcha journalism but [...]
The Institute for Southern Studies has another report on Art Pope’s use of corporate and personal donations to spread lies and depress voter turnout by pumping up the “negatives” of state Democratic candidates. This is how you purchase election outcomes through deceit, but of course it didn’t begin with this election cycle and is not [...]
A quick report by Public Citizen points out the significant role of the unprecedented spending by outside groups in US House and Senate contests on November 2. In 58 of the 74 elections where party control changed, the winning candidate got more support from non-party, outside group(s) than the loser. A press release with the [...]
A segment on NPR today exposes a nasty example of public policy for sale to private interests. It turns out that private prison officials, along with a shadowy group nicknamed ALEC, basically wrote Arizona's controversial new anti-immigration law as a revenue generator; they envisioned special prisons for women and children, among other things. Thirty of [...]
Two front-page stories by the Raleigh News & Observer highlight the perspective of the forces dominating this year's election cycle: make voting for poor people harder and the influence of big-money political donors easier. The first story describes Tea Party supporters in Raleigh harassing Chavis Park voters by writing down their names, asking them questions, [...]
A front group for ultra-conservative Art Pope is jumping into new territory with the encouragement of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. It is using money from Pope’s business to run attack ads against Democratic leaders in the General Assembly. The 501(c)(4) group, called Civitas Action, has the same executive director, office, and dominating financial [...]
The insidious corporate takeover of the U.S. Congress is gaining momentum and going global. A new report reveals that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is soliciting foreign donations to bolster its political operations, which include a $75 million budget for attack ads to elect its proxies to Congress. That’s probably the biggest political budget of [...]
Secret sponsors: Interest groups are spending five times as much in this election as in the last midterm election – and the identities of the money suppliers behind these groups are mostly unknown, in contrast to 2006 when 90% of the donors were disclosed. Public Citizens has a new report analyzing “fading disclosure” and the New [...]