You expect judges to follow the rules, especially when it comes to public accountability. Unfortunately, it looks like NC Supreme Court Justice Paul Newby selected a campaign treasurer who is having a hard time abiding by simple campaign finance disclosure regulations. For months, the State Board of Elections has struggled to get the Newby campaign [...]
Mother Jones magazine has boiled the history of political money deals in the United States into a clever annotated timeline and a highly readable article, starring a host of shady characters in “a dramatic battle between the forces of reform and influence that goes back more than 250 years before the birth of the super-PAC."
Because the State Board of Elections is starved for funds, the public gets a poor view of how money flows into our elections: Who is giving and spending what for whose benefit? While other states have searchable databases of donors, the backlog for processing campaign disclosure reports in NC is measured in years. (See, for [...]
Students at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication have created an interactive flow chart of the money in NC political campaigns with annotated descriptions of key terms. Visualize rivers of money. They’ve also just posted a series of articles about NC campaign finances on their WhichWayNC website and blog. Did you know that [...]
A federal grand jury has indicted state legislator Rep. Stephen LaRoque (R-Kinston) on a variety of charges related to misusing federal funds received by two nonprofit lending outfits he created "to alleviate poverty and increase economic activity and employment in rural communities." The charges follow an investigative series by NC Policy Watch and include stealing $300,000 from the federal government, failing [...]
A new bill in the US Senate to increase disclosure of campaign money again uses the title DISCLOSE Act, but Democratic sponsors have watered it down from last year’s version in the hopes of winning enough Republican support for passage. One report says the Senate bill, S. 3369 “does not prohibit campaign spending by foreign [...]
There’s lots in the daily news of the doings and undoings in the General Assembly and elsewhere, but you may have missed coverage about this new electioneering operation sponsored by the Ayn Rand-wing of the North Carolina business establishment. The mainstream press hasn't noticed yet. Public-interest investigator Greg Flynn reports that these White-Men-With-Too-Much-Money have hired [...]
The New Yorker this week has an in-depth account of the manipulations and blunders that inflated a narrow issue before the US Supreme Court into the now infamous Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision. The majority opinion didn’t need to make sense – it had 5 of the 9 votes, enough to win; the [...]
Two national stories with NC connections: One, from the Los Angeles Times, dissects the damnable lies spewed forth in political advertisements sponsored by Americans for Prosperity. It’s not an accident that the deceitful ads attack alternative energy production as well as President Obama; the biggest backers of AFP are oil and gas mega-billionaires David and [...]
Maybe you’ve heard about the State Integrity Investigation that scored each state on the strength of its laws and practices governing campaign finances, lobbying regulations, ethics, access to government records, redistricting, etc. Overall, North Carolina earned a C- and ranked 18th best among the 50 states, but in some areas it scored an A, in [...]