Update on yesterday’s post: As another benefit from the federal health care reform law, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina announced it will refund $155.8 million to about 215,000 individual Blue Advantage policyholders in the state – or about $690 for the typical customer. In more good news, NC Insurance Commissioner Wayne Goodwin [...]
Contrary to the right-wing cry to “get government off my back,” the NC Council of Churches and the national coalition, Faithful Reform in Health Care, point out that government can help people solve problems. The coalition released a list of nine new benefits that begin this week because of the federal health care reform law. Families [...]
Some updates: The company trying to build a giant cement factory near Wilmington (LINK, Feb. 13, 2010) has changed its legal and lobbying team, abandoning the McGuireWoods firm that once boasted having former Gov. Mike Easley and several of his associates on its payroll. Easley and Ruffin Poole have left McGuireWoods, and some key legislative [...]
NC Congressmen Larry Kissell and Bobby Etheridge, both Democrats, will be blasted with $1.4 million worth of attack ads in the next month by the anti-government Americans for Job Security. Like many front groups designed to help a narrow segment of the super-rich, AJS uses emotional themes tied to fear, greed and insecurity to sway [...]
On this Labor Day, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich succinctly describes how Americans are working longer hours for less pay while the benefits of increased productivity flow to the top 1%; this distorted distribution of the wealth we create means consumers don’t have the money to buy what the economy is capable of producing, and [...]
Want to get a picture of how big money in politics is crushing real people? Watch this short video from Brave New Foundation about a farmer in Iowa, oyster harvester in Louisiana and coal miner in West Virginia. (Explore the Fair Elections website for more Good Stuff.) The message is clear: people suffer when wealthy [...]
Real Jobs NC, the 527 committee backed by Art Pope, Fred Eshelman and the national Republican Party, has begun sending tons of attack-ad mailers to voters in the districts of several state House Democrats who face tight elections. (See August 18 LINK entry.) Mark Binker of the Greensboro News & Record looks into the claims [...]
A Texas judge has ordered the national Republican Governors Association to pay $2 million to the state’s Democratic candidate for governor in 2006 because the association illegally funneled $1 million to Republican Gov. Rick Perry from the nation’s biggest individual campaign donor that year. The donation came from Bob Perry, the Houston mega-builder and patron of the [...]
Mother Jones magazine gives this factoid from a new series by the Center for Responsive Politics: Environmental organizations spent a record $22 million lobbying Congress and federal agencies last year, but for every dollar the groups spent, the oil and gas industry spent eight dollars. Exxon alone spent more on lobbying than all the environmental [...]
The State Board of Elections voted 4 to 1 to fine Gov. Bev Perdue’s campaign committee $30,000 for failing to properly disclose private airplane flights donated to her 2008 campaign. An eight-month investigation by the Board’s chief investigator Kim Strach turned up a hodgepodge of incomplete records and compliance problems with the campaign, but not [...]