The everyday corruption of our government by Big Money has real consequences for Americans, many of whom are struggling to feed their families. Take the farm bill that Congress spent time working on this week. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) introduced an amendment to restore $4.5 billion in funding for the food stamp program, which assists
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On Wednesday, the Bipartisan Policy Center held a forum on the “Vanishing Moderate Democrat.” To demonstrate this supposed phenomenon, it hosted various self-styled “moderate” Democrats as panelists. But besides this supposed centrist ideology, these panelists all shared one other attribute — they all became corporate lobbyists after leaving Congress. Here’s a list of the panelists
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We were the first news site to  report last week that Wal-Mart had hired Mercury Public Affairs, an elite public relations and lobbying firm, to fight against warehouse workers in Los Angeles. A Mercury staffer was caught spying on the workers, and was apparently let go after a media firestorm. Now, the Warehouse Workers United, which
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The Obama campaign just released a campaign commercial talking about how Mitt Romney, while working at Bain Capital, oversaw the outsourcing of Americans jobs to China and Mexico. The ad calls Romney a “corporate raider” for his role at Bain (watch it to the left). The media has picked up the Obama campaign’s attack on
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Earlier this year, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) introduced the Foreign Lobbying Reform Act, which would prohibit federal government officials such as Members of Congress from lobbying for foreign governments until ten years after they have left office.  “I am very serious about this,” said Wolf at the time. “It is not put in for just
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We’ve just received word that Dell has dropped its membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a powerful corporate front group that passes off corporate-written bills to state legislatures. Here’s a statement from Dell: Dell makes it a practice to review our memberships each year. We reviewed the value of our participation in the
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Last year, the more than century-old music company EMI Group announced it would split up in two, with the two parts sold to Universal Music Group and Sony Corporation in a multi-billion dollar deal. A number of consumer groups, lead by the Consumer Federation of America and Public Knowledge, have criticized the Universal-EMI Group merger in particular,
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In our broken campaign finance system, Members of Congress know that they can introduce and advocate for legislation that benefits a certain industry or special interest group and then be lavished with campaign contributions from the same interests. On June 11th, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) introduced a bill titled the “South Carolina Off-shore Drilling Act,”
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