North Carolina House Majority Leader Paul Stam (R) has an idea for fixing our country’s education system — dump tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into private schools. Stam is a sponsor of House Bill 1104, which would utilize the “North Carolina Opportunity Scholarship Program” to shift up to $40 million of taxpayer funds in
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Today, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is testifying before the House Financial Services Committee about his megabank’s stunning $2 billion loss. As during his testimony before the Senate last week, Dimon is being shown enormous deference by members of Congress, many of whom receive campaign contributions from Dimon’s bank. Take, for example the committee’s chairman,
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Drones aren’t just for battlefields in the Middle East or South Asia anymore. In February, Congress authorized the use of thousands of surveillance drones domestically in the United States. At a conference of drone manufacturers that Republic Report attended in Washington, D.C., lobbyists praised Members of Congress for giving them exactly the sort of authorization
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Last week, Republic Report was the first news outlet to report that Mercury Public Affairs, a powerful public relations and lobbying firm, sent a staffer posing as a “journalist” to spy on warehouse workers on behalf of its client Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart and Mercury acknowledged their relationship but claimed that the staffer, Stephanie Harnett, was working
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The for-profit college industry contains many schools that regularly scam students and taxpayers. Large for-profits like Kaplan, DeVry, Bridgepoint, and the University of Phoenix spend big lobbying the federal government and providing campaign contributions, and in return the government shovels about $32 billion a year into the for-profit college industry via student loans and grants. These schools
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Wal-Mart is America’s biggest corporation. It’s also one of the country’s worst union busters, so it’s hardly a surprise that it engages in under-handed tactics to get its way with its workers and with America’s politicians. But a story out of Southern California is particularly shocking. Warehouse Workers United (WWU), a new organization for warehouse workers in the area, caught
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Imagine if, when suspects were taken before a court to testify, they were able to pay off the judge and jury to make sure there was no serious grilling. Unfortunately, this isn’t a hypothetical. This is the U.S. Senate. This morning, the Senate Finance Committee — which is managed by a former JP Morgan lobbyist
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This afternoon, pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson announced that it will be leaving the corporate front group the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC): “We have been in dialogue with ALEC for some time, and while we acknowledge ALEC’s recent decision to focus only on innovation and growth-supporting policies, we have decided to suspend our participation
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