WASHINGTON – The Top 5 “dark money” spenders on presidential election ads have reported less than 1% of their spending to the FEC, which is all that is required by the agency’s insufficient standards, according to a new report analyzing the latest campaign filings.
"Today’s outside spending groups act as megaphones for moguls and millionaires. The more money they pump in, the louder they’re able to amplify their voices—until a few wealthy individuals and interests are dominating our public square, drowning out the middle and working classes.”
TheWall Street Journal ran a disingenuous and misleading opinion piece on Sunday evening titled "The Corporate Disclosure Assault," arguing that “[u]nions and liberal activists are using proxy rules to attack business political speech.” The piece—exactly like the undisclosed corporate money it’s pandering to—doesn’t even have an author listed.
By now it's pretty clear that Mitt Romney's recent claim about female job losses during the Obama presidency has more to do with selective number fudging and electoral pandering than factual accuracy.
The problem of American democracy isn't solely that there's too much money in our politics. It's that the money comes from a narrow (and extremely rich) slice of the electorate.
On a new survey which finds that hedge funds and traders of stocks and bonds are predicted to see bonuses drop by as much as 10 percent from last year.
The derivatives industry is squeezing Washington like a python. Desperate to control the tone and thrust of derivatives regulation, industry lobbyists have been swarming over the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, each of which is writing derivatives rules as mandated by the Dodd-Frank reform law.
The J.P. Morgan Chase JPM -0.68% & Co. unit whose wrong-way bets on corporate credit cost the bank more than $2 billion includes a group that has invested in financially challenged companies, including LightSquared Inc., the wireless broadband provider that this month filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The full details of JP Morgan’s trading strategy aren’t known, but Wallace Turbeville, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker and currently a fellow with public policy think-tank Demos, doesn’t buy the bank’s explanation that it was simply hedging. “How can you possibly lose that kind of money on a hedge?” he asks. “The answer is, they weren’t off setting risk.
The Boston Review recently hosted a forum titled, How Markets Crowd Out Morals, in which Michael Sandel wrote the lead essay, arguing that we as a society should be questioning which institutions we allow to be defined by market norms.
As we all sit around waiting for the Supreme Court to hand down decisions on a whole handful of whoppers — the Affordable Care Act, the Arizona "Papers, Please" law — it was something the Court didn't do this week that may be the most overlooked matter of all. It has before it a case from Montana whereby that state's supreme court upheld Montana's 100-year-old ban on corporate campaign contributions in the face of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the Citizens United case.
The movement has drawn some support from financial circles. Wallace C. Turbeville, a former Goldman Sachs banker who now is a senior fellow at Demos, a public policy research organization in New York,submitted testimony last month for the Senate Banking Committee in favor of more banking regulation.
Are big corporations taking over American elections? It depends whether you ask liberals or conservatives, who can’t even agree on the basic facts.
In the liberal universe, big corporations have swallowed politics. Common Cause President Bob Edgar summed up this version of reality at a press conference in March, declaring: “We, the people, will not stand idly by while the country’s major corporations use their massive wealth to buy our democracy.”
Every day brings more reminders of the terrible unfairness that besets our country, the tragic reversal of fortune experienced by millions who once had good lives and steady jobs, now gone.
An article in the current issue of Rolling Stone chronicles “The Fallen: The Sharp, Sudden Decline of America’s Middle Class” and describes a handful of middle-class men and women made homeless, forced to live out of their cars in church parking lots in Southern California.
If there’s one thing you can say about Art Pope, North Carolina’s mega-donor, it’s that he is a man on a mission. Unfortunately, his mission is to use his wealth to make voting more difficult and restrictive and continue the outsized role money plays in politics.
Here’s another example of how money corrupts the electoral system: a pro-business special interest group has spent almost $7 million on New York City Council races.
Last week, we highlighted how the outside money group, Jobs for New York, was dominating the New York City Council races. So, how did they do? Not too shabby—of the 20 candidates they supported, 16 won, two are still too close to call, and two candidates were unsuccessful.
The standard rap against regulation is that government uses a meat cleaver to clean up problems in the private sector that are better tackled with more nuance.
Yet regulation—or the threat of it—often serves to spur smart self-regulation that wouldn't otherwise occur. You want to see a scalpel at work? Wave around a meat cleaver.
A case in point is how banks are getting more serious about addressing consumer complaints now that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has created a database of complaints about banks and other financial institutions.
Have you heard of the Freedom Partners? According to a Politico investigation, the group raised and spent $250 million in 2012 to shape political and policy debates. According to IRS filings, the group has 200 donors, each of whom paid at least $100,000 in annual dues. And while its head, Marc Short, claims that, “our members are proud to be part of [the organization],” they refuse to be publicly identified. So, proud to be a part of it, as long as you don’t know who I am?
Five years after the fall of Lehman Brothers and the worst financial crisis since 1929, one thing seems certain: another meltdown of the financial system will eventually happen. Why? Because we still haven't fixed many of the problems that led to the last crisis.
