A blockbuster New York Times story published this weekend details how the Mexican subsidiary of retail giant Wal-Mart paid $24 million in bribes to Mexican officials — and subsequently top Wal-Mart officials allegedly decided to cover up these offenses. The details of Wal-Mart’s complicity in bribery are shocking, but there is one important element that the
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It’s been a bad month for the corporate front group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). More than a dozen corporations and foundations have left the organization as it has come under fire for the laws it secretly helps corporations pass. Our friends at Color of Change have just announced that drug giant Procter & Gamble
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The New York Times’ Mike McIntire published a bombshell story about the American Legislative Exchange Council this weekend. Using internal ALEC documents provided to the Times by Common Cause, a good government reform watchdog organization, McIntire revealed how the group’s policy task forces are designed so that corporate lobbyists — not state lawmakers — have
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Over the past week, the mainstream press in the United States has obsessively covered an embarassing incident where U.S. Secret Service agents allegedly employed prostitutes in advance of President Obama’s visit to Colombia. While this incident reflects poorly on the Secret Service and creates issues regarding security, there is a wider scandal that the media largely
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Last year, two teenagers handling a large grain auger had their legs severed while working at the Zaloudek Grain Co. in Oklahoma. The Department of Labor (DOL) proposed rules that might have prevented this tragedy. The rules, designed to curb dangerous child labor in agriculture, were finally unveiled last year after a long delay. The
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It’s a bad month for corporate front group the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The organization has lost at least twelve corporate and foundation sponsors, as the public learns more and more about its corporate agenda. Now, Rep. Greg Cromer (R), ALEC’s State Chairman in Louisiana, has decided to resign from the group. I talked
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On Wednesday, a group of members of Congress, local and state lawmakers, and activist groups met in a Capitol Visitor Center hearing room to do something unusual for its loftiness: they announced and signed a “declaration for democracy,” pledging their support to an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens
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Republic Report previously reported that former President George W. Bush will be speaking at the annual meeting of APSCU, the leading association of for-profit colleges, on June 22 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. For-profit colleges get $32 billion in student aid from your tax dollars every year, but many are marked by deceptive
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