As we’ve noted, one of the biggest problems in Washington is the level of secrecy in lobbying. Communications consultants, lawyers, fundraisers, and other political professionals produce public pressure campaigns and make back room deals without ever registering as lobbyists, so the public is constantly left in the dark about who is really shaping our government.
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Big chemical companies are quietly buying campaign ads that are polluting the airwaves in a bid to convince Congress not to regulate carcinogenic chemicals or not take other actions to protect health and the environment. The ads have appeared in districts of lawmakers who are poised to impact legislation to overhaul health and environmental standards.
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The Republic Report’s story on how Intuit lobbies to make filing taxes annoying has sparked a fascinating conversation on Reddit.  We still haven’t heard from the White House on why they haven’t implemented their campaign promise to make pre-filed tax forms a reality, but we did hear just how easy it is to file in other countries
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The election this year is shaping up to be the biggest spending spree since the Gilded Age. In an era of Citizens United, a small number of billionaires on both the right and left are stepping up to funnel tens, potentially hundreds, of millions of dollars to elect either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama. A
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The Times Union of Albany has a lobbying story about BlackRock, the investment management firm headquartered in New York. Despite earning a tidy $2.2 billion in profit last year, New York lawmakers enacted a change in the tax code that is saving the firm between $5-10 million in taxes. Lobbying records from by New York
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Here’s a chart of Intuit’s lobbying expenditures in Congress, courtesy of Open Secrets. I suspect that some of that nine million dollars of lobbying by that company since 2008 has gone to making it more annoying for you and me to file our taxes. Here’s what I mean. In some countries, the equivalent of their IRS
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Check out this funny new Tumblr.

Corporate front group ALEC — which lets big corporations write legislation and then pass it off to state legislatures to be enacted — is hurting. In recent days, six major corporations and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have decided to stop funding the group, which has been engaged in pushing voter suppression and “Stand
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