You’ve heard their names. University of Phoenix. Kaplan University. Full Sail University. These for-profit schools promise their students great jobs and opportunities, but often end up delivering little else than tens of thousands of dollars of debt and useless credits or diplomas. What makes matters worse is that these subprime schools get billions of dollars
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Today, President Obama signed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act into law, which overwhelmingly passed both houses of Congress. The law takes aim at insider trading within Congress, which was exposed in a blockbuster 60 Minutes report late last year. “The powerful shouldn’t get to create one set of rules for themselves and another set
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Republic Report has been highly critical of the watered down and toothless Stock Act, the recently passed law to curb insider trading in Congress. We had hoped the bill would include Senator Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) political intelligence lobbying registration provision, as well as Senator Sherrod Brown’s (D-OH) amendment on blind trusts and some form of
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Yesterday, the U.S. Senate failed to get the 60 votes needed to eliminate $24 billion in taxpayer subsidies for the five richest oil companies. Lining up neatly by parties, the 57-41 vote had all the Republicans, except for the two senators from Maine, joined by four Democrats, filibuster Sen. Bob Menendez’s (D-NJ) bill to cut
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Samuel Wurzelbacher became better known as “Joe the Plumber” after he confronted then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008. Wurzelbacher told Obama that his tax policies would impact his ability to create a small plumbing business. Wurzelbacher, now a candidate for Congress, never founded that business. But he has continued playing up his plumbing background. “I’m counting
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Selling out pays. We looked at just a dozen Members of Congress who became lobbyists and other advocates for special interests after they left office and found that they received an average of a 1,452 percent raise. So we here at Republic Report sent a letter to all 36 retiring Members of Congress asking them
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Last week, the American Bankers Association (ABA) — a leading lobbying group for Big Banks —  held a large lobbying meeting in Washington, D.C. Thousands of bankers packed the halls of the Omni Shoreham Hotel to hear Members of Congress praise their industry and encourage them to back certain pieces of legislation. The only Democratic
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An interesting idea has emerged from lawmakers from both sides of the political spectrum: why not ban members of Congress from becoming K Street lobbyists? In Canada, senior lawmakers and government officials face a five year lobbying ban. In America, the “cooling off” period is only one year for congressmen and two years for senators
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