Last year, the more than century-old music company EMI Group announced it would split up in two, with the two parts sold to Universal Music Group and Sony Corporation in a multi-billion dollar deal. A number of consumer groups, lead by the Consumer Federation of America and Public Knowledge, have criticized the Universal-EMI Group merger in particular,
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The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) does a lot to help out low-income American families — 46 million Americans participate in the program, half of whom are children. This means there’s lots of money in SNAP — thanks to the weak economy, SNAP expenditures increased from $30 billion in 2007
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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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Yesterday, Republic Report’s Zaid Jilani was the first to report that Wal-Mart’s public relations and lobbying firm in Los Angeles, Mercury Public Affairs, was caught sending an employee to an event posing as a student reporter. The Mercury staffer, Stephanie Harnett, told warehouse workers protesting Wal-Mart’s labor practices that she was “Zoe Mitchell,” a USC student. She
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Yesterday, Chris Frates of National Journal broke the story that health insurance companies secretly funneled over $100 million into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for advertising. The Chamber, during the period in which the money was accepted, orchestrated one of the largest electioneering outside money efforts in American history to help weaken health reform and
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Before June 18, the Senate is expected to vote on a proposal to repeal recently-issued safeguards on mercury and other toxic chemicals released by U.S. power plants. Senator James Inhofe (R-Ok.) claims to have the support of 29 of his colleagues in undoing these Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandates — 30 being the magic number
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Earlier this week, Republic Report exclusively reported on a $500,000 bonus awarded to a Northrop Grumman lobbyist, named Thomas MacKenzie, who was hired to become a top staffer overseeing the military budget in the House Armed Services Committee. The unusual size of the bonus, and MacKenzie’s role in deciding how billions of dollars in taxpayer
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Child health advocates are losing the war over school lunches and that’s because they face exceptionally strong adversaries: the food and beverage industry. While it’s pretty obvious that more vegetables and less sugar at lunch would be a good start to healthier kids, we’ve recently seen Congress declare pizza a vegetable and kill a plan
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