On Monday, Wal-Mart announced that it will be dropping Mercury Public Affairs, a leading PR and lobbying firm, after one of its associate spied on some warehouse workers in Los Angeles. “We take this matter seriously and have taken the appropriate steps to ensure this type of activity is not repeated,” said Wal-Mart spokesman Steven
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Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) head Grover Norquist is one of the most powerful men in Washington. His anti-tax pledge has won over hundreds of elected officials, and he regularly gets meetings with powerbrokers in D.C. But there’s one thing even he’s afraid of. And that’s answering questions about how his organization gets cash from
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Late last month, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed banning soda sales larger than sixteen ounces in the city’s restaurants, movie theaters, and street carts. This proposed ban has been highly controversial, and deserves a healthy debate (no pun intended). But as with any other issue in modern American politics, big corporations and their
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North Carolina House Majority Leader Paul Stam (R) has an idea for fixing our country’s education system — dump tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into private schools. Stam is a sponsor of House Bill 1104, which would utilize the “North Carolina Opportunity Scholarship Program” to shift up to $40 million of taxpayer funds in
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Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the Republican leader in the Senate, is one of the most dedicated opponents of campaign finance reform. Going beyond many of his colleagues on the right, McConnell opposes even the disclosure of many types of campaign spending and funding. McConnell spent much of his day Friday giving speeches on Fox News
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Last week, Republic Report was the first news outlet to report that Mercury Public Affairs, a powerful public relations and lobbying firm, sent a staffer posing as a “journalist” to spy on warehouse workers on behalf of its client Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart and Mercury acknowledged their relationship but claimed that the staffer, Stephanie Harnett, was working
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The for-profit college industry contains many schools that regularly scam students and taxpayers. Large for-profits like Kaplan, DeVry, Bridgepoint, and the University of Phoenix spend big lobbying the federal government and providing campaign contributions, and in return the government shovels about $32 billion a year into the for-profit college industry via student loans and grants. These schools
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Wal-Mart is America’s biggest corporation. It’s also one of the country’s worst union busters, so it’s hardly a surprise that it engages in under-handed tactics to get its way with its workers and with America’s politicians. But a story out of Southern California is particularly shocking. Warehouse Workers United (WWU), a new organization for warehouse workers in the area, caught
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