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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Investing is a time-honored American tradition. Millions of Americans have some sort of investment, and the stock market is an honored cultural institution. But investing your money in a publicly traded company isn’t the only way to make a buck. Let’s say you’re a powerful industry that wants to make a lot of money with an
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One of Big Money’s last targets for privatization is America’s public schools. Using a variety of policy schemes ranging from school vouchers to for-profit charter schools, the education privatization movement seeks to take over America’s largely public K-12 education system and put it in the hands of some of the very same people who caused
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Update: Republic Report has launched an effort to bring transparency to the revolving door. See our letter to retiring lawmakers here; David Halperin explains why here. Selling out pays. If you’re a corporation or lobbyist, what’s the best way to “buy” a member of Congress? Secretly promise them a million dollars or more in pay
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In recent years, the for-profit college industry — which runs veritable “subprime schools” which get billions of dollars from Uncle Sam and then deliver low-quality education while loading students up with debt  — has come under increasing scrutiny. As a result, it has ramped up its lobbying operations in Washington, D.C. Earlier this week, I
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Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) has developed a reputation for being cozy with lobbyists, naming them to all sorts of different positions. In January, he even named a former lobbyist to Florida’s Secretary of State. Yesterday, Scott named Peter Antonacci as the State Attorney for Palm Beach County, and he will serve until January 7th, 2013.
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The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is the most powerful corporate front group you’ve never heard of. The group, sponsored by some of America’s largest corporations, writes legislation that tends to benefit its donors and ships these template bills to state legislatures for compliant lawmakers to pass. ALEC has pushed for legislation doing everything from
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As we head into an election year, we’re going to increasingly hear that Democrats and Republicans fight like cats and dogs, that there is a civil war in Washington. This describes the state of play on some issues, but on others there is bipartisan agreement to do the wrong thing: Both parties do what the money
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