Cuyahoga County’s new government charter was unveiled last year amid the rising drama of the FBI’s takedown of some of the county’s top players — characters who for years had brazenly interlocked campaign donations for jobs, gifts for contracts, and other mutual favors.
The new charter arrived with extravagant claims that the reformed government would clean up corruption and lead Cuyahoga into a brighter tomorrow. And for whatever reason, it would apparently accomplish this with no campaign-finance regulations of any kind.
With no limits on donations, Republican county executive candidate Matt Dolan was able to accept $200,000 and $300,000 checks from his father, Indians owner Larry Dolan, and his uncle, Cablevision boss Charlie Dolan — something he could not have done if he had been running for state or federal office. But most proponents of the charter didn’t seem too troubled by that.
When transition work groups — organized to make non-binding recommendations to the incoming officials — were announced, there was no such group devoted to campaign-finance reform.
“When I saw the reform measures quote unquote being ‘promoted,’ there was this giant missing hole in these supposedly comprehensive reforms — money in politics,” says Greg Coleridge, director of the Northeast Ohio American Friends Society, whose group was responsible for helping cap contributions in Akron. “Several of us, having seen corruption and the power of corporations, started writing and e-mailing and asking questions. How this could be missing was sort of mind-boggling.”
Their reward for speaking up: an additional group devoted to finance reform — and invitations to take part in it. [Read more]
The House today approved legislation that would end public financing of presidential campaigns by eliminating the option taxpayers have to donate $3 of their tax payments to a presidential campaign fund.
A day after President Obama asked both parties to work together during his State of the Union address, the bill, H.R. 359, was approved by party-line 239-160 vote following some very contentious debate.
Ten Democrats voted with Republicans: Reps. Jason Altmire (Pa.), Dan Boren (Okla.), Ben Chandler (Ky.), Henry Cuellar (Texas), Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Jim Matheson (Utah), Nick Rahall (W.Va.), Mike Ross (Ark.), Adam Schiff (Calif.) and Heath Shuler (N.C.).
Republicans said the issue is simple. Eliminating the $3 checkoff option on tax returns would mean $617 million over 10 years could be directed to the general fund of the Treasury. They also said it would still give people the option of donating money to any presidential campaign of their choice. [Read more]
TO: Eric Holder
Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20530
Re: Prosecution of Justice Clarence Thomas for False Statements
Dear Attorney General Holder:
In a January 22, 2011 article in the Los Angeles Times, reporter Kim Geiger wrote
that Justice Clarence Thomas falsified his AO 10 Financial Disclosure Forms from
2003-2009 by checking “NONE” in section “III(B). Spouse’s Non-Investment
Income.” The article is attached as Exhibit A and Justice Thomas’ seven reports are
listed as Exhibits B-H. Common Cause first discovered this falsification and
reported it to the Judicial Conference in a letter to the Administrative Office of the
Courts. Exhibit I. We are writing to urge you to bring criminal charges against Justice
Thomas for this knowing, intentional and willful violation of the law. [Read more]
A year ago today, the Supreme Court issued its bizarre Citizens United decision, allowing unlimited corporate spending in elections as a form of “free speech” for the corporate “person.” Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the dissent, had the task of recalling the majority to planet earth and basic common sense.
“Corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires,” wrote Stevens. “Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their ‘personhood’ often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.”
Fortunately, movements are afoot to reverse a century of accumulated powers and protections granted to corporations by wacky judicial decisions.
In Vermont, state senator Virginia Lyons on Friday presented an anti-corporate personhood resolution for passage in the Vermont legislature. The resolution, the first of its kind, proposes “an amendment to the United States Constitution … which provides that corporations are not persons under the laws of the United States.” Sources in the state house say it has a good chance of passing. This same body of lawmakers, after all, once voted to impeach George W. Bush, and is known for its anti-corporate legislation. Last year the Vermont senate became the first state legislature to weigh in on the future of a nuclear power plant, voting to shut down a poison-leeching plant run by Entergy Inc. Lyons’ Senate voted 26-4 to do it, demonstrating the level of political will of the state’s politicians to stand up to corporate power. [Read more]
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failed to report his wife’s income from a conservative think tank on financial disclosure forms for at least five years, the watchdog group Common Cause said Friday.
Between 2003 and 2007, Virginia Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, earned $686,589 from the Heritage Foundation, according to a Common Cause review of the foundation’s IRS records. Thomas failed to note the income in his Supreme Court financial disclosure forms for those years, instead checking a box labeled “none” where “spousal noninvestment income” would be disclosed.
A Supreme Court spokesperson could not be reached for comment late Friday. But Virginia Thomas’ employment by the Heritage Foundation was well known at the time.
Virginia Thomas also has been active in the group Liberty Central, an organization she founded to restore the “founding principles” of limited government and individual liberty.
In his 2009 disclosure, Justice Thomas also reported spousal income as “none.” Common Cause contends that Liberty Central paid Virginia Thomas an unknown salary that year.
Federal judges are bound by law to disclose the source of spousal income, according to Stephen Gillers, a professor at NYU School of Law. Thomas’ omission — which could be interpreted as a violation of that law — could lead to some form of penalty, Gillers said.
“It wasn’t a miscalculation; he simply omitted his wife’s source of income for six years, which is a rather dramatic omission,” Gillers said. “It could not have been an oversight.” [Read more]
The Supreme Court decision Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, decided in a 5-4 decision on January 21, 2010, is a case which will live in infamy. What started out as asking permission to put a partisan movie on pay per view somehow ended up deciding that companies are people with the same free speech rights as citizens, that money equals speech, and that any limit on money spent by a corporation was a violation of their First Amendment rights, so companies should be allowed to spend unlimited amounts without even having to identify themselves. Corporations got the rights of personhood, ergo, without the responsibilities we have like spending limits, or the requirement to be publicly listed for your donation. This is not to get into the obvious inequity that corporations are really made up of other people who already have those same rights, or that corporations will have far more resources to spend with obvious financial incentives that people won’t. Seriously–what were they thinking?
Such a brazen act of judicial activism by the Roberts court was an even more partisan power grab than the decade old Bush v. Gore, which backed a partisan Secretary of State’s order that ballots in her state stop being counted so she could hurry up and award the election to the guy whose campaign she was working on. Where that decision improperly decided the outcome of one election, Citizens United has opened the floodgates for blizzards of overwhelming corporate spending in races across the country on all levels of government, from now on, unless something is done. [Read more]
You can light a birthday candle if you want to: It was a year ago Friday that the Supreme Court handed down its controversial 5-4 ruling in the case known as Citizens United, giving corporations and unions the freedom to spend as much as they like to support or attack candidates. As lawyers and advocates are discovering, it has sharply altered the debate over regulating political money. [Read more]
The case: Citizens United. The decision: In a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to limit in any way the amount of money corporations can spend on attack ads or other “electioneering communications” to sway a political race.
Before Citizens United, plenty of corporate money had found its way into political PACs and other avenues to influence elections. The court also did nothing to strike down the ban on direct corporate contributions to candidates or political parties.
But the decision opened a massive loophole in our country’s already-porous campaign finance system, giving corporations the green light to inject unlimited sums of cash into independent groups — 527s and 501c4s, references to their IRS tax status — that can intervene in elections.
After the January 2010 decision, many in the media reported that corporations may be skittish about fully exploiting Citizens United’s political windfall, but that proved premature. Millions of dollars began flooding into existing electioneering like Americans for Prosperity, backed by benefactors like the Koch brothers and North Carolina retail magnate Art Pope. New groups like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads andAmerican Crossroads GPS were quickly erected to funnel tens of millions of dollars into key congressional races. (READ MORE) [Read more]
Happy Birthday, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission!
You’re one year old today, big boy. But just think of all the fine things you’ve done already:
[Read more]
The unwritten law of journalism is that you need three examples of a thing to make a “trend piece.” But shouldn’t journalists stay abreast of such things, and warn people when trends are emerging? Not if the trends are idiotic,New York Times Style section! I can’t help noticing, though, that in recent days two nearly-universally reviled corporate behemoths have published studies that actually contribute an unalloyed good to actual humans. Will there be a third? Insha’Allah!
The first example of this perhaps-trend is a report issued by Wall Street megalopolis Goldman Sachs, concerning unemployment benefits. See, this had been a subject of some debate among politicians, many of whom insisted that the jobless were living the life of Gatsby on the government dime instead of pounding the pavement and looking for jobs.
It shouldn’t have taken an expert to shoot this down. Having an actual job is much preferable to subsisting on UI benefits. It’s just that in an economy where there is one job for every five job seekers, UI bennies are infinitely preferable to “crawling off into a wooded area to sleep in dirt and eat tree bark.” And as it happened, the image of the unemployed as shiftless dole-suckers disintegrates if you spend even a small amount of time researching what happens when people with employment opportunities come along.
But hey, you know, Goldman Sachs to the rescue: [Read more]
The Republican Party’s triumph in the 2010 congressional elections, coupled with the rapid depletion of the earth’s natural resources, signaled the impending collapse of human civilization, according to a world-renowned scholar known for his left-wing politics.
“You could almost interpret [the election] as a kind of a death knell for the species,” Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a recent interview.
But he’s not the only one worried; the US business press is, too.
Chomsky continued, “There was an article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, you know – not a radical rag exactly. They’re running through the new Republicans coming to Congress, and they’re worried about them.”
The cause for concern is that these newly-elected conservative members that now comprise the majority in Congress believe that global climate change is not the result of human industrial activities. [Read more]
On the first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, which overturned nearly a century of restrictions on campaign spending, a progressive group has asked the Department of Justice to look into “conflicts of interest” two justices may have had when issuing the ruling.
In a petition to be sent to the department this week, Common Cause will argue that Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas should have recused themselves from the campaign finance decision because of their involvement with Koch Industries, a corporation run by two conservative activists who many say directly benefited from Citizens United.
“It appears both justices have participated in political strategy sessions, perhaps while the case was pending, with corporate leaders whose political aims were advanced by the decision,” the letter alleges, as quoted at Politico.
The group will urge the department to disqualify Scalia and Thomas from the ruling. [Read more]
To mark Friday’s anniversary of a court decision that allowed corporations to sink millions into politics, Common Cause, a reform group, is asking the Department of Justice to investigate alleged conflicts of interest involving two Supreme Court justices – in hopes of forcing the court to vacate the 5-4 ruling.
Common Cause officials and at least one legal expert acknowledged the difficulty of getting the landmark case overturned in this way. But in a document to be submitted to the department Thursday, Common Cause President Bob Edgar cites appearances by Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Antonin Scalia at retreats sponsored by Koch Industries, a corporation run by two major Republican donors who helped finance some of the new GOP groups founded after the ruling.
“It appears both justices have participated in political strategy sessions, perhaps while the case was pending, with corporate leaders whose political aims were advanced by the decision,” the Common Cause petition asserts. [Read more]
January 18, 2011 – The U.S. Supreme Court on January 21, 2010, scuttled the longstanding American tradition of prohibiting overt corporate spending to influence elections in its Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling.
On the one-year anniversary of the decision, this report offers an assessment of its impact. We provide a brief history of the legal restrictions on corporate involvement in elections and the events that led to the Citizens United v. FEC decision. We document the dramatic increase in outside spending in the 2010 elections and assess the enhancement of power that corporate lobbyists now enjoy. Finally, we discuss a comprehensive package of legislative and constitutional reforms that can be pursued at the federal, state and local levels to mitigate the damage caused by Citizens United v. FEC—or to reverse it altogether.
JP Morgan is the largest processor of food stamp benefits in the United States. JP Morgan has contracted to provide food stamp debit cards in 26 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. JP Morgan is paid for each case that it handles, so that means that the more Americans that go on food stamps, the more profits JP Morgan makes. Yes, you read that correctly. When the number of Americans on food stamps goes up, JP Morgan makes more money. In the video posted below, JP Morgan executive Christopher Paton admits that this is “a very important business to JP Morgan” and that it is doing very well. Considering the fact that the number of Americans on food stamps has exploded from 26 million in 2007 to 43 million today, one can only imagine how much JP Morgan’s profits in this area have soared. But doesn’t this give JP Morgan an incentive to keep the number of Americans enrolled in the food stamp program as high as possible?
There are just some things that are a little too “creepy” to be “outsourced” to private corporations. The JP Morgan executive in the interview below does his best to put a positive spin on all this, but it just seems really unsavory for a big Wall Street bank to be making so much money off of the suffering of tens of millions of Americans….
So if unemployment goes down will this ruin JP Morgan’s food stamp business?
Well, apparently not. In the interview Paton says that 40% of food stamp recipients are currently working, and he seems convinced that there could be further “growth” in that segment. [Read more]
Private donors are helping Republicans bankroll their efforts to revise political maps that could determine which party controls the Legislature and the New Jersey delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives over the next decade, but the public may never know who they are.
By accepting donations through an outside group not legally bound to disclose its contributors, Democrats charge the GOP is skirting New Jersey’s pay-to-play law, which limits political contributions from those doing business with the state. Republicans say they are doing nothing improper.
A similar group called Reform Jersey Now raised $624,000 to fund ad campaigns that pitched Republican Governor Christie’s legislative initiatives. When the group voluntarily disclosed its donors, it was revealed some were firms that hold hundreds of millions of dollars in state contracts.
Republicans are revealing few details about their other fund-raising group, called the Center for a Better New Jersey. [Read more]
Comcast gave money to the vast majority of the 97 members of the US House of Representatives that signed a letter to the Federal Communications Commission urging approval of a merger between cable company Comcast and broadcaster NBC Universal, according to research.
The 5 January letter, linked here [pdf] and circulated by nonprofit group Public Knowledge urged the merger be approved quickly and without conditions that could harm investment. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, 84 of the 97 received money from Comcast, Public Knowledge said. The amounts range from token contributions of about $1,000 up to $25,100. [Read more]
The Census Bureau, which has expanded its definition of poverty, has calculated that 15.7% of Americans, many of them elderly, are poor and struggling because of rising medical costs and other expenses.
In 2009, the bureau reported, there were 47.8 million people living in poverty. [Read more]
WASHINGTON — Two House Republicans have cast votes as members of the 112th Congress, but were not sworn in on Wednesday, a violation of the Constitution on the same day that the GOP had the document read from the podium.
The Republicans, incumbent Pete Sessions of Texas and freshman Mike Fitzpatrick, missed the swearing in because they were at a fundraiser in the Capitol Visitors Center. The pair watched the swearing-in on television from the Capitol Visitors Center with their hands raised.
“That wasn’t planned. It just worked out that way,” said Fitzpatrick at the time, according to local press on hand, which noted that he “happened to be introducing Texas Congressman Pete Sessions while glad-handing his supporters in the Capitol Visitor Center that he secured for them when the House swearing in began.”
House ethics rules forbid fundraising in the Capitol. [Read more]
The Securities and Exchange Commission has begun examining whether disclosure rules for privately held firms need to be rewritten as a result of recent deals allowing investors to buy shares in Internet companies such as Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc., according to people familiar with the situation.
The review is at an early stage, these people cautioned, and SEC officials looking at the recent deals haven’t concluded that any of them run afoul of the 47-year-old rules governing private companies. The rules require firms with 500 or more shareholders of record in a given type of stock to publicly disclose certain financial information. The requirement is designed to protect investors from risking money on companies that say little about their operations and performance.
Still, Facebook’s agreement with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to create an investment vehicle that will allow some of the securities firm’s richest clients to buy as much as $1.5 billion of equity in Facebook is causing the SEC to re-examine a key dividing line between public and private companies.
