The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) revealed in August that top political appointees at the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington, DC, overruled career federal prosecutors who sought to bring a felony charge against biotech giant Monsanto for illegally spraying a highly toxic pesticide in Hawaii. This happened after attorneys for Monsanto, including a former head…
Tag: dark money
Commissioner Jackson on Disclosure of Political Contributions
November 18, 2019 The Honorable Carolyn B. Maloney Chair, Subcommittee on Investor Protection, Entrepreneurship, and Capital Markets United States House of Representatives 2308 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515-3212 VIA ELECTRONIC DELIVERY Dear Chair Maloney: Thank you for your July 15 letter regarding my research on the need for transparency in corporate political spending—and…
Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free — ProPublica
[T]he success of TurboTax rests on a shaky foundation, one that could collapse overnight if the U.S. government did what most wealthy countries did long ago and made tax filing simple and free for most citizens. For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged a sophisticated, sometimes covert war to prevent the government from doing…
A ‘Grass Roots’ Campaign to Take Down Amazon Is Funded by Amazon’s Biggest Rivals – WSJ
You’ll have to forgive us for laughing when we first saw this article in the WSJ. After spending a year and a half trying to expose the Main Street Investors Coalition for being a CEO-funded fake dark money front group pretending/purporting to be advocating for the interests of investors while really working to suppress shareholder…
Even ACCF’s Fancy Law Firm Can’t Muster Any Real Evidence Against Proxy Advisors
CEO funded fake dark money front group American Council on Capital Formation hired a partner at a DC law and lobbying firm, Squire Patton Boggs (actual slogan: Local connections, global influence) to produce a report on proxy advisory firms. It concludes that proxy advisory firms sometimes make mistakes and do not give the companies they…
More Smoke and Mirrors from the Main Street Investors Coalition
Thanks to our prodding, the fake dark money front group Main Street Investors Coalition is now admitting that it has no connection to Main Street or investors and is in fact funded by corporations. Yet, in an essay by Advisory Board Chair Bernard Sharfman in P&I (accompanied by a disclaimer disavowing any editorial approval), MSIC…
VEA Vice Chair Quoted in NY Times Expose of the Corporate-Funded “Main Street” Investors Coalition
VEA Vice Chair Nell Minow is quoted in the New York Times Dealbook expose of the dark money Main Street Investors Coalition: Why would the Main Street Investors Coalition want to do this? Because it should probably be called the National Association of Manufacturers — after all, that’s the name of the industry group that…
Vigilant companies can avert Watergate scandal replay | TheHill
Karl Sandstrom and Bruce Freed write in The Hill about liability and reputational risk from corporate dark money political contributions. NextEra, a Florida-based utility giant, has faced sharp questions about its $1 million contribution to Jeb Bush’s presidential Super PAC. The ex-governor had earlier given public support to a rate hike sought by the company,…
Big Oil’s master class in rigging the system – The Washington Post
Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Elizabeth Warren express in the strongest terms their objections to Republican efforts to silence state attorneys generals’ investigations of alleged oil company fraud relating to climate change. So now the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York are investigating whether ExxonMobil violated state laws by knowingly misleading their residents and…
Corporate Money Is Playing a Shadowy Role in 2016 Politics – US News
Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, billionaire investor George Soros and hedge fund manager Robert Mercer have grabbed headlines so far this election with seven- and eight-figure donations to political super PACs. Yet this media attention obscures perhaps the most-overlooked story of the 2016 elections: the corporate dominance of political spending across all levels of government.With their…
