Can you predict the future?

The US government has been asked to approve a controversial oil pipeline, Keystone XL, which would bring oil from Canadian tar sands to the US. Will the pipeline be approved? You don’t need to ask a magic 8-ball to guess, just two facts: lobbying in favor of the pipeline topped 178$ million, and lobbying against it totalled $5 million. Care to make a prediction now?

Whatever you think of Keystone XL, you know the battle was never about what American voters thought, it was about lobbyists duking it out in the halls of Congress. It was about the special interests that finance those lobbyists with huge sums of political money. They can get their way no matter what every-day Americans think – because we don’t have 178$ million in bribes. That’s our future…unless we stop it now.

The post INFOGRAPHIC: Political Money Predicts the Future of Keystone appeared first on United Republic.

A Tenn. debate on allowing grocery stores to sell wine has ignited a lobbying battle with the state’s powerful liquor store lobby. Photo Courtesy Creative Commons.

There’s hardly a facet of American life that money in politics doesn’t affect. From income inequality to the ingredients in our food, the consequences of our broken system of campaign finance touch all aspects of our lives. Now Tennessee drinkers are feeling the pinch as the liquor-store lobby is spending heavy to keep its monopoly on alcohol sales.

On March 12, a bill that would allow wine to be sold at Tennessee supermarkets failed by a single vote in the state house. If passed, the bill would have put Tennessee law in line with 33 other states and the District of Colombia, according to a study by the Food Marketing Institute, a food retailers’ trade group. The bill has come up for the past five years and is favored by 62 percent of Tennesseans, according to the Nashville City Paper.

The Tennessee Wine and Spirits Retailers Association, a major lobby for liquor store owners, claims that allowing grocery stores to sell wine will protect the state’s 500+ liquor stores that “are small businesses owned by Tennessee residents.” They assert that they are protecting the jobs of 3,000 current liquor store employees and keep business from going to “mega corporations like Wal-mart, Kroger and Publix, all headquartered out of state.”

However, the fight in Tennessee is a classic case of where the interests of consumers and the interests of a business group may not be in alignment. Allowing grocery stores to sell wine frees them to use their larger purchasing power to sell it to consumers at lower prices than smaller liquor stores, according to a 2011 study from Cornell University. Unfortunately, the sad reality of contemporary American politics is that industry lobbyists can capture the ear of lawmakers in states debating liberalizing their alcohol laws far better than Ivy League economists. The debate in Tennessee was no exception, as liquor-store trade groups spent more than $175,000 contributing to legislators and PAC’s in 2012. Members of a state Senate panel who heard the bill in early March received a combined $38,000 from PAC’s opposed to the bill, according to an Associated Press report.

The liquor-store lobby, intent on protecting the monopoly powers of liquor stores in states that haven’t cast off their prohibition-era blue laws yet, are major players at state-houses across the nation. They’re fighting an effort to open liquor stores on Sundays in Texas, they killed that effort in Minnesota and they have even shot-down plans to open a Trader Joe’s in Bowie, Maryland—population 55,000.

Representative democracy depends on a fair and impartial legislative process, where representatives debate bills on their merits and weigh decisions based on opinions of experts and the desires of their constituents. Money in politics has contaminated the process to the point where something as trivial and mundane as picking up a bottle of wine at a local Safeway has degenerated into an orgy of special-interest cash and influence-peddling. Reforming campaign finance means restoring integrity to our political process and sanity to the marketplace. It’s time to put a cork in moneyed influence and the corruption of our political process.

The post Money in Politics Keeps Tennessee Drinkers Thirsty appeared first on United Republic.

Can you believe it? It cost America over 7 billion dollars to run our elections last year.

For $7 billion we got: 1 president, 33 senators and 435 representatives.  For $7 billion, we rearranged the chairs in a Congress that most Americans view less favorably than cockroaches (according to a recent poll).

If you’re a huge campaign donor, maybe $7 billion sounds like a drop in the bucket. But if you’re just a regular American, you can probably think of something else our country could have spent that money on. Maybe any of these:

• 10,000 humvees could have been supplied to the Army
• a $60 tax break could have been given to every household
• 112,000 college degrees could have be paid for
• we could have repaired 10,500 miles of road, including 714 bridges
• military aid to American allies could have been increased by %50
• we could have donated immunizations to 3.5 billion children across the world

Do any of those sound more important than politicians beating their own drums?

If we closed the floodgates on big political money in political campaigns, maybe some of these things would get done. And maybe America would better represent us all, instead of just the wealthiest political donors and lobbyists. To make that happen, we’d probably need some sort of bold plan – and we’d probably need your help.

The post What the big money in political campaigns really costs America appeared first on United Republic.

We’re sharing this image with the President via his Facebook Page, where he’s got over 35 million people watching. Let’s get together to ask our President to put an end to the corruption!

You should click right here to add your name.

Not on Facebook? Use the social tools on the left to help spread the word however you can!

The post Sign Our Anti-Corruption President’s Day Card for Barack Obama appeared first on United Republic.

Pres. Obama has continued a decades long practice with appointing big political donors to top ambassadorships around the world. Photo Courtesy: U.S. State Department.

How would you like a job as the main American liaison to major foreign powers abroad?

An ambassadorship involves representing the American people to heads-of-state, government officials and business leaders. In addition, an ambassador must manage a staff of hundreds and act as the point-man for U.S. government activity in that nation. You’d think that before being handed such an immense responsibility, one would need years of experience in that country, learning the language and forging the relationships necessary to advance the interests of the American people.

Of course, you’d be wrong. In fact, all you need to do sometimes is just cut a fat check to whoemver happened to win the last election.

Having just been sworn in to his second term, President Obama has just begun the time-honored process of rewarding big donors with ambassadorships in about 30 major capitols, according to the New York Times.

“Mr. Obama has followed recent tradition in making appointments; like every president going back to Ronald Reagan, he has filled about 70 percent of the posts with career diplomats and 30 percent with political appointees, often but not always top donors…Highly sought European and Caribbean countries usually go to political appointees,” the Times wrote.

Recently, two political scientists at Penn State University calculated the implied price of earning such a plum ambassadorship, which comes with free luxury housing and a salary well north of $100,000 per year.

“When isolating a country’s wealth over other factors, Luxembourg came in at the top of the chart, with a posting there valued at $3.1 million in direct contributions, while an appointment to Portugal was predicted to have a value of $602,686 in personal contributions,” according to the New York Times. “…When factoring in a country’s tourist trade, however, France and Monaco top the list, with the level of personal contributions at $6.2 million and bundled contributions at $4.4 million.”

Often, these mega-donors prove themselves more adept at lining campaign coffers than actually carrying out the business of the American people overseas, according to the Washington Post.

“Nicole Avant, a music industry executive who raised at least $500,000, served as ambassador to the Bahamas until November,” the Post wrote. “The inspector general wrote that her tenure was part of ‘an extended period of dysfunctional leadership and mismanagement, which has caused problems throughout the embassy.’ The report said Avant spent roughly 40 percent of her time out of the country over a two-year period.”

Another politically-appointed ambassador, Cynthia Stroum, resigned less than a year after her appointment as ambassador to Luxembourg in the midst of a blistering report which criticized her after ‘she sent her staff on a house-hunting mission, billed the government for bedding after being told she couldn’t and was ‘keenly interested’ in the materials used for remodeling two bathrooms in her residence,’ according to a Washington Post report.

When America’s top universities are accused to selling spots to the children of wealthy donors, it’s treated as a scandal. When top spots in the American Foreign Service are openly auctioned off, it’s treated as business as usual in Washington.

It’s this exact sorry state of affairs that United Republic’s Represent.us movement is trying to combat. The corrupting influence of money in politics means that top spots representing the United States to major world powers don’t go to the best or the brightest, but simply the richest. It’s un-fair, it’s un-American and it’s about time it changed.

The post Diplomacy for Sale as Ambassadorships get Auctioned off to Big-Ticket Donors appeared first on United Republic.

Special interest groups spend a lot of money to influence politics. Case in point: the National Rifle Association. It has a total budget of about $300 million (with membership dues, donations from manufacturers and other interests, and grants each contributing about one third). In the 2012 election cycle, it used $32 million (around 10% of its budget) for political spending. $6 million went to lobbying, and $1 million was given directly to candidates and PACs.

The bulk of the NRA’s political budget was for “outside spending,” on things like television ads and billboards. What kinds of ads? Another $6 million dollars bought positive ads, promoting a candidate or idea, but three times more money, $18 million, bought attack ads or other negative messaging.

Whether you support the NRA’s mission or not, that’s a lot of political advertising. And the NRA is not alone: all kinds of special interest groups are pouring big money into political campaigns. That’s part of why the last election cost $6 billion. They discovered that negativity works, even if it results in vitriol and political gridlock. If we want cooler heads in government to prevail, and politicians to actually represent us, the reign of big money in politics has to end.

The post INFOGRAPHIC: The NRA’s political self-defense appeared first on United Republic.

A leaked presentation shows that incoming Democratic Congressmen spend about five hours a day fundraising. Courtesy: The Huffington Post

A new report from the Huffington Post spells out something Washington insiders have known for decades–members of Congress spend just four hours a day doing the work their constituents elected them to do. The rest of their 10 hour work days are spent on the phone or shaking hands with the well-heeled donors who command an outsized influence in the corridors of the Capitol Building.

“The daily schedule prescribed by the Democratic leadership contemplates a nine or 10-hour day while in Washington,” the Huffington Post reported based on a leaked PowerPoint presentation prepared by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for new members. “Of that, four hours are to be spent in ‘call time’ and another hour is blocked off for ‘strategic outreach,’ which includes fundraisers and press work. An hour is walled off to ‘recharge,’ and three to four hours are designated for the actual work of being a member of Congress–hearings, votes, and meetings with constituents. If the constituents are donors, all the better.”

All told, a member of Congress spends the majority of their day in business solely of pleasing donors. This raises the question as to whether the job of a Congressman is simply to raise money for his or her party or actually spend time representing their constituents. The congressional training seminar sends a pretty clear message about what they think. Aside from neglecting their constitutionally prescribed duties, this dependence on donor money raises another ugly specter of money in politics, as the article explains.

“It really does affect how members of Congress behave if the most important thing they think about is fundraising,” the article quotes retired Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) as saying. “You end up being nice to people that probably somebody needs to be questioning skeptically. It’s a fairly disturbing suggested schedule. You won’t ask tough questions in hearings that might displease potential contributors, won’t support amendments that might anger them, will tend to vote the way contributors want you to vote.”

The depth of political corruption exposed by the leaked presentation highlights the double-standard that politicians live under. Any average citizen who spent over half their workday neglecting the job they were hired to do would be shown the door in short order. Congressmen and women, in their endless lust for political money, actually get “promoted” by giving higher preference to partisan goals and political bribery than focusing on statesmanship and doing the job taxpayers actually pay them to do.

With inauguration day in recent memory, it’s worth remembering the promise of then candidate Barack Obama in 2007, who proclaimed in a speech that “[he was] in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.” While passing years have seen an explosion of corrupting money in politics, they’ve also given birth to a real movement to end business as usual in Washington D.C. The Represent.Us campaign along with many other good government groups are working to change the lopsided schedules of elected officials to get money out and voters back in.

The post Congress’ Training Schedule Shows the Influence of Money in Politics appeared first on United Republic.

A surge of populism swept the Republican party in the 2008 elections, rallying for fiscal responsibility and lower taxes, and against the moneyed interests that rule Washington. It was made up of everyday Americans, rallying under the name Tea Party. There was no single leader, and it was not organized by the GOP; instead, its legitimacy came from being grassroots. But big political money can creep into any movement, as powerful individuals push their own agendas. It’s the very same political corruption the Represent.Us campaign is working to defeat.

While there’s no official Tea Party political party, there are big organizations that claim to represent it. None is bigger than FreedomWorks, a Super-PAC created by the billionaire Koch brothers (with some old-school GOP advisors like Dick Armey and Jack Kemp). Those ties hint that FreedomWorks might not be so grassroots after all. But its 2012 tax returns are even clearer: of a $41 million budget in 2012, 88% came from large donations. The lion’s share of those big gifts came from just 141 rich donors, who each gave $10,000 or more. Top among those donors is one man, Richard Stephenson, who donated 30% of FreedomWorks’s budget, with an amazing gift of $12 million. Meanwhile, small donations were just 12% of the PAC’s budget.

12% populist doesn’t sound very populist, does it? But with the campaign spending laws we have now, there’s no limit to what people like Stephenson can give. He’s a perfect example of why big moneyed interests, with their own Super-PAC, will always speak louder than the ordinary Americans who support a real grassroots movement. Think we should change those rules, and maybe let the people speak for themselves? That’s what the Represent.Us campaign is doing.

The post Moneyed Interests Hijack Tea Party Name appeared first on United Republic.

• Your name
• Your address
• Your occupation
• Your employer

California Assemblyman Roger Dickinson is proposing legislation to end a loophole allowing big donors to hide behind non-profit groups. Courtesy: California State Assembly Democratic Caucus

But donate $11 million to finance ads such as this one and it takes no less than an order of the state Supreme Court to force an innocuously named out-of-state non-profit just to disclose the name of two other innocuously named out-of-state non-profits.

As California voters learned this past election, there are two sets of rules governing campaign money—one for regular citizens and another for well-heeled influence peddlers. Groups like Americans for Responsible Leadership, who according to Talking Points Memo have “been keeping donors anonymous since before it was cool,” can dump millions into a political race while their financial backers remain completely anonymous.

A new set of campaign finance reforms is seeking to level the playing field between everyday Californians and wealthy special interest groups. Foremost among them is one by Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, (D-Sacramento), which would require a non-profit group to disclose donors of $50,000 or more if that “contribution is made within six months of a California election and if the non-profit makes a large donation to a campaign within that same period,” according to the Sacramento Bee.

Reforms like the ones proposed in California take a small step in rectifying this awful double standard, but reform at the federal level needs to take place in order to make laws like these stick. The 2012 election was like a debutante’s ball for 501(c)(4) groups who emerged in force to shower money on political races across the country. It’s only fair that if voters can learn the identities of individuals making small dollar donations, knowing the names of people dropping millions into campaign coffers is of the utmost importance.

As the Washington Post wrote in a recent editorial, “social welfare groups should not be allowed to serve as a conduit for hidden cash to political campaigns.” While non-profits will always engage in some advocacy work, creating a non-profit group specifically to shield donors from already weak disclosure rules shows serious contempt for the democratic process. After all, a group like Crossroads GPS or Priorities USA would be hard-pressed to show that they exist to less to advance a political cause and more to “further (in some way) the common good and general welfare” as the law governing non-profits requires.

The 2012 DISCLOSE Act, a bill mandating organizations disclose the names of all those who contributed more than $10,000 for use in a political campaign, was killed by a procedural motion in the Senate last July in a strictly party-line vote, with all upper house Republicans either voting no or not voting. Like the reforms posed in California, passing the DISCLOSE Act would take a crucial first step in ending the loophole that allows wealthy donors to skirt the disclosure rules that govern the vast majority of Americans. It would also restore integrity to our elections by allowing voters to know who is funding candidates and issue ads before they head to the polls.

Clean and fair elections mean one set of rules for everybody–no matter if you’re giving one dollar or one million.

The post Double Standard on Campaign Money Laundering appeared first on United Republic.

Thanks to lobbying by special interest groups, American soft drinks are sweetened with processed corn, not sugar. License: Creative Commons.

While the exact recipe for Coca-Cola is one of the world’s most closely guarded trade secrets, it’s no mystery that the nation’s most popular soft-drink is sweetened with processed corn starch rather than actual sugar. Why exactly does most of our food contain high-fructose corn syrup rather than the naturally occurring cane sugar that the rest of the world seems perfectly happy to use?

The answer has to do with a complex nexus of lobbying and influence peddling, a new video from the Institute from Humane Studies explains.

American sugar farmers lobbied for tariffs, which cause Americans to pay nearly twice as much for sugar as people in the rest of the world, said Prof. Diana Thomas, an IHS scholar and a professor of Economics and Finance at Utah State University. At the same time, American corn farmers receive massive subsidies from the federal government, to the tune of more than $8 billion per year, according to the Cato Institute. These massive market distortions cause corn to be much cheaper than sugar, causing soda makers to switch to high-fructose corn syrup about 20 years ago, Thomas explained.

Annually, these subsidies cost American consumers about $3 billion per year, Thomas said. But dispersed among the nation as a whole, these costs only add up to about $10 per person.

“Meanwhile,” Thomas explained, “the benefits of the quota are very concentrated. Between 1980 and 1998, each American sugar farmer made roughly $3 million per year extra as a result of the quota. So each of them is willing to spend a lot of time and money to make sure the law stays that way.”

There’s a legitimate debate to be had between those on the right and those on the left about the proper role of government in society. However, everyone across the political spectrum can agree that forcing Americans to purchase an inferior product just because that industry can fill campaign coffers is a clear abuse of state authority. The drive for campaign finance and lobbying reform is an issue that should unite all Americans who are tired of government hand-outs for the privileged and powerful at the expense of everyone else.

United Republic’s Represent.us campaign is seeking an end to the pay-to-play favoritism that allows special interests like farm lobbies to buy access to lawmakers and legislation. Following passage of the American Anti-Corruption Act, members of Congress would be expressly prohibited from taking any action to benefit any group that raises money on their behalf.

Markets are not fair, free nor efficient when government steps in to declare who wins and who loses. Reforming the way business is done in Washington means not only restoring the ideals of our democracy, but the integrity of our economic system as well. It might just make your Coke taste better, too.

The post Lobbying Dollars Put Corn in Your Coke appeared first on United Republic.