There are almost 27,000 people—or 1/100th of one percent of the United States population—who spent more than $10,000 to influence... View Article
Continue readingCongress members owning TransCanada stock push to approve Keystone XL
Four members of Congress who have disclosed owning shares in Transcanada, the company trying to build the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, have pressed for the $7 billion project's approval.
The State Department took the lead in the approval process, and was supposed to rule last November on the project, which has been the subject of an intensive international lobbying campaign as well as a contentious split among supporters of President Barack Obama, who chose to delay a decision on authorizing construction until at least 2013.
While labor unions and energy companies support the project, environmentalists have objected to its ...
Continue readingFood and media companies lobby to weaken guidelines on marketing food to children
A major lobbying push by a powerful group of food and media companies appears to be working, with a federal agency indicating it would back off on parts of proposed voluntary guidelines for marketing food to children. The guidelines are meant to combat childhood obesity.
Also, language in a pending congressional spending bill, one of several that Congress must approve before the end of the year to keep the government running, threatens to prohibit the agency, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), from issuing a final version of the nutritional guidelines at all without doing a cost-benefit analysis first.
Big companies ...
Continue readingLegacy media bankrolling campaigns of SOPA cosponsors
Traditional big media firms have contributed more than $5 million to the sponsors of the Stop Online Piracy Act, with California Democratic Reps. Howard Berman and Adam Schiff as the top recipients.
The bill, known as SOPA, would strengthen and extend the penalties for online copyright violations, and could force websites hosting pirated content to come down or prevent search engines from sending users their way. Legacy media companies stand to benefit if there's less unlawful movement of their content on the web, like pirated movies and songs for download.
Some of the nation's top tech companies — Facebook ...
Another renewable energy loan recipient hires lobbyists, has fundraising ties to Obama
Abound Solar, another participant in the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, which is facing scrutiny, has hired Washington lobbyists because of that attention, a company spokesperson said.
The lobbying—by former government officials with ties to Congress and the Department of Energy—started in mid-October, about six weeks after Solyndra, the recipient of a $535 million loan from DOE, filed for bankruptcy. Like Solyndra, one of Abound Solar’s key investors is an Obama fund-raiser, although there is no evidence that the Obama administration favored the companies because of this connection.
The Abound investor is billionaire heiress Pat ...
Continue readingDeutsche Telekom meets key people opposing AT&T and T-Mobile merger
While Congress and the Department of Justice are questioning the T-Mobile and AT&T merger, Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile's parent company has been working on a behind the scene lobbying campaign, contacting key opponents to the deal in the last few months, reports filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act show.
Deutsche Telekom, looking to sell T-Mobile to AT&T creating a mammoth corporation making up a large chunk of the U.S. wireless market, has spent $4.3 million in the last six months to lobby and maintain a staff in the U.S., six monthly reports filed with ...
Continue readingMoody’s has most employees leaving through revolving door
Moody's credit rating service -- one of the major credit rating agencies that was cited as a contributor to the 2008 financial meltdown -- has more employees go through the revolving door to work at companies they used to rate than any other credit rating agency, according to new Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings required under the Dodd-Frank financial law.
Eighty-two Moody's employees have moved on to jobs at big banks such as Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America over the past five years, according to the filings, which are available here. This is nearly four times ...
Continue readingSenators grilling FTC commissioner on obesity guidelines took campaign money from industry
When Jon Leibowitz faced a Senate committee yesterday afternoon for a hearing on his renomination as commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), he got a grilling from several Senators, Democrats and Republicans alike, on a controversial issue: the agency’s proposed guidelines on advertising food to children, meant to help in the fight to reduce childhood obesity.
All of these senators have taken substantial sums in campaign contributions from food industry and media interests that have been lobbying against the proposed guidelines, which the food industry has charged go too far.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, asked Leibowitz if ...
Continue readingMusic, movie industries giving to Rep. pushing for copyright enforcement
The House Judiciary Committee chairman backing a bill that would allow the Justice department to force internet service providers to take down websites committing copyright infringement has leading communications companies bankrolling his campaign.
Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, has seen nearly $393,000 from the TV/music/movies industry during his Congressional career and it ranks fifth among the top industries supporting him. It's legacy companies in that industry — along with other broadcasting and recording industry groups — that would benefit from stricter enforcement of pirated content that could come from Smith's H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act ...
Continue readingMF Global pushed regulators to use client funds
Late last year MF Global—the failed investment firm headed by Democratic heavyweight Jon S. Corzine that can't account for as much as $900 million of its clients' money--urged a federal agency to allow futures firms to invest funds from their customer segregated accounts in foreign sovereign debt.
In a December 2010 comment letter to the Commodities Future Trading Commission (CFTC), MF Global, along with another firm, Newedge, argued that the agency’s proposal to disallow such investments “is unnecessary, and will eliminate a liquid, secure, profitable and necessary category of investment....no foreign country that actually defaulted on ...
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