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Tag Archive: Investigations

Food and media companies lobby to weaken guidelines on marketing food to children

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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 ...

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Legacy media bankrolling campaigns of SOPA cosponsors

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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 ...

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Another renewable energy loan recipient hires lobbyists, has fundraising ties to Obama

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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 ...

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Central banks ease terms on currency swaps

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Stocks surged today as the announcement settled in that six central banks are joining forces to ease terms of currency liquidity swaps. As we have reported earlier here and here, the European Central Bank has recently been increasing its borrowing under the emergency swap facility, which is similar to that set up during the 2008 financial crisis, when lending at one point peaked at $586 billion.

While the Federal Reserve reports the totals that flow through this facility weekly here, it does not provide information on which banks in turn receive loans from other central banks. The European Central Bank ...

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Deutsche Telekom meets key people opposing AT&T and T-Mobile merger

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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 ...

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Sunlight Live team to cover GOP national security debate

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The Republican Presidential candidates will meet this Tuesday in the nation’s capital to debate national security, just as they did in South Carolina just two weeks ago. Tuesday's debate will be hosted by CNN and sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute and the Sunlight Live team will cover it.

Over the course of October and November, Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, saw a peak in his poll numbers. During the week of Oct. 21, Cain polled at 26 percent, but has since been slipping. The one-time poll leader is now ...

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Reporter’s Notebook: Understanding the automatic cuts if the supercommittee can’t deliver

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With the supercommittee's deadline only five days away, the special deficit-cutting panel's chances of reaching a deal appear to be in doubt. And if no agreement is reached, more than one trillion dollars in cuts would be set in motion starting in 2013. That is, if the Congress and president allow the automatic trigger to take effect.

All of this is predicated on budget forecasting, a notoriously inaccurate art. As the CBO pointed out in a September report, an analysis based on projected baseline budgets and economic projections are “subject to a considerable degree of uncertainty.” Indeed, we ...

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Unraveling Perry’s air travel using FEC disclosures

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Earlier this month the New York Times revealed that Texas Governor and Republican presidential nominee-hopeful Rick Perry often uses the private planes of businesspeople — some long-time donors — to travel the country for free for various political events and even lobbying.

The use of the plane is legal under Texas ethics guidelines but it obviously raised some questions. A Perry spokesman said the governor was trying to save tax dollars. After the stories, Perry disclosed to the Federal Elections Commission some new travel-related campaign expenses — eight of them totaling more than $227,000, all travel costs.

Under FEC guidelines, candidates have ...

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Moody’s has most employees leaving through revolving door

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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 ...

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Senators grilling FTC commissioner on obesity guidelines took campaign money from industry

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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 ...

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