WASHINGTON – The news flow has been pretty rough in the closing weeks of 2019 – the harsh conflict over impeachment, threats from North Korea and the persistent challenge of China, the dangers of fresh Russian interference in the 2020 elections, relentless partisan warfare. But there’s another story about American Democracy that gets little play […]
Washington – The untold story of Campaign 2016 is that political reform is on the move in grass roots America. Not just Bernie Sanders’s trumpet call for a political revolution, but citizen movements at the state level pressing for political reforms against Citizens United, partisan gerrymandering and dark money to make elections fairer, ease gridlock in […]
Washington – If you’re tempted to think campaign MegaMillions no longer matter because maverick Republican Donald Trump is self-financed and Bernie Sanders has funded a nationwide rebellion with two million small donors, take a look down-ballot. MegaMoney is flooding into a high stakes battle for control of Congress. SuperPAC war chests and the lava of […]
Washington – In its focus on presidential personality politics, the mainstream media has overlooked a stunning watershed in U.S. political history – campaign reform has jumped this year from a fringe issue, popular with grass roots reformers, to a high profile cause embraced by a major White House contender. This past week, Hillary Clinton promised […]
Washington – If you wonder what price we all pay for corporate money flooding political campaigns ($1.7 billion in 2014), see Exhibit A — the attempt by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to exploit legal loopholes and renounce its U.S. citizenship to become an Irish company and to duck U.S. corporate income taxes. Pfizer made no secret […]
Washington – Believe it or not, politicians are as fed up with and angry at the runaway campaign money race as voters. It’s almost impossible to get Republican and Democratic politicians to agree on anything these days. But when they’re being honest and they’ve stopped running for office, they see eye-to-eye on one thing: They […]
The decision by Los Angeles to raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020 has national significance far beyond the powerful impact it will have on the incomes and lives of an estimated 400,000 workers in LA. For not only does it put pressure on the rest of California, New York, Chicago […]
Hedrick Smith, who conceived this website and is its principal writer and architect, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and Emmy award-winning documentary producer for PBS and PBS FRONTLINE. more »
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