September, 18 2012, 01:10pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Jordan Libowitz,,jlibowitz@citizensforethics.org,.
CREW Statement on DC Circuit Court Decision to Allow Dark Money
Today the D.C. Circuit Court issued a wrong-headed decision in what is becoming a long litany of flawed court opinions that ignore legislative intent and keep voters in the dark. The three-judge panel overturned a lower federal court's ruling in Van Hollen v. Federal Election Commission, which ruled that the FEC improperly narrowed the scope of McCain-Feingold's donor disclosure requirements.
WASHINGTON
Today the D.C. Circuit Court issued a wrong-headed decision in what is becoming a long litany of flawed court opinions that ignore legislative intent and keep voters in the dark. The three-judge panel overturned a lower federal court's ruling in Van Hollen v. Federal Election Commission, which ruled that the FEC improperly narrowed the scope of McCain-Feingold's donor disclosure requirements.
The FEC's narrow interpretation allows nonprofit 501(c)(4) organizations like Crossroads GPS and 501(c)(6) associations like the Chamber of Commerce to spend millions of dollars on electioneering communications without disclosing their donors. As a result of today's ruling, the FEC's badly flawed regulation likely will be reinstated.
"Today's decision by the D.C. Circuit Court overturned one of the few glimmers of hope in campaign finance disclosure law," said CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan. "Voters are being pummeled by campaign ads with no way to discover who is really trying to influence our elections."
Given the feckless nature of the FEC, CREW is highly skeptical that the agency will revise the regulations in any meaningful way to provide voters with the disclosure they deserve. It's clear the public will remain in the dark about who is financing our federal elections until many more members of Congress come to their senses and pass reasonable legislation like the DISCLOSE Act that would provide the kind of constitutional disclosure the Supreme Court suggested in Citizens United.
Read more about CREW's actions on dark money:
Dark Money: Keeping an eye on 501(c) groups
End Secret Spending by Tax-Exempt Groups
DISCLOSE Act: Yet Again, No Profiles in Courage in the U.S. Senate
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to promoting ethics and accountability in government and public life by targeting government officials -- regardless of party affiliation -- who sacrifice the common good to special interests. CREW advances its mission using a combination of research, litigation and media outreach.
LATEST NEWS
Calls Mount for US to Provide Free School Meals to All Children
"Hiving off a tiny part of the public school bundle and charging a means-tested fee for it is extremely stupid," argues Matt Bruenig.
Mar 20, 2023
Minnesota last week became just the fourth U.S. state to guarantee universal free school meals, triggering a fresh wave of demands and arguments for a similar federal policy to feed kids.
"Universal school meals is now law in Minnesota!" Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, who represents the state, tweeted Monday. "Now, we need to pass our Universal School Meals Program Act to guarantee free school meals to every child across the country."
Omar's proposal, spearheaded in the upper chamber by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), "would permanently provide free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack to all school children regardless of income, eliminate school meal debt, and strengthen local economies by incentivizing local food procurement," the lawmakers' offices explained in 2021.
Congressional Republicans last year blocked the continuation of a Covid-19 policy enabling public schools to provide free breakfast and lunch to all 50 million children, and now, many families face rising debt over childrens' cafeteria charges.
"The school bus service doesn't charge fares. Neither should the school lunch service."
Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project, highlighted Monday that while children who attend public schools generally have not only free education but also free access to bathrooms, textbooks, computer equipment, playgrounds, gyms, and sports gear, "around the middle of each school day, the free schooling service is briefly suspended for lunch."
"How much each kid is charged is based on their family income except that, if a kid lives in a school or school district where 40% or more of the kids are eligible for free lunch, then they are also eligible for free lunch even if their family income would otherwise be too high," he detailed. "Before Covid, in 2019, 68.1% of the kids were charged $0, 5.8% were charged $0.40, and 26.1% were charged the full $4.33... The total cost of the 4.9 billion meals is around $21 billion per year. In 2019, user fees covered $5.6 billion of this cost."
Bruenig—whose own child has access to free school meals because of the community eligibility program—continued:
The approximately $5.6 billion of school lunch fees collected in 2019 were equal to 0.7% of the total cost of K-12 schooling. In order to collect these fees, each school district has to set up a school lunch payments system, often by contracting with third-party providers like Global Payments. They also have to set up a system for dealing with kids who are not enrolled in the free lunch program but who show up to school with no money in their school lunch account or in their pockets. In this scenario, schools will either have to make the kid go without lunch, give them a free lunch for the day (but not too many times), or give them a lunch while assigning their lunch account a debt.
Eligibility for the $0 and $0.40 lunches is based on income, but this does not mean that everyone with an eligible income successfully signs up for the program. As with all means-tested programs, the application of the means test not only excludes people with ineligible incomes, but also people with eligible incomes who fail to successfully navigate the red tape of the welfare bureaucracy.
The think tank leader tore into arguments against universal free meals for kids, declaring that "hiving off a tiny part of the public school bundle and charging a means-tested fee for it is extremely stupid."
Bruenig pointed out that socializing the cost of child benefits like school meals helps "equalize the conditions of similarly-situated families with different numbers of children" and "smooths incomes across the lifecycle by ensuring that, when people have kids, their household financial situation remains mostly the same."
"Indeed, this is actually the case for the welfare state as whole, not just child benefits," the expert emphasized, explaining that like older adults and those with disabilities, children cannot and should not work, which "makes it impossible to receive personal labor income, meaning that some other non-labor income system is required."
Conservative opponents of free school lunches often claim that "fees serve an important pedagogical function in society to get people to understand personal responsibility" and because they "are means-tested, they serve an important income-redistributive function in society," he noted. "Both arguments are hard to take seriously."
Pushing back against the first claim, Bruenig stressed that right-wingers don't apply it to other aspects of free schooling such as bus services. He also wrote that the means-testing claim "is both untrue and at odds with their general attitudes on, not just redistribution, but on how child benefit programs specifically should be structured."
A tax for everyone with a certain income intended to make up the $5.6 billion in school meal fees, he argued, "would have a larger base and thus represent a smaller share of the income of each person taxed and such a tax would smooth incomes over time," while also eliminating means-testing—which would allow schools to feed all kids and ditch costly payment systems.
As Nora De La Cour reported Sunday for Jacobin: "The fight for school meals traces its roots all the way back to maternalist Progressive Era efforts to shield children and workers from the ravages of unregulated capitalism. In her bookThe Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools, Jennifer Gaddis describes how early school lunch crusaders envisioned meal programs that would be integral to schools' educational missions, immersing students in hands-on learning about nutrition, gardening, food preparation, and home economics. Staffed by duly compensated professionals, these programs would collectivize and elevate care work, making it possible for mothers of all economic classes to efficiently nourish their young."
Now, families who experienced the positive impact of the pandemic-era program want more from the federal government.
"When schools adopt universal meals through community eligibility or another program, we see improvements in students' academic performance, behavior, attendance, and psychosocial functioning," wrote De La Cour, whose reporting also includes parent and cafeteria worker perspectives. "Above all, the implementation of universal meals causes meal participation to shoot up, demonstrating that the need far exceeds the number of kids who are able to get certified."
Crystal FitzSimons, director of school-based programs at the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), told Jacobin, "There is a feeling that we can't go back."
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Protests—some of them violently repressed by police—broke out in Paris and cities across the nation after a parliamentary vote following the government's deeply unpopular move to raise the retirement age by two years.
Mar 20, 2023
Fresh protests erupted in Paris and other French cities on Monday after President Emmanuel Macron's government narrowly survived a pair of parliamentary no-confidence votes over bypassing the lower house of Parliament to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64.
The first parliamentary vote of no confidence, called by a small group of centrist lawmakers, fell nine votes short of the 278 needed to pass, Agence France-Presse reports. A second no-confidence vote, brought forward by the far-right National Rally, was also rejected.
The French Senate, which is dominated by right-wing parties, approved the higher retirement age last week. However, faced with the prospect of a vote shortfall in the National Assembly, Macron's government then invoked special constitutional powers to push through the retirement age hike.
The deeply unpopular policy has sparked widespread protests, some of which have drawn hundreds of thousands of people into the streets despite government bans on gatherings in locations including Place de la Concorde and the area of Avenue des Champs-Elysées in Paris.
Protests renewed following Monday's votes, with thousands of demonstrators marching in Paris alone. Videos posted on social media showed police charging protesters, spraying them with pepper spray, and beating them. One video showed officers brutalizing a person who appeared to be a photojournalist while an onlooker repeatedly shouted "it's the press!"
"We are not resigned," the Aubervilliers parliamentary group of the left-wing populist party La France Insoumise (LFI), or France Unbowed, tweeted Monday. "The fight against retirement reforms continues. All together in the street until the retirement of this unjust and illegitimate reform!"
LFI's parliamentary group in Haute-Garonne—which includes the southern city of Tolouse—tweeted that "Macron is more isolated than ever."
"The fight continues tonight," the party group said, previewing a Monday evening demonstration.
French unions are calling for a nationwide general strike on Thursday.
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Tens of Thousands of LA Teachers to Strike in Solidarity With Support Workers
"How do we properly service our students when we are being overworked and underpaid and disrespected?" asked one special education assistant.
Mar 20, 2023
Demanding "respect and dignity" for tens of thousands of school support workers who help the Los Angeles Unified School District run, the union that represents 35,000 teachers in the city has called on its members to join a three-day strike starting Tuesday as school support staffers fight for a living wage.
Members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99 "work so hard for our students," said United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) on Monday. "They deserve respect and dignity at work. We will be out in force tomorrow to make sure they get it."
Roughly 65,000 teachers and support professionals including bus drivers, cafeteria workers, teaching aides, and grounds workers are expected to walk out from Tuesday through Thursday this week, nearly a year after SEIU Local 99 entered contract negotiations with LAUSD, the second-largest school district in the United States.
The union is calling for a 30% pay increase for its members, who earn an average of $25,000 per year, or roughly $12 per hour. According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, a living wage in the Los Angeles area is more than $21 per hour for a single person with no children and far more for people with children.
"I am a single mother and for the past 20 years I have worked two and sometimes three jobs just to support my family," Janette Verbera, a special education assistant, told In These Times Monday. "How do we properly service our students when we are being overworked and underpaid and disrespected?"
The school district offered a 20% overall pay increase spread over several years on Friday, along with a one-time 5% bonus.
Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, noted that LAUSD has a $4.9 billion surplus and said the district must use those funds to "invest in staff, students, and educators."
SEIU Local 99 members voted to authorize a strike in February, and said the limited three-day action is a protest against the district's negotiating tactics.
LAUSD has claimed the strike is unlawful and that workers are actually staging the walkout over pay without having exhausted all bargaining avenues. A state board over the weekend denied the district's request to block the strike.
As In These Timesreported, negotiations between the district and SEIU Local 99—as well as separate ongoing talks with the teachers' union about educators' contracts—are being led by Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho, "whose $440,000 salary is nearly 10 times that of a starting salary for a LAUSD teacher."
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