Tag: u.s. politics

Not that U.S. politicians can be bought or anything …

I’m a smug Canadian when it comes to political financing. Corporations, unions, and NGOs are not allowed to donate a penny to federal candidates or parties in Canada. Only regular Canadians can kick in and we are all restricted to donating no more than $1,000 a year to a candidate or a party.

Though we still have some improvements we could make to our system, we have successfully removed the distortions of “Big Money” from our politics. Every party in Ottawa would agree with that assessment. (It’s very much a different matter in provincial politics and I encourage Premiers Redford, Wall, McGuinty, etc. to do something about that.)

But in the U.S., billionaires, giant unions, and mega-corporations can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to warp the political process. Continue reading Not that U.S. politicians can be bought or anything …

TAL the week after: Take the Money and Run for Office

The weekly NPR radio show This American Life made headlines last month for retracting a story it aired about Apple’s manufacturing problems in China. One of the reasons this was such a big story was because TAL, as it’s known, had a history of doing excellent, detailed, long-form journalism. So when it had to pull back from the Apple story, well, that was big news.

Well, the week after it spent the entire episode retracting the Apple story, it’s back with a hallmark example of the kind of work that’s made it such a popular show — a somewhat depressing inside-the-Beltway look at fundraising in U.S. politics. Continue reading TAL the week after: Take the Money and Run for Office