Wall Street has given $41 million in campaign contributions to the members of the Congressional ‘supercommittee’ charged with finding $1.5 trillion worth of deficit reduction measures, according to a report released today by two watchdog groups.

The finance, insurance and real estate sector spent $3.7 billion on lobbying and campaign contributions from 1999 to 2008, according to the report, and the 12 members of the bipartisan Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction have all reaped the benefits.

‘Wall Street bought the deregulation that led to our economic collapse and the American public has paid the price,’ said Nick Nyhart, president and CEO of Public Campaign, the group that co-authored the report. ‘The supercommittee should not give Wall Street and big banks another free ride because of their campaign cash.’

Congressional veterans Sen. John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana) top the list, having each received about $6 million in contributions from the financial sector during the course of their careers in Washington. The top GOP recipient on the committee, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Arizona), has received $5.2 million from the sector.

Donations from the political action committees and executives of Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo – banks that received $95 billion […]

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Their names suggest selfless dedication to democracy. Fair Districts Mass. Protect Your Vote. The Center for a Better New Jersey. And their stated goals are unarguable: In the partisan fight to redraw congressional districts, states should stick to the principle of one person, one vote.

But a ProPublica investigation has found that these groups and others are being quietly bankrolled by corporations, unions, and other special interests. Their main interest in the once-a-decade political fight over redistricting is not to help voters in the communities they claim to represent but mainly to improve the prospects of their political allies or to harm their enemies.

The number of these purportedly independent redistricting groups is rising, but their ties remain murky. Contributions to such groups are not limited by campaign finance laws, and most states allow them to take unlimited amounts of money without disclosing the source.

Today’s story is the first chapter in an in-depth examination of how powerful players are turning to increasingly sophisticated tools and techniques to game the redistricting process, with voters ultimately losing.

For special interests, there’s a huge potential payoff from investing in such efforts.

‘Reshaping a map is very powerful’ for donors, said Spencer Kimball, a political consultant who is […]

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PALM CITY, Fla. — Holly Purkey, 28, is one of many Floridians trying to sell her pre-purchased burial plots for some quick cash. She is selling two burial plots in Forest Hills Memorial Park in Palm City. ‘This is new to me. Kind of a weird investment,’ said Purkey, of Port St. Lucie.

The side-by-side plots belonged to her grandparents, who had moved out of state. She bought them seven years ago. Now Purkey, a stay at home mother, wants this cemetery real estate off her hands. She would like $3,000 for the pair of plots in return. ‘The money would help. That’s the reason why I should get these on Craigslist and do something about it,’ she said.

Sellers are posting online, using burial plot brokers, and also funeral homes to market the real estate. Some of those advertisements show single plots starting at about $1,000, while family plots can go for up to $50,000.

Julian Almeida owns Palms West Funeral Home and Crematory in Royal Palm Beach. When money gets tight in life, Almeida says many people begin to cut costs when it comes to planning for death. ‘The cemetery is the part of the funeral that really has gone up […]

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AN ambitious study of the clerical child-abuse scandals in Ireland by Amnesty International suggests that people are as angry with society as they are the State over the institutional abuse of children.

The study, commissioned by Amnesty International Ireland, finds that while 83 per cent of those polled are angry with the State, marginally more, at 84 per cent, are ‘angry that wider society didn’t do more’. More than half found the subject of the Ryan Report on institutional child abuse too overwhelming to know what to think, while one-third said they didn’t know what the report said.

The national poll is part of an extensive research study commissioned by Amnesty to establish the reasons why clerical child abuse was allowed to continue unchecked for so long in Ireland.

The silence of so many Irish people emerges as a key factor, according to Amnesty’s executive director Colm O’Gorman, and the poll findings suggest the public acknowledges this.

The 100,000-word document, called ‘In Plain Sight’, will be launched by Children’s Minister Frances Fitzgerald tomorrow. It includes significant new research by social historian Dr Carole Holohan based on the four inquiries into clerical sex abuse — Ferns, Ryan, Murphy and Cloyne. It will also set out […]

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Through the quotidian rhythm imposed by the online Schwartzreport (www.schwartzreport.net) I sit at my computer and watch streams of data trek across my desk, the influences shaping America’s future. The details teach the trend if you can find the pattern and, once you do, you can see it swell and retreat, like a melody in a symphony. The trick is to put all judgments aside and just follow the data with no cherished outcome. Some of the trends are easy to track and describe. The evolution that has brought us to the iPad and the iPhone (Apple, Cupertino, CA) and the effects they have are easy to see, and the data does not threaten values. Certainly, there are some people who scorn computers. But they are not a force. With some trends the principal problem is the signal-to-noise ratio. Climate change is such a trend where the most notable thing about it is the complete divorcement of data from political debate. The Denier movement upon close examination is almost entirely fact-free. This is part of an even larger trend: the growth of Willful Ignorance-a worldview notable for being formed through the deliberate exclusion of relevant data. Creationism is climate change […]

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