investigation

"The chamber’s increasingly aggressive role — including record spending in the midterm elections that supports Republicans more than 90 percent of the time — has made it a target of critics, including a few local chamber affiliates who fear it has become too partisan and hard-nosed in its fund-raising."So reports a headline story in the New York Times today about the Chamber of Commerce's increasingly secretive and partisan fundraising and lobbying efforts. The Chamber, once an institution that supported small and family businesses, increasingly does the bidding of a few large corporations, and in the first part of our GRITtv Digs investigation, Harry Hanbury starts to open up the Chamber's secrets for you.Want to see more investigations ; like this from us? Let us know, and send us your support!Following a recent spate of well-publicized suicides by gay teenagers, Dan Savage, Savage Love syndicated columnist, started a YouTube channel recording videos to tell LGBT youth "It gets better." The first videos included messages from Savage and his partner, and now even President Obama has recorded a message for the project.Members of the faith community here in New York, frustrated that religion is often touted as a reason for hatred of gay and lesbian people, have started recording It Gets Better messages within their congregations.

"Vulnerable Democrats are begging donors for cash -- $2,400 at a time, while their colleagues are sitting on millions of dollars they could unleash with a pen stroke." So wrote Erica Payne of the Agenda Project, pointing out that the control of the entire House could be in the hands of a few Democrats in safe seats.That's just one of the problems with a severely dysfunctional election system overly dependent on private cash, notes Chris Hayes of The Nation, who joins Payne and Laura for a discussion of the campaign season thus far, and the potential for a little bit of money to go a long way in the right place. According to Stephen F. Cohen, half of Russia looks back to Josef Stalin as a great leader and the other half as a genocidal murderer. This disconnect, and a longing for a stronger, secure state, can be seen in public debate over a memorial to the victims of the gulags, where more people died than in Hitler's death camps. Cohen tells the story of the victims and their struggle to reenter society in his new book, The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin. Born of more than 30 years of research and personal experience, the book is a memoir as well as a history, and Cohen joins Laura in studio to discuss it, and the ongoing struggle to reconcile that period in Russian history. Last week, The Nation uncovered evidence that Lou Dobbs, famed immigrant basher, had in fact employed undocumented immigrants on his estates. Dobbs' daughter is a championship equestrian, and Isabel Macdonald, the reporter for the magazine, spoke to several men who said they cared for horses owned by Dobbs while they were working in the country without authorization. Betsy Reed, executive editor of The Nation, stopped by the GRITtv studio to give us her thoughts on the controversy.

A Congressional investigation has confirmed what Aram Roston reported last November in The Nation: US tax dollars go into the pockets of Afghan warlords in "a massive protection racket" which may lead back to Taliban hands.Roston joins us in studio to discuss the web of connections, payoffs, and private armies of what he calls "irregulars" who are accountable only to themselves and their own military power. Nine years in, Afghanistan is the US's longest-running conflict--and we still don't know where the money is going? And just what's going on with General McChrystal, anyway?