The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "trade restrictions" ...
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How are you voting? What are your stocks?
A Business Week investigation finds that members of Congress often invest in companies whose fortunes they could influence. The story reveals that lawmakers often had insider information, which determined their or their relatives' stock trading decisions. For example, the reporter quotes the finding of a marketing professor that many members of the Congress sold tobacco stocks at the time when the antitobacco mood in Washington began to heat up. "The only strict prohibition bars members from voting on or pushing legislation that benefits a very small group ... but if the bill benefits them as ... shareholders, for example, they face no restrictions," the magazine reports.
Tags: insider trading; politicians; Congress; House; Senate; conflict of interests; tobacco; access to information; ethics; investments; stocks and bonds; financial disclosure filings
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How the little guy gets crunched
A Time special report investigates how campaign finance contributions have changed laws, regulations and policies. The main story in the report focuses on the trade war that the American government launched against Europe on behalf of the banana baron Carl Lindner, a major contributor both to Republicans and Democrats. Lindner's company, fruit-and-vegetable giant Chiquita, was restricted to export its low-cost bananas to the European market, Time reports. In response, the U.S. government imposed higher tariffs on European goods. The trade war did not affect consumers of luxurious goods from overseas, the story reveals. Instead, it only hurt American small businesses that imported their supplies from European countries.
Tags: politicians; Washington; Clinton; lobbying; lobbyists; taxes; tariffs; trade; World Trade Organization (WTO); Al Gore; White House; legislature; Congress; Senate
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Open for Business: While Marc Rich Was Fugitive, Firm Dealt With Pariah Nations
A team of Wall Street Journal reporters from around the globe reports that while fugitive billionaire Marc Rich worked to clear his name of criminal allegations, his trading empire also worked hard -- "landing some of the same sorts of deals that helped him get into trouble in the first place." Rich, who received a pardon from President Clinton before he left the White House, was indicted in 1983 on tax-evasion charges. Prosecutors also charged that Rich bought "about $200 million worth of oil from Iran while revolutionaries...held 53 Americans hostage there in 1979-81...Mr. Rich was never tried because he fled to Switzerland and renounced his American citizenship before being indicted." After he moved to Switzerland, Rich's business, unfettered by American trade restrictions, "not only conducted additional deals in Iran, it also traded with Libya, Cuba and South Africa, all at times when U.S. citizens and companies were barred from doing so." Although Rich's business practices since leaving the U.S. have not been illegal, they do "raise new questions about the wisdom of pardoning him."
Tags: Marc Rich; Pincus Green; presidential pardons; Denise Rich; trade restrictions; Marc Rich Investment
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Lethal Drug Trade: Unsafe Medicines From Mexico
The Los Angeles Times reports that "Back-room shops sell Latino immigrants dangerous remedies without warnings of sometimes fatal side effects. Medications banned or highly restricted in the United States because of severe, and sometimes fatal, side effects are being smuggled in from Mexico and peddled out of back-room shops across Southern California. These potentially dangerous drugs, which multinational pharmaceutical companies market in Mexico, where regulations and enforcement are less stringent, have shown up consistently in more than 70 raids over the last year of markets, dress shops and swap meets catering to Latino immigrants."
Tags: Immigrants; minorities; illegal drugs; FDA
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No title (id: 10399)
Wall St. Journal describes the business practices of Oren L. Benton, who has made a fortune buying under-priced uranium in the republics of the former Soviet Union and selling it in the United States; criticism includes not paying the already needy republics, orchestrating questionable deals to circumvent trade restrictions and under-cutting domestic producers, June 10, 1994.
Tags: DC Fialka 4 pages
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No title (id: 9427)
The Nation reports on the high-dollar lobbying efforts being conducted in Washington, D.C., over the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA; the Mexican government and American Corporations eager to take advantage of the easing of trade restrictions and Mexico's cheap labor force have commenced an all-out campaign to see the measure passed; lists the former U.S. government officials working for NAFTA's passage from 1989 to 1993, with their current firm and their former government position and the number of years served, June 14, 1993.
Tags: Lewis Ebrahim
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No title (id: 4063)
Wall Street Journal finds that smuggling is big business in America and that the United States keeps imposing new trade restrictions even though it can't enforce the current ones; customs officials find themselves in a losing battle against illegal imports, January 1986.
Tags: None
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No title (id: 1290)
Christian Science Monitor spends one year traveling the globe to trace the spread and availability of chemical and biological weapons; explains trade restrictions and their limitations; documents the production of these weapons by the superpowers; uses a computerized search of Pentagon contracts relating to chemical weapons in compiling this 56-page special report, Dec. 13 - 18, 1988.
Tags: None