copenlu/druid huggingface dataset:
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2019-10-07): Bernie Sanders, a longtime critic of the nation’s campaign finance system, is releasing a plan Monday aimed at ending the influence of corporate cash in politics, including at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. [...] Sanders’plan states that corporate lobbyists "were everywhere and filled the VIP suites" at the convention, adding that "this type of corporate sponsorship is a corrupting influence and must end if politicians are going to represent the American people." His proposal also calls for a lifetime lobbying ban on Democratic National Committee chairs and co-chairs, as well as a prohibition on them working for companies that hold federal contracts or are trying to obtain government approval for mergers or other projects. [...] Sanders’ platform against corporate money also puts a spotlight on the candidate’s fundraising operation, which is powered almost exclusively by small-dollar donors. Sanders raised $25.3 million in the third quarter of the year, more than any other Democratic presidential candidate, but that news has been subsumed somewhat by his health scare.
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2020-02-20): Bernie Sanders has taken corporate lobbyist money — in small amounts [...] "One major reason I support Bernie is his consistency when things are hard. Not only does Bernie reject corporate money in 2020, he’s also never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career*," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, using asterisks for emphasis. "He is a real one. And in politics, that is nearly impossible to find." Sanders never once took corporate lobbyist money? That’s not the case.
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2024-05-10): Bernie Sanders - Budget - Energy and Natural Resources - Environment and Public Works - Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Chairman - Veterans' Affairs [...] Corporations themselves cannot donate to candidates at the federal level but federal candidates can get contributions from corporate PACs, employees and owners as well as their immediate families. At the state level, corporations and unions can give directly to campaigns in many jurisdictions. [...] Showing these clusters of contributions from people associated with particular organizations provides a valuable — and unique — way of understanding where candidates are getting their financial support. Knowing those groups is also useful after the election, as issues come before Congress, presidential administrations and state governments that may affect those organizations or their industries.
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2023-01-03): Sanders’ well-chronicled antagonism toward lobbyists has some concerned they’ll be unable to blunt criticism of their clients’ profits or corporate executive salaries. [...] But Sanders’ well-chronicled antagonism toward lobbyists has some concerned they’ll be unable to blunt criticism of their clients’ profits or corporate executive salaries. They are anxious Sanders might seek to revive policies like importing drugs from Canada and other nations, an idea loathed by drugmakers. [...] Sanders, meanwhile, isn’t rubbing elbows with executives and lobbyists at fundraisers and doesn’t have a "kitchen cabinet" of donor-advisers he talks with about policy, Crowell and others said. He’s sworn off all money from political action committees — even ones run by other senators and members of Congress — to his Senate campaigns.
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2018-10-30): That’s why rejecting corporate PAC money is such an important step for Democrats to take. It shows voters that you understand that political corruption is a real concern for them and it demonstrates whose side you’ll be on. Perhaps most importantly, it affirms that your policy decisions won’t be influenced by corporate contributions. Yet, consider the status quo: Of the nearly 200 Democrats currently serving in the House of Representatives only seven current Democratic House members have rejected corporate PAC money (including Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Penn., who made the issue central to his race last spring). [...] If Democrats are successful in the November midterms, those who have rejected corporate PAC money should only be the beginning of this trend. The entire Democratic caucus should follow the lead of these challengers who are taking the first step in restoring trust in politicians, and get serious about reforming the whole system by strengthening ethics laws, expanding voting rights and legally limiting the influence of money in our politics.
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2018-06-25): In 2016, he watched Hillary Clinton deploy the strategy Democrats have used for years. She raised tons of money from big donors and lobbyists and pushed moderate positions designed to offend as few people as possible. Beals and other Democrats, the ones on the Bernie side of things, thought that the party had lost its credibility with Americans. It was too cozy with Wall Street, too corporate, too insider, and out of touch. They saw Clinton as the pinnacle of what had become a losing strategy. [...] That's not a minor point of difference. That's a chasm. Everybody knows that's just a fig leaf for accepting corporate influence over the issue and refusing to take on a very powerful lobby and industry. That's all that that is. [...] Jeff Beals --corporate power has bought out our own representative. And it has bought out our own ability to take control of our economy and have the jobs we need to have. Unfortunately, three of the candidates here are working for those large corporations. One of them shut down a factory in New York State, in Buffalo, moving jobs to the Dominican Republic. Another one of them works for one of the largest lobbying law firms in the United States and does white collar criminal defense for those companies when they--
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2020-02-27): She isn't alone. The seven first-term Democrats Vox talked to for this piece made it clear they plan to stick to their promise and aren't planning to take corporate PAC money when they run in 2020. [...] As Wild demonstrates, there's an important distinction to make here: Just because these Democrats aren't taking corporate PAC money doesn't mean they're saying no to all PAC money. Many accept donations from advocacy group PACs like Planned Parenthood Action Fund and House leadership PACs like House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's AmeriPAC. There's plenty of reason to question that saying no to corporate PACs actually erodes a financial advantage; Democrats far out-fundraised Republicans in 2018. [...] It's not as if these first-term members are forswearing all meetings with corporate lobbyists, but the meetings come without the added pressure of doing favors for some campaign cash.
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2022-06-07): Manchin's public rationale that power companies are already transitioning away from fossil fuels as rapidly as possible is blatantly false: Ninety percent of the electricity generated in West Virginia still comes from coal. Perhaps his decision was shaped by the good ol' boys he hangs out with. He's had a long romance with climate-denying coal barons and the CEOs of companies like American Electric Power and ExxonMobil (in a much-publicized Zoom meeting secretly recorded by climate activists posing as recruiters looking to hire lobbyists, a senior Exxon-Mobil lobbyist claimed that he talked to Manchin's office every week, calling the senator "a kingmaker"), all of whom have billions of dollars invested in fossil-fuel infrastructure that is rapidly losing value. Manchin is currently by far the biggest recipient in Congress of cash from the oil-and-gas industry, pulling in more than $570,000 this year, nearly four times as much as the next highest senator. Manchin, who is up for reelection in 2024, also profited from right-wing donors who appreciated him mucking up Biden's agenda. During the first nine months of 2021, he raked in $3.3 million in campaign donations — 14 times more than his haul through the same period the previous year.
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2019-11-25): The speech was classic Bernie, full of grand visions for a universal health care system at the expense of greedy corporate executives getting rich off the status quo. For Kahn, the CEO of the Federation of American Hospitals, which represents more than 1,000 for-profit hospitals, it wasn’t so much the rhetoric that bothered him, despite the fact that he — as head of one of the nation’s most powerful hospital lobbies — was one of the corporate executives in Sanders’ crosshairs. A 67-year-old former GOP operative who’d worked in and around politics since high school, Kahn was familiar with the Vermont senator’s lengthy, mostly solitary campaign for single-payer health care. [...] Even in a town with more than 20 lobbyists for every member of Congress, the corporate health care army is outsized; health care companies spent nearly $568 million on lobbying in 2018 alone, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, more than any other industry. For the past four years, its spending has topped a half-billion dollars. [...] Two Washington lobbying powers, meanwhile, defected in the past year. The National Retail Foundation quietly dropped out amid its escalating feud with hospital and doctor groups over surprise billing legislation.
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2019-01-24): Having toiled his entire political career as a gadfly, Sanders is now a prophet. "The ideas we brought forth in 2016, which were considered, not only by the Democratic establishment but by the editorial writers, to be extreme and fringe and out of step with where the American people are," Sanders told me, "are now what is in, by and large, the Democratic national platform and are being adopted by candidates across the country." What’s more, the Democratic Party’s future—as reflected by the remarkable rise of the 29-year-old New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—has clearly tilted to the left. This development has been as satisfying for Sanders as it was unexpected. "We have had more success in ideologically changing the party than I would have dreamed possible," he said. "The world has changed." [...] For Sanders, who spent most of his political career as a lonely voice in the wilderness, the opportunity of these past three years to be heard, to call attention to issues that no one used to care about, has been as gratifying as anything. "He still cares immensely about the hour-and-fifteen-minute, eat-your-spinach speeches he gives," Briggs says. "He likes the huge crowds, but he was happy making the same arguments to a hundred people at town-hall meetings in the Northeast Kingdom."
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2022-11-04): By: Bernie Sanders, Fox News [...] As the longest serving Independent in congressional history, I’m not going to tell you that Democrats are perfect. Far from it. In a Senate evenly divided 50-50, there are at least two Democrats who have made it clear that they are more interested in protecting corporate interests than the needs of working-class families. That has got to change. Right now, more than any time in modern history, we need a Congress that has the courage to take on the wealthy campaign contributors, super-PACs, and lobbyists who work overtime in protecting the interests of billionaires and corporate interests. And that is precisely what Democrats must do if they expand their majority in the House and the Senate.
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2019-10-07): If Sen. Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2020, he plans to halt all corporate donations to the party’s convention next summer. This as party leaders actively court donors for millions of dollars to pay for the event scheduled to take place next July. [...] Sanders, who refuses to take money from corporate donors, wants to eliminate the practice completely. "When Bernie is the nominee, everything will fundamentally change for corporate elites. Bernie Sanders fights for the people, cannot be bought, and is under no obligation to fulfill any transaction with a corporation trying to corruptly buy access. A Bernie Sanders convention will be a people-powered convention," said Sanders policy director Josh Orton.
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2024-04-03): WASHINGTON, April 3 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), today joined President Joe Biden at the White House for an event on their work to lower health care costs for the American people. Sanders' remarks, as prepared for delivery, are below and the full event can be watched live here: [...] Well, here is some good news. Despite all of the wealth and political power of the pharmaceutical industry, despite their more than 1,800 paid lobbyists on Capitol Hill, the Biden Administration and Democrats in Congress are beginning to make some progress. What have we done over the last few years?
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2019-06-13): For decades, fossil fuel corporations knowingly destroyed our planet for short-term profits. The fossil fuel industry has known since as early as the 1970s that their products were contributing to climate change and that climate change is real, dangerous, and preventable. Yet, they kept going. Instead of working to find solutions to the coming crisis, the fossil fuel industry poured billions into funding climate denialism, hiring lobbyists to fight even the slightest government regulation and oversight, and contributing to politicians who would put the interests of fossil fuel executives over the safety and security of the planet. Fossil fuel corporations have fought to escape liability for the pollution and destruction caused by their greed. They have evaded taxes, desecrated tribal lands, exploited workers and poisoned communities. Bernie believes this is criminal activity, and, when he is President, he will hold the fossil fuel industry accountable. [...] Bernie has fought for workers his entire career. He understands that coal miners and oil-rig operators are not the problem. Fossil fuel workers have powered the country for more than a century, working in dangerous and precarious jobs to provide for their families. They have given their lives on unsafe, under-regulated worksites, and they have seen their pensions get cut, their health care get stripped away, and their jobs disappear while fossil fuel executives rake in billions.
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2016-04-01): The Bernie Sanders campaign countered by pointing to a Greenpeace tally that says she has collected "$1,259,280 in bundled and direct donations from lobbyists currently registered as lobbying for the fossil fuel industry." [...] - And neither campaign rejects money from lobbyists who represent the industry. [...] But Sanders, too, is apparently accepting money from the fossil fuel lobby. According to an Intercept examination of online records of lobbyist disclosure of political contributions, the Sanders campaign took in $24 from Nathen Causman, a lobbyist for the LNE Group, whose clients include American Municipal Power Inc.
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2019-04-10): In my view — not really; million-makers can defend themselves, at least qua makers of millions. But there is something to say in defense of Sanders as a consistent politician and an honest broker, which is really what his detractors are out to dispute. First, Sanders’s complaint isn’t that millionaires exist per se. After all, if America’s household wealth were distributed evenly across the population, then every family of four would have a net worth of $1.2 million. Sanders’s critique is that the United States’ super-rich are symptomatic of a system that churns out a small class of extremely wealthy people who rule over the vast remainder. Key to Sanders’s argument against the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a small elite is that their largesse allows them to wield disproportionate, anti-democratic political power by funding campaigns and lobbying politicians; seeing as Sanders’s campaign is funded strictly by small donors and he is not a lobbyist himself, it would seem that his having made more than 1 million dollars in a year doesn’t exactly run afoul of that critique. [...] It may instead be a failure of another kind: Call it cupidity, or — worse for political types — an insensitivity to optics. Neither misstep compromises the final integrity of Sanders’s politics nor implies he’s insufficiently serious about them, especially after so many decades pushing the same policies with no best-selling books or millions to show for it.
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2024-08-21): Bernie Sanders has not chosen the easy road in American politics. During the Cold War, in the early 1960s, he decided to join the Young People’s Socialist League. In the 1970s and ‘80s, he pursued third-party and independent politics in Vermont. In the 1990s and ’00s, he was among the few progressive voices in a rightward-moving Congress. [...] Bernie Sanders: Look, the Democratic Party is a corporate-dominated party, which was increasingly moving to the right, and had turned its back on the working class of this country. That’s no secret. [...] Sanders: Sometimes the politicians don’t come from those [elite milieus], but they are surrounded by people who do. If people are walking in day after day saying, "I represent Pfizer and I represent Novo, so let me tell you my problems. Oh, and by the way, I look forward to attending your fundraiser next week." If you’re surrounded by lobbyists who tell you why tax breaks for billionaires make a lot of sense or why we can’t raise the wages for workers because it’ll be terrible for business, if that is who you are surrounded with and you’re not out talking to ordinary people, that’s the kind of mentality that you develop.
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2019-12-10): And, third, capitalism is destroying nature. As corporate lobbyists work to dismantle the regulatory apparatus, the companies they represent are irrevocably harming our environment, our health and our collective future. In pursuit of profits at any cost, corporations continue to ravage public lands, demolishing ecosystems, and poisoning the water we drink and the air we breathe. Meanwhile, even as corporate America has become more vocal about the importance of sustainability and the perils of climate change, it has opposed the dramatic policy changes needed to prevent catastrophe.
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2021-09-16): And so it is important to consistently remind yourself of that.
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2021-03-20): I felt that way because I grew up around Bronx machine politics, where there was a lot of cynical use and weaponization of identity under the guise of lobbyist-driven policies and corporate policy. I had essentially given up on it, and I felt the only way we’re going to do this is by committing ourselves to our communities. [...] I think sometimes people fall into this trap of wishful thinking about a poll question, thinking that support is solid, and that it is unsusceptible to the propaganda of corporate lobbyists and the health insurance industry. I think the first thing we need is real honesty about the work to be done ahead of us. There are some issues that poll really well, and the polling is concrete. There are other issues that poll one way or another, and the polling can really fluctuate with just one ad campaign. [...] One of the exciting things about your early days in Congress was your willingness to break from convention, like when you blew the lid on the freshman orientation that was crawling with corporate lobbyists, or appeared at the Sunrise Movement sit-in in Pelosi’s office. Has your strategy shifted at all from those days?
Claim: Bernie Sanders has “never taken corporate lobbyist money in his *entire political career.*" (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020-02-21)
Evidence (2016-07-21): When innocent people suffer, because our political system lacks the will, or the courage, or the basic decency to enforce our laws – or still worse still, has sold out to some corporate lobbyist for cash – I am not able to look the other way, and I won't look the other way. [...] I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders – he never had a chance. [...] To all Americans tonight, in all our cities and towns, I make this promise:
Claim: “Starbucks just announced that they’re going cashless.” (Instagram posts, 2022-08-30)
Evidence (2022-08-30): A sign from a Starbucks cafe in the United Kingdom announcing it was going cashless started rumors that the entire company was eschewing cash. But that’s not right.
Claim: “Starbucks just announced that they’re going cashless.” (Instagram posts, 2022-08-30)
Evidence (2022-09-02): The claim: Starbucks is going cashless [...] "Starbucks has no plans to go cashless across our U.K., U.S. or Canada stores," a spokesperson for the company told USA TODAY. "We want to shut down any inaccuracies or further speculation on this matter." [...] Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that Starbucks is going cashless in the U.S. The company told USA TODAY that it had "no plans to go cashless across our U.K., U.S. or Canada stores."