The Center for Responsive Politics is celebrating its 25th birthday today. As its Executive Director for its first decade and a half, I couldn't be more proud of its breathtaking accomplishments over the years.
As a birthday present for all of us, their Web site -- OpenSecrets.org -- has undergone a dramatic transformation.
I've been playing around on the site for a few days and there are some fabulous improvements. According to CRP, here are some of the new features:
- The money-and-politics articles that we've published for years on CapitalEye.org are now front-and-center on OpenSecrets.org as part of our new blog. We'll continue to produce in-depth reports using our data, but we'll also be posting "quick hits" most every day in the blog. If you're an RSS user, make sure you sign up for our blog's feed.
- We've reorganized the site. You'll still navigate OpenSecrets.org using file tabs that run across the top of the page (along with more tabs on the interior pages, and options in the left navigation bars), but we've changed the site's main "buckets" to better accommodate the variety of data we track now.
- OpenSecrets.org is not just a campaign finance site, you know; in recent years we've expanded to also track federal lobbying, Washington's "revolving door," privately sponsored congressional travel and the personal finances of Congress, the president and top executive branch officials. OpenSecrets.org's old "Who Gives"/"Who Gets" tabs just didn't suit everything we do today. On the new site you'll find our data options split between "Politicians & Elections" and "Influence & Lobbying." It'll take some getting used to, even for us, but it makes much more sense given all that CRP does now. Continue reading
GOOD Magazine Illustrates Transparency
If you haven't discovered GOOD magazine yet, do yourself a favor and check it out. It bills itself as a venue "for people who give a damn." It's also a lot of fun. In the past couple of weeks, the magazine has published four political visualizations in its TRANSPARENCY section.
The first is an amazing graph illustrating the amount of work accomplished and time spent by the U.S. Senate over each of the last 20 years.
Another is a very cool three-minute video on where John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have received their campaign cash.
They have a fascinating graph titled "The Cost of Nation (Re) Building" illustrating the value of U.S. government contracts awarded in Iraq and Afghanistan from October 2003 through September 2006.
Continue readingCorporate Access at the Democratic Convention
Monday's edition of the Rocky Mountain News, Kevin Vaughan has a detailed article about the 56 national corporations, from Allstate to Xerox, that are sponsoring/funding this summer's Democratic National Convention in Denver. And as Vaughan writes, they all either do business with the federal government or they have pending legislation in Congress or regulation issues with the federal bureaucracy. (Of course, the same situation exists for the Republican National Convention to be held in Minneapolis as well. Expect to see a story about that soon from someplace.) What the corporations get for their sponsorship of the conventions is access to party leaders, members of Congress and their staff, and to possibly the soon to be occupants of the West Wing of the White House.
Continue readingCorporate Accountability
Our friends at the Center for Political Accountability (CPA) received a great plug by Jeffrey Birnbaum in today's edition of The Washington Post. CPA's mission is to bring transparency and accountability to corporate political spending.
CEOs and other corporate officers have traditionally kept shareholders in the dark about the company's political contributions. CPA believes that large corporate political spending distorts the American political process while not necessarily serving the interests of the company or its shareholders. And lack of transparency exacerbates the problems.
CPA is helping build a movement among shareholders and activists groups to push companies to disclose publicly their political giving. They work with shareholders to submit proposals requiring disclosure to investors of political contribution policies, plus the amount, recipient and business purpose of each contribution.
Continue readingSunlight is Running the Numbers on Congressional Wealth
Just as members of Congress are filing their latest annual personal disclosure reports (due this Thursday), we are launching "Fortune 535," a new Web site which lets you track how much, or how little, lawmakers' wealth has grown during the past 11 years -- the period of time from which lawmakers' personal financial data is available.
For the first time ever, we compiled and visualized online lawmakers' net worth from personal financial disclosure filings to show the growth in net worth for each member of Congress from 1995 to 2006. These filings reveal lawmakers' personal finances-assets, liabilities, outside income-and the gifts and travel provided for them by outside organizations. Fortune 535 also lets you compare the net worth growth of each lawmaker to that of the average American family, and lists the wealthiest lawmakers (Rep. Jane Harman, Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. John Kerry), those with the greatest change in their net worth, those who began their congressional careers with no net worth and those whose net worth was less than $0 in 2006. Sen. Clinton, for example, started her Senate career with over $6 million in debt, but is now worth over $30 million.
One thing we learned while working on this project: measuring lawmakers' net worth is very difficult (and sometimes impossible) because of the seriously flawed disclosure system used by members of Congress. Because the personal financial disclosure reports lawmakers file asks for assets and liabilities in ranges, we could not determine whether some lawmakers, like Speaker Pelosi, are extremely wealthy or on the verge of declaring bankruptcy (or somewhere in between). That's why we support more precise reporting requirements as well as full online disclosure and preservation of lawmakers' personal financial disclosure reports.
Continue readingHelp Wanted
The good folks over at Talking Points Memo need some help in making a Pentagon's military analyst's documents more transparent. Pitch in.
Continue readingDatabase of Foreign Gifts Available
Legistorm, a Web site dedicated to providing a variety of important information about the US Congress, has launched a new database of all foreign gifts (whether tangible gifts or travel) received by members of Congress and their staff since 1999. The database details each of the 450 gifts members of Congress and their aides reported receiving in the past decade. Senate rules require that senators and their staff must report all gifts over a $100 value threshold, and House members and their aides threshold has been adjusted for inflation and stands at $335.
Gifts from foreign sources were not affected by the reforms pushed through in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal. The giving and receiving of gifts is all part of diplomatic protocol, and the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act governs the practice. Congressional travel, including transportation, lodging, food and refreshments, make up the bulk of gifts received.
Continue readingSocial Citizens
My friend Allison Fine is a senior fellow at Demos, editor at TechPresident, and author of the award-winning book Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age. She writes frequently about the Internet and its impact on society and the promises it holds for democratic renewal. Allison has recently written Social Citizens, a discussion paper about how Millennials will use their Internet skills in civic engagement. The paper makes the case that this generation has unique potential to make impacts on the civic landscape.
The Case Foundation had asked Allison to write the paper, and as she wrote on the Social Citizens Blog, they decided to go deeper than just listing a litany of different ways these young people are using the tools of Web 2.0 to share information about their favorite causes. They wanted to know what the impact will be of Millennials having "...the ability to become an advocate for their cause instantly, broadly, inexpensively, and what does their ability to do so mean for the rest of us?" Fascinating questions.
Allison and the foundation invite everyone interested in social change and how technology can be used to foster it to join the conversation in an effort to define what it means to be a "social citizen." Do it.
Continue readingGreat New Transparency News Resource
This is very cool. Our friends at VoterWatch have just launched a new 'Transparency Recap' -- a regularly updated overview of what bloggers are saying about government transparency and accountability. In their first roundup, VoterWatch highlights Sunlight's latest project, PublicMarkup.org (thanks!), a post from Free Government Information on a report about the National Archives' plan to provide online access to the Founding Fathers papers, All Things Whistleblower's reporting on the raid on the Office of the Special Counsel and on the home of Special Counsel Scott Bloch and the soft launch of the Center for Responsive Politics' newly redesigned OpenSecrets.org site.
We love roundups like this for keeping updated on the news that matters the most. Make sure to add VoterWatch to your feeds!
Three Perspectives on Transparency and Sharing
Last week I participated in a panel at the Center for Global Development with Scott McNealy, Chairman of Sun Microsystems. Dave Witzel, a visiting senior program associate at CGD and I shared the Q and A session with McNealy, and while the three of us approach the issue of transparency from very different perspectives, there was no disagreement about the answer to the basic question -- whether sharing and openness is a good thing, does it really matter?
The obvious answer was "yes." McNealy articulated a whole host of reasons why it matters, not only to his company, but also for the rest of the world. Dave and I amplified his core thoughts. But for the most part the audience, made up of people from international agencies, foundations, non-profits, think tanks, consulting firms, academia, and publishing, appeared a bit dubious, or perhaps, it was just the first time that they had been exposed to the notion of what sharing and openness means in the 21st century. There is alot of education to be done.
Dave has a detailed write up about the event here.
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