As stated in the note from the Sunlight Foundation′s Board Chair, as of September 2020 the Sunlight Foundation is no longer active. This site is maintained as a static archive only.

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Four years after Lehman Brothers collapse, financial industry still works its political will

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Like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that touched off World War I, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the largest underwriter of bonds backed by subprime loans when it declared bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008, was an event whose repercussions extended far beyond its executives, investors and creditors. It touched off a financial crisis that's affected employment and earnings of the middle class.

The bankruptcy of the 158-year-old Lehman Brothers wasn't the first sign of trouble in the economy, or in the mortgage backed securities market--the bad investments that brought the firm down. More than a year earlier ...

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International Declaration on Parliamentary Openness

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Declaration on Parliamentary Openness multilingual coversTomorrow morning, I'll be joining a number of other organizations in addressing a broad gathering of parliamentary officials at the World e-Parliament Conference. We'll be formally announcing the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, a joint document prepared and drafted by the growing movement of Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations, or PMOs, operating throughout the world. This is the clearest, most broadly representative effort yet to represent global norms for legislative transparency. It's intended to create common goals and expectations for a representative branch of government that is transparent and accountable, increasingly by using new technology to represent citizens better. Sunlight is participating as both a PMO, since our advocacy, reporting, and technology are so often about political influence and substance in Congress, and also as a convener, joining with the National Democratic Institute and the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency to connect PMOs from around the globe.  We created OpeningParliament.org to serve as a resource for the group and our activities, and since our kickoff meeting in May 2012 (adjacent to TransparencyCamp), the community has grown dramatically, and worked together to shape and sharpen the declaration.  Over 80 organizations have now endorsed the declaration, and we're proud to be presenting it to officials from the world's Congresses, Assemblies, and Parliaments tomorrow.

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