Last week, my colleague John Wonderlich spoke on a panel about the nature of the Open Government Directive with other... View Article
Continue readingLocal Spotlight
Today I want to spotlight Triad Watch’s great post on Greensboro, NC new policy on emails that are sent from... View Article
Continue readingTransparency Swarm
Last week we asked people to blog about why transparency is important to them. There was a great response and... View Article
Continue readingAvailable on paper: Government records on jobs lost to foreign trade hard to access
In December 2009, Bristol Myers Squib, a biopharmaceutical company with international operations, told employees at two Indiana plants that 75 to 100 of them would need to seek other work. In February 2010, HSBC, the British financial firm that bills itself as the "world's local bank," laid off 20 full-time customer service representatives who processed loan modifications in a Kentucky town named, ironically enough, London. Some 125 workers who built and assembled truck cabs for 18 wheelers at Mayflower Vehicle Systems in Norwalk, Ohio, saw their workplace shut its doors in April 2010.
A few hundred layoffs in a ...
Gov’t Database of Bad Doctors Blocks Public From Seeing Names
In the mid-1980s, incompetent and negligent doctors were moving freely between states, with state licensing boards and hospitals largely oblivious to lawsuits or disciplinary actions in other locations that might have flagged bad providers.
In response, Congress passed the Health Care Quality Improvement Act of 1986, which created the National Practitioner Data Bank, a repository of information that includes malpractice payments, license revocations and loss of clinical privileges for physicians, dentists, nurses, pharmacists, physical therapists and other professionals. “The NPDB is primarily an alert or flagging system intended to facilitate a comprehensive review of health care practitioners' professional credentials,” says ...
The First Citizens United Ad
The Texas Tribune spots what could possibly be the first corporate-sponsored political advertisement allowed under the Citizens United ruling. The... View Article
Continue readingHealth Care Recap: Interest Group Power
I noticed this post last week from Matt Yglesias dinging Ezra Klein on the power of interest groups in light... View Article
Continue readingThe bailout makes a move towards transparency
Today, in a huge win for transparency, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled that the Federal Reserve Board must disclose records containing information about how it intervened to bail out banks during the financial crisis.
Since Bloomberg News filed the lawsuit in November of 2008, the Fed has claimed that if the information is released it could do more harm to the already weakened banks by stigmatizing them, thus hurting their ability to compete.
Supporters of Bloomberg’s lawsuit say the public has the right to know where their money is going. These records tell which ...
Let the Sun Shine In
This Sunshine Week was a particularly successful (and busy!) time for Sunlight. We helped usher in new transparency legislation, launched... View Article
Continue readingPublic=Online Launch Event @ Google
“I can’t think of a more important word in politics than transparency.” Those words were spoken by Huffington Post’s Technology... View Article
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