Blog : Sunlight Foundation

Finance Industry Giving Visualized

by Ellen Miller Sep 25, 2008 11:30 am

Wonder just how Wall Street has become so influential on Capitol Hill that it can command the attention of the... View Article

Question of the Day

by Paul Blumenthal Sep 25, 2008 11:25 am

How much of the $700 billion in taxpayer money doled out to private enterprise will be turned around and used... View Article

Publish the Mortgages on Line

by Ellen Miller Sep 25, 2008 11:20 am

Dan O’Neill (of Everyblock fame) is calling for publication of all mortgages that the government (read “we”) is going to... View Article

Financial Bailout: Who’s minding the store?

by Bill Allison

investigations

Sep 24, 2008 10:31 pm

As Congress begins wrestling with the Bush administration's financial industry bailout legislation (and Sen. Christopher Dodd's alternative), perhaps it's worth asking who are these folks who may well be deciding the economic fate of the nation? In this post (which took me about five hours longer to put together than I'd anticipated; hint to Labs: we need to design a tool to do this stuff faster), we take a look at the Senate Banking Committee and the House Finance Committee. Specifically, we look at how much of the campaign cash raised by members of those committees ...

Financial Bailout: Who does Frank see at his fundraisers?

by Bill Allison

investigations

Sep 24, 2008 8:52 pm

Among Rep. Barney Frank's top career donors are employees, their family members and PACs of the following players in the nation's financial meltdown: American Bankers Association (wants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to continue paying dividends, despite going bust), J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (which bought Bear Stearns), National Association of Realtors (working to "assure a robust secondary mortgage market"), UBS AG (which hopes the bailout will include foreign banks), Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association (hopes Congress will "hastily approve" the administration's plan), Credit Union National Association (members are included in any bailout plan), Bank of America ...

Hal Rogers’ Yearly Earmarks

by Anu Narayanswamy

investigations

Sep 24, 2008 8:37 pm

In the House Defense spending bill released last night, Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., sponsored an earmark worth $2 million for U-60 Leak Proof Transmission Dip Pans, an earmark he has backed for four years now. In the past this earmark has been awarded to Phoenix Products, Inc., a small company in McKee, Ky.

As Real Time reported last year, although this company has received more than $10.4 million in earmarks from Rogers, Army officials said at the time, that they have yet to decide if the transmission drip pans should be purchased from the company at all. As in ...

See Who’s Wining and Dining the House Finance Committee

by Ellen Miller Sep 24, 2008 6:36 pm

You already know that the very same lawmakers who are deciding the fate of the financial bailout receive campaign cash... View Article

TCS releases searchable earmark lists

by Bill Allison

investigations

Sep 24, 2008 6:27 pm

While most of Washington fixates on the $700 billion bailout package now being debated by the House Finance and Senate Banking Committees (Rep. Frank has added his own version of a bailout to the ones proposed by the administration and Sen. Christopher Dodd), our friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense are paying attention to some $600 billion in spending that Rep. David Obey, D-Ohio, concocted in secret, or, as he put it to Bloomberg News, operating "the old fashioned way by brokering agreements in order to get things done and I make no apology for it." Taxpayers has posted searchable ...