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 readingHow Can Markets Help Policy Deliberation?
I just discovered DARPA's Policy Analysis Market project. The idea has me wondering what the place is for market based deliberations solutions, and when it's appropriate to give actors a self-incentive that isn't already inherent to a situation.
There's a strong argument to be made for the predictive power of markets, and their stabilizing incentive structures, but their application beyond economics hasn't really been worked out yet. Some examples of market-like political models include Fantasy Congress, and National Journal's Political Stock Exchange.
When success isn't able to be neatly defined as profit (as in financial markets), and when motivators and strategies are as complex as they are in a legislature, sometimes, paradoxically, it's profitable to operate at a loss. Indeed, one could suggest that all non-profits are the pure form of incentives being isolated from broader incentive structures.
(hat tip to this tweet from "hytmal"; my initial response is here)
Great 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!
New Investigations and Suitcases of Money
Now boarding, El Al nonstop flight to Israel. Please make sure your suitcases of money are properly secured in the Prime Minister's house. William Jefferson eat your heart out. An investigation into corruption in Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office led to a search of Olmert's house where suitcases of money were found. The suitcases, containing hundreds of thousands in American dollars (I know what you're thinking, American dollars, aren't they worthless now), came from New York businessman Morris Talansky, referred to in coded transmissions as "the Laundry Man." Olmert denies any wrong doing, claiming that the money was for campaign purposes. Judah Grunstein at World Politics Review makes about the only observation one can:
I don't know a whole lot about Israeli campaign finance laws, but I imagine that suitcases full of cash that go undeclared until a police raid on your home probably violate them.
Back here in the states, the Department of Justice opened a new investigation into the possible misuse of congressional staff by two offices. Reps. Jane Harman and Neil Abercrombie were accused of using congressional staff to do campaign work by a former staffer who recently plead guilty to fraud charges. It is a violation of House rules for congressional staff to do campaign work unless it is on their own time. This may also violate federal law statutes regarding the solicitation of political contributions from employees.
Both Harman and Abercrombie denied using staff for campaign work. It should also be noted that these violations rarely go anywhere. If anything, members get a slap on the wrist, which in congressional terms is a politely worded letter that stops short of admonishment. The House Ethics Committee should investigate this alleged misuse of campaign staff. They did recently when Rep. John Conyers was alleged to have forced a staffer to do campaign work and they should do so again. I'm not holding my breath though. (Sigh.)
Continue readingVA Secretary of Technology Gives Blogger Briefing
This afternoon I attended a talk by Aneesh Chopra, the Secretary of Technology for Virginia, hosted by New Media Strategies.
Chopra described his rather unusual job, a sort of newly styled state-CIO position, and gave us his vision for government and the development of the surrounding areas in the process.
Chopra began by listing the three priorities in his job as a cabinet member under the Governor. He sees his job in thirds. The first third deals with tradition IT manangement (are the servers working). The second third is his role as emissary and cheerleader for technology in government, soliciting, recognizing, and fostering creative new ideas, like combining forms to orient agency workflow toward a citizen-centric model. In his description of this aspect of his work, Chopra really shined, probably a sign of someone engaged in something new and constructive, full of ideas, and seeing potential everywhere he looked. He said "just scratching the surface" and "really simple things" repeatedly, more signs of someone enchanted by the possibilities of technology, and in the right position to make things happen. About including the public in his work, he said:
We have failed to tap the hidden talent of the uncredentialed.
I've tried to say this before in other ways--distributed expertise is disconnected from policy creation, etc--but his formulation captures the real potential for transparent and receptive institutions. Chopra sees analysis from bloggers as having huge potential for stimulating reform (and should check out the Open House Project), and, as I often do, bemoans the focus on the political and wonders about people's capacity to add to substantive policy debate and deliberation. His plan to integrate public policy ideas amounts to a small e-suggestions box for now, but Chopra is certainly deeply involved in the practical fight of how to make Virginia's government function more effectively though technology.
He's not just trying to get the government running smoothly, though. Chopra sees the development of the IT sector of our area's economy as the third major goal in his work, and has grand ideas to test about how young people given a real chance and a computer might find their way into the new tech economy. Virginians are lucky to have such a proactive visionary leading their tecnological development. Continue reading
Local Sunlight
Every week I climb into the depths of the local political blogosphere to find the Sunlight. I use this series to highlight local blogs that do a great job of covering local, state, and Congressional political news. This week I have highlights from
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