The Bush Administration's lust for secrecy is well documented. And as davidk at TPM Muckraker wrote recently, Bush and Company is "the most secretive administration in history."
But even so this latest gambit by the Administration is over the line. The Washington Post's Walter Pincus reports on how earlier this month the Bush White House issued a memorandum outlining new Executive Branch rules on the handling of sensitive but not classified information. They coined the term "Controlled Unclassified Information" (How's that for bureaucratic doublespeak?) for information so sensitive that its disclosure would create "risk of substantial harm." They replaced the term "Sensitive but Unclassified."
Continue readingPublius Project@Berkman
In conjunction with the Berkman@10 Conference (where I just returned from spending a fascinating two days), the Berkman Team has launched their Publius Project. (The name is borrowed the writers of the Federalist Papers. ) The goal is for it to be a platform for lively discussions on the governance and rulemaking of the Internet, and they have solicited a number of thoughtful Internet gurus to submit short yet provocative essays on the subject.
They have posted op-ed style essays by Pierre de Vries, Esther Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Reed Hundt, David Johnson, J.P. Rangaswami, Doc Searls, Wendy Seltzer, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, Kevin Werbach, and Jonathan Zittrain so far. They asked me to submit a piece as well, and I am so honored to join this discussion with such a collection of Net luminaries. You can access my submission here.
Continue readingShadow Government
Last week, The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) released The Shadow Government, another of their eye-popping reports that they are so known for. The report is the result of an investigation of federal advisory committees, the secret, multi-layered and unaccountable bureaucracy that influences much of the federal government with precious little oversight and largely no record of their activities. There are over 900 committees, boards, commissions, councils and panels that advise the various agencies of the Executive Branch and the White House, meant to offer government expert opinions on various topics.
Continue readingHappy 25th Birthday!
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.
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