In today's edition, The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune reports that the annual Washington Mardi Gras party kicks off tonight at the Washington Hilton, a weekend-long event billed as "one of the most sought-after tickets in any season in Washington." The event's parties, the paper says, "are arguably the most intimate gatherings of businesspeople, politicians and lobbyists left in Washington" after new congressional ethics rules were adopted. Writing that the parties are"a throwback to the days when politicians and lobbyists socialized regularly outside the glare of the public spotlight," the paper added that they are "largely immune to the new ethics standards."
A secretive, Louisiana-based group headed by a lobbyist and former aide to now lobbyist and former Sen. John Breaux (D-La.) organizes the event. The organization declined to name this year's corporate sponsors, but in years past they included R.J. Reynolds, BellSouth, and Lockheed Martin, according to the paper.
Continue readingBig Money Still Rules
Catherine Holahan, writing at BusinessWeek, published a story last week on how the various presidential candidates are having tremendous success at attracting contributions from small donors, those who make gifts of less than $200. The campaigns are tapping blogs, e-mails, social networks, YouTube videos, and their own Web sites to reach into the hearts and pockets of new contributors. This year's campaigns are receiving more small donations than the campaigns in previous elections, according to the Campaign Finance Institute.
However, this year's candidates are also receiving more large money donations than ever before. And apparently the ratio of large donors to those who give $200 or less has remained relatively the same as in prior elections. So you have to wonder about the 'new' conventional wisdom that large donors means less to the candidates this year as a result of the influe of small money, and that some how the campaign finance system that allows the big donors to get their hooks into the candidates is less awful than its ever been because of the influx of small money.
Continue readingOmidyar Network Invests $2M in Sunlight
Sunlight is extremely happy to formally announce today an investment of $2 million from Omidyar Network, a mission-based organization established by Pam and Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. This is the second such grant Sunlight received from Omidyar Network.
Omidyar Network's investment will support Sunlight's operations and grant-making to organizations that create "Web 2.0" tools that make information about the workings of Congress and the influence of money in politics more accessible to citizens. Since our founding in 2006, Sunlight has awarded more than $3.1 million to organizations who use the Internet to make Congress more open and accountable to the public. Read the full press release here.
We are also pleased to formally announce that Lawrence Lessig, renowned expert in intellectual property and Stanford University Law Professor, has joined our Advisory Board.
Round and Round They Go
Earlier this week, CorpWatch published a fascinating article by investigative journalist Tim Shorrock on a new and rapidly growing side of the military-industrial complex: space-age, technology-driven intelligence capabilities. The article centers on Steven Cambone, a former high-raking official in the U.S. Department of Defense now turned defense contractor, and how he personifies the world of high tech intelligence gathering where the distinctions between private industry and government are increasingly virtual.
Cambone has been a longtime associate of Donald Rumsfeld , under whose tenure he served as the Pentagon's top intelligence officer. In March 2003, he became the first Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. It was in this role that he and Rumsfeld succeeded at transforming the Pentagon's acquisitions away from the traditional large weapon systems like aircraft carriers "and radically increased its purchases of space-age war technologies such as communication systems, sensors, robots, low-flying satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles," Shorrock writes. When Rumsfeld stepped down in late 2006, Cambone followed soon after. He landed as vice president for strategy with QinetiQ North America, a British-owned, defense-intelligence contractor that specializes in just the type of whiz-bang gadgets and systems he and Rumsfeld placed in the Pentagon's shopping cart.
Continue readingWidget Week
Earlier this week we talked about all the cool new applications over at OpenCongress.org (which are really taking off), and today we're delighted to tell you that MAPLight.org has produced some new widgets that allow you to track fundraising for over 1,500 congressional candidates. These widgets are perfect for blogs, social networking pages, and personal Web sites, and they are completely customizable according to the candidates you are interested in.
The congressional money race widgets follow MAPLight.org's August release of presidential money race widgets that allow users to track funds raised by presidential candidates.
Continue readingElectronic Filing in Connecticut
The Hartford Courant editorializes today about Connecticut's elections commission's new website that promises significant gains in regard to political transparency for the state. The commission was given the responsibility of designing an electronic campaign reporting system for candidates for state office, PACs and party committees. Now, seeing who has donated money to state candidates will be as simple as online shopping, as The Courant reported last week. "Disclosure is meaningless if the information is not readily accessible, searchable, sortable and easily understood," as the commission's director was quoted. Amen. Their new database enables candidates, PAC and political party committee chairs and treasurers to electronically submit campaign finance statements and other required information.
The Courant called on the commission to take further steps for transparency. The current law requires only statewide candidates who raise more than $250,000 have to file electronically. Those who do not meet that high threshold, which includes most of the members of the state legislature, are required only to file paper reports. And the editors called the General Assembly to amend the state's campaign finance law, passed legislatively in 2005, to require electronic filing by all serious candidates for state office and PACs.
Continue readingForgive Us For Bragging
We are absolutely delighted to have been profiled in the Chronicle of Philanthropy's edition this week (sub. required, but here's a link on our site) and we wanted you to know about it. The article highlights our distributed research projects, as well as other elements of our work and grant making. It also gives a glimpse of some of our esteemed citizen researchers and some of our grantees. We couldn't do it without both of them.
Continue readingWhere the Money Comes from Matters
The official voting of the 2008 presidential race begins tonight at the Iowa Caucuses. And next Tuesday, New Hampshire voters will cast votes in the first primary of the election. Before casting a ballot I want to encourage everyone in all states to visit OpenSecrets.org, the website of our colleagues at the Center for Responsive Politics, the "follow the money" folks. CRP's easily accessed Race for the White House database profiles the fund raising and spending of each candidate's campaign. Unfortunately, because of filing rules, CRP only has data through September 30. Fund raising and spending reports for October through December are not due to the Federal Election Commission until the end of this month. Nevertheless, the data CRP has shows the important early period where the various candidates' strengths and weaknesses is gauged largely by the amount of money raised.
CRP breaks down the data to reveal each candidate's contributors by state, metropolitan area and zip code; contribution size; gender and industry the donor is associated with. You can even look up individual donors by candidate, industry or ZIP code. "Before you vote, count the candidates' cash," CRP Executive Director Sheila Krumholz advises Iowa and New Hampshire residents, as well as those in later-voting states. "Just as it's important to know the candidates, it's important to know who got them this far and might hold sway with them in the White House," Sheila adds.
Continue readingNew FOIA Law Signed
In all the festivities surrounding the New Year's holiday, you might have missed President Bush signing the Open Government Act of 2007 on Monday without comment, the first reform of the Freedom of Information Act in a decade. David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Center for Citizen Media, hails the act for expanding the definition of who is representative of the news media. "This change would significantly benefit bloggers and non-traditional journalists by making them eligible for reduced processing and duplication fees that are available (to members of the media)."
The Associated Press reports that the new law "is aimed at reversing an order by former Attorney General John Ashcroft in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, in which he instructed agencies to lean against releasing information when there was uncertainty about how doing so would affect national security."
(Updated: The Associated Press reported on the new law; the First Amendment Center did not issue a statement as previously reported.)
Continue readingPublic Accountability Is Going Down
File this under "Two steps forward, one step back."
Secrecy News highlights a change in disclosure policy by several federal defense intelligence agencies in anticipation of last week's launching of USAspending.gov. Claiming that online disclosure of their unclassified contracts would compromise security, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) asked the Department of Defense for and received permission to keep the documents secret. "I appreciate your concerns that reporting these actions to the publicly accessible website could provide unacceptable risk of insight to your individual missions and budgets," wrote Shay D. Assad of the Under Secretary of Defense in a December 7 memorandum (pdf). "But when it comes to intelligence spending, there will actually be a net loss of public information because categories of intelligence contracting data that were previously disclosed will now be withheld," writes Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News editor.
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