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Tag Archive: Investigations

New tool tracks new lobbyists and their clients

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After the Nov. 2, 2010 election, lobbyists filed more than 350 new registration forms, disclosing their hiring by clients seeking to influence everything from the federal budget to Kyrgyz government negotiations with the United States to supply jet fuel to airbases in Manas, Kyrgyzstan and Bagram, Afghanistan. 

As members of the 112th Congress begin work, special interests will start adapting to the new political landscape in part by hiring new lobbyists to work the corridors of power on Capitol Hill. To follow those adaptations, the Sunlight Foundation is launching the Lobbyist Registration Tracker, a tool for tracking newly hired lobbyists ...

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Some tools that might help the Pajamas Media’s Transparency Project

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Roger L. Simon, writing at Pajamas Media, announces a new transparency project, soliciting suggestions from readers on what the blogosphere-bloomed news organization should dig into. I wouldn't presume to play assigning editor for the effort, but hope I can help by pointing to some resources (full disclosure--many, but not all, are built by or supported by the Sunlight Foundation) that might help Pajamas Media readers do some digging on their own and get the ball the rolling.

Simon notes that government spending is a big issue, and starts by asking about spending on government employees. He writes, "Some of ...

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Diplomats not the only ones aiding Boeing business abroad

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Over the weekend the New York Times ran a story highlighting the diplomatic relations used to help Boeing acquire business in foreign nations, but the informal and potentially inappropriate dealings between diplomats and foreign leaders done for Boeing's benefit is not the only thing the U.S. government  does to help the company's bottom line.

The Export-Import Bank of the United States regularly issues loans and loan guarantees in foreign countires to help Boeing export its commercial aircraft. According to the Ex-Im Bank's annual reports for 2009 and 2010, the bank issued almost $20 billion in long-term ...

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Looking back at 2010

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Hard to believe that a year that began with the Reporting Team analyzing and critiquing federal data released under the administration's Open Government Initiative ended with our pursuit of political organizations that do not disclose campaign donors. In between, we continued to publish the only resource for tracking congressional campaign fundraising, Party Time, updated our Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker, delved into Recovery.gov data and earmark disclosures, and, with the help of our friends at the Center for Public Integrity, identified dozens of high value federal data sets that government agencies have not released.

The Data Mine project delved ...

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Information scarce on bids for failed banks

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The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is making less information available to the public about how it is dealing with the rising number of bank failures in 2010. Over the last year, the agency has failed to post a complete list of bids on 41 percent of the deals it makes with other banks to take over failing institutions--and what information it does provide is more limited than before.

Before May 2009, the FDIC would provide, upon request, the names of all entities placing bids on failed banks and how much each of them bid for the bank in question ...

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Key GOP lawmaker wants to stop financial regulations

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Reuters reports that Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas, the incoming chairman of the Financial Services Oversight and Investigations subcommittee, wants to delay implementation of the new financial reform law for a year "so regulators have more time to understand the impact of rules they are writing."

What's missing from the story, however, is how much money Neugebauer has collected from the financial sector for his election campaigns--the very folks who might be interested in such a delay. In his most recent race he got more than $418,000, dwarfing contributions he received from other sectors, according to the Center for ...

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Senate discloses earmarks…poorly

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Senate Appropriations chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, packed more than $130 million worth of defense earmarks into the $1.1. trillion Omnibus Act that the Senate released yesterday. Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., the committee's top Republican, larded the bill with more than $167 million defense earmarks. To find that out, one has to download the earmark table--in PDF--then convert the PDF to a tab delimited format, then plug them into a database (we've done so for Defense earmarks in a Socrata database below).

In January's State of the Union address, President Obama called for Congress to release ...

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Senate releases Omnibus spending bill

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The full text of the Senate's 2011 $1.1 trillion Omnibus bill is here; supporting documents--including tables featuring pages and pages of earmarks--are here. Among the Senate's priorities--$10 million to the John P. Murtha Foundation (in the Defense earmarks, here, and note that the funds were requested by five house members--Rep. Jim Moran, Va., Rep. Mark Critz, D-Pa., Rep. Chaka Fattah, D-Pa. and Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio).

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Banking interests strive to get regulations written their way

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New meeting records disclosed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) last week show that corporate banking interests, many of which lobbied on the Dodd-Frank Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, continue to weigh in on its implementation by the agency.

On November 9, the same day the agency issued new proposed rules changing the way banks are assessed fees for the exhausted deposit insurance fund, agency officials met with executives from eight banks, insurance companies, trade associations, and law firms on the issue. Institutions represented included the Financial Services Roundtable, Regions Bank, Hartford Financial, and State Street ...

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Firms severing ties with Wikileaks have multiple interests before feds

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Amazon.com, Paypal, MasterCard and Visa have ceased to do business with Wikileaks--the controversial organization that's published thousands of classified U.S. government documents. All four have spent millions of dollars lobbying the federal government on a variety of issues ranging from keeping Internet sales exempt from taxation to the regulation of credit card issuers under the Dodd Frank financial reform bill.
 
Lobbyists for Amazon.com, for example, have reported spending more than $20 million to influence the government since 1999, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. In the company's most recent lobbying disclosure ...

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