New Posts

Feb 8, 2016

Top 400 Taxpayers See Tax Rates Rise, But There’s More to the Story

As Americans were gathering party supplies to greet the New Year, the Internal Revenue Service released their annual report of cumulative tax data reported on the 400 tax r...

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Feb 4, 2016

Chlorine Bleach Plants Needlessly Endanger 63 Million Americans

Chlorine bleach plants across the U.S. put millions of Americans in danger of a chlorine gas release, a substance so toxic it has been used as a chemical weapon. Greenpeace’s new repo...

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Jan 25, 2016

U.S. Industrial Facilities Reported Fewer Toxic Releases in 2014

The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data for 2014 is now available. The good news: total toxic releases by reporting facilities decreased by nearly six percent from 2013 levels. Howe...

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Jan 22, 2016

Methane Causes Climate Change. Here's How the President Plans to Cut Emissions by 40-45 Percent.

  UPDATE (Jan. 22, 2016): Today, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released its proposed rule to reduce methane emissions...

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Senate Passes Limited "Audit the Fed" Amendment

During the ongoing Senate debate on the financial reform bill, Federal Reserve transparency briefly took center stage. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced an "Audit the Fed" amendment to the bill during the week of May 16, which the Senate approved in a 96-0 vote after the amendment was greatly scaled back. The amendment would instruct the Government Accountability Office to "conduct a one-time audit of all loans and other financial assistance provided during the period beginning on December 1, 2007 and ending on the date of enactment of this Act."

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CBO Monthly Budget Review, April 2010

Congressional Budget Office

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which economist James Galbraith suggested in yesterday's Washington Post should be eliminated because its "projections are indefensible, internally inconsistent and economically impossible," released on Friday one of its more accurate pieces of work, the Monthly Budget Review (MBR) for April.

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BP Won't Say What Toxics It's Dumping Onto Its Oil Spill

British Petroleum has in fact gone "Beyond Petroleum" and is now spilling tons of toxic chemicals known as dispersants onto their colossal oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, hoping to break up the slick before it reaches shore. However, BP refuses to disclose what chemicals are in the dispersants they are dumping into the Gulf. The chemical identities are considered trade secrets. Without knowing the chemical identities, we may never know what additional insults BP has left us to clean up for years to come.

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Factory Farms Take Federal Money, Refuse Disclosure of Pollution

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) yesterday announced plans to expand a program with the Department of Agriculture (USDA) that uses tax money to help factory farms capture their methane pollution and burn it for energy. Before EPA and USDA spend more money on factory farms, the very least these facilities can do is agree to tell us how much they are polluting. Big Agriculture has successfully fought an attempt to measure the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from these large factories, known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). With these giant livestock operations in position to reap financial rewards from climate change policies, the public needs to know what they are emitting in order to measure progress and ensure accountability.

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EPA Puts More Environment Online

Several new online tools developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are now available to provide the public with a variety of environmental information collected by the agency. The tools provide access to information about enforcement actions against polluters in the Chesapeake Bay watershed and across the nation, plus information about health risks from toxic chemicals and the ongoing oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. These online information access tools follow the recent release of the EPA's Open Government Plan, which makes public access to information a priority for the agency.

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DISCLOSE Act Seeks to Blunt Impacts of Citizens United

To blunt the impacts of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) recently introduced companion bills, both called the DISCLOSE Act (the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections Act). The legislative response would create new, rigorous campaign finance disclosure requirements meant to prevent moneyed interests from drowning out the voices of citizens and smaller advocacy organizations.

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Commentary: Fiscal Hawks Shaping Focus of Debt Commission

On April 27, President Obama’s fiscal commission convened its first meeting, kicking off a seven-month discussion among 18 panelists on ways the federal government can reduce the federal budget deficit and shrink the national debt. The next day, many of those same panel members, including co-chairs Erskine Bowles and former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY), attended a "Fiscal Summit" organized by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation to discuss the same issues. Talk about how to overcome deficits and the debt at the Peterson event, which centered on eviscerating the nation's social safety net, mirrored discussion at the commission meeting.

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Open Government Advocates Grade Federal Agency Openness Plans

On May 3, a group of open government experts, including OMB Watch, released a review of federal agencies’ initial Open Government Plans that were published on April 7. Overall, the independent audit organized by OpenTheGovernment.org found that agencies did good work, but much remains to be done.

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Audit Reveals Wide Variation in Agency Plans to Make Government More Open

WASHINGTON, May 3, 2010—A ranking of agencies’ Open Government Plans compiled during an independent audit reveals the strongest and weakest agency plans, with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at the top of the list and the Department of Justice (DOJ) at the bottom. Strikingly, the audit also found that several agencies that are supposed to lead by example on the government openness front failed to do so in their Open Government Plans.

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Resources & Research

Living in the Shadow of Danger: Poverty, Race, and Unequal Chemical Facility Hazards

People of color and people living in poverty, especially poor children of color, are significantly more likely...

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A Tale of Two Retirements: One for CEOs and One for the Rest of Us

The 100 largest CEO retirement funds are worth a combined $4.9 billion, equal to the entire retirement account savings of 41 percent of American fam...

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