Evidence of an American Plutocracy: The Larry Summers Story

“So here is the evidence for an American plutocracy of a narrow and discrete but hardly harmless sort. Wall Street seduced the economics profession not through overt corruption, but by aligning the incentives of economists with its own. It was very easy for academic economists to move from universities to central banks to hedge funds …

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Obama Packs Debt Commission with Social Security Looters

LittleSis is expanding its investigation into the networks of money and influence behind efforts to gut Social Security. Join the Social Security Looters research group if you want to get involved. The most generous bank bailout in history has amplified Wall Street’s considerable political influence, and the economic implications of this democratic calamity go well …

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September 11, 1989

It wasn’t my intention, launching LittleSis with Kevin in January 2009, to be so consistently absent from our blog. Early on we made the decision to divide up our growing organizational responsibilities, with Kevin taking on research, writing, and outreach — the activity that keeps LittleSis fresh — while I focused on adding to our …

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NewsShift: Watchdog Journalism With a Long Tail

Every year for the past few years, Knight Foundation has conducted a News Challenge that awards about $5 million in funding to a selection of projects that Use digital open-source media To distribute news and information In a geographic community As Kevin recently noted, this year we finally got our act together and submitted a …

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New Ways to Follow the Money on LittleSis

Faithful readers may have noticed that a good chunk of our recent research has centered on analysis of campaign contributions made by various power players: Chicago 2016 Committee Gave More to Obama than Goldman Sachs Following the Chamber money trail, part 1 and part 2 This has been made possible by a new tool we’ve …

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LittleSis Goes Open Source: An Offering and an Invitation

As you may know, LittleSis is built entirely with open-source software, out of necessity as well as out of principle. Over the years the growing OSS movement has given budget-strapped organizations an ever-expanding suite of free and powerful tools to implement ambitious technology projects, as well as the support of a generous community of developers …

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Rep. Grijalva: Everything in Baucus bill “had to be approved by the industry”

This morning Democracy Now! interviewed Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which is vowing to withhold support from any health care reform bill lacking a strong public option. Amy Goodman asked Grijalva about the significance of the revolving spinning door between the industry and Senator Baucus’ staff, citing research first published …

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McKesson: Healthcare Giant, Network Hub

Last week Kyle wrote about some of the important names behind Chevron as part of our latest research project on LittleSis, which we’ve posted as a pitch on Spot.Us. We’re going to be blogging about our findings as we go, so we’ll hopefully produce a post about each of the ten companies we’re scrutinizing as …

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Do you like our new look?

You may have noticed late last Friday we updated the LittleSis look. For months we’ve been asking our designer friends for help developing a site redesign plan, and we finally made our first steps towards implementing it. The changes so far aren’t exactly radical, but looking at the old design now makes us cringe a …

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Catch this CrocTail

Last week our friends at CorpWatch unveiled their great new API, which extracts corporate subsidiary information from SEC filings and makes the data available for the world to navigate in a structured way — or to reuse. SEC 10-K filings are notoriously difficult to parse with automated scripts (that’s where LittleSis gets its corporate boards …

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