Comments on: Who Bought Your Politician?

By: GawainLavers

GawainLavers — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 00:32:00 +0000

Nancy Pelosi got about $2m total; her highest donor was 20k (Occidental Petroleum — probably accidentally wrote an extra zero), the rest of the top ten under 11k. Can’t rightly call that “ownership”.

By: AsteriskCGY

AsteriskCGY — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 22:04:00 +0000

My local Rep is apparently owned by a costume and hosiery business. After that the State of California.

By: Mister44

Mister44 — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 21:56:00 +0000

Emanuel Cleaver (D) MO House – He’s in the pocket of Big BBQ.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 21:01:00 +0000

What?

Also, why?

By: flarktobble

flarktobble — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Aha! I missed that. That would explain the smaller-than-expected amounts.

By: SamSam

SamSam — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 18:48:00 +0000

Hmmm, actually I don’t particularly mind my newest senator being the candidate of Harvard University, University of California and MIT.

I’m glad she beat the Fidelity, Raytheon and Goldman Sachs guy.

By: Stooge

Stooge — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 18:22:00 +0000

They’re grouped together under corporation names, but it’s important to note that these donations are not from corporations, but from individuals who have to declare who their employer is. Of course, they may all be working in unison to further a corporate agenda, but it’s certainly not a given.

Indirect contributions, however, which aren’t included in the widget, can and frequently do come through a corporate entity. In Casey’s case, for example, the AFL-CIO paid for over $170k in TV advertising in the past year and a survey of 10,000 voters in the state to help their 5,000 canvassers best target which areas got the 600,000 doorstep visits, which got the 1,000,000 phone calls, and which just got the 1,500,000 flyers.

Somehow, even if the CEO of Comcast had personally delivered Casey $61k in a muffin basket, I don’t think he’s the first person Casey would roll over and start wagging his tail for.

By: Melinda9

Melinda9 — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 17:42:00 +0000

Can’t find one of my senators, Richard Blumenthal (CT) on this list or the 2010 one. (I read more carefully – the 2010 one only had incumbents)

By: flarktobble

flarktobble — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 16:46:00 +0000

I feel your pain….I still can’t believe he won. Don’t bail out, though — I’m still convinced we can make it better if the good folks don’t all leave.

(To say that he’s owned by Goldman Sachs is a bit of a stretch, though — they were less that half a percent of his total. That’s scarier, though — it means that he’s just like that on his own.)

By: flarktobble

flarktobble — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 16:32:00 +0000

Excellent point. After playing around with this for a while, I have to say I’m pretty surprised at how _little_ these folks (generally speaking) seem to be taking from the various individual corporations, especially as the raw dollar count gets higher.

Unscientifically clicking about with no regards to state, office, or party affiliation, it looks like the top contributor is regularly below one percent, although normal sample size and selection warnings apply here.

Not all of them are in the same ballpark, of course — of Rob’s two examples, Casey’s (D-PA) top contributor is 0.6% and the top 5 add up to 1.8% (of $9.5million), while Christian’s (R-PA) top contributor is over 16% and the top five are almost 46% (of $61k).

What’s more interesting to me is the industry-collected data over at Wired’s reference data provider, MapLight ( http://maplight.org/us-congress/interest ). Even in the case where each individual politician doesn’t take a whole lot from a particular corporation, it’s pretty impressive to see how much each industry pours into the process.

No matter what the data says, or what conclusions you draw, a big thank you to MapLight and Wired for putting this out there…

By: Ito Kagehisa

Ito Kagehisa — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 16:31:00 +0000

I was disappointed to see Joe Biden (RIAA – DE) not included.

By: Boundegar

Boundegar — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 16:11:00 +0000

No, who. But it’s Bob Casey.

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 15:46:00 +0000

Even more exciting is that he is Ted Cruz, who won the Republican primary in Texas by screaming “I’m the most conservative” louder than anyone else. The Tea Party also likes him.

I need to move somewhere else.

By: Joshua Bardwell

Joshua Bardwell — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 15:44:00 +0000

Whom.

By: Stooge

Stooge — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 15:22:00 +0000

Rob, another way of looking at it is that if Casey tells Comcast to go fuck themselves he loses a whopping 0.6% of his campaign contributions.

By: Lemoutan

Lemoutan — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 15:20:00 +0000

You must be so proud.

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 15:16:00 +0000

Goldman Sachs owns my new Senator-elect. Yay!

By: Teirhan

Teirhan — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 15:13:00 +0000

Interesting, I didn’t know Time Warner had enough of a presence in my home state to co-finance my senator with Stanford and Northrop Grumman. On the other hand, apparently the representative for my congressional district didn’t receive any major political contributions from corporations.