Legal and systematic corruption. Make it illegal. Good start for campaign finance reform: http://mayone.us
The information is kind of infuriating and depressing but at least you found a nice Winsor McCay illustration for it.
Then there are those dirty hippies who support net neutrality and have for years, even in their platform, and refuse contributions from corporations. But keep it under your hat or decent folk might vote for 'em.
Iâm not from America, so could you please explain why it costs less to buy a Democrat than a Republican?
Wait a minute, what the fuck? Congressmen are allowed to own stock outside of blind trusts?
Welcome to America!
The Congressmen who sent letters to the FCC condemning Net Neutrality
received 2.3 times more campaign contributions from the cable industry
than average.
Not saying they did or didnât do anything sleazy (my guess is the former), but this is kind of a meaningless statistic. We hear how much above the mean it is, but without knowing what the variances on these contribution tend to be we donât know if this is statistically significant. If the sigma on the distribution of money to vote is, say, 4x, then these would not be a meaningful result.
Like I said, I imagine that this is a significant result, but I find it frustrating that I have to imagine. I wish news organizations would report in a way that actually gives mathematically useful numbers.
i hope breaking the internet for americans, and driving tech innovation overseas was worth their vacation homes and private yacts. classic profit over freedom move.
I find âpost withdrawnâ messages fascinating at the best of times, but Iâve not had a reply to my posts withdrawn before⌠Iâm intrigued 
Cute idea but I have a bridge in Brooklyn Iâd love to sell you cheap if you believe for one second that congress is going to vote against its own interest. If anything theyâll just pocket the money and say âThanks suckers.â
Theyâre not out to convince candidates, rather, theyâll support the campaigns of those politicians already committed to one of these reforms: http://reform.to/#/reforms
Just a reply to the wrong person, sorry.
Doh - there goes the mystery out of my life:smiley: D
This â and opensecrets.org â are great sites, but itâs more or less categorized raw data without any of the analytics that are needed to draw deeper insights. From these data it would be possible to do the kind of âinsight analyticsâ Iâm speaking of, but no one has really done it in a focused way (as far as I can tell). People will do it on a specific topic or issue at times, but no one (again, as far as I know) takes the larger horizontal slice thatâs really needed to understand the data in context. Itâs good to know, for example, who contributes to your local representatives and to see how they vote, but whatâs lacking is a wider picture about how that compares to other representatives, what issues theyâve voted against despite contributions, etc. On the highest level, for example, is Xâs vote on Y statistically significant? Is it a single point is X swayed in a way that can be shown over a multitude of issues to be significantly correlated to contributions?
We all âknowâ the answer, but our knowing isnât particularly well informed without these wider views.
I think such a wider view would be an interesting and important project. Unfortunately I donât have the time, despite having some of the skills neededâŚ
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