Following the Money Trail Online – Pogue’s Posts – Technology – New York Times Blog

0atwong • 20th Jun 2007 • Conversation Pieces

Following the Money Trail Online – Pogue’s Posts – Technology – New York Times Blog
The first step to solving a problem is recognizing that you have one.

That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway, to avoid becoming depressed by Maplight.org.

It’s a new Web site with a very simple mission: to correlate lawmakers’ voting records with the money they’ve accepted from special-interest groups.

All of this is public information. All of it has been available for decades. Other sites, including OpenSecrets.org, expose who’s giving how much to whom. But nobody has ever revealed the relationship between money given and votes cast to quite such a startling effect.

If you click the “Video Tour” button on the home page, you’ll see a six-minute video that illustrates the point. You find out that on H.R.5684, the U. S.-Oman Free Trade Agreement, special interests in favor of this bill (including pharmaceutical companies and aircraft makers) gave each senator an average of $244,000. Lobbyists opposed to the bill (such as anti-poverty groups and consumer groups) coughed up only $38,000 per senator.

Surprise! The bill passed.