Dollars and Cents

[Joe Fields]

Last year, according to opensecrets.org (who keeps track of political contributions and lobbying in Washington), the telecom industry spent 65.3 million dollars lobbying members of congress. AT&T alone spent a little over 3 million dollars lobbying various politicians. 1.2 million dollars went to Democrats. In fact, AT&T is the second all time leading lobbying corp., having spent over 39 million dollars lobying various congressmen and women over the years.

Sixty-five million dollars....

Money well spent on their behalf, I'd say, since 31 Democratic senators voted for cloture on the FISA Bill the other day.

Sixty-five million dollars....chickenfeed for congressional protection.

Is it any wonder that 31 Democratic Senators voted for cloture? And that, of those 31, sixteen of them have listed as their top corporate contributors telecom companies?

Here is a list of the Democratic Senators who voted for cloture, and amounts of money contributed to them by the telecoms. I am only listing the Senators whose top corporate contributors were telecoms. (To clarify, to be counted as a top corporate contributor, they had to be in the top 20.)

Baucus..Montana...$53,700.00

Bayh...Indiana...$43,691.00

Dorgan...N. Dakota...$33,700.00

Feinstein..California...$165,730.00

Inouye..Hawaii...$28,000.00

Johnson...S. Dakota...$22,000.00

Lincoln...Arkansas...$119,200.00

McCaskill...Missouri...$18,599.00

Mikulski Maryland...$33,400.00

Murray...Washington...$34,939.00

Nelson...Florida...$43,150.00

Nelson...Nebraska...$99,750.00

Pryor...Arkansas...$52,050.00

Reid...Nevada...$78,550.00

Rockefeller..W.Va. $144,700.00

Webb...Virginia...$28,850.00


There couldn't possibly be a correlation, could there?


Just a thought: maybe we can buy our freedoms back, if we can get enough money together and form our own lobby. Freedoms to the highest bidder?

[anonymous171]

1. Why are corporations even allowed to lobby?

[ryanmuegge]

2. Evan Bayh: that bastion of liberalism.

Hopefully he is not the VP pick just to appease Clinton supporters.

[chimpymustgo]

3. All of these whores should be booted out of office.

[Joe Fields]

4. kick

[barack the house]

5. The irony is, it means telecom customers are paying for the privilege of being spied on. NIce...

The main thing is we mostly don't need to worry about spying with a Democrat in office, not their style to suppress political opposition with spying. Got to get a Democrat in office and work to make that for at least 20 years.