HOW TO REALLY STOP BIG OIL RUNNING OUR GOVERNMENT

In light of the offensive "magic wand" speech today by Dubya (stands for Wastrel), here's an online tool for you to track precisely how Big Oil buys our politicians. Oil Change International has a stated purpose of separating oil and state, and they/we are making progress. They note that "in the 2006 election:

• ALL of the incumbents who took no oil money won. Each and every one of the Congressional incumbents of either party that refrained from accepting campaign contributions from Big Oil in 2006 was successfully re-elected to office.

• Big Oil’s biggest friends lost. Four of the top five Congressional recipients of campaign contributions from Big Oil during the 2006 election cycle lost to cleaner candidates in close Senate races.

• The 110th Congress is the least beholden to the oil industry in a generation. Roughly one quarter of Congress is completely free of oil industry campaign donations, and the majority takes less than $5,000 in each election cycle."

In addition to education and calls for action, they have a marvelous tool for tracking oil money contributions, Follow the Oil Money. You can search by zip code, U.S. Congress, and Presidential Race, and you can see the results in a Relationship View (similar to a cloud format), Politician View, or Company View.

My search for the U.S. Presidential Race today, rendered in Politician View, turned up the following:

GIULIANI, RUDOLPH W. $659,158
ROMNEY, MITT $442,063
MCCAIN, JOHN S $291,685
CLINTON, HILLARY RODHAM $289,950
RICHARDSON, BILL $206,125
OBAMA, BARACK $163,840
THOMPSON, FRED DALTON $161,654
PAUL, RON $92,742
HUCKABEE, MIKE $76,739
BROWNBACK, SAMUEL DALE $43,665
EDWARDS, JOHN $36,350
DODD, CHRISTOPHER J $33,350
THOMPSON, TOMMY G $18,400
BIDEN, JOSEPH R JR $6,600
VILSACK, THOMAS J $2,300

Please note: The genuinely progressive Democrats received far less oil money than the current front-runners.