People who look at lobbyist money using the various search-tools out there probably fit into 2 categories at any time - some in both at various times:
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puzzled, looks at money that a politician gets to try and understand their position
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looks to see what a given lobbyist (or lobbying group/consultant) gives
Both fine goals.
Time comes when a fella wonders what the big picture is - like "who all gives money to so-and-so, and once you know who-all-etc., who else are they giving to.
Doing this kind of digging becomes a lot (really) harder with the simple query tools that are on senate.gov and house.gov. I should know - I've tried myself.
If you've read this far, there's more . .. .
So, I started digging - starting with house.gov, and what I found is that
The last point is bold-face because this interests me very much.
Obfuscation
I got annoyed at this obfuscation (unintentional though it may be), so I downloaded the zipped congressional-lobbying data XML files (about 16 500 once unzipped), churned through them using various automated XML-processing/database-writing tools, and some prelim data-cleaning (whoever wrote this software for lobbying-data submission needs to be schooled on software, data, XML and validation-checking righteousness because the data is all over the place. Not to worry, we can recover from most of that.
Bottom line is this : I have a working MySQL database of lobbying-contribution data - 2 tables, contents not entirely clear to me - yet. It needs a bit of work, and maybe some more cleaning, and the relationship between the 2 kinds of files is not entirely clear to me; at first it seemed to be classical header/detail, but there are "detail" entries without matching "headers" - so clearly it's not really header-detail.
But I digress maybe, so back to the main point of this diary.
My point is this: there are master money-channelers at work for big-business. Doubtless it's not as simple as it could be to figure out what's going on (gee, wonder why that might be?), BUT - it's possible to query a proper relational database much more easily that it is to query XML (there are many high quality open-source tools that make it a snap). It's not amazingly complex, but getting data out of XML is not something everyone needs to do (I do it so not everyone has to . . . .)
So, finally cut to the chase :
are there any masters of lobbying-law who are interested in helping to mine this data (with ideas and questions - I can do the technical heaviy-lifting) and figure out some home-truths? I'm certain that I'm not the first person to realize that the franken-CSV and download-limits together scuttle any serious effort at figuring out what's going on. Now that the data (such as it is) is all in one place and more transparently stored, there may be something in digging at it, and there may be good reason to continue this effort to get the data from senate.gov as well, and mine it.
For example, there's a "fine fella" who has $5 million against his name; I'll leave names out of here because there's no glory in the GOP-like tactic of
"Mr X has $5 mill; sure would be peachy to know where THAT came from. We expect it was above-board, but we don't know that he didn't get it from the back of a truck at night".
There's another fine fella featuring in Kos diaries today (Monday 12th), who has gathered (if I understand the meaning of this data correctly) over 1/2 a million.
Here's a little tidbit from yet another fine upstanding scumbag. Note that the losers who designed this system seem to allow free-form entry of critical fields - making the data harder to clean and link up.
20,000 American Council of Life Insurers PAC
20,000 NBWA PAC
19,000 BRACEPAC
15,000 Patton Boggs PAC
15,000 TPAC
13,000 Bechtel PAC Committee
12,000 AEGON USA INC. POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE
12,000 Hogan
10,500 America's Health Insurance Plans PAC
10,500 America's Health Insurance Plans Political Action Committee
10,500 American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) PAC
10,000 BASF Corporation Employees Political Action Committee
Now - sure - there's money flowing in and out of various funds, PACs, foundations, etc. etc., specifically meant to throw people off the scent, but unless someone looks and looks deeply we may never get the full picture. The "full picture" may not be a secret, but that full picture may not be widely known. We can change that.
So, what's the level of interest? This is a sword with more than one edge; there may be things here that won't fit neatly into everyone's comfort-zones.
Lastly - spare the handwringing; you could argue that lobbying of some sort is necessary for the US. This is not my debate; my debate is "who's donating, and who's doing favors - get some sunlight on it".