Brilliant of the Sunlight Foundation to show who pays each elected speaker, in text next to them as they’re speaking at the Heath Care Summit. Dig it here, live.
[Later…] In the interest of fairness, here’s a Democrat, and his major backers:
(I’ve cropped and moved the video image a bit so browsers won’t shrink the numbers too much.)
[…] pointer from here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2010/02/25/what-you-see-is-what-they-buy/ […]
I too watched the summit via SunlightFoundation’s page. I think very highly of that group and thought their coverage was innovative and quite interesting, but …
Much of the twitter-driven supplemental commentary focused on the contributions that the then-speaker had received from the healthcare industry. What struck me was that the amount of contribution didn’t seem to correlate at all with what the speaker was saying. In particular, a number of the Democrats, while receiving huge chunks of corporate largess, were sounding a very populist, almost anti-corporate themes.
Naturally, many/most were pandering (at least to a degree). But nonetheless, after a while, I just stopped looking at the twitter notes about all the contributions they had received.
Alas, I don’t think much happened. Theater, basically.
I mean, did anything change?
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