"Follow the Oil Money"

This is a pretty interesting visualization of how much money presidential candidates are getting from oil companies.

Oil Change International also offers a tool to show you how much other politicians (you can search by zip code) are getting.

That's cool. Why was Guliani so big, though? He's out of the race now, but I never thought of him as being in bed with Big Oil.

Of course, these guys have plenty of money to give. Exxon was the most profitable company in history last year... $39 billion in profit. The next most profitable company had only about 1/2 that.

I wonder just how much influence a $50,000 campaign contribution buys you these days.

Lets see....ExxonMobil made $40.6 billion in 2007 (on sales, by the way of something over $400 billion, around 10%) so an expenditure of $50 K is not significant at that scale.  Also, relative to a billion $ presidential campaign, makes one wonder about the significance of the oil patch contributions as compared to other orgs.

It amazes some of us that folks seem to think that the Oil Companies somehow have bought congressional  influence.  Look at legislation targeting the Oil companies, doesn't seem like they are getting positive preferential treatment.  Hillary would take ALLof the Oil company profits, for example....curious, I'd say.