Nicholas Rubin, a 16-year-old self-taught programmer, has made a very interesting plugin for your browser called Greenhouse. You can install this and it will show you where every political candidate’s contributions come from. It highlights the names of any House or Senate members that are on the page you are viewing. Then, you can hover your mouse over the name and see where they are getting their campaign money. It shows every organization/industry that is sponsoring the candidate. It can also show the percentage of contributions that are from individuals. This includes contributions from individuals that are less than $200.
Here is the statement he released with the plugin:
“It is my hope that providing increased transparency around the amount and source of funding of our elected representatives may play a small role in educating citizens and promoting change. If you use the extension when reading about a Congressional vote on energy policy, for example, maybe you’ll discover that a sponsor of a bill has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the oil and gas industry. Or maybe you’ll learn that the top donors to a member of Congress who opposes tort reform are lawyers and law firms. I use data from the last full election cycle (2012) and plan to update it as more relevant data becomes available. Special thanks to OpenSecrets.org for providing access to that data.
The motto of Greenhouse is: “Some are red. Some are blue. All are green.” What it signifies is that the influence of money on our government isn’t a partisan issue. Whether Democrat or Republican, we should all want a political system that is independent of the influence of big money and not dependent on endless cycles of fundraising from special interests. The United States of America was founded to serve individuals, not big interests or big industries. Yet every year we seem to move farther and farther away from our Founders’ vision.”
You can download the plugin from this website.
For Seth Meyers’s hilarious take on campaign contributions, see the video below:
Featured image by 401(K) 2012 via Flickr, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
