Trying to find your way around this place? Like most expositions, we offer a map: 
Appalachian Voices shows you how to connect to legislators shilling for Big Coal and how to follow the $$. They do good work there at AV. We've pointed to their actions before (with Mountaintop Removal, for one).
Go to this link: Follow the Coal Money. Then click on Zip Code and Name search. Then you get two ways to see the connections-- one, a visual mapping that connects your political representative to her/his funders; the other, tabulated data. The image below shows the results for Virgil Goode (R-VA), who is (unfortunately) the congressional representative for my district.
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It's not just about coal! There's a similar page for oil money (www.followtheoilmoney.org) that has the added advantage of allowing you to print out "Oily Dollar Bills" with a member's name, picture, and total amount of oil money they've received. You can pass them out at actions, send them in to the congresspeople, be creative.
Look up your state's representatives. What you find might not be surprising, but it's crucial this close to the election. Let's make sure our elected officials represent us--NOT the fossil fuel industry.
Posted by: moe33 | October 16, 2008 3:57 PM
I've used both of those tools before and they are really interesting. It's almost depressing how influential money from oil companies can be. Oil Change takes this oil and coal money data and compares it to how they voted on clean energy bills. The correlations are astounding! The more money they take from oil companies, the less likely they are to vote for clean energy! I don't think that sounds like democracy to me...I'm a US citizen and I want clean energy!
Posted by: Kate | October 17, 2008 12:01 PM