>Today, Public Campaign is launching a new poster and associated
>website aimed at attacking the way all of Washington has turned into
>an extension of corporate America and Wall Street. The poster photo
>captures the real "State of the Union," showing Bush speaking to the
>merged floors of Congress and the stock market--or what we like to
>call the trading floor of Congress, where politicians exchange our
>tax dollars for campaign contributions from wealthy special
>interests. (This poster has been in the works for months; we
>honestly had no idea Bush would pitch his entire new "economic
>stimulus" plan directly at the stock market. Honest!)
>
>The subtitle of the poster is "Congress Meets Wall Street: How Big
>Corporate Campaign Contributions Are Buying America...And What the
>Rest of Us Pay." Beneath the photo are a series of thirteen charts
>detailing how big corporate campaign contributions from leading
>industries are buying America, what they are getting for their
>political investments and what the rest of us pay in higher taxes,
>dirty air and water, billions lost from our retirement funds, and
>the like.
>
>The purpose of the poster is two-fold: to give people a
>one-stop-shopping display of all the critical ways that big money in
>politics hurts them, and to stir up some populist fire about this
>problem and the solution we're fighting for, which is full public
>financing of elections (as in Maine and Arizona, our flagship states
>for this reform).
>
>To see the poster, go to www.publicampaign.org/stateoftheunion
><http://www.publicampaign.org/stateoftheunion>. You can see a
>blow-up of the image, read the charts and get the big picture.