(2012-01-05) Transparent Lobbying Market Idea

Inspiration

a friend pointing to the whitehouse.gov petitions site, and me thinking "maybe that would work if you attached dollars"
the new Matt Taibbi piece showing how the same folks (like Goldman Sachs) showed up in the top-contributors list for both Barack Obama and John McCain (Presidential Candidates 2008).

Idea: a transparent Lobbying Market

all contributions to candidates must instead be made to positions/actions ("veto any bill including any clause providing military detention for American citizens") applied to some relevant cohort-group (e.g. the US President is 1 group, the US Senate another, the House another, etc.), during some time window
all the people within the cohort group that support/take the position/action split the money evenly.
a contributor could move money at any time up until some appropriate close-time (which might have to be the end of the action-time-window, but sometimes shorter when an actual law is signed). This would allow action-proposals to be refined, and priorities to be changed. This would cause a timing mismatch between when money is "needed" to buy Big Media time vs when it would be paid out, but I'm sure Goldman Sachs could arrange financing.
you'd need adjudicators like in Earth Web Book to evaluate actual actions against contribution-positions.
all contributions would be public. So you'd know where everyone was putting their money.

Update

this also reminds me of Glenn Greenwald's piece on Ron Paul vs Barack Obama - 2012-01-01-GreenwaldOnPaulAndProgressives - in terms of "voters" prioritizing what they really care about.
hmm, this gives no money to the losers in an election. So maybe the pre-election window is not tied to hard actions like votes-on-bills but rather on "signing on to" specific positions. This might also solve (or at least shorten) the timing-financing issue I noted above.
- but what stops a candidate from "supporting" every position?

Bill Seitz