The next US president and the financial sector: just a coincidence?

US election time. Mainstream media are spending an huge amount of money to cover all sort of debates, pools, and talk, talk and still talk about useless things.
I think one of the most useful website to understand what is happening and which kind of policies will the future president promote, is Opensecrets.org.
It has an impressive amount of data: how much money is spent on this US presidential election, which sectors gives more money to which candidate, and so on.

I made a quick research and found some interesting stuffs. I found the total amount of money given by the sector defined as "Finance/Insurance/Real Estate" to the two main presidential candidates. And I present here the data for the three last US presidential elections (2012-2008-2004).
2004 elections: 
The Finance sector gives 19 million more to Republicans than to Democrats.
Republican's George W. Bush wins.

2008 elections:
The Finance sector gives 11 million more to Democrats than to Republicans.
Democrat's Barack Obama wins.

2012 elections: 
The Finance sector gives 34 million more (!) to Republicans than to Democrats.
..................

Now let's have a look at the "Top 5 contributors" to the two candidates:
Obama: University of Californa (1th), Microsoft, Google, US Government, Harvard.
Romney: Goldman Sachs (1th), Bank of America, Morgan Stanely, JPMorgan, Credit Suisse. I don't think I need to comment on it.
Conculsions? We cannot say that there is a causal relation, of course. And I cannot say that Mitt Romney will win the election because of this.
However, it is crystal clear that whoever will win, the financial sector will continue to play a fundamental role in the policy-making, as already does. Don't you believe it? It is plenty of evidence, for some more enterteining just have a look at the movie "Too big to fail".
On tuesday we will know if all this means something. Would it not be (at least) funny? Stay tuned!

Paid propaganda in the name of democracy

The premise is: Hugo Chavez's government in Venezuela, as many other democratically elected governments in Europe, USA and developed world, is far from perfect. But...my question is: do the Americans, the Europeans, and the Canadians know that their governments spend $40 million dollars to fund propagandistic projects in a foreign sovereign country, with the aim to provoke regime change? And, is this the international law?

I suggest you to read, and discuss, this article from Eva Gollinger on Znet, an independent non-corporated network of writers, journalists, and experts.

http://www.zcommunications.org/buying-the-press-by-eva-gollinger

Here some abstracts. I'd like to underline the fact that one ageny involved is "Freedom House", which is supposed to be independent (ah ah), and yearly gives a mark for the freedom of expression all over the world.....

US State Department documents declassified under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) evidence more than $4 million USD in funding to journalists and private media in Venezuela during the last three years. This funding is part of the more than $40 million USD international agencies are investing annually in anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela in an attempt to provoke regime change.

Today, corporate media outlets and their journalists use communications power to publicly promote the overthrow of the Venezuelan government. The owners and executives of these media corporations form part of the Venezuelan elite that, under the reigns of Washington, ran the country for forty years before Chavez won the presidency in 1998.
What these documents demonstrate is that Washington not only is funding Venezuelan media, in clear violation of laws that prohibit this type of “propaganda” and “foreign interference”, but also is influencing the way Venezuelan journalists perceive their profession and their political reality.

I'd like to ask to my American friends if this piece of news, which is quite serious politically, has been presented and discussed in any television news. About Italy, nothing has been said. They are so busy talking about Berlusconi (as always), hot weather, bikinis and beaches. In our case Freedom House is right: we are a partly free country.