Also I wonder if additional transparency could work as an opposing force to moneyed interests. We could petition the government to create a realtime spreadsheet

Also I wonder if additional transparency could work as an opposing force to moneyed interests. We could petition the government to create a realtime spreadsheet of all donations and lobbying so we could query it and see the entire money chain at any time. That way even gaps in the chain would be suspicious and fraud would be more easily revealed by crowdsourcing. Taken to the limit, we could even get an immediate summary of what percentage of our retail purchases go to which political issues and buy according to our ethical values. It would be a way to put democracy back in the hands of the middle class since our combined buying power is larger than the wealthy class (I assume, I actually don't know if this is true anymore).