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They Rule Overview They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 1000 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations. Context A few companies control much of the economy and oligopolies exert control in nearly every sector of the economy. The people who head up these companies swap on and off the boards from one company to another, and in and out of government committees and positions. These people run the most powerful institutions on the planet, and we have almost no say in who they are. This is not a conspiracy, they are proud to rule, yet these connections of power are not always visible to the public eye. Karl Marx once called this ruling class a 'band of hostile brothers.' They stand against each other in the competitve struggle for the continued accumulation of their capital, but they stand together as a family supporting their interests in perpetuating the profit system as whole. Protecting this system can require the cover of a 'legitimate' force - and this is the role that is played by the state. An understanding of this system can not be gleaned from looking at the inter-personal relations of this class alone, but rather how they stand in relation to other classes in society. Hopefully They Rule will raise larger questions about the structure of our society and in whose benefit it is run. The Data We do not claim that this data is 100% accurate at all times. Corporate directors have a habit of dying, quitting boards, joining new ones and most frustratingly passing on their name

I think this data must be very useful to the people in Occupy Wall Street

What is Spokeo? Spokeo is a people search engine that organizes vast quantities of white-pages listings, social information, and other people-related data from a large variety of public sources. Our mission is to help people find and connect with others, more easily than ever.

Scott Wilson of http://screen-scraper.com/ has created a useful comparison of web-scraping software and posted it as a public doc on Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsaY3Pb1lTh1dERtbWtTN0U3REgtYlNld0stV0NCV1E#gid=0

A free search engine for data sets published by governments, private companies and other organizations. It now indexes 255,180 datasets from many sources.