You guys are really hopeless!  Something like this which has a chance of passing, and you can’t get on board to promote it in spite of the encouragement of Public Citizen and the extreme likelihood of another scandal occuring as soon as the mid-term elections.  Plus all the rising public discontent about lobbying.  What would it take to get you all on board?  Or shall we just give up trying?

Multiple current troubles all point in the direction of drastic need for reform.  The machine is held together by nothing but money and the influence of people who depend upon war, poor people’s mortgages and a Rube Goldberg “surveillance” system to keep them in power.

Courage. Commitment. Common Sense. Cooperation.

in order to see the evil in lobbying, real stories about real victims must continually be high-lighted…search “presidio, sean walsh, chloe murphy, conor o’sullivan, sarah kelly,” in search engines such as google, bing, yahoo, excite, lycos, etc.  And search on an on-going basis.

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Of course, it should be understood that lobbying needs to be
treated as the crime of influence peddling that it is and that
those who offer the money and those that take the money, if law
enforcement were doing their job and the prosecutors also, for
lobbying to be totally obliterated which is what needs to be done
instead of it remaining as ‘the way of doing business’.

Sadly, this won’t happen because the courts and the scotus is
part of the crime or protectors of those being prosecuted.

And they all either end up marrying congressional
staffers or congressen themselfves.

  My congressperson was lobbyist,  married a congressman,
he ate to much Chesapeake Bay seafood and died,  not she
is it.

  Then the girl I knew from grade school staffer, high up
married umpty ump years…...ran off with a lobbyist.
IT IS ONE BIG HAPPY, HAPPY , FAMILY….lets support them

I have serious reservation about this conclusion. Sixteen years ago saw the infamous “Contract With America and the Gingrich Congress wherein lobbyists were actually writing and revising bills in the Senate cloakroom, bills that became law.

Now I do note that the study only went back ten years but does anyone seriously believe things have changed that much? I reject this bit of whitewashing of our lobbyists as “harmless and self correcting”.

Health Care Bill a breakthrough?  NOT!  The people were required to purchase high priced private health insurance or face a financial fine.  Clearly the lobbyists won!  What a financial windfall! 

Financial deregulation was driven by lobbying and brought down the capitalist system.  Involuntary socialism rescued the banks who shared in the socialist benefits, not the people. 

Clearly this study was influenced by right wing money to justify their greed.  Fortunately objective economic historians will see right through this study.

****************

“”“A 10-year study of the influence business finds that the
billions of dollars ($3.5 billion in 2009 alone, according to the
Center for Responsive Politics) thrown at elected officials add up
to a whole lot of nothing—that is, the influential spend a lot of
time, energy and cash stalemating each other and keeping
things the way they are.”“”“
*****************

“A 10-year study of the influence business”

I guess ‘influence business’ is legal and ‘influence peddling’ is
illegal.  If the scotus decides, they would consider it two
different businesses. And I shouldn’t presume that there isn’t
any monthly retainer automatic money deposits being
processed, should I?

A hopeful piece of this insightful and detailed article:
“Publicly financed elections would be the best reform we could have. If we could have one reform, that would be it.”
  “The Fair Elections Now Act, a sweeping campaign finance reform bill backed by a coalition of advocacy groups, including Public Citizen, would allow candidates for Congress to run for office on a blend of small donations and limited public funds. “It stands the best chance I have ever seen for a congressional public financing bill,” Holman says. “It is reasonable to expect House approval this year, and then we have to take the battle to the Senate, where we do not yet have the votes.”
  “From past experience, Holman knows the legislation is worth putting out there, no matter what. All it may take is another major scandal, a mind-blowing tale of graft and corruption to rival Abramoff’s, and — poof! — it could be goodbye status quo, and hello, serious election reform … after 40 years of trying.”

A 10-year study came up with that?  10 years it took the researchers? Many of us
could have done that study in a few days with less funding. Lobbying from private
interest groups is designed to maintain the legislature in their payroll. There’s no
other outcome to expect from that.