President Biden’s domestic agenda has taken a back seat to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but it drew unprecedented attention from Washington lobbyists and special interest groups last year.
The lobbying industry had a record year in 2021, taking in $3.7 billion in revenue as companies, associations and other organizations pressed Congress and the Biden administration over trillions of dollars in new pandemic spending and rules affecting health care, travel, tourism and other industries.
The revenue figures, compiled in recent weeks from government records by OpenSecrets, show that lobbying spending began steadily growing in 2017, President Donald Trump’s first year in office, before mostly flattening in 2020 as the pandemic began. The jump in 2021, when lobbying spending was about 6 percent higher than 2020, came as the government’s pandemic interventions and record expenditure took center stage, including an additional $1.9 trillion in pandemic relief and a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package.
The surge came as companies and associations aimed to roll back regulations on their industries — many of them […]
Lobbyists are Apolitical. They spend on both sides which means that both sides are corrupted. As with anything else, one side might be more corrupt than the other, but on some issues it is both sides.
The $3.7 Billion in lobbying money spread evenly among our representatives, senators and president works out roughly to be 7 million dollars per year, per “representative”.
Does that make you feel powerless bunkie? What do all those “representatives” agree on?. . unwavering, through time: A) war funding, and B) deregulating banks.
What does it lead to? War and people living in the streets with record profits for hedge funds holding bidding wars for domiciles.
Our ideal of democracy is being disproven as we watch. The two party system along with unregulated banks and bribes and a Supreme Court that equates money with speech but not speech with money as well as forgetting the constitution (At least WWI & II were declared!) and instead making judgements consistent with stare decisis a term no where in the constitution.
I reckon all the historians are right, when the oligarchs rule, the empires fall. We get to see this up close.
What if we were a constitutional democracy…. would billionaires be consistent with the first amendment which grants freedom of the press?