Zonkerbl wrote:
Is that a lobbyist or a lawyer? To me a lobbyist is someone who talks to political representatives and other political actors to try to advocate for a certain point of view. A lawyer is a tool used to bend the application/interpretation of laws to serve your interest. Lobbyists are a kind of lawyer, but not all lawyers are lobbyists, and not all lawyers who call themselves lobbyists are "lobbying" all the time.
Ruthlessness is not evil. It's being good at your job within the rules that are permitted/enforced. Using a lobbyist to take advantage of market failures introduced by government intervention is smart business. Allowing the government intervention to produce the market failure in the first place is the root of the problem. Is it fair that big businesses have economies of scale in hiring lawyers/lobbyists to peddle their influence? No. Does that make lobbying evil? No. What's evil is that small businesses can't afford lobbyists -- they cannot buy as much democratic representation per dollar that a large business can. Rather than labeling democratic representation as evil and trying to suppress it, we would all be much better off figuring out ways to lower the cost of democratic representation for smaller entities. That's what consumer advocacy groups are for. That's what online political campaigns are for.
Bravo.
Lobbying ~/= right of redress of grievences
I agree with what I take as your basic premise, that big money has an unfair advantage
in lobbying. That has resulted in our current society of a tiny number of haves, and a
large number of have-nots.
I stumbled across an interesting panel discussion last night on C-span (from GWU)
on ending poverty. That's a lobby that could well use the kind of resources that
plutocrats and corps currently have. One of the speakers repeated a quote
(not sure who first said it) but the gist of it was that we have a highway to
poverty and a sidewalk out to the middle class. This affects people of all
political persuasions, ethnicities etc.
fact - we have the greatest disparity in wealth and income of any advanced country.
Some of the cause of that is due to the influence of big money on political decisions
and priorities (by BOTH parties).
link to video of panel discussion
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/TavisSm