Keeping a Close Check
Deborah Venable
09/28/09
How
Lobbying Can Interfere
As
our government bureaucracy has grown, so has the professional field of
lobbying. If ever there was a more
useless calling for an individual to pursue, I can’t figure what it would
be. A lobbyist’s only purpose in life
is to influence legislation via the legislators that do the legislating. As soon as you throw in the “professional”
aspect to lobbying, (making a career out of it by getting paid for it), you
have entered the arena of corruption.
Corruption happens when people allow their “special interests” to be
bought and sold via the outer reaches of the congressional floor.
When
I was a child, my first experience with a lobby was the lobby in my local movie
theatre. I learned right away that if
you spent much time there it would cost you money because you would probably
end up buying more than you needed in snacks and drinks, after which you would
have to return to the lobby, from which you could access the restrooms, (waste
disposal) from your overindulgence, which may even prompt you to overindulge
some more and spend even more money.
Not only that, but any time spent in the lobby was time away from what
was really going on in the theatre!
As
an aside from all that, every time you would remove yourself from the theatre
to attend the lobby, you were generally distracting to those who wished to keep
their eye on the ball, err, movie, as you disturbed their concentration with
your actions.
I
can only imagine how distracting it would be if they actually paid people to
“lobby” in a movie theatre. Do you
think it would end up effecting how the movie turned out?
Paid
lobbyists are second only to overpaid legislators in the destruction of the
government of a free republic. How many
aides to legislators does it take just to handle these lobbyists I wonder? (Answer later.)
Political
action groups are almost more prolific and less effective (in a positive way)
than governmental regulatory groups.
The kicker is that many of these groups are then restricted from
lobbying by their own guidelines or regulations via their grant and resource
rules. Tell me, just what is their
purpose? Can it be anything but
sinister to expect a group, which is receiving money from any number of dubious
sources, and admonished to maintain a non-profit status, to accomplish anything
positive within a burgeoning government bureaucracy? The ones that DO lobby, (and all of them do in one form or
another) generally do so for the purpose of helping a group – not individuals
gain recognition and/or status within legislative bodies.
To
cut to the chase, the most powerful lobbies in the country today are those
which boast the most members, collecting the highest dues, and stirring up the
most disruption in the theatre of legislation, while giving individuals who
might actually make a difference a reason to cop out of the whole process. You see, it is absolutely irresponsible to
think that paying dues to some PAC or lobby is the best way to keep a close check
on a government that is supposed to be a representative republic looking out
for individual liberty.
I
know I’ve bitten off a lot here, but this is an educational site, so bear with
me. Way back when “joining” was not a
favorite national pastime, we had a republic made up of responsible individuals
pursuing capitalist endeavors to grow the American Dream. We made our own choices, took our own lumps
as we learned the ropes, fought our own battles against injustice, and enjoyed
more individual freedoms than any society in the history of the world. Career politicians were not superstars. Lobbyists were voters first and spent more
time with “waste disposal” than anything else effecting legislation.
It
was only when we decided to contract out our self-governing responsibilities to
paid lobbyists that our self-indulgence got expensive. We forgot to keep a close check because we
expected others to do it for us. We
took ourselves a nice little nap in that dark theatre, and only woke up long
enough to go to the lobby for more self-indulgence.
We
bought into that old, “there’s power in numbers” routine and forgot that the
greatest power any of us have is the power of our individuality. Our own God-given moral compass got rusty
and somebody replaced it with a new-fangled device that downloads all its
information from the same few powerful sources – those wonderful tracking polls
that aren’t designed to keep a close check on anything but which way the wind
is blowing. And it’s always blowing for
change.
Statistics
From
this source
we find statistics from the “Office Of Integrity Commissioner. Did you know there was such a thing as an
integrity commissioner?
Lobbying Top
Spenders
– Yes, this information also exists.
Revolving Door – Discover the revolving door of government influence
from this neat little source. Make sure
you take a look at the other sub-titled information that exists there.
Advertising and Public Relations
Services
– from the Bureau Of Labor Statistics we learn specifics of this industry, all
too often funded in large part with foreign money.
Interesting
Little Video
on the lobbying reform question. Obama
says he’s all for it. Is it
happening? Well, I’m sure that NO
lobbying is going on within the health care debate – on either side – aren’t
you?
Now,
this all just scratches the surface on the subject of lobbying, public
relations and advertising strategies (as they may effect legislation) and the
fact that while everyone agrees we need more “transparency” in government,
whole industries are doing everything they can to smoke that glass.
Leading
Voice
Why
did all this happen – this move to compete for government influence? We let it happen, just as surely as we let
the advertising industry take over every facet of the news and entertainment
media. We are supposed to be a free
capitalist society, and I wouldn’t have it any other way, but what we have is
anything but that. There is nothing
free in the machinery that cranks out money and influence simultaneously even
as it attempts to limit freedom, prosperity, and individual responsibility by
tossing that money and influence into cavernous sinkholes of corruption.
We
allowed the “leading voice” in our government and society to be drowned out by
the noise of self-indulgence and uselessness.
There is no way to rein in waste that we are constantly creating and
sponsoring. That leading voice needs to
define us again as individuals – not just members of various groups. If government does not serve individual
interests, then it does not serve anyone.
If government is only influenced by the groups with the most money, then
it does not serve anyone. Indeed, if
money is the only motivator in the government of a free society, then that
society is not served.
Why
do legislators need huge staffs of people, and why do taxpayers have to pay for
them? They are merely “handlers” of we,
the people. They are the intermediaries
that stand between the people the legislators should be listening to and the
paid activists the legislators will listen to.
If you write a letter to your congressman or call his or her office,
your communication is intercepted by and in most cases responded to by
staff. Your concerns may or may not be
passed along to the legislator.
Keeping
a Close Check
The
generally accepted fact is that you can judge the size of government by the
number of lobbyists. The supporting
staffs of all branches of government generally equals or comes close to the
number of active and registered lobbyists.
Believe me, individuals and individual interests get lost in this glut
of money and influence. The whole idea
of lobbying as a good thing got started because of proximity. The great majority of American citizens were
not located in close proximity to the seat of their government, therefore, when
someone came up with the bright idea of unofficial representation to represent
the people to their official representatives, it seemed logical enough. The whole term, “lobbyist” came about
because of a couple of people waiting around in the lobby of a hotel to grab
the attention of Lincoln as he passed by sometime during the Civil War.
Just
about anybody who is anybody in the whole government complex scene will tell
you that lobbyists perform an invaluable service to the public, and we probably
couldn’t begin to do without them.
Well, I, for one, would like to try.
Who knows? It just might
work. After all, didn’t we just see a
large gathering of ordinary American citizens in Washington D.C. on September
12th – there for the explicit purpose of pursuing their
Constitutional right for redress of grievance?
(Look it up. It’s the oft
forgotten part of the first amendment.)
Then there are the numerous town hall meetings that took place all
summer, (wherever elected legislators were brave enough to find out just what
was on the minds of the people they were supposed to represent.)
This
is how you keep a close check on government.
This is how you let representatives know how they need to be
representing you. Do you think anyone
in government would have the audacity to ignore you in such settings if it were
not for their ability to shove their responsibility to listen to their
constituents off on the middlemen personified by their staffs and
lobbyists? And how do you know what
they are hearing from these people? We
already know that most of media can’t be trusted, so why do we trust the
communications of our grievances to such a shadowy concept of paid influence
peddlers?
Redistributing
Responsibility
If
you have bothered to listen to anything Obama and those he surrounds himself
with say, you will know that their ultimate stated goal is redistribution of
America’s wealth. They hate capitalism
and embrace socialism. They hate
individual liberty and embrace communism.
They hate America’s heritage and culture and embrace “fundamentally
transforming” America. They speak out
of both sides of their mouths whenever it suits them, but their very actions
absolutely prove these accusations. How
do you respond to that?
How
do you respond to the continuing attempt to indoctrinate American children to
take these beliefs into their future and trample on their rightful
heritage? Are you going to continue to
believe that you can effectively draw attention to legitimate grievance with
paid intermediaries, or do you think perhaps that you know better than anyone
else how you feel about these things, and the responsibility to effect your
government is better handled by you?
If money is truly the only thing that can control
government, then we are already lost.
The redistribution of wealth should never be a goal of this
government. How about, instead, we
redistribute responsibility back into the hands of the individuals that
government directly affects? I am
absolutely sure that future generations of Americans would thank us for
that. I am absolutely sure that God
would continue to bless this country for that.
For anything less, we should expect nothing but the worst that has ever
befallen a human society that lost itself in self-indulgence and the gluttony
of an overbearing government.