Lobbying Quotes

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”
― Barry Goldwater

“James Ed smiled. “We should start a cuddling movement. Cuddling would solve most of the world’s problems. I can just see our bumper stickers. Have you cuddled today?”
― Shafter Bailey, James Ed Hoskins and the One-Room Schoolhouse: The Unprosecuted Crime Against Children

“I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism.”
― Barry Goldwater

“Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting “prison-industrial complex”—the business interests that capitalize on prison construction—made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything—health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“Very few of the common people realize that the political and legal systems have been corrupted by decades of corporate lobbying.”
― Steven Magee

“And the banks - hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created - are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”
― Richard Joseph Durbin

“Under a system in which no single question is submitted to the electorate for direct decision, an ardent minority for or against a particular measure may often count for more than an apathetic majority.”
― Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals

“The Democratic Party would like to be re-elected so that they can continue to uphold almost no Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) whistle-blower complaints, enforce hardly any police internal affairs allegations, and corrupt corporations with lobbyists can continue operating outside of the law.”
― Steven Magee

“It truly disturbs me how little some leaders care. Few lobby for food stamps, because the people who need them aren't in positions of power. The logic is sad and twisted.”
― Kirsten Gillibrand, Off the Sidelines: Raise Your Voice, Change the World

“These were lobbyists—many of them compensated quite handsomely not to react as human beings.”
― Ron Suskind, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President

“To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. (...) The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“The UK needs a post Brexit US trade deal like a hole in the head. Given America's out-of-control opioid crisis, fuelled by prescription drug addiction, along with an obesity epidemic like the world has never seen, why on earth would the UK want to open its doors to US healthcare companies ? So that they can wreak untold havoc and destroy our National Health Service ? No thanks !”
― Alex Morritt, Lines & Lenses

“So it's 2019. I'm gonna say the right thing to do is for the US to declare bankruptcy (Trump can do it… done it before…), and dismantle the criminal state of Israel as it exists today. Unfortunately, politicians are so full of shit and AIPAC money, and the economy is so addicted to war, and the US population is so fucking stupid... that we’ll probably have to go and try to fuck up another two or three countries before moving on to a decent, honest life.”
― Dmitry Dyatlov

“A world where you cannot even speak to another person without worrying about what they are going to think of you, has not advanced much from the days when white people used to own slaves.”
― Abhijit Naskar, When Veins Ignite: Either Integration or Degradation

“Fashion and public relations share a charter to turn life to their own advantage, to make malleable and commercially useful the naked human perception. Both interests consider life too small, dull, and colorless to get itself sufficiently noticed without the lobbying efforts of professionals.”
― Kennedy Fraser

“Weber,... argues that... personal bias should not preclude the scientific ascertainment of objective historical facts.”
― Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology

“The hoops one has to jump through to win an election creates highly compromised leaders.”
― Freequill

“Our political process renders the public mute in a contest of volume.”
― Freequill

“You have the illusion of elections and we, the corporations, will purchase the elected government through lobbying and donations.”
― Steven Magee

“After living more than a decade in America now, I have come to accept that most of my fellow American citizens are as powerless as I am in influencing the American foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. Even more discouraging is that, by pointing out this reality, one is immediately labeled as ‘un-American’, ‘anti-American’, or other misleading adjectives and accusations to silence any voices seeking to change this bleak reality.”
― Louis Yako

“When you buy the government, you can do whatever you want.”
― Steven Magee

“This longstanding bipartisan revolving door between government and business reflects the inconvenient realities of life in a capitalistic democratic republic. On the one hand, when work- ing well, this revolving door allows businesses and government to draw on talented, ethical individuals from the private and public sectors to serve the interests of both shareholders and citizens. On the other hand, this revolving door can lead to corrosive cronyism and corruption that eats away at the integrity of both business and government as narrow interests are served, to the detriment of shareholders and citizens.”
― Tom C.W. Lin, The Capitalist and the Activist: Corporate Social Activism and the New Business of Change

“The Citizens United decision profoundly changed American politics. The Court’s ruling effectively lifted any limitations on American corporations’ political expenditures. The ruling permitted for-profit corporations to use corporate funds for campaign contributions to support candidates and issues. It also permitted wealthy and well-connected individuals to form corporations as vehicles to solicit, collect, and disperse funds, with little to no transparency.”
― Tom C.W. Lin, The Capitalist and the Activist: Corporate Social Activism and the New Business of Change

“The truth of the matter is that influence inequality makes income inequality look impoverished.”
― Tom C.W. Lin, The Capitalist and the Activist: Corporate Social Activism and the New Business of Change

“Mrs. Martin, I happen to be committed to a course of action. That does not mean I don't care whether the action is good or bad.”
― Spider Robinson, Melancholy Elephants

“political order, and political decay, presciently drawing attention to perceived faultlines in American society. the American political system has decayed over time because its traditional system of cheques and balances has deepened and become incessantly rigid. with sharp political polarisation, this decentralised system is less and less able to represent majority interests, but gives excessive representation to the views of interest groups and activist organisations that collectively do not add up to a sovereign American people.”
― Stephen D. King, Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History

“rising income inequality. not for nothing did Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ become a New York Times bestseller. Piketty made the strong claim that the rate of return on capital was, in the absence of wars and revolutions, always likely to be higher than the rate of economic growth. the implication was simply that the already well-off, basically those with no shortage of capital, would steadily get richer”
― Stephen D. King, Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History

“Finance capital subordinates the Canadian State more and more directly to its interests and control. State-monopoly capitalism — the integration or merging of the interests of finance capital with the state — is a new stage in the extension of corporate control to all sectors of economic and political life. The government, while seemingly independent of specific corporate interests, has become predominantly the political instrument of a small group comprising the top monopoly capitalists for exercising control over the rest of society. Finance capital uses the state to provide orders, capital and subsidies, and to secure foreign markets and investments. Monopoly capital supports the expansion of the state sector — both services and enterprises — when that serves its interests, and at other times it uses the state to cut back and privatize. The state is also used to redistribute income and wealth in favour of monopoly interests through the tax system, and through legislation to drive down wages and weaken the trade union movement. State-monopoly capitalism undermines the basis of traditional bourgeois democracy. The subordination of the state to the interests of finance capital erodes the already limited role of elected government bodies, federal, provincial and local. Big business openly intervenes in the electoral process on its own behalf, and also indirectly through a network of pro-corporate institutes and think tanks. It uses its control of mass media to influence the ideas and attitudes of the people, and to blatantly influence election results. It corrupts the democratic process through the buying of politicians and officials. It tramples on the political right of the Canadian people to exercise any meaningful choice, thereby promoting widespread public alienation and cynicism about the electoral process.”
― The Communist Party Of Canada, Canada's Future Is Socialism Program of the Communist Party of Canada

“Reading The Wealth of Nations as an attack against lobbying from special interest groups and cronyism suggests that for Smith the violence and inefficiencies of rent seeking mercantilist policies cause harm and are unjust.

For Smith, rent seeking and state capture by special interest groups is not only inefficient, but uses the (actual) "blood and treasure" of fellow citizens to enrich a few merchants under the false pretence of enriching the country. The Wealth of Nations can therefore be read as a moral condemnation of mercantilist policies: unjust policies are also inefficient policies.”
― Maria Pia Paganelli, Adam Smith: The Kirkcaldy Papers

“Landed interets also successfully staged a fightback around this time by reviving the language of stewardship, and by claiming to be the voice of rural Britain. Older organisations like the NFU and CLA were joined by new lobby groups such as the Moorland Association and Countryside Alliance. These lobbyists still claim to speak for the countryside, despite most of them representing only tiny numbers of people with huge power and wealth: the 27,000 members of the CLA who own around a third of the land of England and Wales; the 150 or so grouse moor estates that that own at least half a million acres of the English uplands Even the 45,000 members of the NFU and the 100,000 who belong to the Countryside Alliance comprise but a small fraction of the rural population. By shouting loudly, they have occluded the fact that farming, forestry and fishing make up just 7 percent of employment even in rural areas of England. Across the UK as a whole, agriculture generates just 0.5 per cent of GDP and employs only 1.5 per cent of the workforce, yet takes up 71 per cent of the land. Land use decisions remain disproportionately dominated, therefore, by a small number of people.”
― Guy Shrubsole, The Lie of the Land: Who Really Cares for the Countryside?