Quotes About Interest groups

Corporations declare more than $2.6 billion in lobbying expenditures each year. "For every dollar that unions and public interest groups spend, large corporations and their associations now spend $34.

In U.S. politics, 'compassion' means giving money and privileges to well organized interest groups at everyone else's expense.

Rules are not improved by sloganeering, fact-free letter-writing campaigns, or special pleading from interest groups.

Challenge your self to read what your children are forced to endure, and then ask why we expect that textbooks - written and negotiated line by line to placate politically active interest groups in Texas and California - are up to the task of supplying a first-rate curriculum.

The problem is, of course, that these interest groups are all asking for changes, but their enthusiasm for change rapidly disappears when it affects the core of their own interests.

A political survivor has to follow a path through the ineffably complex maze of voters, donors, interest groups, and media mavens.

Political parties and interest groups strive to make their concerns become current triggers of your moral modules. To get your vote, your money, or your time, they must activate at least one of your moral foundations.

Political scientists after World War II hypothesized that even though the voices of individual Americans counted for little, most people belonged to a variety of interest groups and membership organizations - clubs, associations, political parties, unions - to which politicians were responsive.

The U.S. is ruled by private interest groups and by the neoconservative ideology that history has chosen the U.S. as the 'exceptional and indispensable' country with the right and responsibility to impose its will on the world.

What corruption is for poor countries, lobbying is for rich ones, a means of obtaining political influence through the expense of money.9 No other country has anything like the number of American lobbyists who load up legislation with interest group bargains.

This highly negative narrative about interest groups stands in sharp contrast, however, to a much more positive one about the benefits of civil society, or voluntary associations, to the health of democracy. Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America noted that Americans had a strong propensity for organizing private associations, which he argued were "schools for democracy" because they taught private individuals the skills of coming together for public purposes.

In the hands of good leaders, such a system can actually perform better than a democratic system that is subject to rule of law and formal democratic procedures like multiparty elections. It can make large, difficult decisions without being hampered by interest groups, lobbying, litigation, or the need to form cumbersome political coalitions or educate the public as to their own self-interest.

Unrepresentative interest groups are not simply creatures of corporate America and the Right. Some of the most powerful organizations in democratic countries have been trade unions, followed by environmental groups, women's organizations, advocates of gay rights, the aged, the disabled, indigenous peoples, and virtually every other sector of society.

Interest groups are not the same as individuals. Through false nostalgia for the New Deal, you are taking the younger generation hostage. They are the ones who are going to have to pay far greater taxes. They are the future's forgotten men.

When Xi Jinping took command in 2012, some of us anticipated that he might turn foreign policy in a more conciliatory direction by centralizing the policy process and curbing the scrum of interest groups that had characterized Hu Jintao's oligarchy. Xi's personal authority was, and is, more than sufficient to restrain the various groups that had been promoting their own interests by overreaching under Hu's collective leadership.

Meanwhile, as Francis Fukuyama has argued, the very legitimacy of democratic politics is being corroded because 'interest groups . . . are able to effectively buy politicians with campaign contributions and lobbying', a process that he dubs 'repatrimonialization

There is an abundance of misinformation, exaggeration, and blatant lies being spread by interest groups regarding the prospects for embryonic stem cell research.

All this is to offer the heresy that the role of presidential leadership, yet another shadow cast by the Roosevelt years, is often exaggerated. Presidents of course can take executive actions, especially in foreign affairs, that have dramatic effects. But only sometimes, for many snags—bureaucratic inertia, the capriciousness of public opinion, partisan opposition, interest group pressures, Congress—hem in presidential designs.

American cities are kind of difficult contexts to work in. They are politically complex. There are a lot of different interest groups. It takes immense political skill to get anything done at all.

We are living in a globalised world and most of us are worried stiff about powerful interest groups steadily pushing India towards obscurantist and fundamentalist beliefs and regressive economic policies.

Bulgaria has been deindustrialized by interest groups who extracted state assets like oil states extract the oil in their ground.

But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.

State interventions in markets (once created) must be kept to a bare minimum because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals (prices) and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions (particularly in democracies) for their own benefit.

Socialism meant the responsibility of the whole for the individual, whereas "nationalism" was the devotion of the individual to the whole; thus the two elements could be combined in National Socialism. This prestidigitation allowed all interest groups to have their way and reduced the ideas to mere counters: capitalism found its true and ultimate fulfillment in Hitler's socialism, whereas socialism was only attainable under the capitalistic economic system.