Quotes About Lobbying

My good friend Walter Mondale is a good lapdog. He'll give them [special interest groups] everything they want. He'll lick every hand.

We have two Governments in Washington: one run by the elected people—which is a minor part—and one run by the moneyed interests, which control everything.

Democracies have a weakness: If a bad law has enough money or people behind it, it stays on the books.

What does it mean that the number-one funder for political campaigns in our state is the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which is the prison guards' union? It means that law enforcement organizations are deciding who will be our governors and our state senators, who in turn write laws to expand prisons.

American politicians are responsive almost solely to the interests and desires of their rich constituents and interest groups that primarily represent big business.

Association of Petroleum Producers—spoke with federal government officials 536 times between 2008 and 2012, while TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, had 279 communications. The Climate Action Network, on the other hand, the country's broadest coalition devoted to emission reductions, only logged six communications in the same period. In the U.K., the energy industry met with the Department of Energy

In 2013 in the United States alone, the oil and gas industry spent just under $400,000 a day lobbying Congress and government officials, and the industry doled out a record $73 million in federal campaign and political donations during the 2012 election cycle, an 87 percent jump from the 2008 elections.

Many of us think of people who lobby for pure water and pure food as food faddists or health nuts. We call a section in our local supermarket the Health Food Section. What is the rest of the store called, the Death and Disease Section?

In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense.

The people who talk about the middle class aren't upholding their interests in the legislature.

For far too long, Congress has been focused on the CEOs, the millionaires, the billionaires.

An aim of the movement, it would seem, is to turn houses of worship into the cash machines of the political system by allowing special interests to pour millions of tax-free dollars into churches, which could then turn around and spend like super PACs to elect or defeat candidates.

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.

Government breeds more government, and a lobbying infrastructure to defend itself.

The permutations of rent-seeking are as many as the administrative state is vast. Rent-seeking is the activity of attempting to increase one's income without increasing the quantity or quality of the goods or services offered to customers. It is the attempt to manipulate public power for private advantage—to get government to improve your economic circumstances by conferring a benefit on you or a handicap on your competitors.

Most financiers, corporate lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants are competing with other financiers, lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants in zero-sum games that take money out of one set of pockets and put it into another.

Wall Street gives money to both [Democrats and Republicans] because they want to be on the good side of whoever becomes president .

I saw money change votes.I mean, they just seem unaware of this, that money is something - if they want to see the appearance of corruption, all they had to do was look in Las Vegas last weekend.

Wall Street, the banks, and corporate America, has been able to call the shots here. They control our members of Congress and they get what they want.

But they are not going to take on Big Oil because Big Oil is very generous at campaign time, and this is all about the elections. They want to pretend that they are doing something meaningful.

Thus they become easily prone to manipulation by lobbyists

The democratic process will always favor small, well-organized groups at the expense of large, diffuse groups. It's not just how many people care one way or the other; it's how much they care. Two percent who care deeply about something

I don't think I would have to run a campaign that's financed like General Motors.

Well I think money has been going into political campaigns for a very long time.