Quotes About Lobbying

How did the Farm Bill achieve overwhelming support from Congress in the face of such widespread calls for reform?...In exchange for leaving support for the large commodity crop farmers in place, House and Senate negotiators packaged support for nearly everyone else into the bill.

When laws are literally written now to make donors happy, we've got a problem.

It's pretty clear that Americans have a strong interest in knowing who's trying to influence their vote in elections.

Where I come from, Big Pharma's the enemy.

Whenever the very rich hold views at odds with those of the entire population, the federal government tends to do the rich's bidding.

I want to make it clear that the lobbying sector does an important job. It is very useful to the government to hear the views of a broad range of groups to make sure we get the best.

The Congress is virtually incapable of passing any reforms unless they first get permission from the powerful special interests who are most affected by the proposal.

The ability of the 1 percent to buy politicians and regulators is nothing new in American politics - just as inequality has been a permanent part of our economic system. This is true of virtually all political and economic systems.

Family law is institutionally anti-male. I've been lobbying MPs, and I'm not going to give up campaigning for equality until I get equality.

I'm always lobbying for the irrepressible strength of love.

I don't know anything about politics or lobbying in the film world.

The lure of post-public service lobbying employment needs to be eliminated.

For the Bidens, it's not just about Joe; it's a family racket that includes his son Hunter and his two brothers, James and Frank. All of them have become millionaires by trading on Biden's political name and connections. "In the early 2000s," Politico reports, "Hunter had opened a lobbying practice that landed clients with interests that overlapped with Joe's committee assignments and legislative priorities.

I did this within a philosophical framework, and a moral and legal framework. And I have been turned into a cartoon of the greatest villain in the history of lobbying.

There are a lot of grotesqueries in politics, not the least of which is the fund-raising side.

My experience politically has always been that one-word definition of politics: money. Keep your eye on the buck. And that tells you where the American people are going to be.

Joined by retired Democratic senator George Mitchell and former Senate aide Charlie Scheeler, DLA Piper sought to protect the avaricious interests of its clients, including one of the retailers identified with the factory collapse (Gap), at the expense of the people and economy of Bangladesh.1

The abuses by individual clergy in religious organizations are evil; the persistent cover ups by religious organizations, which empowered clergy pedophiles to get ever more victims, is worse; but the Roman Catholic hierarchy's lobbying against access to justice for all child sex abuse victims is about as cynical as it gets.

For example, it is commonplace for the states to impose mandatory reporting requirements on professionals who have regular contact with children and suspect abuse. An obvious category would be clergy. The Catholic Church's bishops, however, invested in lobbying to obtain exemptions for clergy so that they would not have to report child abuse (knowing as it did that many of its priests were in fact abusing children).

The Vatican even today, under the popular Pope Francis, continues to prevaricate as it says that bishops should report abuse…if the law requires it. This year, the Italian bishops disclosed that they will not report clergy abuse to the authorities, because Italy does not require it. The Vatican knows full well that the law often does not require clergy to report, because its own bishops lobby to ensure it doesn't!

Religious lobbyists have used the "secularism" and "discrimination" arguments to cover their voracious and seemingly insatiable demands to obtain rights to act however they choose. They "need" legislatures to help them, because they are so weak and so discriminated against, or at least that is their shtick.

The food industry, its trade associations, and research foundations, is well financed and highly organized to pressure the FDA.

I was set free because the negotiations were successful, because there were people lobbying for my freedom, and because hundreds of thousands took to the streets in Rome for my freedom.

This book exposes the ways in which food companies use political processes—entirely conventional and nearly always legal—to obtain government and professional support for the sale of their products. Its twofold purpose is to illuminate the extent to which the food industry determines what people eat and to generate much wider discussion of the food industry's marketing methods and use of the political system.