Lobbying: A career born in hell — funded by addiction, oil, and war.
How does lobbying negatively affect the government?
You know the folks from Purdue Pharma who helped enable the opioid epidemic? The ones who slid into the FDA and got culture-shifting and highly addictive drugs greenlit for mass consumption?
Those folks are lobbyists.
And boy do we have a lot of them.
By the numbers: a nation for sale
Let’s do a quick run by numbers.
There are roughly 13,000 registered lobbyists in the United States. 535 elected federal representatives.
That means there are over 24 lobbyists for every member of Congress.
In fact, AIPAC has two full-time lobbyists for every elected official in the country.
Two people whose entire job is to bribe elected officials — make their lifestyle ‘comfortable’.
I know for certain, even Pinocchio only needed one Jiminy Cricket.
They’ve done it before
Lobbyists — who you know as Philip Morris — came in and paid doctors to broadcast across the media that tobacco was okay.
To share their opinion with an impressionable demographic that smoking was fine.
In fact, it was as cool as the Marlboro Man.
You could ask my Dad — had the coolness not caused lung cancer.
Ever wonder about the bills that don’t pass without being padded with obscene add-ons that make our legislation look like a grocery list of favors?
The rise in prices and overall reduction in freedom?
Lobbyists.
But are all lobbyists evil?
Is every single lobbying apple a bad one?
It’s not that the people are bad. Most of them think they’re doing good work — that they’re part of a system that works, it just needs a little grease.
In many cases, they are incredibly passionate about the special interest they represent. And in some cases, they’ve pushed forward good work.
Because the issue isn’t a few bad apples.
It’s the entire orchard.
We live in a country that legalized bribery through Citizens United — and now we reward people for getting more and more creative in how they use corporate money to manipulate public policy.
This isn’t about isolated corruption.
It’s about an entire industry whose job is to subjugate the people in service of corporate profits.
We the People™
My people: Walmart, Amazon, Google, Purdue Pharma, BP Oil…
As the Founding Fathers intended when they sank that bayonnette into the heart of King George’s army and secured our hard-earned freedom.
Can you imagine if the East India Trading Company tried to weigh in on the Bill of Rights?
It’s unfathomable.
Because that’s what they were fighting against. A monarchy owned by merchants.
A government that served the Crown — and the Crown’s corporate interests — at the expense of the people.
They dumped tea because it was taxed by a chartered monopoly with royal protection.
The modern equivalent is torching an Amazon facility
The British East India Company wasn’t just a business — it was a state-sponsored empire, weaponized to crush local economies and extract value for the Crown.
And the Founding Fathers said nope.
They didn’t fight a revolution to replace kings with CEOs.
They built checks and balances to stop concentrated power — not to hand the mic to billion-dollar brands with Super PACs.
But then we traded red coats for brand logos
There was a corporate coup — wrapped in a robe and stamped constitutional.
Wasn’t there always lobbying?
Yes.
But Citizens United is the entity that was given an inch, took a mile, and then decided to become an ultramarathoner.
Corruption and politics is like peanut butter and jelly
They belong together.
We will always have forces of good and forces of bad working against each other.
That balance is our entire existence.
But those bad actors and blatant bribery should be kept behind closed doors. It should be hard — and illegal — to make moves that cause heinous ripple effects on the population for corporate profit.
But we made corporations into people. We gave them the same rights as us and then, through Citizens United, we opened the floodgates.
We allowed those ‘people’ to pay off anyone they want, indiscriminately.
Citizens United didn’t just legalize corruption — it outsourced it
Citizens United wasn’t just a legal ruling. It was a broadcast signal to the world:
The United States is for sale.
You don’t need to run for office.
You just need to rent one.
Politics stopped being governance. It became Facebook Marketplace for power — absurd purchases, no returns.
With this dynamic, congress cannot truly serve the people
Because the people will always come second to the big money and influence.
If you had someone who was like, “I’ll give you $1 to do this thing.”
And then a guy who represents a corporation approaches you, “I’ll give you $100 dollars to do this thing.”
Almost any human is going to convince themselves the $100 is the ‘right’ choice. That they’ll make a bigger impact, stretch that money far in the community.
But that just does not seem to happen, does it?
It seems like all the money stays in-house — the House or Representatives: where Nancy Pelosi dominates trades.
Foreign money spends the same
How does lobbying negatively affect government?
The most dangerous part? It didn’t just supercharge domestic corruption.
It made us vulnerable to foreign influence — the exact threat the Founders wrote the Constitution to prevent.
Because once you define money as speech, you don’t just empower American billionaires. You open the floodgates to any global entity with deep pockets and a motive.
Russia. China. Saudi Arabia. Multinational oil. Global tech.
They don’t need troops. They’ve got lobbyists
And they’re inside the walls — perfectly legal, totally protected.
Citizens United flipped the power structure. It didn’t just uncap donations — it decapitated accountability.
That’s the insight people miss. This wasn’t a policy tweak.
It was a quiet coup that rewrote the job description of government.
How does lobbying negatively affect government?
The result is we continue to get worse products and services, but we have to pay more for them.
We get more red tape and less freedom.
The question is often posed: What’s wrong with this country?
It’s quite simple: lobbying.
It is the source of all of our pain.
The reason Lady Liberty suffers.