01-09-2006, 08:15 AM
Lobbyists are an extention of the First Amendment of the Constitution. The right to free speech and the right to petition the government against grievances.
The perception that today is different than before is a historical fallacy and modern day ego trip. Money has always been the determining factor in "redressing" grievances and many administrations, not just this current one, have succumbed to the bribes.
It may be an insoluble problem, not unlike the war on drugs. If find a way to remove the need for massive amounts of money to run for office let the people at DEA know; maybe they use the info to curtail the consumer market that drugs satisfy.
It's a crime to allow private companies to sell public air time they license from the public, back to the public, in the form of paid political ads.
One solution would be to ban all political advertising over publicly licensed air or ground lines.
As a former editor/publisher, I can tell you we salivated over the political "season". Those top dollar paid-in-advance ads were almost as much as lucrative as the government mandated "classifieds".
The perception that today is different than before is a historical fallacy and modern day ego trip. Money has always been the determining factor in "redressing" grievances and many administrations, not just this current one, have succumbed to the bribes.
It may be an insoluble problem, not unlike the war on drugs. If find a way to remove the need for massive amounts of money to run for office let the people at DEA know; maybe they use the info to curtail the consumer market that drugs satisfy.
It's a crime to allow private companies to sell public air time they license from the public, back to the public, in the form of paid political ads.
One solution would be to ban all political advertising over publicly licensed air or ground lines.
As a former editor/publisher, I can tell you we salivated over the political "season". Those top dollar paid-in-advance ads were almost as much as lucrative as the government mandated "classifieds".