It is the next big scandal waiting to happen. It's an issue that crosses party lines and has tainted our politics for too long, an issue that exposes the far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money.
I'm talking about lobbying – and we all know how it works. The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisors for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way. In this party, we believe in competition, not cronyism. We believe in market economics, not crony capitalism. So we must be the party that sorts all this out.

People are fed up with politicians who don't listen to them. Fed up with a corrupt system that benefits the elites instead of working men and women.

Industry's high powered lobbying effort is actually about much more than just passing bills. A convenient side effect of this lobbying crusade is to apply corporate spin to maximize effect. The rhetoric surrounding the lobbying shapes the broader debate related to who is to blame for obesity and diet-related health problems. Because lawsuits are such a hot-button issue, industry can take full advantage of the popular scapegoating of trial lawyers, while at the same time invoke all-American values and shove the personal responsibility theory down the nation's collective throat.

We simply should not care about politics as much as we do, because it should not be as important as it has become. The question of who serves in political office should not be as consuming as it has become, but is a consequence of the concentration of power and expectations. There is a lesson here for both sides of the political spectrum. Our politics have become too toxic and scary, in large part because our government is too large and consequential.

To many, our democratic system seems so broken that they have simply lost faith that their participation could really matter. The politics of self-interest and catering to narrow special interests is so dominant that so many ask themselves: Why vote? This disaffection stems both from the all-too-true reality of the corruptions of our system and from a deeper psychic disillusionment and disappointment. The is so formulaic, so tailored into poll-driven, focus-group-approved slogans that don't really say anything substantive or strike at the core of our lived experience; the lack of authenticity of discourse—and the underlying lack of gravitas, of penetrating insight and wisdom on the part of politicians—is numbing. But we must keep in mind that the disgust so many feel comes from a deep desire to hear more authentic expressions of insights about our lives and more genuine commitment to improving them. Many of us long for expressions of real concern both about the pain of our individual lives and about the common good [...] as opposed to the blatant catering to base interests and to narrow elite constituencies. We long for politics that in not about winning a political game but about producing better lives.

...four very powerful corporate lobbies have repeatedly come out on top and turned our democracy into what might more accurately be called a corporatocracy.”

No abuse of power has so tarnished the corporate image or shown the need for government legislation as the numerous public revelations of wholesale political and foreign bribery that came to light during the 1970s. These revelations are one of the most sordid chapters in American corporate history. Investigations revealed widespread illegal corporate political contributions and extensive bribery of foreign government officials. When the bribes were large, they significantly distorted the corporation's actual financial picture, thus misleading company stockholders as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the . When U.S. corporations bribe officials of developing countries, they may help to undermine that country's political stability and in some cases contribute to the spread of anti-American feeling. A particularly serious situation develops when pharmaceutical corporations bribe health officials in other countries to obtain permission to sell dangerous drug products.

Politics is a dirty business, a ruse, an ideological cul-de-sac, a vast looter of intellectual and financial resources, a lie that corrupts, a deceiver, a means of unleashing vast evil in the world of the most unexpected and undetected sort and the greatest diverter of human productivity ever concocted by those who do not believe in authentic social and economic progress.

There are few things that enrage the American public more than crooked, dark money political spending. If you tried to get a dark money political spending bill through the Senate, you couldn't do it. If you tried to get it through the House, you couldn't do it. If you put the Senate and House under Republican control, you still couldn't do it, but if you have captured the Supreme Court [...] then a decision that is as unpopular and enraging as this decision comes your way, and they pulled it off in plain daylight.

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done. We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.

America first. We get a little tired of these deals where they actually put, and you know why, because of lobbyists and special interests and people representing and people wanting it to happen. It's just not that they want other countries to benefit over us. There are reasons for it and you know, when I raise money, and I'm putting up a lot of money for my own campaign, I'm funding me. And I'm raising for the Republican party. And we're getting a lot of money from the small donors.

Just about everybody in politics has something to hide. The higher they rise in the system, the more skeletons they have stuffed in their closets. And as we have all come to appreciate, this goes double — or perhaps even squared — for politicos who got their start in Chicago. And because the system no longer cares about our rights (to the extent it ever did) we can no longer focus solely on issues related to them, but must cast about more widely to ensnare and defeat the enemies of liberty.

Congress... has become a secret tyrannical bastion of Wall Street, and that outrages people...

That’s what politics is all about—coercion and lies.