McCain : The Lobbyists' Candidate

by: tsingy and first posted at AfricanAmericanOpinion.Com.

Lobbyists should be shown the door. As far as McCain’s campaign goes, lobbyists are flying roughshod in the Republican side of the presidential election. They’ll screw up this election process with all of the commercial interests that are tugging at their coattails. What we’ll be seeing is a bunch of corporations in line to buy candidates’ favors. Lobbying is a fixture in Washington, but it’s never been part of a presidential election in this way.

There are lobbyists for any industry you can think of : automotive, pharmaceutical, energy, farming equipment, coal industry, you name it! These companies will pay anything to get bills through Congress that help them peddle their product. For example, a company that sells canned sardines hires a lobbyist to visit a bunch of congressional offices to do some tongue wagging and propose softer import restrictions. That way the sardines cost less to bring over from Sweden. Then there's companies that hire lobbyists to push to reduce restrictions on air emissions, so they can have their refineries on full throttle and completely pollute our skies.

There's probably a lobbyist out there for the tire industry bouncing around in Washington. A tire company would push for things like federal funds to build more roads : more roads, more cars and bingo, more tires. All of these people in McCain’s committees are following instructions from commercial interests, not from citizens! McCain’s town meetings must be a farce if his campaign is led by some of the top lobbyists in the country.

There are too many lobbyists interfering with our country’s legislation. A law that is supposed to increase the minimum wage can get railroaded by a dozen companies that hire lobbyists to prevent that.

A lobbyist from an automotive company could show up at every Congressman's office with a Powerpoint presentation showing why a higher minimum wage wouldn't work. At the same time, a group of construction companies could hire a lobbyist to go around Washington clamoring that the price of materials would slow down building if they had to raise everyone's pay. Along comes a lobbyist that the movie industry has hired because it doesn't want to pay a cent more for extras that stand on the sidewalk and chew gum. Or maybe just chew gum. There could be a handful of billion dollar companies hiring lobbyists to do and say whatever it takes to keep the minimum wage increase from passing through Congress.

Here’s an article that describes that situation from a while back : Minimum-wage Hike Faces Hurdles. This approach can be applied to bills that improve energy use, improve education, decrease costs of medicine, put more funding into bridge repair, improve manufacturing policies and whole bunch of things that this country needs to move ahead.

Let's take William V. Hilleary, for example. He's a lobbyist for Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. Copy and paste "William Hilleary Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal" into Google for more info. So William here is hired by companies that need certain government policies to pass that benefit their shareholders. Check out his page here William V. Hilleary. As a lobbyist, William is working in government everyday to push commercial interests. He's also jumped into McCain’s raft, acting as the Tennessee co-chair. He's probably doing alot of fundraising for McCain, with alot of money coming from previous clients. You gotta wonder, how do the donations from these companies reflect Americans?

Mega-million corporations putting up the bucks to ride on McCain's Merry-Go-Round.

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